Alcatraz-1259

by William G Baker

  And that summer I finally got around to writing a letter to my mother. I wrote it mostly out of respect, because she was my mother, but we were never very close. My mother had given me up to my grandma when I was three-years old, and it was my grandma who had raised me. I loved her and she loved me, my grandma, and I cried when she died.

  After that my grandpa got rid of me as quick as he could, found my mother and told her to come and get me. By then she had married Zeb Hackney, who was also from Kentucky, same county and everything, but she'd met him in Detroit working in a factory. A lot of people went to Detroit to find jobs in those days. Anyway, she came after me. I hid in a closet at my grandpa's house but they found me and took me away.

  My mother explained to me that she'd had to give me to my grandmother because it was during the depression and Garnet, my father, had left her, and she, with no money and my baby brother in her arms—well, she'd had no other choice. She'd taken off to Detroit.

  But that's another story, and I'm not here to trash my mother's name. She was still my mother.

  In reform school I'd learned to respect my mother, for in reform school a mother's name was more sacred than a stack of bibles. If you took an oath on your mother's honor to prove to somebody you were telling the truth, then your word was accepted without question, and not even fingers crossed behind your back could negate such a sacred oath. And you'd dare not bad-mouth somebody's mother unless you were prepared to get into a serious fight.

  So I wrote to her, my mother, something like, "Dear Mom, How are you, I am fine. I'm in Alcatraz. Your son, Bill." What else are you supposed to say to a mother? I had learned to respect her, but I had not yet learned to love her. Maybe that was something you couldn’t learn.

  And that summer Simmons worked the yard, the little guard I'd cussed out over the cigarettes. He was really pissed off when he first saw me on the yard. I guess he figured I'd be in the hole. When he first saw me his face turned red and he just kept looking at me, but I ignored him and walked away. He was a little guy, looked a lot like a girl. I figured maybe Mama Nature was having a problem with her X’s and Y's, genetically speaking, when Simmons was conceived, and he could have been born a boy or a girl. It must have been a close call. Snicker.

  Back in the cell that evening Whitey Knight handed me a magazine to read, figuring he was doing me a favor, but the magazine was Reader’s Digest and I was not very fond of that magazine because of its views against convicts—they thought we should be treated even worse than we already were. Apparently they had never set foot on Alcatraz Island. But I thumbed through the magazine anyway until I came to a page that had been cut out by the old librarian, which pissed me off so I tossed it aside. The librarian was not only the librarian and the parole officer at Alcatraz, he was also the censor.

  Prisoners were allowed to order a few magazines, like Life and Look and Reader's Digest. It was his job, the librarian, to read magazines that came in and cut out any article that dealt with crime or prison riots or any other excitable material that he deemed worthy of a good whack of his scissors. And whack he did, so that by the time you received your long-awaited magazine it often only served to make you so mad you couldn't read it anyway, so it went flying out the bars and over the tier.

  Can you imagine censoring Reader’s Digest?

  Newspapers were forbidden entirely. So it was hard to get official confirmation of baseball scores and things like that, but, God bless him, our boss in the glove shop brought in a clipped-out copy of all the scores from the San Francisco newspaper every morning, which saved a lot of arguing about "I heard this" or "I heard that" on the radio. I wish I could remember his name, my boss. He was a decent man.

  As the summer wore on the new started to wear off and the gray background in my head started turning a darker shade of gray. There was always that gray background. I mean you were always aware of where you were, no matter what you were doing. You could be watching a movie, listening to a football game, walking the yard, laughing and joking with your buddies, it didn't matter. Every thought in your head was filtered through that gray background of doing time. And when life in prison started to get boring it was my way to take action.

  I decided, logically, that what our almost-barren recreation yard needed was a shade tree. And, logically, I decided it was up to me to plant one. So I did.

