Prisoner in the Kitchen

by William Bonham

  Toler kept his eyes locked on me. Subtlety hadn’t made him go away. Now I had to be blunt. I looked at him with what I fancied my steadiest gaze.

  “Move on,” I said.

  Despite the knot in my stomach, I knew there was almost no chance Toler was going to take flight over the noodles and attack me. It would put him in the hole for a long time, doing push-ups in the dark, with even less meat to eat. And it would add time to his sentence. Toler knew that, but he still hoped that his powerful stare might send my ladle screaming back into the goulash.

  At the back of the dining hall, Max hitched up his pants and pawed the ground. Over by the windows, Bill continued smoking his pipe, gazing out on the prison yard, lost in the beauty of the day.

  Finally, slowly, like a ship steering to starboard, Toler turned to his right and moved down to the peas.

  I served the next man in line. At the back of the room, Max relaxed.

  Toler filled his tray with peas, bread, and chocolate pudding, occasionally sending a dark glance my way.

  More convicts came through the line, carnivores all, with hardly a noodle man among them. They complained; I ignored them. With the line progressing, I stopped answering questions. “Move on,” I said.

  With Toler gone, my main concern wasn’t whether he or anyone else received a second helping; many convicts hadn’t had their first. Other men, some of them every bit as gruesome as Toler, waited, and I worried that I wouldn’t have enough meat to feed them all. Convicts in Montana had the option of skipping a meal and staying in their cells if they wished. But if they all showed up, I could easily run out.

  The men kept coming, and the goulash kept dwindling.

  In the second row, Toler had already finished with his food, and his eyes stayed on me. When I fed the last man, Toler resurfaced right behind him. About two pounds of beef remained at the bottom of the pan, floating in quite a bit of gravy.

  Toler’s eyes bored into me.

  I put noodles on his tray and ran my ladle through the goulash, picking out two pieces of beef, which I put on top of Toler’s noodles. He looked down at his tray.

  “More meat,” he demanded.

  Fifteen men had lined up behind him, also waiting for seconds, and I wanted to give them some beef, too.

  “That’s it,” I said. “Unless you want more noodles and gravy.”

  Toler looked at me with hatred, but this time he didn’t linger. He left, stopping for more peas and pudding.

  As the convicts finished eating, Stutzke and Aldrich started taking the empty pans from the steam line back to the kitchen. The rest of the crew went to work cleaning up.

  At the back of the dining hall, Max and Peterson watched as the men filed out, dropping their silverware into a bucket of soapy water—one knife, fork, and spoon per man.

  Main line was over. Mentally, the hardest work I’d ever done was standing on that line, pretending to be unafraid of Toler and the others. Now that I had finished serving, I was surprised to find I was sweating.

  I just hoped I’d fooled everyone.

  I looked over to the windows—no Bill Perdue. Proud of myself, I wanted to be congratulated. I found Bill sitting at his desk in the office. He looked up at me.

  “Well,” he said, “that went smooth enough.”

  6

  ORIENTATION

  “Go ahead, give ’er a pull,” ordered retired Captain Donaldson.

  There were six of us—five newly hired guards and me. I was wearing my whites, and the new guards looked fine in their new, freshly ironed blue uniforms. I stood in front of the class holding a long section of white rope. Jim Dale, one of the new guards, waited about six feet away, holding another section. We pulled against each other.

  Captain Donaldson wanted more. “Oh, come on now, you boys can pull harder than that. Give ’er a big, hard pull!”

  We pulled as hard as we could. We grunted and groaned. Finally, satisfied that we couldn’t break it, the captain said we could sit down. He coiled the rope and held it up in front of us. “This rope,” he said, giving it a shake, “is near twenty feet long. Two strong men can’t break it. And it just might take a man over that wall.” He pointed out the window toward the prison wall. Then he smiled, a tight little grin. “An inmate behind that wall braided this rope out of toilet paper,” he explained. He set the rope on the desk. Then he nodded, and his gray eyes narrowed. He stared at us. “Clever boys, these convicts. And don’t you forget it.”

