That tour had been a long hour ago, and now I had the job. If I wanted it.
Gun cages. Tear gas. Convicts with knives. I tried to separate fear from imagination, but they seemed tied in a knot I couldn’t untangle.
Bill and Mr. Bernhardt waited for my answer, but I needed to think.
“Well, I think I’d like to talk it over with my wife,” I said.
“Oh, you’re married,” Mr. Bernhardt said. He seemed surprised and looked down at my application. “It says so right here.” He looked up at me, and the smile returned to his face. “Well, then, I guess you’ll have to talk to your wife.”
Yes, I would. At her parents’ house in Missoula, Anne was waiting for me to call.
Mr. Bernhardt rummaged around for a pen and started writing. He mentioned that there were several vacant apartments in Deer Lodge right then, and handed me a piece of paper with a few addresses on it. He said the apartment over on Missouri Street was a nice one and that I could pick up the key from the owner, who worked at the hardware store, if I decided to take the job.
We shook hands. Mr. Bernhardt asked when he could expect to hear from me. I told him I’d let him know by the end of the day.
Bill Perdue had to get back to the kitchen; it was time to start feeding the convicts. He walked me out of the prison and gave me directions to the hardware store.
“It’s a few blocks down on the right,” he told me, “right on Main Street.”
Deer Lodge was a small town, with only a few thousand people, and I already knew it didn’t matter where you were—everything was either across the street from the prison or a few blocks down on Main Street.
But I thanked him anyway and watched as he crossed the street to the entrance of the prison at Tower 7. From a distance, Bill appeared slow and lumbering, but I knew it was an illusion. I’d walked beside him on my tour, and I’d felt like a cocker spaniel trying to keep up with a Saint Bernard.
I stood there for a moment, staring at the prison. It seemed a prison out of time, a vision of the Old West a full city block long, built in the 1890s by the convicts themselves, in an era when men arrived at the penitentiary in horse-drawn wagons.
I tried to imagine myself working there. I couldn’t.
2
THE 4B’S
Before calling Anne, I decided to weigh my options at the 4B’s Café, half a block away.
Heading down Main Street, I could see the end of civilization only four blocks ahead of me. Behind me remained two blocks of prison buildings; after that, nothing but miles of open country. The Continental Divide lay to the east, the Flint Creek Range to the west. The only time I’d ever been in a town this small was to stop for gas or pick up a hamburger.
The restaurant was nearly empty. A lone waitress sat at the end of the counter, smoking. When she saw me she smiled and stubbed out her cigarette, then picked up a pot of coffee and came over.
“What can I get for you, honey?” she asked. Her nametag read “Margie,” and over the next year I would spend a lot of mornings with her.
You don’t see waitresses like Margie anymore, but I remember them in bowling alleys and roadside cafés all over the West: women in their forties, fifties, and sixties who got up every day and made themselves pretty for their customers. Margie must have been on the high end of fifty; it’s hard to pinpoint the age of a woman with as many beauty secrets as she had. Her jet-black hair—well, her wig, rather—was teased up into a beehive, a long-forgotten hairstyle that required women to attack their hair with a comb until it climbed into a great, furry pile. She wore false eyelashes and applied her makeup with a fearless hand. She’d given herself rosy cheeks, blue eyelids, and fire-engine lips. The focal point of her face, though, was her eyebrows. At some time in the past, she’d made the decision to shave them off in favor of drawing on her own. Some days one eyebrow stood higher than the other and she walked around all day looking skeptical. Other days both ran in a hard, straight line, dipping sharply at the outside edges, resulting in a severe look. My favorite was when both eyebrows were rounded and riding high, giving her a vaguely surprised expression.
Margie poured me a cup of coffee and returned to her post at the end of the counter, lighting another cigarette.
The kitchen tour had triggered an adrenaline rush that still hadn’t subsided. My body was on some kind of animal alert; I seemed aware of everything—the air on my skin, the lingering smell of Margie’s perfume, the taste of the coffee, and the sound my cup made when I set it back on the saucer. It was like being on a drug. The world vibrated at a different frequency, and I had a feeling of being very alive.
