Doing Time

by Bell Gale Chevigny

  For these and many other reasons, the exit from prison can be as menacing a portal as the entrance gate. In Robert Rutan’s richly ironic story, the protagonist, a “penal commuter,” exerts his will not to be taken back. Freedom for him is so bound up with disappointment, prison so identified with dreaming and story telling, that the final outcomes seems both surprising and inevitable.

  Dream of Escape

  Henry Johnson

  The free side of the walls

  Night, warmth, a parking lot.

  But no keys.

  You hear the sirens

  shatter the fragile calm,

  the yellow stench of fear,

  thick and rolling in

  like fog

  filling every shadow.

  The guards scurry out

  in force

  and they form a line,

  their faces painted

  beneath their SWAT caps,

  brandishing imaginary guns

  in the prison yard.

  You decide to flee

  through the dense woods,

  where people line the trail

  holding out cups of cold

  vintage wine.

  In front of you

  a wood nymph

  insinuates herself

  between you and freedom,

  promises pleasures

  long denied.

  You join her

  for a few fierce seconds

  of tenderness

  in a clearing

  hidden from all eyes

  but the stars.

  1987, Sing Sing Correctional Facility

  Ossining, New York

  After All Those Years

  Ajamu C. B. Haki

  After being punished

  for 10, 15, 25, or more years,

  do you think that you’ll want to leave?

  Can you imagine anything more terrifying

  than walking through those gates

  without looking back at that great square wall

  that kept you in all those years?

  Punishing you and comforting you!

  Punishing you and comforting you!

  Do you think that you will at least miss it?

  That somehow, inside, you loved being here

  under the tooth mother’s wings?

  You ain’t got to worry about a damn thing!

  You ain’t got to worry about a damn thing!

  You’re Amerikkka’s greatest son,

  the tooth mother’s greatest capture.

  She has taught you how to bend your knees,

  stand up curved back and mop her welcoming floors,

  given you paint to embellish her halls of terror —

  more terrifying!

  And you’ve been smiling all those years at her morbid green,

  her institutional colors, her slavery that fits you.

  So do you think after all those years of being trained

  that you can just un-train yourself and leave?

  That you can enjoy the wonderful colors you’ve only enjoyed

  as a crayoning child?

  After all those years behind these gray walls —

  the monotony!

  The Sunday pancakes, refried french toast, and greasy chicken,

  the Mondays you wish they had something edible,

  the Tuesday Yakasorbi murder burgers,

  the Wednesday killer liver,

  the Thursday everything from the last four days mixed

  together,

  the Friday lumpy oatmeal and fluorescent Kool-Aid,

  the Saturday cold cuts you go down to the mess hall just to

  look at.

  The cycle begins again on Sunday;

  and you’ve gone to the mess hall for every meal,

  didn’t miss a single meal in all those years.

  Now why do you think that you can get used to real food?

  Home cooking, a gourmet restaurant,

  after you’ve only had seven minutes to eat

  and an ulcer bigger than your heart.

  After all those years you still think that you can just leave?

  Well, maybe, but remember — even though you leave the

  prison the prison will never leave you.

  1996, Sing Sing Correctional Facility

  Ossining, New York

  Stepping Away from My

  Father

  William Aberg

  My father leans toward the green, electric

  dials of the transceiver, clicking the Morse key

  between thumb and forefinger, talking in dashes and dots

  with a man in Magadan, far

  eastern Siberia, about how they put fire pots

  all night beneath running truck engines to keep the gas

  and oil from freezing. How the Sea of Okhotsk,

  even now, in late March, is a plateau

  passable only in the wake of icebreakers.

  My father tells him how an early Maryland spring

  has teased the flowers and trees into a bloom

  that could still be murdered

  by frost. This could be

  the conversation of two men in a local

  hardware store, arms folded across their chests

  as they stand beside the snow shovels and salt shacks

  and grouse about insurance, doctor’s bills,

  the motions of clouds and sun.

  My father’s face is warm, animate,

  his lips silently forming the words

  he taps out in code, the signals

  flashing over the Atlantic, the skies of Europe,

  over the snowy steppe and taiga of Holy Russia.

  I, who have stood by the door

  waking to ask for a loan, back quietly

  into the hall, not wanting to startle him

  out of his easier intimacy with strangers, nor sense

  the fear in his eyes when he sees his addict son.

  1997, Federal Correctional Institute La Tuna

  Anthony, Texas

  To Those Still Waiting

  M. A.Jones

  In Boston, this first October Sunday

  I’ve never felt so far

  from where I started, yellow concrete room

  looking out over barbed wire, Arizona desert

  and out on the prison yard those men I called

  brother still play handball, argue drug deals and

  imagine a way out. How can I

  explain to them this distance, how I’ve fled

  to a city where people move casually

  down streets lined with brownstones, maples

  and in another week the leaves will flame orange, red.

