Prisoner in the Kitchen

by William Bonham

  Then the boy raised the stakes.

  He reached down and picked up a saltshaker from the counter. Nearly full, its size and weight was that of a fair-to-middling rock. The boy drew his right arm back until the shaker was just below shoulder level, like that of a child about to skip a stone across a quiet pond.

  Instead of a pond, he saw only the heads of row after row of convicts. Should the shaker hit one of those heads, other convicts might start throwing things. Fists might fly.

  Max and Peterson started running. Reed, standing beside me, swore.

  Insane people were supposed to be housed at the state mental institution in Warm Springs, fifteen miles down the road. And, unless deemed dangerous, they were. But Warm Springs didn’t have the facilities or staff to take care of the violently crazy. So they sent them to prison.

  This boy didn’t seem dangerous to me, but I only knew him from his trips through the line. Mostly, he just seemed odd. He needed specific instruction to move down the line: Someone would say, “Now, go get some potatoes,” and he would move a few steps to his right. Whatever convict was serving the potatoes would then have to give him his next direction: “Get some green beans and Jell-O.” This happened at every meal, all the way down the line, until someone told him to sit down.

  Usually, he sat down, ate his meal, and left with everyone else. Today, he’d decided to surprise us.

  Just as Max and Peterson reached the boy’s row, he drew his arm back. A convict shouted.

  “Duck!”

  Heads lowered as the boy’s hand flew forward. Max raced toward him, reaching desperately for his arm. He missed by a matter of inches. The saltshaker shot from the boy’s hand with great force at almost the same instant that Max and Peterson grabbed him.

  The salt grenade sailed away.

  Over the convicts’ heads it flew, twelve inches above one, eight inches above another, then five, four, three, two . . . one head to go . . .

  It missed, barely. But that last convict, boy, he’d felt the breeze.

  “For Christ’s sake!” he shouted.

  The glass container hit the wall and exploded.

  The convicts seemed irritated by all of this and watched as Max and Peterson wrestled with the boy. Then, satisfied that no more saltshakers were headed their way, they resumed eating.

  Max and Peterson struggled to force the boy out of the row and into the aisle. The boy didn’t fight, but he’d braced himself between the countertop in front of him and the one in back, doing a pretty fair impersonation of an immovable object. His face showed no emotion, as if he considered himself nothing more than an observer as Max and Peterson pulled at him.

  Reed leaned over.

  “I think you’re supposed to go get help,” he said in his dry voice.

  I’d been watching it all happen like a fight on the playground, but Reed’s advice sent me into action.

  I took off for the officers’ mess. As I rounded the corner through the archway to the kitchen, I stopped. A number of guards—six, maybe seven of them—had already abandoned their lunches and were running toward me. They rushed around me, almost knocking me down, and charged down the aisle.

  The guards grabbed the boy’s arms and legs, lifted him up, and carried him out the back of the dining hall. The boy didn’t fight at all.

  From beginning to end, little more than a minute had passed.

  I glanced around the dining hall. Most of the convicts continued eating. A few, finished, smoked cigarettes. They didn’t look upset, and no conversations began. Aldrich and Reed went back to work, removing pans from the steam table.

  The minute might never have happened.

  The only thing different now was that there were no guards—anywhere. They were all occupied carting the boy across the yard. They seemed pretty damn brave. Without hesitation, they’d rushed into a room filled with 230 convicts, not knowing what had happened or what would. With them gone, I knew I was supposed to be responsible for something. But what?

  Then it dawned on me: the glass. The container had shattered. Salt was scattered everywhere, and a few sharp pieces of glass the size of arrowheads had to be kept out of the hands of clever convicts. A shard would make a fine tip for a knife. I told Aldrich to get me a broom and dustpan.

  As I waited for Aldrich, Lieutenant Covey strode through the double doors. A retired air force man, he carried himself with an officer’s bearing. He’d served in Europe as a bombardier during World War II before taking a job at the prison.

  He headed up the aisle, and when he reached me, he stopped, his eyes scanning the convicts and taking in the broken glass at our feet.

  “Any problems?” he asked.

