Caged to Kill

by Tom Swyers

  But up until now, Annie’s innate generosity started and stopped at the checkbook. She simply didn’t have the time outside of her teaching job to volunteer to serve the needy directly. That’s why she told David it’s what she wanted to do when she retired.

  David knew that Annie had never dealt with a charity case in person. She certainly had not been involved with an accused murderer fresh out of prison. David thought it would be a marketing tour de force to sell Phillip’s cause to Annie and he was up to the challenge.

  His strategy was to feint and distract. He would soften her up by addressing one of her longstanding concerns for David in their relationship at the same time as he slipped Phillip through the back door. David asked Annie if he could have a guy friend over to have lunch with her and Christy. He knew Annie would agree immediately. She always said David should have more friends, so long as they were male friends.

  “Oh, I think that would be wonderful, David,” she said, with the warmest of smiles when he told her about Phillip a few days ago.

  A commitment right out of the gate from Annie was just the thing David expected. He knew that it would be much more difficult for her to back out now. Of course, David neglected to tell her Phillip was an accused murderer right up front. That was the last thing he mentioned after he had sold her on Phillip’s virtues in contrast to his dire living situation.

  “Murder?” she exclaimed, with her eyes going wide in dismay.

  “Yes, honey, but he’s innocent,” David replied. Innocence was Phillip’s saving grace. Without it, even David would not involve the convict in his life—let alone the lives of his beloved wife and son. David added, “They locked him up and threw away the key until thirty years later, when they discovered he was innocent.”

  “That’s awful,” Annie had said, throwing up her hands. “The poor, poor man!”

  When Annie said this, David knew that he had tapped into her generous nature and the only thing left on his agenda was to schedule a meal. Today was the date and now was the time.

  Phillip jumped when David slowly applied the parking brake to the Mustang in his steep driveway.

  “It’s just the emergency brake, Phillip—you know—to keep the car from rolling down the hill into the street.” Once, David forgot to engage the parking brake and his beloved Mustang not only rolled into the street, but also across the way onto his neighbor’s front yard. Thankfully, it made the trip without hitting anyone or anything.

  “Oh, okay,” Phillip said, thinking that the sound of the brake reminded him of his cell door closing at Kranston.

  “Are you ready to meet the family?” David asked as he opened his car door.

  “Okay, I guess.”

  Following his host through the winter-ravaged yard, Phillip entered through the side door of the red Cape Cod house. He stepped directly into the dining room, while David held the door behind him. The table was set and Phillip immediately was overcome by the wonderful aromas of a working family kitchen: fresh rolls baking in the oven, coffee brewing, and the lingering aura of bacon from breakfast.

  “Hello,” Annie called from the kitchen, when she heard the side door open.

  “We’re here,” David replied.

  Annie walked through the archway from the kitchen to the adjacent dining room. Her jeans, with their sequined back pockets, were barely tight enough to reveal her slightly bowed legs. It was something that she had grown self-conscious about after a catcaller at college hollered, “Bow-legged ladies make the best lovers.” She wore a lavender sweater—pastels were always in season for her—that revealed the curves of her petite frame. Her shoulder length, sandy-blond hair wrapped around her face and set off her chocolate eyes like a pair of Brown-Eyed Susans.

  “Annie, I’d like you to meet Phillip Dawkins,” David said as the fragrance of her perfume permeated the room. David wondered if he should’ve asked Annie to tone it down a bit for Phillip. Kranston didn’t have sweet scents like perfume. David was concerned that Phillip might have an allergic reaction.

  Phillip stood at attention with his feet rooted into the oak floorboards. “Hello, ma’am,” he said, bowing slightly.

  “Please call me Annie.”

  “Yes, ma’am—I mean Annie.”

  Phillip shook his head and looked at the floor.

  Annie and David shared a smile with one another.

  “Whatever you do, don’t call her Anne,” David said

  “Yes, that’s what my mother calls me when she’s angry with me,” Annie giggled.

