Prisoner in the Kitchen

by William Bonham

  When I first started at the prison, I’d made the mistake of asking him what he was braiding.

  “Hitching,” he corrected. “You hitch horsehair.” “Braiding” was something girls did.

  As I got to know him better, he’d told me some of the history of hitching: it had started in Spain and came to America when the Spaniards brought over horses. Native Americans had taken over, hitching horsehair into bridles and tack for their horses, eventually making hatbands and belts for cowboys.

  Walker ordered horsehair by the pound and dyed it himself to bright reds and yellows and blues, darkest black and purest white. Then he gathered the hairs into strands of six or eight—called “pulls”—and started hitching. His hands moved and turned in small, tight motions until, after weeks, he stood there with a belt in his hands. I’d never ordered one from him because, as beautiful as they were, and as much as I admired the skill, I didn’t care for the bright colors. To my eye, the resulting belt looked like it might have been made out of nylon.

  Then, on a day in August, I saw him working on another belt. Some of the horsehair had been dyed turquoise, but most had been left in its natural colors: beautiful grays and blacks and whites. He was hitching a diamond pattern, which I’d seen before, but it was imperfect because the shades of horsehair couldn’t be matched exactly. It was as beautiful as anything I’d ever seen.

  “My God, Walker,” I said, “that’s magnificent.”

  He handed it to me: “There’s no color,” he said. “It’s flat.”

  “No,” I said, “you’re wrong. It’s beautiful.” I felt the band, the tightness of it, the thickness. “I want it.”

  Walker immediately became a salesman. “Well, let me show you some of my other ones. I can dye them any color you want.”

  “No,” I said, “I want this one.”

  I couldn’t have it: the belt I had in my hands had already been sold, made to order for some big rancher in eastern Montana.

  “Then I’d like one just like it,” I said.

  Walker looked doubtful. “Well, it’s pretty expensive,” he said. “It’ll run you close to fifty dollars.”

  Not much money for a rancher in the east, but too much money for a cook to be spending on a belt. I didn’t care; I still wanted it. I told him to go ahead.

  I ordered a belt an inch and a half wide, with eight inches of leather on each end. Walker made one more pitch for the dye. I said no again and he shrugged, a pragmatist. He’d done his best: It was none of his business if a man wanted an ugly belt.

  “Just with that little bit of turquoise,” I said, “and the rest natural.”

  “Okay,” he said. “It’ll take a month or so; I’ve got a lot of orders.”

  The deal was done. A month went by, and I still didn’t have my belt, but I knew my turn was coming. Then, in early September, Walker walked into the kitchen at midmorning. He was excited, and I could see him talking to Aldrich. As he talked, Aldrich became excited, too, pumping Walker’s hand and slapping him on the shoulder.

  All this excitement was unusual, and I walked over.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  Walker turned to me, his face open and relaxed, filled with a genuine, unmistakable joy. The dark mask of a convict had been pulled from his face, revealing an entirely different person. “I got my parole,” he said.

  “That’s terrific,” I said, “good for you.”

  Even as I said it, something inside told me I didn’t mean it. It was great news; I liked Walker and I should have been happy for him. But I wasn’t, and I didn’t know why.

  Walker shook his head in disbelief. “I didn’t think I’d get it this time. I thought maybe next time.”

  Suddenly it wasn’t years until he could walk out of this terrible place, and it wasn’t months or weeks; it was a matter of days. For a moment I thought he was going to cry, but Aldrich broke the spell.

  “What the hell, you can be back by Christmas if you fuck up quick enough,” he said.

  That lifted Walker’s spirits. “You go to hell. I won’t be looking at you ugly bastards again.”

  “Hey, you can’t call Bonham a bastard!” Aldrich said. “There goes your parole!”

  Walker laughed, a great, confident laugh you don’t hear in prison. Some big part of him was already free.