  “Just the glass on the floor,” I said. “I thought I’d better stay here till it gets cleaned up.”

  “Good thought,” he replied.

  Aldrich returned with the broom and dustpan, ready to sweep it up, but Covey told him to leave it.

  “I’ll have the officers go over all this,” he said.

  With Covey in charge, I relaxed, although as far as I could tell I was the only one remotely bothered by what had happened.

  I spent the rest of my shift worried about something else: Reed. If he wanted to make me look like a fool, he had a good story to tell about the supervisor who didn’t have the brains to call for help. Still embarrassed by the pat-down incident, I waited for someone to mock me over the next few days, but no one did.

  Reed hadn’t mentioned it to anyone.

  13

  I SEE BY YOUR OUTFIT

  When I first came to the prison, the convicts appeared almost indistinguishable to me. Clothes became the great equalizer; every man wore the uniform white T-shirt, khaki pants and shirt, and belt and shoes. You would have needed Sherlock Holmes to spot the differences.

  But in fact, their appearances had a tale to tell; it just took me a few months to realize it.

  First, I noticed their hair. Sometimes I could guess how long a man had been in prison by his hairstyle. The younger men, those who’d entered in the late sixties, wore Beatle cuts, and would have looked right at home on the cover of Rubber Soul. One of the bakers, Jimmy Mahoney, had started his prison career in the late fifties; he had a ducktail, his hair oiled up and combed to the side, a curl falling over his forehead. Some of the older men, those from the Korea and World War II generation, maintained crew cuts.

  Their bodies struck me, too, but I only differentiated “big” men from “little” men, knowing that the “big” men generally ruled.

  A man’s size only served as part of the equation, though. After I’d been at the prison awhile, distinctions emerged from the blur of khaki the convicts sported. Had I known anything about convicts when I first saw Smoky Boy, fresh out of the hole and standing in front of the storeroom, I never would have mistaken him for someone mentally damaged. All I would have had to do was glance at his clothes to know that he was either a man to be feared or a man to be respected.

  It might have helped to compare a picture of Smoky Boy standing next to Aldrich, who was feared and respected by no one. Looking at each man in turn, I might have first noticed the T-shirts: Smoky wore a white one, nearly new; Aldrich had a gray shirt, frayed around the collar with small holes along the seam.

  After spotting the T-shirts, it would have been easy to spot other differences. Smoky Boy wore pants and a shirt that were ironed and crisp, and fit him well. Aldrich’s were stained and patched in spots; some days his clothes hung loosely, while on others they might be too tight.

  The convict in the laundry who handed out fresh clothes would have been afraid to give Smoky Boy—or the other tough convicts—anything less than the newest and best clothes in the prison. Aldrich wore whatever they handed him.

  Montana convicts could bring a pair of their own shoes into the prison; it allowed the state to save money. New prisoners often arrived on fish row with their feet resplendent in fine leather. They soon realized their mistake, one they wouldn’t have made if t
hey’d known that Rusty Shay had a cell on fish row.

  Shay was the only long-term convict with a cell on fish row. He was the “swamper,” mopping the floors and keeping the row clean and bright, and he took it upon himself to scare the living hell out of new inmates. He made it his life’s work to take their commissary—cigarettes and candy—and, as a bonus, relieve them of their footwear. If a nice young boy arrived with size 10 feet, Shay knew Smoky Boy was always looking for a better pair.

  By providing dominant convicts like Smoky Boy with shoes, Shay walked through the prison without fear.

  I knew none of this for several months. Most of my prison knowledge accumulated slowly, the result of my own observations. I learned Smoky Boy was one of the truly tough convicts by watching him wake up from his time in the hole.

  It took a few days, but gradually, his eyes grew hard and aware. He straightened and walked confidently. His face, initially so flaccid, took on a hard cast, his lips a tight line. His body, which had seemed formless and soft, now appeared all muscle—not the muscle of a weight lifter, but compressed and taut, the rock-hard body of a man born that way.

  Smoky Boy changed as if he were coming out of a cocoon and taking on the form he was meant to have. He watched everything and everyone, including me. His eyes appeared constantly in motion.