  Captain Donaldson was long and lean, something over sixty years old. He sat on the corner of the desk, one leg hanging over, his hands clasped in front of him. He seemed completely relaxed, a confident speaker with all the time in the world to spare.

  We were almost halfway through a two-hour orientation, and the toilet-paper rope was the first thing he’d mentioned that had anything to do with the prison. Donaldson had devoted the first forty-five minutes to a long tale about his boyhood growing up on a ranch in Wyoming. He told us about his daddy, Big Ed, whose name matched his size. Big Ed had been one hell of a cowboy. He was missed. Captain Donaldson himself had left the ranch in his teens. His mother had cried, but he was fiddle-footed, and wanted to see the Old West before it disappeared. He spent some time in Colorado and Texas, got himself in some scrapes. Had a few doozies of a fight. On and on.

  Finally, after a brief story about his long-deceased childhood dog, he’d stopped talking and looked at his watch.

  “Well,” he’d said, “I suppose we’d better get started.” He’d picked up the rope and asked two of us to step forward.

  After the rope, which really was an amazing piece of work, Captain Donaldson picked up a lightbulb from the desk. He held it up, turning it in his hand as if it were a jewel.

  “We had an inmate here one time tried to kill another inmate with this lightbulb,” he said. “But we had a fine officer here, name of Harley, stopped it cold.” The captain nodded. “Old Harley spotted this lightbulb in one of the cells, screwed into the socket in the ceiling. It appeared to him there might be some kind of liquid in it. And he was right.” He pointed to the neck of the bulb. “There’s a tiny little hole here,” he explained. He turned the bulb so we could see. “An inmate drilled that hole, and then he filled her up with kerosene.” Captain Donaldson gestured toward the ceiling. “Then he snuck into that cell and screwed her into the socket.” He paused. “Might have had an explosion that night when the lights came on. Might have had ourselves one crispy inmate.” He set the bulb down. “You’ve got to use your head. You’ve got to use your eyes.”

  One of the new guards raised his hand and asked where the kerosene had come from.

  The captain chuckled. “There’s vehicles and engines all over this prison. An inmate wants a little bit of kerosene, a little bit of gasoline, believe me, he’ll get some. Might cost him a pack of cigarettes, but he’ll get it.”

  Next up, he showed us a “stinger”—a plug and wire attached with tape to two razor blades. If a convict plugged it into the wall and lowered the razor blades into a cup of cold coffee, he could have hot coffee, right in his cell.

  He saved a good one for last. He held up a length of rubber tubing, a Bic pen, a long needle, and a piece of string.

  “Can anyone here figure out how to kill a man with these?” he asked. None of us could. Captain Donaldson smiled and showed us how. First, he took the pen and removed the ink cylinder, set it aside, and kept the hollow plastic tube. He held up the rubber tubing.

  “You can steal this from the prison hospital,” he said. He poked a hole in one end of the tubing, and stretched it over the tip end of the plastic tube, leaving the opening clear. He tied the piece of string at the tip, and wrapped it around the shaft several times, securing the tubing to the shaft. Then he held up the needle, about ten inches long. I was starting to feel like I was watching one of those people who make balloon animals at the county fair. “Used to be a mattress factory here,” he said. “This damned needle might have been hidden forty ye
ars.”

  He touched the end of it with his forefinger. He made a face like it hurt.

  “Deadly,” he warned. He slid the needle into the hollow tube, holding the dull end with his right hand and the free end of the tubing with his left. He tugged on it a little, showing us how much tension the rubber tubing brought into play. The plastic tube was now the barrel of a gun, and the needle a projectile. And the rubber tubing, with a slingshot effect, could send the needle flying.

  “Now,” Captain Donaldson explained, “if I was to pull this back, take aim, and fire, this needle would cut through a half-inch board ten feet away.”

  I questioned that assertion, although I had no doubt that if it hit a convict in the ass it would send him ki-yi-yi-ing across the yard. If it hit him in the eye, that eye would be gone.