That day’s Missoulian rested on the counter. I picked it up. Watergate was kicking into high gear, and Nixon’s lawyers were having a tough time coming to an agreement with Archibald Cox over the release of tapes. Spiro Agnew was in a foul mood, offended by the charges that he’d taken kickbacks while he was governor of Maryland. Henry Kissinger had just been named secretary of state.
Then I picked up the Silver State Post, the weekly paper of Deer Lodge. The lead story profiled a fourteen-year-old boy who had felled a bull moose up by Rock Creek.
I sat there, going over my choices.
When I first arrived in Montana, I’d hoped I might find a job cooking in a lumberjack camp, but the lumberjack camps of legend didn’t exist anymore, and men drove to work in their trucks, lunches packed beside them. The other job I wanted was at the smoke jumpers’ training center in Missoula, a job feeding the men who fought forest fires. But there was a long waiting list for that one.
The other openings were too awful to think about. I could have gone to work at Rieley’s Café in Missoula, feeding men who worked the night shift for the railroad. Or I could have worked at the University of Montana cafeteria, opening up cans of soup and making Jell-O and sandwiches for college students.
These were jobs I could do in my sleep. Worse, they were jobs that paid only minimum wage, two dollars and a few cents an hour. The prison paid $480 a month—almost twice as much.
That made the prison the brightest spot on the horizon. Unless, of course, I took into account murderers and rapists with French knives. Once you’ve pictured a convict putting a knife in you, it’s hard to wrestle it out of your mind.
I sat at the counter, suspecting I had more than a little cowardice in me.
There aren’t too many things harder on a young male than the thought that he might be a coward. Now, years later, I wonder if it’s only young men, not knowing the difference between bravery and stupidity, who ignore the instinct to flee. Any animal on the planet has more brains; every creature in the forest will either hide or take off at the sound of a shot. Only a man will run toward it. Across the counter, behind the grill, I could see the cook, a man no more than twenty or twenty-one. He stood there, bored, waiting for customers to come in. If I didn’t go to work at the prison, this was the kind of job I had ahead of me. For years I’d done the same work: standing and waiting for customers to order a hamburger, a steak, or a BLT, sausage and eggs over easy or silver-dollar pancakes, reubens and Monte Cristos and Spanish omelets. I loved getting lost in the physical rhythm of cooking. But I knew there wasn’t much of a future for someone who went from one fry-cooking job to another. It was time for me to move on, or up, or somewhere, and the prison offered a title—Food Service Supervisor—and a chance to be in charge of a crew.
I knew Anne wouldn’t like the idea of me working at a prison.
Anne was a blue-eyed, brown-haired Montana girl, shy and intelligent. I’d met her in Denver, where she was a waitress at a dinner house downtown. Anne had a wandering spirit like mine, and she’d taken a year off from the University of Montana to go to Denver to make some money and have an adventure. We walked around the city and fell in love. We got married—too young and too quickly—and Anne returned to Seattle with me. We’d assumed that being married would make us want to settle down, but it hadn’t. After a year in Seattle, we moved to San Francisco. It
took us another year to grow tired of city life and make the move to Missoula, where her parents lived.
We were going to settle down there, for sure this time. It was time to think about buying a house, growing up, maybe having children.
But Anne wouldn’t want to settle in Deer Lodge, especially if I ended up killed by a convict.
I considered not even telling her I’d been hired; I could crawl back to Missoula and no one would ever have to know how much the thought of working at a prison scared me. But I’d be crawling back to two dollars an hour, and we couldn’t live on that.
Margie came over and refilled my coffee cup. She was a great waitress, never going anywhere without something in her hand. With the lunch hour approaching, customers started to come in. She would remain on her feet for the next few hours, making a hard job look easy.
When I finished my coffee, I looked at the clock. It was almost noon. I left twenty-five cents on the counter and walked over to the phone.
