by Tim Green
21
I THOUGHT THAT EVEN the remotest sparks of hope were buried and long cold in the ash heap under my ribs. But at the sound of Lester Cole’s words, a phoenix springs up.
I am afraid, but unable to stop it. I do not want to die all over again. I have been comfortably numb, slowly rotting away at my own pace. My life is empty, but the only sharp pain I feel is physical and it pales next to the anguish of being destroyed.
Lester tells me he doesn’t want to talk anymore now. He just wants me to know that things are different.
The loaf is the shittiest-tasting slice of crap ever made, but time goes by and I behave. Lester is a genius. He teaches me things I never knew. The way particles are assembled on a picture tube. Why airplanes fly and compressed Freon cools air. How J. J. Thomson used cathode rays to discover electrons. The weather on the day in AD 445 when Attila the Hun murdered his brother Bleda to secure the throne and how much the Eastern Roman emperor Theodosis II paid him to maintain peace. The affair between Gauguin and van Gogh that was the real cause of the great artist’s self-mutilation.
He pours it out and I suck it up. We whisper to keep the maniacs at bay. During rec, he diagrams things for me in the snow and then the dust. The battle plans of Alexander the Great. The layout for a particle accelerator. Michelangelo’s design for the dome of St. Peter’s Cathedral.
Bluebeard is giddy with the power he appears to have over me. He gloats at my docile behavior, taking credit for kicking my ass into line. I am given an additional three months in the box for crushing the Colombian’s hand and breaking his nose, but my release now nearly coincides with Lester’s. We put in a request to be bunked together, and Lester works it out for us to get an end cell on the ground floor, A block First Company.
There are five blocks in Auburn, A through E. Each block has five floors of cells, forty-five in a row, two rows, front and back. It used to be one man to a cell, but to save money, the governor now allows double bunks on the end cell of each company by request.
Clarence takes me down the elevator from Special Housing and across the yard. I blink at the bright sunlight and shuffle my feet along the faded blacktop, enjoying the scuffing sound of long even strides. The yard is a rectangle of pavement surrounded by the cellblocks. Lester has familiarized me with everything during our hour-long rec sessions on the roof by drawing in the grit. The administration building rises above C block to the east. At the west end is the mess hall and auditorium. Corroding basketball hoops are staggered around the inside of the yard in no apparent order.
It’s after breakfast, so only a few inmates are scattered in small groups, sitting at metal picnic tables in the shadow of A and B blocks. The men are mostly black. They wear the faded forest green outfits and stare sullenly at me. My heart begins to pound. There are two guard posts on the roofs and what they call a sergeant’s box, a trailer without wheels in the yard, butted up to the wall of D block. All the guns are on the roof and in the towers and I can feel them.
I am light-headed with the sensation of freedom, but scared by the thought that I am sticking my neck out for some wild-ass notion of an old man who might be crazy, even if he is brilliant. I keep my eyes straight ahead as I am escorted up the steps and into A block. I think of the first rule and force a sneer onto my face. I think I hear a low whistle, but I pretend not to. I think of the third rule. Exact revenge. Does that whistle mean I have to punch that man’s teeth out?
Clarence passes me off to another guard and says he’ll see me around. The guard rattles his keys and opens the box of levers.
“Clear on one,” he says, and pulls down on one of the brass levers.
I hear the cell door begin to hum. The guard rattles his keys again and opens the barred door leading into First Company. I step inside. All along the wall, inmates push their faces against the bars to see who the fresh meat is. They look like zoo animals. Some hoot and catcall. Some laugh and holler. Lester is standing in the gloom of the double bunk, his thin white tufts of hair blazing. Those enormous eyes shine and his smile exposes how badly he needed dental work as a kid. I step inside and the door begins to hum shut. It clanks in place, and I feel relief as I take Lester’s gnarled hand.
“Welcome,” he says, pumping my handshake.
I see now that the walls and ceiling are plastered with museum posters. Reprints of famous works of art from Europe and the United States.
“What’s all this?” I ask.
