I wasn’t thinking of what we were about to do—break into someone’s house—or maybe it still didn’t feel quite real, as if something would derail us yet, that we’d play this out until the last minute, a scheme that would never be enacted, even though we’d set it in motion by meeting that night on the tracks, sitting on the cold metal rails, blowing smoke rings with my hot cigarette breath, circles hovering in the frigid air as if paused in time.
One day when I was eight, two police cars zoomed down our street and screeched to a halt between our house and the Wagners’. The policemen leapt out of their cars and strode across the lawn toward the woods, their cruiser doors ajar, radios emitting tinny voices and scratchy static, each cop touching the handle of his gun holstered at his hip, ready to draw, like that cartoon character, Quick Draw McGraw. The officers disappeared into the woods where my brother had a fort, where we skated on the swamp behind the Richardses’ when it froze, past the dump with a half-dozen bullet-pinged car bodies, where I hunted for green and red plastic shotgun shells.
Neighbors gathered on the sidewalk, quietly chatting, but after twenty minutes or so the cops emerged empty-handed, jumped in their cruisers, and zoomed back up the street. Whomever they were hunting behind our house, he was still out there.
Walpole Prison was called “escape-proof,” but shortly after it opened an inmate named John Martin escaped by tucking himself between the body and frame of a milk truck, Cape Fear–style. Unfortunately for Martin, cops spotted him two hours later walking down Main Street in the bordering town of Norfolk. In Martin’s second attempt, he wore a guard uniform he’d stolen, dyed his skin with tea bags, drew a crayon mustache on his face, and then brazenly strolled toward the exit, nearly making it before a tower guard grew suspicious.
That same year Frank Drozdowski, an ex-Marine serving life for murder, walked away from a coal silo outside the prison where he worked as a trusty. He tramped through the woods and cedar swamp surrounding the prison for five hours, then stumbled onto the road near Pondville Hospital just three hundred feet away, where he was caught. Another inmate, Michael Thompson, wedged himself between some furniture on a delivery truck and passed through Walpole Prison’s gate, but the truck was traveling only a mile down the road to Norfolk Prison. When Thompson stepped out of his hiding place, he was still behind prison walls.
After the prison opened in 1956, the town of Walpole’s selectmen asked the commissioner of corrections to sound an alarm when a prisoner escaped, and so occasionally we heard sirens, deep resonant blasts like tornado warnings in the Midwest. When the alarm sounded, how were we supposed to react? Lock ourselves inside? Form a vigilante posse? Sue was afraid that escaped prisoners would hide in the woods behind our house, but my mother assured her that escapees would want to get out of Walpole as fast as they could. Still, they’d have to pass through Walpole.
Maybe it was Robert Dellelo the cops were looking for that day they searched the woods behind my house. After he escaped from Norfolk Prison on September 21, 1968, there was a massive manhunt around Walpole and Norfolk, involving 125 local and state police, bloodhounds, a helicopter. Six years earlier Dellelo and another man had attempted to rob a jewelry store in Boston but tripped an alarm. Outside the store, after the two ran in opposite directions, Dellelo’s partner shot and killed a cop. Even though Dellelo was a block away, the killing was considered part of the commission of the crime, and at twenty-one he was convicted of murder and sentenced to life without parole.
Dellelo served a few years in Walpole Prison, then was transferred to medium-security Norfolk for good behavior, and there he methodically planned his escape. He studied the twelve strands of electric wire on the first barrier, a chain-link fence, and saw how he could short-circuit the fence and scurry beneath it. He observed the radar system and noticed a gap in its range of detection. From the paint shop he stole a thirty-foot rubber cord, to which he attached a grappling hook fashioned from bucket handles. Using skills he’d learned in Walpole Prison, he removed the lock assembly from a hallway door, then molded a key from aluminum and reinstalled the lock before anyone noticed it was missing. He picked the locks of the supply room and stole wire cutters.
Dellelo patiently waited for a forecast of fog. The night of his escape, he placed on his pillow a plaster-of-paris dummy of his head with broom-bristle hair and draped a fellow inmate’s dirty clothes on a chair in his cell to confuse the bloodhounds he knew would track him. (When the dogs tried to follow the scent from the clothes, they ran in circles inside the jail.) He dropped ten feet out a window, but contrary to newspaper reports that blamed the fog for the fact that Dellelo “vanished without a trace,” the fog arrived long after his escape.
