We’ve known each other over the years. I even campaigned for him once, in a no-sweat half-assed way. As politicians go, he’s not a bad guy.
The aide fades into the corner. Her eyes never leave his excellency.
“Thank you for coming on such short notice, Mr. Alexander.”
“It wasn’t presented to me on a voluntary basis, sir.”
“Thanks anyway.” He looks at Robertson and Gates. “Have you been filled in at all?”
“All I know is what I read in the papers,” I tell him.
“We were waiting for you,” Robertson tells the governor.
The governor nods, as if that was the right course. A show of not dodging the buck.
“We’ve been talking all night,” he says. “Would you pour me a cup, Elaine?” he digresses momentarily to ask his aide. “Extra sugar this morning,” he smiles. Always on; you never know when a photographer might pop out of the ficus. “I need the energy.” He turns back to me.
“Excuse me. We were talking—my colleagues here and others, anyone who’s affected. All the way to Washington. Which is a lot of people. It’s the warden’s prison, he’s in charge, but this whole thing’s gotten crazy now.” He turns to the warden.
“It’s out of my control,” Gates finishes for him. He’s up-front about it, but it’s got to be killing him. The man’s in his fifties, with a lifetime spent in the prison system, coming up from the ranks to the number-one job, and he’s lost control; the one absolute no-no. He’s out of a job, no matter how this is resolved he’ll be gone before the year’s out.
“The prison’s completely sealed,” the governor says, picking it up—we don’t have all day for chit-chat, he has to get to the point: the point of what I’m doing here talking with him while the prison burns. “Anyone that could get out, has. The rest are trapped inside.”
I nod, sip my coffee. I’m keeping my own counsel, it’s their show.
“They took eleven hostages,” he continues. “Eight guards, all male, and three female clerical workers.” He pauses, knowing what I’m thinking, what anyone would be thinking. “We think they’re all right, that they haven’t been harmed … or molested. We’re not sure, we’re not sure of anything, but to the best of our knowledge we don’t think so. Of course, that’s old information.”
In situations like this, any information older than fifteen minutes is old information. While we’re talking here, eating greasy doughnuts and drinking coffee, a dozen people could be getting whacked.
“I gathered as much,” I say, cautiously. “From watching the news this morning. And the radio driving in.”
“It’s already a full-blown disaster,” he exclaims, for the first time showing some honest feeling. “I’ve been thinking about those women. They’re clerks, for Godsakes, they’re not trained to handle this. At least if it was lady guards … these women, they’ve got to be hysterical. And you know where that can lead.”
To panic, chaos, and destruction. Like the baby crying in church—you’ll do anything to shut it up.
“Anyway,” he goes on, “there’s a new development now. Their leadership, we don’t know who it is, they’ve set up a council, they contacted me through the warden here about—what?—an hour and a half, two hours ago.”
Gates nods confirmation.
“They’re prepared to talk,” the governor tells me. “They want to start a negotiation.”
“That’s a step,” I say. That’s good; as long as people are talking, they usually aren’t killing.
“The thing is, they don’t want to negotiate with anyone officially connected,” he says. “They don’t trust the system, which, let’s face it, given who they are and where they are, I can’t blame them.”
He looks over at Gates, at Robertson, back to me.
“The governor and I talked about this,” Robertson tells me, picking up the ball. “Earlier this morning. He’s signed off on it—with my disagreement, I must add.” He stares hard at me. “My strong disagreement. But it’s his decision to make and under the circumstances we don’t have much of a choice.”
The governor looks at me like I’m supposed to know what Robertson’s talking about. I look at Robertson. I don’t know exactly what’s coming, but this was a set-up from the get-go.
“The inmates have asked that you represent us,” the governor says coolly. “They want you to negotiate for … well, us. The authorities. We agree …” here he stares at Robertson, a look stating ‘we’re all on the same page here, boyo, and don’t you forget it,’ “that you’re the right man for the job. Basically, Mr. Alexander, we’re authorizing you to negotiate a settlement; we’re asking you to take charge. To run the prison until this is over. Because we can’t.” He throws up his hands in frustration and surrender. “We’ve lost control. You’re the only one they’ve agreed to talk to.”