  To those still waiting

  where there are no trees and the sunlight

  touches reluctantly, how do I describe

  the air that enters the window and blouses

  the curtains, how in the next room

  a woman makes coffee, and stepping

  toward me her blue robe falls

  open, the light catching a moment

  on her breast. She sings a little as she

  turns away and I don’t think that she

  understands much of this, how certain mornings

  a part of me drifts back and wants

  to sit all day in a yellow room and say

  nothing, while believing in a world

  that waits elegantly

  just out of reach, some place I’d

  invent for them if they asked and swear

  were true, something more tangible

  than the light that falls through the curtains

  on an October morning, a woman’s voice

  that rises from another room,

  these things around which my life settles.

  1997, Recalling all the prisoners the author has known

  The Break

  Robert M. Rutan

  Clutching the rope and hook in his worn and wizened hands, the old
man crawled on his elbows and knees through the wet grass toward the wall. Craning his neck and looking up, up along the wall, up past the guard tower that sat upon it like a mythical monster, a multi-eyed sentinel whose cones of light pierced the darkened prison yard, he saw the gray clouds part and the moon emerge. The moonlight didn’t bother him for, as long as he made it to the wall safely, it would make visibility poor within the steam when the time came.

  The wet grass had surprised him, and that caused him some irritation: All the years he had watched the steam being blown off from the nearby prison powerhouse, it should have occurred to him that the condensation would dampen the grass. But it hadn’t, and he considered his lack of foresight a bad omen. He tightened his grip around the rope and hook and crawled on, on to the base of the wall. Reaching it, leaning against it, he rested, for he was already tired.

  The ground and the wall vibrated slightly, carrying the rumble of the huge boilers in the powerhouse. Off in the distance, a barge sounded on the river, its engines droning evenly as it slid through the night. The air was colder than he first thought; he zipped up his jacket and tugged the sleeves to his wrists. Lying on his back, he pulled the rope and hook to his chest and concentrated on the climb he’d have to make. Could he do it? He was an old man, but a determined one: He was going over and that was that. He had been a bull of a man once; now, wintered and weakened, he cursed his decrepitude and longed for his former strength. But he had two things in his favor — a good rope and a good hook.

  And that was important. Years ago, when he was doing a ten-year bit in Menard — or was it Statesville? he wasn’t sure — he and two others planned a break. He fished his memory for their names but caught nothing. The plan they had was simple, and they kept it to themselves, executing each step with cautious precision. Using an array of excuses, they manipulated the prison administration into housing them in the same cellblock. Once there, they acquired hacksaw blades from a retiring guard who charged them fifty dollars per blade. Each man sawed the bars of his cell almost but not completely through; then, caulking in the outcuts with putty, they repainted them. Next, in similar fashion, they sawed the window bars of the cellblock barber shop. The cooperation of the inmate barber cost another hundred dollars, but it was well worth it as the window led to the prison yard. They made a rope and a hook. From the hospital, they contrabanded skin-tone surgical gloves and three pairs of white pajamas.

  Then they waited.

  One January night, during a driving snowstorm, they made their move. Each man placed an ingenious dummy in his bed after the cell-house guard finished the 2 a.m. count. The dummy heads, papier-mache skulls pasted with human hair, were covered with blankets up to the hairline, while next to them, curled in repose on the pillows, the surgical gloves, filled with water and tied off like balloons, were left exposed, appearing remarkably lifelike. Pants and shirts, stuffed with rags and dirty laundry, lay bodylike under the covers from which feet, formed with toilet paper and covered with socks, extended. After first yanking out their bars with vice grips, they stole to the barber shop, slipped the doorlock, and yanked out the bars there. On the yard, unseen in the whirling snow, wearing the white pajamas over their prison denims, they dropped into a drainage ditch and crawled the fifty yards to the thirty-foot wall. One of the other men, a tall farmboy from Missouri with a glass eye {his name was on the tip of his tongue) tossed the hook up and over the wall; it bit into the opposite side and held true. They were on their way. The other man, the smallest of the three, started up. The rope stretched against his weight, but held. Using the footholds they had tied into the rope, he climbed up the wall; ten feet, twenty feet, almost to the top, when suddenly, irrevocably — the rope snapped,

  The old man lay against the wall, shivering, trying to remember the names of the two men. Off in the night he heard another barge laboring against the current. He pressed himself to the wall, seeking warmth. Out of the murky waters of his subconscious two names washed up: Jerry Dayton and Roy Bollinger. That’s who they were! He saw their faces clearly, but only for a moment as they slipped back into the dark waters of memory. They didn’t make them like that anymore. Pieces of information bobbed up to him: Dayton was killed by the police during a robbery at Springfield; Bollinger died in the electric chair at the old Cook County Jail for the murder of a minor politician. Or was it Dayton who got the chair and Bollinger who was shot in the holdup? It didn’t matter. The names were right. After so many prisons, so many jails and reformatories, it was hard to keep things straight, and if he got things screwed up now and then, what difference did it make? He knew hundreds of stories grounded on his long experience as a prisoner and a convict which he enjoyed telling despite his inability to keep facts straight, and the way he saw it, if he tacked on a little embellishment over the years, or if he had the wrong characters in the wrong story, or if he distorted the truth once in awhile so that he hardly knew the truth himself, what difference did k make? And who, now, would know? Or care?

