Behind the Iron

by William W. Johnstone

  Fallon stared at where he imagined his boots might be. His head shook in sympathy. He knew of more than one kid who had been sentenced to the Detroit House of Corrections to do hard time, perhaps, but for only a year, maybe five at the most. And the kid had killed someone in prison.

  “They didn’t sentence you to hang for murdering that man?” Fallon asked.

  The Mole laughed. “Why would they show any mercy on a murderer such as me?”

  Fallon nodded. Yes, hanging would have ended The Mole’s suffering. But keeping a man in blackness for all this time wasn’t humane. His head lifted, and he thought of another question.

  “Was that man . . . never mind.” Fallon tried to remember all he was taught as a cowboy, before he first pinned on the six-point star for Judge Parker. You didn’t stick your nose into another person’s business.

  “No.” The Mole shifted his feet in the dark. “There were others.”

  “Others?” Fallon asked.

  “Others I killed,” The Mole said.

  “Like Mr. Sherman?” Fallon asked.

  “Who? Oh, yes. Well, no.”

  “Prisoners?” Fallon was curious. “Another guard?”

  “No, Hank. These were men I killed outside the walls. And . . . well . . . never mind.”

  “Outside?” Fallon wet his lips again. “You escaped?”

  “I have talked too much. That is why I remain here. I think we should forget about this. These are unpleasant memories. Would you like to play checkers?”

  Fallon did not sleep well that night.

  * * *

  But he woke with The Mole, and after each man took his turn at what passed for a chamber pot, they sat on their beds and stared at the place where the door was. They stared, their stomachs gnawing toward ribs and spine, until they knew the sad truth.

  “It is as I thought,” The Mole said. “They torture you.”

  “To break me?” Fallon asked.

  “Perhaps. Or kill you. Remember, Mr. Sherman was here for a good, long while.”

  “But you had no food or water, either,” Fallon said.

  “Ahhh.” Again, Fallon would have sworn he could see The Mole tilting his head back, laughing so hard that his Dundreary chin whiskers bounced across the tattered, filthy prison uniform—likely a uniform from a previous administration. Maybe stripes of black and gold, or gray and white, or perhaps sold blue denim. Fallon feared that his mind was cracking. Perhaps it already had. He closed his eyes and tried to remember what daylight looked like.

  “You forget, my friend, Hank,” The Mole said. “I had learned. I save my water. I saved some food. And since I did not care much for Mr. Sherman, I shared nothing with him. Perhaps I should have, though. Had I fed him, the meat on his bones might have lasted longer than it did.”

  “No,” Fallon said, and felt his head shaking.

  “You are right,” The Mole said. “He was in poor condition when he joined me. And the meat was tough and poor already. More of that would have done me little good. In fact, I was sick for two days after I first consumed his flesh.”

  Fallon shook his head. “No,” he said. “I meant that they won’t forget me. They don’t want me dead.”

  The Mole chuckled. “They want everyone dead. No matter who is in charge now. I cannot recall the name of the warden who first put me here. It does not matter. But, no, they want us all dead.”

  Fallon made himself stand. “No. They need me alive. They want to know what they think I know.” He shook his head. And I don’t know a damned thing.

  He put his left foot out into the darkness. He breathed in and breathed out. He walked to the wall gingerly, touched the stone, and turned around. Breathing steadily, walking carefully, he crossed the twelve feet to the far wall. After turning, he walked back. Back and forth.

  Fifteen minutes later, The Mole asked, “What is it that you do?”

  “Stopping myself from rotting away,” Fallon replied. “So I won’t be a weakling when they come for me.”

  “Ah. Yes.” Again, Fallon felt he saw The Mole’s head nodding and the old man’s smile trying to make an appearance beneath the massive beard that housed vermin and maybe even rats. “To work your muscles. To keep yourself strong.”

  Fallon reached the wall, pushed himself away, turned, and came back, always careful to avoid the bucket of extra water that The Mole had been saving for . . . who knew how long . . .