“Why me?” The words are out of my mouth before I even realize it.
“They figure you as a stand-up guy,” Robertson says. The way he puts it, it isn’t a compliment. “They think they can trust you.” He pauses. “So do we,” he adds grudgingly, looking at the governor.
“Do I have to?” I ask.
The governor takes a breath.
“We’re not going to force you.”
I swish my coffee in my cup. It tastes like graphite.
“What’s the alternative?” I ask. “If I pass?”
“We haven’t thought beyond this,” Robertson says. “We don’t … hell, Will, we’re playing everything by ear here.”
“What guarantees do I have?” I ask. I’m thinking as fast as I can.
“About your safety? Honest answer? None that we can give you. They’re running the show,” he says.
I shake my head.
“From you,” I say.
“Whatever,” he says, looking to the governor, who nods. “You’re the boss.”
“The boss.” Uh huh. “In other words,” I say, “I negotiate, you’ll endorse, right? Officially, on paper?”
John and his eminence look at each other.
“Well …” the governor says. He doesn’t want to play all his hole cards. Unfortunately for him, he has to.
“Yes,” he says. “That’s correct. The terms will have to be run by me for approval, but yes.”
I look at him. “I’ve got to think about this,” I say.
“For how long?” he asks, a bit more anxiously than he’d like to.
“I don’t know. But I’ve got to think about it.”
“WHY DOES IT HAVE TO BE YOU?”
“I was requested. Kind of like when the queen wants to see you. You can turn it down but it’s considered bad form.”
She doesn’t see the humor.
“But why you? You’re a civilian.”
“That’s the point. They—the guys inside—don’t trust anyone in authority … which is one area, at least, in which we are kindred spirits.”
“This is a little more serious than a bumper sticker, Will.”
We’re in a coffee shop across the street, Mary Lou and I. Claudia’s been dumped at a friend’s, so far none the wiser. Mary Lou’s upset, more than I am. She’s got a much stronger grasp on reality than I do.
“You’re fodder,” she says.
“Maybe. But what am I supposed to do?”
“Tell them you won’t do it. It’s their dirty work—let them clean up their own mess.”
“They would prefer to,” I tell her. “Asking me to do this was not something that went down easy, I can assure you.”
“You want to do this,” she says.
“No.”
“Come on, Will, this is no time to play games. It’s a macho ego trip, admit it.”
“Well …” Come on, man, this is the woman you love. Be straight.
“There’s ego involved, yes.”
“Ego gets people killed.”
“I’m not going to get killed.” Keep saying that, pal, it sounds good.
“Do you have a guarantee?”
she asks. “Something in writing? You’re a lawyer, you know it has to be on paper.”
“Sure,” I say. “I’ll show it to the inmates. ‘You can’t kill me, I have a letter from my mother.’”
“You’re going to do it, aren’t you?”
“I don’t have a choice, Mary Lou.”
“I guess you don’t,” she says. She’s fighting to keep the tears back. “Anyone else would; but you don’t.”
Outside, she gives me a hug.
“I’ll be watching for you on the news,” she says.
“I’ll be the one wearing the carnation in my lapel,” I say.
“Be careful, sweetheart,” she implores. “And come back.”
“HERE’S THE PROGRAM,” I tell them, staring the governor square in his puss. “I’m not going to be your stooge. You’re not going to send me in there to do what you can’t and then cut my legs from under me once you’re back in control again. If I do this—and I emphasize if—we establish how far I can go, right now in this room, and the rest is at my discretion. And I want it in writing—from you.”
“Will …” Robertson moves in quickly.
“Sayonara, baby. Thanks for breakfast.”
