by Tim Green
Lester has a black piece of paper that he tapes over the hole. We are in complete darkness now, but only for a few seconds. In his hand, Lester has a small bulb, taped and wired to a D battery. In this pitch, it sheds just enough light for us to see the twisted labyrinth of pipes and wires and ducts protruding from the cells on either side. The tangle of mechanical veins rises five stories.
Lester starts to lower himself through the space between the narrow catwalk and the cells. I follow him, and he guides my ankles as he said he would so that I will find the footholds that will quietly bear my weight. Even though Lester warned me against it, I look down. It is a long way to the oily filth, and I wonder if I will be able to keep from retching once I lower my feet into its murk.
Soon I hear Lester swishing around. My footing is fine, but with five feet to go, I grab a hot water pipe that burns my hand. I stifle a cry, but drop down, splashing back into the sewage. I jump up with my hands plastered over my mouth, but the vomit finds the seams in my fingers and my quiet retching continues for another ten seconds before I am finally able to subdue it. Lester stares at me with those big eyes magnified under their lenses even more in the thin light. He blinks and I shake my head apologetically. He looks up toward the empty catwalk, shrugs, and begins to wade through the mess toward the other end of the cellblock.
The going is tricky with the sediment below the filth sucking on my shoes. Lester is taking long steps that bring his knees briefly clear of the oily stink. My stomach begins to turn again. Beads of sweat tickle my forehead. I think I cannot hold down another convulsion when I see a brick tunnel at the edge of Lester’s homemade light.
Lester stops and dips down into the scum. He comes up with his claw hammer and holds it out for me to see. He is grinning. We climb up into the tunnel and crawl along in the gritty crap that lines its belly. I search for a manhole, but see only the long smooth stretch of sediment. Lester stops suddenly and turns around.
“What are we doing?” I say.
“I must have gone past it,” he says.
My head spins with that same familiar fear. My heart thumps even harder. The tunnel walls seem suddenly tighter.
“What do you mean?” I say. “How?”
“It’s here,” he says. “I missed it.”
“I thought you dug it up.”
“It’s been two years, kid,” he says. “The water rises up down here in the winter and leaves fresh sediment. Right behind you, there. Dig.”
I spin and start to claw at the soft muck, scrabbling like a dog until my fingers rake the bricks below. The stink presses in on me.
“It’s brick,” I say, my voice rising in pitch.
“Keep going.”
Scraps of mud fly through the tunnel and spatter the crumbling walls.
My fingers are numb. They strike something harder than brick.
“I think I got it,” I say.
“Here, use this,” Lester says, handing over the hammer.
I claw at the edges of the old steel plate. My heart starts to slow and my breath is coming easier now. In minutes, I have exposed the entire manhole cover. Using the claw on the hammer, I lift it up and shove it aside. Cool air lies beneath us in a vast empty space that echoes with the sound of dripping water.
“There are ladder rungs,” Lester says, his voice laced with giddiness as he dips the light into the hole.
I see more black water down below. The stench is richer down there, but not as sharp. I see the corroded metal rungs protruding from the brick wall. As I descend into the cistern, the hairy rust flakes off in my hands, leaving them dusty brown.
The water is cold and comes up to my knees. Lester eases himself slowly down and we wade the length of the aging cavern. The walls are alive with spiders that creep and sway under the glow of our dim light. A rat squeaks and scrabbles along a ledge above us, kicking free a swirl of dust into the halo of light.
When we reach the end of the cistern, there is another set of rungs that lead up to the large dark hole of the overflow pipe. The cistern collected water to be used for the women’s bathrooms. When the tank filled up during the wet season, the overflow let the excess water run out into the Owasco Outlet. When the prison was rebuilt in 1930, Lester claims the new wall had to be built around this overflow pipe because the women’s prison wasn’t razed until 1934.
We climb up and in. The pipe is wooden. Narrow, but smooth with only a small deposit of grit on the bottom. Two feet in diameter. Just enough for me to get through without jamming my shoulders. We crawl for a good ways. The only stench now comes from my clothes. The air is stale, but cool. In the thin light from Lester’s bulb, I can see a few feet in front of my face, so I don’t bump into the pile of broken brick and dirt, but when I see it, my heart constricts.
“It’s blocked,” I say in a hiss.
“I told you it was,” Lester says. “We have to dig.”
“How far?”
“Not far,” he says.
I begin to pull at the pieces of brick, pushing them under my belly, then moving the mound back toward Lester with my knees and feet. After a time, the pipe behind us is nearly blocked. Lester moves backward, spreading the refuse beneath him, giving me more room to dig.
A battle rages between panic and hope in my mind. I try to reinforce my will with sweet images of freedom. A walk on the beach, cold sand in my toes. Moonlight dancing on water. The taste of a thick steak, red wine, and a Cuban cigar. But it’s hatred that wins the day and propels me on. The bullet I will put into Frank Steffano’s head. The sound of Rangle’s whimper. Villay’s squeal. Exact revenge.
I work on.
We must be twenty feet farther than the original blockage. Our muffled coughs are snuffed out by the pipe and the dirt. My arms and hands are numb from their work.
