Hard Sentences: Crime Fiction Inspired by Alcatraz

by David James Keaton

  Sounded better than Hell, which is where Whitey knew he was headed one day, and forever.

  Hell was murky. When Alyssa came back from the trip, the FBI agent tried hard not to look disappointed.

  “Are you a reader, Ms. MacLeod?” he asked.

  “I wouldn’t go so far as to say I am, officer,” she said, getting a little fancy.

  “I’m not an officer.”

  “Whatever, mister,” Alyssa said.

  “That’s right out of any number of biographies of Whitey Bulger is my point,” the agent said. “Are you even seeing into his past, or just telling me some story you read about?”

  She shrugged. “I’m not the book type. Wasn’t last week’s experiment a good one? A real ‘hit’?”

  The agent didn’t even try to hold back his sneer. “An Irish girl from Southie never read a book about Whitey Bulger, or a newspaper article, or his Wikipedia entry? Hell, I’ll even believe the first bit, about not reading any books, but—”

  “I’m not from Southie,” Alyssa snapped. “My mother was. I grew up in Essex County.”

  “You’re even genetically related to Bulger, and you never heard any of this stuff about him?” the agent said. Alyssa’s anger faded, pushed out of her body by confusion. The agent went on. “The frozen turkeys? His headaches? How it’s against his code to kill a woman? All the money he sent to the IRA?” The agent had always been tight-lipped, not wanting to give anything about Bulger away, but now he was letting loose with all sorts of barstool trivia.

  “Listen . . . maybe I need to talk to somebody else about this. Your manager . . .” she started to say.

  “My ‘manager’?” the agent said. “This isn’t a Starbucks, lady!”

  “You couldn’t get a job there. Starbucks doesn’t spike their drinks with LSD!”

  “No, they don’t. They don’t at that.” The agent turned cold. Alyssa knew this game from childhood. Men get hot, then they calm down, just before they strike. The drug was still in Alyssa’s system, so she was primed, sensitive to the tiny changes in the air, the ripples of the agent’s aura. Her lip throbbed in a weird phantom pain. He was going to punch her right in the face if she didn’t give him something.

  “The Chocktaw Kid,” she said, suddenly. “He did something. White—uh, Bulger did. He was worried about Hell, and wanted to do something good. He—I saw him, in this little town, in a funeral parlor, buying a coffin, a big brass number, for the Chocktaw Kid. But it wasn’t back when he was in Alcatraz . . . ”

  “Carnes died ten years ago. Of course it wasn’t back in Alcatraz. What are you saying, that Whitey Bulger went to Oklahoma and paid for Carnes’s funeral?”

  “Something like that . . .”

  The agent laughed. “Yeah, I read The Boston Herald last week, too.” He sneered. “See you next week, Ms. McLeod. Don’t leave town.”

  Alyssa had never left “town” in her whole life. The reach of the T and the Commuter Rail described the radius of her existence. The Boston metroplex was just a big smear of communities and warring ethnicities and shitty weather, which she found herself back in now. It was a hard February, the kind that kills. So the week flew by.

  Alyssa had done a bit of reading, despite the rules, on her phone and in the homes of her “friends.” Nearly everyone she knew had a book on Whitey Bulger or the Irish mob. Sometimes it was the only book in the house, except for Harry Potter. Alyssa had always been more of a skimmer than a reader, but she got the basics—a bad boy with a “good” brother; a troublemaker from early on, but smart, oh so smart. Ruthless and—there was that word again—”audacious.” He lost his six-year-old son, and neither his power nor his rage could save the boy. Alyssa had wiped away a tear at that. And MKUltra. Whitey Bulger had signed up to be dosed with LSD repeatedly in prison. They told him that he’d get time off his sentence, that the scientists were looking to cure schizophrenia. They were actually looking for mind-control drugs; they actually just caused a lifetime of icepick-through-the-skull headaches for Whitey. Alyssa was some cousin of a cousin of the Bulger family, but her parents spent their lives trying to be respectable, and stayed away from the bars, the horses, even all of Somerville. When Alyssa drifted into her casual life, she stuck with Cambridge, taking care never to even step across the streets on the sawtooth border between towns.