  A few of the other convicts had heard the news and congratulated Walker, too. Some of them, with their own parole hearings in the foreseeable future, wanted the details. What had Walker done and said to the mysterious and powerful parole board? As Walker talked, I saw a few convicts, the ones with long sentences, walk away. They didn’t want to hear good news, couldn’t bear to hear about someone else’s freedom. Their own parole hearings were ten years, twenty years, thirty years in the future, and a few would never see the parole board. I walked away, too, back to the office. I didn’t want to hear any more good news, either. It wasn’t just a matter of my not being happy; the thought of Walker leaving depressed me. He was leaving prison, on his way somewhere, to a new life, far away from Deer Lodge. I wasn’t. I’d figured out why I wasn’t happy for him: I was jealous.

  32

  THE CONFESSIONAL

  It was nearing the end of summer when I ran into Jim Dale on Main Street. I’d gone to orientation with Jim and considered him a friend, but I’d never seen him out of his guard’s uniform and cap before. I almost didn’t recognize him. He wore a cowboy shirt with pearl buttons, cowboy boots, and a straw cowboy hat, the clothes of an eastern Montana man.

  “You look like some kind of damn cowboy,” I said.

  Jim squinted at me. “I am some kind of damn cowboy,” he said.

  I hadn’t laughed in a long while, but I did now. I asked Jim how he was doing.

  He turned his face toward the sky, as if the question required deep thought. “Well,” he said, “I’ve been thinking I might retire from prison work. I’m thinking it might be time for me to head back home.”

  Jim had grown up on a farm outside of a town smaller than Deer Lodge.

  “You’re kidding,” I said.

  Jim shook his head. “I don’t think I care for life in the big city anymore,” he said.

  I laughed again. I was about to ask if he wanted to get a cup of coffee, but he spoke first. “Feel like a beer?” he asked.

  It was morning, not much past ten. I knew a lot of the guards drank anytime they were off duty, but it surprised me coming from Jim; I knew it meant he was headed downhill. I was headed downhill, too, but beer was never a weakness of mine.

  “It’s a little early for me,” I said. “How about coffee?”

  He nodded.

  We were at the opposite end of Deer Lodge from the prison and the 4B’s, down by the bars. The closest place to get coffee was a restaurant in the run-down Deer Lodge Hotel. I’d only been in there once; I didn’t like the sickly green walls or the sticky linoleum floor, and the food was so bad I never went back. But it was only a few doors away, and all we were having was coffee.

  We were the only customers in the place, and we sat down at a table along the wall, ordering from a waitress as run-down as the hotel. After some small talk, Jim eyed me strangely.

  “If I tell you something,” he said, “can you keep it a secret?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  He shook his head; “sure” wasn’t enough. “You have to swear,” he said.

  I swore, but even so, it took a moment before Jim spoke.

  “I beat the shit out of an inmate last week.”

  He didn’t say anything else, just looked at me, waiting for my reaction. No wonder he wanted to quit.

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “Yeah,” said Jim.

  “Who?”

  “LaFevre.”

  It was hard to fault him for his choice; LaFevre was another Weldon. He’d come off fish row with his mouth running, and he was bound to get in trouble because of it.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “He wouldn’t shu
t up,” Jim said. “I was taking him across the yard, back to his cell. He kept talking, telling me I was an asshole. I told him to shut his mouth or I’d write him up, but every step of the way his mouth was going, telling me I’m an asshole, I’m a prick, and what was I going to do to him if he didn’t shut up, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.” Jim sighed. “I should have written him up, but I just took him to his cell and put him in it. I was giving him a break, you know, letting it go. But he’s still talking. So I say, ‘Shut your fucking mouth, LaFevre; you’d better learn to shut your fucking mouth!’ ‘Or what, asshole?’ So . . . I started pounding on him. I got him down on his bunk and, man, I kept hitting him, telling him to shut the hell up. And he wouldn’t. Christ, I must have beat him for five minutes, him talking all the time. Finally I had to quit because my arms were tired.”