Lester’s blue eyes glow and crinkle at their corners. I don’t even see the yellow scum of the cataracts any longer.
“A surprise, kid,” he says. “I never told you what kind of a thief I was.”
I know he killed a man during a job. That’s all he’s ever said about why he’s here.
“You stole this kind of stuff?” I ask.
“Picasso, Miró, Rubens, Dalí, Monet, Cassatt,” he says. He is beaming now and has straightened his crooked little form up to its full height. “Even a small van Gogh. Jewels too.”
I whistle to make him feel good and lean toward the wall to study the brilliant red flower on a Rembrandt, but I can’t say that it matters all that much to me.
“I guess a lot of people would kill for this stuff,” I say.
“What the hell makes you say that?” he says, and the tone of his voice makes me turn. I see that his face has clouded over.
“Well…”
“I killed a guard because he was going to kill me,” Lester says, holding up a single bent finger in the air. “It’s wrong to kill, except in self-defense. There is no other justification. None.”
“No, I guess not,” I say and his eyebrows ease up.
“I was there for Jan van Eyck’s panels of The Crucifixion and The Last Judgment,” he says. “I had it. I was in and on my way out. The guy wasn’t even on duty. Do you want to know what he died for?
“A pen,” he says. “His wife gave him a silver pen for their anniversary. He came back for it and saw me going up a rope. He shot three times and missed. I didn’t…”
“The well-placed little things are the ones that can move mountains,” I say. “I guess that goes the same for the misplaced little things too. You want me on the top bunk?”
Lester rubs the white stubble on his chin and looks up at me.
“Is that Aristotle?” he asks.
“My dad.”
“The top is fine,” he says.
I hop up and try it out. The ceiling is twenty inches from my face. I am looking at a print of The Slave Ship by Turner from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
“God, Lester. How about something a little more cheerful?” I say. “To look at, I mean.”
“Of course,” he says. “How about an earlier period?”
“Like from the Renaissance or something?” I ask.
“Too far. I was thinking rococo,” Lester says, musing as he holds up the soft colorful print and examines it at arm’s length. A broad beam of sunlight filters down through the trees, illuminating an elegantly dressed young woman on a swing. “Fragonard’s The Swing.”
“It’s better,” I tell him. The colors are pleasing and everyone in the picture seems to be happy. Then I lower my voice. “But I shouldn’t bother you about it. We’re not going to be here very long anyway, eh?”
Lester drops his voice too and says, “We don’t need Einstein to tell us about the relativity of time.”
“Meaning,” I say, “a week? A month? A year?”
The bunk below me creaks and Lester’s face appears beside my ear. His bug eyes are wide. I smell those soft carrots from breakfast.
“Every tool in this prison sits on a shadow board,” he says. “Do you know what that is?”
“No.”
“A board with the shape of that tool painted in black,” he says. “If a tool is missing, any tool at all, the entire prison is locked down. Everyone is searched. Everything is searched. Heads roll…
“I was in the shop in 1970 when the riot broke out,” he says. “I g
ot a hacksaw blade, a chisel, and a claw hammer. More valuable than a Rembrandt. More valuable than the crown jewels. I will have one chance.
“I know you’re different, kid. You’re not one of these other animals. You saved my life for no reason, and I could use your strength. So, I’ll take you with me if I can, but I will not be rushed.”
Lester’s finger stabs up at the ceiling before he drops down out of sight. His bunk creaks, then he lies still. After a time, he begins to snore quietly.
I close my eyes. He’s brilliant, but he’s mad. A lonely old man who wants someone to care. I cannot stay here. They will get me before the day is out. I’ll have to punch the guard when they let us out for lunch. My eyes pinch tight and I try to slow my breathing.
22
LESTER MOANS and the bunk begins to creak. The girl in the picture above me is laughing. Her dress balloons out, showing her skirts. The bunk complains and Lester’s face is back by my ear.
“You need to sleep as much as you can during the day,” he says in a whisper. “We work at night.”
“What do we do?”
