Just Like That

by Les Edgerton

  He was one of the principals in this big trial, been in the papers all summer. Probably the most notorious murder ever committed in Indiana up till then. There was a little girl—Sylvia Lykens was her name—whose mother worked in a circus and the summer before the mother left her with Randy’s mom to take care of while she went on the road for a few months. While she was in their care, Randy’s mom tied the little girl up in the basement, and she and Randy and Randy’s teenaged sister took turns torturing the kid, burning her with lit cigarettes, that kind of stuff. She eventually died and his whole family got arrested and sentenced for murder. Randy was in the second year of a natural life bit. Eventually, he’d get transferred to the other prison at Michigan City once he turned thirty.

  Natural life was a bitch. Most straights don’t know there’s different kinds of life sentences. Natural life—usually they said “natural life plus fifty years—meant just that—the sentence was for the duration of the guy’s natural life. Just plain “life” was a joke. That could mean anything. Usually, on a plain life rap they were eligible for parole in about four years. Randy caught a natural life sentence which meant he wasn’t never going to see the outside unless Indiana went Democrat and elected a liberal governor. Not likely in the home state of Orville Redenbacher.

  Less than a week after Randy had been shipped to Pendleton one of the older cons decided he wanted to fuck the kid. He made the mistake of reading him as a scared little punk. Pretty and scared. Perfect combination of features for a wolf. Randy surprised the guy—stabbed him in the eyeball with a spoon handle he’d sharpened on his cell floor. Stabbed him eight or nine times actually, messed up his face pretty good. After that nobody fucked with him much. He did his thirty days in the hole and then came right back to the barber shop. What else could they do to him? He was already in for life. They’d assigned him to the barbershop in the first place because he was so young and good-looking, and the shop was the most heavily guarded place inside the walls what with all the razors and other instruments we had there. Send him anyplace else as pretty as he was, they’d be asking for nothing but steady trouble, guys trying to rape his tight little ass.

  “Randy’ll have the guys go to your chair,” Dusty explained. “I’ll give you the sign when they come in.”

  Dealing was pretty open. I mean, everybody, guards, instructors, everybody knew it was going on all the time, but you still didn’t want to get caught passing contraband around. Hell, there were at least three hacks were major dealers themselves. We’d have to be careful giving the cigarettes to Dusty’s customers but that wouldn’t be hard. There was always a guard on duty, and the instructor himself, Mr. Dillsie, would be around, but Randy was going to get a phone call from up front asking the instructor to go up to the officer’s barbershop and the hack on duty, Mr. Clifford, went outside about every twenty minutes to have a cigarette. We’d pass the butts then.

  Only we never got the chance. Ten minutes before noon a full-fledged riot broke out.

  CHAPTER 14

  Riots were nothing new. I’d been in eight of them last time I did time. Nine, if you count the one I came into when I hit quarantine my first day. That riot was over but I sure suffered through the consequences! Lyndon Johnson was president during my first stretch and he came on the tube one night and said the government had done some kind of study and it was their opinion that Pendleton was the single worst joint in the U.S. We were having a riot a month then, seemed like. When the president made that announcement on TV, every single inmate stood up and cheered like we’d won the championship of the NFL.

  This was Manny’s first riot, but I told him to hang with me and he’d be all right.

  “The thing to do,” I told him, “is stay out of the way of the crazies. There’s guys go nuts, times like these. A guy can get killed just standing around picking his nose the wrong way. Maintain a low profile, that’s the key to staying alive.”

  That was good advice for all the time, not just during a riot. Time after time, I seen guys come in and start breaking bad right from the git-go. You could tell they was actually scared and that’s why they were trying to act like Charles Bronson, but it was the wrong thing to do. You draw too much attention in the joint, your ticket’s gonna get punched. Don’t matter how big you are or even how bad you might actually be. There’s always somebody bigger and badder. Or littler and badder. I found that out myself, didn’t I? Somebody got a razor blade to your throat it don’t matter if you’re eleven feet tall.