Lester clears his throat and says, “Kid. We have to go back.”
I hear, but it doesn’t register.
“Raymond,” he says, “we won’t make it. It’s light outside by now. We’ll have to come back.”
“We’re almost there,” I say, still clawing at the dirt and bricks. “We have to be.”
Lester grips my ankle. I feel the strength in his old hands, constricting my ligaments and the flow of blood. He shakes my leg and I stop digging.
“No, goddamn it,” he says, rupturing the quiet. “We need the night. I waited too long for this, kid. We have to go back.”
Lester lets go of my ankle. The light jiggles and begins to fade. I hear him squirming back down the pipe. I continue to dig, but soon it’s pitch black and I feel the earth squeezing in on me from all sides. A cry bursts from me and I scramble backward, slithering out.
Lester is waiting in the cistern. When I drop down into the cold water, he nods once and turns to go. When we reach the basement beneath the catwalk outside our cell, Lester shows me a spigot jutting out of a pipe that runs up the concrete wall. He turns it on and we rinse most of the stink and slime from our bodies and clothes.
Since most of the Vaseline was rubbed off, it will be harder for me to get back into the cell, so I go first. Lester is able to push me through without drawing more than a trickle of blood from my shoulder. Daylight seeps into the window outside our bars, but everything is still quiet. Lester fits the steel plate and the sewage pipe from the toilet back into the wall. He complains quietly of a pain in his arm. I help him fill the cracks with shoe polish.
We strip out of our clothes and change into our spare set. Lester rinses the dirty ones in what’s left of our hot water bucket from the day, then he stuffs them into the laundry bag and tosses them into the corner. I am climbing up into my bunk when I hear him grunt and collapse on the floor.
I take a panicked look around before I start to yell for help.
There is confusion and shouting.
Lester is taken to the prison hospital.
Later, a guard tells me that he’s had a heart attack. They don’t know how long he’ll be in the hospital. He might not make it at all. After
two days of worrying, the company sergeant calls me to his desk. He says that tomorrow I will be moved into a new cell by myself. If Lester survives, we can apply for another double bunk when one opens up. If he dies, I will stay in my new single cell.
Night comes and I lie awake with these thoughts spinning through my head: If Lester dies, it could be ten or twenty years, if ever, before I have the chance to get a drill bit of my own. Even if he lives, when the new prisoners take this cell, they will be sure to find the hole. They will either use it, or report it. If they use it and find the open manhole, the route will be discovered and sealed off forever. If they report the hole in the cell, Lester and I will both spend the next three years back in the box.
Here’s what I keep coming back to:
If I wait, both of us are likely to be in Auburn for the rest of our lives.
If I go now, alone, I just might make it.
26
I OPEN MY EYES to The Swing. When Lester first showed it to me, it meant nothing. A pretty baroque painting with soft colors. A pink dress. A broad beam of sunlight through the blue-green trees. A dainty shoe sailing through the air. A young man in the bushes gazing up with admiration. An older refined gentleman entertaining the beautiful young woman. But as I began to study it, it wasn’t long before I knew it for what it was. A picture of betrayal.
I have used this painting over the past year to secretly fuel my hatred for the people who betrayed me. The light coming through the window is proof that at least I have not betrayed my friend, even if it costs me everything. I search within myself for even a flicker of contentment. I don’t know why, but there is nothing there. I am an empty grave.
The escape hole behind the toilet is so big it makes me ache.
I reach up and slip my finger between the edge of the paper and the metal ceiling, tearing the print free. The paper shears off at the corners where it has been taped. I spread my fingers and mash the print into a ball, then throw it onto the floor.
All the things in the cell besides my bunk and spare set of clothes belong to Lester. They said someone will take care of his things. I haven’t decided whether or not I will earn my way back into the box. I realize that I enjoy the small freedoms I’ve become accustomed to. The sun. The rain on my face. Long walks around the yard. The books. The question is this: How safe will I be without Lester?
I hop down and roll everything into my mattress. After breakfast, I sling the roll over my shoulder and a guard walks me across the yard to E block. I feel naked without Lester by my side.
When the first officer at the desk looks up, I recognize the shadowy face as Bluebeard’s. His hair is longer and slicked back with pomade, but his beady eyes still have their gleam.
“Well, well,” he says, “the big bucks were snortin’ and a-pawin’ in here this morning like they smelled a doe in heat, and I guess they did.”
His long hairy fingers slide over the change sheet, a yellow pointed nail comes to a stop halfway down the page. He turns his head and raises his voice to a group of officers standing in the doorway.
“Seventeen ready to go?” he says. “New girl’s here.”
He leers at me and says, “I know you’ll be wanting to bunk up once you decide who your new daddy’s gonna be, but for now, I hope you’ll like your new home.”
A guard marches over and says, “Uh, Marty. Seventeen still ain’t ready. Garden Hose says he ain’t goin’.”
“Well, you tell Garden Hose I’m gonna come in there and tickle his ass with my stick,” Bluebeard says, putting his hand on his baton as if to prove he means it.
“Told him that already.”
“Well, gas the motherfucker out of there,” Bluebeard says.
“You’ll have to call the lieutenant.”
