Prisoner in the Kitchen

by William Bonham

  Greene had started serving his sentence just before Christmas. He worked in the kitchen for about a month after he got off fish row, never causing any real trouble, although he did have a temper. Receiving an order angered him. It puzzled me, because otherwise he was a pretty good worker. One day, I realized his anger came from the expectation to drop whatever he was doing and start doing something else. If he was washing his pots and I told him to go out on the line, it threw him for a loop—he didn’t have time to switch gears. So I tried an experiment. While he washed pots one morning, I went over to him a few minutes before short line.

  “Hey, Greene,” I said, “in about five minutes I’m coming back here and giving you an order.”

  “To do what?” he asked. I could already feel his anger bubbling.

  “I’ll tell you when I come back.”

  He eyed the clock and gave me a sly smile. “You’re going to tell me to serve short line,” he said.

  “Maybe,” I replied, and started to walk away.

  “Why are you telling me now?” Greene called.

  I glanced back at him. “I’m giving you a head start on getting mad,” I said.

  When I went back to him five minutes later, I spoke with mock harshness. “All right, Greene, get out on the line and don’t give me any of your crap.”

  It worked wonderfully; he thought it was funny, and he followed me out to the line without any argument.

  I never had problems with Greene again. But he didn’t like working in the kitchen and soon transferred to the laundry. I was sorry to see him go.

  Over the months, I saw him change for the worse. He was getting into trouble because of his temper, and the melancholy he displayed while working in the kitchen had turned into depression. He looked so down one day I asked him if he’d like to transfer back.

  “I’d love to boss you around again,” I joked.

  No smile—just strange, distant eyes looking at me. He shook his head.

  A day or two later, he threw a fit and ended up in segregation. That night, he hung himself.

  I first heard of it from Margie at the 4B’s. “I hear we ‘rehabilitated’ another one last night,” she said, referring to a dark joke common at the prison.

  I asked what she’d heard.

  “One of the convicts killed himself,” she told me. “That ought to save the state a little money.”

  It was the guard on Tower 7 who told me the dead convict was Steven Greene. He had taken a blanket, torn it into strips, and made a rope.

  I went up to the office building, shaken by the news. Maybe I should have told someone how depressed Greene was. Maybe I should have asked him if he needed help.

  The office building bustled with guards, most of them gathered around the door to the associate warden’s office. One came over and told me to be careful; some of the convicts had heard Greene choking as he died in his cell and now, at five a.m., the population was awake and upset.

  A rumor circulated that Greene hadn’t killed himself, that he’d been murdered by guards. Like all rumors, this one flew rapidly around the prison. At one point, there was even talk of a riot, although it quickly died down. It simply didn’t make any sense that guards had killed Greene. He was a nobody in the prison, a strange, medium-sized boy who threw tantrums. Most people—guards and convicts alike—didn’t know him until he died.

  Within a week he was forgotten.

  He wasn’t worth killing, and he wasn’t worth saving. He wasn’t worth remembering, and he sure as hell wasn’t worth a riot. At the age of eighteen, Steven Greene was buried in the convict graveyard on the road to Rothe Hall, without a headstone. His body wasn’t even claimed by his family.

  I’d never known anyone who’d committed suicide, and it left me depressed.

  This was August, and these were the dog days. That month, President Nixon finally resigned.

  Also in August, a Montana state senator was released from prison. He’d been found guilty on four felony counts of grand larceny, forgery, lying under oath, and taking many, many thousands of dollars from the state workmen’s compensation fund. After he was caught, he promised to pay everybody back.

  As a lawyer, he’d been involved in cases that sent men to Deer Lodge, so, for his own protection, he had been sent to a friendlier prison out of state. He was paroled after four months.

  It appalled me.

  If you were a lawyer, a senator, a somebody, you could embezzle money and get a short sentence. You could be sent somewhere safe and be paroled in a few months.

