Anyway, we didn’t see Lieutenant Francis again for a long time, but we were cautious about resuming our sawing because we were convinced somebody, maybe a snitch in the cell house directly above the hole, was listening for it. So we decided to cool it for a while.
The days drug on. I’d lost my football, so I couldn’t kick out light bulbs anymore, but that was all right because I was tiring of the whole thing anyway. Time was wearing us out, even me. I got my days and nights mixed up for a while, as did everybody else. We started sleeping all day and talking and smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee all night. They, the prison, furnished us with sacks of Bull Durham tobacco, and we saved our cup of coffee from breakfast and heated it up at night with a toilet paper “bomb.” Me, I didn’t talk all that much, but I did a lot of walking back and forth in my cell.
We finally got our days and nights straightened out, but we knew we had to do something pretty soon. We were bored shitless, simple as that. Time was wearing us out, our indefinite hole sentences, not knowing when or if we would ever get out. At eighteen I was way too young for that shit.
Eighteen? Well, maybe nineteen or twenty, I didn’t have birthdays. In prison a birthday is just another day. Christmas was okay—that’s when Santa Claus brought the Christmas bags and we got a good Christmas dinner, so we kept track of Christmas, all right, so, let’s see, I’d been in prison for two Christmases, in the hole for one, so, man, I’d been in the hole a long time—with no end in sight.
No more fun and games. We decided to go with what we had and not take a chance on doing any more cutting. We had enough doors fixed to give us a good start, anyway. The prisoners out first could get the key and let everybody else out. So late one night we started banging on the bars to get their attention, and when the hole guard, along with two more guards, came down to check on us, we popped our doors and captured them. Surprise! No problem, they were new guards and easy to capture. And, as planned, we unlocked all the doors in all three sections, including the death row cells.
Then we went over to the other side and opened all the cells over there. There was another side to the hole, which I’d never seen, but it was about the same as the side I was on and had about the same number of prisoners. Now, everybody was out, wild eyed awake and ready to roll. We told them what the deal was, and, of course, they were all for it.
The guards were white with fear. We tried to assure them that we would let no harm come to them, and that seemed to calm them down a little, but I don’t think they were entirely convinced, and in the end we assigned a couple of burly convicts to guard the guards to make sure nobody messed with them. And Al Doolin, himself, made a little speech, just a few simple words, actually. “Don’t fuck with these guards,” and that ended any contrary speculation in anybody’s mind, for everybody in the prison knew Al Doolin could back up what he said. As a result the guards were treated that night as if they were members of an endangered species. And the mob, with nobody to beat up, went looking for child molesters.
The two death row prisoners hadn’t come out of their cells. They had closed their doors and now huddled in fear in the back of their cells. We really didn’t know much about them, the death row guys. They never came out of their cells, all they did that we could see was crochet doilies and things and wait quietly to die, and the preacher came down to the hole once in a while to tend to their souls, so we figured they were some kind of baby-rapers or something, because baby-rapers and child molesters and such always carry a heavy load of guilt which they usually try to unload on Jesus Christ or whatever god will listen to them.
There were so many child molesters in the Oregon prison that it would have been impossible to rid the world of all of them, so we usually more or less left them alone as long as they kept quiet and stayed out of sight. We dealt with molesters like the carnival guy, who, like I said, built some carnival rides on the yard to attract the kids so he could molest them, we dealt with him real good. And there was another molester, an old rawboned braggart with a scraggly beard that went around the yard aggressively defending the fact that he was in prison for fucking his daughter. “I put food in her mouth, so I have a right to put meat in her ass,” he was heard to say more than once. So some convicts caught him in his cell one day and when they were through with him he left on a stretcher, still alive but that’s the last we saw of him.
Al Doolin put the three guards in an empty cell and made sure they were comfortable, then he posted big Joe Benson in front of their cell, not to keep them in but to keep everybody else out. Me, I noticed a bunch of guys gathered in front of the death row cells and said, “Oh shit,” and I headed that direction quickly. We had talked it over, me and Doolin and Poe and the rest of our bunch, and decided that it would be a mistake to mistreat the guards or anybody else, no matter what their crime, because too much was riding on winning this confrontation. Lose, and we’d never see daylight again for a long, long time. Win, and we’d have a release day from the hole, no matter how far away it was. At least we’d know. So this was too serious for fun and games.
I pushed and squeezed my way through the mob and turned to face them with my back against the bars of the death row cells. The leader of the mob was a young, beefy guy with a big jaw and a very loud mouth, so I got face to face with him and spoke before he could figure out what was going on. “Nope, we can’t beat up the baby-rapers tonight, another time maybe, but not now.”
Well that big dumb fucker, he was befuddled at first. You could see him trying to comprehend what I was saying, see his face turning red. He finally said, “Who the fuck are you?”
I had seen Al Doolin in action enough times to know not to hesitate and I didn’t. I popped him right between the eyes as hard as I could. He fell backwards. One of his bunch caught him, and then seeing what he’d caught, let him slide the rest of the way to the floor and looked at me in awe.
