Death Row Breakout

by Edward Bunker

  Rube was waiting, eyes aglow, grinning gleefully.

  “It sounds like it’s worth a try,” Roger finally said.

  Big Strunk reappeared, rubbing a towel through his wet hair with one hand and carrying a stack of New Yorkers with the other.

  “Here you go, homeboy,” he said, putting them on the bars.

  “My turn to shower,” Rube said.

  “Yeah, go wash that funky body,” Strunk said.

  When Rube was gone, Strunk asked, “He tell you about it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What do you think?”

  “It’s a shot… maybe a long shot… but better’n sittin’ around jackin’ off.”

  A young man walked past behind Strunk. “Who’s that?” Roger asked.

  “That’s Robillard.” Strunk turned. “Hey, Robillard, come here.”

  The young man came back and Strunk introduced him. Roger thought he looked sixteen. Actually, he was nineteen. He’d been raised in a foster home. When he was eighteen, he graduated from foster care to the street on his own, poorly educated and untrained. Somebody offered him $500 to steal a car. He did so – and ten minutes later a Highway Patrolman turned the red light on him. It was Robillard’s first crime, and he was terrified. When the Highway Patrolman walked up to him, Robillard shot him dead and was sentenced to die under the felony murder rule. After Robillard walked away, Strunk said, “He’s scared. But what he’s most scared of is that he’ll piss his pants or break and have to be carried into the gas chamber.”

  “Shit, I worry about that, too,” Roger said. “Don’t you?”

  “Man, I don’t think about it. And when I do, I stop real quick and concentrate on this breakout working.”

  From the front they heard one of the black voices from the night before. It was loud, “Hey, motherfucker, get over here.”

  Strunk rolled his eyes to the skies and leaned back to look down the tier. “Those two fuckin’ niggers. Damn!”

  “What’re they doin’?”

  “Callin’ Robillard over. They want him to pass something,” Strunk raised a hand and waved, obviously getting Robillard’s attention, and then signaling him to go along with the demand.

  “I heard those fools last night,” Roger said. “I was gonna say somethin’ until Rube signaled me off.”

  “We can’t do anything up here – but even if we started yellin’, we could wind up getting a cell move over to the Adjustment Center, or around the other side. Wouldn’t that be a bitch? Be ready to break out and they move you out of your cell, maybe to another building. With my luck, they’d put the nigger in my cell and he’d be the motherfucker to get out.”

  Robillard appeared behind Strunk. “What happened?” Strunk asked.

  “He wanted me to carry something down the tier. I wasn’t going to do it until you signaled me. I feel kinda sorry for the way black people been fucked over, but that’s no reason to disrespect folks. Fuck him in his ass.”

  “Yeah… yeah… yeah – but we can’t be that way right now.”

  “Hey, home,” Strunk said to Roger, “I gotta get some exercise. I’m gonna walk some. You’ll be out with us next week. Classification is Friday.”

  “They’re gonna classify me, huh?”

  “Yeah, minimum custody.”

  Strunk and Robillard passed back and forth a couple of times, eventually joined by Rube, who was fresh from the shower. He took a couple of turns, talking to them, and then came over to Roger’s bars. “What happened? Those young niggers making you warm?”

  “Not really, but, man, that shit could get old real fast. All that paranoid self-pity – plus all that murder mouth, offin’ this motherfucker and that nigger, like it was a fuckin’ movie they were in. Bein’ baaad is cool.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Rube said, “but I do know they snitched on each other ten minutes into the police station… tryin’ to get down first. There was a third guy, and he walked free because he didn’t say a word except that he wanted a lawyer.”

  “What was the crime?”

  “Brave deal. Out in Oakwood where the Mexicans were having a war with the Shoreline Crips, remember that?”

  Roger nodded. It had been in the newspaper before he was paroled. In one square mile in a five-month period there had been forty shootings and a dozen deaths.

  “They saw some young Mexican bopping along the street with his chick – so they drove by and opened up; spray and pray. They missed the guy, but they killed the girl and she was five months pregnant. They also got an old white woman in her house. She was the neighborhood nice lady. So they gave these two fools the death penalty under that new federal law.”