  Now Alyssa understood, or thought she did. Same genes, same drugs, but maybe now she would be able to tell present from past, to really experience what Whitey was experiencing, instead of just remembering what he’d already experienced. The FBI agent came for her on Monday and brought her to the gray building, let her check her phone to guarantee that the money had been deposited into her checking account before relieving her of it for the afternoon, and gave her the usual dose.

  Alcatraz was Hell; Alyssa knew it like it was a fact stitched into her skin. The Chocktaw Kid’s friendship and protection wasn’t always enough. Even that rambunctious kid had to sleep some time. Alyssa felt what happened, and it felt huge, and like burning, like Hell, swelling up from behind him. Worse even than the headaches. Whitey Bulger promised himself that he’d never go back to prison, except to piss on those frickin’ SOBs. When he got out, he’d be staying out. There was that other Hell, too, the one much further away, under the waves, under the Earth, that lasted forever. Whitey Bulger would happily march down into the lake of fire to stay out of the hell he’d already experienced.

  Whatever it took, it took. Kill some of the boys he came up with—sure, if he had to. Turn fink and feed the FBI a few tidbits in exchange for protection—why not, the feds were easy to play. Kill a woman—why the fuck not? Whitey’s mother was five years dead when Stephen Flemmi’s “stepdaughter” Deborah Hussey got herself arrested for turning tricks, maybe got all chatty with the local police while cooling her heels in the holding cell. He could think the f-word now. He could think anything he needed to do. There’s hell, and then there’s Hell.

  Whitey had a sense he was being watched. Always somebody, always something. Had the feds put something in his brain during those experiments? A capsule-sized electret microphone? Yeah, he knew something about electronics, too. The throbbing. Hussey—yeah, that was an apropos surname. Whitey had a good vocabulary. Better than Alyssa’s. He was smarter than the average Southie mick. He knew things. He knew he was being watched.

  Whitey looked in the mirror. He could still see the girl, even though his eyes were watering from the pain in the back of his head, in his reflection. She was a big-haired blonde with that familiar Irish dumpling face, and though he was seeing her through a glass darkly, he knew it had to be Hussey. She was the one causing the headaches, working with the feds. And through the mirror, and the years, Alyssa stared back at Whitey, and knew this would be her last trip. Hell was forever, and she was in it. Time had very little meaning here. But when it came to that one moment in time that meant something, the moment when Whitey clamped his hands around the girl’s throat and start choking while the man she called “Daddy” waited in the vestibule, Alyssa was watching through Whitey’s eyes, strangling with his fingers, on a strange throat that wasn’t her own, but that as she gagged and sputtered and the world went black, felt like it was.

  Dream Flyer

  by Les Edgerton

  They never bust cock fights—least-ways I never heard of it before—hell, half the spectators is always cops—but here I was, in the Orleans Parish Jail, and here I would sit my butt another ten days. Twenty down, ten to go.

  I’m not one to bellyache, but it just ain’t fair, this roust. I was just there, as a sort of observer of the human melodramaticus, not betting or nothing, and the judge sentenced me anyway. I might have five lousy bucks or so down, but that was it. A hundred, tops. Hell, some’a these players light their Cubans with a C-note!

  I even brought up my college education to the honorable barrister, but that didn’t cut no grass.

  “Your Honorable,” I says, “I’ve got nearly a full semester in right here at our own De
lgado J.C. and woulda finished up pret near the top’a my class, only there was that ruckus at the Saints game you mighta read about, landed me in the clink right before mid-terms and that washed my higher edification right down the spigot. And,” I tacked on, “I only made a general comment about our famous quarterback, which I might add, half the town agrees with, having witnessed with their own eyeballs ol’ Junebug Taylor out and about the party trail powdering his nose over to Pat O’Brien’s before the home games, and besides, I never laid a glove on the other guy as he had me down and tromping about on my rib crate before I knew which end was sideways, and it wasn’t my fault twenty or thirty other hotheads jumped in and began mixing it up and got the security guys involved in stuff that wasn’t none’a their bidness.”

