Smugglers Notch

by Joseph Koenig

  Raising the blinds, Graham looked out at four hundred cons divided into desultory bunches on an athletic field ringed by a cratered cinder track. Worn grass lay in flattened patches under late March snow, and few of the men ventured far from the eastern wall that got whatever sun filtered through the gloom. Graham studied them with a bitterness all his own. In the eighty-six years of its existence there had been nine successful breaks from Southern Vermont Correctional Facility involving a total of thirty-four men, the majority of whom were recaptured within twelve hours of gaining their freedom. Five of the escapes had come during his tour as warden; one more and he would be out on his ass, or back rattling keys on the tier. The thought of it made him go to his desk for the office bottle. But the lock had been jimmied and the drawer was empty.

  When Vermont’s only maximum security penetentiary was erected during the first term of President Theodore Roosevelt, it had been considered escape-proof, the last word in keeping men humanely in cages. Four cell blocks like spokes on a copper hub radiated from a domed building housing administration, factories, and mess hall. Walls eighteen feet high and three feet thick enclosed the blocks, each of which was two hundred feet long. Because convict lore held the walls to be impregnable, each of the nine breaks had been made by inmates who stowed away in vehicles paying regular calls at the institution—garbage trucks, delivery wagons, ambulances, in one case a hearse. So there was no doubt in Graham’s mind that Cleve Holmes had handed him a load of shit. He would spend the Easter weekend not sleeping as well as he had expected, trying to figure out what was going down.

  Sunday, in a classroom under the green dome of administration, thirty-seven-year-old Archie Walker, doing fifteen years for the attempted murder of the sister of the woman whose testimony had put Holmes in prison, was delivering an Easter sermon to the Fellowship of Christian Convicts. Due to the shortage of staff, the services were under the nominal leadership of the Protestant chaplain’s clerk, Jefferson Stark, twenty-eight, a trusty in the ninth year of a life term for first-degree murder.

  “Brothers,” Walker said, “as promised we have a holiday treat for you. Mr. Conklin is going to lead a discussion of an inspiring and uplifting reading from the Book of Psalms.”

  Paul Conklin slid out of his chair with attached desk and went to the front of the room. Clutched against his chest was a morocco-bound King James Bible, a gift from his brother at their reunion two Sundays before. Conklin opened the heavy volume to a page marked with a leather tassel and then gazed at his audience. Besides Walker and Stark only one other prisoner had spurned the visitors’ room for Easter Bible class—Michael Munson—a night-time burglar from Poughkeepsie, New York.

  “Today’s portion is going to be short, but I think you’ll find it relevant.” Conklin coughed ostentatiously into his fist. “It’s from the One hundred and forty-fourth Psalm, verse seven.”

  “You call that a portion?” Munson said. “It’s two fucking sentences.”

  Stark rapped bruised knuckles against his desk. “If the brother will let Mr. Conklin go on.”

  Munson glowered at the trusty as Conklin lowered his head over the page. “‘Send thine hand from above,’” he read. “‘Rid me and deliver me out of great waters, from the hand of strange children.’” He slammed the book shut. “Now,” he said, “does anybody know what that means?”

  “Has something to do with you pray hard enough and really mean it, God’ll take care of you no matter what you done before and what kind of mess you’re in now,” Stark said thoughtfully. “Doesn’t it?”

  “Cut the shit, Conklin,” Munson said. “You know why we’re here, and it’s not for Sunday school. Do you have the blades or not?”

  Archie Walker raised his hand. When Conklin acknowledged him, he pushed out of his seat and stood at attention like a schoolboy begging favor from a teacher. “What it says, I believe, is we pull this off we don’t have to do any more hard time listening to such assholes as Mr. Munson.”

  “Could be you’re taking it too literally,” Conklin said. “Let’s have another look in here.” He opened the Bible again and ran his fingertips against the inside of the cover. Using his thumbnail, he peeled back the yellow paper glued to the leather and four thin strips of metal clattered onto the lectern. “Well, maybe not,” he laughed. “Send out thine hands, guys. Deliverance is surely on the way.”

