Prisoner in the Kitchen

by William Bonham

  Max cocked a thumb back over his shoulder toward the kitchen.

  “Now, Perdue, he’s sitting in his office, having a nice day. All of a sudden he hears Smalley shouting, ‘He’s gonna kill me!’ So Perdue decides maybe he ought to go have a look. He gets out here, sees Smalley running and screaming and Smoky Boy chasing after him. So he goes back to the office and calls for help. Then, while he’s waiting for it to come, he starts to think maybe he should do something himself, you know, come out here and tell Smoky to knock it off. So he does. Well, by then Smoky’s got Smalley down on the floor and is just about to put that knife in him! But now, with Perdue shouting at him to stop, he gets mad at Perdue. So he waves the knife at Perdue. ‘You want some of this?’ he says. Then Smoky drops the knife, grabs Smalley by the shirt collar and lifts him two feet off the ground with one hand, coldcocks him with the other, and drops him on the floor. Now Smalley’s laying there, out cold, with that one good eye of his rolling around in his head, and Smoky picks up the knife and heads for Perdue. Well, Perdue ain’t no runner, and he’s starting to think he’s about to get himself killed!”

  This seemed to Max like a very funny part of the story, and he had to let out a good, long chuckle before he could go on.

  “Just then, Dick Lund shows up.” Max said it as if the cavalry had arrived, and in a way it had; Dick Lund was a prison sergeant. “Now, Lund knows karate, see, and he walks right up to Smoky and tells him to drop the knife. Well, that makes Smoky even madder, and he forgets all about Perdue. And now he turns to Lund. ‘So,’ he says, ‘I hear you’re one tough son of a bitch. I guess I better kill you first.’ ”

  Max paused, let that sink in for a moment, then wrapped up the whole story in two quick sentences.

  “So Lund chops him on the neck. Smoky goes down, out like a light, and Lund drags him off to the hole.”

  Max looked at me, laughing and shaking his head. He’d told the whole story in the same jolly tone that I might use to tell the tale about the day my uncle Al got tipsy and chased a mouse around the porch with a broom. As funny as it seemed to Max, it scared the hell out of me. The tale didn’t take place in some faraway prison or long ago. It had happened here, in this dining hall, a few weeks before, with a convict who was going to be working for me in the kitchen.

  Max must have sensed that his tale had bothered me.

  “Hey,” he said, “don’t worry about it. Some of these guys are never getting out of here. Every so often one of ’em goes off. It relieves the tension.”

  His attempt to comfort me failed. I hated the idea of some convict “going off” every now and then.

  Max went back to filling the thermoses, and I returned to the kitchen. Bill remained in the office, but Smoky Boy was standing outside the door now. His arms hung loosely at his sides, his jaw slack. His eyes, used to the blackness of the hole, blinked in the bright light of morning.

  He stood there for a very long time trying to remember who he was.

  10

  THE WOMAN AT THE BANK

  Helen was a friendly woman in her forties, a teller at the bank. She was looking over the forms Anne and I had filled out.

  “Oh,” she said, “you work at the prison. My husband works there, too.”

  He worked in the administration building, and I’d never met him.

  “You will,” Helen assured me. “Eventually you meet everyone in Deer Lodge.” She shuffled some papers and started filling out the forms that would grant us a savings account and a checking account.

  After paying our rent and laying in supplies, Anne and I were down to our last fifty dollars or so. Anne took thirty out of her purse, sliding it across the counter, ten for savings and twenty for checking. Our last twenty had to last till my first payday.

  “It’s going to take a while before anyone wants to cash your checks,” Helen said.

  “Why?”

  “Because you work at the prison.”

  Anne had just taken a job at the bakery in the grocery store on Main. She mentioned it to Helen.

  “That should help,” she said. “You shouldn’t have a problem cashing checks when you need to.”

  No one was lined up behind us—one of the blessings of life in Deer Lodge was that there was rarely a line anywhere—and so Helen had all the time in the world to explain why someone working at the grocery store could cash a check, but not someone working at the prison.