  Christy walked in from the kitchen, wiping his hands with a dish towel. He was sixteen, already slightly taller than his dad with a slimmer frame.

  “This is my son, Christy,” David said.

  Christy extended his hand. “It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Dawkins.”

  Phillip gently grasped his hand and shook it slowly. “It’s nice to meet you, too. Please call me Phillip.”

  “Okay,” Christy said, pushing back his light brown hair with his free hand. It was the first time that any adult had asked Christy to interact with him on a first-name basis.

  “It’s so nice of you to come join us for lunch,” Annie said. “You can sit over there by David if you’d like.” Annie pointed to a chair on the side of the table.

  “You can sit in the chair at the end here if you want,” David said. He pointed to the more ornate captain’s chair he always took as head of the family.

  Phillip sat down at the end of the table and David claimed a seat at his side. The sporadic April sunshine, which seemed so chilly out on Central Avenue, pooled its warmth from the bay window in a halo around the spot Phillip picked.

  Annie carried in a platter of deli meats and a selection of macaroni and potato salads from Gershon’s Delicatessen. She positioned them at the center of the table on the neatly ironed white linen. Christy brought out a basket of fresh-baked sandwich rolls and filled the drink requests.

  Phillip practically leered at the meal unfolding before him and marveled at the entire table setting. Annie had broken out the fine china; Phillip sure didn’t miss the tired old routine of shoveling every meal from a Styrofoam tray that doubled as a dish. Annie had neatly folded cloth napkins beside each plate. The silverware glistened in the light cast by the brass chandelier overhead.

  Phillip heaved a sigh of relief that each setting boasted a dinner knife. It meant that they wouldn’t look for the carving knife he still had tucked in his sock beneath his cargo pants. Phillip knew that the zipper circling his knee on each pant leg would not only create cargo shorts but would also allow him to grab the knife handle in a second. That’s why he selected this pair of pants at SALs.

  Annie sat herself beside David, close to the kitchen so she could fetch any forgotten items. Christy pulled up a chair across from his parents in a long-established pattern.

  “Did you want to say Grace, David?” Annie asked.

  “Okay,” David replied, extending one hand to grasp Annie’s and the other to hold Phillip’s huge paw. Christy reached out to take Phillip’s hand and across the table to hold his mother’s fingers.

  For a moment, Phillip looked back and forth at David and Christy’s hands, unsure of what he should do with them. Then he spotted Christy’s arm extended across the table that let him hold his mother’s hand. He took the hands that Christy and David offered. They were much smaller than his, and much warmer.

  “Lord, thank You,” David said, bowing his head, “for the food before us, the family and friends beside us and the love among us. Amen.”

  Unexpectedly, Phillip felt his eyes start to well up with tears, as he released their hands. He hadn’t held someone else’s hand for as long as he could remember—decades. It struck him that he was being included in a family gathering. He had forgotten what that felt like. He wondered if it was too late for him to have a family of his own.

  “David tells me you’re living on Central Avenue,” Annie ventured. “Are you getting settled all right there?”


  Phillip finished chewing the potato salad in his mouth and swallowed. The whipped mayonnaise dressing tasted so light and sweet, not institutional at all. “Yes, thanks to your husband.”

  “It’s a crying shame what happened to you,” Annie said, her voice cracking.

  Phillip took a bite out of a half spear of sour pickle. He couldn’t believe how it crunched in his ears when he bit into it and how the strong, clear flavor brought a pucker to his lips. Limp, soggy pickle chips were the order of the day at Kranston--when they even had pickles.

  “I can’t imagine what it was like for you,” Annie added.

  Phillip nodded while he chewed the precious pickle.

  “Can I ask you how it feels to be free after all these years?” Annie asked.

  David jumped in, “Maybe he doesn’t want to talk about it.”

  Phillip swallowed. “It’s okay.”