  I figured he would see the logic of my calculations when I further explained that since I was bum-rapped on that litigious, I figured the state owed me one, but not this bailiff, no, he just raps his little hammer down and says, “Mr. Thierry, you’ve been before me four times in the last year and a half and you still don’t get it, do you? Thirty days! Call the next case. By the way,” he leaned over as they were leading me away, “it’s water down the drain, you nitwit, and my report says you were flunking both your classes. How do you flunk fizz-ed, lessen you’re in an iron lung?”

  So much for the value of an education these days.

  All of that was awhile ago—a year, actually—but I thought I’d stick that in so’s you could see how it all started out and how I’m really an innocent dupe in all this.

  Some other things happened in there you might not know. How, ten days before I was to be let go, they put me out on a work detail, picking up go-cups the tourists had rudely thrown on the ground, and I kind of walked away, being distracted by a little honey with some serious hot pants who I know wanted me to come over and pat her on the po-po, which I did, and which resulted in a charge of escape and some other trivialities, which got me sent over to the Farm in Angola. Escape! Can you believe it? I walked ten steps away from the doofus hack and just to give my respect to those hot buns that were screamin’ at me to pat ’em, and that’s escape?

  Granted, when I walked off the work detail at the Farm and they chased me through some pretty miserable swamps and other such hardships, that might be construed as escape and I don’t deny it, but that’s when they sent me here, to The Rock, and the judge says, “Let’s see you escape that, you moron!”

  Well, I’m here now and they also give me a life sentence on account of I accidentally killed one of the guys chasing me in the Achafalaya with his coon dog and it was truly a random accident as I only meant to render him unconscious with the sleeper hold I applied, only he musta had a weak constitution as he went into a deeper nap than I’d intended and so all that’s why I’m here, looking out at the City by the Bay, which is S.F., home of the Seals and Joe DiMaggio and all the interestin’ stuff.

  And then, they had the effrippery to put me into the same cell as “The Dream Flyer.” That’s what I called him, right from the gitgo—you probly read about him in the San Francisco Weekly Shopper and thought some reporter give him that name—but it was my oneself that named him, not no booze-hound with a typewriter. What happened, one of the other inmates—that fruitcake bird guy, I think—let it out that’s what I called him, and that’s how he got his brand.

  His real name, which you might not know, seeing as how the papers always call him “The Dream Flyer” now, was Karol Block, with a K, not a C, but which don’t matter nohow, since nobody remembers his real handle no more. It was in all the papers, even up in Oregon. Nobody likes a child molester, but everybody sure likes to read about the skunks!

  I probly know more about him than his own mother, who didn’t much cotton to him to t’begin with, bein’s she usta crank him over the head with the cast iron fryer when she was in a mood, and so never did any serious confiding in, like he done with me. Being cellmates makes you closer than Siamese kittens, and what I don’t know about Karol wouldn’t take three minutes to foretell.

  “I’m gonna beat the rap,” he says, first day I checked in, and I only half-heard him as every man Jack in here’s gonna beat that same rap. “I raped her, sure, but I didn’t kill her. I wasn’t even close to her, being knocked out and disambulatory. She kilt herself. Got up and run into a tree branch, knocked her inta the river which she proceeded t’swalla half of, not having taken the caution of closing her trap like anyone with any sense woulda done.” He was talking about the twelve-year-old moppet he was in jail for rendering extinct in a particularly gross way. He had glommed onto a new trial for that, but didn’t want to talk about the three guards he’d killed in other prisons which got him sent here to Alcatraz. I think he figured he beat his original rap, they’d just dismiss the others—that “fruit of the poisoned chinaberry tree” legal thing.

  I shook my head in sympathy cause that’s what you do in jail; you agree like you was up for reelection, ’specially if you’re in the same cell as a mad-dog killer. Not agreeing with folks makes ’em mad, and jail is no place to get someone PO’d at you, ’specially a ice-cube cold rape-killer like Karol. You can’t just walk away and climb on a bus, happen they take exception to something you say. So I agreed with him most of the time, even at his craziest, which was generally all the time, maybe arguing on some minor point just to show him I was no pushover, but a tough tomato, same as him.”

