Keeplock: A Novel of Crime

by Stephen Solomita

  “Check the register.” I kept my voice deliberately hard, trying to gain some control over the situation. When Mando hesitated, I let my automatic drift over toward him. His eyes grew even wider. “Check the register,” I repeated.

  He muttered, “Nobody don’ keep no shit in no cash register,” but he did it, moving around to the back of the counter and pounding on the buttons until it opened. “Ten fuckin’ dollars, Pete. Wha’ we gonna do with ten fuckin’ dollars?”

  He turned back to the old man and screamed at him in Spanish. I stepped behind the counter and began to paw through the paper bags, the twine, the account books. Mando stopped screaming and watched me closely. I found an ancient sawed-off shotgun behind a case of dog food, broke it, and tossed the shells across the room. An open carton of canned tomatoes caught my eye. I pawed through it, discovering an empty can packed with singles and fives.

  “You got it, man?” Mando whispered.

  “Yeah, I got it.” I counted out the money. “Eighty-five dollars. That’s your big fuckin’ score, Mando. Eighty-five dollars. You want me to count the pennies, too?”

  Without waiting for an answer, I bent down and continued to search. At the very end of the counter, across the room from where Armando held the old man and the kid, I found a box of register receipts and a woman’s ring with a small red stone. I remember thinking that the ring might be gold, but was too thin to be worth much. The stone wasn’t much larger than a chip, but the setting, a bird’s nest of thin gold wire with a tiny red egg in the center, had been carefully done. I admired it for a fraction of a second before slipping it into my pocket.

  “Let’s go,” I announced, standing up. “We been here too long as it is.”

  Mando answered me by jabbing the barrel of his .357 into the old man’s mouth. The kid, his courage restored, jumped to his feet and said something in Spanish. Mando grinned, turned slightly, and shot him in the chest.

  FIFTEEN

  THE DREAM BEGAN DURING my first year in Cortlandt. Once a week, in the beginning, then more and more often until I couldn’t close my eyes without seeing this ludicrous figure, shoulders padded out to eternity, strutting through the glass doors of a nonexistent jewelry store. At first I dismissed the dream as a joke. Telling myself: “That’s not the way it happened, the kid didn’t die.”

  The dream ignored my objection, pounding home the same message, night after night. In the end, it broke me down. I suppose, if I’d been outside the Institution, I could have avoided it. Walked the streets. Watched television. Boozed or drugged myself into dreamless oblivion. But the lights go out at ten o’clock in Cortlandt and all you have is a cassette player and a pair of earphones. They weren’t enough.

  There are black holes in outer space. I first read about them in an old Reader’s Digest years before I went to Cortlandt. They were millions of miles across and contained millions of stars, yet they appeared to be empty spaces in a sky filled with light. It was as if a careless artist had forgotten to finish his painting. The explanation, at least in theory, was simple enough: there was so much gravity in a black hole, not even light could escape. Once there, suns and planets, meteors and comets, were trapped forever. Each day, I woke up more tired than when I’d gone to sleep. I stopped going out to the courts or the weight boxes. Marching down to breakfast, eating the watery powdered eggs, and drinking the watery orange juice exhausted me. By the time I reached my job in the tailor shop, I was ready to go back to sleep.

  There’s a bonus system in the tailor shop—exceed your quota and the man rewards you with an extra two dollars a day. Since I had no one on the outside to send me the occasional money order, I was what the C.O.’s liked to call a motivated worker. I put in as many extra hours as I could because I was planning to go to school and I wanted to put aside enough money to keep me in cigarettes and coffee until I got my degree.

  After the dream began, I started to slow down. Each day I completed fewer uniforms, fewer flags. I was losing money, but I didn’t care. I studied the dream like it was a puzzle I had to solve, but I couldn’t get past the literal images. Then I tried to edit the dream, to resurrect it while I was awake and make the necessary changes. To, for instance, transform the jewelry store into a bodega, to put the gun in Armando’s hand, to make Armando pull the trigger.

