Because Charles Makley was the absolute picture of the happy fat man, he was often able to get out of a tight spot without having to resort to rough stuff. His looks and manner also made it easy to underestimate his capacity for self-defense. Out in the yard one morning I saw a bohunk named Markowski backing Charley against a wall as a bunch of other cons were looking on. Markowski had had it in for Fat Charley ever since losing all his cigarettes to him in a crap game a week earlier. I couldn’t hear what they were saying at that distance, but Markowski was poking Charley in the chest with a finger and running his mouth hard. Charley was talking calmly and apparently trying to keep things from getting out of hand, but I knew he wasn’t going to take too many more of those pokes.
As I started toward them, Markowski jabbed him one time too many. In a blink Charley snatched him by the shirt and the hair and spun him around and rammed his head into the wall so hard it must’ve rattled the paperweights on the warden’s desk over in the next building. Even as the bohunk dropped to his knees and fell over, everyone was moving away from him like ripples from a splash, moving in that deceptively fast-walking way of convicts. In a matter of seconds, there was nobody within twenty yards of Markowski as he lay there with his brains oozing out his ears. Red and I covered Charley’s flanks and back as we headed for the other end of the yard, in case any of Markowski’s pals might want to make it their fight too, but nobody made a move on us.
We mixed into a crowd of convicts and looked back to see the yard hacks converging around Markowski. Charley looked almost rueful. He said it disturbed him deeply when a man refused to listen to reason. He said reason was the bedrock of orderly human relations.
Goddamn right it is, Red said. Anybody wants to argue the point I’ll kick him in the nuts.
That was Red Hamilton for you. His real name was John. He’d come to M City a year or two after I did. A beefy, big-boned guy with rusty-red hair and huge hands, he was only two or three years older than me but he looked closer to Charley’s age. He’d worked his way up the robbery ladder to bank jobs and was doing fairly well until one night when he was on his way to a date with some girl and realized he’d left his wallet at home. So he decided to pull a filling station stickup to get some quick cash. He was holding his piece on the attendant with one hand and rifling the till with the other when two police cars pulled into the station to gas up and the cops saw what was going on. Next thing Red knew he had four guns pointed at him and the jig was up. He still hadn’t gotten over the embarrassment of being taken down on such a two-bit job. It was his second robbery conviction and he got twenty-five years.
Little on the harsh side, if you ask me, he said. There was only twenty-two bucks in the till. That’s more than a year for every fucken dollar.
He had Charley beat in the missing fingers department, lacking part of both the index and middle fingers of his right hand. Naturally some of the guys called him Three-finger Jack. He said he’d lost them in a sledding accident when he was a kid, but some of the stories that followed him into M City told it differently. One version had it that he’d been a bagman for the mob in Kansas City, got caught skimming and paid for it with the fingers. According to another, a St. Louis gambler caught Red putting the blocks to his woman and opened fire on both of them, killing her and clipping Red’s fingers before he got hold of his own piece and shot the gambler through the wishbone.
When I told Red the St. Louis story he laughed and said it was a new one to him but he liked it and might start using it. Those hands of his were so large he could still work a trigger with the stub of his index finger.
He wasn’t one to talk about himself very much, but he did divulge that, like Charley, he’d been married once. He was still somewhat bitter about the divorce settlement. If the bitch had fucked me as good in bed as she did in court, he said, I never would’ve divorced her.
As dangerous as they were, Red and Charley were basically cool types and usually managed to avoid trouble with the hacks. Charley thought the Red Shirts were courageous fools to fight so openly against the system. The way he looked at it, the more attention you drew to yourself the worse your chances of ever breaking out. We had talked a lot about escape, but every plan I came up with had too many holes in it to suit them. They weren’t afraid to take chances but neither were they reckless, which is what my breakout plans always seemed to them. On the other hand, they hadn’t been able to come up with a worthy plan either.
My skeleton key took them by surprise. I’d been making it on the QT and now that it worked I had every intention of using it.
Fat Charley said the key was a nice piece of work but it didn’t constitute an escape plan. All it did was get us out of the cells. Then what?
Then we cut the bars out of a cell house window with the saw blade Russell had swiped from the tin shop. We’d let ourselves down on sheets tied together and sneak over to the admin building and jump a guard or two and disarm them and take them hostage. We’d force the hacks posted on the doors to open up and let us out or we’d shoot their pals.
It’s a plan, said Red. Risky bitch but it’s a plan.
Charley said it was too hastily conceived, there were too many unknown factors. Some of the inmates on the row might’ve been aware of me trying the key on my door night after night and one of them could’ve finked us already.
I said if somebody had finked the warden would’ve come down on me by now.
Not necessarily, he said. Could be the warden was only waiting for us to try the break so he could hit us with everything in the book. In any case, the wall guards would be sure to spot us as we went down the sheets like a bunch of cartoon convicts.
No, they wouldn’t—the wall under the window we’d cut through was the only one not in view of any of the towers.
It felt great to have all the answers. I mean I was ready. I let every man have his say, then said I was going out that night and whoever wanted to come with me was welcome.
