Sutton

by J. R. Moehringer

  Excuse me sir.

  Shrink looks up from his book. Yes, Willie?

  Can I ask you something?

  Of course.

  Willie purses his lips. Can I ask you to be totally honest sir?

  Yes.

  Do you think I belong here?

  Oh Willie, I don’t know.

  No. Really. Do you think I should spend the next fifty years of my life in this stinking tomb?

  Shrink shuts Bertrand Russell, sets the book on his lap. He watches the smoke curl up from the tip of his cigarette. Willie the Actor, he says under his breath. The Actor who doesn’t like the roles in which he’s cast himself.

  Willie already regrets asking the question.

  The Actor who has a conscience, Shrink says—or thinks he has. Okay, Willie. Why not. Since you asked. But remember, you’re not my patient. This isn’t a diagnosis. Just an opinion.

  Right.

  So then. The alienation from the mother and father, the sibling abuse, the grim poverty of your early years, the simultaneity of your life span with a series of the most violent economic convulsions in history, it all created an uncommonly dangerous and potent witches’ brew. By the time you came of age you were very likely to go down the wrong path, to have a great deal of trouble controlling your impulses, but my God, Willie, add to all that the convergence of your first crime with this overpowering first love—that sealed it. We don’t know if criminal natures are born or made, but you were certainly shaped to some extent, to a large extent, by external events, and by an environment that rendered criminality all but inevitable. Now, what makes you different, what makes you more dangerous than other men in this institution, is your first-rate intelligence. Thoughtful, sensitive, articulate, empathetic, an inspired storyteller and a determined self-mythologizer, you’re also alarmingly—what’s the word? Cunning. All of which makes you highly appealing, seductive, charismatic, to accomplices, to casual observers, to newspapers, even to some of your victims. I’ve heard you say that you’ve never hurt anyone, a point of pride with you, but look at the people with whom you’ve crossed paths. How have they fared? They’re all in jail, or blind, or dead. A likable criminal can be more lethal than a snarling ax murderer, because people don’t take the necessary precautions. People think a gentleman bandit is cute, cuddly, and so he is, like a newborn lion cub. But take him into your home and one day you’ll discover how cute and cuddly he is. People will always want to embrace you, Willie, to follow you, to imitate you, to throw in with you, to write about you—to diagnose you—and they’ll often pay a dear price. But no one will ever pay more dearly than you, Willie, you, because you still don’t think yourself a criminal. You see yourself, or portray yourself, which amounts to the same thing, as an honest person who happens to have committed crimes. And yet your dedication to crime, your great skill—well, I believe you’re every bit a criminal, in your marrow, drawn ineluctably to the life because you’re so good at it, and because every time you rob a bank or open a safe I believe you feel what you must have felt that first time with Bess. That thrill of first love and that arousal of complicity and illicitness and danger. And sex, of course. Sex, Willie. Sex and parents—I can’t think of a single neurotic complex that doesn’t originate with one or the other. Imagine the human psyche as a skein of different color yarns. We spend our lives trying to understand and organize all the colors. Let’s say sex is blue yarn, Mom is red yarn, Dad is white yarn. In you, Willie, in your skein, I see these three colors being extremely tangled. When you rob a bank, I believe, that blue yarn becomes a bit less tangled, a bit looser, for a brief while, and this must provide a tremendous, though temporary, relief. That’s why—I’m sorry to say, Willie, but you asked—yes, I do, yes, I think, yes you belong exactly where you are. Yes.

  When they let you out of Semi Iso, Mr. Sutton, did they give you anything to do? A job?

  I was secretary to the prison psychiatrist. He was one of the leading authorities on criminology in the country. He wrote the textbook that’s still used in colleges.

  Did you read it?

  I typed it.

  Did he ever try to analyze you?

  Nah. I was too complex for him.

  EIGHTEEN

  Baseball is everything at Eastern State. It’s the best way of killing time, of forgetting time, and one of the few sources of triumph and manly pride. The six prison teams, therefore, play to win. Murderers pitch inside. Mob bosses crowd the plate. Arsonists steal home every chance they get. Things can get out of hand quickly.

  And yet every game also features a moment or two of pure calm. With each home run comes a tranquil pause, not just for the batter to round the bases, but for everyone else to stare in envy and wistfulness at the spot where the ball went over the wall.