  It wasn't a great big tree, or even a medium sized one. In fact it was a little sickly looking thing that I snatched, roots and all, from the side of the hill and shoved down the front of my pants and under my shirt as we came up the steps from work on a Friday afternoon. I hid it under my bed that night and the next morning I took it to the yard. I'd already decided where I was going to plant it. There was a spot over behind the screen behind the softball team benches that had a few sprigs of green stuff growing up next to the base of the screen, grass and weeds and stuff, so I dug a little hole, sneakily of course, and planted it there. I don't know what kind of tree it was, wasn't even sure it was a tree—it might have only been a bush—but, well, we'd find out in a year or so.

  I had a little plastic bag like the ones Burgett made his water wings out of (and died in the bay when they collapsed), which I filled up with water from the drinking faucet, and I watered that tree and the grass and weeds around it.

  Well, weeds need water too don't they?

  I watered that tree every weekend, but it wasn’t long before Simmons picked up on what I was doing and questioned me about it. “What are you doing, Baker?” he asked one day.

  “Just watering the grass and stuff, uh huh.” And I sprinkled the water all around, hoping he wouldn’t notice my pitiful looking tree. Well, he just watched me doing what I was doing, and then he said, “Baker, you don’t need to water that stuff as much as it rains around here, and look at all the weeds—you sure don’t need to water them.”

  “Well, I know. It’s just something to do.” I shrugged and added, “And it can’t hurt anything.”

  He studied for a minute and then walked off shaking his head.

  I thought I’d fooled him, but I guess I hadn’t, because that afternoon when we went back to the yard my tree was gone, roots and all. I knew it had to be Simmons, and he just wandered around, la-de-da, all afternoon and didn’t look at me one single time, which was further proof, because any other time he’d be checking me out every ten minutes. There wasn’t anything I could do about it, though, except bide my time and think of something else to do. Poor tree. It was uprooted long before it even reached puberty. What a shame.

  I remember the first time I saw Robert Stroud, Birdman. Why they called him the Birdman of Alcatraz, I’ll never know, because he never once had a bird while he was at Alcatraz. He had all his birds at the U.S Penitentiary in Leavenworth, but, oh well, the first time I saw him old Fat Mitchell was taking me from the factory to a dental appointment in the hospital one gray, misty morning, and we had to go through the yard to get there. And it just so happened that they were giving Birdman his one-hour-a-day of exercise, so I saw him standing on the other end of the yard, a gray ghost with a silver sheen around him as the sun, at that moment, came out from behind the clouds and tried to shine through the mist. He, Birdman, appeared like an apparition from another world, slouched forward with his hands in his pockets peering at me. Freaked me out, and for once in my life I was relieved to face a dentist rather than linger on the yard with that ghost.

  And I remember well that first summer when one Saturday morning we couldn’t go to the yard because it was pouring-down rain, Mother Nature doing her laundry, I guess. The bitch. I mean she could have picked a better day.

  So we had a movie instead. Which would have been all right, except the preacher picked our rainy-day movies and we’d often see the same movie two or three times before he’d think to swap it for a new one. So between God and Mother Nature we just couldn’t win.

  I don’t like church or funerals or hospitals. I used to go to church with my grandma, but when she died I had to go to
all three and they didn’t turn out too well at all for her. She died in a hospital and I saw her in a coffin in church and I saw them bury her in the graveyard. But I like graveyard cleanings and baptisms. At graveyard cleanings back home everybody brings big baskets of food, which they spread out on a bunch of tables placed end to end and we really chow down. I mean I used to go back and forth from one end to the other until my skinny stomach popped. But I didn’t get in on any of the cleaning. That was before my grandma died.

  And when the preacher baptized his flock we all went down to the creek to this special waterhole and sang songs for a while and then he’d do a little preaching but his sermon was short and then the good part came when he dunked the women all the way under and they came up dripping wet with their dresses clinging to their bosoms and—well, I was only seven but my eyes popped out just the same.

  That was before my grandma died.

  So I didn’t go to church at Alcatraz, not that I didn’t believe in God, I did, I just didn’t go to church. And anyway somebody said the preacher went to gun practice with the rest of the guards so we figured he was a cop just like they were and he’d shoot us in a minute if he got a chance, though he might try to save our soul once we were dead.