Dellelo dodged the radar, then ran unseen across a 150-yard no-man’s-land to the electrified chain-link fence. Protected by a rubber pad he’d stolen, he snipped the fence and crawled underneath. He bolted another fifty yards under floodlights and reached the twenty-foot concrete outer wall, its top garlanded with electrified barbed wire. He scaled the wall with the rubber cord, and at the top, wearing squirrel-fur gloves lined with rubber and boots he’d rubberized, he cut the electric wire, then slid down the other side. He dashed to the tree line, where he covered himself in pepper to mask his scent.
And then he ran.
Dellelo escaped along the train tracks through Walpole, ground I knew well. As the crow flies, it’s about a quarter mile from Norfolk Prison to the railroad tracks behind St. Jude’s Church. On summer days in junior high, my friends and I rode our bikes past the prison and cut across the tracks to a kettle-hole pond, where we swam and gossiped. In eighth grade I rode along these tracks on the backs of minibikes that were more like small motorcycles, holding tight to boys I liked, like Christopher Nash, with his deep brown eyes, shoulder-length chestnut hair, a sexy silver cap on his front tooth, a rooster tail of gravel spitting off the back tire as we sped along. I hugged his waist, pressed my cheek into his back, inhaling the musky scent of his leather jacket, until he pulled over in some woods and we lay down on leaves and he pushed his tongue into my mouth.
One night in eighth grade, Alison and I and another girl, Jackie Conley, walked those tracks to Dante’s, a six-lane bowling alley in the basement of a restaurant, where we set fire to paper towels in the girls’ room and clogged the sink dousing the flames. The boys—Adrian, Carl, and Ricky Strickland, my boyfriend in eighth grade (who later landed in Walpole Prison)—whipped the candlepin balls so hard they skipped wildly across lanes, the noise drowned out by the jukebox upstairs. Jackie found a carton of macaroni in the supply room and scattered it all over the stairs so that it would crunch beneath the feet of the manager whenever he came down. We left quickly after that, walking along the tracks to stay hidden.
Near the town center, Dellelo would have encountered an intersection of four rail lines behind the Kendall Company, Fiber Products Division, which I passed when I walked or rode my bike downtown, always a hum emanating from the building and all around the factory white fluff in the air, like after you blow on a dandelion that’s gone to seed. The tracks ran behind the row of stores one block deep on Main Street—Holt’s Clothing (where my mother stole clothes), First Sandwich Shop, Tee-T’s restaurant, where my father used to take us for fried clams and pizza.
At that junction one set of tracks ran slightly north, past the end of my dead-end street, where my brother Patrick and his friends played chicken, dashing across the tracks as trains bore down, where one day they broke into a stalled railcar and found—like a fantasy they’d conjured—cases and cases of Miller Beer, the sixteen-ounce cans. They hid as many cases as they could in the woods, and then someone’s older brother came in his truck and hauled more.
As a kid I loved the train tracks, which seemed both forlorn and hopeful. When I was a girl, Sally and I and our friends packed lunches and rode our bikes to the dead end, picnicking on the tracks, the wooden ties smelling pleasantly of creosote, of tar, eating bologna sandwiches as we waited to feel the earth vibrat
e beneath our feet, and then the rumble and the sudden deafening roar as the train thundered by, the clickety-clack of each car passing over the joints, afterward the air singed and changed. I’d squat by the creek that gurgled in a ditch alongside the tracks, searching for translucent crayfish. They were nearly invisible, but if I sat perfectly still, I’d spot them scuttling along the mud bottom, leaving a faint trail like an echo.
The swamp on the far side of the tracks—you had to cross a log laid over the creek—was edged with blueberry bushes drooping with fruit. Sally and I spent hours picking berries on days so hot the air shimmered off the iron rails, hot enough to scorch your fingers. My mother turned the kitchen over to us and we’d roll out dough, stir the filling, and shove the pie in the oven, then sprawl under the shade of the oak trees in our side yard as the pie baked, happily staring at the sky.
