Alcatraz-1259 Read online

  Son-of-a-bitch.

  When I say Jackrabbit was quiet I don't mean John Wayne quiet, for he didn't swagger or carry a big stick, and I don't mean sneaky quiet like a few people I'd known. And he wasn't softly quiet, like Simpco, who was the nicest guy in the world but would kill you in a second on principle. Jackrabbit was just thoughtfully quiet. Like even when he was silent, which was most of the time, you knew something was going on up there in his head.

  But then I saw another side of him one day in the mess hall when somebody was kidding him about his beloved Boston Red Socks. He could get excited about that—and loud at times in defense of the slumping Sox. And you'd better not bad-mouth Ted Williams. That was after Ted Williams came out of the military and batted four-hundred for the season, so he was still greater than God in Jackrabbit's mind.

  Some people took advantage of Jackrabbit's loyalty to his team, knowing he'd take any bet offered, so they'd get him worked up and then bet him a pack of cigarettes on the day's game, or two packs or three.

  It was hard for me to watch these snickering fools take advantage of Jackrabbit the way they did, but this was before I got to know him all that well, and anyway he was a grown man, so it wasn't any of my business. Boston was really losing bad that year, game after game, and Jackrabbit would lose his cigarettes and turn right around and bet on the bums again. He must have loved them a lot. Jackrabbit didn't smoke, that was one thing, but still, cigarettes were worth a lot in our little world.

  You couldn't have but three packs of cigarettes in your cell, that was the rule, so we took our extra cigarettes down to the factory and hid them there just to play it safe. I mean most of the guards didn't bother about extra cigarettes or little petty stuff like that when they shook down our cells. They'd bust you if they found a knife or some homemade hooch, or something like that, but if it wasn't serious they didn't mess with it. But there was always that ass-hole who went by the book trying to make some brownie points.

  I ran into one of those one day. It was a Saturday morning and the sun was shining bright outside. I was ready to hit the yard. That was really a big deal in Alcatraz, the yard. We got yard rec on Saturday and Sunday during the day. That was it. And that was only when it wasn't raining. And we only got Sunday morning rec every two weeks, because every other week they showed a movie on Sunday morning after church. So that Saturday morning I was bouncing off the wall ready to get out of that cell.

  Well, when the doors slid open mine didn't slide. At first I didn't know what was going on because people were walking by my cell on the way out and my door was still closed. I tried to open it but it was locked tight, so I started hollering, thinking there was something wrong with my door. "Tell the guard my door didn't open!" I yelled at the passing prisoners. Which did no good at all. And when everybody was gone, a young, fresh-faced guard appeared in front of my barred door.

  "I'm writing a disciplinary report on you for having too many cigarettes in your cell. You had four packs, which I confiscated and which I'll turn in with my report. You'll remain in your cell until you go to court." That's what he said standing there in front of my cell.

  I went nuts on him. I mean, I wouldn't be able to go to court until next week sometime. The whole weekend would be over with me locked in my cell. I called him every dirty name I knew. Well he turned a little red but then he just took out a pen and pad and started writing down everything I said.

  I finally ran out of breath and slumped down on my bunk, still steaming while he finished writing. Now I'd go to court for having too many cigarettes and cussing him out too. It's a good thing for both of us that the door was locked or I would probably be in even worse trouble. I checked my stash and sure enough my cigarettes were gone, all four packs of them. "Hey, you took all four packs. I only had one pack over the limit. You're only supposed to take that one!"

  Well, he just gave me an indulging look and said, "Okay, I thought of that, but I couldn't determine by looking at them which one was the extra pack. They all looked the same. So I had to take all of them to make sure I got the right one."

  Yes, he actually said that. I remember every word like it was yesterday. I was so surprised that I couldn't speak. I mean it was so ridiculous I just sat there looking at him. And he turned and left.

