The professor preferred the mushy, fuzzy sounds of someone who wanted everyone to know he went to college for a really long time.
He didn’t speak that loudly, and he may have actually thought he was being discreet, but an occasional sentence fragment would waft out over the kitchen and fall on our ears. He spoke of “inmates entering a penal institution for the first time” and “the high recidivism rate” due to their “unwillingness to avail themselves of educational opportunities,” and on and on. His message to his students was clear: the men you’re looking at are stupid, lazy, or nuts.
And, depending on the convict, there was some—some—truth in that. But to hell with truth; at that moment it seemed the rudest, cruelest thing I’d ever witnessed.
Almost.
As the professor droned on, my eyes fell on a girl in the front. She outdid the professor in cruelty.
There was a kind of Montana girl that I loved, and they were everywhere. They filled the streets of Missoula and Bozeman and they walked along the rivers; I saw them in stores and on mountains and sitting in parks having sandwiches. They were wool-and-cotton girls. They wore hiking boots and no makeup. These sturdy young women stepped out of the shower every morning, combed their hair, got dressed, and walked into the world looking so damned fresh and clean and rosy it broke my heart and made my male hormones roar.
The girl on the tour was one of them.
She had long auburn hair that fell around her shoulders and down her back. Her skin was clear and lovely and pink, and she had beautiful eyes. She wore jeans. I couldn’t see her feet, but I’ll bet she had boots on. On this warm day, she’d taken off her plaid jacket and laid it across one arm. The rest of her outfit consisted of a thin white cotton T-shirt. And there she stood—a magnificent, busty Montana girl in the middle of Montana State Prison, not wearing a bra.
The T-shirt was so thin that from across the kitchen I could see the dark shading of her areolas.
Her nipples were shouting.
I don’t know how many young girls wore bras in 1973; I know a lot didn’t. Opinion pieces filled newspapers, debating the meaning of going bra-less. Some said it was a matter of comfort and personal choice; some called it a statement of freedom. Others believed that a girl without a bra was yet another sign the world was going to hell. But I was young and shallow, and bra-less girls brightened my day.
But not at the prison.
Looking at her, I started to feel like a middle-aged father—I wanted to lecture her on propriety and common sense. I wanted to tell her that barely contained breasts in thin T-shirts didn’t belong in a prison. And what I wonder now is this: Did she know the effect she had? Did she think she was giving the convicts a thrill? Was she a tease? Or is it possible she was so unaware that it didn’t occur to her to keep her jacket on? If she was simply dense and thoughtless, she can be forgiven. If she knew, then I say it was an act of cruelty.
As the professor wrapped up his little lesson, all the air left the kitchen; the convict characters deflated, leaving the real convicts standing at their stations, depressed. The tour filed into the dining hall, exiting out the back.
The students had come to the zoo, stared at the animals, and learned nothing.
A part of me knew I wasn’t much better; only a few weeks before I’d applied for this job partly in the hope that, even if I didn’t get hired, I’d get to see real live convicts. But the professor had stunned me, speaking as if we were deaf, and the blatant staring had appalled me.
The convicts went back to work, and no one spoke for a long while. Richter left the kitchen. Then Smoky Boy came out of the storeroom. He looked around the kitchen for a moment.
“Hey, fuck ’em,” he said. “Fuck ’em all, eh?”
A little life slipped back into the room. “Yeah, fuck ’em,” Mackey agreed.
Smoky Boy asked if anyone had noticed the breasts on the girl in front. They sure had. Fuck her, too.
“Next time,” he said, “we’ll hose down this floor and soap it up before they get here. If they come in they’ll fall on their asses.”
This plan garnered a lot of approval.
Then Bear, the always-silent, “off in the head” Indian who took out the garbage, came into the kitchen. He’d been out back and hadn’t seen the tour.
“Hey, Bear,” Smoky Boy said, “you missed the show.”
The other convicts were getting into it now.
“You sure did, Bear,” Mackey said. “We had women in here.”
