Left for Alive

by Tom Hogan

  She sent a pitcher of beer over to their table with a note: “I’m writing an article on Josh Clements, but everyone seems afraid to talk. Do you mind answering a few questions?” The men looked at the note, then over at her, then helped themselves to the pitcher. They talked as they drank, occasionally glancing over. Halfway through the pitcher, the guard she didn’t recognize waved her over.

  “You’re pissing a lot of people off, you know that?” he said, motioning her to a chair. “But long as you don’t use our names, me and Kenny’ll answer some questions.”

  “Mind my asking why?”

  The guard named Kenny, the one from the warden’s office, gestured with his mug towards the prison. “That lockdown this week, just so the fish couldn’t meet with you. I don’t like runnin scared, like we got sumpin to hide. Fuck Josh and his experiments. And fuck that Fairchild broad. You lie down with trash, you got to expect to stink. Know what I mean?”

  “Not really. That’s why I’m here.” She looked from one man to the other. Kenny was a heavy, square man with a chin sliding into a fleshy throat. He had a pale, softly-freckled complexion and a thin reddish mustache. His companion was in his late forties, well-leathered, with the squinting, crow-footed eyes of a man who lived most of his life outdoors. He had long sideburns that stopped just short of joining up with his mustache.

  Carol took out her notebook. “Were both of you at the prison when Josh started there?”

  Her host nodded. “I been there eight years, Kenny a year longer than me. I work the yard, Kenny works the warden’s office and receiving. So we got different takes on your friend Josh.”

  She helped herself to some of the pitcher. “So that we’re clear, Josh is hardly a friend. The one time I tried to talk to him, he pulled a knife on me.”

  The man nodded. “Not surprised. Might give you a little glimpse into why no one will say word one to you about him.”

  “Including your bosses.”

  “Including them,” her host said. “Me, I’d like to see some of what he did get into print. Bottom line, he was one of us. Deserved better than he got.”

  “Matter of opinion,” Kenny said. He nodded at Carol’s notebook. “What d’ya wanna know?”

  “Let’s start with what brought him to San Tomas.”

  “Alameda,” Kenny said. “He had some luck up there, so they sent him down to the real world, see if his programs worked with the hard cases.”

  “San Tomas is hard time, Miss,” Earl said. “It’s a light year from a country club like Alameda. We had the worst numbers in the state before Josh arrived.”

  “What kind of numbers?”

  “I.V.’s. Incidents of violence. An I.V. can either be within the population, meaning the cons turn on each other. Or it can be institutional, meaning either a riot or an assault on one of us.”

  “And you guys had higher numbers than Quentin or Soledad? Hard to believe.”

  “Not if you understand how prisons work,” Kenny took a long draw of his beer. “San Tomas is a new prison, built to handle the overflow of places like Q and Soledad. So when those prisons get a new dumpin ground, what do you think they give us? Their pieces of shit, their hard cases.”

  “Also,” Earl cut in, “the older the prison, the more established the order.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning in a place like Q, the gangs, the rules, they’re all in place. A new piece of meat comes in, they join one of the gangs within a week and fit in. Or else…” He coughed into his fist, a smoker’s cough. “In a new place like ours it’s open season. Everyone’s jockeying for turf and recruits. And the I.V.s just stack up.” He nodded at his partner. “Kenny sees the ones happen in the cells, I see the ones in the yard.”

  “So what was Josh’s role in all this?”

  “I don’t remember his title,” Earl said, “but his job was simple: drive down the I.V.’s.” He lit a cigarette, offering the flame to Carol. “It’s all got to do with money. I.V.’s go down, the cost per prisoner goes down, the suits look like heroes.”

  “And Josh drove down the numbers?”

  Earl nodded solidly. Kenny’s head moved, but without conviction. “He had an impact,” Earl continued. “I can’t speak for inside, but out in the yard, he made a difference.”