  Throughout the 1930s, home-run balls from Eastern State become coveted souvenirs in downtown Philadelphia. Then they become vessels. Instead of hitting them over, players toss them over, with letters attached. Prison mail is censored, but no one can censor a horsehide. Whoever finds this please deliver to Mickey Whalen, 143 Spruce Street, Phila, PA. Reward!

  In time balls start flying into the yard, stuffed with drugs, money, razors. One ball contains a midget stick of dynamite.

  Willie is a star in the Eastern State League, an agile second baseman with a quick bat, who rarely strikes out and always hustles. Baseball helps him reacclimate, finally, rejoin the community of prisoners. Then his knee gives out. June 1936. Done for the season, he’s consigned to the stands with the other middle-aged players. Between innings he trades newspapers, cigarettes, rumors.

  Most of the men at Eastern State are inspired liars, so Willie tends to ignore all rumors. But one keeps cropping up. Again and again Willie hears that somewhere below the baseball diamond is a sewer pipe, which snakes all the way to the wall and beyond. Then, while watching the Eastern State Pirates whip the Eastern State Yankees, Willie hears a new twist on the familiar rumor, hears it from Tick Tock, an old con who seems to know everything except the time. He’s forever asking Willie for the correct time of day even though Willie is forever pointing at his watchless wrist. Tick Tock says he recently found a loose floorboard in the basement under Cellblock 10, and far beneath the floorboard was the unmistakable sound of rushing water: It’s gotta be the sewer, Tick Tock says, and if the sound is that loud, there must be a hole in it—and if a few guys could pry up that board, and if a guy with a slight build could maybe slip down into that sewer, then maybe, just maybe.

  Willie nods.

  Nasty down there though, Tick Tock says.

  Nasty in here, Willie says.

  They make a deal. In exchange for help writing a love letter to his girl—How do you spell twat, Willie?—Tick Tock agrees to help Willie sneak into the basement.

  Christmas 1936. While Shrink is seeing patients Willie hurries across the yard. With him are three lifers, friends of Tick Tock. Willie barely knows them, but Tick Tock says they’re right guys.

  One nice thing about Eastern State—it operates like a small village, with dozens of shops and guilds humming all day long. Even the cells are left open during the day, so prisoners can come and go to their jobs. Guards don’t think twice, therefore, about Willie and three lifers walking briskly, at midday, toward Cellblock 10.

  Tick Tock, as promised, has left a window unlatched. Willie slips in first, then the three lifers. They run down to the basement, find the loose floorboard. They pry it up. They kick off their shoes and socks and strip to their underwear. One by one they drop through the hole in the floor. They land on the sewer pipe, in which, sure enough, there’s a man-size hole.

  The last one through the hole in the pipe is Willie. He lands with a loud splash. Warm water comes to his shins. Not water exactly. More like East River muck mixed with apple chutney. It squishes between his toes, slides between his calves. His thighs. He carries an electric torch stolen from a supply room. He clicks it on. Bugs the width of field mice slither away, up and down the sides of the pi
pe. The beam of light barely pierces the darkness. It picks out a mound of waste here, a bigger mound there, an iceberg of gauze and bandages from the prison infirmary. Willie remembers that the prison was built a hundred years ago. He whips the beam back and forth and thinks: a century worth of human—

  He feels the three lifers staring at him. He faces them. All three are big, tough, heartless, but a childlike terror fills their eyes. Willie creeps forward. The three lifers follow. After twenty feet the pipe abruptly slopes down. The muck rises to their hips.

  Don’t think about it, he tells the lifers.

  But he’s really telling himself.

  He tries to think of Chapin’s garden, and the grounds of Greystone, and Bess’s delicate perfume, but it’s not easy when the muck turns to custard. And rises to his belly. Now his nipples. Shoulders. He recalls the guards in their towers squatting over the buckets. He wonders which guard is responsible for this particular scoop of custard now bobbing against his chin.

  At last, as the custard reaches his bottom lip, Willie decides they must be near the end of the pipe, meaning they must be at the wall. Beyond, there’s supposed to be a basin, then a manhole, then the street. He motions for the lifers to follow. They shake their heads—nothing doing.