  “Anyway,” Rube continued, “when they get on your nerves, before you open your mouth, remember that we might get outta here in a couple of weeks if you keep it shut.”

  “Yeah, you’re right. If you can, I damn sure can.”

  “What’re you sayin’?”

  “Man, you know you’re five times the loudmouth I am.”

  “Bullshit!”

  The dinging bell announced the elevator’s approach.

  “Who else is up here that I know?”

  “On this side, just me and Strunk. No, there’s good snitching Rudy Wright.”

  “You mean hot head Rudy.”

  “That’s him.”

  “How do you treat him?”

  Rube put his finger to his lips and leaned forward. “The outside cut is right in front of his cell. His bars are cut, too.”

  “How’d that happen?”

  “He moved into the cell. That’s where Gilmore was. He just about had the bars cut when they took him downstairs.”

  “LOCK UP! LOCK UP!” a guard yelled from the front, banging his key for punctuation and emphasis.

  “Hey, boss,” Big Strunk yelled. “We only been out thirty-five minutes.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know. I’ll give you extra tomorrow.”

  Rube said, “That’s old man Blair. He’s ok.”

  “I don’t think he’s ever mistreated anybody in his life.”

  “See you mañana, brother,” Jimmy Rube said, tapping the bars and heading toward his own cage.

  Roger heard the gates slam and the bar drop. He thought of Rudy Wright. Rudy the heavyweight fighter – slow, clumsy and with a glass chin. Rudy the ignorant. Rudy the pervert who liked to suck dick and fuck young white boys. He muscled one kid, who stabbed him several times. Rudy was transferred to Folsom. He disliked Folsom. Its inhabitants tended toward grizzled old warriors who came out of their cells not caring if it rained dog shit or they died before lockup. Rudy wanted a transfer to a prison with younger convicts. To get a transfer, he testified for the prosecution in a prison murder. Despite Rudy’s testimony, the jury acquitted the defendant. Still, Rudy got his transfer. Alas, the youths were unimpressed by a big black rat. Rudy killed one of them. The jury found him guilty and ordered him put to death. Here he was, two or three cells on the right. With his bars cut? Jesus, what strange alliances are made by circumstance. Roger’s crime partner in the Death Row breakout was someone he found totally despicable.

  Instead of unlocking more convicts to exercise, Sergeant Blair opened the gate for the Mail Room Officer. “Listen up,” the man called. “If you want this certified mail, you goddamn sign for it. I’m not having the Post Office gimme any more shit about it because some idiot doesn’t want to sign his name.”

  Roger wondered what was behind the declaration. He started to read a New Yorker’s Table of Contents, with part of his mind aware of voices near the front. The figure of the Mail Room Officer passed Roger’s cell and stopped farther back. He then went the other way and disappeared.

  After a minute or so, Rudy Wright called out, “Hey, Big Strunk.”

  “Yeah, Rudy?”

  “What does ‘judgement af…firmed mean?”

  “It means you go home tomorrow,” called a previously unheard voice, eliciting a chorus of titters along the tier.

  �
��Aw, man, quit jivin’,” Rudy said. “It’s bad news, ain’t it?”

  “Yeah, it’s bad news,” Big Strunk said.

  Instead of absolute loathing for Rudy, who was everything despicable by convict values as well as those of society, Roger found some pity for the stupid brute. His absolute ignorance made him somehow less culpable. He was, like everyone, more or less what he had been taught by the teachers of life. What was that hoary bromide? “To understand all is to forgive all.” That fell short of being a truth, but it came close enough to make him think. He could imagine Rudy’s childhood. If God had a scale that weighed what most convicts had inflicted to what they had suffered, no doubt their own suffering would outweigh what they had meted out. Roger felt a strange new compassion for Rudy Wright.