  But if you were a stupid eighteen-year-old boy who stole $201.40?

  That would get you ten years. In Deer Lodge.

  With the option of killing yourself.

  30

  NOWHERE TO HIDE

  Stutzke stood in the office, his hands on his hips.

  “C’mon, c’mon,” he urged. “Just do it!”

  “Not unless you tell me why,” I said.

  Stutzke’s nostrils flared.

  “Why not?” he asked.

  “Because I want an explanation,” I said.

  I liked Stutzke, and he had an easy but strange wish to grant: He wanted me to write him up for an infraction and then call a guard to haul him off to segregation.

  “C’mon!”

  “I don’t have any reason to write you up,” I told him. “You haven’t done anything.”

  He stared down at me. “All right,” he said, “you’re a son of a bitch! And I’m not doing any goddamn work today! Now write me up!”

  This was a man in a big hurry to be locked up in a cell twenty-four hours a day, but I still wanted to know why.

  “It’s none of your goddamned business!” he said. “Jesus!”

  Whatever Stutzke’s reason for wanting to be written up, he’d been relatively straightforward and honest with me. Frustrated by my refusal, he debated whether to tell me.

  “All right, all right!” he said. He took in a breath. “I owe somebody money and I haven’t got it! Okay?” Having told me, he became mad again. “Are you happy now?” he asked. “For Christ’s sake!”

  Stutzke was a gambler. He’d bet on some game and lost, and owed money. That day. He hadn’t thought he would lose the bet, of course, but even so, he normally would have been able to cover it, because Stutzke—nearing sixty years old—had an ace in the hole: his mother. I can’t imagine how old she must have been, but she faithfully sent her Johnny a small check each month.

  This month, however, she’d failed to send it on time. Unless Stutzke could find a place to hide, he risked a beating. He kindly refused to blame his mother.

  “She’s been sick,” he explained. “It’s not her fault.”

  That was John Stutzke shouldering responsibility.

  I believed him, and I didn’t want to see him get beaten up. So even though I knew it had to be against some rule, I wrote him up for calling me a son of a bitch and refusing to work. He went to segregation for a few days, and by the time he got out, the check from Mom had arrived.

  I didn’t think much about the Stutzke incident. But when another convict needed a place to hide—a man I didn’t like, big, dumb Weldon—the story didn’t have a happy ending.

  Red-headed, twenty-something Weldon, the blowhard and bully, was in fact, scared to death in prison and used me to protect him.

  When Weldon got off fish row, he came to work in the kitchen. He decided his only chance at safety was to hide in plain sight, near me. I should have had more sympathy; after all, I’d spent my first week curled up in the shadow of Bill Perdue. But Weldon hung so close, and for so long, that it annoyed me. I must have looked asinine following Bill around the kitchen during my first days at the prison.

  In the end, though, when Weldon tried to fool the other convicts into thinking he was tough by picking on a weaker convict, he had no place to hide.

  He chose Hannigan, the cell house runner.

  At first glance, Hannigan seemed like a good choice: only five foot six, he cou
ldn’t have weighed much more than 140 pounds. He was in his forties, with an odd, hunched-over walk. To complete the feeble portrait, he had sunken cheeks—there wasn’t a tooth in his mouth. He looked like someone ripe for abuse.

  Weldon didn’t know that, as a young man, Hannigan had been a boxer in Chicago. At one time, according to Hannigan, he’d been a contender for the Golden Gloves in the welterweight division. His odd walk was, in fact, the instinctive crouch of a born fighter, and his small size gave him great speed. His cheeks were sunken because many of his teeth had been knocked out in the ring.

  Hannigan, an old-time convict, kept his mouth shut, did his time, and did his job. The other convicts and the staff respected him.

  Weldon, secure and happy in his ignorance, decided to make his debut as a tough guy while serving up main line. All went well, until Hannigan came through.

  “You toothless old fart,” I overheard Weldon say.

