Big Bob was trapping himself with every word he spoke, ensnaring me as well. We costarred in his idiot’s version of High Noon.
“Three trays, Bob,” I urged. “It’s just three trays. I’m going into the office. You have two minutes to get them ready. If you don’t, I’m going to call the cell house.”
Big Bob snorted.
I returned to the office, followed by the renewed sound of Big Bob’s laugh. As I stood there, growing angry at the sound of laughter, I realized that his merrymaking must have infuriated the kitchen crew as well. That’s why Walker sounded gruff, and why the rest of the crew was ignoring the Bobs. The convicts had an unspoken pact to resign themselves to a silent, miserable day, and the good humor of the Bobs violated it. Max’s and my wishing them a merry Christmas had done the same. This was a miserable day, as it should have been.
The office phone rang. I knew it was the hospital before I answered. I told them the trays would be on their way in a few minutes. I looked into the kitchen—the Bobs had had their two minutes and hadn’t moved. I called the cell house; Sergeant Lund on duty meant bad news for the Bobs. I told him I had two drunk convicts refusing to work.
“I’ll be right there,” Sergeant Lund said, full of holiday cheer.
I headed over to Walker. “Let’s heat this food up and get these trays ready,” I instructed.
“Not my job,” Walker replied.
“It is now.”
I told him to put vegetables on the stove and dessert on the trays. Walker sulked, but he did it. I put some meat and potatoes on a sheet pan and put it in the oven.
Across the kitchen from their luxury box, the two Bobs applauded.
Minutes later, Sergeant Lund arrived, with Max behind him. They stood in the doorway to the officers’ mess for a moment, glancing around the kitchen. Sergeant Lund pointed at the Bobs.
“Those two,” he said.
How could they have been surprised? Lunatic Bob’s eyebrows shot up, and Big Bob opened and closed his mouth in mute astonishment. Sergeant Lund gazed at them, his face a mix of mock sorrow and disappointment.
“Have you two been drinking?” he asked, sadly, “and refusing to work?” His head moved back and forth in slow disapproval. “And on Christmas Eve, too . . .” He smiled, clapped his hands, and rubbed them together. “Let’s go.”
The Bobs sat there.
“C’mon!” Sergeant Lund said in a loud voice. “Let’s go!”
They stood up, stumbling over their own feet. Big Bob, unbelieving, looked at me. “But it’s Christmas Eve,” he argued.
“Move it,” Sergeant Lund ordered.
Big Bob stared at me, his eyes full of hurt. In the space of a minute he’d gone from a happy drunk to a self-pitying one. “But there’s a mo-oovie tomorrow,” he pleaded.
“Oh, I don’t think you’ll be seeing any movie,” Sergeant Lund predicted.
Max, gentler than Sergeant Lund, said quietly, “C’mon, you guys, let’s go.”
They left, with Max in the lead, the Bobs following, and Sergeant Lund bringing up the rear. The Bobs, stumbling along, headed for the hole, or—if Lund was feeling full of the Christmas spirit—segregation for the night.
No laughter pierced the kitchen’s misery anymore. Walker and I let the food heat for a little longer, dished up the trays, and packed them up. I told him to take one of the gift bags that had been handed out earlier before he left, and he did.
After ten minutes the rest of the crew had finished work. After patting each man down, I handed him a gift bag and we left together, walking out into the cold, dark yard.
No one wished anyone a merry Christmas, and I went home.
It didn’t seem like anything would redeem this holiday.
Christmas morning, I sat in my in-laws’ living room next to a warm fire, unwrapping presents to a soundtrack of Nat King Cole and Bing Crosby. The tree, alight, shined. Cookies and bowls of nuts beckoned from the coffee table.
Anne was happy.
Her folks were happy.
Me? I had a sense of disorientation, like a diver who had risen too fast from the bottom of the sea. I needed time to decompress from the starkness of a prison Christmas before I entered this warm, festive living room.
We gave Mom and Pop a set of steak knives. They gave me a fishing pole.
Later, friends arrived, all possessing the same festive spirit. Several asked about my Christmas Eve with convicts. I thought about telling them my “fuck Santa in the ass” story, but it seemed inappropriate.