  Almost all the merchants in town had been stung by bad checks from people who worked at the prison; the high turnover rate meant that more than a few had disappeared without paying their bills. It would take a while to earn the shopkeepers’ trust. Helen warned us that the locals, the old Deer Lodge families that had lived there for generations, hated the prison and its employees. When their parents and grandparents had settled this valley, back in the 1880s, it looked like Deer Lodge would become the state capital. They built the town betting that the railroad, the timber industry, and the first college in Montana would make this valley the center of all action in the state. They lost that bet, and some of their descendants remained bitter. Despite the massive evidence on Main Street, they refused to think of Deer Lodge as a prison town, pretending that it didn’t exist—unless, of course, someone who worked at the prison skipped town before paying his bills.

  I found Deer Lodge fascinating, as if we were in a foreign country with strange customs, where the fastest cars went no more than twenty miles an hour and everyone knew everything about everybody else. Meanwhile, the Deer Lodge aristocracy, hidden behind shaded windows, dreamed of the Deer Lodge that might have been and prepared themselves to snub anyone from farther away than Anaconda.

  I asked her how bad their bias was.

  “Well,” she said, sliding our temporary checks across the counter, “you are now . . . officially . . . ‘prison trash.’ ”

  Helen smiled again. She hadn’t grown up here, but she had long ago adapted to the mysterious world of Deer Lodge.

  We left, our useless temporary checks in hand, and stepped out onto Main Street. Anne was quiet, and I didn’t need to ask why; the talk of prison trash had taken a toll on her spirit. We crossed the street and started home.

  Missouri Avenue was one of the nicest in Deer Lodge, home to some of the founding families who didn’t want to cash our checks. A ten-foot-wide strip of grass separated the sidewalk from the road, and trees lined the street as far as you could see. We passed the courthouse, built of gray stone, and then the library, constructed of the same material.

  We walked until we reached the old Larson mansion. The house was fading now, in need of a fresh coat of white paint, but it must have been something in its glory years. The first banker in Deer Lodge, Larson had built this house in the 1890s, clearly intending to stay. But he’d taken off for Seattle when it became clear that Deer Lodge wouldn’t be the center of any action that didn’t involve the prison. The man who owned the house now had converted it into apartments, and Anne and I rented the original living room, dining room, and library.

  It should have been a museum.

  Every morning we woke up in the library. The books were gone, but by God, it would have housed a lifetime of reading—the room was fourteen feet wide and twenty-five feet long. An old double bed sat at the far end. When the sun came up, light filtered through a leaded stained-glass window on the east wall, leaving a gold-and-blue floral pattern on the worn beige carpet. The window, though, was only a centerpiece for the hand-carved cherry and mahogany fireplace that ran along the wall, set back into a bay. It was a good seven feet wide and ran from the floor to the top of the ten-foot ceiling. Brown tiles of varying hues surrounded the firebox, and a sheet of hand-pounded brass that fanned out over the top of the firebox held the screen. Two hand-turned pillars spiraled up and held the mantel, and two flues, encased in mahogany panels, climbed from the mantel to the ceiling, framing the stained-glass window.

  It made for one fine bedroom.

  A short hallway, passing a small bathroom
, led to the dining room. The owner had put in a stove and a sink. He’d also tacked up prefabricated cabinets on one wall, in the process driving screws through some damned nice oak. But after that travesty, hand-hewn oak panels rose several feet high along the walls, and scrolled oak frames surrounded the doors and the archway into the living room. There was oak everywhere. A magnificent, floor-to-ceiling carved oak sideboard took up the south wall. Three windows faced west, and above them perched three smaller stained-glass windows. The ones to the left and right, rendered in gold and red and yellow, depicted leaves and cherries and little birds; in the center window, two ducks, surrounded by gold leaves, flew across a blue sky.

  All three rooms, and the basement, cost $125 a month.

  I knew Anne was unhappy after our meeting with Helen. She looked at me with steady, unblinking blue eyes.