  He enjoyed telling his stories; they were his only wealth, and he had hoped to pass them to the boy. The cold night air caught him up, and he winked. Shifting closer against the wall, he listened to the increasing rumble of the boilers. The time was near.

  He’d spent many years in this prison, and during his many stays had often watched the steam being blown off. Except for the newer additions, the prison was steam heated. The ancient, enormous boilers sat squat and Buddha-like on concrete slabs in the red-brick powerhouse close to the main wall. The three boilers, all alike and two stories high, rumbled violently, hissed enigmatically, and succeeded in giving the impression that explosion was imminent. At noon, when the convicts were eating in the prison industrial area, the boilers were blown off to let the excess steam escape. At night, the prisoners secured in their cells, the steam was bled every two hours.

  From the dining room at noon, or from his cell at night, the old man had often watched the process. It fascinated him. On the black tar roof of the powerhouse, three openings were cut, from which the great steam stacks of the boilers piled seventy feet in the air. The three stacks, thick at their bases and starting flush in their openings, were made of sheeted steel that had been seamed together to rise cylindri-cally to the sky. When the steam blew, the hot jets rose like vaporous ejaculations whose high density lent them shape, substance, and color. The wail of the steam whistles was a perfect accompaniment, matching pitch with the velocity of the spewing steam. At first the steam rose in single pillars, then mushroomed into distinct caps and stalks. The caps sucked the stalks up, forming balls of steam that turned to clouds of steam that merged eventually to one single cloud that migrated toward the river. As the cloud drifted, gravity and the cooling air brought it down until it hung on the wall, enshrouding it. Only a few minutes passed from the time the whistles blew until the cloud dissipated completely.

  Lying on his back, listening to the boilers, he shivered almost uncontrollably as the night cold crept into his bones. He remembered when he was a boy and had fled from an orphanage to take a job on a river-boat, an old sternwheeler that plied the Upper Mississippi between St. Louis and Davenport. Unless the weather was exceptionally cold for an extended period, the river stayed clear throughout the winter. The cold earth below him now triggered the memory of the bone-chilling winter river. He had told the boy about the riverboats and about the men and women who rode and worked them. He told the boy about the river itself, calling it his river and telling him how it wound in a childish scrawl, down through Iowa, Illinois, and Missouri, brown and milky and always contemptuous of its banks, to its confluence with the Missouri River at St, Charles and then down, all the way through the South to New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico. The thought of the boy was depressing; he forced it from his mind and concentrated on the rumble of the boilers as best he could.

  The boy, his daughter’s only child, didn’t like the old man. On one of his many paroles, he had lived with her and her son, Jimmy. He had been determined to make a
friend out of the boy, not only for his daughter’s sake and for the harmony of the household, but for his own sake too, as he knew he was old and close to death. Filled with the loneliness of the old that sprang from the inescapable self-alienation of one who wanted to live on despite the realization of approaching death, he saw his chance to do so through the boy. Jimmy, however, a hostile redheaded ten-year-old, resisted him from the start. The boy made it clear that he disbelieved the old man’s stories, and the old man, much to his alarm, found himself disliking the youth, a realization that embarrassed him; yet, he persisted in his attempt to win the boy over, telling him wild stories of bank robberies, prohibition, prison riots, great escapes, gangsters, and shoot-outs until he exhausted his repertoire, while the boy, unimpressed, listened with undisguised boredom. He took the boy on walks, on trips to the zoo, to the movies, and to wherever else he thought a boy that age might want to go. Jimmy, an unwilling participant on these expeditions, went only under the admonishments of his mother, who was glad to have them both out of the house. Once, the old man succeeded in taking him fishing.

  They fished in a small stream not far from home, and, sitting on the bank in the morning sun, the old man surveyed the stream: beer cans and bottles glinted from the creek bed, their reflections shimmering on the surface; old discarded tires and inner tubes lay filmed in silt, mouthing Os of protest against their abandonment; and no fish, fit to eat, lived there.

  He shook his head, saying, “A goddamn shame.” He baited his hook with a bloodfat nightcrawler and tried to show the boy how to do the same. But the boy, displaying an irritating squeamishness, refused to follow the old man’s lead and lapsed into a sulk, so the old man fished alone. Eventually he caught a small bullhead; its white belly flashed with an oily iridescence as he pulled it from the muddy water. As he elevated his pole the fish swung crazily toward him, dancing on its tail; he reached for it with a slow uncoordinated hand and succeeded only in deflecting it. The fish spun away as he groped after it. The boy laughed at his effort — a deep howling, self-indulgent laughter. The old man turned and saw the boy’s face, and the derision and mockery published there. The boy’s dull-witted viciousness scared him; yet, at the same time it served to cancel his desire for rapport, and there was some solace in that. He turned from him, gathered the fish in, unhooked it, and tossed it back into the stream where it darted for safety in series of jerks, dissolving in the alluvial depth. Kicking over the can of worms, he tossed his pole and the boy’s in some scrub and said, “Let’s go.” They walked home in silence.