  After a month of fighting and losing, I refused to leave my cell. One morning, after the count, I went back to my bunk and laid down with my face to the wall. The C.O.’s ignored me. If I was after a voluntary keeplock, it was okay with them. I wasn’t the first prisoner to avoid a beef by staying in his cell.

  Four days later, when my friends told Sergeant Petti that I wasn’t eating, he decided to come down and talk to me. Petti had a reputation as a con’s C.O. If you had a beef with one of the other screws or a problem with the administration, he would try to square it for you.

  “Pete,” he said, “you wanna tell me what’s the matter?”

  I ignored him as I’d been ignoring everything else. The astronomers had been wrong about the black holes. They aren’t filled with trapped starlight. Not even close. They’re just as empty as they appear, devoid of sight or sound or smell or taste. And gravity isn’t a factor, either. How do you find your way out of what isn’t there in the first place?

  “C’mon, Pete, you can’t stay like this.”

  He reached over and put his hand on my shoulder. I suppose I should have warned him not to get too close, not to risk falling in, but I was a million miles away and I didn’t give a shit.

  “For Christ’s sake, Pete, if you don’t get it together, they’re gonna take you to the annex and let the psychs work you over.”

  The Cortlandt Psychological Annex was more feared than the box or the Squad. Rumor had it that every kind of torture was practiced within its brick walls, that patients were laced into straitjackets and beaten with ax handles, that shock therapy was routine. Half the prisoners who went into the annex never came back into population. They were transferred out to Mattewan, the state hospital for the criminally insane.

  The cons who did return to population usually refused to discuss their treatment. And their bros didn’t ask. You could beat the honorable convict down, but you couldn’t break him down. The honorable convict was not dishonored by rape or assault (or by raping or assaulting). He was dishonored by losing control of his violence or, in my case, by abandoning violence altogether.

  I should have been afraid of the annex. Petti wasn’t making an idle threat. The administration, though it didn’t give two shits for my life, couldn’t afford to let me starve in my cell. Helpless prisoners wasting away in eight-by-five cells are the stuff from which riots are made. If I didn’t respond, the C.O.’s would force me to eat. They’d put me in a straitjacket and push a tube down my throat.

  But I barely heard Petti speaking. The words came into the hole and disappeared immediately. If I tried to grab them and draw them close enough to have meaning, if I opened myself enough to receive Petri’s words, other things would flood in behind them. Things like regret and despair. Much better to play the three monkeys and float safely in the darkness.

  “Hey, Avi, come over here,” Petti said.

  I heard footsteps coming across the gallery, then Avi’s voice. “Yeah?”

  “I’m gonna give Frangello a five-day keeplock. I’m gonna say it’s a punishment for not comin’ out of his cell. That means you got five days to get him together. After that, he goes to the annex.”

  Time passed. People came up to my cell and spoke to me through the bars. Sometimes the voices were familiar, but often they came from so far away that by the time the words reached me, they’d been reduced to mere sounds. Then the C.O.’s showed up.

  “Get outta that bunk, you piece of shit.”

  When I didn’t respond, they pulled me to my feet. I felt the jab of a club in my ribs. It should have hurt, but I didn’t feel the pain because I wasn’t really in the body they were hitting. Still, I managed to stumble along the gallery a
nd down the stairs to the tunnels. There were other C.O.’s manning their posts and a few cons being escorted from one block to another. I didn’t look at them and, as far as I could tell, they didn’t look at me, either.

  We arrived at the annex without ever going up into the daylight. I was ordered to strip down, then shoved naked into a cell. A C.O. was stationed outside to prevent me from killing myself. There was no mattress on the bunk, because a mattress cover can be stripped down to make a rope. That’s why they’d taken my clothing. They were afraid I’d hang myself with my underwear.

  It was cold inside the cell. I knew it because I could feel my body shivering, especially when I lay down on the bare metal bunk and faced the wall.

  Time passed. An hour, a day, a week, a month, forever—I really couldn’t say. Time was as irrelevant as everything else. At some point the C.O. on the other side of the bars began to take an interest in my therapy. In his own way he tried to talk me down.

