by Edward Abbey
“You gonna give me that blanket, cowboy?” The man in the bullpen leaned on the bars, now letting his arms dangle through them. The light, coming from behind his head, made it difficult to see his face. Nothing certain but the black shape, the shining bald skull.
Bondi rubbed his itch. Cockroaches, he thought, lice, spiders, ticks, worms, flies, microbes, bacilli…
“Kind of a bad-tempered bunch in that bullpen,” Burns said; “I shoulda let them alone.” He stripped the blanket from his own bunk and passed it through the bars. “Here,” he said—-“catch.” He tossed it, rolled up, through the intervening space; the man in the bullpen failed to catch it but picked it up from the floor and pulled it through to his own side.
“How about the mattress?” he said, gathering the rag of a blanket under his arm. “Huh?”
“You can go to hell,” Burns said. He turned his back to the bullpen and the corridor, went to his selected corner nearest the window. “Let’s get to work, boys,” he said, and pulled the two files out of Ms boots. Blue dull-gleaming instruments, hard, clean, perfect, fresh from the machine shops. He offered one of them to Bondi. “Take it,” he said, a sardonic grin on his face, “Or do you have to think it over first?”
You insolent bastard, Bondi thought; he stepped forward and took the file. “I’d be glad to be of assistance,” he said.
Burns squatted down by the latticework of bars. The cell consisted of one solid steel wall separating it from the next cell and three barriers of intersecting bars reaching from floor to ceiling which divided it from the corridor and the catwalk surrounding the cellblock: the cell was not a room but a cage. “I’ll start here,” Burns said, indicating a right angle of iron about eighteen inches above the floor.
Bondi went down on one knee beside him. “What shall I do?” he said. “Keep time?”
“Let’s both work on the same bar,” the cowboy said: “you on one side, me on the other. We’ll cut it through here at the bottom and then bend it up—if we can—and maybe that’ll do the trick. That might be all we need.”
The Indians watched them, and said nothing. The old vagrant slept, the Mexican twisted his socks, dripping water on the floor: he saw the glimmering files then and his eyes widened, his mouth sagged open.
Burns winked at Bondi, spat on his palms, rubbed them together, picked up his file and ground it against the iron bar—a grating sound, low-pitched and dull. Once, twice, he scraped the file across the bar, then stopped to listen. From beyond their wall came the sound of Greene singing, of Hoskins preaching, the coughs and groans and chatter of the others, an explosion of activity in the plumbing system. “Not so bad,” Burns said; he paused. “But they’ll hear us in a minute, ever one of them.”
“What can we do about it?” Bondi said.
“Nothing.” Burns went to work again, grinding his file edge into the iron bar. “We could sing… but that ain’t gonna cover it up neither. Besides, this is gonna take a mighty long time.” He filed steadily, with quick short strokes; within a few moments a small shining notch appeared on the side of the bar, and on the cement below the bright hot silvery dust began to accumulate, to glisten—iron sweat, the jewels of freedom.
Madness, thought Bondi, this is madness. He drew his file across the bitter iron—God! He was afraid he might burst out laughing—or weeping. A spell of vertigo clouded his vision; it passed but left his nerves vibrating like violin strings. He kept on; he applied the heavy file to the bar with all the free weight of his body. Here we go, he thought, here we go—God knows where!
“Jeez!” the Mexican said, coming close to them, “what you guys doin?”
The cowboy laughed. “We’re workin our way through college,” he said; “we’re goin home. Wanta come along?” Already his forehead was shining with sweat, his black hair dangling over one eye. “How about it, cuate?”
“This is bad,” the Mexican said. “Lots of trouble. Not for me, no thanks. I get out in a week.”
“A week’s too long for me,” Burns said, filing stead-fly on. “No more of this jailhouse stink for me…”
While Bondi, furious and amazed at his own audacity, wondered what had happened to himself: I’m in league with a fanatic, he thought, a libertine maniac. Suppose I were caught at this criminal occupation? He filed deeper into the iron. This is a criminal activity, he reminded himself, a felonious enterprise; complicity in a jailbreak. Aiding and abetting; quite serious: almost as bad as actually escaping. The Law giveth and the Law taketh away, but retaliation is forbidden and evasion of punishment itself is a crime. He felt his soft, academic muscles relenting before the resisting iron, his thoughts hesitating before the awful magnificence of Authority. But he continued to gnaw at the bar with his slender weapon; particle by particle, grain by metal grain, with painful drudging slowness, the disintegration of the bar proceeded.