  “I am glad that the guards put you in here with me and did not leave you alone,” The Mole said happily. “You are no weakling. You have a brain. You want to survive. You remind me of Mr. Sherman.”

  Fallon had reached the other wall. He turned around, started back again, and stopped. “Why is that?” he asked, and, feeling no lingering effect in his calf or the myriad other injuries the guards had put on him, he moved again to the wall.

  “Mr. Sherman,” The Mole said. “He had the same idea. For the first week or so. But his resolve did not last through the second week.”

  * * *

  Fallon stopped walking, stretching, breathing when his throat turned parched. He found a loose pebble and placed it under his tongue, hoping it would produce saliva.

  “Have some water,” The Mole said.

  “We must save it,” Fallon said, and those four words made his throat and tongue as raw as an Arizona creek bed in the dry months.

  “Dip your right hand in the bucket,” The Mole said. “Let the water run off your fingers, and when the dripping has practically ceased, bring your hand to your lips, lick your palm and fingers with your tongue. Then rest. You must rest.”

  Fallon stopped. He stared at the floor where he knew the bucket of water had to be. He thought he could see it. An oaken bucket, once red, now brown, condensation on the sides, the handle broken. He closed his eyes and shook his head. Yet he lowered himself to his knees and dipped his right hand into the cold, wonderfully wet water. He obeyed The Mole’s instructions down to the letter.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  “How much food have you saved over these sixteen years?” Fallon asked on the fourth day.

  “You save only the jerky,” The Mole answered. “Jerky will keep. The bread is not worth saving. It will break your teeth on the day they bring it. Now and then, they will bring beans. The beans are good. The beans can last. Sometimes, there might be a chunk of ham or bacon in the beans. I finger the chunk out, and I use it to catch rats. Rats are amazing animals. There is no place for the rat to enter into my home, but the rat finds a way. The smell of bacon and ham and beans brings him here. And I kill the rat. Fresh meat keeps a man wise. And healthy. Hearty.”

  Fallon stopped his walking and dipped his fingers in the water bucket.

  “Four days,” he whispered, hearing the water drip from his fingers and drip into the bucket. He wondered how much more water the bucket held. “Four days,” he said again.

  “Yes,” said The Mole. “Mr. Sherman lasted only three and a half.”

  “But you didn’t share your water with Mr. Sherman,” Fallon said.

  “Yes.” Again, Fallon thought he saw The Mole’s hairy head bob in agreement. “He got no rat meat, either.”

  A tough man, a really tough man, probably more Indian than white man, a man like that could live maybe a week without water. And Fallon had not met many men that tough. And food? Well, three weeks would be pushing a man to his limits. Yet Fallon kept telling himself that the warden could not let Fallon die. The warden had to find out what the warden thought Fallon might know or how much the law beyond The Walls had learned about their sweet deal.

  Fallon moved to the corner, held his breath, tried not to gag, and found the rough rope handle to the slop bucket. He brought it up over his head, then lowered it, and lifted it again. Walking was good for one’s legs. Walking, even across a dark, damp, stinking cell that measured twelve feet by eight feet, was good at keeping a man’s legs from withering to nothing. But a man needed good strength in his arms, too. So Fallon lifted the slop bucket ove
r his head, in the darkness, for thirty minutes three times a day.

  Exhausted, he came back, wiped his hands on his trousers, and scrubbed them with the straw from his bed.

  He leaned his head against a wall and let his breathing return to something resembling normalcy.

  As he rested, his muscles aching, Fallon thought. He wet his cracked lips with his tongue and asked, “Mole?”

  “Yes, Hank.”

  “When I first arrived here, toward the back of the prison, there were a number of buildings.”

  “There are likely more shops there than I remember,” The Mole said.

  “There was a smokestack at one. Black smoke pouring out of it. It looked like a thundercloud. That’s how much smoke I saw.”