“Bill Baker,” I said, introducing myself. “Like Al Doolin told you earlier, we are trying to get our hole time set to a definite time. That’s too important to risk a bad outcome because we beat up some baby-rapers.” I was aware that Al Doolin and Buck Poe had eased up, one on either side of me.
The new speaker of the group, still in awe, said, Oh, Bill Baker—you’re one of the Halloween Six guys that escaped from the hole—hey, we weren’t going to beat these guys up, we, uh, he (he pointed to the guy who was on the floor trying to get up, shaking his head now) he said these death row guys were homosexuals, so we figured we’d, uh, check ‘em out. We’ve already got definite sentences. I got ten days and he’s got ten and thirty.”
I just shook my head in disbelief. Al Doolin made up his mind quick, as usual, said, “Okay, take him over to the other side,”—talking to the guy with ten days about the guy I’d coldcocked. He added, “All you guys go back to the other side. Well they all looked at each other as if waiting for somebody to say something; when nobody did they straggled back to their own side and Al Doolin locked the door leading into their cell-block. And that solved that problem.
We went back to our side to tend to the captured guards, asked them if they were doing okay, if they needed anything. They had settled down considerably, even engaged in a friendly bullshit session with Joe Benson, who was a master of BS, had a degree in it probably. Big Joe Benson could do two things better than anybody I know: Play pinochle and bullshit. He could maybe even outtalk Buck Poe, except Buck Poe was a legend and he wasn’t.
Little Al Brumfield came around the corner and told us the warden was here. That got our attention. Little Al was so quiet by nature that you’d never see him unless you looked real hard, but he’d been with us from the beginning, helped us capture the guards, then he’d gone about halfway up the stairs to stand watch. We’d already called the control room and told them we had their guards captured and that we wanted to see the warden, and now there was already a gang of guards at the top of the stairs on the other side of a locked grill.
So we went around the corner and looked up t
he stairs and there he was, the warden himself, and he didn’t look too happy. At his side was Carl, a new lieutenant who’d brown-nosed his way from a guard in the hole who used to come to work every morning, come back to the back and drink coffee with us and bullshit like he was one of us, he had brown-nosed his was all the way up to the rank of lieutenant in just a few months. When he was working the hole he’d even come back sometimes and take off his shirt and shave, just make himself at home, but we’d figured him as a phony from the very beginning and he was. Now he had his nose up the warden’s ass day and night.
I was beginning to almost feel sorry for Warden O’Malley. He must have really been desperate for somebody to support him for him to promote such an obvious phony to lieutenant, but there he was, Lieutenant Carl, at the warden’s side. On the warden’s other side stood Lieutenant Francis and the old superintendent and several more. They had guns and they definitely did not support the warden’s policies in any way shape or form. And, as usual, they wanted to shoot us, which they could have done right then for we were all out there in plain sight, the very convicts they wanted most to shoot, wanted to so badly that they begged the warden right then and there for his permission, and for a minute I felt the hair on the back of my neck prickle for the warden seemed to be seriously considering it. But then he hollered down at us and said, “Where’s my guards?” And Al Doolin answered, “They’re in a safe place.” And the warden said, “Let me see them.”
Al Doolin thought about that and then nodded at Buck Poe.
Poe went around the corner and in a few minutes he and Joe Benson came back escorting our captives. They stopped directly behind us, so that we couldn’t be shot without hitting the guards too. The warden addressed the guards, asked if any of them had been hurt and when the guards said no the warden asked if they were the only hostages, were there anymore. Assured that we only held those three and no more, the warden asked us what we wanted.
Buck Pope spoke up, explained nicely but firmly that we just wanted to have our hole sentences set to a definite time, that indefinite sentences were too hard to handle, not knowing if we’d ever get out, that the uncertainty of it was not fair, so on and so on until I figured his indefinite speech was not fair either and that the warden might give in to our demands just to shut him up. When he was finally done talking the warden thought about it a long time, then looked at the superintendent and Lieutenant Francis as if inviting their opinion. And that wasn’t good.
They both urged him not to give in, that our demands were ridiculous, and that if he, the warden, would give them permission they’d end this standoff real quick. And the warden thought about that, seemed to be considering their words seriously. So we not only had a standoff with the captured guards but we had another drama playing out up there between the new warden and the old regime. Was the warden finally tiring of all the trouble he was having maintaining control of the prison population and with his inability to gain the backing of the old regime? He seemed alone up there, isolated, and his face and posture showed it. It could go either way.
And, I guess Carl, Lieutenant Carl, also figured it could go either way for he inched away from the warden’s side, sort of eased backwards in preparation to abandon ship if necessary. A subtle move, but I noticed it because I knew Carl.
The warden asked the guards how they were doing, how we had been treating them, maybe just to buy time to think some more before he made a decision. And I’ll be damn if one of the guards didn’t speak right up, said, “Hey, we were treated real good by all these guys. They laid the law down to everybody else down here not to mess with us and we wound up swapping stories with Joe Benson here (he looked at Benson like he was his best friend or something) and we were just getting ready to play a game of pinochle, the four of us. We were just dealing the cards when you showed up and they brought us out here.”