  I wish I could think of his name, but I can't. I think it was Simmons, but I'm not sure. Somebody told me they thought he came to Alcatraz from El Reno or one of those youth joints. They've really got some petty rules in reformatories, and he acted like that's where he came from, so maybe he did. So I'll call him Simmons for the sake of this, because that wasn't the last time I, we, ran into him. He messed with me and everybody else for the whole time I was there.

  Whitey Knight celled next door, so he handed me over a pack of cigarettes and a pack of Bull Durham so I'd have something to smoke. And Jackrabbit sent me up a bridge book with the chapters marked on defensive card play and defensive bidding, so I guess he was trying to tell me something about my game.

  I would go to the hole for cussing old Simmons out. I was a goner for sure. I wasn't afraid of the hole, or anything like that, but to tell the truth I sort of dreaded it, the monotony mainly. And I wouldn't be able to smoke. And they might even keep me in segregation after I did my hole time. They probably would. I'd really cussed out old Simmons pretty good, and he'd wrote it all down. And when they write it down like that they always make it sound twice as bad as it really is. So I was gone for certain.

  Court day came Tuesday and a full lieutenant came to escort me down to their little kangaroo courtroom. He stuck his head in to let them know I was there and then we waited outside. He was a different lieutenant than the one who interviewed me when I first came in and he didn't seem like such a bad guy. We talked for a while, and he asked me some questions about what I did, so I told him straight out about the cigarettes and stuff and about cussing Simmons out. When I was through he advised me to explain it like that when we went into the room. "Just be straight with them, the captain don't like bull shitters." I learned later that his name was Lieutenant Mitchell. They called him Fat Mitchell, and like I said, he wasn’t such a bad guy.

  When they called us in I saw a guy in a captain's uniform and a guy in a suit and tie who I figured was an associate warden or something, both sitting behind a desk. The guy in the suit started off talking and then turned it over to the captain who on that day did most of the talking. It was what he said that I remember most clearly because he talked in a language I could understand, not the bullshit language of many of the officials in suits.

  "William Baker?"

  "Yes." They didn't offer me a chair, so me and the lieutenant stood there while the captain studied some papers. He read out the charges, out loud, the extra cigarettes, all the cuss words and some extra ones I don't remember saying. Then he looked up at me curiously. "How old are you?"

  "Twenty-three," I said sadly.

  Well the old captain really surprised the hell out of me. His face sort of softened and he chuckled. "You can wipe that pitiful look off your face, Baker. I know who you are. I've got your institution record from Oregon and your FBI file and I've read every word of both of them. You were a bad boy up in Oregon, weren't you? Broke out of the hole—you and five other inmates took six prison guards hostage and made them push you down a hill in a boxcar, where you rammed it through the back gate with bullets flying—is that true?"

  That was true. I just nodded and mumbled something.

  "You had thirty-two disciplinary reports while you were there, one for hitting a guard with a stick during a prison riot, and here you are, still alive. You must have had a very understanding warden up there."

  The tone of his voice wasn't threatening but his words were. I didn't know what to say so I said nothing.

  He went on, "Did you have a very understanding warden up there?"

  He was pushing it. I decided to be honest. "Yes, I guess so. Some guards wanted to shoot us but he wouldn't let them. But we didn't like him.
We called him old Beet Face, because his face was always turning red when he got excited." I hesitated, went on. "I guess we didn't appreciate him till we got rid of him and an old gimp-legged warden from the feds took over. He wasn't no joke."

  "Well, we've got a very understanding warden here, too. Have you met Promising Paul?"

  "No, not yet." Where was he going with this?

  “The prisoners call him that because he sometimes makes promises he can't keep, like helping you get off this island, which he can't do because that's determined by the Bureau of Prisons, but he does try. And if you hit one of my guards with a stick or any other weapon there's nothing he can do to keep you from getting a serious ass-whipping, either, because that's determined by my goon squad who will pay you a visit over in the hole day and night and take turns whipping you until they get tired and then they'll rest and whip you some more. They'll hurt you Baker, and they won't clean up the mess. And when they're all through they'll send an MTA down to tend to your wounds, but you won't get any sympathy from him. He'll just give you a couple of aspirins and tell you to drink plenty of water and walk slow. Do you understand that?"