  Earl motioned to the waitress for another pitcher, shaking his head as Carol reached for her purse. “First month here, he just wandered the place. Worked a few shifts—in the kitchen, the laundry, the carpentry. Hung out in the yard during the breaks. Didn’t talk to anyone, ‘less they talked to him first.”

  “Tell her about Bad Blue,” Kenny said.

  “In a bit. Anyway, Miss, your boy Josh had good radar. He picked up right off who were the mules moving the dope, who were the sugar boys.” At her puzzled expression, “The whores. He watched and learned about the gangs, how they recruited, how they claimed their turf. Things like that.”

  “So how did this affect the numbers?”

  “It didn’t, not at first. But slowly he started making suggestions. Like if he saw one of the sugar boys changing partners, he’d transfer the whore or the guy that just got jilted. In the past, that would have been good for a couple of I.V.’s—one for the whore that got carved up, then another when the new boyfriend took his revenge.”

  Earl ran a hand over his chin. “Also, he’d watch the junkies, keep an eye on who was doing more than his share of the horse. Those are the guys that the big boys set up to do their bloody work. They up the junkies’ supply for a coupla weeks, then cut them off until they’re willing to do anything. Josh’d put a junkie in medical solitary right before they got desperate. Tough to say how many I.V.s that was worth.”

  “Tell her about the thing with Blue,” Kenny urged.

  “The African Nation got pissed at Josh for putting one of their mules on ice, so they sent Bad Blue, their enforcer, after him. Blue was a big guy, about two-fifty. Blue-black skin was how he got his name.”

  Earl refreshed everyone’s glass. “You work in a place long enough, you get a feel for when somethin’s goin down. In the yard it gets real quiet. Trouble is, you usually can’t tell where’s it’s gonna happen ‘til it’s done. They use all kind of decoys, distractions. Whatever. But whenever Josh was out in the yard, if it got quiet, I’d look over at him first, make sure he was okay.”

  He ran a finger down the ridge of his nose, his eyes drifting off. “So I see Blue slip the knife out of his sleeve and come up behind Josh real quick like. So fast I couldn’t even shout a warning or get off a shot. But just as Blue takes that last step, Josh spins around, kicks Blue in the knee—broke it, turned out later—then grabs Blue’s wrist as the knife moves past his head and twists the wrist until it snapped. The knife goes flying, Blue goes down screaming, holding his knee. And Josh walks over, picks up the knife, goes back to Blue, grabs his hair and pulls his head back. The whole yard’s dead quiet, mesmerized like. And before anyone can say or do anything, Josh cuts off a chunk of Blue’s hair and lays it in front of Blue’s eyes on the ground. Then he just walks off.”

  Earl nodded at Carol’s notebook. “Those of us worked the yard, we may not have liked him all that much, but we admired his balls. You can put that down.”

  “Hey,” Kenny said, “I didn’t say I didn’t like him. He’s sittin here, I’d buy him a beer.” He took a sip. “He gave you respect, whether you were a guard or a con. And he didn’t try to be someone else, like one of those assholes shakes your hand with one of them jig handshakes.” He pointed a finger. “But his ideas and his programs, they fuck up somethin’s that’s been workin just fine for a long time.”

  “What kind of programs?”

  “Such as havin cons on the parole board. Such as cons bein part of reviewin a guard’s performance, havin a say in setting daily work schedules and menus. Such as givin the gangs more room to maneuver, rather than breaki
n some heads.”

  “He ever explain what his logic was?”

  “One time. One of the guards got in his face in the lunch room, tellin him he had trouble at times knowin which side Josh was one. The guy kept after him, askin him to enlighten all of us on his ‘great theories’. And Josh finally told him that the system is intended to make people helpless. And helpless people got nothin to lose.”

  Carol doodled in her book, not looking up. “What that guard said, about not being sure if Josh was one of us or one of them. Do you think Josh ever did time?”