  Christy wiped his mouth with his napkin. His eyes were locked on Phillip. This was a totally foreign experience for Indigo Valley; not many convicts wandering around the ‘burbs.

  “It’s a lot to process in such a short time,” Phillip said, with both hands folded on his lap. Smiling, he added, “Maybe you should ask me that a few years from now?”

  All of the Thompsons smiled back.

  Christy joined the conversation, turning his body to face their guest. “Can I ask a question?”

  “Sure,” Phillip said.

  “What did they allow you do to in your cell?”

  “Reading, writing, drawing, and they gave you a pair of earphones.”

  “Earphones for what?” Christy asked.

  “Well, they have a jack in the wall and they pump music into it, mainly rap. Maybe you’ll hear a television station, but that’s hard to follow without seeing what’s on the screen. That’s about it.”

  Annie asked, “Were there any educational programs made available to you?”

  “No, there’s nothing like that offered to inmates in solitary. They have a few in-cell study programs, but that’s it.”

  “Really?” Annie shook her head. “How about job training opportunities?”

  “No.”

  Annie rolled her eyes then bit her lower lip. “You mean they just threw you out on the streets after leaving you in a cage for years?”

  “Yes,” Phillip said matter-of-factly. He longed to get back to the luxury of his lunch. Intimate conversation was a rarity in his life. When his cellies peppered him with questions, he always felt like he was being set up. And he was usually right.

  “Annie,” David said, “it happens all the time in this country. Inmates do their time in solitary and then they’re released straight into communities without anything to support them.”

  What David wanted to also say was that the worst inmate problems became a neighborhood problem in a flash. But he wasn’t going to lob that verbal grenade with Phillip around.

  David knew what Annie was driving at with her questions. It was her years of human resources work experience bubbling to the surface. She understood that Phillip’s odds of making it on the outside weren’t good without education or training.

  Annie had pinpointed the issue and now her laser focus was on finding a solution. She looked at David. “What can Phillip do to support himself?”

  “We’ve been talking about that,” David said.

  “I can be a barber,” Phillip blurted out.

  David sat there with his mouth wide open. Phillip and he had talked about job prospects, but barbering was never mentioned.

  “Why a barber, Phillip?”

  Phillip had been in a fog ever since his release from prison a week ago. His mind worked like a sputtering engine: trying to tie thoughts together, to think about concepts beyond his immediate survival needs, to revive long-lost memories. He had trained himself not to think while in the box. He knew if he thought too much about the hopelessness of his situation there, he’d bug out. The bugs were the solitary cons who’d scream all day and night—cries of desperation, rage, and loneliness—as their spirit was sucked out of their souls.

  Not that Phillip didn’t scream—because he did. He could scream with the best of them. But most of the time he’d scream at them to shut up or else he’d slice them up into pieces. Every night he’d cram those earphones deep into his ears—all the way to his brain—so he couldn’t hear the men in agony anymore.

  While in the box, he lost his memories of life before prison, one by one, like a vulture was picking at his brain. He struggled to keep the memories because, once they were gone, he felt as if he would never get them back. He tried to replay a continuous loop of all of his memories in his head. He panicked when one fell out of the loop, if only for a minute.

  Still, while trying to clutch to his memories, he had lost so many links to the real world that at times he questioned his very existence. The line between reality and fantasy was breached daily, if not hourly, and Phillip would hear voices that he thought were real and see things that were not anything but hallucinations. He was reluctant to look in the mirror because he was afraid he wouldn’t recognize himself.

  But once he set his mind on the goal to never go back to prison—to live his life as a free man—in the face of the COs that pulled David over, he needed a plan to survive. The barbering memories floated to the surface and he latched on to them like a drowning man clutches a life preserver.