I liked being in that forbidden place, hushed but for the buzz of insects, birds thrashing in bushes crowding the tracks. Sometimes we’d see a figure coming toward us, a man walking the tracks alone in broad daylight, T-shirt slung over his shoulder from the heat, and we’d hide and wait for him to pass. Who was he? Where was he going? I’d stare down the tracks until they converged to a single point and disappeared, like a magic trick.
When I was sixteen, old enough to feel the tug of the world, after Sue had moved out for college, I had my own bedroom for the first time, with a double bed and a lime-green bedspread. My head was just below a window that faced the dead end, and lying in bed on balmy summer nights I’d watch the curtain lift and billow on the breeze as if it had desire. I’d hear the chuff of the train near midnight and the faint whistle and feel already far away.
At that juncture downtown, if Dellelo had turned slightly north onto the tracks that ran past the end of my street, he’d have eventually reversed direction as the line curved south and continued to Rhode Island. Instead he ran straight, chugging along the tracks that ran northeast toward Boston, passing behind the A&P plaza and Friendly’s, where Paula and I waited for Alison on that cold February night, Dellelo a young man, just twenty-seven, a prisoner breaking out; my friends and I just fifteen, fledgling criminals, breaking in.
After Alison arrived, we walked along the tracks and then cut into town. We took the shortcut through the field behind United Church, where Davey Winters had hanged himself from the wrought iron fire escape the year before but where everyone still went to get stoned, where I’d eaten the Popsicle I stole from Mimi’s Variety, where in a few months Alison would try to kill herself by swallowing a bottle of pills she’d steal from Betro Pharmacy. We stopped at the edge of the woods behind the house we were going to rob. I could see across the street into Alison’s living room, the silhouette of her mother in the window against the flickering gray light from the television.
We skulked across the lawn to the back door, which was unlocked, as if the family were expecting us, and we walked in. The house was dark but for patches of street light filtering through the windows. The aunts were upstairs asleep, we assumed, so we had to be quiet, even though they were half deaf. I started to have a nervous laughing fit, probably from the tension of suppressing my fear and gnawing guilt. I knew what I was doing was wrong, but I was doing it anyway.
I saw Alison lifting silverware from the drawer of a sideboard and stuffing the pockets of her coat. For all our elaborate planning, we’d forgotten to bring a bag. At the liquor cabinet, Paula shoved a quart bottle of something in her sleeve. Alison had mentioned that the people hid money in the refrigerator, so I looked in there. In back behind the milk I saw a small tin bank in the shape of the world, Africa a yellow blotch. As I reached for the globe bank I knocked an egg out of its preformed manger in the refrigerator door and it smacked quietly on the linoleum. Paula and Alison didn’t even hear it.
Sometimes I wonder, did this really happen, the egg breaking? I remember feeling clumsy in my thick parka, logy from beer and nervousness, seeing the eggs in the refrigerator under the bluish fluorescent light, the sensation of something slipping. How absurd the moment was, the invasion of someone’s refrigerator more invasive than the invasion of their home. I know I was in their refrigerator. I remember the light, the cool air on my face, the eggs, the milk, the globe bank, a sound from upstairs, someone roused, and then the three of us hurrying out the back, the screen door slamming behind us, racing through the woods and reconnoitering breathlessly in an alley downtown, the giddy anxiety in my stomach, the two-mile walk back to Paula’s house. I remember prying the rubber stopper out of the globe bank, the small sum contained in that miniature world, $28.
I’m haunted by another memory that I’m not sure is real—that the aunts woke, that after we heard rustling upstairs, someone called, “Who’s there?” How awful it must have been for the women to suspect someone was in their house, some dangerous person or people. I’ve lived alone often enough to understand how horrifying it would be to sense a menacing stranger in my house, how my heart would throb sickeningly, how I’d lose much more than whatever the intruder could take—how I’d lose my sense of safety in the haven of my home, my sense of safety in the world.
After our robbery we perused the police log, and one day there it was in black and white, almost astonishing, the name of the street, the fact of our theft, the news that we’d made, something worthy of reporting, ours one of four burglaries that night. But somehow the whole episode was anticlimactic, even embarrassing. The robbery was so amateurish, so ridiculous and shameful, that we didn’t talk about it afterward.