Burns, in rhythm with his labor, began to sing:
By yon bonny banks
And by yon bonny braes…
A comic, Bondi said to himself, at a time like this he reveals himself: a bloody comic! He ground at the bar and when the refrain came, joined in:
O you take the high road
And I’ll take the low road…
They grinned at each other through their sweat and the smoky gloom of the air; they toiled and sang and grinned like exceedingly foolish children, while the whole cellblock listened. A pang of pleasure, like an illumination, shot through Bondi’s nerves; for a few brief irrational moments he was deliriously happy. Then he, then both of them, became aware of the enveloping silence: not a complete absence of noise—somewhere an old man was coughing his lungs out, somebody was snoring in the next cell, an Indian chanted softly over his clasped hands—but a sudden and striking lapse in the gabble, shouting and mutter of jailhouse conversations.
Bondi and the cowboy stopped their work for a moment to listen. Neither said a word; they waited for the sound of the cellblock door, the voice of a guard. But there was nothing.
Then came the saxophone tones of Timothy Greene, speaking from the adjoining cell. He said: “What you boys cookin up in there? You-all sharpening up your toenails, maybe? You brushin your teeth?”
Bondi did not know what to say. He left it up to Burns. The cowboy squatted there, head tilted to one side, eyes half closed; his right hand and the file rested lightly on his left knee.
“You boys hopin maybe to leave us?” said Greene.
Burns answered this. “Yeah,” he said; “we’re hopin. And we’ll be pretty busy for a while. Don’t you worry none about us.”
“Sure ain’t gonna worry about you, man.”
“If you hear anything give us the word.”
“Sure will, man,” said Greene; “that I’ll do.”
“Much obliged,” Burns said, and lie returned to his work: Zing! Zing! went the stroking file.
Bondi sighed, crossed himself, and went back to work.
Oklahoma City, Okla. 9
BLUE, RED, YELLOW, FLASHING AND DANCING—crash of machinery and a soaring wall of gray tombs, monuments, cathedrals of power… while the blue red yellow shrieks of neon—frantic, eyeball-clutching—splashed, blared in his face, blinding, inviting catastrophe: a woman, a child, a pride of young men, sightless, skin-seared, moved in agonizing slow motion across the asphalt path of his machine—forty tons of steel, iron, rubber, glass, oil, a cargo of metal and the mere thing of flesh that drove and was driven by it— himself…
He was sick, miserably and suddenly and inhumanly sick; greased convulsions of nausea in his stomach and throat, a stinging, glitter of fire and glass behind his eyes, exploding his skull…
I’ve got to stop, he repeated to himself, got to find a place to park this brute, have to get that sewage out of my stomach…
He went through a yellow light while human figures scuttled past his fenders; he blinked his watering eyes, wiped sweat and dust from his forehead, and turned at a narrow sidestreet between a warehouse—SLOAN’S MOVING AND STORAGE DON�
��T MAKE A MOVE—and a used-car lot and followed the dark alleyway past parked cars, back lots, garbage cans, warehouses, barbed wire, cyclone fences, telephone poles… He steered his tractor and his freight trailer into the vacant space over the black cinders of a feedmill loading lot, parked askew, slantwise, across the entrance and half the interior, shut off the engine, leaned on the doorhandle and sagged with closed eyes, nearly falling, out and onto his knees on the ground and was sick at once, without preliminaries…
About ten minutes of satisfying agony was sufficient. He then pulled himself up and crawled, a sad empty stricken animal, into the cab of his truck and stretched out across the leather seat and closed his eyes, invoking sleep; which did not come immediately: he had time to savor the corrosion of his bile and liver, the deadly metallic residue of his sunken, clystered stomach: he had time to speculate—what was it? he thought, what’s wrong with me? Never before… never before quite so bad, so quick, as this.