In less than an hour, the paperwork, duly signed by the governor and witnessed by two of their secretaries and Susan, is safely reposing in the locked safe of my office.
THEY MEET ME at the front gate. Four of them, wearing various styles of masks. They look like Middle Eastern terrorists: the only facial features that show are their eyes, which are sunk back into their skulls with fatigue, fear, and rage.
I’m alone with them in no-man’s land, between the two sets of gates. One of them frisks me thoroughly. I steel myself to be as calm and still as possible; two hundred people are watching this live, and millions will be seeing it on the nightly news. The teaser runs through my head: ‘Gonzo lawyer stripped and searched; film at eleven.’ Hyperbole—I’m fully clothed, and my gonzo days, if there ever were any, are behind me. At least in my own mind.
It’s late in the day. To the west the sun is dying behind the hills. After I left Robertson’s office I went home to pack a small overnight bag, and to tell Claudia what was happening. She was worried, of course, but she had that wonderful faith kids have in their parents, that they’re invincible, especially when they’re doing the right thing.
We said our goodbyes. Mary Lou drove her to the airport, in Albuquerque. She was much more upset; she didn’t want me to do it. If it was the other way around, I put it to her, wouldn’t you? We both knew that answer. I gave them both big hugs and kisses, watched the car until it was out of sight, went back to town and joined the war party.
I’m not scared; not for myself. There’s a protocol for this, long established. I’ll do the best I can, and either it’ll work or it won’t. They don’t shoot the messenger in situations like this, this isn’t Lebanon.
I just have to go on faith that these men are sane enough to remember the rules. Martyrdom isn’t much of a turn-on for me; I have no desire to become a home-grown Terry Waite.
What I am scared of, rationally, is not being able to make it work. That no matter what I do, say, or promise, it won’t be enough, or worse, that what’s already happened has become such a mountain, is so far gone, that there is no solution except siege. I can’t promise them the moon; I can’t give them their freedom.
They finish searching me. One of them takes my bag, as if he’s my porter. We pass through the inner set of gates, which, from somewhere inside, are automatically locked behind us. We walk the fifty yards across the lawn. The prisoner-guards accompanying me (who are comporting themselves very seriously, almost military-style) flank me front and back, side and side. We fast-walk up the steps to the administration building and inside, and the free world disappears behind me at the same moment that the sun drops out of sight in the sky.
THE WORLD IS DARK, and it’s on fire. The darkness is not merely lack of light; it’s a real, viscous darkness, thick and heavy, darkness caused not by loss of light but by the forceful removal of light, of light violently sucked out of the air and replaced with oppression. You can almost reach out and touch it, as if it were a wall, it feels so thick, so real. Hanging heavy, suffocating, an accumulation of enormous weight. To live in darkness like this would be to go crazy eventually.
The density of the smoke assaults my mouth and nasal passages as soon as I pass into the old maximum-security section. One of my escorts leads me to a sink, where I dip my hands in tepid water, splash my hands and face. Then he hands me a water-soaked towel, helps me tie it around my face and neck.
“It’s worst here,” he tells me. He’s black, he talks with a thick southern drawl. There aren’t many blacks in here; seventy-five percent of the inmate population is Chicano, the oppressed minority of choice in these parts. “In case they try to storm us,” he informs me, a cautioning, “we got it rigged with oil-drums, we can explode this whole fuckin’ place in a fireball, it comes down to that. The fumes’re fierce though, ain’t they?”
They are; it’s hot as hell, the place has been shut down for over twenty-four hours, so the air-conditioning is off. Except for water, which is a self-contained unit of wells and cisterns inside the prison walls, all the utilities are off. If this goes more than a week they’ll run out of food, unless they negotiate for it. If it goes more than a week, people much heavier than me will be doing the negotiating, and it’ll be at gunpoint. If it comes to that, the hostages will be dead.
I’d given the authorities three days. If I haven’t pulled it off by then, or, at the least, have gotten damn close to a settlement, I’m walking out. Then they can do it the hard way.