  I take it back, I did go to church one time while I was at Alcatraz. They held a memorial for Burgett when he died out in the bay, and I went then because he had that coming. He died but in dying he escaped from Alcatraz. He did that. He hit that water and they didn’t bring him back alive. They brought back his body but his soul was long gone.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Burgett was a big boy, a strong boy, tall, slim of waist and wide of shoulders. He did pushups by the dozens and jogged the yard now and then when he wasn’t playing poker. Told me he was in training, but he didn’t tell me what for until a lot later. He was about five years older than me, I think, had a strong jaw and handsome face. He would have qualified for a part in a cowboy movie except for one thing: he was a knothead just like the rest of us, not dumb but not smart either. In fact, he would have been most qualified as a replacement for a team of mules on a Georgia chain gang.

  So when someone suggested he join our raggedy softball team we jumped on it, for he was a perfect fit, a natural born Gullie. There was only one problem. He could smack that big old softball all the way over the wall every time. But we overlooked that because he was such a good guy.

  He also worked in the glove shop and I got to be friends with him, so it was natural that when I decided to carry fruit from the mess hall to the glove shop to set up a batch of hooch, he quickly volunteered to help. I mean, it was time to stir up a little excitement, and I figured, logically, it was up to me to do it.

  Some other guys volunteered to help, also. Carl Bistram, he got right in on it, wormed his way right in. Carl Bistram was usually dedicated to his work. He could really sew gloves, make that sewing machine sing songs all day long, and when he got through at the end of the day he was so covered with white glove dust from head to toe that he looked like Santa Claus, and everybody got out of his way when he went to blow himself off with the air hose. Well, he volunteered, too, with a thirsty look in his eyes, so I guess he had a secret taste for the bottle.

  We tried to keep it quiet, but by the time we were through, half the glove shop was in on it.

  I had learned a lot of good things up in Oregon, like how to make good home brew. A bowl of fruit, a pound of sugar, and a little yeast to each gallon of water was about right. The main thing, though, was the length of time you let it ferment before you tried to drink it. Seven days was about right, between seven and ten days. Leave it too long and it started turning to vinegar, drink it too soon and you’d get sick to your stomach. But, to tell the truth, what with all the shake-downs and the smell of fermentation, there was a bad risk of getting it busted, so you could, I mean you could, drink it in five days. Yep, you could.

  So over a period of a couple of days each one of us carried whatever fruit we had with our meals, apples, oranges, plums, we carried them in the top of our socks down to the glove shop, and I got a packet of fresh yeast from the bakery for five packs of cigarettes, and by Friday we were ready to set it up, which I did, personally, in a trash can in the bathroom of the glove shop, I being the professional brew maker of the bunch.

  We vowed we wouldn’t touch it for five days, me and Burgett. That was it, five days.

  Monday came and we went back to work. Somehow we’d made it through the weekend without cracking up from the suspense of waiting. We weren’t there to watch it so anything could have happened to it, anything. After we filed into the shop and the boss settled down in his office, I cut my eyes toward the bathroom. I couldn’t stand it any longer. I got up and made my way, nonchalantly, to the bathroom. Our garbage can was still there. I peeped inside, glanced back outside. A thousand eyes were on me, well, maybe ten or twenty, but it seemed like a thousand for they had stopped sewing and were flat out staring at me in the silence, frozen in mid-motion. I made a desperate pantomime of sewing motions until the idea finally got through to the dumb fuckers and they started sewing again. And again I peeped inside the garbage can, pulled out the big sack of trash that covered the bags of brew. It was still there! Yep, our brew was still there, bubbling like Niagara Falls, and the smell about knocked me over. I quickly re-covered it and made my way nonchalantly back to my seat. “It’s still there,” I whispered. Everybody stopped sewing to hear what I said. “Damn! Keep sewing. It’s still there. It’s okay!” I whispered as loud as I could. Everybody started sewing again, more vigorously this time.

