by Tom Swyers
“It’s great to see you, Johnny.”
“Been too long.”
“Yes.”
“Sit down, David.” Johnny raised his hand and the waitress returned as if attached by an invisible string. “You remember Suze?”
“Why, yes, I think I do. It’s been a few years,” David said.
Suze bent her firehouse red lips in a smile, as she chomped on her gum with her back molars. “What can I get you, hon?” You knew she didn’t need the Ticonderoga pencil stub tucked behind her ear to track orders from Johnny’s booth.
“Cup of decaf, black.”
“High-test for me, babe,” Johnny said.
When Suze was out of earshot, Johnny came clean, as if he couldn’t wait to clear his conscience. “Yeah, that was me in the back seat of the car that pulled you over the other week. I figured that’s why you texted me and wanted to meet.”
Now David’s smile evaporated. He thought the man might have been Johnny, but he couldn’t quite make himself believe it. More than anything, the encounter reminded David that it was long since time to catch up with Johnny. “What the heck is going on with you?”
“I swear to God I didn’t know it was you until afterwards—”
“What were you doing in the back of that car?”
“I became a corrections officer, a CO—”
“Were the other guys in the car COs too?”
“Yeah, but you didn’t hear that from me and you can’t say anything to anyone about it.”
David rolled his eyes. Phillip was right after all. “Why not?”
“Because I’ll lose my job.”
“Really? How did you get involved in this line of work? The last time I saw you, you were selling meat door-to-door from the back of your truck.”
“I couldn’t compete with all these new grocery stores,” Johnny said, pointing out the window toward ALDI. “Bills were piling up. I needed a job with security, benefits, and a future to support my family. You don’t need a college degree to be a CO. So I sat for the Civil Service Exam for COs, passed it, and graduated from the Albany Training Academy. That’s the short of it.”
“Where are you working now?”
“Kranston Maximum Security Prison. I commute the one hour up and back every day from Albany.”
“How long has this been going on?”
“Six months at Kranston. Like most COs starting out, I did time at Sing Sing and—”
“Oh yeah? What were you in for?” David asked, straight-faced.
“Funny guy, ha ha. Actually, the only real differences between us and the cons is that we serve our sentence in eight-hour stretches each day, get paid for it, and, if we hang around long enough, we’ll also draw a pension.”
Suze effortlessly slid two cups of coffee in front of the men, hardly breaking stride in her white Skechers, as the china mugs hit the Formica tabletop.
“So how did you end up at Kranston?”
“I put in a bid for a job there when I started working at Sing Sing, and I got lucky. I’ve put a bid in on a prison even closer to Albany. When I get a little more seniority, I’ll get it.”
“So why did you and your buddies pull me over the other day?”
“It wasn’t me. I was just along for the ride. I swear I didn’t know it was you until after the fact. You see, being a CO is like belonging to a fraternal organization—like Elks or the Moose—”
“You’re pulling my leg—”
“Dead serious. We call each other brother or sister, you know, like they call me Brother McFadden.”
David almost spat out his coffee as he choked in disbelief. “Not on the job?!”
“No, no, not on the job—when we meet as part of the New York Corrections Officers Union. We’re a close-knit group. You know, there are generations of COs from the same family—it’s like the son takes over the father’s business. There’s siblings, cousins, nieces and nephews all over the place. We’re all part of an extended family in a way. You’re not black, white, red, or yellow when you’re a CO, there’s only blue—the color of our unis.”
“Yeah, I’m familiar with the union. They run ads on the TV all the time. I always wondered why they spend all that money on ads to tell us that they keep us safe. I mean, I don’t see any other law enforcement unions spending money to tell us that they are doing their jobs.”
“We have to look out for one another. There’s so few of us when compared to the number of cons and we don’t have any weapons except a baton, sometimes mace. We can’t carry guns on our beat, ‘cause we can’t risk the cons getting their hands on them. I’ll tell you, David, I got the biggest and hardest baton they’ll let me use. It’s freakin’ dangerous in there.”
“What does this have to do with pulling me over?”
“I’m getting there. They told me to get in the car—”
“Who told you?”
“The two other senior COs—”
“They got names?”
“I can’t tell you. I shouldn’t even be talking to you now.”
“Why not?”
“It’s against the code—the code of the brotherhood.”
David glanced up from his cup of coffee. Johnny’s eyes were drooping. He’d never seen that look on him before. “Geez, this is starting to sound like some kind of cult or something.”
“I hear ya. I wonder every day if I made a mistake in becoming a CO. But I’m into it too deep. I went through two months of BS at the training academy. Then I really learned how to be a CO on the job at Sing Sing for a year. I lived in an RV outside the prison wall because the living costs around the prison were sky high—it being Westchester County and all. Froze my butt off in the winter. The cons were living better inside than I was on the other side of the wall. I only saw my family on the weekends. Then I finally got a transfer to Kranston. If I quit or lose my job as a CO, it would all be for nothing. The only thing I could get with my experience is some minimum wage job doing mall security. I don’t want to be a rent-a-cop.”