Bear looked confused.
“It was a tour, Bear,” Smoky Boy explained. Then he told Bear about the girl in the T-shirt, crudely describing her breasts. Mackey and Reed chimed in with their own descriptions; they all had ideas for what they might do with those breasts if they had a chance. Then Smoky Boy had another thought.
“Next time they come through here, we’ll have Bear go over and grab one,” he said. He turned to Bear. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Bear? Run over and grab some tit?”
Bear looked shy, but he smiled and nodded—yes, he’d be happy to do just that.
“That’d be the last fucking tour we got through here,” Smoky Boy said.
The convicts laughed, enjoying their imaginary revenge, and the kitchen headed back to normal again.
It’s easy to think of convicts talking about women all the time, longing for them, dreaming of them, but if they did, I never heard. Maybe it was easier not to mention women than it was to dwell on what they were missing.
Later that day I talked to Lieutenant Covey. I mentioned the girl to him, and the T-shirt; thanks to Richter, Covey already knew. The girl hadn’t come into the prison that way, she’d entered wearing her jacket. They intercepted her on the way to the cell house and escorted her out of the prison. I told Covey about the professor, and I asked him what I should have done. Covey didn’t have to think long.
“He wasn’t supposed to say anything at all,” Covey said. “It was a walk-through.”
So what would he have done?
“I would have gone over and told the professor to shut his damned mouth,” Lieutenant Covey stated.
He was right. I should have done that. And what about the girl?
“You should have told her to get the hell out.”
The advice was too late, but it cheered me to know I had the power to throw professors and breasts out of the prison. I wanted the morning back just for the pleasure of kicking the whole sociology class across the yard and into the street.
I was changing fast, although I couldn’t have defined it that day. In little over a month I’d gone from being afraid of my crew to wanting to protect them from people who would casually and thoughtlessly shame them. If a line had been drawn in the sand that morning, and I’d been forced to choose between an afternoon with the convict to my left or the pretty, auburn-haired girl to my right, it wouldn’t have been a choice.
I would have hung out with the convict.
15
PARADISE
A few miles of paved road, then a few more miles of graveled road, and I had almost reached Rothe Hall. There were no lights anywhere along the way, and at five in the morning I was enveloped in complete darkness. In the winter, even with the road cleared of snow, it was hard to see and hard to drive. On my first few trips there, I was lucky I didn’t end up in a field.
In daylight, Rothe didn’t even appear to be a prison. It consisted of one long two-story building, painted white, with a cyclone fence surrounding several acres. One tower, made of wood, stood just outside the fence, and even though barbed wire had been strung along the top of the fence, the overall effect was of a place trying to keep people out, rather than keeping convicts in.
There was nothing prisonlike about the inside of the building, either. It had no bars or cells; instead, the men slept in dormitories on either side of the lobby, where a large raised desk sat in the middle for the officer on duty. Just behind the lobby, a set of double doors opened into the dining hall.
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nbsp; The dining hall and kitchen was Charlie Galvin’s world, his paradise, made even more so now that Reed and Mackey had been transferred to Rothe as a reward for their “good time” in maximum security. Charlie now had the two best cooks in the prison.
Both Reed and Mackey were happy with the transfer; it marked a giant step up in their lives. And Mackey became even happier when his best friend and crime partner, Frank Stick, arrived.
Stick was about the same age as Mackey, midthirties, a full-blooded Indian and very proud of it. One of those small men who still manage to look fearsome, his face was usually sullen and mean.
Mackey loved reminiscing about their days on the road together robbing convenience stores. Seeing Stick always prompted him to reenact the story of their last robbery, the one that sent them both to prison. Listening to Mackey filled Stick with fond memories, and he smiled and nodded as the tale unfolded.
Mackey mimed ducking down behind the getaway car to dodge a bullet. Then, cautiously rising from his crouch, he peered over the hood, his fingers in a boy’s impersonation of a gun. He fired back. “Bam! Bam!” he shouted. “Bam! Bam! Bam!”