  *

  Days turned into weeks. Cutting the outer bars was excruciatingly slow. Only during exercise could they work on it. The bridge game was cover. Seated cross-legged on the floor, Jellico rested his back against the outer bars and used the piece of hacksaw when the gun-walk guard was on the other side. Al Salas and Charlie Jackson were over there. The water had been forced out of their toilet by placing a pillow over its top, sitting on it and bouncing up and down. Roger did the same on this side because the bridge game was taking place directly in front of his cell. When the water was out of the toilets, they had a ‘telephone’ to the other side. The moment the gun-walk guard started to move, Salas or Jackson sounded the alarm through the toilet, and Roger relayed it to Jellico. When Jimmy Rube, Big Strunk, Robillard and Roger came out to exercise, they did calisthenics on the tier. To the guards watching from the front, it appeared quite natural. They relied on the gun-walk officer to patrol the tier. Rudy or Jellico kept his head in the toilet. The moment the gunman moved on the other side, he got the warning and relayed it with a loud cough. Even though they might saw for only a few seconds in a whole hour, it was hard for Roger to believe that nobody heard the hacksaw – and even harder to believe that nobody snitched.

  Then it was done. The breakout would come the next stormy night, when rain would hide the sound of the hacksaw on the window.

  The storm came four days later.

  “Tonight,” said Rube when they were out to shower.

  “What about the hacksaw blade? It’s getting dull.”

  “Oh, yeah. Why don’t you run down to the hardware store for a new one?”

  “We’ll get it cut,” Strunk said. “We’ll have time, from midnight to eight in the morning. Nobody comes up here until they change shifts.”

  “By then it’ll be broad daylight.”

  “Oh shit! That’s right.”

  For the first time, Roger understood that Strunk was a little bit retarded. A man who planned escape for eighteen months and never thought of when the sun would rise had to be retarded.

  “We’ve got five hours for sure,” Jimmy Rube said. “I can chew through it in five hours.”

  “Okay, five hours. That’s an awful dull blade and an awful thick bar.”

  “So whaddya wanna do? Give it up? Go back to our cells?”

  “Hell, no!”

  “Wait and give ’em a chance to find the cut bars?”

  “Nope.”

  “So we throw the fuckin’ dice and hope for seven.”

  “Don’t use dice as an example,” Strunk said. “I always throw snake eyes.”

  “Who’s on duty tonight?”

  “Sergeant Mencken and Deputy Dog.”

  “Is that right?” Although nobody knew for sure, it was believed that Sergeant Mencken was the executioner, he who took the extra pay to dip the gauze bag of cyanide pellets into the bucket of acid, creating cyanide gas. As for Deputy Dog, his nickname bespoke his nature.

  “Do you think he’ll make those check calls?”

  “If he don’t, he’s in bad fuckin’ trouble,” Big Strunk said. “I don’t like the motherfucker anyway. He’s ready to kill me for a hundred and fifty dollars added to his paycheck.”

  “Is that all they pay him?”

  “That’s what I heard. They give him a day off, too.”

  “He’ll make the check calls,” Jimmy Rube said. “What would you do if you had a knife at your throat… and the guy holding it was under a death sentence already?”

  Sergeant Blair banged a big key against the front bars. “Grab a hole! Lockup!”

  Roger and his partners looked at each other and nodded. As Roger passed Rudy’s cell, he grinned and winked and gave a slight thumbs-up signal. “Tonight,” he said, embarrassed for his duplicity. Rudy was the lowest form of scum, a pervert child molester and a stoolpigeon. Yet Rudy was the fulcrum of escape; his cell bars were cut and he could crawl out. Indeed, there was no way to stop him short of calling the guard. He was big and strong and could be useful to Big Strunk in the takeover. Still, Roger tasted his own hypocrisy. It was a trait he particularly despised.

  Roger entered his cell. The security bar came down and he heard the cell gates being locked. He was urinating with one hand on the wall when the key turned in his cell. “G’night Harper,” said Sergeant Blair.

  “G’night, Sarge,” Roger said, adding “goodbye, too,” in his mind.

  Later, when Fast Eddie picked up the food trays, he commented, “Nobody’s hungry. I hope it ain’t the flu.”