David cradled his rapidly cooling cup of joe and looked out the window at the traffic idling on Central Avenue. He remembered when Johnny used to own the street. He was his own man, selling meat. He could do anything and say anything he wanted—both on the job and off. He used to be fiercely independent and it was this quality that David admired most. Johnny used to do crazy, wonderful things with a sparkle in his eye and a grin on his face. Together, they saved baseball for thousands of sandlot players in the region. But now it seemed like the same system that owned Phillip had a hammerlock on Johnny.
“So, why was I targeted for this pull-over?”
“Promise me this conversation won’t go any farther than this table and I’ll spill.”
“Well, tell me first if I can expect to be harassed by a goon-squad car in the future.”
“All I can promise you is that I won’t be riding in it. I know enough now to make sure that won’t happen again.”
David thought a second. He didn’t like the idea that he might still be walking around with a bulls-eye taped to his back. He wondered if this put his family at risk, too. But what more could he really expect from Johnny? There was no harm, no foul from the pull-over. Not at this point. It also seemed like Johnny would help keep him in the loop, so long as he shut up about it. And if he learned one thing from working with Johnny to save baseball for kids, it was that you always want him on your side. “Fair enough. I promise.”
“It was you and the company you keep.”
“You mean Phillip Dawkins?”
“Who else?”
“What about him?”
“They say he’s dangerous—a psychopath.”
David didn’t know if he was dangerous or not. He knew Phillip wasn’t entirely with it. That was to be expected given his experiences. Still, he couldn’t shake his memory of how Phillip almost lost it during the pull-over. “Who’s they?”
“The senior COs I was riding with—the CO brotherhood.”
&nbs
p; “You know Dawkins was found innocent, right?”
“What difference does that make? I’m just telling you what I heard. I’m not sure what his deal is either. If I asked too many questions, they’d get suspicious. I don’t need them riding my ass any more than they have already.”
“If he’s dangerous, it’s what solitary confinement did to him over thirty years.”
“Says you.”
David got the sense Johnny was holding back. “What else do you know about him?”
“I think he’s got enemies in high places. Many of the COs look up to him in a way. Not because he’s innocent. All cons claim they’re innocent and that’s not our call to make. We just deal with what they send us. Some COs admire Dawkins because they couldn’t break him. He never cracked in the box or at least he didn’t show it. He didn’t bug out. He didn’t throw crap or urine at anyone. He’d fight the CO tickets and win more often than not. There were times when he was well-behaved for years at a time, before they could get a misbehavior ticket to stick. Some COs wondered why they wouldn’t give him a chance in the regular population. Nobody could figure out what was going on.” Johnny shrugged his shoulders. “But innocent or not, they say he’s a killer. That’s all I know about him.”
“Do those COs you rode with know that you and I have a history?”
“No, I’d never say anything about that to anyone. That might come back and bite me in the ass as a newjack.”
“Newjack?”
“Yeah, a newjack—a rookie CO.”
“Okay, you said the COs had a beef about me too. Is that because I’m helping Dawkins out?”
“That’s part of it.”
“What’s the rest of it, then?”
“It’s what you’ve done publicly about solitary. They told me you wrote letters to everyone about The Mandela Rule passed by the UN. You know, the one that prohibits solitary beyond fifteen consecutive days.”
“I know what The Mandela Rule is all about. You know, this United Nations rule was supported by the US government.”
“Yeah, well, that doesn’t matter.”
“Well, I think it matters. They found that after fifteen days, you risk causing inmates irreversible psychological damage. They called it torture—pure and simple torture. That sounds like it’s cruel and unusual punishment under the US Constitution to me.”
“Jesus, you haven’t changed. You did the same thing back in our baseball days. When you go legal, you just don’t know when to shut up. Writing letters to editors, writing magazine articles, speaking at public functions—always going ballistic about the rights of these low-life cons who would kill us in a heartbeat.”
Here we go. Shifting into typical us-versus-them mentality. “Did you ever think that his hostility is somehow related to being confined to a box 23-7?”
“They were put there for a good reason.”
“Maybe so, but the goal should be to modify their behavior to get them back into the general population, if possible. They can get some training there, some education, a chance to make it on the inside, a chance to make it on the outside if they’re ever released. You’re too afraid to release them from solitary back into general population, but you have no problem setting them free into our neighborhoods.”
“Dude, I got nothing to do with this! Even if I wanted to work in solitary, I couldn’t. That’s reserved for the senior-most guys.”
David knew Johnny was right. Solitary was secure inside and from outsiders too. No accountability. Photographs of the cells or the inmates were never released, out of concern for prison security. “Sorry, I didn’t mean ‘you’ personally. I meant ‘you’ as part of the system, ‘The Blue Wall.’”
“None of this matters to what’s going on with you. It’s not so much what you did for the boxed cons. It’s all about what you’re doing to the COs.”
“Huh? Come again?”
“You are threatening them—their livelihoods, their jobs. It takes more staff per inmate to oversee solitary and so you are threatening them that much more by attacking the box. Kranston, like a lot of other upstate towns, has lost its manufacturing jobs due to plant closures. They have become prison towns. That’s the biggest and sometimes the only employer around and the union works hard to keep those jobs no matter what.”
“That explains the union TV ads.”