  “We’re prison trash?” she whispered. Her voice was quiet and distant. “How did you and I become prison trash?”

  Anne didn’t want, or expect, an answer, and left for the library/bedroom. It wasn’t in her nature to slam doors, but somehow it seemed worse that she closed the door softly behind her. It wasn’t in her nature to shout or cry, either, but even worse, she kept silent.

  I sat at the dining room table, looking up at the ducks flying in the blue sky and at all the oak, patiently carved by men who spent their lives creating beauty for the very few who could afford their work. Not many people in the world have ever lived with the kind of craftsmanship that surrounded Anne and me.

  For prison trash, we were living pretty damned good.

  11

  EVERYBODY MAKES MISTAKES

  At one o’clock, I had my hands around Earl’s throat.

  We were outside, between the door to the officers’ mess and the gate that led to the prison yard. Fifteen convicts stood beside us. They all watched me.

  “C’mon, let’s go,” a few of them shouted.

  It was a beautiful autumn day, and the convicts were impatient to go out in the yard. One of the benefits of working in the kitchen was a few hours of yard time in the afternoon while the rest of the convict population worked—in the laundry, cell house, or offices—or stayed locked up on fish row and in segregation. The kitchen crew had the yard, the gym, and the hobby room to themselves during yard time, but they couldn’t go until I had finished patting down Earl and then each one of them.

  Patting a man down followed the same ritual you see in every cop show as the bad guy’s searched for weapons. Every time a convict left the kitchen he had to be patted down for contraband, just in case he’d decided to sneak something out with him.

  Earl relaxed, carrying on a conversation with another convict. He kept his legs spread and his arms extended straight out from their sockets. He seemed completely unaware of my hands searching him. Many years in prison, and thousands of searches, will do that to a man.

  My hands roamed over his arms and shoulders, chest, stomach, and waist. I moved to his back and down to his butt. Now I explored his legs on the outside, then up the inside to his crotch.

  I found nothing; everything I stumbled across seemed appropriate to the area. When I finished, he walked to the gate and waited.

  Every convict had his own reaction to the pat-down. Most were like Earl’s, but some were memorable.

  “Next,” I called.

  Mahoney stepped up to the plate. Barely eighteen, Mahoney was only five feet five inches tall, a recent transfer from the boys’ prison near Swan Lake. He liked to pretend that being patted down gave him pleasure.

  “Oo-oo,” he said, as my hands crossed his chest.

  I ran my hands down his back. When I reached his buttocks, Mahoney started flexing the cheek muscles in a rapid little dance.

  “Oo-oo, you’re good,” Mahoney murmured.

  “Be quiet,” I said.

  Mahoney wiggled his hips. As I approached his groin he bent a little at the knees and leaned back in mock sexual ecstasy. “Oo-oh, that’s it, that’s it,” he moaned.

  “Next time I tell you to be quiet, be quiet, or you won’t have any yard time,” I snapped.

  The pat-downs embarrassed me at first, and the sound of Mahoney’s pseudo-orgasm didn’t help. Not that it worried Mahoney. An unbroken colt, he ran to the gate with the other convicts.

  A few more went by, then Stutzke stepped in front of me.

  Stutzke, the kitchen potato peeler, hailed from Canada. In his sixties, he stood several inches over six feet tall, and thin—rarely is skin required to cover less. He had a strong jaw, prominent cheekbones, and eyebrows wild and gray with age standing guard over deep-set brown eyes. Stutzke had all of his hair, black and gray, combed straight back and held down with hair cream. To my knowledge, he wasn’t a religious man, but his voice and bearing suggested a crazed prophet imported from some city street corner.

  Stutzke was a burglar, but not a good one. I know this because he’d spent most of his adult life in and out of prison. He hated Montana, often vocalizing his thoughts on the superiority of Canadian prisons—and Canadians in general.

  A cranky old man, Stutzke had an odd dignity about him, and he didn’t relish being patted down.

  “All right, c’mon,” he said. “Let’s get this done.”