“And I’ll do that,” Bluebeard says. With his chin in the air, he picks up the phone and punches in a number.
He glares at the guard who brought me and says, “Take her back to A block while I fumigate that bug.”
To me, Bluebeard says, “Don’t you worry, little lady. We’ll have your room for you real soon. Why don’t you go out and have a drink by the pool?”
I walk back across the yard to my cell and unroll my bunk. I lay down and stare at the ceiling, empty except for the four corners of the print. I have decided that my next interview with Bluebeard will send a message to the entire prison. It will be nothing for me to launch myself across his desk. I will roll his head between my hands like a melon, snapping his neck and tearing the spinal cord between the third and fourth vertebrae. If I’m going to go to the box, I might as well go in style. When I do get out-if I get out-I feel pretty confident that after something like that, no one will bother me.
I am reviewing the technique in my mind when I hear Lester’s gravelly voice at the end of the hall. I jump down and grab the bars. He shuffles slowly toward our cell, prattling to the guard.
“Clear one,” the guard says in a loud voice.
I step back.
“Open one.”
The bars vibrate and the door slides open. Lester stands there. His enormous eyes are shiny and brimming with tears.
“Later, Jim,” he says to the guard in a choked voice.
He steps inside and the bars hum shut. He opens his arms and steps toward me, hugging me. The tufts of his hair tickle under my chin.
“You stupid son of a bitch,” he says, his voice muffled by my shirt. Then he pushes me away. “You should be gone.”
“I… couldn’t.”
Lester shakes his head and sits down on the edge of his bunk, laughing softly, but crying at the same time.
“You’re a prince, kid,” he says, looking up. “Like my own.”
“They tried to move me,” I say. My own eyes are watering. “I was gone. E block, but the cell wasn’t ready. They said you were going to die.”
“They wish,” he says. “The state would love to have my bunk, but I’m tougher than that.”
“Are you all right?”
Lester swats his hand in the air and says, “A minor episode. I’ll outlive the doctor. Happens all the time. Sit.”
I sit down next to him, and Lester claps my right hand between both of his.
“Tonight,” he says, in a whisper, “we go. We’ll make it this time.”
“My God, Lester,” I say. “I mean, I was gone. Do you get it? They moved me out. Then some bug named Garden Hose decides he won’t leave the cell…”
“I don’t know about God, kid,” Lester says, “but destiny… That’s another story. And what you’ve done… The loyalty?
“We still need to split up when we get out,” Lester says, “but not for long.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m talking about unimaginable wealth,” Lester says, shaking my hand in his, his eyes glittering at me. “I’m talking about sharing it with you, kid. I… I didn’t know before. Even after all we’ve been through. Money does things to people, and we’ll be on the outside. Things will be different.”
Lester’s eyes turn glassy and he looks across the cell as if he were peering out over the ocean. He tells me about an old Adirondack lodge built by Thomas Durant on Lake Kora, a place that burned to the ground at the turn of the nineteenth century. Lester bought the only standing building, a guest cottage, in 1964.
“You can only get there by water and it has a cobblestone foundation like a fortress,” he says. “Dry as dust. Perfect temperature. Fifty degrees in the middle of summer or the dead of winter.
“I turned it into a huge vault,” Lester says. “Brought a locksmith up from Baltimore and two boilermakers from Peoria. The floor is these two-inch-thick oak planks, and with the hardware, you’d have to use dynamite to get it open.”
“What’s in it?” I ask.
Lester lowers his voice and leans toward me. His big eyes blink and he peers hard through the gloom.
“Almost everything I ever stole,” he says. “I was going to live modestly and work for twenty years. Then I was goin
g to sell it all and retire to New Zealand. I still will, but I don’t need all that. Put together, by now it’s got to be worth close to a billion.”
“A billion?” I say. “As in nine zeros?”
“There was a trainload of stuff from the Louvre that Hitler was having shipped from Paris to Berlin. It never made it,” Lester says. “I spent over ten years stealing it and now I’m giving half of it to you…”
“What can you do with it?” I ask.
“Sell it,” Lester says with a shrug.
“To who?”
“Sotheby’s,” he says. “Christie’s. I’ll call the director of fine arts. Happens all the time. He’ll be outraged, but in about a week I’ll get a call back from someone who’ll just happen to be looking for what I’ve got.”
Lester tells me the exact location of the cottage and how to get into the vault. There are two bank vault tumblers. The combination is derived by assigning a numeric value to each of the letters in his son’s name-Seth Cole-and subtracting them from fifty for the first descending to forty-three for the last.
“Not that anything’s happening to me, kid,” he says, showing me those crooked teeth, “but, who knows? Maybe only one of us gets away, and if it’s you, I don’t want you going hungry.”
My face is warm and I put my other hand on top of his and begin to stammer, not knowing what to say.
“If you want to do something,” he says, nodding his head as if he can read my thoughts, “promise me this: that you’ll use this treasure for yourself. Go. Start a new life. Leave the past alone, kid. Let it die.”
I go rigid.
Lester cocks his head just a tick to one side, as if he’s heard a small noise. He looks at me for quite a while before he sighs and says, “No, I guess not.