  “Ya know somethin’, Frangello?” he said, already laughing at his own joke. “You got a pretty ass. And the way you’re hangin’ it out there, I could go for a piece myself. Just bring it over to the bars. I’ll use hair oil so it won’t hardly hurt at all.”

  I felt something smack into my leg, felt it through the cold and the indifference. Suicide watches are long and boring. The C.O. was keeping his interest up by shooting paper clips at me with a rubber band. On the few occasions when I got up to drink or use the toilet, I found myself stepping on them.

  “Hey, Frangello, you want a cigarette? Come and suck me off. I’ll give you a pack of Marlboros.”

  Ping, ping, ping.

  After a number of tries, he managed to hit me in the crack of my ass. “Bull’s-eye,” he shouted. “Right on the money. And it is money, right Frangello? Your ass is money, right?”

  At some point a second C.O. joined the guard outside my cell.

  “He movin’?” From the tone of his voice, I knew he was either a sergeant or a deputy warden.

  “He gets up to piss. That’s about it.”

  “I thought you were such a tough guy,” the second one said to me. “I pulled your package and it says you been committin’ felonies since you were ten years old. Now, all of a sudden, you’re curled up like some faggot. You turn sweet, Frangello? Maybe you’re sweet and you don’t wanna face it.”

  “See what I mean,” the first one said. “He don’t move no matter what you say. Watch this.”

  He shot off a paper clip and got himself another bull’s-eye. Both C.O.’s found this hilarious.

  “I still think he’s fakin’ it,” the second one said. “The piece of shit’s after the drugs the pinko fuckin’ shrinks give out like candy. If we didn’t make it hard, every convict in Cortlandt would be on a psych ward. Takin’ the shrinks’ dope and goin’ back to bed. Hey, Frangello, how come you’re up here, anyway? You look like a white man. How come you’re up here with all the niggers? You like niggers? You a nigger lover? Your sister fuck niggers?”

  The door of the cell slid open. I knew what was coming and my body curled into a ball without my willing it. The blows continued to fall, thudding into my flesh, until someone began to scream. It couldn’t have been me, because I was too busy trying to figure out if they were using ax handles, which were forbidden, or standard issue batons. But the C.O.’s didn’t really care who was screaming. They were satisfied with the scream itself.

  “Get your shit together, Frangello,” the second one called out as the cell door slid shut. “If you don’t, I’ll be back.”

  I know that he kept his word, though I couldn’t say how many times he returned. In the end, it was Haldol and not C.O. therapy that brought me out. Haldol transformed me from a nearly comatose zombie into a sitting, shaking, drooling zombie. A zombie who, when he closed his eyes, didn’t dream of jewelry stores and .45 automatics. Who didn’t dream at all. Eventually the psychs had me brought onto a regular ward. The aides, all convicts, kept urging me to fight back, I heard them and, at some level or other, understood that if I managed to escape the Haldol, I wouldn’t fall back into the dream.

  I stopped taking the Haldol, hiding it under my tongue and spitting it into the toilet. The aides knew what was happening and they encouraged me. Gradually, I returned to some sort of normalcy. I began to eat and talk. The dream receded, but never disappeared altogether. Occasionally, when I least expected it, I’d wake up sweating. Telling myself: “It didn’t happen that way. It didn’t happen that way.” Saying it over and over until I was ready to get up and face the realities of prison.

  You can’t make the past over. You can’t undo what’s been done. That doesn’t mean you don’t have to deal with the past. Convicts accomplish this task in any number of ways, from the bug who claims to be acting under God’s orders, to the amateur social scientist who can offer a hundred reasons why he commits mayhem whenever society lets him out of a cell, to the true sociopath who takes what he wants just because he wants it.

  “Hey, I told him not to move. He shouldn’t have moved.”

  “The world been hurtin’ me all my damn life. Ain’t nothin’ wrong with puttin’ a little hurt on the world.”

  “I saw the bitch standing there and I wanted to fuck her, so I fucked her. How was I supposed to know she was a cop?”