  Donaldson set the device on the desk.

  “I’m thinking about taking that contraption out in the hills,” he said. Wouldn’t be a damned bit surprised if I brought back an elk.”

  He took a sip of water and cleared his throat. “That brings us to some of the rules we have around here,” he said.

  A lot of the rules applied only to guards, not cooks, although Captain Donaldson did emphasize that we should not show curiosity about the crimes that had resulted in a man’s imprisonment.

  I’ve forgotten most of the others, except for the most important rule: No Matter What, You Never Give Anything To The Convicts. These were men who could turn a Bic pen into a killing machine. Once you’d taken something in, it would snowball. More convicts would ask you to bring something in until you couldn’t say no anymore. Next thing you knew you’d be walking through Tower 7 with a pound of heroin in your underwear.

  Near noon, our orientation drew to a close. Captain Donaldson stood. He raised an arm and pointed one long finger toward the prison. “When you walk through that gate over there,” he said, “the inmates are to call you ‘Officer Jones,’ or ‘Mr. Smith.’ And if they don’t, well, you just write ’em up.” We nodded. “Those boys don’t want a write-up,” he said. “If you write ’em up, they go to segregation. They go to the hole. They sit in the dark and eat cold food. They can’t earn any ‘good time’ when they’re in the hole,” he said. “You do not allow any inmate to sass you or cuss at you,” he continued. “It is not allowed. And if they do, you write them up! If an inmate refuses to work, you don’t hesitate, you . . . write . . . them . . . up! You are an officer at Montana State Prison,” he intoned, letting the sacred words hang in the air and ring through our souls. “And every inmate in this institution has to do what you tell them to do. And if they don’t?”

  Six voices spoke in unison: “We . . . write . . . them . . . up!”

  A crisp nod from the captain. “That’s right,” he said. At last, his arm lowered to his side. He brought up both fists and sent a short punch into the midsection of an invisible convict.

  “Go get ’em,” he said.

  I wondered how long it had been since Donaldson had spent any time in the prison. Of course, he knew the rules. But if you followed all of them, every convict in the prison would have been in segregation in the first hour.

  As we started to file out, we heard his voice once again.

  “One more thing,” he began. “A lot of those inmates over there would like nothing better than to beat on each other. And more than a few are looking for a chance to rape some of the itty-bitty boys we get in here.” He gave his usual pause and stare, but this time it seemed appropriate. He jabbed his finger at us. “But you just remember old Harley. They can’t do anything—not if you’re watching.”

  It proved a powerful image. Until that moment, I’d envisioned myself only as a man checking oven temperatures and making sure the meals came out on time. I had been so wrapped up in real or imagined fears about my own safety that it hadn’t occurred to me that some of these convicts were far more vulnerable than I was. Donaldson’s final admonition filled me with a great sense of responsibility. From that moment on, I saw myself as a protector of the weak.

  I walked out onto Main Street and into the sun. Jim Dale, the man who had been at the other end of the long white rope, walked out with me. When we got to the sidewalk we stopped. “Pretty good orientation,” he said.

  Jim was in his midtwenties, with hair the color of straw and a deep tan. Somewhere in his genes, a pale Norwegian had lived near a fjord, wrangling salmon in the mist, but Jim had grown up in Montana, wrangling wheat in the sun. We stood there for a minute, reviewing the details of the rope and Bic pen. Hearing voices, we looked back toward the office. The other new guards had made it to the doorway, but they were stuck there, still deep in conversation with Captain Donaldson. Jim had a dry sense of humor, and he nodded in their direction. “They’re probably telling him how sorry they were to hear about that boyhood pooch of his,” he said.

  “Well,” I said, “I think we all feel pretty bad about his pooch.”

  “I sure do,” said Jim. “A dog like that, dead.”

  Jim was surprised to learn that I already worked inside the prison and started asking me questions. He mostly wanted to know how accurate Captain Donaldson’s speech had been.