Russell said count him in. Everyone else nodded except for Red and Charley. Red ran his three-fingered hand through his hair and sighed, then said What the hell, me too.
Charley looked glum. He said his intuition told him the plan was folly but that we’d caught him in a moment of philosophical weakness. To paraphrase Socrates, he said, the unrisked life is not worth living. I’m in too.
Who’s Socrates, John Burns wanted to know, some outlaw you partnered with? Burns was doing life for murder. Sounds Mexican, he said.
Sounds like a guy with no use for insurance, Red said, winking at Charley.
Charley always did his best to be patient with the untutored. He told Burns that Socrates was most definitely an outlaw, a true enemy of the state who had been executed.
Tough break, Burns said. What state was he enemy of? Texas I bet. They’re quick to fry your ass in Texas.
Even Charlie couldn’t resist. Oklahoma, he said.
Oh hell, Burns said. Them Okies are just as bad.
I’d be the last one to call myself an educated man, but it’s always been fairly obvious to me why most guys in prison are in prison.
That night I unlocked my cell and then let out the others. Russell and I took turns with the saw blade, working like we were in a contest, while some of the guys started rolling up bed sheets and tying them together to make shinny ropes.
We’d almost finished cutting through the first bar when the guards came charging in, all of them armed with shotguns, yelling for us to drop on our bellies and put our hands behind our heads—Now now now! By chance, Red and Charley had just gone into their cells to get their sheets to add to the shinny rope. When they heard the hacks come crashing in they shut their cell doors before the guards even looked their way. Like I said, very cool customers Red and Charley.
Charley’s hunch had been right—somebody on the row finked, and the warden had been waiting to catch us in the act. A lookout in an adjoining building had been keeping an eye on our tier through the windows.
Every man caught
outside his cell was punished with a beating and a month in solitary. Except for me. The warden knew about the cell key and he instructed Captain Evans and his apes to give me an extra-special treatment before clapping me in the hole for two months. Big Bertha smiled like he’d been given a present.
I’m sure the warden thought I wouldn’t come out alive, and he wasn’t the only one. I was conscious enough to hear the guards making bets on it as they dragged me down to the solitary cages. My vision was blurred for days and I pissed bloody fire for more than a week and it was longer than that before my ears stopped ringing, but I never doubted I’d make it.
I admit I wasn’t looking my handsome best when they took me out of the cage at the end of that stretch. I was the color of the newly dead and my skin was scabby and felt loose on my bones. It would be another week before I could walk right again. As a pair of hacks were helping me across the yard toward the cell house, I saw the warden watching us from his office window, and in a crackly voice I started singing “The Best Things in Life Are Free.” I could faintly hear inmates laughing from the cell house windows. One of the guards said to knock off the shit but the other one told his partner to take it easy. The warden’s mouth looked like a tight little scar and then he yanked the drape closed.
While I’d been in the hole, Red found out who ratted on us about the key and had attended to the matter. The warden had tried to protect the fink’s identity by transferring him among two dozen other guys from our cell house to another. But Red still learned who it was, and he put out the word to some friends in the guy’s new block. A few days later the fink somehow went tumbling over the second-tier railing and his head shattered on the concrete floor. More than a hundred inmates had been out on the tiers at the time but none of them witnessed what happened. We heard that the warden was in a fury but there was nothing he could do except write it up as an accident.
By that time, John had been at M City for about three years. He’d been transferred from Pendleton a few months before the inmate labor strike, when Russell and I got caught trying to escape by way of the rooftops, but he was never a part of any of my attempts to bust out. Not while he was inside the walls, I mean.
He’d arrived a few days after I’d been given two weeks in the hole for I-forget-what, so I didn’t know he was at M City until I came out of solitary. Russell and I were crossing the yard and I spotted him tossing a baseball with some of the guys on the prison team.
I went over and said Well now, look what the cat dragged in.
I was so skinny and beat-up it took him a second to recognize me—then he grinned and we shook hands. Christ, Harry, he said, it looks like they really gave you the business.
I said I’d be right as rain in no time and introduced him to Russell. Physically, he didn’t look too different from the way he had at Pendleton, maybe a little huskier. But he had a little more twist in his smile and a lot more iron in the eyes. I asked what kind of trouble he’d made at the reformatory to get sent to M City, and he said no trouble, he’d requested the transfer.
Russell said You asked for the pen? Goddamn, man, how long you been brain-damaged?
John gave him that cocky smile.
Later on he told me his request for transfer actually had to do with a couple of things that happened almost back to back. First of all, his wife divorced him. During the first three years he was in Pendleton she’d often gone to visit, but then the visits began to fall off, and her letters became long complaints about being lonely and feeling that she was wasting her youth and so on. He wasn’t surprised when she filed for divorce, but it hurt like hell just the same. He said he hadn’t known what loneliness was until he got the divorce papers. He couldn’t put out of his mind that she was still so geographically nearby but was as removed from him as the moon.