  When Jim said he’d stopped because his arms were tired, we started to laugh. We tried to stop, and couldn’t, and the hilarity built. We howled, the both of us, leaning back in our chairs, a snorting, coffee-rolling-out-of-your-nose laughter. Every time it started to subside, one of us would go off again. Finally, I choked out a sentence.

  “And he’s still talking . . .”

  Tears poured from Jim’s eyes. “He asked me if I was done . . .”

  God, it was funny. There you are in the middle of a good beating and you have to stop to give your arms a rest.

  It took a while for the laughter to subside. Our world became serious again.

  “Ah, what the hell am I going to do?” he asked.

  I didn’t know. I thought he should quit, maybe. The same thing I thought for myself.

  I told Jim about Weldon and Hannigan. As I talked, he shook his head in disbelief. He tried to make me feel better.

  “At least Hannigan did the beating,” he said.

  That didn’t make it any better. In fact, letting Hannigan beat Weldon was an abuse of the small power I had. Using one’s own fists seemed positively clean-cut to me.

  There we sat, two miserable young men, unable to explain what was happening to us, or why we’d done what we’d done.

  We found comfort in talking to each other, I suppose, because there was no place for us to go. I felt too ashamed to confess to Perdue, and Jim thought the same about going to his supervisor. We needed help, but psychological counseling didn’t exist for anyone at the prison in those days—not that either of us would have gone. Working-class boys didn’t see shrinks. Psychologists saw the loony, the weak, and spoiled rich people.

  But at least we’d told our stories out loud, and I think we both felt better for it. We left the restaurant and lingered on the street for a bit.

  “Sometimes I feel like I’m dealing with a bunch of damned kindergartners in there,” Jim admitted.

  That’s exactly what some of the convicts were, big old kindergartners, unable to control their impulses, sent to prison for a Big Time-out and bent on proving they couldn’t be bossed around. The new guards acted like first graders, intent on proving that kindergartners could be bossed around.

  “Are you really going to quit?” I asked.

  Jim stuck his hands in his pockets. “Hell, I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe.”

  As rarely as I saw him, I would miss Jim Dale if he left Deer Lodge.

  “Well, if I don’t see you again, good luck to you,” I said.

  His eyes locked on mine and we shook hands. “You, too,” he said.

  We left one thing unsaid: We’d each committed a crime that might have landed us in prison ourselves.

  We parted on the sidewalk. I started across the street toward the bookstore. I happened to glance back just as Jim, the all-American farm boy, walked into Wally’s Place for his morning beer.

  33

  THE FROSTING ON THE CAKE

  It’s hard to believe that a piece of cake could make two men want to beat each other half to death.

  Especially since we had plenty of cake, with chocolate frosting, to go around—eight sheet pans of it, lined out on the worktable in the bakery. It was enough cake and frosting for everyone and more. Three of the sheet pans were earmarked for Rothe Hall; the other five were going to be cut and served to short line and main line.

  A piece of cake went missing from the first sheet pan.

  Someone had gouged a large hole from the center. A metal spatula rested on its side in the frosting. It wasn’t enough for whomever had done it to simply take a piece of cake; the cake had been destroyed.

  The bakers stood a few feet from me. They must have seen it happen.

  “Who did this?” I asked.

  Convicts don’t like to snitch on anyone, even guards, for fear of retaliation. Earl gave me a clue by looking past me.

  I followed his gaze to the cake killer, twenty-five feet away.

  A guard.

  He acted as if he might have just stepped out of the bakery on Main Street, stopping for a moment to take a taste of a midmorning treat. I didn’t know his name, just that he was new, one of the ever-changing Guards of Summer who didn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground. In his midtwenties, Guard had a little brown mustache that hung down over the corners of his mouth. The missing piece of cake rested in his hand. He took a bite. Then, oblivious, and clearly enjoying the cake, he strolled off toward the officers’ mess.

  My anger rose. Guards had come in and taken cookies, they’d taken doughnuts, rolls, pieces of cake, but not even the worst of them had deliberately destroyed anything. I started toward him.