  The men gathered around and Conklin gave each a blade. “What the Lord has wrought is a Pro-Kraft hacksaw, the best made. Cuts through iron, case-hardened steel, you name it, except the vault at Fort Knox, Kentucky.”

  Munson tilted his at the window and squinted at the lettering etched in the metal. He was a short, swarthy man, a hairy man even in the moments after he shaved, and the carbonized steel was the same dark blue as his cheeks. “These are Nestor blades. You promised the Pro-Krafts.”

  “These are as good,” Conklin said quickly. “Better.”

  “Nothing’s as good as Pro-Krafts,” Munson said, and Conklin felt for the reassuring weight of his Bible. “You fucked up. Do it some more and the one thing I’m sure these cookie cutters will slice through is your neck. … Damn kid,” he muttered. “I never should’ve—”

  “From the hand of strange children.” Conklin was looking at Walker, for four years three tier’s light heavyweight clean and jerk champion. Walker began to laugh, a dry chuckle that filled out into a roar that he turned on Munson until the burglar went back to his seat. “You do remember what we’re bringing you along for?” Conklin asked.

  “Yeah,” Munson said. “I remember.”

  Stark pocketed his blade, started to pace anxiously in front of the door. “Let’s get going.”

  “What’s your hurry?” Conklin said, allowing a laugh of his own. “With Graham checking for smoke bombs, or looking under the food trucks to see who’s hitching out on an axle, we’ve got all the time in the world.”

  “Not me,” Stark said. “I wasted enough time in the joint already.”

  Conklin rubbed his palm against the cool Morocco binding, then put down the book reluctantly. “Okay, school’s out,” he said. “Now let’s see what you learned.” He opened the door and looked both ways, as if he were afraid of being run down in heavy traffic. The corridor was deserted. Empty cans, a drop cloth stiff with paint, and a ladder had been stored at the far end, blocking access to a steel door secured with a Yale lock. The men tore through the rubbish and then stood back as Munson used a pick fashioned from a nail file to open the padlock.

  “What’d I tell you?” Conklin gloated as the door swung wide. “We just follow the plan, with everybody doing his own bit, and we’re out of here.”

  Their eyes adjusted to the darkness of a stairwell cluttered with furniture that had been carted out of the classroom forty years before, scarred desks and chairs and shattered blackboards gray with obscene graffiti. Stark cleared his throat and spit yellow phlegm on the steps. “’S nice here,” he said. “Quiet and peaceful.”

  “Maybe you ought to stay,” Munson said. “No one’d miss you. And if they did, I doubt they’d give a big enough shit to start looking.”

  “Brother Munson,” Walker said, “how is it that you always seem to be having your period?” Walker moved on the burglar, who reached quickly inside his shirt.

  Conklin stepped between them with his arms spread. “You want to tear each other apart, be my guest. Only try and hold off a little longer, ’cause me and Stark need both of you till we’re over the wall.”

  “Why do we have to take his crap?” Stark asked. “Who wants him?”

  Conklin slapped the Yale lock into the trusty’s palm. “You do.”

  Stark dropped the lock as if it were red hot and it bounced down the stairs, echoing so loudly that Conklin had to fight the urge to run after it. “Where do we go from here?” Stark asked.

  Conklin unbuttoned his shirt and came out with a hand-drawn map. “You can thank my brother for this, too. It’s amazing, the stuff you find in the public library.�
� He glanced down the stairs toward a landing where the lock was still rattling and then nudged the others toward the next flight up. “This way,” he said. “I’m pretty sure.”

  “You’re what?” Munson said.

  The same look from the three of them silenced him. They climbed a second flight, to a landing guarded by another steel door. “Where are we now?” Walker asked.

  “Should be right outside the chapel,” Conklin said. “It hasn’t been used in years. Lousy atheists. If they let us hold services in there like they’re supposed to, we wouldn’t have to go through so much shit.”

  Munson moved through the others and examined the door. “You fucked up, wise guy. We can’t get through this.”

  “Why not?” Stark asked. “Can’t you pick the lock?”

