Chapter 26: “Exit, stage right”
The Warden wants to make this a quick and clean transaction. He’s impatient to get the FBI out. They never fail to give him the jitters, even in the best of times. “Hoover’s Maids,” he calls them out of earshot, thinly smiles, imagining them in aprons using Hoover vacuums. He’s thoroughly irked and feels jerked around because he didn’t know about the escape beforehand. More so now that he knows that Davitt did and that he’s somehow linked with the FBI.
“No COs means no more Feds!” Jared has got to go.
The Feds, on the other hand, were ready for a long morning. They were eager to grill Jared and fry his ass. Although he couldn’t have known they were waiting, they’re royally peeved that he spoiled their fun. Most have sat tedious hours in ambush, frustrated by raiders who failed to show for their appointed crime. “Bunglers! Weed heads! As stupid as gooks!” With Jared’s escapade, many were anticipating a career highlight. Last night was a potential coup de grace, a dramatic and chilling expose of how hapless the Resistance movement is. Cameras and a fist of reliable reporters were in tow. “Believe it! Burston, too.” This Jared heard only much later.
As Jared is led in—walk being an inaccurate term, for he clops along like a camel in tow, still being a shade below awake—he fails to recognize Agent Brennan, the emcee of his arrest night. He’s deeply spaced out. He can’t decide whether last night was real or just a long, ever too long, bad dream. Sally?
The Warden wastes no time in taking charge. “Gentlemen,” he nods to the Feds, “this is my House and”—he wants to say “and I’ll vacuum it myself” but skips the sarcasm—“and I’ll put things in order.”
From the first, the Warden has seen Jared as a paper tiger—just another punk who’s come in with a big street rep, only to spend his time hiding under his bunk blankets all day.
“Mr. Jennings, you’re being transferred to another penitentiary.”
Anticipating his question, which Jared isn’t awake enough to ask, he gives the answer, “I’m not at liberty to say where. Just that these gentlemen are here to escort you.”
A full twenty seconds of group silence elapses before Jared realizes that this is all the Warden is going to say.
“Okay,” Jared half-mutters as if his affirmation meant something, his compliance was necessary.
One hack taps Jared’s right shoulder and when he’s slow to move two of them each grabs a forearm and an armpit and jerk him back and away. The Feds follow. As is their way, two agents move with haste to make him theirs. They spin Jared around like square-dance partners dosey-doeing and quickly yank him outside the office into the corridor and hustle him down the hallway. Control has all the gates open, so they quickly hand him off to a third agent who’s ready to wrap and bind this Special Delivery bundle. He decorates Jared in leg, waist and hand chains; twines his hands with steel handcuffs—in front, not around his back. Smirk, “Comfy?”
Done, much like a priestly blessing, they palm his head, push it down, bending him in half so that he isn’t bruised as they not so gently but not too roughly insert him in the idling unmarked car. Zoom! Burning rubber, not stopping for a last genuflection before the Tower, not measurably slowing to check other traffic wending towards Millston— zoom!—they are on a burn, juiced and happy like the Merry Pranksters on the hippie’s mythic bus, “Furthur.”
Jared’s awareness of what’s actually happening sharpens when the face of Agent Brennan comes into focus, brightens—small mouth, thin teeth—a ferret’s grin. Or is it a leer?
Agent Brennan’s in the front seat again. Far out! Hey, wake up, man! It’s a TV special rerun of “The Capture of The Four”—oops, Three! The weirdness of last night and now this morning’s flip-flop of “Take him away, he’s all yours!” twists and turns Jared’s stomach. He leans forward, turns his face towards a side window and starts to dry heave.
Embarrassed, Jared struggles for some self-control, tries to ignore his stomach’s rebellion. With a great effort, he attempts to throw out a falsely friendly, sarcastic “Hi!” but can’t. Fucking-A. He’s so soundly bushwhacked that all he can do is fall back into the seat, droop and let things just happen. Karma, man, karma.
It’s Brennan who takes up the conversation.
“Nice to see you again, Mr. Jennings,” spoken coolly, not revealing his true feelings or intentions. “I thought I should brief you on where you’re going.”
Jared is too blitzed to really care.
“You’re going on the Ride. Do you know what that means?”
Jared’s silence is received as a no.
“Listen closely. You’ll be given an opportunity to obtain firsthand information on the best and the worst of our federal system.” Brennan’s words drip with self-amused sarcasm.
“Someone in Washington must like you. Not every con gets this special treatment.”
What are they saying? What do they mean?
The Ride. It’s a phrase similar to Circuit Rider, which was used during Colonial America to describe the preachers who rode by horse to reach the scattered communities of frontier parishioners. They had no fixed parsonage. They were on “God’s Circuit.” Jared is about to experience the secular version of that divine mission.
The Ride. Jared will be spending the next phase of Doing Time—for him to try and remember it as days or months or what part of 1971, well, it just won’t work that way—in county jails, state and federal pens, sometimes in a Big House, at others on a Farm—those minimum security barracks that fringe such places as Leavenworth. He’ll visit most of them on stop and go’s, one-night stands, all the while speeding through a multitude of states, constantly on the move, nowhere for more than ten days at a given lockup.
The Ride will make it impossible for his family or friends to reach him, visit him, or directly send him mail. By the time a prison official receives a request from family, friends, even his lawyers, he’s already en route to somewhere else. Routinely they respond, “All we know, ma’am, is where he’s been.”
Only a clandestine visit with his mother, arranged by Agent Brennan, begins to calm the rumors that he’s been murdered. She meets with him in some county jail visiting room in a town he doesn’t know and one that she’s sworn not to reveal. It’s all cloaked heavily in Cold War “Loose lips sink ships!” dramatics, with hushed mentions of “Mr. Hoover” and praise about her deceased patriotic husband—“Lieutenant Jennings was a Republican, wasn’t he, ma’am?” His mother is profoundly grateful and can hardly stop thanking Agent Brennan for “your act of kindness.” Brennan, pleased with his own cleverness, outflanks the Irish wiles in her. “From Galway, you don’t say. Blessed be, Mr. Brennan, that’s where the Jennings are from!”
As calculated, this contrivance ensures her silent collaboration. She’s shrewdly recruited as a rumor-calming agent. In her heart she truly believes that agent Brennan is her ally. Gleefully, the agent knows that this visit secures the theft of her son.
Karma.
Kill the dove! Page 26