Well I’ll be damn, that was just like old Joe Benson, all right.
And that gave the warden something to hang his hat on, I guess, for he straightened up. He was in command again. He asked one more question, addressed it to us: “What about my death row inmates, are they all right?”
I answered that question: “Yep. Nobody messed with them.”
I guess he was satisfied with my answer, maybe the tone of my voice, the set of my shoulders, whatever, for he didn’t ask to see them or talk to them. He had made up his mind.
He said, “Okay, we’ll go get your records and set your sentences. Will you agree to live with the sentences we set and settle down and leave my guards alone?”
I noticed Lieutenant Carl ease back up close to the warden’s side. The old superintendent was shaking his head with disappointment. Lieutenant Francis just stared at us with clenched jaw, both hands gripping his gun. He held his tongue with obvious effort.
We thought about the warden’s conditions, to live with whatever sentences he set and settle down and leave his guards alone. It was Al Doolin who finally answered. “We’ll take the sentences you give us and we’ll leave your guards alone, but I can’t guarantee we’ll be model prisoners. That’s a tall order, warden.”
“Yes, I suppose it is, for you guys anyway. Okay, you’ll take the sentences we set and leave my guards alone for the duration that you remain in the hole under those sentences—“ He looked at us and waited for an answer. We agreed quickly to his new wording.
Well, he said it would take a few minutes to dig our files up, but that he’d be back in a little while to set our sentences, and he kept his word. And about three o’clock in the morning sometime around nineteen-fifty-three, I think, in the hole in the state prison in Salem, Oregon, Warden O’Malley held his own court and reset our hole sentences. I came away with five more months to serve, Buck Poe and Al Doolin got seven months, if I remember right, and Joe Benson and the rest got something like six months. I don’t remember what Al Brumfield got.
We released the guards, unharmed, and went back to our cells. We had won, but we didn’t brag about it, for we were greatly relieved to be able to see the end of our time in the hole at a definite date in the future, and relieved that our siege was over. It had been a close call.
Me, maybe for the first time I began to realize Warden O’Malley was a decent man.
The warden kept his word, and we kept ours. I got out first and immediately took up with my young buddies and we hung out in the vacant building across from the cannery just like old times. Again we were wanted dead or alive by the cannery cops, but to tell the truth I think they enjoyed our games as much as we did for it relieved the boredom of their beat with a little excitement. I say this because they often laughed when we devised some unique tactic that left them embarrassed and bewildered, and when they caught us cold turkey with a counter-plan of their own, they bawled us out triumphantly but then they always turned us loose to try again. They never wrote us up.
I finally decided to sign up for school, just to have something different to do. I took an English class, which I liked a lot and did well in, and I took a science class taught by a wild-eyed convict, which I liked even more, but that didn’t last long because the food was getting bad. We had been having issues with the food administrator. For one thing he had fed us a bunch of infected pigs, and a lot of prisoners who ate the pork one day were infected with trichinosis and walked around with pink eyes. One of them died. According to the grapevine, the food administrator was hooked up with the old regime faction led by the superintendent, and they were taking kickbacks from farmers and food vendors and they didn’t care how bad the food got, that’s what I heard. They wanted to see us have a riot.
The embattled warden was steadily losing support both with the prison guards and with the local newspapers, radio, and television people, thus the general population. There was a strong rumor going around inside the prison that guards and staff who opposed O’Malley—the superintendent and his bunch—were secretly feeding information to the news media, which we figured was true, the rumors, because every time something ha
ppened inside the prison that would serve as bad publicity for the warden, the news media announced every detail of it, really played it up big, and they could only have gotten that information from somebody who worked at the prison. So O’Malley, who rode into Salem on a white horse to save civilization, was no longer a hero. His days as warden were numbered. All he had left was the support of Lieutenant Carl (Karl?) and a convict named Punchy Bailey—whose days were also numbered.
Before the big food strike of ‘fifty-one the superintendent ran the prison and when O’Malley took over as warden the superintendent was allowed to keep his job, but with reduced authority. That’s what we heard, anyway, and the superintendent had been working behind the warden’s back ever since to restore himself to power.
Anyway, we had been having problems with the food for some time then, so one day a small riot broke out. It was actually, at first, just a loud demonstration. A mob of convicts gathered on the main prison street and began hollering and raising general hell about the food. Me and my buddies had had nothing to do with starting the demonstration but when we heard all the noise and found out it was about the food we just naturally joined in. It was just a non-violent demonstration and I could holler just as loud as anybody.
But then suddenly out of the rotunda of the main building came, guess who, Lieutenant Francis with a crew of guards armed with tear gas guns, which they immediately began shooting us with. And one of the loads hit somebody right in the face, and that did it. What had been a peaceful demonstration turned into a small but loud prison riot. The prisoner who had been hit in the face was lying on the street screaming, for not only was he blinded by the tear gas but the missile that carried the gas had exploded right in his face at point blank range. Pissed me off. Somewhere I found a wooden stick, not much of a weapon since it was not much bigger than a switch my grandma used to whip me with, but big enough to sting just the same.
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