  If you’re smart, you get in the habit of fading into the woodwork. Blend, baby, blend! Anybody stands out, they might as well write MAJOR DUMBASS in red crayon on their back. There’s too many dudes in here can’t wait to establish a reputation and the only thing that impresses a con is taking somebody out, whacking them. You get to loud-talking folks, acting tough, you just put your whole front on the line. You got to keep it up. Really, you got to act badder and badder and sooner or later somebody’s going to front you and then you better come through, kill his ass or it’s your own. It’s not smart to break bad, not unless you are the baddest dude ever lived for real. Tough guys in here, really tough guys, they see an act like that they know there’s not much else there. Quiet guys, guys that don’t say much, keep to themselves, now there’s a mystery about them most people don’t want to fuck with. They might just be quiet little punks scared to death...or, they might be the nastiest motherfuckers on the block. Nobody knows and nobody wants to especially find out. That old saying about “don’t judge a book by the cover”—that got started in a joint somewhere, I’d bet money on it.

  There’s one thing for sure started in some joint somewhere. High fives. I see guys on the street high- and low-fiving each other and I got to smile. Guys in the joint, old-timers, know where that came from. It came from not trusting any other motherfucker. You meet a guy, you sure as hell aren’t going to shake his hand. Do that, put your hand in another guy’s hand and all he has to do is yank you toward him, put a shank in your gut. An old-timer told me that at chow one day. He claimed he was doing time in Chino back in the early fifties when they started doing it, couple of white guys who’d had a fight and then decided to bury the hatchet. The brothers saw it, picked it up and now everybody thinks it started as a black thing. They think it’s a sports thing!

  We were over in the barber school when this riot broke out. The whistle blew and the phone in Mr. Dillsie’s office rang at the same time. and we all knew some shit was going down even though when a bunch of us ran to the window we couldn’t see anything.

  Mr. Dillsie came out, his face as white as an Eskimo’s ass and give the guard on duty the high sign. Jonesy, the guard that day, came running over and they stood together talking low so nobody could hear them and then Jonesy says, “Okay, men. There’s been some trouble over at the hospital and everybody has to go back to the cells.” He started lining us up, barber students on one side, inmates that were there for a haircut on another. Mr. Dillsie was running around gathering all the straight razors that had been checked out to put away in the cabinet which was heavily locked at all times. That was a joke—they had three big Yale locks on the razor cabinet, like that meant something, when three-fourths of the guys in here were B&E guys, could open a Yale in about six seconds flat, if they took their time and worked with their eyes closed and were dead drunk, a lot faster happen they were on top of their game. I guess the locks made Dillsie feel secure.

  They got us back to K Dorm, all of us barber students except one lived there and the one that didn’t, a guy we all called Sniffles because his nose was always running. We found out later Sniffles never made it to J Block where he lived, as both he and Jonesy got stabbed, him dead and Jonesy cut bad enough to miss three months of work when it was all over. I’da been Jonesy, I wouldn’t have come back.

  In K we were all right. Looking out the window we could see the riot escalate until there were inmates all over the yard between us and the chow hall. First thing they did was bring down the Ame
rican flag from the big flagpole out in the center of the yard and replace it with a professional looking Jolly Roger. Some talented seamstress must have sewn it in craft class—it was a beaut. Corny, but it got all of us and we all cheered when we seen it go up, busting with pride like we’d done something major like win World War II or something.

  “You guys know what this means, don’t you?” said Dusty. Me, him and Manny were all clustered at one of the end windows watching the merriment below.

  “No food,” he said. “Nobody’s going to the chow hall until they get this thing shut down.”

  “What if they don’t?” Manny said. “What if this goes on for a week?”

  “Then we don’t eat for a week.”