He heard the scream of the city soaring over him, felt the yellow dusty night falling on his steel shell, the weight of his eyelids growing under it; never like this, he thought. I’ll drive no more tonight. Sleep tonight, maybe see a doctor in the morning. Maybe it was just something I ate. God, it has to be…
I need some rest, sleep, a change of rhythm; my kidneys are cracking under the jar and pressure… When I finish this trip, soon as I finish this trip… see a doctor, knock off for a while, maybe go home for a couple of weeks…
Sleep came at last, vague fumbling sleep, and his mind rolled in it, pushed and drawn and split in dreams, smoky shards of dream, reconstructions, recollections:
… On a redstone road, past shagbark hickories and a rail fence—alone, or mostly alone—sometimes accompanied by a familiar but unnameable figure—silent as all dreams, soundless but troubled—and then the splintering of barriers and a scramble, an insane charge of pigs, hogs, monsters with red eyes, horns, gaseous withering breath, fury without purpose, blind maniacal destruction…
In this manner, filmed in sweat and riven through the heart and brain by internal, insubstantial and powerful terrors, he passed, slept, endured, fought, lost seven hours.
While the city, new and terrible, rode the night, groaned and triumphed over the night and the rolling earth.
10
AT SIX O’CLOCK IN THE EVENING THE CELLBLOCK lights went on: one dim yellow glow recessed deep in the ceiling of each cell.
Burns glanced up at the light, then at Bondi. “Will they come in now?” he said; he continued to file as he spoke. Beside him the Navajo, relieving Bondi, worked on without stopping or speaking. The iron bar was solid, heavy, and still intact, but a deep notch had been gouged in on two sides. On the floor between the Indian and the cowboy the metal dust piled up, shining softly in the light “Is somebody coming?” Burns said again.
Bondi heard him and raised his head from his hands. He was sitting on his bunk watching the labor, not seeing it. “No,” he said; “they always turn the lights on about this time. Doesn’t mean that anybody’s coming.”
“Maybe I oughta knock that light out,” Burns said.
“They’ll turn it off in a few hours. Nobody can see in through those windows anyway.”
“It worries me a little.”
“You have worse to worry about, in my opinion.”
They all worried about it but the work went on; at ten o’clock the lights switched off, except for one light above the cellblock’s central corridor.
Bondi and the cowboy lay on their adjoining bunks, the cowboy smoking; behind them the two Navajos hewed with the files at the stubborn iron, chanting a slow sullen dirge as they worked.
We can’t go on like this all night, Bondi was thinking. Something unpleasant is bound to happen; they’ve probably already discovered us and are now waiting outside below the window with submachine guns, having a joke at our expense, ready to blast the first head that shows in that window. Burns’ head, of course.
“What’re you thinkin about?” Burns said.
“Your head.”
“My head?”
“I’m afraid,” Bondi said. “I have a queer feeling in my stomach that things aren’t right.”
“We know that,” said Burns.
“I mean that something bad is going to happen to one of us—soon. Maybe tonight.”
“Wouldn’t be surprised.”
“You know,” Bondi said, “I’ve never done this sort of thing before—jailbreaking. It’s a novel experience for me. Interesting but not very comfortable. A little frightening, in fact.”
“I know how you feel. It’s a worrisome business.”
“Maybe we’ve already revealed ourselves,” Bondi went on. “Perhaps the bars are wired in some way… electrically. I can see a little red light blinking on a switchboard in the booking office.”
“That’s the sub-jailer’s wife callin up,” Burns said. “Checkin on the old man.”
“But if they already knew,” said Bondi, “why would they wait? What are they waiting for?”
“To catch us in the act,” Burns said; “the guards prob’ly need some target practice.”
“I was wondering about that…”
Burns turned toward the Navajos. “You boys ready for some relief?” he said.
It must have been near midnight when the final filestroke was made on the bar; the metal hung rigidly above its own base, severed through. For the first time in six hours there was nearly absolute quiet in the cell-block. Bondi and the cowboy squatted on the cold concrete, facing each other, smiling nervously, listening to the snores, the coughing and groaning, the delirium sounds of the sleeping men around them. For the first time they felt it needful to whisper.