  Alone, Willie steels himself, presses forward. As the lifers watch in horror he shuts his eyes, pinches his nose, dives.

  He wriggles ahead. No basin.

  He reaches out with his right hand. No basin.

  He swims and slithers another few feet. Still no basin.

  Running out of air, he starts to panic and loses his bearings. He’s suddenly not sure which way is forward, which way is back. He turns, swims a few feet, reaches, prays that his hand will touch the knee or thigh of a lifer.

  Nothing.

  He turns the other direction, reaches—nothing.

  His lungs are begging him to inhale. But if he opens his mouth, he knows what will fill it and rush up his nose and down his throat. He reaches, reaches, and at last feels something hard. A lifer. He grabs hold, pulls, breaks the surface with a violent gasp. He smears a path on his face so that he can open his eyes. The lifers are staring. He can’t tell if it’s horror or pity in their expressions. His head, hair, eyes are covered, slathered with this, this—he can’t avoid the word anymore. Shit. His mouth is full of it. He coughs. He spits and spits. Shit, shit, shit. Shit.

  Now they all turn, peer back down the pipe at the darkness into which Willie just ventured. That way lies freedom. Beyond a solid sea of shit.

  They trudge back to the hole in the pipe, climb up and through, then up through the floorboard. They have one rag. They take turns wiping themselves, but it’s hopeless. They dress, pull baseball caps over their slimed hair and march double-time to the showers.

  Willie wishes he could stand under the hot spray all day. But he has to hurry back to Shrink. He spends the rest of the afternoon typing, trying not to think about where he’s just been. He can still feel that scoop of custard against his lip. He’ll always feel it.

  Days later, in the middle of the night, Willie and the lifers are rousted from their cots. Their clothes and shoes are confiscated and lab tests find that dirt from their shoes matches dirt from the basement. Willie is national news again. The arch bank robber is also a wily, relentless escape artist. Newspapers give him another nickname, Slick Willie, which he likes less than the Actor. Hardboiled throws him and the lifers into Dark Cells for a month, then Semi Iso for another year. Once again Willie reads the Bible. Front to back. Back to front.

  Photographer speeds to the heart of midtown. Sutton stares out the window, seeing nothing but a blur of new buildings, until he spots St. Patrick’s Cathedral. He remembers, decades ago, anarchists setting off bombs inside St. Patrick’s. The anarchists were furious that the church had refused sanctuary to hundreds of unemployed workers. A priest was killed. The same anarchists tried to blow up Rockefeller’s mansion. The bomb didn’t go off. Willie never noticed before how much eucharist and anarchist sound alike.

  He’s going to die today.

  Photographer double-parks on Fifth. They all pile out, march single file into Rockefeller Plaza. Everywhere you go in this city, Sutton grumbles, you run into that name. Rockefeller.

  Photographer shoots a few frames, advances the film. Okay, Willie, first let me get a couple of you in front of that gift shop window. With that Nutcracker guy.

  Sutton looks. A wooden soldier, taller than a grown man, stands guard beside an artificial tree and fake fireplace. Sutton walks over, leans against the window, eyes the wooden soldier.

  Perfect, Photographer says. Just like that, Willie. Wait—camera’s jammed. Shit. Fucking Leicas. Hold on.

  While Photographer examines his camera, Reporter steps forward, stands beside Sutton, admiring the wooden soldier.

  Did you know that I swam through shit kid?

  Pardon?

  Shit.

  Metaphorically, you mean.

  Do I seem like a guy who speaks in metaphors? Christmas 1936, I did the Australian crawl through human feces. Literally.

  I’m sorry, I’m not following.

  There was this sewer underneath Eastern State.

  Okay.

  The rumor was, it led to freedom. But I found that it led to shit and more shit and that shit then led to deeper realms of shit. When they caught me, they threw me back in a Dark Cell, then back in Semi Iso. They almost broke me that time. I was so desperate for human contact, any contact, I drained the water from the toilet and spoke through the pipes to the man in the next cell. At least I think he was in the next cell. We could barely hear each other, but we’d speak for hours—one of the strongest bonds I’ve ever had with another person. Then one day the voice was gone. Got released, died, I never did find out. A year or so later, when they let me out of Semi Iso, I was a good boy. I took correspondence classes, got a degree in creative writing, became a model prisoner. Swimming through shit—it changes a person.