  You never hear anything resembling remorse. Not among convicts, anyway. Remorse is a ritual. When the time for sentencing finally arrives, whether you’ve copped a plea or been convicted at trial, you’re allowed to make a statement. Some choose to remain silent, but many take the opportunity to state their deep sorrow for any pain they’ve caused their victims. The speech isn’t for the judge’s benefit. The judge has already made a decision based on reports sent over by the Probation Department. The remorse expressed by the prisoner before the bar of justice is for the ears of some parole board in the distant future. It will be repeated to the parole board each time the convict is up for consideration. Without an admission of guilt and an expression of deep sorrow, it’s almost impossible to get parole. Your remorse doesn’t have to be sincere, but it has to be stated. In the end, it becomes just another prison humiliation.

  SIXTEEN

  IT WAS SIX-THIRTY IN the morning. I was on the phone, waiting for Simon Cooper, when Old McDonald came into his office. He took one look at my face, spun on his heel, and left the room.

  “Yeah?” Simon didn’t seem too happy either.

  “What’s the matter, your corn flakes gettin’ soggy?”

  “Who is this?”

  “Pete Frangello.”

  “Shit.”

  “Don’t kill me, Simon. I’m only the messenger.” I gave him a second to respond, but he kept his mouth shut.

  “I gotta speak to you as soon as possible.”

  “It can’t wait until I get to the office?”

  “It can if you leave soon. The thing is, I have to be out in Queens at nine o’clock. If I’m not there by nine, I can’t go at all.”

  “Damn,” he whispered. Then: “I’ll meet you at the office in half an hour.”

  “I’ll bring the corn flakes.”

  “Fuck you, Pete. This better be good.”

  Thirty minutes later I was sitting across from him in his office, going over my story. I didn’t mention the dream or what had happened to me in Cortlandt, but they were the only things I left out. When I finished, he sat back in his chair and shook his head.

  “The problem, Pete, is how do I know you’re telling me the truth? You’ve scammed me so many times, it’s hard for me to believe anything you say.”

  I didn’t answer. Just stared across at him. He was massive, his neck bigger than my thigh, his face as blank and empty as my own. “My problem,” I said finally, “is that I don’t know what to do. I can feel the urge to just take off. You understand what I’m saying? I wanna get on the next bus and keep going. I wanna get to Los Angeles, jump in the ocean and start swimming west.”

  “You don’t need me for that,” Simon obs
erved, lighting his pipe. “You can do that without my help.”

  I ignored him. “If I go back into Rikers and take my chances with the board, Eddie’s gonna find someone else and do the job anyway. What kind of cops do you think they put in a patrol car to guard a witness’s house? You figure they take experienced veterans? You think they use sergeants or lieutenants? Kids do that work, Simon. And I keep seeing a twenty-year-old rookie with half his head blown off. I can’t deal with it.”

  I hadn’t mentioned the dream, so I couldn’t tell him that I knew the dream would come back if I let it happen. He wouldn’t have understood, anyway. If you haven’t spent a couple of weeks not caring whether you live or die, there’s no way you can understand. Maybe that’s why the psychiatrists deal with that reality by drugging it into oblivion.

  “What Eddie Conte does or doesn’t do is a problem for the cops,” he said. “Your only move is to walk away. Which, as you say, means going to Rikers for a few months. Of course, the fact that you’ve been bullshitting Condon and Rico makes the deal a little more complicated. If you tell them what Conte’s really up to and then refuse to help, they’re gonna do everything they can to bury you. They’re gonna go to the D.A.’s people and they’re gonna go to the parole board. I make it 70-30 you end up in Cortlandt. On the other hand, you could always let the cop die. What’s a pig’s life mean to you, anyway?”

  He was pissed, no question about it.

  “I thought you didn’t believe me.”

  My wise-guy attitude wasn’t helping. I knew it, but I really didn’t have another way to deal with parole officers. Or any other agent of law enforcement. It’s what they expect and what the honorable convict delivers.

  “The way I see it, you don’t have a lot of choices.” He didn’t bother answering my question. “That’s if you really want to save that cop. If you want to save the cop, you have to go back to Condon and Rico and tell them you lied. You have to tell them what’s really happening and you have to go through with it. You have to become a rat.”