  “Naw, just not hungry,” Roger said, having barely touched the tray’s contents.

  The shift changed. The 4:00pm to midnight crew came on. After the 4:30 count, the Sergeant passed out the mail. Roger got nothing. Richard Romero had eight letters. He had sharp, saturnine features and demonic good looks. Women wrote him from all over the world. Maybe I didn’t kill enough people, Roger thought. The wryness of his thought was belied by the surge of anguish he felt when he remembered what he’d done.

  “Hey, Roger,” Rudy Wright called after the mail was passed out.

  “Yeah, what’s up?”

  “They sent me an execution date,” Rudy said. “June fifth. That’s sixty-two days.”

  “We go together. I got one for the same day,” came the seldom heard voice of Merkouris, who had killed his ex-wife, her new boyfriend and her nine-year-old son from a previous marriage. Afterward, he’d gone into a bar, ordered two drinks, “Bourbon for me. Scotch for my wife.” He then pulled her head from a hatbox and put it on the plank. The bar emptied. The cops came. The jury turned thumbs down on an insanity defense and now, fourteen years later, the appeals were over and the trial court had issued a death warrant. He was a hundred pounds heavier than when he arrived. Roger remembered, for he had been in the county jail when the trial was in progress.

  “It’s gonna be crowded in there,” Jimmy Rube said. “Rabbit Carson got a June 5th execution date.”

  “Who’s Rabbit Carson?” someone asked.

  “A dude over in the Adjustment Center,” Strunk said: then, “Hey, Rudy, maybe they’ll let you sit on Merkouris’s lap.”

  Scattered laughter; silence from Rudy and Merkouris. Roger smiled. Sick shit, he thought, this bizarre talk of dates with death. Being on Death Row had a surreal aspect, a dream quality, something unbelievable. He’d imagined himself in prison, but not Death Row. It was part of the reason he’d chosen to heist drug dealers and pimps; nobody went to Death Row for killing scumbags. Nobody cared that they were dead – not that he had planned to kill anyone unless forced. As he leafed through the pages of events, he was unable to see where his decisions could have been different.

  The flashing light told him the TV sets were turned on. He reached for the tiny earphones and the remote channel changer. It was his week to run things. He went through the channels and stopped on American Movie Classics. Brando and Karl Malden in “One Eyed Jacks”. All right; maybe it would take his mind off things for a couple hours.

  Ten o’clock. Another movie, Astaire dancing through London in “Royal Wedding.” It made Roger ache to realize he would never see London, or anywhere else. Tonight’s breakout was barely possible. The odds against them were immense.
If they got out, imagine the manhunt for a bunch of condemned killers. He envisioned every Peace officer for hundreds of miles joining the hunt. It would take a miracle to get away. Shit, it would take a miracle to get out. In fact, it was already miraculous that they had cut their way through two sets of bars under the nose of the guards.

  Then he wondered how many would go. How many could they let go? They had never talked about how many were going or who would be let out of their cells. It was too late to talk about now – until after things started to happen.

  The movie was going off when the elevator bell rang out. The shift was changing. After that things would kick off.

  The TV went off. A minute later the tier gate opened. The flashlight beams bounced from bars and across concrete floors. The new shift was coming down the tier, taking the count. As the footsteps got close, Roger shut his eyes and felt the light flash momentarily into his cell. When he heard them go out his armpits were slick with sweat. He could see rain running down the high windows.

  The outer door opened and closed. The whir of the elevator marked its descent. Nobody would come up until morning. It had to start quickly. It was going to take hours to cut that fat window bar with half of a used hacksaw blade.

  A black shadow showed on the outer bars. A moment later the gun-walk guard went by on rubber soles. He looked at the cells and the figures under blankets. Nobody sleeping, Roger thought, not up here. What about the French death penalty: you never knew when it would happen. Nobody told you. They came for you in the night. Damn, nobody at all sleeps there, thought Roger.

  Down the tier he heard the hollow whump of someone jumping his rump on a pillow over the toilet, driving out the water to open the phone line to the other side.