  “Don’t be surprised if you hear a couple of the convicts swearing,” I said. “And I don’t think they fall down weeping if you write them up.”

  Jim nodded. “I thought maybe we were tiptoeing through some bullshit here and there.”

  We said our good-byes, and I walked back across the street to the prison.

  By the time I returned to the kitchen, main line was over. I checked in with Bill and then, inspired by Captain Donaldson’s words, I began searching for places where the convicts might be out of my sight: the bakery, the walk-in coolers, a small space between the office and the storeroom. From the office, I couldn’t see the goings-on in the storeroom, and vice versa. And because of the gun cage, I couldn’t see the dining hall at all.

  At that point, I decided I would never stay in any one part of the kitchen too long. I’d keep a mental list of all the convicts working in the kitchen, and if I hadn’t seen someone for a while, I’d walk through all the areas until I found him. If he spent too much time talking to me, I’d suspect he intended to divert my attention from some other part of the kitchen, and I’d make another loop.

  From now on, I would be watchful. No itty-bitty convict need fear being raped, beaten, or sodomized in the kitchen or dining hall.

  Not on my watch.

  7

  A BETTING MAN

  I was holding two pounds of yeast, but it might as well have been plutonium. The convict bakers waited in the kitchen—they couldn’t start their day without it—but I couldn’t just hand yeast over to convicts and walk away.

  We kept the yeast locked up on Tower 2, along with all the kitchen knives. Every morning, the guard on the tower lowered the knives and yeast in a bucket, and I signed for them.

  I issued the knives to the cooks, but couldn’t hand over the yeast to the bakers on my own, not at first. In my first week, Bill had come with me for the yeast unveiling.

  Earl always had a bowl full of warm water ready. Bill removed the foil packaging, placing the yeast in the bowl. Earl stirred it until it dissolved.

  “Wash your hands,” Bill instructed, and Earl took a few steps to the sink, placing his hands under the faucet. Bill checked Earl’s washed hands, then scanned the bottom of the sink for any residue.

  Earl then took the bowl and carefully poured the liquid into the bottom of the huge bakery mixer. He turned the power on Low and started adding flour for the day’s bread.

  Once the flour had completely absorbed the yeast and Earl had scraped down the sides of the bowl, Bill and I left.

  We’d done all we could to prevent the manufacture of pruno.

  Pruno was prison home brew, concocted from anything that ferments—tomato puree, fruit cocktail, and rice were favorites. The recipe is simple: take one of the above, add water, sugar, and yeast, and leave it in a warm place.
Eventually it ferments, and you can get drunk.

  But time was of the essence, because the convicts had to not only make but also hide the pruno and hope that no one found it before they could drink it.

  One day, not long after I came on board, a guard called after the dispensing of the yeast to say we had a delivery. Bill asked me to check in the supplies. Here was a job I could do without direction, the same job carried out in restaurant kitchens every day. I stepped outside just as the driver turned off the engine of an old flatbed truck loaded with meat, flour, sugar, onions, and canned goods.

  A guard not much older than me leaped out of the truck, clipboard in hand, and slammed the door. He chewed on a toothpick.

  “Hey, you,” he barked at me. “Get moving! Start unloading this shit!”

  I wore white pants and a white shirt, just like the kitchen crew. The guard had mistaken me for a convict—easy enough to straighten out. “I work here,” I said.

  A look of disgust crossed his face. He pulled the toothpick from his mouth. “You . . . work here?” he asked. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

  “Yes,” I replied, “I’m the new supervisor.”

  “They hired you?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Unbelievable,” he muttered.

  With that, he handed me his clipboard and stepped up onto the bed of the truck, leaning back against the cab and crossing his arms.

  The guard was trying to humiliate me, in front of my crew, and it was working. The convicts paid attention now, alert to this pathetic challenge, waiting to see how I would handle it.

  I had no idea how to handle it.

  A minimum-security convict had come in with the truck; he’d loaded it and would help unload. Now the guard spoke to him, still loud enough for all of us to hear.