  The Mole sighed. “There are steamboats beyond The Walls. The Missouri River is right there.”

  “This was no steamboat. It was on this side of the stone wall.”

  Fallon imagined The Mole’s head nodding. “Aye. Yes. The shops were small when I saw morning, noon, and the sunset. I imagine things have expanded. Progress.”

  “Prisoners do the labor,” Fallon said.

  “Such was the case shortly after I arrived. At first, some prisoners were allowed to go to town, to work in shops. But some men of nefarious reputation did unspeakable things once they were beyond these walls. Well, it was soon deemed improper to allow prisoners to work outside of the prison.”

  Fallon understood.

  “So prisoners work like slaves. No pay. The businesses make a hell of a profit.”

  “They even had the women making uniforms for the male prisoners long before the War Between the States,” The Mole said.

  “And I’m sure the owners of the businesses pay the warden generously.”

  “Even The Walls has its limits,” The Mole said. “Only a certain number of businesses can operate inside. I wonder if I could have made a broom. It might have been a good trade. Did you ever sweep out your cabin when you were a kid?”

  Fallon grinned. “My cabin had a dirt floor.”

  “So did ours,” The Mole said. “Yet Mother always had me or one of my brothers sweep. Then she would yell at us when the cabin became quite dusty.”

  Fallon remembered that Renee used a homemade broom to sweep up the mud and dirt Fallon had tracked in after a long trip into the Indian Nations. He squeezed his eyes shut. After a moment, he shook his head.

  “You are troubled, Hank?” The Mole asked.

  “No,” Fallon replied. “I thought I had something, but it just doesn’t make sense. Most prisons allow convict labor. That wouldn’t be a sweet little deal to hide from detectives.”

  “I would not know,” The Mole said. “I was never in prison until I came here.”

  In 1836, Fallon added, and that fact made him shiver.

  * * *

  Somehow, despite living in a stinking, cramped, wet hole in the ground for days, Fallon still woke when it had to be morning. Maybe living so close to a man he could not see had made him wake with The Mole. If The Mole remembered when breakfast came—if breakfast came—then Fallon wanted to be there.

  He sat, staring toward the door, listening but hearing nothing. The Mole sat across from him, and Fallon could picture the ancient convict staring at the door, too. Hell, Fallon could practically see the old man like it was daylight in the Sonoran Desert. He waited. This was . . . what? The fifth day? Despite all his attempts to keep his muscles strong, he felt his life beginning to ebb away. The Mole had little food left, and the water was slowly emptying.

  He tried to swallow, but his throat felt as though it had contracted into a minute hole, a syringe. Fallon wanted to wet his lips, but he had no desire to waste any moisture. Or maybe he had no strength to lift his tongue.

  So he just looked into the darkness. He heard nothing, but they had heard nothing beyond these walls since he had been thrown in. The blocks the convicts had quarried and hauled and set into the ground were giant, massive, and whatever mortar they had used had not withered in all the decades that had passed.

  Just when Fallon started to sigh and think that he had been mistaken that Warden Harold Underwood wanted him to die, to rot, to be forgotten in the depths of A-Hall, he felt an intense pain.

  Screaming in bitter agony, he brought both forearms to his head and covered his eyes. Turning from the fires of hell, with the intensity of ten suns, he rolled away, and screamed in pain. He was blinded. Would he ever be able to see again?

  He started rolling to one side, but made himself stop, fearing that he would overturn the water bucket. So he rolled back to the bedding, and buried his head into the dark wool covering, smelling the straw, trying to squeeze his eyelids tighter and tighter and tighter. Somewhere in the hellish blackness, he could hear the screams of The Mole, too.

  Yet a moment later, he heard the slamming of metal, and he felt the comfort of midnight settle back into the cell he shared with a man he had never seen.

  Immediately, The Mole stopped screaming. Fallon bit his lip to make himself stop his horrible, earsplitting shrieks amplified in the grim confines of the cell.