Now he grabbed his right side, just below the rib cage, and grimaced. “Ahh-ow! Shit!” he yelled. Poor Mackey had been shot.
After robbing the store, they had run toward their getaway car, but found themselves surrounded by cop cars, all blaring sirens and screeching tires. With an unbounded lack of foresight, they decided their best bet was to shoot at the policemen. It didn’t work out as they had hoped.
The whole crew enjoyed the story—not that it was a big crew. Fewer than a hundred convicts populated the whole of Rothe Hall. We didn’t need one man for pots and another for trays; here it was a job for one convict. Mackey and Reed cooked, an old man named Pop Mercer washed the pots and trays, and a few more mopped the floors and took out the garbage. A retarded man, Kline, cleaned the tables. He had no idea why we were laughing, but he joined in any time the rest of us laughed.
This small group listened as the tale of this epic battle wound toward the end.
“Now, I’m down on my knees,” said Mackey, “bleeding like a stuck pig, and I still got bullets flying over my goddamned head. I look over at Frank, and there he is sitting on his ass, blood everywhere. He looks at me and says ‘I’m dying, Mackey.’ Well, I’m pretty fucking busy, and I say, ‘What the fuck do you want me to do about it, Frank?’ ”
All of us laughed, but Stick laughed harder than anyone, covering his eyes whenever Mackey impersonated him.
“So I end up in the hospital for a week, and Frank’s in there for two or three weeks, and we didn’t hit one cop! We go to court, and the judge says he’s only sentencing us to twenty years, since no one got hurt. And Frank says, ‘No one got hurt?! Christ, I almost got killed!’ So the judge bangs down his gavel and shouts, ‘You get twenty-five years!’ ”
All good stories end with a lesson learned, and this one did, too. “Don’t mess with these fucking Montana judges,” said Mackey. That garnered him a few knowing chuckles.
For me, the best part about working shifts at Rothe was that men came through the line without complaining, and you never had to turn down a convict who wanted more food. These men did hard, physical work all day long in the dairy, the slaughterhouse, and the butcher shop, sometimes not getting back until late in the evening. Whenever they returned, hungry and tired, we were waiting with a hot meal. Talk at breakfast, lunch, or dinner was often about the workload for the days ahead.
To create contented convicts leading constructive lives, give them a real job—a necessary job—and put them to work. At times, it was hard to believe they were convicts.
Of course, hearing of an adventure like Mackey’s brought me back to earth: These were still criminals, doing time.
His story had surprised me because it was rare to hear convicts talking about their crimes. At orientation they had told us not to be too curious about the crimes that had brought a man to prison; it might make you fearful of one convict, or contemptuous of another. Besides, it was just impolite and kind of unhip to go around asking. I only learned what crimes a man had committed gradually, through their stories, or by hearing a guard, Bill, or Charlie say something in casual conversation.
Despite what I’d been taught at orientation, I desperately wanted to know what each man had done to send him to prison. I played a mental guessing game, never sure. I pegged Aldrich for a car thief, for instance, and suspected Walker was a burglar. Smoky Boy, there was no doubt in my mind, had to be a murderer.
At Rothe Hall, I had a way to satisfy my curiosity that was too tempting to resist.
Just inside the entrance to the building rested a metal rack, like the kind that held individual time cards in a factory. Each convict had a card there. Whenever he left the building to go to work or meet a visitor, the supervisor accompanying him plucked the card and returned it to the rack when he brought the convict back.
Each card included the crime a man was in for.
I discovered this accidentally on one of my first days there. Noticing the rack and overwhelmed by curiosity, I pulled the card of a convict I didn’t know—a car thief. I grabbed another card. Bad checks. Now I felt some excitement.
The cards were in alphabetical order, so I went to K, for the retarded Kline. A child molester. So tragic—I wondered if he had a clue what he’d done. I returned his card and went to M, for Pop Mercer. I was surprised; the little old man was in for murder.