The next night we left the bright lights of Missoula to drive home. On the road back to Deer Lodge I started to relax, leaving the world of eggnog and brandy and reentering the world of pruno.
My sense of disorientation mimicked the feelings of convicts who, after release, often feel lost in life “on the street.” Many commit a crime in order to go back to the life they understand, locked behind walls. It happens to people who work at a prison as well, but to a much lesser extent. And now it was happening to me.
Two days later I went back to work. I started on the eleven o’clock shift and walked into the kitchen just as Bill shouted “Count time.” We rushed through the kitchen, dining hall, and cooking school. While we waited for the count to clear, Bill asked how my Christmas had been.
“Good,” I said. “I got a fishing pole.”
“That’s a good Christmas right there,” he said.
Everything seemed back to normal in the kitchen, and the oppressive weight had lifted. Only the Bobs, already back to work, seemed unhappy, not ready to meet my eyes. It took several days to convince them to speak to me. When the count cleared, Bill shouted, “Main line!” and I told a couple of convicts to come with me. I went out to serve the line.
Although it hadn’t snowed on Christmas, today the flakes fluttered down all morning. Through the windows I could see it was starting to come down hard, and good-sized flakes drifted into the yard. I watched as the first convicts followed Max from the cell house, their heads down and their hands in their pockets. The line grew long, stretching all the way across the yard.
The first few men came through the double doors of the dining hall. At first I wasn’t paying that much attention, but as more convicts arrived I noticed something that surprised me—a sliver of salvation, a small redeeming moment for the Christmas of 1973. As each man entered he paused for just a moment, brushing the snow from his prison-issued khaki jacket. Then, starting up the aisle, a hand reached up as each man—thanks to a few old ladies in Butte—removed a hand-knitted, navy-blue watch cap from his head.
Even big, bald, weight-lifting Toler.
20
HAPPY NEW YEAR
“Do you know the cannibals?” Ray asked.
I hated that question.
“The cannibals” referred to two of Montana’s most famous inmates, known for exactly what their nicknames suggested. I didn’t know them. I wished I had, partly because it would have made a great story to tell my future children—any boy who could step onto the playground and announce that his father knew cannibals would have a leg up on the others—and partly because my negative answer disappointed whoever asked.
“No,” I replied, “they were transferred out of state before I started work.”
Ray’s gaze returned to the fireplace, where a cozy fire blazed. I wasn’t as interesting as he’d hoped.
It was New Year’s Eve, and Ray, along with his wife, had dropped by my in-laws’ for dessert. For the moment, Ray and I sat in the living room, waiting for coffee and pie.
The fire had made the living room uncomfortably warm, but Ray kept his wool cap on; he’d gone bald, but pretended no one knew. Beads of sweat formed at his temples, readying themselves for the journey down his cheeks, yet the cap stubbornly refused to join the coats and scarves and other hats on the rack in the hall.
“Those were some bad boys,” Ray stated.
“Yes,” I said, “I guess they were.”
I considered telling him th
at Bill Perdue had known the cannibals, since one of them had worked in the kitchen for a time. Bill, in fact, had a great story: the state dietician, a nice woman, had come through one day, wanting to talk to Bill about the prison menu and daily nutritional needs of inmates. He sat down with her in the office. After a few minutes, Bill remembered his manners and asked the woman if she wanted a cup of coffee. She did. Bill sent the cannibal, the nearest convict, to fetch it. He returned with the coffee, milk, sugar, and a paper napkin nicely laid out on a sheet pan. The dietician thanked him. When he left, she asked Bill what had earned him a spot in the prison.
“He’s one of the cannibals,” Bill admitted.
The state dietician, a woman of delicate sensibilities, looked like she was going to be sick. She soon departed, having lost interest in the dietary needs of inmates.
That story belonged to Bill, though, and I had no intention of handing it to Ray.
My not knowing the cannibals hadn’t been Ray’s only disappointment; a few minutes earlier I’d given him the bad news that we had no one scheduled for execution. Ray, believing Montana would be a better place if all the convicts were executed, was disheartened by the news.