  Hannigan appeared stunned, then angry. Weldon, pleased with the reaction, started laughing, a high-pitched, annoying cackle. He glanced around for approval.

  He found silence.

  The other convicts stared straight ahead. This was between Hannigan and Weldon.

  Hannigan wasn’t used to being talked to in this manner and wanted to be certain he’d heard correctly. He leaned forward, tense, and stared into Weldon’s joyous face.

  “What did you say?”

  Weldon didn’t pick up the cues all around him to shut up. Perhaps he thought no one was laughing because they hadn’t heard his funny remark.

  “I said,” he repeated, a little louder, “you’d better move on down to the Jell-O, you toothless old fart.”

  I told Weldon to keep his mouth shut.

  Hannigan, enraged, was too smart to attack Weldon then and there, but he did lean further over the steam table toward him.

  “I got you, boy,” he said, “and I know where you live.”

  Not very frightening words, I suppose, coming from a toothless old man.

  Hannigan moved down the line, and Weldon cackled again, still too dense to recognize that he’d just stepped into very dark woods.

  Although I didn’t like Weldon, I didn’t hate him or wish him harm. He was just young and stupid, a boy who wanted other convicts to think him brave. So after main line, I took pity on him and told him to come to the office. I planned to tell him that he’d just insulted a pretty tough man, who, even now, was debating how and when he would remove Weldon’s head. I wanted to impart the little I knew about the convict code, and the concept of “doing your own time.” After that, I would suggest that the best thing he could do for his physical safety was apologize to Hannigan at the next meal, publicly and loudly, over the steam table.

  I thought if Weldon knew all that and apologized, his punishment might be reduced to getting slapped around a little bit.

  I walked into the office, sat down, and looked back toward Weldon.

  He wasn’t there. He’d decided not to follow me.

  Through the office window, I could see him standing by the sinks, his arms crossed, waiting for someone to pat him on the back for his performance at main line. But no one came near him; they ignored him.

  I stepped back into the kitchen. “Hey, Weldon,” I said, “I told you I wanted to talk to you.”

  He looked around, making sure he had an audience. “Oh,” he said, a false innocence ringing in his voice, “you meant now.”

  His messing with Hannigan had gone to his head.

  “Yes, now,” I said. “Get in here.”

  I walked back into the office and sat on the edge of the desk. It had been a long time since a convict had tested me, and never this pathetically. Weldon took his sweet time crossing the kitchen, swaggering and smirking, checking out the other convicts to see if anyone was paying attention. No one was.

  Finally, he stopped in the doorway, resting one meaty forearm on the frame.

  “What you said out there on the line was stupid,” I said.

  “Ah, fuck that old man,” he said. “I’ll kick his ass.”

  Before I could interrupt him, Weldon turned and walked away, the swagger in full force. I’d bored him, I guess.

  I stood up to call him back, then stopped. Why should I help Weldon avoid a beating? To hell with him. He deserved one. I let him walk away, knowing that in a few days I’d hear a wonderful story about his stay in the prison hospital.

  At that moment, without realizing it, I’d crossed over into thinking like a convict myself: I was going to “do my own time” and let Weldon do his.

  I waited for the good news.

  A week went by—nothing. Weldon was still his smug, cackling self. But all his newfound courage was false; he still stuck close to me. He did a lousy job so that he had an excuse to keep working in the kitchen when the rest of the crew was in the yard or hobby room. After main line in the evening, he returned to his cell for the night. Weldon had put himself in his own version of segregation, never having to be anywhere near the main population except in the dining hall while serving the line.

  Day by day, Hannigan grew more frustrated, coming through the line and muttering under his breath to Weldon, making Weldon smile.

  The kitchen crew, to a man, continued to ignore Weldon. I suspect Hannigan had put the word out to leave him alone. Perversely, Weldon seemed to grow more confident, and his cackle grew louder.