  “The door’s bolted shut. Without tools there’s no way to take it off its hinges.”

  Conklin seemed unconcerned. “Archie, did you hear what the man said?”

  “Yeah, I heard.” The weight lifter doubled his right hand into a fist. He drove it into the wall to the left of the door and a large block of plaster fell out and broke apart on the landing.

  “What this is an illustration of,” Conklin said, crumbling a morsel of plaster in his fingers, “is the power of God, or Archie Walker.” He laughed again. “Or maybe just shoddy construction.”

  But the other cons weren’t listening. They were tearing at the hole, using their blades to slice through a steel mesh grid until they had opened a space big enough for even Walker to crawl through. Conklin tied a handkerchief around his neck and pulled it up over his face. “Jesse Fucking James,” he said, and waved away the gritty powder that hung in the opening and squeezed through first.

  The all-faith chapel at Southern Vermont Correctional Facility had been off limits since the early 1960s, when interest in prison religious life had dwindled to a record low. It was a large room with a high vaulted ceiling and two dozen oak pews pushed into a corner and buried beneath cardboard boxes filled with prayer books and hymnals. Conklin sat down on a bench that stood away from the others. “We’ll relax for a while,” he said, “rest up till it starts getting dark. Nobody’d think of looking for us here.”

  “What if they do?” Stark asked. “What then?”

  Conklin pushed some of the dust off the pew. “Sit down, Jeff,” he said. “First of all, the screws won’t know we’re missing for another three, four hours, till evening count. Then Graham’ll be so busy eating his heart out for not personally crawling under the bread truck or checking all the visitors at the gate, he won’t know where to begin. But I wouldn’t worry even if they started now. They probably don’t know this place exists.”

  “Only thing that worries me,” Stark said, “is where we go from here.”

  The chapel seemed hollow, a punishment cell the size of a theater. Light entered from a barred window behind the low podium that had served as a pulpit. Conklin hurried to the window and scraped away nearly three decades’ grime, confirming that they were at the third-floor level of the administration building, which overlooked the yard where cons in weathered denim marched around the track beside women wearing gaudy hats and children with vacant, frightened eyes.

  “Look at those fish,” someone said, “like they’re on Fifth Avenue.”

  “I am looking,” Munson said, “and that goddam Easter parade is all I see. This place is a dead end.”

  Conklin returned to the bench and lay against the shiny spot where Stark had been sitting, put his feet up. “You’re too antsy, Munson. Look close to the building, look straight down. All we got to do is saw the bars, drop to the second-floor roof, and follow it around the dome. If we can do that—and I’d like to hear one reason we can’t—we’re good as gone.”

  Munson touched his blade to his thumb. “I have one.”

  “What’s eating you now?” Conklin said, the aggravation building, sounding like he wanted to hide it but couldn’t. “Still don’t like the view?”

  “The bars are two inches thick. With these lousy Nestor saws there’s no guarantee we can slice through before they discover we aren’t in our cells.”

  Conklin sat up. He walked back to the window with short, even steps, trying to look unconcerned, just strolling, picking up the pace in spite of himself. Walker and Stark moved aside, and he stood close to Munson as the burglar smashed the glass with a Bible and brushed in the shards, then scraped his blade against the pitted bars.

  “Check it out,” Munson said, “hardly makes a scratch. If we’re going out this window before they’re ready to parole us, we’ve got to get on it now.”

  Stark’s thick eyebrows wriggled across his forehead seeming to burrow into a crevice above his nose. “He know his business?”

  “Only one way to find out,” Conklin said. “Archie, you start.”

  It took Walker forty minutes to saw through the center bar and another quarter-hour to open a second groove two feet below the break, ruining his blade in the process. Stark replaced him and in half an hour doubled the depth of the bottom cut before the carbonized steel was worn smooth.

  “Okay, we’re just about done,” Conklin said. “Munson, you take over. I’ll finish up.”

  “No, now’s your turn.”