The time I’d spent pondering hadn’t helped me. I decided to find out how Anne had fared in Missoula, where she’d spent the morning job hunting and trying to find a place to live. If she had managed to find something, that would give me an excuse to take one of the low-paying, boring jobs available in Missoula and wait for something better to come along.
The phone rang a few times, and Anne answered.
“How’d it go?” I asked.
“Terrible,” she replied. “The college students have taken everything.”
“Any prospects?”
“Nothing,” she said. “How was the prison?”
“Interesting. They interviewed me and gave me a tour.”
“Was it awful?”
“No, I liked it. The prison’s beautiful.”
Anne had been to Deer Lodge and didn’t find the prison beautiful. She thought it looked scary and ugly. She asked how I liked the town.
“Well,” I wavered, “it’s small.”
“I told you,” she said.
It was time to break the news.
“If I want the job, I’ve got it. I think I should take it.”
She stayed silent for a moment. Then she asked if I’d be working with convicts.
“A few,” I said. It was quiet again, so I continued. “If I don’t take it, we’re going to end up living with your folks all winter while I work at Rieley’s for sixteen bucks a night.”
“It sounds like you’ve decided,” she said.
I guess I had.
After we hung up, I walked back to Mr. Bernhardt’s office. He was thrilled that I was taking the job and pumped my hand up and down. He told me I’d spend a week or so observing Bill Perdue at work, and then I’d have an orientation. After that, I’d take my own shifts.
Over dinner at Anne’s parents’ house that night, I broke the news to my in-laws. Anne’s father, Pop, was an imposing man. He was big, born and bred in Montana, a train engineer for the Burlington Northern Railroad. He’d worked for the railroad for more than thirty years, starting as a fireman shoveling coal into the firebox of old locomotives. His arms and back and temper had moved trains over the top of the Rocky Mountains. I wanted his respect.
As we ate, Anne and my mother-in-law fretted over the idea of my working at the prison, and as they talked my own fear rose up. Pop sat there eating his meal, not saying a word. If he’d said, “No, Bill, that’s a terrible place for a man to work. Stay here for a while. You’ll find something,” I very likely would have changed my mind. But he didn’t. Between bites of my mother-in-law’s beef stew, he paused, looking at me with the hardened eyes of a man who’d spent a lifetime doing backbreaking work.
“Good for you,” he said. “That’s a state job.”
3
THE MORNING MAN
Wednesday morning, I stood at the entrance to Tower 7, waiting for Bill Perdue.
Earlier, Anne had sent me off to my first day on the job with a long hug, the kind men got as they headed off to World War II.
Just before eleven o’clock, Bill came up the street. At the prison entrance he shook my hand, then shouted up to the tower.
“Hey!”
A moment later a guard stepped onto the wall.
“I’ve got a new man here. He doesn’t have his ID yet,” Bill yelled.
“Well, I still need a pass to let him through,” the guard called.
“I know that,” Bill sighed. “Send down the bucket. I’ve got a pass.”
The guard went back into the tower and returned with a metal bucket that he lowered on a rope. Bill put my pass in the bucket, and the guard hauled it back up, looked at it, and returned to the tower. Bill and I walked over to the massive door that would take us into the prison. Before we entered, I took one last look down the block. By now, Anne would be on her way down Main Street, Mr. Bernhardt’s list of apartments in her purse. Her mission was to find and rent our new home.
Bill and I entered the prison, passed through all the gates, and went in to work.
Only a few steps into the kitchen, a short man, dressed in whites, appeared. He stopped directly in front of Bill. In his late forties, he had a bristle cut and looked in good shape. He held a set of keys in his hand, and he shook with anger.
“Here are the fucking keys,” he said. His voice had a strangled quality to it, and he thrust the keys at Bill. Bill, caught off guard, looked puzzled. The man’s lips quivered, and he dangled the keys in front of Bill. “Take the fucking keys,” he said, a little louder. “I’m not working here anymore.” Bill grabbed the keys, and the man glared at him, defiant, as if he expected to be challenged.