After four months, I thought I knew the stories that interested most people, and I’d told Ray about knives and yeast lowered in buckets from the tower. No reaction. I told him about pruno. No interest. As a last shot, I mentioned that nutmeg wasn’t allowed in the prison. I’d always thought that was an odd and interesting fact: Nutmeg, if you stir enough of it into water and drink it, can apparently cause a strange, druglike buzz. The prison didn’t want buzzing convicts, so, no nutmeg.
Ray wasn’t interested in the buzz, but it did make him curious. “Why would you need nutmeg anyway?” he asked.
“In the bakery,” I said, “you can use it in bread pudding, cookies . . .”
With that, Ray stiffened. “You make cookies in there?” he asked.
I’d caught Ray’s attention.
“Yes.”
“Jesus,” he muttered.
This information disturbed Ray. His tax dollars went to the preparation of cookies. For criminals. And Ray didn’t like it.
I could have said any number of things to Ray. It might have cheered him to know we didn’t have chocolate chips for our little cookie fests. On the other hand, I might have made him angrier by telling him that a lot of the convicts liked dipping their cookies in milk.
“Sounds like a Boy Scout camp over there,” Ray sniffed.
I’d run into people like Ray before. They wanted to hear about miserable convicts, stories of men dropping bars of soap in the shower and getting raped. I didn’t have any raped-in-the-shower stories, but if Ray wanted to hear about miserable convicts, I could tell him about their epically cold prison. Frozen convicts would have surely appealed to him.
And “frozen” is just barely an exaggeration.
When I picked up my crew at the cell house in the morning, I entered through the huge iron door, then parted thick canvas curtains erected every winter in a futile attempt to keep out the bone-chilling air. Even with the door and curtains behind me, I could still see my breath. More canvas hung along the bottom four feet of each cell, and the convicts, against prison rules, put up blankets along the top of the bars. They slept—if they could sleep—fully dressed.
When my in-laws, Anne, and Ray’s wife entered the living room, the women passed out plates of apple pie and cups of coffee, then took their own to the dining room, leaving the men to settle back into our seats in the living room.
I thought our prison talk had finished, but Ray was a haunted man.
“You know they make cookies in there, Bob?” he said to my father-in-law.
Pop, a big eater, appreciated good food. In another lifetime he might have been a cook himself, and he loved hearing about the prison food.
“Oh, yeah?” Pop said. “Well, I suppose those boys need a treat every now and then.” It was the new year, and Pop was in high spirits. “It’s quite an operation they’ve got going out there on that ranch,” Pop said. “Tell Ray about the pork.”
Pop always drooled when I talked about the pork, an entirely justified drooling. Unless you were raised on a hog farm or dined at Montana State Prison, you would never taste pork in your life. Pork is at its peak when it’s absolutely fresh. Every hour it spends refrigerated, and every day it spends on a truck from Iowa to your house, it loses flavor. Our pigs lived five miles away, raised by convicts.
I hauled out all the classic adjectives for Ray—“crisp,” “juicy,” “rich,” and “tender.” The pan gravy made you want to take a piece of bread and sop up every last drop on your plate, and, believe me, we did that.
Ray took this news with stoicism, but Pop was enthralled, smacking his lips, wishing there were some way to get at that pork.
Soon, Ray started interjecting comments about the problems with the prison system. He brought up the criminals of Missoula who should have been sentenced to death. He called the people who worked at the prison “a bunch of dropouts from Butte.” To a Missoula man, saying someone was from Butte constituted an insult. Ray held up poor Butte as proof that everyone who worked at the prison was stupid.
I was offended.
Sure, I knew some stupid guards, and plenty of stupid convicts, too, but most of them were simply uneducated. And were Bill and Charlie stupid? Max or Lieutenant Covey? Me? And who was Ray to say? These were my guards he was talking about, and my convicts, at my prison. I had a right to criticize them if I wanted to, but not Ray.
Pop added his own comments, but he wasn’t up for a serious conversation, and he saved the day, at least for me. He turned the subject back to food.