Now my mind turned to Reed. What could he have done? He didn’t have any problem working hard, so I couldn’t picture him embezzling money, stealing a car, or robbing someone. Murder? I didn’t think so. Manslaughter, maybe—a big old fight in a Montana bar that ended with a man dead.
I turned over the card.
Rape.
I gasped. I knew several men who were doing time for rape, but they all fit my image of a rapist; they were either brutal or ugly or flat-out strange.
But Reed seemed like . . . a good guy. In his own way, he’d been kind to me, and he’d made me laugh. And he sure as hell wasn’t bad-looking. Many women must have found him attractive before he came to prison.
I stood there in the Rothe Hall lobby trying to make sense of it. Maybe Reed was innocent, wrongly convicted. But no, I was smarter than that. He’d raped someone.
I had the oddest, sickest feeling: I knew a rapist. A big, funny rapist.
And I liked him.
16
THE WARDEN
Don Hallum was an insurance salesman.
“You’re working in a prison,” he said, “you need insurance. What if your wife was pregnant right now, and something happened to you? The odds are it won’t, but if it did, you’d want to know your family was taken care of, wouldn’t you?”
Certainly I would. Don Hallum made all kinds of sense. He was a good salesman. He didn’t go out of his way to make me paranoid, either. These were commonsense concerns. He cared about my future. He asked me what kind of insurance the state provided. I was young and healthy, and I didn’t have a clue what my coverage was. He told me I should look into it; if the coverage wasn’t adequate he could suggest several plans that would cover my needs nicely.
Then, still talking insurance, Hallum walked over to the ovens and peeked in; whatever was in there wasn’t done yet, and he closed the oven door. He told me he was sorry he himself wouldn’t be able to sell me the insurance I needed, but he could recommend a good man in Missoula. Don Hallum was the new convict cook, serving time for writing bad checks.
Hallum looked like one of those TV dads from the fifties—if the TV dads had been drunks. Tired, and thin, and gray, and middle-aged, his face showed the deep lines and broken veins of an alcoholic. He was sober now, had been since his arrest, and he was full of shame. During the few weeks he worked in the kitchen, he told me how he had wound up in prison. He’d been on a drunken downward spiral for decades. He’d gone from sales job to sales job, selling anything. Each time, after c
oming into work drunk too often, he’d be fired, and he would move on to the next job. Finally, it was too long between jobs, and with a wife and kids to support, he started kiting checks. He hoped, like Willy Loman, that his comeback was just around the corner. It never came. His wife tossed him out of the house. His kids hated him. Hallum found an alcoholic girlfriend and went on a long, howling-drunk bad-check-writing spree. It had been the toot of his life, and he woke up in jail.
Hallum and another convict, Smith, became the cooks in maximum security after Mackey and Reed had been transferred to Rothe Hall. Mackey and Reed had always put out a good—sometimes a great—meal, and having new cooks made me nervous. But Hallum did fine. He’d been a cook in the army, or the navy, and even if his cooking skills were a quarter-century old he could still, step-by-step, put together whatever was on the menu.
Whenever I had a man working for me who did a good job, a sick hope would rise up in me: maybe, if I was lucky, his crime was bad enough to keep him in maximum security, and in my kitchen, for a while. I hoped this especially of someone like Hallum, who was interesting and intelligent to boot. He liked to talk about Richard Nixon and the constitutional issues involved in Watergate. He was interested in Arabs, and capitalism, and long gas lines. If headlines were dull, he had his years as a salesman to fall back on, and gave me excellent advice on purchasing cars and shoes and appliances. But a man serving time for writing bad checks seemed destined for Rothe Hall and the sweet life of minimum security. If only Hallum had smacked somebody in the mouth during his long, drunken spree. A nice assault charge would have kept him right there beside me for a while. Hallum was apparently one of those gentle drunks, and after a month in the kitchen, he was transferred. I went to pick up my crew in the cell house one morning and the forgettable Smith was the only cook there.
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