“You’re quitting?” Bill asked. “Now?”
The man’s head bobbed up and down.
“Yes,” he said. “I’m quitting. Now.” He turned and walked rapidly past the guards in the officers’ mess. When he got to the door that led out to the yard, he yanked it back and exited, letting the door crash against the wall.
Bill sighed and pocketed the keys. He looked around the kitchen at the convicts.
“All right,” he demanded, “what the hell happened?”
A convict over by the ovens answered.
“Nothing,” he said. “That guy just runs around here shouting all day.”
“I don’t think he likes us, Perdue,” another convict said.
Behind us, in the officers’ mess, one of the guards spoke up.
“I’ve been here a half an hour, Bill,” he said. “Nothing happened. That guy fed short line, then just kept walking around the kitchen yelling at everybody.”
Bill nodded and said nothing, and we entered the office. Lost in thought, he sat at the desk, pulling his pipe from a pocket. He filled it and lit it, staring at the wall in front of him.
He turned to me for just a moment.
“Ex-marine,” he said.
Bill wasn’t the greatest explainer in the world, and he would often say just one or two words to me, forcing me to guess what he meant. Bill’s eyes returned to the wall.
Part of me wanted to run. The man who’d walked out looked like a tough guy to me, and if an ex-marine couldn’t take it, I figured I couldn’t either.
But whatever fear I had, so far, was all in my mind.
As I watched them work—cooking, mopping floors, and washing pots, no one standing over them cracking a whip or shouting—I realized, to my surprise, that the convicts reminded me of men in the working-class neighborhood I’d grown up in. Any one of them would have looked right at home on my block, leaning over the engine of a ’53 Chevy or ’52 Ford with a beer in hand, trying to squeeze another few thousand miles out of an old beater. The dramatic exit of the ex-marine disturbed me more than the sight of the convicts.
Bill and I had planned to review menus, but that wasn’t going to happen now. The ex-marine had taken off during the busiest part of the day, and we had work to do. Bill’s ruminations lasted only a few minutes, ending with the ringing of the phone.
He answered, said a few words, and hung
up. “It’s count time,” he announced, standing. “We have to count the convicts, so we know if someone’s escaped.”
He moved to the doorway of the office. “COUNT TIME, GENTLEMEN!” he roared.
Every convict froze in his tracks. Bill stepped into the kitchen. “Come with me,” he instructed. I had no problem with that. I intended on going everywhere he went.
Eight times a day, every convict in the prison was counted. In the laundry, the cell house, the hospital, the kitchen, the offices, all the supervisors counted at the same time and called their numbers over to the cell house. The cell house sergeant added up the numbers. If the day had started with 230 convicts, and the total fell to 229, we counted again.
I followed Bill to the southwest corner of the kitchen, where we did an about-face. The count had to happen quickly, and Bill took off.
The first two convicts were inside the doorway by the dishwashing area that served the officers’ mess.
“One . . . two . . .” Bill recited. He counted out loud, probably for my benefit.
The potato peeler.
“Three . . .”
To our right were two walk-in refrigerators and a walk-in freezer. Bill opened each one, making sure no convicts were inside. One of the convict cooks, the muscular one, stood to the side of the third walk-in with a tray of uncooked hamburger patties in his hands.
“I’ve got hamburgers burning on the grill, Perdue,” he complained. “You want me to stand here and let ’em burn?”
“Four,” Bill counted, then called over to the cook with the bloody dagger on his arm standing a few feet from the grill where the hamburgers were frying.
“Take care of those hamburgers, Mackey,” he said.
We moved fast. Bill stopped at the bathroom and opened the door; a young convict stood there.
“Can I come out?” the boy asked.
“Stay where you are,” Bill answered, and we moved on. He wasn’t being mean. You didn’t want men moving during the count, in case you ended up counting them twice. Some of the kids thought it was a good joke to sneak past you and mess up the count.
Prisoner in the Kitchen Page 2