Hard Sentences: Crime Fiction Inspired by Alcatraz

by David James Keaton

  I drew in a deep breath and knew that this time it had to work, as men were waking up, and I was running out of time. I thought of Mindy again, and pulled with all my might. I couldn’t get a short quick pull, which was preferable, only a long, drawn-out motion, but I didn’t care, as I heard the crackling and grinding of bone on bone and the shift and thud which compressed my bladder and sigmoid colon. Urine and stool leaked from my body as I passed through with a triumphant but protracted groan.

  I fell to the ground with my ankles draping the cross bar, the not-subtle smell of bodily fluids seeping upward into my nostrils, mercifully jarring me awake like smelling salts. My breath hitched and coughed, each inspiration accompanied by shooting pains into my chest. But I couldn’t let that bother me. I clambered to my feet, clutching the bars for assistance and stood tall a moment, gathering myself, the prisoner on the other side of my cell now wide-eyed and agape.

  I started to stumble towards a sliver of sunlight and the promise of vitamin D activation in the distance, pelvic bones clicking with each step, wobbling like a damaged puppet, limping, grasping the bars for support. Up ahead, a guard walked away from me, headed toward the cell that housed the staff restrooms at the end of C-Block. I quickly turned and started the other way, toward one of the two doors that would release me forever.

  And when I got to the barred door, I repeated the whole procedure again.

  It was so much easier squeezing through the bars this time, given I was warmed up and the bones were freshly broken. But what really helped, besides that flicker of sun, was the adrenaline pouring through my body, endorphins streaming and dampening the pain.

  Eventually, I made it outside, dazed, and I slowly staggered down towards the water, my body drinking in the sun I saw the tumble of boulders up ahead. Then I saw the yellow raft and an orange flash of the life vest Mindy had hid amongst the rocks and brush. I dragged the raft toward the water and could smell the sea salt as the cold air slapped my face. I found myself at a small ledge, a drop-off of about three feet to the sand and water below.

  “Stop!”

  I turned and saw two guards a couple hundred yards away, moving towards me, guns drawn.

  I reacted instinctively, thinking I could kick out in the raft far enough into the fog before they got to the water.

  And I jumped.

  Under normal circumstances, this would not have been a problem for anyone. But in my condition, it always was. I knew I’d made a mistake as soon as my feet left the ground, and the split second before I hit felt like an eternity.

  My knees shattered simultaneously, followed by both tibia and fibula, fracturing and collapsing in multiple sites so my kneecaps plunged all the way down to my feet. Both femurs drove upward, first breaking above the knees as they hit the ground and subsequently pushed up through the acetabuli, with the femoral heads jutting up above the iliac crests, resulting in two grotesque soft tissue bulges at the low back, to join the new distortions pulsing at my hips.

  My torso folded forward, like a closing book, multiple ribs splintering as my chest hit the ground, finishing up in a heap at the water’s edge. Sand rode a wave into my mouth as my face hit, and overwhelming pain seared my body. I struggled to move an arm, my hand reaching out to the icy water lapping at my fingertips.

  When one of the guards ran up, he stopped abruptly, befuddled at the contorted, gnarled pile of flesh and bone sprawled on the sand. He was unsure of what he was seeing, and it took him a moment to process. And after a tense pause, he uttered, “Mother of God.” I caught a glimpse of the raft riding off without me, and I closed my eyes to block out the sun. Traitors all.

  Technically, I escaped from Alcatraz on an emergency medical ferry, and I was hospitalized for a year. My body was hideous to most, deformed beyond belief and beyond repair. And given the situation, what I had tried to do, my case was never given top priority. I remain bedbound and contorted, catheterized and diapered.

  But because of Mindy’s petitioning, along with her father’s begrudging fondness for me, my contorted form being possibly the closest approximation he’d ever had to a son, I was granted something like a pardon, essentially paroled early, which didn’t matter because I wasn’t going anywhere fast in my condition.

  Mindy and I lived together as she took care of me, and we both hid from the sun out of habit, but, truthfully, we no longer had any need for it. This went on for twelve years, until recently, when she passed due to complications of pneumonia. The warden had died several years before after a major stroke, but for as many days as we had, Mindy and I loved each other dearly.