  “Hey!” I called. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  Guard stopped. He gave me a small smile and held up the cake.

  “I’m having a piece of cake,” he said. He took another bite.

  I gestured toward the bakery. “You know I have to put that cake on the line and serve people later?”

  “Fuck ’em,” he smirked.

  At nine thirty in the morning, my crew was in the kitchen, and the ones near us could hear. When he said, “Fuck ’em,” he referred to them. I got right in his face.

  “You don’t walk into my kitchen and take anything,” I said. “You got it?”

  It didn’t seem to upset him at all. “Well,” he said, licking some frosting off his finger, “I was looking for pruno.” Another small smile. “Got it?”

  If I complained about this, that would be his defense—he’d simply dug a hole in the cake during a search for pruno and, sure, he’d taken a little piece, but it was all in the name of duty.

  He opened his mouth and sank his teeth into the cake. Frosting clung to the tip of his mustache, and his tongue flicked out to capture it. He was teasing me. Coyly, he turned away and continued toward the officers’ mess.

  I caught up and walked beside him.

  “What’s wrong with you?” I asked. He ignored me. “I’m not kidding—what the hell was the point of ruining that cake?”

  No answer.

  “I guess you feel good about yourself, being able to destroy a cake like that.”

  He stopped, still unconcerned; he relished his dessert, taunting me. We were outside the door to the officers’ mess now, and the angrier I became, the more Guard seemed to enjoy his cake. He popped the last little piece into his mouth.

  “M-mmm,” he went, letting me know the cake had been very good.

  No guard had ever behaved like this—the taunting, the slow walk, the yum-yum sound. That isn’t what guards and cooks did at the prison. We were men, and when we were mad, we shouted at each other. Guard should have told me to go to hell, and I would have told him to go to hell right back, and it might have ended there. But this was a different kind of guard. He went out of his way to make it clear that he held me, my job, the food, and the convicts in contempt. And that I couldn’t do anything about it.

  I’ve never felt such hatred for a man in my life.

  “Yeah, it takes a big, tough son of a bitch to attack a cake,” I said.

  That made his temper flare a little. For the first time since our
little journey began, he made eye contact with me.

  “You don’t want to fuck with me,” Guard warned. He took a step into the officers’ mess.

  “I don’t? Why not?” I said, goading him.

  He turned. His eyes flashed and his cheeks took on a pinkish hue. I wanted him to come back and take a swing at me; I balled my right fist.

  “You and I can talk later,” he said.

  It was an implied threat: this could wait, but he’d see me on the street somewhere, sometime, outside the walls, and he would take care of me then. Maybe Guard and I could duke it out in front of the 4B’s. He started to leave, walking through the officers’ mess.

  “Let me know next time you come in,” I called. “I’ll have your trough ready.”

  That did it. He wheeled around and took a step toward me. Now I could see anger and hatred in his face, and it thrilled me.

  “Fuck you,” he said. His mustache fluttered, and itty-bitty cake crumbs flew from his mouth.

  “Oh, no,” I said courteously, “fuck you.”

  His right arm pulled back and he stepped forward. My left hand was prepared to block, and my right hand was going to separate his jaw from his skull.

  Somehow, I’d become very clear-headed. I’d deliberately provoked him into attacking me. I took a strange joy in the pure hatred I felt for him; it was almost relaxing, though at the same time, the thought of hurting him excited me.

  As I write this, it’s hard to recognize that young man as myself. I’ve never wanted to hurt anyone before or since. No one I know, family or friends, would recognize me in that young man, because I’m not violent.

  But I am, I guess, just like so many of the men I fed—all I needed were the right conditions.

  Guard provided those conditions.

  I’d forgotten that we had an audience: The convicts in the kitchen and the guards in the officers’ mess watched, probably enjoying themselves greatly. But fun as it must have seemed, the guards wouldn’t let it escalate into a genuine fistfight—not inside the prison, and not in front of convicts. Two guards grabbed Guard from behind, and a few others got hold of me.