“That’s it,” Bondi said, whispering; “what now?”
Burns was grinning at him; Bondi could see the white teeth shining in the dark face, a glint of the eyes, the indirect light from the corridor outlining the cowboy’s head and hat and his narrow shoulders.
“What do we do now?” whispered Bondi.
In answer Burns wrapped his hand around the lower end, the free end of the bar, and pulled: nothing happened. He put both hands around the bar, braced his feet against the base of the grill, and strained backward with all his weight and strength: slowly, very slightly, the metal yielded, the bar bent inward. About one inch. Burns stood up, gasping, and kneaded the small of his back. “We need a strong man,” he said; “we need some gorilla like Gutierrez now.”
“Want me to try it?” Bondi said.
“Don’t bother.”
“What do you mean by that?” Bondi said quickly. “Eh?”
The cowboy laughed. “Go ahead, if you want to. Be careful you don’t bust a gut, that’s all. Use your legs as much as you can and spare your back.”
So Bondi put his hands to the bar, straightened his back, bent his legs, and tugged, heaved, jerked without perceptible result. Burns stood watching him, hands on hips, grinning. Bondi bit his lip and tried a second time, pulling steadily and carefully at the grudging iron. Without success. He gave up then, saying: “To hell with it; this is no office for a gentleman.”
Burns laughed again. “No, it ain’t,” he said, “What we need is about three feet of steel pipe; that would help us some.”
The two Navajos were watching; the cessation of the filing had awakened them. One of them stood up and came forward. “I’ll do it,” he said. He squatted and pulled, the sweat popping from his forehead, and managed to bend the bar another inch or two inward and upward. Then Burns pulled at it a second time and brought it forward another inch and the two of them, alternately straining and resting, succeeded in bending the bar in and up to a position approximately perpendicular to the plane of the grill of bars. This left an opening twelve inches wide and about sixteen inches high, allowing for the bent bar above and the slight rough butt of the bar below.
“You can’t get through that,” Bondi said.
“I can,” Burns said; I don’t know about you, what
with all that fat around your middle and them wide hips.”
“Never mind; I’m not going anyway.”
“This fella can get through,” Burns said, indicating the Navajo. “You’d be surprised how flexible the human body is when it has to be. I remember a time up in the Shoshone Mountains I got caught in a crack in a dead pine tree—I’d been a-chewin jerky all day long and was gettin kinda bloated—”
The lights went on.
The light seemed to intensify the sudden stillness. “Now what the hell…” Burns said. “What’s up now?”
“I don’t know,” Bondi said. They listened but could hear nothing—other than the cacophony of sleeping prisoners.
“Well,” Burns said, “let’s not stand around worryin about it. We gotta rig up some kinda rope now; about three or four of these blankets, maybe.” He stooped to pull a blanket off the nearest bunk.
And then they heard the squeal and rumble of the cellblock door rolling open. And the voice of Gutierrez:
“Burns!” the voice said; “John W. Burns!”
They heard the grinding of the crank and saw the cellgate slide open. Open to the corridor, the gaping gray space…
“Don’t answer,” whispered Bondi. “He may not be sure you’re in this block. He might look for you in one of the others.”
“Are you crazy? He knows damn well I’m in here.”
“Burns!” cried the voice beyond the corridor; “you’re wanted in the office. Telephone call!”
“A very funny fella,” Burns muttered, his eyes taking on the dull glaze of hatred. “The bastard…”
“Buns!”
“I’d better go,” the cowboy said. “If I don’t he’ll come stompin in here and see what we done. Hide the files,” he said to the Navajo. And to Bondi: “I’ll be back in a minute.” He smiled briefly, bitterly; and walked out of the cell and down the long corridor. They heard his boots rapping on the cement, a growl from Gutierrez and the closing of the door—a ponderous grumble of steel, the slam and mesh of locks. The cellgate screeched on its trolley, slid shut and locked. Bondi stared, unbelieving, frozen in fear and astonishment. An awakening, it seemed to him, from a bad dream into a nightmare. But he was unable to think beyond that point; stunned and incredulous, he gazed through the wall of bars, into the yellow light in the corridor, the spreading shadows.