Lester looks around. He takes off his glasses. His naked eyes widen and blink. His fingers twist the plastic stem of the glasses. I roll on my side to get a better look.
“Drill bit,” he whispers. “With you, it’ll be twice as fast. I don’t know how long. Twelve months, maybe. Look, kid.”
Lester disappears and I slide off the bunk. He checks the bars, listening, then comes back and bends over the toilet. I lean close.
“Each cell is a steel box. Boilerplate steel,” he says, whispering. “But the prison was rebuilt in 1930 after the ’29 riot, so it’s old. Even the molecular order of steel is in the constant state of decomposition, returning to chaos.”
When he sees me looking at him funny, he says, “All matter seeks chaos. When it’s hot in the summer the sewage line from the toilet sweats like a bastard. In seventy-five years, even seamless half-inch-thick steel gets weak.”
He looks over his shoulder, then smudges his thumb against the metal wall close to the toilet. I detect a small hole, filled with a black substance.
“I fill the holes with shoe polish,” he says, “Every night. We work at night. After lights-out, they do a walkaround every hour to check. On the end cell, you hear the keys to the box before the guard opens the door to get in. You have plenty of time to get to your bunk.”
Lester looks wise again. My fingers shake as I reach out to touch the hole. I’m a basket case. Up. Down. Up. Down.
“What’s behind there?” I ask.
“Catwalk,” he says. “Access to all the pipes and wires and ductwork. Three times since ’77 I’ve broken drill bits off when I’m working in there and let them drop down. This one took a year to find. Down below is the basement, a holding tank of shit and piss and ten inches of scum. They left me in there to unclog a sewer pipe in ’99 and I hopped down into it and got this bit.
“Used to be you put everything up your ass, but they got smart back in ’98. Now they got the Boss Chair. It’s a metal detector you sit on, but my glasses work like a dream. It’s pretty goddamn nice, actually, not having to dig it out every night.”
I look at him to see if he’s playing with me, but his eyes are fixed on the wet steel. He stands up, fits the bit back into his thick plastic glasses, and puts them on. He adjusts the glasses on his hooked nose and, as if on cue, they announce it’s time for lunch.
Lester smiles at me and says, “Let’s eat.”
I don’t like the way we move like cattle out of the block and down through the yard toward the dining hall. I’m jumpy and there’s some twittering, but I don’t know where it’s coming from and no one touches me. I don’t look anyone in the eye. I don’t want to know them. I don’t even want to see them.
I take the boiled meat and the limp vegetables they serve me on a tray and follow Lester to a round seat that juts out from under the table on a metal arm. The tabletop is stainless steel like the tray. Two white men sit across from me. One is doughy with a bald head and a full brown beard.
“This is Carl,” Lester says, nodding toward the dough man. “Carl, Raymond. And that’s Justin.”
Justin is younger than I am-mid-thirties-with dirty blond hair, a ponytail, and a long muscular build. His arms are covered with tattoos. A green-and-orange snake’s head pokes out from beneath his collar with its tongue licking at his Adam’s apple. Part of a claw extends up toward his ear.
“Justin doesn’t talk,” Lester says. “But he’s okay.”
Carl belches and grins like an infant.
“They’re still finding bodies from Carl,” Lester says as if we were talking Easter eggs. “But he wouldn’t hurt a soul in here. He likes it here, don’t you, Carl?”
“Food’s not bad,” Carl says.
“He can’t hurt anyone,” Lester says. “And he doesn’t want to. Makes him feel safe to be locked up, I guess. He’s not the only one.”
After lunch, we go out on the south yard where the weights are. Half a football field of rusty machines and bars with the steel plates welded on so no one can use the bars as weapons. The weights are arranged in a patchwork of square spaces, and each area is painted a different drab color. Lester explains that the faded red weights belong to the Bloods. The yellow ones are for the Latin Kings, the blue for the Sunni Muslims.
“If you want to use them, kid,” he says, “the only ones who might let you are the Dirty White Boys.”
“Which ones are those?”
“The green ones,” he says, pointing. “I could probably get you in without too much trouble.”