  That’s exactly what happened. I remember it well. Looking back to that day in the glove shop on Alcatraz Island I wondered why the boss hadn’t called a halt to the whole operation and locked us all up on the spot, for if he’d looked out his window and seen how hard all of us were working he’d have known without a doubt that something was wrong, something was bad wrong, because never in the history of Alcatraz had twenty sewing machines made such a racket, mine included.

  But nothing happened, and we went to lunch and came back from lunch and still nothing happened.

  Burgett eased over to my machine that afternoon and pretended to talk to me about a box of gloves I’d messed up. I told him to stack them on top of the other boxes of rejects I’d already got back from quality control, which amounted to about all the gloves I’d tried to sew that day. I guess Burgett had been thinking about our home brew that was bubbling away in the bathroom, that’s what was really on his mind. And he finally got around to that. “I’ve been thinking. It’s been five days since we set up our brew, and—we might ought to sample it and see if it ain’t about ready to drink. I added it up and it’s been five days. That was our agreement, five days, home-boy.”

  “How do you figure that?” I asked hopefully.

  “Okay,” Burgett counted on his fingers as he explained. “We set it up Friday, that’s one day, and Saturday is two days, and Sunday is three days and this is Monday, so that’s four days, and we started it early Friday morning and this is Monday afternoon, so that’s five days.”

  He had used all four fingers and a thumb, so it came out to five days all right. I counted on my fingers, mouthing the words like he had, as he watched me anxiously, and, sure enough, I used all my fingers and my thumb. Then I counted my fingers and thumb, did the math and everything, and, yep, it came out to five days, and that was our agreement. “Yep,” I said. “Five days.” Whereupon I hopped up out of my chair and went straight into the bathroom and strained every bag of that hooch through two big bath towels and into one big bag. I threw the towels, mashed-up fruit and all, into the garbage can and covered it up quickly. Then I dragged the bag of hooch behind the garbage can and motioned triumphantly at Burgett to bring his cup, and he did, nonchalantly.

  I sampled the first cup. It tasted good, a little sugary maybe, but good. Burgett sampled it, ran his tongue around his lips, smiled, and killed the whole cup. I slurped down a cupful. Wow.
Told Burgett to send in Bistram. He did. Bistram drank a cupful, made a face. Everybody who was in on it took a turn, got up from their chairs one at a time and wandered into the bathroom nonchalantly, cool as hell. I drank another cup and wandered back to my chair, cool as hell and getting cooler by the minute, smarter too. I don’t remember how many trips into that bathroom I took, but by late afternoon I was smarter than Einstein and the coolest dude on the planet. I’ll never know how we got away with it.

  Fortunately, we ran out of booze and somebody had sense enough to clean up the mess. Several times we had to scoot back to our chairs when the boss came out of his office to count heads, but he didn’t even go into the bathroom, just glanced inside and kept on going. We were very lucky that day. Well, up to that point we were, because my luck ran out on the way up the steps. I forgot to tell you—I don’t drink, not much anyway, because two beers makes me dizzy and three gets me drunk as hell, so Burgett had to help me up those steep stairs on Alcatraz Island that day.

  My memory gets a little fuzzy here. I remember that we made it to the first landing, partway up the stairs. But Burgett had to turn me loose there because a big old guard was standing on the landing looking everybody over. Me, I must have tripped over something I guess because the next thing I knew I was on the ground and this big old guard was standing over me asking me questions and then he was hollering something and I looked at a pair of big old clodhopper boots about level with my head which was about level with the ground, my head, and when I saw those big old boots I saw Zeb Hackney, my step dad, standing over me hollering crazy things and I stood up with an anger that not even alcohol could kill and I said, “Fuck you!”

  That’s when I discovered that my previous observation that you could cuss out the Alcatraz guards all day long and they’d just stand there writing down what you said, didn’t always hold water. The guard standing there was a big old boy and when I said “Fuck you,” that’s all I remember because he threw a big roundhouse fist and I felt something hit my jaw and saw a blinding light, and he knocked me all the way into the next day.