  “I got a plan,” he says, meaning to beat the rap, and proceeds to let me in on the scam. It seems laying in the joint gets him to remembering about when he was a juvie, and he comes up with this idea that when he was around seven or eight, he could fly. The story he gives me is that he could get out of his body, like a pearl-diver shucks his wet suit, and float around and buzz around into other rooms to check if his parents was playing bedsheet tag or what-not, and one thing leads to another, and pretty soon he figures out how to fly while still in his body, by holding his breath and suspending his molecules and some other tricks and deceits of the trade. First time, he finds this out accidental, when he was nine, when he jumps off a little hill and finds he can stay in the air longer than other kids of his same general weight and height classification, and then, by a lot of practice, he gets to where he can take off from a flat spot and go clear up into the clouds, dodging aircraft and flocks of robins and spy satellites and other such artifices. Kind of a nine-year-old Superman, ’cept he didn’t have any X-ray vision or incredible strength or work on the Daily Planet. He could just fly. Then, he claims he got older and interested in girls and lost the art.

  “You shoulda kept flyin,” I says, cracking wise. “Girls is what got you into this fix,” but when he doesn’t laugh, I drop the subject like a match burned down to the tender part of the fingers.

  I asked for another cellmate, but they said no, they was overcrowded. I can help fix that problem, I come back; give me my walking papers, but Whitey the hack only walked away giggling and shaking his head like he thought I wasn’t serious.

  After giving me this look that makes my blood turn to Kool-Aid, Karol tells me that he remembers all this flying business from his own youth again, under the stress of the predicament he’s in, and not only that, he’s been practicing every night and has regained his powers. He’s been in Alcatraz almost six months before, working out with the aeronautics, so he’s up to the point of loop-de-loops and fer-de-lances, or so he says. Since I only been here a few weeks, I can’t attest to all this, but I think one night I seen him raise up off the floor a couple two-three inches, but then it might have just been a mirage-a-twa, since I seen my ex-wife Dixie at the same time, sitting over in the corner on the stool, doin her regular occupation which was boffing her nails, and besides, I had drunk a half-pint of apple-jack I got for two packs of Camel regulars, maybe half an hour before I dozed off which mighta had something to do with what I was visualizing.

  Dying don’t bother him none, Karol says, but getting exterminated for something he didn’t do, gets his dander up. H
e done the rape, sure, but it warn’t his fault she run into a tree and kilt herself, is his take on the deal.

  Weird, huh? I had to stay in there, across the bunk from him and pretend the puzzle that was his brain had all the pieces.

  His genius plan was to wait till his big day when they take him to Sparky, when they take him to the little room where they pop the needle into you, and just up and fly away from ’em. Then, he’ll come back and let ’em give him his shot. This will prove his innocence, he says, and also show them that dying don’t mean a hoot in a pile of owlshit in the mote of his eye, and he can die joyous.

  Well, there is some squirrely folks in the joint, and I’ve met a couple of ’em, but the Dream Flyer, he’s an original-diginal if I ever come across one, with both cheeks fulla walnuts and pecans.

  Least he was. Yesterday was the day they was supposed to extinguish him, and they even let me go to a conference room and listen on the radio for when it happened. All the stations had remotes there since it was such a big deal and one of those days the governor hadn’t accepted a bribe—slow news day is what they call it—and I guess the turnkey thought me’n Dream Cookie was bosom sidekicks since we celled together awhile, and so I got to go up and listen with Whitey and the other moron hacks. Beats laying around in your six-by-ten, winking at your trouser worm and teaching it to sit up and do tricks.

  Well, believe it or not, he never made it to the death room. Course you know that unless you’ve been living out in Sacramento or the Okefenokee, cause that’s all that’s been on the tube since.

  He fell and broke his neck, is what it said in the Examiner, but they wasn’t real clear about what went on, only that he fell three tiers and squashed himself like a Halloween pumpkin off the overpass. Neck-breaking was the official cause of death, but the way it sounded, there wasn’t a bone left in one piece. He went from Dream Flyer to Dream Whip. Instant parole.