I see a crowd of whites, mostly younger men with tattoos. Half of them have long hair. They go to work on the weights like miners. Somber and methodical. Justin is one of them.
“Think I’ll pass.”
Instead, we walk up and down the gritty pavement just outside the chain-link boundary of the weight yard. I look around me at the different men. No one looks back. I’m beginning to feel that Lester and I really are safe.
Lester says hello to a guard that I haven’t seen before. The guard smiles and says hi back. You can tell the man likes Lester.
“What about when you get to the catwalk?” I ask when we’re out of earshot. “I heard Clarence talking to another guard about a break in Elmira last month. They were saying that no one ever got out of here since it was rebuilt in ’30.”
“No one ever did,” he says, looking up at the clear blue sky, shading his eyes from the summer sun. “Once you get out of the steel cell, the block is just a solid box of concrete. If you could get out of that, you got the wall. It’s four feet thick and buried forty feet into the ground.”
“So, we’re screwed,” I say.
He stops and looks at me. His eyes glimmer and he smiles.
“It’s so simple, no one ever thought of it,” he says. “Or if they did, they didn’t have the patience to do it.”
“Do what?”
“Escape backwards,” he says, and begins to walk. “They get out of the cell, then they have to figure out how to break the block. Then the wall. The pumpkinheads in this place who do make it out of the cell just wander around down in the tunnels for a few days before they start screaming for someone to help them.
“I did it backwards,” he says. “It took almost forty years, yeah, but that’s what it takes, kid. When we break this cell, I’ve got the block and the wall already beat.”
“How?”
It’s time to go in and we do, following the crowd, milling into the back entrance of A block. I’m trying not to step on anyone’s toes when I realize that Lester’s white tufts are three deep in front of me. I am in a crowd of blacks and being squeezed. None of them look at me. One has thick glasses. I see a hairnet and bare shoulders like cannonballs. I see a cheek with two long scars and dreadlocks. I smell boiled beef and pungent body odor.
I try to push forward, but can’t and my heart races. Sweat beads on my brow and my palms are wet
. Two big hands grab my ass. Moist lips brush my ear.
“Gonna make you my bitch,” he says. “Sweet little white thing.”
Fingers probe the seam in my pants. I roar and jump and flail.
“Hey, man.”
“The fuck?”
“Yo.”
Guards strain their necks and arch up on their toes. Batons are drawn. The press loosens. I push free and stumble in through the sliding steel door to First Company.
“Watch where the fuck you goin,’” a long-haired Dirty White Boy says, shoving me.
I swing a wild fist and scramble into the cell, backing into the corner. My fists are balled. My face is hot.
“What?” Lester asks, his smile fading.
“I’ll fucking kill them,” I say, pointing toward the cell door as it hums shut. “I don’t want this, goddamn it. This is why I can’t be here.”
“What did they do?” he asks.
I tell him and he shakes his head.
“You’ve been alone too long, kid,” he says. “They’re like dogs. You look them in the eye. You stare them down. You walk tall. They won’t do a damn thing. You should have heard that Colombian I did howling before he died while the poison ate out his guts and they couldn’t stop it. No one wants a taste of that.”
“That kid tried to get you in the box,” I say.
“A kid too stupid to know better,” he says. “You don’t see me worried.”
“I never let myself think like this,” I say, my voice breaking. “And, fuck, now I can’t stop. I keep thinking we can do it. That’s all I can think of.”
“We can, kid.”
“I can kill one of those motherfuckers,” I say. “Just like you. With a dumbbell.”
“Don’t,” he says. “You’ll be in the box for five years. Wait. Twelve months. Maybe fourteen. They won’t touch you. They’ll play with you if you let them. That’s the way.
“Listen, there was a women’s prison back in the 1800s. When they rebuilt this, they built right around the women’s block, and then built over it in 1934. There was a guard I knew in the seventies. I heard the rumors and I got him to get me the plans. They keep them. All of them. From the beginning. In the powerhouse. That brick smokestack you saw out in the south yard.”