  “No ‘think’ about it,” Earl said. “First time I saw him out in the yard, I knew. He had the look. But no one ever dared ask him about it. Kenny ran a few scans on the computer, but it was all within the state system, and he came up empty each time. Then one day, about a year later, we get the answer.”

  Kenny picked up the story. “This guy was transferred over to us from Soledad. A real hard case. I booked him in. And the next day I’m told he’s bein transferred to Q. So I go over to Processing to see what gives. Guy’s still there, sittin in the transfer van, so I go up and talk to him. He gives me some attitude, but after some gentle convincin he tells me he did time in Baltimore in a Federal joint eight years back. One of the guys he did time with was Josh. So the day he’s admitted, as he’s goin to his cell, he sees Josh, Josh sees him, and the next thing he knows, he’s on his way to Q.”

  “Did he say what Josh was in for?”

  “He didn’t remember…or didn’t want to be helpful. He did say he was pretty sure that Josh was doin a dime. And it being Federal, that meant either some form of aggravated assault—and there’d have to be a weapon involved—or manslaughter.”

  “You didn’t find out which one?”

  “Tried to. Took a mornin and made some calls to Baltimore. But it was a long time ago and no one was in a rememberin mood. Records wasn’t any help. Turns out that Josh was eighteen when he went in, but the crime he was convicted for took place when he was a minor. And the law…”

  Carol finished the sentence. “Calls for all criminal records to be expunged once the sentence has been served. I’ve run into that one before.”

  He nodded. “I’m not sayin you couldn’t find out. But you’d need to go there in person. With a roll of twenties. Grease the right palms, either out at the prison or down at the prosecutor’s office. Phone or computer—you’re wastin your time.”

  She wasn’t back in her motel room more than an hour when the phone rang. “I take it you’re going to Baltimore,” William said.

  More to herself than to William, she said, “Earl. Couldn’t have been Kenny.”

  “Earl owes us.” He let a long silence build, but Carol waited him out. “Put off your trip for another day,” he said finally. “Come on up to The Gimp’s tomorrow night, and I’ll have something for you.”

  “I think I got what I was looking for tonight.”

  “You’re not even close. See you at nine.”

  The next night as she entered the bar, The Gimp looked up, his face hard and unwelcoming. “In the card room,” he nodded down the hall.

  William was sitting at one of the poker tables. Across from him, back to the door, sat a woman, long hair tumbling out from beneath a scarf, flowing down the back of a simple white linen blouse. As Carol entered the room, William looked up, then nodded to his companion. The woman turned and half-rose in greeting. As she stood, her hair fell across her face for a moment. She pushed it back with an impatient gesture. By the time Carol recognized her, William was into his introduction. “Carol, this is Donna Fairchild.”

  The two women shook hands wordlessly. Carol looked critically at the face that had been so public three years ago. There was little change. Even with no make-up, the East Coast patrician looks were still there. The slender, fine-lined nose and cathedral cheekbones that the reporters had fixated on. Dark green, ‘no-nonsense eyes’, as one judge had described them, returned Carol’s gaze evenly.

  Without taking her eyes off Carol, Fairchild gestured towards an empty chair. “We’ve got a proposal for you.”

  Before Carol could take out her notebook, Fairchild began. “Let me make one thing clear up front. Josh needs to think that this article is my idea—that I’ve decided it’s time to quit running and get on with my life. If he ever found out I did this to keep you away from Baltimore, he’d be angry with me, but he’d be furious with you. Which is not something you want.”

  “I can deal with that.”

  “No, you can’t. And don’t kid yourself that you know what you’re talking about.” She nodded at Carol’s pad. “Now let’s get to work.”

  The next morning, Carol called Miles with the news. She’d found Donna Fairchild, had already conducted one interview and was scheduled for two more within the week. Fairchild would cooperate with the article on one condition: there was to be nothing about where she was living, nothing that could lead the press to her. About the other story, the ex-cons and their mystery leader, he’d been right—she’d been trying to make a story out of something that wasn’t there.