  I would think.

  Shit. People use that word too casually. They say shit when the littlest thing goes wrong. They’d never say it so freely if they actually had to swim through it. In fact, people would think different about everything they want in life if they asked themselves: Am I willing to swim through shit for it?

  Sutton faces Reporter, throws back his shoulders like the wooden soldier. Is there anything right now, kid, that you’d be willing to swim through shit for?

  Let’s see. You, standing at the site of the Schuster murder, telling me who killed Arnold Schuster.

  Sutton pulls Reporter’s trench coat tighter around himself. Shoves his hands deep in the pockets. You really missed your calling kid. You should have been a cop.

  The seats in the prison movie theater are boards set on cinder blocks. They wobble like seesaws every time a new man sits down. Willie is watching newsreels. The bloodiest fighting so far for our brave GIs! He wobbles as someone sits heavily on his right. Freddie Tenuto, a hothead from South Philly. Black eyes, sideways nose, bad skin—real bad. Angry skin for an angry man. A mob assassin, Freddie was known on the streets as the Angel of Death. Willie wobbles again. Someone sits heavily on his left. Botchy Van Sant. Another Philly guy. Hatchet face, smile like a wince.

  Spring 1944. Operation Gardening is under way. Under the boom-boom of Allied bombers bombing the Danube, Botchy and Freddie tell Willie that they’re digging a tunnel. They have nine guys working round the clock. They’ve already gone twenty feet down, through solid rock, and now they need to dig a hundred feet straight ahead and they’ll be under the lawn along Fairmount Avenue. Then all they need to do is dig straight up, thirty feet.

  Where’s the tunnel start? Willie asks.

  Under Kliney’s cell, Botchy says.

  Willie nods. Kliney is a scavenger, a pack rat, and a nut. It makes sense that he’d be involved in a scheme like this.

  Big job, Willie says.

  The Angel of Death whispers in his ear: That’s why we need yo
u, Willie. We need a place to put the dirt.

  They think the best place would be the sewer, and Willie is the local sewer expert. They want Willie to tell them where their tunnel is likely to intersect with the sewer pipe. But Willie isn’t eager to go underground again. It’s been seven years since his sewer excursion, seven years, and still he has nightmares. He still wakes up spitting shit. Also, he gets a bad vibe, a Marcusy, Plankish vibe from the Angel of Death and Botchy. One is ruthless, the other is hopelessly dumb. The Angel of Death got his nickname not because he kills, but because he kills for pleasure, and Botchy got his nickname because he botched so many holdups. Willie keeps staring at the screen. Now it’s a newsreel about the journalists waiting to cover D-Day. Say hello to the brave cameramen preparing to record the Allied invasion of Europe! Who else is in? he asks.

  Botchy rattles off nine names. Willie recognizes one. Akins. An imbecile, a nervous Nellie. Not exactly the 101st Airborne, this crew. But what choice does Willie have? It’s the tunnel or nothing.

  Part of him is resolved to stay forever in Eastern State, to die here, to be buried here, or reburied, as he thinks of it. In the last six years he’s found contentment, even some happiness, in books. Books are all he has to live for, but some days they’re enough. He’s getting an education, finally, the education he never got as a boy, the education that might have made everything different. Even the name of the damn prison—Eastern State—sounds like a fucked-up college.

  His dean is E. Haldeman-Julius. People call Julius the Henry Ford of literature, because he’s created an assembly line of professors, scientists, eggheads, who churn out crisp, simple booklets on every subject under the sun, from Hamlet to farming, mythology to physics, U.S. presidents to Roman emperors. Everyone in America has read at least a couple of Little Blue Books—Admiral Byrd took a bunch to the South Pole—and Willie has read hundreds. His cell is filled with them. This year alone he’s read A Guide to Aristotle; How to Write Telegrams Properly; Hints on Writing One-Act Plays; Evolution Made Plain; A Short History of the Civil War; Tolstoy: His Life and Writings; The Best Yankee Jokes; The Art of Happiness; Poems of William Wordsworth; Irish Poems of Love and Sentiment; A Book of Broadway Wisecracks; The Weather: What Makes It and Why; Essays on Rousseau, Balzac, and Victor Hugo; A Voyage to the Moon; and How to Build Your Own Greenhouse.