“I guess.”
“So, what was the goal of the pull-over?”
“To send you two a message.”
“What message is that?”
“You figure it out. I really don’t know. I was a lackey on this run. It was like my initiation or something. Like I said, newjacks don’t ask questions. The first lesson I learned at the academy was not to stand out from the crowd. I can’t afford to rub these guys the wrong way. When there’s three of us COs in the yard watching over hundreds of cons and we’re armed with only a stick apiece and stupid can of mace, I need all the backup I can get—like the COs in the watchtower armed with rifles. If they want to screw me over, all they have to do is look the other way for a few seconds. The worst nightmare of any CO is being held hostage.”
“The CO who shook me down said, ‘When you guys make a move, we’ll be there to take you down.’ Do you have any idea what that means?”
“Nope,” Johnny said, rubbing his face and eyes with his hands.
Johnny looked uneasy. It was a new expression for him. David never saw him behave like this before. He wondered if it meant he should be afraid of Phillip, too. But so far, Phillip had been nothing but cordial to him.
Still, this gave David a pang of regret for bringing Phillip into his life. He wasn’t afraid for himself. He feared for his family. The last thing in the world he wanted to do was to put his loved ones in harm’s way. Annie and Christy had grown to like Phillip. They were spending time with him alone when David couldn’t monitor his behavior.
It had been a week since the CO pull-over and nothing else had happened. He wondered if he were to distance himself from Phillip, then the COs would back off. But he didn’t want to just abandon Phillip. That wouldn’t be right. He’d go straight back to prison, for sure. David figured that he had a little time to figure out a way to extricate himself from the situation without feeling guilty.
David believed that any danger Phillip presented to him or his family was the direct result of him being in the hole for thirty years. He figured that the more time Phillip had to air out from the box, the less threat he was to anyone. It wasn’t like the COs were parked across the street, calling his house phone, or following him around town. His plan was to help Phillip get started as a barber. Then the Thompsons could keep their distance from him, as he invested long hours to get his business off the ground.
“Johnny, please do me a favor.”
“What’s that?”
“Just give me a heads-up on anything you think I need to know.”
“I’ll do what I can, David. Be careful. COs are licensed to carry concealed weapons on the outside.”
David exhaled as he raised the chipped china cup to his lips to finish it off. He watched Johnny peel back the aluminum cover to yet another vanilla creamer and stir it slowly into his coffee, watching the vortex form and grow. Like two men who served together in combat, David knew that he and Johnny would always have their baseball memories to bond them, even in this new chapter of their lives. But he also realized things had changed between them. Johnny was no longer the carefree, happy spirit eager to take on the world. The sparkle in his eyes had been replaced by a blank stare. His jagged features revealed no curiosity or passion, no disgust or delight—like a face chiseled out of the old slate quarries that ran along the Vermont border outside of Kranston.
David had seen that look before. It was the face that Phillip Dawkins brought to his doorstep the day after his release.
Chapter 6
Late one evening, Phillip was lying in his bed at the Red Apple Motel when he sensed the entire ceiling starting to crush him like a vise.
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It had been a good day. David had taken him on a tour of the historic Old Cider Mill in Karner first thing in the morning, when it was quiet. That outing was part of David’s tour plan to transition Phillip back into the American mainstream. They would go on regular day trips to new places like tourists from a foreign land. The idea was for the different experiences to give Phillip a comfort level with being free and taking care of himself.
Phillip took his nightly vitamin with a glass of tap water, then he stretched out on his lumpy mattress. After a few minutes, he visualized himself as a pile of apples plucked from cold storage at the mill and wrapped in cheesecloth—ready to be mashed under the cider press. He instinctively sat up. It was a reflex to try and block the ceiling from dropping any lower with his head. But when he felt the walls began to close in too, he knew he had to work everything back into place. He fell back on his coping mechanism, just like he did while he was trapped in the box. He stood up, flexed his shoulders and rotated his head to work the ceiling upwards. Next, he paced—four steps forward, four steps back—to work the walls outward, like he was doing a jig. He called it the Anti-Bug-Out Dance. After a few minutes focused on the back and forth movements, his perspective changed and suddenly everything snapped back into place.
When he felt the ceiling was going to stay put, he tried once again to fall asleep on his back. He didn’t pull the covers or place the pillow over his head. The flimsy sheets and foam felt like the weight of the world on his face, trying to smother him alive. Phillip fought off the urge to strip down to bare skin to rid himself of the suffocating weight of his pajamas, too.
Inhale through your nose, hold it and count to four, then exhale through your mouth. Think positive thoughts.
Phillip opened the top drawer of the wobbly nightstand by his bed. He pushed the motel room copy of the Gideon Bible aside to grope for his red transistor radio and his earphones. He had discovered the radio in his leisure suit side pocket when he got to the Greyhound bus station on the day of his release. He figured someone from the prison knew he liked to listen to the radio through the prison audio system, so maybe it was a going-away present. Tonight, he tuned it in to WAMC—the public radio station in the Albany area—in the hope that some classical music would calm his brain. He still wasn’t accustomed to the quiet of his motel room; the absence of sound made his ears ring.