  CHAPTER 9

  “I wasn’t by nature a political person when I entered law school,” Donna told Carol during their first interview. “I had lived a life of privilege, in which a lawyer was someone who facilitated your life, who preserved or extended what you already had. The first pre-law class I took didn’t so much change my idea of law as much as enrich it, showing me that law was intellectual reasoning and consideration, using one argument to mount another. I liked all of that. I still do.”

  She took a sip of tea and looked around uncomfortably. They were in a corner table of the coffee house William used as his office, Josh having refused to let Carol up to the camp. Donna was done up for the meeting, dressed in an ivory silk blouse and grey pleated skirt. And makeup. Her posture was one of caution and resistance.

  “You were headed for a clerkship with the Supreme Court, weren’t you? Until…”

  “Until one of my professors challenged me to take a position furthest from my interests and background. So I took an internship with the Legal Defense Coalition in Roxbury.” She nodded at the notebook. “But you know all of that already.”

  “I’m trying to find out whether you changed overnight, as many of your Harvard classmates allege, or if the radicalization came about gradually.”

  “I didn’t change, so much as my concept of the law did. I already knew that the law was only theoretical at the highest level, that for the bulk of society it was a tool. But I found that it was logical only in theory, that in practice it was not so much practical as political. Political at its core. That was a shock.”

  She sipped her tea. Her eyes wandered to the window. “What changed me was the complete imbalance of how ‘Law’ worked for the people I grew up versus the ones I was now working with. And what ‘radicalized me’, as you put it, was that at best the government was apathetic to this huge gulf and at worst was determined to maintain, if not extend, it.”

  She smiled distantly. “I was naïve enough to believe that all it would take was for one of their own—someone privileged like me—to point out the injustice and discrepancies. And like that,” she snapped her fingers, causing the waitress to look over, “they’d get right on it. And they’d thank me for bringing it to their attention.”

  “In 1972, four months before you disappeared,” Carol consulted her notebook, “you said in one of your summations…” She moved her finger to an underlined section. “‘Our government is based not on consent but on oppression. Law is never neutral, it is either a weapon or a shield. The hubris of this society, this government, this court is that you continue to be shocked when those in your crosshairs fight back with whatever is at hand. I would ask this court—and the government it serves—when your only options are slaughter or warfare, what would you do?”

  Carol shut her notebook. “You
remember that speech?”

  “Superior Court, St. Louis.”

  “Do you still feel that way?”

  Donna sighed, the air creaking in her throat. “Look, that was over five years ago. I was a lot younger then. It was a differ…” Her voice stiffened. “Yes. I still feel that way. Absolutely.”

  Her early class-action activities against the housing authority and welfare system brought her local respect, but it was her successful defense of a Black Panther accused of the dubious murder of a policeman that turned her into a national figure. At thirty, she was the face of the New Left, the radical lawyer known for taking on difficult political cases and winning.

  She had a reputation for professionalism, of working her cases not as circus events but as legal battles. One judge was quoted as saying, “I’d take five cases in front of that clown Kunstler over one with that Fairchild bitch. She does her homework, which means the rest of us have to do ours, too.” She was direct with her clients, establishing up front what she expected of them and what her legal approach would be. If their foremost concern was winning, she’d focus on that. If they wanted to use the trial as a political forum, she would accommodate that as well. If they wanted flamboyance—theatrics over law—she referred them out. Her defenses worked on two levels, legal scholars agreed: while focusing on the individual case at hand, she was still able to articulate that while society was evolving, legal and police reactions were not.

  The street gangs of that time were more complicated than the days of West Side Story. The same group that distributed booklets on how to make the most effective Molotov cocktail also provided breakfast for every child in the neighborhood. Her legal arguments confused her juries, but she then assured them it was okay and natural to be confused. Couple that confusion with her ability to blur legal lines in her closing arguments and ‘reasonable shadow of doubt’ was often inevitable.