  I had no sense of his power, though, until the day a fight broke out in the cell house, between two convicts named Hauser and Grimes. Cocky young Mahoney, one of the pot washers, had witnessed the fight. He’d seen Hauser, a vicious man, go after Grimes—a smaller, weaker version of vicious—with his fists. Just after the fight, his role as witness made Mahoney someone worth listening to. Every man in the kitchen gathered around as he told his story. Smoky Boy stood to one side, with his arms crossed and his head down. Mahoney, in the spotlight, felt like a big shot.

  “Man, you should have seen it!” he exclaimed. “Hauser got mad and went off, man. He just went off ! He tells Grimes, ‘You better shut your fucking mouth, you cocksucker!’ ”

  The convicts listened, fascinated. Then Mahoney made a mistake.

  “You should have seen Grimes when Hauser came at him. Man, he was shitting his pants, he was so fucking scared!”

  Everyone laughed at the thought of Grimes afraid—everyone but Smoky Boy. “I guess you’re a tough guy,” he interjected.

  His voice wasn’t loud, but it was deep and cold, and it silenced all the convicts.

  Mahoney stopped, confused. “What?”

  Smoky Boy got a little louder. “I said I guess you’re a fucking tough guy. I guess if Hauser came at you with his fists, you wouldn’t be shitting your pants,” he sneered.

  “No, no . . .” Mahoney said.

  “I’ll make you shit your pants right now,” Smoky Boy threatened.

  Mahoney looked as if he already had. Smoky Boy walked away.

  The rest of the convicts drifted away, leaving a red-faced Mahoney alone.

  I realized then that a man’s size didn’t automatically make him a tough guy in prison. Smoky Boy had shut up everyone, not just Mahoney, with a few words, even though there were several men in the kitchen who were a lot bigger. Earl said nothing. Reed towered over Smoky Boy, had broader shoulders and bigger arms. But when Smoky Boy spoke, Reed shut up.

  Smoky Boy had gotten angry at a cocksure boy and had slapped him down to make his point. It confirmed a lesson I’d learned in second grade, from a third-grade fist: Don’t pretend to be tough in front of a tough guy.

  Mahoney, like a lot of young convicts, had to wait until he came to Deer Lodge to learn the same lesson. He might have been a tough boy on the street, or in the boys’ prison, and perhaps he was used to people being afraid of him. But here, he would have to get used to the idea that he wasn’t much of anything, doomed to a life of rolling his own cigarettes in clothes that would never fit, wearing shoes that filled with snow in the winter.

  14

  THE TOUR

  All together, there must have been twenty of them. They looked scared and a little nervous, their eyes wide and their cheeks flushed, the herd of them gathered behind the closed door to the officers’ mess. They peered through the window in the door and along the wall into the kitchen. Some of them balanced on their toes, craning their necks. At ten o’clock in the morning, I was staring at a sociology class from one of Montana’s colleges. On a tour of the prison, the kitchen was their first stop.

  Two other people, a guard and a professor, had entered the officers’ mess with them. The professor appeared somewhere in his forties; his eyes held the bland gaze of a seasoned observer. He opened the door, walked about twenty feet into the kitchen, and stood under the archway that led to the dining hall. The students followed. They stood huddled together inside the kitchen, staring. Then the professor spoke, and when he did, I began to hate him.

  I’d known for a few days that a tour would be coming through; Bill had told me, and Lieutenant Covey had come into the kitchen that morning to remind me.

  “They’ll be coming through here about ten,” he’d said. “I’ll send an officer over before they get here. Have the men tuck in their shirts.”

  The morning went by quietly, and at a quarter to ten, a guard named Richter arrived. When some guards entered the kitchen, the tension rose and the convicts grew silent. These guards prowled, looking for trouble; Charlie had told me to throw them out of the kitchen. I’d seen Richter around but hadn’t met him yet, and I didn’t know if he was a candidate for being tossed out of the kitchen or not. But I had learned that all I had to do was watch the reactions of the convicts to judge. When Richter came in, Mackey looked up and asked about some football game on TV. Richter said it had been a terrible game. A few of the other convicts greeted Richter, and he responded in kind. He looked around for a moment, then walked over to the coffeepot and poured himself a cup.

