Robert Alton Harris

Joe was leaning over a pan of scrambled eggs, stirring them slowly, and saying they ought to execute Robert Alton Harris right now, not wait a second longer, never mind the bleeding heart media.

Harold, who was cooking diced potatoes on another camp stove back to back with Joe’s, said why not seal off the whole Death Row, fill it with gas and get rid of them all at the same time?

The bacon and pork sausages were already cooked, but Joe wasn’t satisfied with the eggs yet, they were too watery. He turned the heat up a little.

Fred heard part of the conversation and came walking up sipping champagne from a plastic glass.

The trouble with the legal system, he said, was all the delays. Fourteen years was too long to keep messing around. Once they figured out who committed a crime, he ought to go right from the courthouse to the electric chair.

Told there was no electric chair in California, Fred shrugged and said however they did it was good enough.

“I don’t know about gas, though,� Russ was saying, standing there watching them. “I think he ought to be injected.�

“I have no thoughts on that,� Joe said.

Satisfied with the eggs, Joe heaped them onto a large platter. Others brought plates piled high with bacon, sausages, potatoes and hot cross buns to the outdoor tables, as the women began gathering the kids and the grandkids.

Someone called, “Come and get it!�

Easter.

Morning had come warm and sweet to the San Fernando Valley as the family gathered for an egg hunt and breakfast. The yard that belonged to Joe and Penny glowed with the flowers of spring.

This was a day of resurrection, of new life, and it was in abundance. Lantanas, asters, golden daffodils and orchid-toned irises waved in the breeze. Children danced in the sunlight.

It was a funny kind of day to be talking about death.

I’ve got to admit, I was the one who brought it up. I get invited to places by decent people, my wife Cinelli says, and I keep poking at them with questions until best friends are chewing on each other’s throats.

“You’re a people-poker, Martinez,� she said to me once, and she’s right. I’ve never been sure whether I do it for columns or just because I’m a rotten, sewer-hearted, devil-lovin’ son of a sailor.

I had also brought up the Harris case at Seders we’d attended two consecutive nights before. Seder is a feast on the eve of Passover that commemorates the exodus of the Jews from Egypt 3,000 years ago.

I’m not a Jew and I’m not really a Christian either, not in the usual sense. I’m just a guy with a stick who keeps poking at everybody, and the stick I was poking with this time was Robert Alton Harris.

No one really responded at the Seders because they were quiet-spoken people, educators and lawyers, who maybe didn’t feel it was the time or place to bring up “political questions,� as one of them put it.

The host at one Seder tried by including Harris in a kind of prayer for mercy, but it was followed by silence. I guess that said something too.

It was different at Joe and Penny’s place.

These were working people, the kind who won’t hesitate to speak out, and the fate of Robert Alton Harris bounced around the yard like a big, red balloon.

I heard Joe saying it cost $32,000 a year to keep Harris alive and there was no good reason taxpayers had to bear that kind of burden for a killer.

I heard Jerry saying an eye for an eye is the way it ought to be.

I heard Harold saying that maybe we ought to go for a firing squad, that way no one person gets the blame for killing him.

“What do you say?� Joe asked, looking directly at me.

My attention had wandered during the discussion. I was watching Travis and Shana and Chad and Justin and D.J. dance in the yellow light, like sun sprites on an emerald hillside.

I was watching the way a small bush of white and lavender flowers called Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow caught the sunlight so fiercely brilliant it belonged in fairy tales.

But I pulled myself away and said to Joe I’d seen three people die in the gas chamber in a clinical killing more gruesome than any I’d ever witnessed at war or on the streets and I just never wanted it to happen again.

Joe nodded because he’s a thoughtful kind of guy, but no one else spoke except Linda, who said very softly, “I don’t know why, I just hate it.�

Then we all dug into our scrambled eggs and bacon and little pork sausages and diced potatoes and hot cross buns, and the children danced and the flowers waved slowly . . . slowly . . . in the warm breeze of a rich and glorious, life-sustaining spring day.