Everyone inside the walls has been brought to this unit, A unit. It’s the original prison building, constructed the old way, barred cells in tiers. All the new buildings are compartmentalized; no unit in any of them houses more than two dozen prisoners. It’s a better system because it keeps large groups of the population from gathering together.
When the rioting started, the warden could have shut down the one building where it was happening in D unit; he could have stopped it from spreading prison-wide. Only about two hundred men would have been affected, then. The other six hundred-odd would have been prevented from getting in on the action. The down side would have been that the hostages, at least those who were taken in the first wave, would’ve been assured of being killed; if not at once, definitely before it all ended. Some wardens would have done that; they would have sacrificed their troops. By the book, you’re allowed to do that. Trade lives for the greater good.
To his credit, Gates didn’t. He swapped keeping the hostages alive for control of his prison. I’d bet the farm that most prison officials think he’s a pussy, that he should’ve detonated the place, and made the sacrifices.
But most prison officials never have to face this choice, although they spend their lives in dread of it. I have no doubt Gates did the right thing, and I suspect he still feels the same, even though it’s costing him.
If I can pull it off, bring the hostages out alive, I might save his bacon. But his bacon, or any other part of his anatomy, is not the problem. The problem is the over eight hundred men who have been locked up like animals in these cages. That they deserve to be locked up, that they have to be, is not in question. There’s no other way to handle many of these men. The question is, how do you get madmen, psychotics, losers with nothing more to lose, to agree to docilely go back into their cages?
It’s very quiet. Normally a prison is loud. People talking and yelling all the time. There are men in prison who scream every second they’re awake. Now there is none of that. It’s frightening, the quiet is so intense.
We are in the small holding area outside the main section. Normally, to get in, you go through two sets of thick, lead-covered doors that lock independently of each other, and you wait in between for one set to lock before the other set opens. It’s to keep some chump from trying to make a break. Now, all th
e doors are open. People can go in and out at will; but they don’t, because they have nowhere to go.
“Put these on, man.” One of my escorts hands me a couple of Baggies, the kind you stick your garbage in. I look down; I notice they’re all wearing them over their shoes.
“What for?” I ask.
“The floors are wet inside,” he answers dryly. “You don’t want to fuck up your new Nikes.”
I wrap the garbage bags around my shoes, secure them with plastic ties.
“Follow me,” the leader, the black convict, tells me. “Keep up. Don’t go sight-seeing on me, you hear? Time for that shit later, maybe.
Right now we got to get you together with the council. Follow up close now.”
We press forward, towards the body of the prison. I’m right up against them, asshole to elbow. We round the bend, and as I walk into the cellblock proper I’m assaulted by the unbelievable, overwhelming smell, it hits me before anything visual registers, almost like shock waves of a nuclear explosion, it’s that strong and immediate, before anything I see makes an imprint: the most powerful, intense, horrible odor I’ve ever encountered, the smell of a thousand septic tanks bursting, ten thousand toilets overflowing. I gag violently, my lunch is in my mouth, my hand is up covering it through the towel. I’m not going to vomit in front of these men, not when I’ve barely set a foot inside the door.
We start forward.
“Watch your step,” my escort warns. The floor is very slippery. Linoleum. Easy to keep clean. I realize that it’s wet, that there’s a virtual river underneath my feet, several inches deep. And immediately I realize, a realization that brings fresh revulsion, that all the toilets are stopped up, I hear them flushing, over and over, they’ve been jammed-up to keep doing it, so that they’ve overflowed out onto the floor and I am walking through a river not only of foul water, but of piss, shit, and vomit. And blood. I can’t help but look down and even though it’s dark in here I can see the blood, it flows in clots, almost fluorescent, silvery-red, the water pale yellow, turds and clumps of vomit carried with it. It moves slowly, from one wall to another, seeking an outlet, a release, but there is none so it’s a stagnant tidal pool, a swamp of human waste.
Against the Wind Page 35