  He was right. The first thing the warden did in a riot was cut off the food supply. They figured if the rioters got hungry enough they’d cave in and go back to their cells. Like they couldn’t just go over and take over the chow hall and get their own. That was the first fucking place took over every riot I ever seen. The only ones a shutdown hurt were the ones like us, locked up. We weren’t too bad off though. Not with Dusty the loan shark. He had about six weeks’ worth of Oreos alone, plus potato chips, candy, stuff like that. It’d wipe out his stash, we were on lockdown very long but the main thing is we weren’t about to starve. We might get shanked by our friends for the food but we wouldn’t die hungry.

  “Fuck!”

  “What?” Both Dusty and I both responded to Manny.

  “We’re gonna miss the movie.”

  He was right. This was Friday and we always got a movie on Saturday morning. And for once, they had one scheduled that wasn’t forty years old and didn’t have John Wayne in it. Somehow, in a bureaucratic mixup they’d scheduled “Shane” with Alan Ladd. The fact that it was only about twenty years old made it like a sneak preview, compared to the turkeys we usually got.

  Right then, something happened that made us forget our disappointment. Smoke. From the chow hall. First, someone yelled “Smoke!” which we could all see plainly and then fire itself appeared inside the windows. They were burning the tables. And probably anything else combustible they could find, piling it in the dining area and setting it ablaze.

  “This is getting serious,” Dusty said, and I knew what he meant. Once guys started burning stuff they wouldn’t stop. If they got the idea to start on the cellhouses we were in deep doodoo. Below us was one of the worst cellblocks in here and there was no doubt in my mind it’d be one of the next places to go. And we were locked in.

  Or so we thought.

  “It gets hinky, I can get us out,” Dusty said. He said it in a low voice like he didn’t want anyone else to hear what he said.

  Turns out, Dusty had a key would open the barred door. Bought it for a hundred green years ago from another inmate who’d somehow copped a wax impression from the master key that unlocked all the cells and had a duplicate made up over at the metal shop. Dusty said they changed the locks and the civilian who’d come in to make it had laid it down for a couple of minutes. There were several copies around here and there. Dusty’s was the only one in K and nobody knew he had it. Except us. Now.

  “Keep your mouths shut,” he said, saying it more for Manny’s benefit than mine. “I ain’t gonna use it unless we start going up in smoke and they don’t want to let us out.”

  The reason he bought it, he said, was he always had an idea in the back of his mind he might make a break sometime. So far, he hadn’t figured out just how to bring that off other than to get out of the dorm some night. He was pretty sure he could get past a couple of the front gates with it as well but beyond that he wasn’t sure. There was no way it’d fit the main door.

  Right now the fire seemed to be going pretty good over at the chow hall. There were inmates running around all over the place. Not a single guard was in sight. They must have gotten them all out. So far nobody, inmate or guard, had come up to K Dorm, let us know what was going on and everybody had a theory. The best one was that the inmates had taken over the entire institution and were holding fifteen guards hostage and the governor was on his way. State troopers and the National Guard were lined up elbow to elbow on the walls and were preparing to lob tear gas into all the cell houses and shoot every single prisoner the minute the governor gave the word. There was no way this could be confirmed from where we were in K since the only view was of the other side of the institution across the quad, the chow hall, hospital, library, the top of the roof of the auto and metal shops and a few other small buildings and offices. You couldn’t see the walls or the towers from where we were; they were all behind our building where there weren’t any windows.

  “You’re an idiot,” I said to the guy who came up with this theory, a weightlifter everybody called Clark Gable on account of the way his ears stuck out. I said it smiling. He was a mountain of muscles. “If they’ve taken over the joint how come we’re still stuck in here? All I see out there are thirty guys running around like squirrels.” It was true. For all the havoc they were creating over at the chow hall it looked like a small band of guys were doing all the destruction. Especially considering they had over two thousand of us locked up in here. It didn’t look like any major riot, not like some I’d been in when every asshole in the place was out loose and running around.

  Just when it looked like our friendly argument was going to develop into something unhealthy for yours truly, we heard a lot of yelling downstairs and then people running up the stairs. We all ran to the front. Across the way, the blacks were doing the same. In just seconds, there were fifteen, twenty guys outside our doors and they had hacksaws. The place went nuts.