  “Are you all right, Hank?”

  “Oh, God,” Fallon said, after he lifted his head off the straw bed. “That light.”

  “Yes,” The Mole said with sympathy.

  “You screamed, too,” Fallon said.

  “Yes. The guards like it better when you scream.”

  “Can you see?”

  “I see spots now. You will, too. But they shall fade. You will be comforted by the night that lasts forever. Stay, my friend, and rest. I will see what food they brought us.”

  Fallon waited until he could breathe regularly and finally rolled over. His eyes opened. He saw darkness. He made himself sit and blinked often. The light had been so intense, so sudden, and yet, now that he remembered, he knew that the door had not been opened. The guards had just pulled up the opening at the bottom, and left it open just long enough to slide in a tray. They had not even bothered with the slop bucket, but then that chamber pot was still in the other corner.

  “Do you want the bread?”

  The Mole was sitting right next to Fallon.

  “You said we should not eat it?”

  “This is not as hard as it usually is. The bread is . . . it is . . . it . . . I have forgotten,” The Mole said sadly.

  Fallon reached and felt the bread. It was hard, but not like hardtack or those biscuits that belly-cheater once served on a drive to Kansas. He lifted it to his nose. Not fresh. But no more than two days old.

  “Sourdough,” Fallon said.

  “Yes. Yes. Yes. That is the word. My mother made sourdough biscuits. They were wonderful. I wonder what became of her jar of starter.”

  Fallon laughed. “Ma had a jar of starter herself. I think it started with her mother’s mother.”

  “Jerky, too. Extra water. A bowl of beans. Is it Christmas?”

  Fallon shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

  “But we shall feast. But I will save the jerky. There is not ham or bacon in the beans, or I would have smelled those. So I will not be able to catch a rat. Remember. Half the water shall be emptied into the bucket.”

  Soon, they began their feast.

  “Just half the bread,” The Mole said. “It is not that hard, so it will keep another day. Perhaps two. You do not want to eat too much bread because it makes you thirsty. Likewise with the beans. There is salt in the beans. Eat a few spoonfuls, just enough to fill your stomach. But do not eat too much. If you eat too much, after all these days with just what I could give you, then you will turn sick. When you turn sick in this place, you die.”

  Fallon listened and obeyed. But that taste of beans, the fresh water, and half a piece of day-old sourdough bread was like the best meal Renee ever cooked for Fallon after a long trip into the Indian Nations.

  * * *

  More food came the next day, but this time Fallon and The Mole turned away from the door and stared at the far wall,
squeezing their eyelids tightly against the agonizing blaze of light. They still screamed, of course, but that was just to make the guards snigger. They also left the slop bucket to be replaced. And that must have really angered the guards.

  Fallon felt himself strengthening from the little nourishment the food brought. He still did his routine of walking and lifting the slop bucket—although since the guards had emptied it, it no longer was that heavy.

  The next day was the same. They stored the jerky, poured half the water into the bucket, and tossed the bread aside because the slices served on this morning felt as though they had been cut last week.

  “If you could have one wish,” The Mole asked that evening. “What would it be?”

  Fallon thought. “Anything?”

  “Anything that is possible?”

  Fallon grinned. “I’d like to get out of here.” He sighed. “I don’t know. To get my life back in order.”

  “That is always possible.”

  Fallon stretched his arms. “And you?” he asked.

  “I would like to sit on the banks of the Big Muddy,” The Mole said, “far away from The Walls. And I would like to see the moon rise.”

  “Moonrise?” Fallon asked.

  “Yes,” said The Mole. “I do not believe I could endure a sunrise or sunset.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  The next day, the door opened during what The Mole and Fallon figured to be the middle of the day—hours after the daily ration of food had been delivered. The suddenness of it, completely unexpected, sent light that was a thousand times brighter and caused the pain twenty thousand times worse.