  Conklin turned to Walker for support, but the weight lifter was busy studying his fingernails. He produced his own blade, holding it out like a pass as he came over the podium. He fit the blue metal against the bar, dragged it back and forth with little visible result when it snapped in his hand. “Sorry about that,” he said. “My fault.”

  “You could get us killed, being sorry,” Munson said. He snatched up the pieces and flung them across the chapel, then dipped inside his pocket faster than anyone could move. “It’s a good thing I don’t pay you much mind.” His hand came out wrapped around his blade. “I’ve got to wonder why anyone does.”

  He slipped on dark glasses that he adjusted over his eyes like goggles. The others hovered close by as he began sliding the blade through the bar, pausing to gauge the depth of the groove with a fingertip. With smooth, sure strokes he enlarged the space like a woodsman whittling a miniature tree till the bar seemed to balance on an invisible point. Then he took off his glasses, and Walker tugged at the bar, working it back and forth until the metal gave out.

  Munson dragged a carton of prayer books under the window and squeezed his torso through the space in the bars. “It’s big enough for me.” He slid back inside and glared at Conklin. “And for him. I don’t know about you, though, Walker. It’s something else you might want to take up with the boy genius.”

  Conklin looked up in surprise, like an actor called onstage before he had memorized his lines. What was going on at the window had seemed of no special importance because he wasn’t at the center of it, not like the good time at Malletts Bay when he had the big sheriff’s lieutenant twitching like a puppet on a thousand strings. Now he shoved through the men, reclaiming the spotlight. “Go ahead, Archie,” he said. “You’ll see.”

  Walker ground bits of broken glass with his heel until Munson jumped down from the box, then stuck his head into the opening. As he squirmed outside, his broad shoulders snagged on the jagged nubs of the bar. “Shit,” he said. “It hurts.”

  “Yeah, but you can pull yourself out, can’t you?” Conklin asked.

  Walker grimaced and sucked air between clenched teeth. “In or out, I’m stuck.”

  “Crawl out of there, quick,” Munson said. He pulled at Walker’s hips and the weightlifter inched inside, bleeding from under the left arm.

  “You like to tore my ribs out, Munson.”

  “Someone could have seen you.”

  Walker lifted his shirt and examined two gashes running freely with blood. “Like who? The yard’s empty, everybody gone home or back to the blocks. Or didn’t you notice?”

  Conklin circled around the pair. If Munson got off putting his head in the lion’s jaws, who was he to ruin his good time? He stepped onto the carton for a
grandstand view and glanced out the window. “Shut up, Archie,” he said suddenly. “He’s right. I don’t know where Graham found screws to spare, but there’s a bunch coming into the yard.”

  “I didn’t see them. What are they doing there this hour?”

  “Trailing a work crew cleaning up after the Easter crowd.”

  Conklin went back to the pew and sat with a prayer book in his lap, returning to the window four times before he said, “Time to blow.”

  “Thought I’d never hear it,” Walker said.

  “Same here,” said Stark.

  “Munson, you have an opinion?”

  The burglar climbed onto the box again. “Yeah, let’s go.”

  “You feeling all right?” Conklin said. “Everything’s okay?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “How come you’re so agreeable?” Conklin opened the prayer book over the bottom of the broken bar. He boosted himself onto the sill, slithered out, and sat with his legs dangling. Light from a ripening moon lent substance to the second-story roof that jutted from the base of the dome twelve feet below. If he dropped straight down, he would land without injuring himself. A miscalculation would bounce him into the yard with a fractured leg or two for his trouble. “Archie,” he whispered. “Archie, give me a hand.”

  He felt the weightlifter’s grip under his arms and then Walker was lowering him down the side of the building. “Okay, now,” he said, and the big man let go and he fell against the dome and rode it down, turning his ankle slightly in a mound of pebbles. When he looked back up, Stark had poked his head out and was surveying the landing area. “It’s a cinch,” he called to the trusty. “Archie’ll help.”

  Stark was gazing past him, looking anywhere but the narrow roof. “I … I got a thing about high places. Let Munson go next.” He ducked away, then reappeared at the window, wide-eyed and trembling. “I’ll murder you, you don’t put me down,” he shouted.