  It is only now, with both of them gone, and the island and its crumbling, cold fortress relegated to a tourist hotspot, that I am able to reveal this story as per an agreement with the warden. Not a legal agreement, but more of a gentleman’s agreement, which I respected. I have no doubt I should be in the history books, somewhere next to Houdini, who died from suffering far fewer injuries than my own, and even the warden believed this to be true. But it’s okay. My body doesn’t hold a grudge. I can’t even hold a pencil for very long. And all the anger drained from my skeleton and muscles long ago. I lived and loved, and I was happy for a while. But more importantly, I escaped.

  The Children and the Gardener

  by Amber Sparks

  To us, he was The Gardener. No name, just The Gardener. Funny that, because of course there were many gardeners, many groundskeepers. Some were lovely to us, some odd, some gruff or taciturn, and one would flash a smile all black with missing teeth. But The Gardener was the only one who’d earned the capital “T” capital “G.”

  We all knew when someone had escaped, had flown or climbed the fence or fallen off the cliffs. The red would flash. We could see it from our bedroom windows, flooding the rooms with lurid light. They always brought them back, sometimes dead, sometimes not. You could never quite see the bodies, but we all pretended we had. We liked to lord it over the mainland kids, the things we’d seen. We imagined ourselves quite jaded.

  We kept watch over the waters in the direction of Angel Island—we hoped for a makeshift raft of escapees—or bodies, bloated and purpled, bumping over the waves. Our fathers would shake their heads, and frown, and forbid us the binoculars we had asked so many times for. Our mothers called us morbid. They whispered to our fathers in the hush of prison dark, was this any kind of life for children? Was it fit? Would we grow odd, crooked, end up right back here to end our days less free than we began them? Our fathers, who herded hard and leathered men through days and nights, would laugh. They would kiss our mothers, and they would sometimes bring death to men and sit to dinner hours later. The commute, they said, could not be beat.

  We were just like other children in most respects. But we did not fear monsters under our beds, or shadows along our walls. The monsters, we knew, lived just down the hall, locked up tight.

  We didn’t know what The Gardener had done, though we made many guesses. The eldest of us was sure he was an old gangster, long past his heyday of running rum and whiskey and gin. The youngest of us was sure he was a bank robber, the kind the cops were always chasing on TV, blam blam blam. A long string of successes behind him, locked safe after locked safe sprung, and then—caught up like a fish in the law’s wide net. We were never quite sure whether we cheered for the police or the robbers, and mostly, we cheered for both. It seemed the surest bet.

  He was stooped, white-haired, with the skin of someone standing long years in the sun. He seemed frail and strong at the same time, steady of purpose and with large, deft hands. His eyes were no color you could tell, no matter how long you looked—they were blue and green and brown and sometimes black, and often they were the sky and clouds and all the fierce waves of the bay. There was a fierceness to him, too, that sometimes made us uneasy when alone with him too long—though it seemed an alien notion, nothing to do with us. He was as inscrutable as snow.

  The most of us thought that he might be a murderer, strangling ladies with thos
e big, long hands. But the oldest of us scorned the most of us utterly, rolled their knowing eyes past the cliffs to the Bay. Our fathers, they said, would never let him near us had he done such things. The most of us shivered with fear and delight, anyway. We wanted to be uneasy in our friendship with The Gardener, unsure of where we stood.

  He built us things with those hands. Teepees and forts and stout little slingshots, playhouses and cribs for dolls. Hobbyhorses and rocking horses and bright painted signs for our clubhouses. Like the others, he was always planting cuttings on the hillside terraces on the west side slopes, and he carefully tended the rose garden. He told us the soil came from Angel Island, and from the Presidio, long before any of us had ever been born, even he. Back, he said, before there ever was a prison here to die in.

  Sometimes, he told us stories. Strange short stories, unlike any we’d heard in nurseries or books. They seemed wrong somehow, and sad, and they seemed to be missing an ending or a moral. We didn’t know what to make of them. Just think, he would say, there were days when the world was brand new. Can you imagine, he would say. This is how he always started his stories.