  Dusty grabbed me and Manny and pulled us aside.

  “They get those doors open, the best thing to do is stay put. This riot is like every other fucking riot. Sooner or later the hacks will take the place back over and everyone who’s out of their cell or dorm is either going to get shot or clubbed in the face or gassed and the ones that don’t are going to the hole. Stay here and let these buttholes have their fun.”

  “He’s right,” I said to Manny. “The Man doesn’t like it when this kind of shit happens. You don’t want to be on the list when it’s all over. Just stay up here when everybody goes out. We’ll play some cards.”

  Good idea, except it didn’t work out that way. Almost the very instant the bars on the doors were sawed through somebody started setting fire to the mattresses in the back of the dorm.

  “Oh, shit,” we all said at the same time. Now we had to leave whether we wanted to or not, or else end up as Crispy Critters. We saw one of the arsonists come running up to the front, hollering and waving a rolled-up newspaper that was on fire, touching it to every pillow and blanket he ran by. It was ol’ Clark Gable, the simple fuck, and I think I remember seeing his sheet when I worked in I.D. Arson. Just ‘plying his trade. Smoke was rolling up behind him. He must have done a good job. We could already see the flames and our eyes were watering, not to mention we were hacking out pieces of lung with every breath. The door went down and guys were trampling each other trying to get out.

  “Wait!”

  Both Manny and I had started toward the gang that was killing themselves getting out of the dorm. We looked back at Dusty.

  “Where you going?”

  I looked at Manny, then back at Dusty and said, “Why, just out to stroll around the grounds. We figured that was better than getting toasted like a marshmallow.”

  “You guys got shanks?”

  That was dumb. When I realized what I was about to do I hit the side of my head with an open palm. “Yeah, you’re right, Dusty. Damn!”

  Quickly, I ran down what we were talking about to Manny. “It ain’t the hacks we got to worry about right now. It’s other inmates. Half these bozos turn into sharks, this kind of shit goes down. Sharks that smell blood and go wacko. Some of these guys will cut you just because you’re standing next to them or you look like their ex-wife.” I looked closely at him, squinting my eyes. “Espe
cially you, Manny. You for sure look like somebody’s ex. I was you, I’d carry a bazooka.”

  Dusty ran over to his bunk and grabbed his pillow and began to rip the stitching. “Here!” He ran back over and pushed something in our hands. Laundry pins. One for each of us. Laundry pins are big brass pins they use to fasten the large canvas sacks they use for laundry. They look like Baby Huey’s diaper pin and when you bend them out they make about a foot-and-a-half-long shank. It’s the favorite weapon for most of us, next to a filed-down spoon. They only let you have one eating utensil, a soup spoon, that you keep with you all the time. No knives or forks. You carry your spoon with you everywhere, twenty-four hours a day. Lots of guys hone down the handle on the concrete cell floors, sharpen it, and it makes a great weapon. Of course, you get caught with it it’s a week in the hole, so you try and cop an extra one, one that’s for show and tell, just your regular spoon and one you’ve made into a shank that you keep hidden.

  There were lots of weapons in K Dorm. More than in the other cell houses because to get into K in the first place you had to have a squeaky clean record. That meant they considered us less dangerous and less likely to be armed, so we didn’t catch near as many shakedowns as the rest of the population.

  I had such a spoon, taped inside one of the hollow legs of my bunk. I ran and got it as well. You couldn’t have too many weapons during a riot. Then we booked. Everybody else had already cleared out and coming down the stairs we saw they’d set fire to the cell house below us as well. There was no way the building would burn itself—it was solid concrete—but the danger was smoke inhalation.

  We went outside, moved toward the middle of the compound between K and the chow hall. Guys were running everywhere, screaming and laughing and yelling and just going ape shit in general.

  “Stick together, guys,” Dusty said and Manny and I shook our heads in agreement.