  I could feel my face turning red, and I was about to say something, but he cut me off.

  "But I've got a good idea. You've only got a couple of years left—why they sent you here I don't know—but you ought to be able to do that little bit of time standing on your head, so if you don't fuck with us we won't fuck with you."

  That threw me off balance, and before I could think of anything to say he went on, changing the subject. "I see you haven't got anyone on your visiting list. Do you ever hope to get a visit from anyone while you're here?"

  "I don't know anybody except my mother and she's too far away," I said.

  "In Kentucky?"

  The fucker knew everything, and he wasn't reading from any papers. "Yes."

  "Do you ever wonder why you don't know anyone who might be able to visit you?"

  I felt my blood pressure rising again, but I held my mouth shut. Was he testing me, to see if I’d go off? Again, his voice wasn't menacing but his words were. I mean I had a temper, but I wasn’t suicidal. I just didn’t know how to take this, uh, captain. He sounded more like a convict.

  He let me think about that for a minute, and when I didn't answer he finally turned to the papers on his desk. "Okay, Officer Simmons wrote a very colorful report on you—what do you have to say about that?"

  I shrugged. "I'd been waiting all week to go to the yard. It was Saturday morning, the sun was shining, and I was ready to go. And then my door didn't open. That fucked me up.”

  When I didn't say anything else, he turned to the guy in the suit and asked him if he had any questions or comments. The guy cocked his head at me for a minute, but then he declined.

  "Okay," the captain said. "Officer Simmons used improper procedure when he shook you down and took all your cigarettes, but on the other hand you dressed him down pretty good, so we could call it either way."

  He opened his desk drawer and pulled out four packs of Wings bound in a rubber band, which he looked at and played with for a minute, then he took one pack of them and dropped it back in his drawer. The other three he slid across the desk in my direction. "This is your first report, so I guess we'll let you slide. Don’t let me see you back in here again anytime soon."

  He looked at Lieutenant Mitchell. "Take him back to the cellblock. Tell the CO to take him off lockdown.”

  Were they turning me loose? Holy fucking shit, they were turning me loose.

  Lieutenant Mitchell looked at me and nodded at the door. I mumbled some kind of thanks and headed that direction.

  The captain said, “Don’t forget your cigarettes.” So I whirled around and grabbed my smokes, trying not to grin.

  The captain added, "Write your mother. You never know when you might need her someday."

  His words bounced off my head and I didn't think about that until later. Right then I got the fuck out of there.

  CHAPTER THREE

  A lollypop sunrise came up over Alcatraz as we fell in on the yard in work-detail groups and went down the steep winding steps to the factory shops single file. Happy thoughts frolicked in my brain like warm puppies. This was my first day on the job.

  Lollipop sunrise? Yep. The day before they’d assigned me to a job in the glove shop and that meant I would no longer be locked in my cell all day during the week. You had to have a job to get out of your cell except when the yard was open on the weekend. And to go with the job they’d moved me to a new cell over on the bright side of C-block with the rest of the factory workers, and lucky me my new cell was on the second range near the front and I could see out the window, see the sea, see the sky, feel the fresh air when the windows were open. So, yes, it was a lollipop sunrise.

  Happiness comes in small packages in prison. But it comes. It has to get through the gray filter of awareness that you’re locked up. But it gets through, somehow, maybe not as powerful as cruising down the road with the wind at your back and all your red lights green, like when you’re free, but it gets through in smaller portions. It’s all relative. To a junkyard dog a bone is pure heaven.

  And, me, I was locked up, all right, but there was nothing wrong with my chemistry, with my hormones, whatever Mama Nature endows us with to keep our nuts pumped up. I was just naturally happy, always had been. I mean there were no warm puppies to hug at Alcatraz, no one to hold your hand. We were on our own. We got what we brought with us, and that’s all we got.