  Just imagine, he said to us once. Death no sure thing, not back then. Humans might live for hundreds of years, only to be called up to the Other World in seconds. Sometimes the dead were allowed to choose: remain with the living, haunt the earth, or sleep forever. Sometimes the living forgot the dead; sometimes they remembered every nail and skin flake, each expression and birthmark.

  Would you become a ghost, he asked, if you could? And we ran home to our parents, hid from the sun, safer near the cruelest locked-up criminals than this odd man. He seemed to belong to some Other World himself.

  Our fathers supposed him quite harmless, though he made our mothers nervous. Despite the harshness, the brutality of the island, our fathers believed in rehabilitation. If a man could find good, honest occupation, they felt. If he could only turn the dirt with a rake or a hoe or his own two hands. They never said what, exactly, would follow, but it seemed the good earth offered up second chances.

  We did not believe in second chances, nor rehabilitation. Children rarely do. A monster is a monster, we knew, and the only good monster was a dead monster. Some of us lived in the prison proper, and some of us lived in the outbuildings near. The prison dwellers outranked the outlanders, and all of us outranked the mainlanders. They were white and soft, pale as milk and just as weak. We were tough, and ruthless, and we were smarter than most other children. This we knew, this we told ourselves.

  Can you imagine, he told us, when the world was new, there was a great city by the sea. He was tending the roses, long fingers deft around thorns, and we trailed behind. Hanging wary on his words.

  In this city by the sea, he said, there was a man, a very wealthy man. And the man loved children, so much that he never wanted to be without them, even in the Other World. And so when the man’s time came to choose, he chose death, and he chose the children’s company, too. He paid the people of the city a great deal of money for their children. Then he gathered all the children to him, and when it was time to go, he pulled them close and took them all with him into death. And so the city lost its children forever.

  What happened, the boldest of us asked. Did the parents cry? Did they miss their children?

  No one cried, he said, not then nor ever again, for the city’s punishment was swift and severe. A wave, taller than ten thousand buildings, rose from the sea and swept that wicked city away. And all the wicked parents with it.

  Were the children happy in Death, asked the shyest among us, small-voiced. But the man did not answer. His fingers were bleeding, his brow wet with work, and we nodded sagely at one another.

  Our parents came with sorrow eyes, tried to comfort us with candy and kind words. Our parents told us The Gardener had gone, though they did not tell us how or why. Our parents let us listen to our radio programs until late in the night, and tried with clumsy hands, with soft stubby fingers, to build us a tree house. It collapsed under the weight of the first small storm.

  We thought the roses looked bent, and sad. We thought the terrace gardens wilted and wept. But we thought of the man, his body rolling, smashing fast down the cliff face, sinking in the waters of the bay. We thought we had done the right thing, and we said so to one another. We nodded. We told each other a story: imagine, we said, an island by the sea. Imagine the children of that island grown strong, grown wise. Money meant nothing to the children. Roses meant nothing to the children. Promises, gifts, kind words—these meant nothing to the children at all. The only thing the children cared for was the children, and the wild beauty of the island, and both were safe for now, for well and good.

  Being Whitey

  by Nick Mamatas

  It wasn’t Alyssa’s worst trip, and as acid goes it wasn’t even especially weird, but there was something about this one that made her spinal fluid bubble and squeak. She could smell the sea, and a distant trace of fried foods. She felt different; her limbs were longer, stronger. Alyssa was a man now, her belly full of chuckles. He was having a good time, posing with his girlfriend in comically exaggerated prison garb, a lightweight ball and chain. An Alcatraz Island tour staffer took their photo. He liked wearing the prison-issue cap; no giant bald dome in a picture for a change.

  A thought emerged: Fuck these fucking fuckers, the fucks. It came out in her own voice, with her own accent, and the trip was over. Government-issue LSD was always rough; it felt something like the beginning hours of strep throat.

  “Well?” the agent asked Alyssa.

  “He’s in San Francisco. Actually visiting Alcatraz. Like a tourist,” Alyssa said, half-choked, desperate for water.