A month after the divorce, he got another kick in the gut. He’d already served about five years of that ridiculous ten-to-twenty he got for a first-time conviction on a minor stickup and assault, and although he’d caused his share of trouble in his first two or three years at the reformatory, his record since then had been pretty good. What’s more, his partner in crime had been paroled two years earlier. John thought his own parole would be a cinch. It hit him hard when the board said no dice.
It amuses me that so many people like to think he would’ve gone straight if either his wife hadn’t left him or if he’d been granted parole at that Pendleton hearing. People are always saying If only this had happened, if only that, if only, if only…. That’s parlor-game stuff. The only thing that matters is what actually happens, not what should’ve or would’ve or could’ve. Like Fat Charley used to say, in any endeavor that’s over and done with, what could’ve happened…did.
John was convinced the Pendleton parole board had it in for him on account of his early troublemaking in the joint, and he was sure they’d turn him down again next time. He figured if he transferred to M City he might get paroled sooner. His official reason for requesting to go to the penitentiary was that it had a better baseball team than Pendleton’s and playing for it would boost his chance of becoming a pro when he got out. Boss Miles thought John was being foolish, but he okayed the transfer.
It didn’t take long for him to pass muster with Red and Charley and Russ. He also started buddying with Van Meter again, but my attitude toward the scarecrow hadn’t changed and never would, and John knew better than to bring Van Meter anywhere near me.
He tried hard to stay out of trouble with the hacks, and all of us encouraged him to keep his record as clean as he could. He would go before the parole board much sooner than any of the rest of us, and if he stuck to the straight and narrow he stood a good chance of being let out. But in a place where there were rules against nearly everything, it was hard for him not to break one now and then. It was usually for something petty—having a cigarette lighter in his cell, having a razor, gambling, stealing tomatoes from the garden house. I don’t think he did more than a one-day stretch in the hole until he was caught putting it to one of the cell house punks. That episode got him three days.
It wasn’t the first punk John put it to and it wouldn’t be the last, and I was always disappointed in him about that. Red and Charley and I were among the few guys I knew at M City who never used punks. Russell used them only to get sucked off, but as far as I was concerned any kind of sex with a punk was degrading. Whenever I got so worked up that the urge couldn’t be ignored or willed away, I’d lie in the dark with my horn in my hand and think about Mary’s ass and bang, in less than a minute it was done with. Beating off isn’t the best sex in the world but it beats—ha ha—using a punk. John used to give me a song and dance about how if he didn’t have frequent sex he’d get terrible headaches. He claimed that jerking off didn’t help, only sex with somebody else. He made it sound like doctor’s orders. I always thought it was a lot of hooey.
As long as we’re this close to the subject, it’s as good a time as any to say how sick and tired I am of being asked about John’s dick. Ever since he was put on display in the Chicago morgue, the rumor’s been going around that he had one like a smokestack, and I’ve been asked a hundred times if it’s true. I hear there’s even a Tijuana Bible about him and Mae West in which he lugs his hard-on around in a wheelbarrow. Jesus. I wish I’d done what Russell did one time when a reporter who was interviewing him from a chair at his cell door asked how big John’s dick really was. Russ stood up and pulled out his pecker and held it through the bars in the guy’s face and said It was about like this.
The reporter jerked away from the bars so fast he fell over in the chair. He ended up writing that Russell was a degenerate personality and had the look of a born criminal.
Ten to one that none of the guys who have written about John’s dick ever saw it with his own eyes. Well I did, and I mean at full mast. Mary did too—she was with me at the time and I’ll get to that part of the story when I get to it. Suffice it to say for now that John’s tool was, to use Mary’s word, impressi
ve. However—and as much as I hate to toot my own horn, ha ha—I have to be completely honest and say that he had nothing on yours truly. As you may have heard, the guys in the gang called me Pete, and why do you suppose? Because one Sunday afternoon at M City I’d been napping and dreaming about fooling around in a swimming pool with Norma Shearer and Greta Garbo, the three of us naked as jays, and I woke up to find Charley and Red and Russell at my cell door and grinning at the erection sticking out of my shorts. Russell and Red applauded and Charley said Good heavens man, that’s no peter that’s a nine pin. He always called a dick a peter. So they took to calling me Big Pete for laughs. After a while it was just Pete. Later on when Mary asked how I picked up the nickname and I told her, she waggled her brow and said she should’ve known. With her, though, I was always Harry.
As I was saying, John found it a lot harder to toe the line in M City than he’d thought it would be, but like Red and Charley, he was able to stay out of serious trouble. And being the easy guy to like that he was, he had a lot of pals.
One of them was a kid named Jenkins who was doing life for murder. The guy was friendly and a pretty good singer but there was something about him that struck me as a little off. I asked around and came to find out he’d hustled pansies on the outside. There was a rumor he was punking for John but I didn’t know if it was true—I didn’t ask John and he didn’t say. In any case, Jenkins had a swell-looking sister, and the minute John saw her picture he went ga-ga. Jenkins said she was married but unhappy about it and would soon be filing for divorce. So John started writing to her. Next thing I knew he had his own snapshot of her taped on his wall. Like I’ve said, the man was cool in all things except women. He once said it himself: his dick was his weakness.
Handsome Harry Page 7