  There were no birthday parties for me, no touchdown dances. But it didn’t take much to make me happy. Chemistry, I guess. All my sunrises came up lollipops. And if they didn’t I knew how to stir up a little excitement.

  Stop it, Baker!

  Okay. I’m done.

  Anyway, I bounced down those steps to the glove shop that lollipop sunrise morning for my first day of work. The boss introduced me to a sewing machine. Then he went into his office and sat. A convict introduced me to a box of white cotton gloves and showed me how to sew the front and back halves together to make a glove. None of it made any sense.

  Two months later sitting at that same sewing machine it still didn’t make a lot of sense, for I didn’t see any point in sewing white cotton gloves, so I didn’t break any records. I mostly just sat there daydreaming, thinking about this and that. One thing I could do good was daydream. My boss later wrote in one of his reports that I was the laziest man he’d ever seen, which didn’t hurt my feelings at all. I had important things to think about, like the great mysteries of space and time and women—and what was for dinner.

  Once in a while, though, I got a spurt of energy and sewed as fast as I could just for the hell of it. One day I sewed a whole box of gloves in less than an hour, really burned rubber. But I slowed down to my normal pace of one glove every once in a while as we neared lunch time.

  The boss didn't care how fast we went anyway. We were on piecework and only got paid for what we did. And we couldn’t buy anything with the money we made anyway. The boss, he just sat in his office and got up every half-hour or so to count heads, then he sat some more. He was pretty good at sitting.

  Somebody said they counted every thirty minutes so we wouldn't have time to swim to the mainland between counts in case we were able to get out of the building and hit the water. Me, I didn't have enough time left on my sentence to risk another escape attempt. And, besides, those currents were really mean around the island, with two big rivers emptying into the bay close by. Sometimes you could see great big logs and things shoot straight up into the air and then disappear again and never come up. And they said the sharks around the island worked for the Federal Bureau of Prisons, wore badges and everything, which I, of course, figured was an exaggeration but I wasn’t about to jump into that water to find out.

  It was spaghetti day at Alcatraz. My mouth watered thinking about it. The old Italian cook always started simmering his spaghetti sauce the day before and by the time it w
as done it was so good it would make you dizzy just thinking about it. Like I said, the old warden believed in feeding us. And the convict cooks took pride in their work. With the spaghetti they served some kind of salad that included olives and anchovies, and we got a big dipper of butter beans and a big chunk of apple pie or something for desert. I mean they fed as good as a restaurant, better than some. So we couldn't complain about the food.

  Of course you could say they had to feed good because we couldn't buy any snacks or anything like you could in other prisons, so all we got to eat was what they fed us in the mess hall. You could say that. But we had plenty of things to complain about besides the food, so we left that alone.

  Lunchtime finally came. I heard Lieutenant Mitchell coming down the factory street calling "Slow walkers!"

  They took the slow walkers up the hill first, the old men and guys with a bad heart or lame leg. Then away we went, galloping up those winding steps to that spaghetti dinner."

  It was a slow, lazy summer that year. I played a little softball on a team of hapless scrubs. We barely knew what end of a bat to hold onto. We were so bad that we didn’t even have a name. Finally somebody suggested we name ourselves after the cursed seagulls so despised by most people on Alcatraz Island, except me—I kinda liked them. So we called ourselves The Gullies, and we were really bad. We dropped balls that should have been caught, we struck out on big old fat balls right over the plate, we tripped over our own feet. But we had fun and a lot of people watched us just for the entertainment, sort of like watching the Keystone Cops, I guess. Me, I could run like a deer, I just couldn't hit the damn ball.

  Forest Tucker was on our team. So was Whitey Knight, my next-door neighbor. They called him Whitey because he had premature gray hair and he was only about thirty-years old. And we had Fat Duncan and Jack Waites, great guys but they were both a little slow because they were still recovering from cutting their heel strings in protest over conditions over in the hole where they spent a good part of their time. So we took great pride in having a very fucked up team.