  I introduced myself.

  Richter was an easygoing man in his late twenties who looked like he’d been in a few fights himself, but the truth was he’d been smashed up in the rodeo. There was no time for him to tell me his rodeo stories on this day, but later I would enjoy hearing him talk of his years on the circuit. He never tired of describing the broken bones he’d suffered. He told tales of horses that had thrown him in Miles City and horses that had kicked him halfway across the ring in Bozeman. All that riding had made him a tough man, well capable of springing into action, if needed, to save the sociology class.

  On that day we only spoke for a moment as it grew close to ten o’clock. I left Richter and walked around the kitchen, telling the men to tuck in their shirts. No one argued.

  The prison that day contradicted every image I’d envisioned of prison life before I started working there. I hadn’t imagined a guard and a convict having a chat as Richter and Mackey did. Over by the ovens, Reed was working on the noon meal, occasionally offering up a “bullshit” in response to the football analysis Richter and Mackey provided. Near the outside door, Aldrich smoked a cigarette and Walker worked on his hobby, hitching belts out of horsehair. In the storeroom, Smoky Boy filled out an order form. One man swept the floor. The men in the bakery pulled bread out of the ovens. It was all so ordinary.

  It all changed when the sociology class arrived.

  As soon as the tour stepped into the officers’ mess, the convicts and Richter began to transform themselves. Richter straightened up and looked like he was actually on guard. Mackey walked over to the ovens. Above the grills, a rack held kitchen tools—pots, spoons, ladles, and a few four-foot-long metal paddles—and he pulled down a paddle. In his hands, it looked like it might make a formidable weapon. Mackey put it in the fifty-gallon stockpot. He stirred the stock.

  The professor opened the door to the officers’ mess and he and the students entered the kitchen, still staring. Mackey stared right back, the image of a vicious convict who might, just might, decide to lop off someone’s head with the paddle.

  Other convicts were changing, too. Aldrich hunched
over the trays in his sink, scrubbing like a madman, a pathetic portrait of an abused convict trying to avoid his next flogging. Walker put the belt away and glared at the class. The convicts in the bakery had stopped working and looked through their windows, staring, appearing like all they wanted in the whole world was five seconds alone with any one of the students.

  As I looked around the kitchen, all the convicts had transformed. I was puzzled for a moment. Then I realized that they were all acting, becoming caricatures of convicts. I had no way of knowing what was in their minds, but I think I was right: The men were giving the audience what they came to see. The students wanted cliché guards and cliché, nasty-looking convicts, and so that was what was being served to them.

  Standing there in my white pants and white shirt, I realized the students and professor probably thought I was a convict, too. If anyone looked like he was running the kitchen, it was Smoky Boy, still sitting at the desk in the storeroom, filling out an order form. The sociology class very likely assumed he was in charge.

  As the students stared, their eyes sometimes met mine, then darted away. It amused me to be mistaken for a convict. So I went along with it. A French knife lay on the worktable—no one had told me to put the knives away, and it hadn’t occurred to me—and I thought about picking it up. I rejected that idea as too dramatic, but I did lean against the wall, puffing up my chest and looking surly; by God, let these students fear and wonder why I was doing time. I stood there, doing my best to look like the Baby-faced Killer from Hell.

  The professor and the students had now made their way to the archway and stopped. The professor was about to speak. And when he did, he uttered that terrible word: “inmate.”

  The convicts in Montana preferred to be called “convicts,” or “cons.” If you said “inmate,” they would correct you. We all had our preferences. The guards preferred the title “correctional officer,” even though there was no “correcting” going on anywhere. I always referred to myself as a cook, even though “Food Service Supervisor” was my title. I found “guard” and “cooks” perfectly honorable words; “correctional officer” and “food service supervisor” seemed pretentious to me. Besides, I liked the sound of “cook,” and “guard,” and “convict,” preferring the blunt, quick sounds of Anglo-Saxon English.