  He stood there like a martyr, his back to me, his face to the sun. As I started patting him down, he reminded me, as he did every day, to be careful; he had bursitis in one shoulder and arthritis everywhere else. My mother had bursitis, and I knew it was painful, so I took more time with him than I did with the other men, careful to go lightly over his joints. When I finished, he lowered his arms and walked slowly up the sidewalk to the gate.

  A few more convicts and I was done. The guard in Tower 4 had watched this whole process, and now I waved to him, the signal that I had found nothing. He waved back and pressed the button that opened the gate. The convicts poured into the yard.

  Given that I hated pat-downs, as time passed, I’d started to give some pretty shoddy ones. It’s possible that the guard on Tower 4 noticed my lackadaisical approach and decided to alert the cell house. In any event, the sergeant there decided to search the convicts again, and five minutes after he’d finished with Stutzke, the phone rang. I answered.

  “Bonham? This is Doyle, over in the cell house. I just found some contraband on Stutzke.”

  Oh, God. Had he found a knife?

  “I know you’re new, but you’ve got to be careful shaking these guys down.” Doyle didn’t sound unkind; he was simply giving advice to a new man.

  “I know,” I said. “I’m sorry I missed something.”

  “These guys are tricky,” Doyle reminded me.

  I asked what Stutzke had taken. He drew in a breath, his voice filled with disbelief. “He had a sandwich under his nuts. I don’t know how in the hell you missed it.”

  A sandwich. I’ll admit that my crotch searches weren’t as thorough as they should have been, but I was surprised I’d missed a sandwich. Doyle went on: “Convicts aren’t allowed to take food out of the kitchen. They have to eat in the chow hall, same as everyone else.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’ll be more careful.”

  But it wasn’t as simple as that. “You miss a sandwich, you’re sure as hell going to miss a knife,” said Doyle.

  He was right. That’s why the searches were so important. “Sometimes these guys’ll hide a knife in the crack of their ass,” Doyle continued.

  My gut feeling told me that if a man wanted a knife so badly he was willing to hide it in the crack of his ass, then by God, he should have it. Doyle answered my unspoken thought: “Next thing you know, somebody’s got a knife in his back,” he warned.

  I liked that less. I thanked Doyle for the phone call and assured him I would do a better job in the future.

  By the end of the day, everyone in the prison knew about the sandwich. By the time my shift ended, rumor had eclipsed reality and the sandwich had grown in size to several inches thick, crammed with meat and onions and lettu
ce, weighing in at close to a pound. And the new man had missed it.

  The tale of the sandwich dogged me for several days. There were little comments as I passed, guards asking if I’d found any lunches lately.

  If I wasn’t careful, I’d end up becoming another Teddy Melton, the guard who dropped a .38 revolver in the prison yard. Missing a sandwich during a search wasn’t as bad a mistake as dropping a .38 into the prison yard, but another big one like it just might relegate me to the Hall of Shame with Melton.

  But this was a prison, and there were always new and exciting ways to look stupid. Within days, another opportunity came my way.

  12

  ANOTHER MISTAKE

  Right after main line, the crazy Indian boy stood up. All the convicts had been served, and Reed and a few others had started to break down the steam line, bringing trays back to the kitchen.

  A minute before, the boy had been quietly sitting and eating at a table twelve rows back. Now he was standing, gazing over the heads of the convicts still seated. The men on either side of him looked up, curious, but the boy made no further movement, so they went back to their meals.

  Then the boy screamed.

  It was an oddly emotionless scream, lasting only a few seconds. Then he was silent again.

  The convicts in front turned to look. When they saw it was the crazy Indian boy, they returned to their meals. The men to the boy’s left and right, however, knew that Max and Peterson were on their way to take the boy to segregation, and they had to get out of the way. Quickly, but without panic, they picked up their trays and headed for more peaceful rows.

  Max came up the right aisle and Peterson up the left, fast. Screaming in the dining hall wasn’t allowed—it could lead to all sorts of bad things.