  Phillip smiled—not so much at the memory—but at the satisfaction he felt in finding something he had lost decades ago. “When I was a teenager, my family didn’t have enough money to get my hair cut. My mother would cut it using a bowl as a guide. The kids would make fun of me. My eyeglasses didn’t help. All the cool kids got their hair styled—not just cut—by . . . by Manny . . . Manny Romano. In our neighborhood, Manny was a god.”

  “Where was this, Phillip?” David asked.

  “Syracuse, the Northside. I remember begging for him to style my hair--to layer it, to blow-dry it, to make me look normal. Finally, he said if I’d cut his lawn, he’d cut my hair. His lawn wasn’t that big. He lived in a two-story house—the bottom was his shop and he lived on the second floor—and so I cut his lawn and he shampooed and styled my hair. I never looked so good before in my life. After school, I’d always stop by and see Manny to ask if I could do anything so he’d style my hair the next time I needed it. I was a pest . . . and he finally broke down and hired me as a shampoo boy at twenty bucks a week. I also cleaned the shop—swept up the hair, cleaned the bathrooms. I was the coolest boy around—having a job at Manny’s—with my perfect hair. I’d start shampooing a head when he gave me the signal. Then I’d pass them on to Manny for styling when his chair became free. It was just me and Manny . . . we were like a well-oiled machine.”

  “Did you ever cut any hair yourself?” Christy asked.

  “Yeah, I started to train under Manny as an apprentice barber when I turned seventeen.”

  “Did you get your license?” David asked.

  “I finished the two-year apprenticeship, but . . . you know . . . life got in the way . . .”

  David’s eyes met Annie’s. He had told her and Christy that Phillip was convicted at age nineteen.

  “That’s something we’ll have to look into, Phillip—if you want to be a barber.”

  Phillip grinned while he nodded. “I think I’d like doing that,” he said. He had a vague memory of being happy cutting hair.

  In prison, Phillip had been like a man locked in a septic tank. His nostrils had been filled with the smell of feces and urine—the two means of protest most readily available to everyone held in solitary. But he wasn’t a participant in hurling his crap and piss at the COs; though he was tempted to some days.

  He struggled to overcome the memory of that daily stench—to recall the sweet barbershop aromas: the combs soaking in the ocean-blue Barbicide, the talc, the hair tonic, the bay rum aftershave. These fragrant memories of barbering excited his senses. The thought of holding cool steel once again in his hands
did too: the memory of his metallic combs, his thinning scissors, his sleek eight-and-a-half-inch pointed shears, and his long straight-edge razor—all made of polished stainless steel. They were all high-quality tools of the trade that could double as lethal weapons. It was the best of both worlds in Phillip’s mind: he could earn a living and protect himself at the same time.

  The thought of holding the straight-edge razor against the jugular vein of a helpless man leaning back for a shave in his barber chair put Phillip at ease. He would be in control. No con was going to cut him up. No screamer was going to throw crap at him. No CO was going lodge a steel-toed boot into his ribs. He could finally run his own life now. He felt liberated at the prospect, but at the same time he never felt more scared in his life.

  Chapter 5

  A week later, David walked through the door of the Yellow Ribbon Diner on Central Avenue, midway between his home and Phillip’s motel. Johnny McFadden was already ensconced on home turf, in his back-corner booth—the largest one in the place—chatting with his favorite waitress. It was where McFadden held court; it was where David had last seen him years ago.

  The waitress departed as David wove through the tables and waiting patrons. The din of cutlery hitting china and the chatter of happy customers filled the place. Johnny’s eyes locked on David’s and they both grinned ear to ear. He stood up and the two embraced man-style, with a little back slap. In a second, Johnny lost his smile.

  Johnny was a stocky man; average height but square bodied, with larger-than-life forearms. His brown hair, now graying a bit at the temples, was still combed from front to back perfectly, like a nor’easter had blow-dried it. He continued to sport a bristle-like mustache—nothing sloppy—just a brush that claimed his upper lip for the male gender. While his face now showed some crinkles and crevices of aging, he looked in great shape—more muscular than David remembered.