“You know they make Chinese food in there, Ray?” he asked. “It’s better than that place in Hamilton. Tell Ray about the Chinese food.”
Certainly.
Ray fell silent, once again staring at the fire, as I led him and Pop back to the glories of Old Canton and the taste of egg foo yung, fried rice, and—for the best of both worlds—sweet-and-sour pork made with the finest pork anywhere, the pork raised by convicts in the great state of Montana.
The conversation neared its end. Soon the women would join us, and the talk would go in a different direction. But, for Pop, it had been a fine half hour, sitting with his boon companion, Ray, as he listened to his very interesting son-in-law. When I finished describing the cuisine of China, Pop asked for no more. Full and satisfied, he leaned back in his La-Z-Boy recliner and sighed. He glanced at Ray.
“Almost makes you want to commit a crime, doesn’t it?”
21
A PERVERT
I usually enjoyed the few days a month I worked at Rothe Hall. It made for a nice break from the tension inside the old prison, and I could relax.
But today, as I stood filling out an order form in the storeroom, I heard Reed shouting in the kitchen.
“Keep your hands off that boy, you old pervert!”
As soon as I heard him, I knew he was shouting at Wills. Wills wasn’t the only “pervert” in the prison by a long shot, but he worked in the kitchen sometimes as the garbage man. The other convicts hated him, and he spent most of his day outside, only coming into the kitchen to take out the cans.
I hurried out of the storeroom. I had to stop Wills. When I reached the kitchen, Reed was standing by the ovens, looking down a hallway that led past the walk-in refrigerator to the outside door. I followed his gaze. Wills had cornered a young convict named Woods against the wall. Woods, slight of build, thrashed his arms, his eyes wild with terror, trying to elbow his way around Wills. When Wills saw me coming, he backed away from Woods. He smiled as I approached them.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Nothing,” said Wills. “We’re just talking.”
“Woods?”
“Nothing,” Woods said. He shook.
Wills, in his fifties, a hard, tough old man, was serving a long sentence for raping young boys. You could recogn
ize him immediately for what he was: a looming, sick presence, with narrow, lifeless eyes and sallow skin.
Woods, at twenty, looked about sixteen. He’d been a college student in Bozeman until he got caught selling a half-ounce of marijuana to another student. Now he was serving a two-year sentence, and part of his punishment involved running from Wills.
I told Woods to go back to work and he left, still trembling.
Then I looked at Wills. I hated dealing with him; he put knots in my stomach. I always had the feeling he’d like nothing better than to press me up against a wall, too. At twenty-three, I was a little long in the tooth, but I knew that, in a pinch, I would do.
“I don’t want you in here unless you’re working,” I told him.
“Yes, sir,” he replied, his voice full of mock deference.
“If I catch you anywhere near Woods again, I’ll report you.”
“Yes, sir.”
Next time, I told him, it wouldn’t matter what Woods said, Wills would go on report anyway, and he would end up back in the main prison. My threat didn’t bother him; I suspect perversion is patient work, and it’s not easy to embarrass or intimidate a man like Wills.
I told him to go back outside, and I went back to the kitchen, looking for Woods. As I passed Reed, I thanked him for calling out.
“Somebody ought to kill that son of a bitch,” Reed said.
There was no irony in his voice; he seemed to have a genuine contempt for Wills. The incident gave me hope that Reed had regrets of his own, and at least a working knowledge of right and wrong.
Woods went back to work cleaning tables in the dining hall. “What really happened back there?” I asked.
Even with no one around, he wouldn’t say.
“You can’t hang around near Wills,” I said. “You have to keep away from guys like him.”
Woods opened his arms wide. “How?” he asked. “How do I do that?”
I didn’t know.
And I didn’t know why someone would put a young, beardless boy in the same prison that housed a man like Wills. Or why someone like Wills was allowed in minimum security. Boys like Woods were trapped. He could, in return for sexual favors, have aligned himself with an older, tougher convict who would have protected him—better to be sodomized by one man than many. Woods chose to thrash his arms and elbow his way through his sentence. But it’s hard to believe he could have won every battle.
Prisoner in the Kitchen Page 11