  “Bulger’s always been audacious,” the agent said.

  Alyssa didn’t know what that meant. “Well . . .” Alyssa said, a whole question embedded in the word.

  “Well what?”

  “Uhm . . . aren’t you going to make some phone calls? He’s at a famous landmark. Right now!”

  “Is he?” the agent said. “Was someone walking by with today’s San Francisco Chronicle while you were . . .” he paused, struggling with something internal, “. . . experiencing his experiences? Where was the sun in the sky? It’s early morning out West.”

  Alyssa didn’t know exactly—and didn’t know how she knew—but no, it hadn’t been the morning. The sensation was . . . lunch. He’d had a full belly. “Yeah,” she said, her lips twisted.

  “It’s good intel anyway,” the agent said as soothingly as he could while still retaining a sense of the imperious and disinterested. “A public place, a national park. Potential photographic evidence as well. Easy enough to make calls.”

  Alyssa shifted in her reclining chair. “If there is a picture, could I see . . .”

  “No,” the agent said.

  Of course not, Alyssa thought, then and also later when she was back at her usual haunt in Harvard Square. It would ruin the experiment. So many things could potentially ruin the experiment: Alyssa had money now, but couldn’t use it to get a real room in a real apartment. She wanted to kick her other habits, but couldn’t—what if her visions weren’t thanks to just the LSD, but to the whole pharmacopoeia she ingested over the course of the average week? At the same time, she couldn’t just up her intake and tell the feds to screw off. The one time she tried, a half-dozen black sedans swarmed down Mass Ave. and busted her dealer right in front of her, mid-exchange. He went away and, unlike most low-level street workers, stayed away, which was good since he would surely be gunning for her as a stoolie when he got out of jail.

  Purple cough syrup. Alyssa still called herself a “street kid” at twenty-six. Irish whiskey, which may as well be running out the taps in the apartments Alyssa couch-surfed through. The booze helped her deal with the headaches. An assortment of pills, most probably nothing, but pretty-looking, and fresh from a friendly fat guy’s pocket in exchange for a handjob. She wasn’t a prostitute, or what the kids at Harvard called
ever-so-politely a “sex worker.” Alyssa just had a handful of friends she liked to spend time with and have sex with, and they sometimes gave her money because she needed it. Sure, she had an address, in Swampscott, but her mother was a total bitch, so she was hardly ever there, okay? Then before she knew it, it was Monday again—every day was a weekend to Alyssa, so Monday always snuck up on her—and she was fetched by her handlers and deposited back in the gray building, a paper cup of water in one hand and a smaller paper cup with an LSD tab in the other.

  A big black swirl, that’s how the trips always started. It unnerved Alyssa. She told herself a story, that the inky cloud of nothingness was the beforetime—before Whitey Bulger had volunteered to be part of the MKUltra experiments while in prison in Atlanta. For all the good it did him; a smiling guard told him, “Enjoy sunny California, with all the fruits and nuts,” and it was a long ride across the country to the Rock.

  Today, he was looking in the face of a real-life “frickin’ Red Indian.” His voice reverberated in her synapses. It wasn’t something he said, but experienced. Clarence Carnes, the Chocktaw Kid was a kid, literally. At least a decade younger than Whitey, and he was in for life after fighting it out with the bulls, and then the frickin’ Marines at age nineteen, during the ’46 Blastout. Whitey was still a kid himself in his early 30s; his mother was alive and he couldn’t bring himself to even think the real f-word. Carnes had a voice that soothed, even when he was talking about the blood running from the holes in the men at his feet back in ’47. Everyone in Whitey’s life was always bellowing. When Carnes talked about the happy hunting grounds awaiting all the good people, and even most of the bad people, Whitey felt his head buzzing, his spine tingling. Carnes’s story always ended the same way: “. . . most of the bad people, mind you, except murderers. They—” never we, no matter which murderers had gathered ’round to listen—” are kept out, just close enough to hear the music and the laughter, to smell the bison roasting, to catch a glimpse of the tan breasts and thighs of the women . . .”