The neighbors suspected Alison and mentioned it to Alison’s parents, who interrogated her. Perhaps someone in the family remembered telling Alison about the money in the refrigerator. Otherwise how would the thieves know to look there, behind the milk and juice? But Alison had an alibi—she was sleeping at Paula’s house across town. Our paltry haul amounted to less than $30, some worthless silverware that we had no idea how to pawn and so remained in a bag in Alison’s closet, and a quart of Four Roses whiskey—I remember the red roses on the label.
Ours was a “third-rate burglary,” to use the words of Ron Ziegler, President Nixon’s press aide. In Nixon’s B&E, four of the five burglars stayed at the Watergate hotel. At least we’d had the sense to leave the area. A moment of sloppiness led to their capture—instead of placing tape over the door locks vertically, they taped them horizontally, so that the tape was visible on the front of the door and was noticed by an alert security guard.
In ninth grade on Fridays in Mr. Klein’s civics class we played College Bowl, a trivia contest of not-so-trivial current events: the oil embargo, Vietnam, Watergate, Nixon, who’d resigned a month before school began that year. We knew some facts and names—just enough to win a candy bar—but we didn’t delve into the issues. (It would have been edifying if we’d taken a class trip to Norfolk Prison that spring of 1975, when inmates staged a reenactment of the Watergate crimes for an audience that included Senator Ted Kennedy.)
From what I’d gathered about Watergate, it was Nixon himself slinking around in black clothes and, I imagined, a nylon stocking over his face. But what was he trying to steal? That, I didn’t know. I didn’t know that his henchmen were not taking something but leaving something, bugs (or repositioning the bugs they’d planted earlier, because they weren’t recording properly). But Nixon was taking something—secrets.
Was the president’s burglary an imprimatur for us to do the same? Was the rise in crime in the 1970s, ours included, attributable to a trickle-down effect? “It is a classic idea that a whole community may be infected by the sickness of its leadership, by a failure of ideals at the top,” Anthony Lewis wrote in the New York Times in 1974. “We are infected by corruption at the top.” As the nation goes, so goes its towns, its families, its citizens. Whatever reasons allowed me to forget my moral sensibility, pounded into me by my mother using Walpole Prison as stark example, whatever reasons placed me in a strangers’ house at night taking their things, in the end our B&E was more succ
essful than the president’s because we were never caught, in spite of the pathetic evidence I’d left behind: a mitten.
When I think of the B&E now, I’m glad I dropped the mitten, this clue that led the family to suspect Alison, because maybe then the two aunts were not afraid in their home after our burglary. Maybe they would take comfort knowing that the break-in was not some bad guy, some dangerous escaped prisoner, just some sad troubled girls.
6
Hello World
In our junior year Paula began to deal angel dust for Duane, which meant that we had a seemingly endless free supply of dust. At Fernandes, Duane or Wayne Kosinski or Rod Tyler passed through Sue’s checkout lane with jars of parsley flakes, which they soaked or sprayed with liquid PCP. Maybe they picked Sue’s lane because Jeff, her boyfriend, was dealing for them. But even if a store manager noticed, it wasn’t illegal to stock up on dried parsley.
Angel dust was fairly easy to produce and enormously profitable. A $100 investment in the precursor chemicals could yield $100,000 worth of angel dust on the street. The main ingredient, piperidine hydrochloride, was available for purchase without identification, sold by companies that supplied university and research labs. Around Los Angeles in 1977, police were destroying PCP labs at the rate of about one per week. Smaller home labs were run by amateurs mixing PCP in pots and pans in their kitchens, which was, according to the Boston Police Drug Control Unit, “a terribly easy thing to do.” In the early 1980s in South Boston, two brothers were producing $15,000 of angel dust weekly out of their mother’s apartment before they were busted.
We heard occasionally that there was a bad batch of dust, to watch out because someone had made angel dust with Raid or embalming fluid. There was a rumor that formaldehyde was stolen from the high school biology lab, from those gallon glass jars of clear liquid with pale pink pig fetuses floating inside. One night outside a Fleetwood Mac concert at the Patriots’ stadium in Foxborough, where I’d sold hot dogs when I was fourteen, Nicky’s sister, Andrea, and I bought a joint of dust from a stranger for $2. The joint smelled rancid—not the usual stale dried-herb smell—but we smoked it anyway.
Body Leaping Backward Page 13