  He might have gone on indefinitely like that but for one thing: Hannigan’s position as cell house runner required him to come into the kitchen on legitimate errands.

  One afternoon, two or three weeks after the “toothless old fart” comment, Hannigan came into the kitchen. It was empty, save for me. The convicts were having their yard time, and no guard sat in the officers’ mess having coffee. Weldon was alone in the dining hall, remopping the floors.

  This was what Hannigan had been waiting for. Only one thing stood in his way: me. He had to figure out a way around me. He came to the office door and stood there a moment. Then Hannigan, like Stutzke, decided to tell me the truth.

  He came in, put both hands flat on the desk, and looked me in the eye. He had a favor to ask, and he was passionate in the asking.

  “Now, Bonham, I want you to listen to me here for a minute,” he said. “That boy out there, Weldon?” He pointed a finger toward the dining hall. “I want to go out there and knock him around some. He’s been asking for it. You know it, I know you do. I know it, and so does everyone else in this joint. Now, he can hide in here forever if he wants or, you know, he can learn. He don’t know how to behave, that’s all, and I can teach him. It’ll do him good.”

  What an interesting way of putting it. Hannigan proposed it as an act of kindness, not a beating.

  “Now, hiding in here feels good to him right now, but it won’t do him no good,” Hannigan continued. “You know that, I know that. He’s just young and don’t know how to do time, that’s all. I can straighten him out in half a minute.”

  Almost done with his request, Hannigan wanted me to understand that this would be a judicious beating.

  “Now, I ain’t going to kill him or nothing like that, you got my word. I ain’t going to break any bones. I’m just gonna make him so goddamned stiff he can’t walk for a few days, that’s all. Bloody his nose some. You know I was a boxer, don’t you? Well, I know how to hurt men good without killing ’em.”

  He stopped, waiting for my response.

  “Go ahead,” I said.

  Hannigan gave a small, quick nod and took off for the dining hall.

  I stepped over to the doorway and listened. Somewhere in the distance, on the other side of the gun cage, I could make out hushed, angry voices. I thought I heard something that sounded like fists landing on flesh, but it may have been my imagination.

  In little over a minute, Hannigan walked back into the kitchen and, without looking at me, left through the officers’ mess.

  I sat at my desk and waited.

  It took a few minutes, b
ut Weldon eventually came into the kitchen, walking as slowly as I’ve ever seen a man walk. He made it over to the pot washer’s sink and placed his hands on the edge, resting a moment. He looked at his reflection in the bakery window. Then he reached out and turned on the water, bending down ever so gingerly to take a mouthful. He spit it back into the sink. Then, cupping some water in his hand, Weldon brought it to his face, washing off some blood. When he was done, he turned off the water and stood there, his head down, not moving.

  I wondered if he was going to come over and report Hannigan to me. He didn’t—he probably didn’t feel much like walking—so after a few minutes, I went to him. Blood had dried on his shirt and just under his nose. God only knows what his rib cage would have looked like had he lifted his shirt.

  “What happened to you?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” Weldon said. “I just fell down.”

  I remember my pleasure so well.

  I should have quit that day, walked out and never looked back. A mean streak was surfacing in me. I was happy Weldon could barely walk. And I was doing the one thing you can’t do if you work with convicts: I was judging them. I liked Stutzke and helped him hide. I disliked Weldon and allowed him to be beaten.

  Hannigan came out of it with his pride restored, and there was irony, too: The beating ended up doing Weldon a world of good. He kept his mouth shut from then on, his hideous cackle silenced. He learned how to do his own time and ended up in the general population, the best little convict any food service supervisor could ask for.

  31

  HORSEHAIR

  One thing I’d enjoyed all year was watching Walker hitching horsehair while he waited for the trays to be ready for the towers and the hospital.

  I’d watched Walker standing in the corner by Aldrich, hitching horsehair, for nearly a year. His hands moved quickly, twisting the hair into intricate patterns. It fascinated me.