The guards came through counting, shining their flashlights. We laid quietly until they left and went over to the other side, then we popped our doors open with our bent spoon handles. It was time to roll. Buck Poe and Al Doolin went out first. There was a big square wall fan over beside the window which hid them from view of the guard up front in case he came back to our side. They pried the corner of the window screen up and popped the bars out one by one. Buck Poe had left just a little sliver of each bar uncut so they’d stay in place, but they popped loose easily. He motioned for the next two to come out, me and Joe Benson, so we did, hid behind the fan. Then the next two, Jonesy and Little Al. They hadn’t bothered to wake up Little Al, figuring to leave him behind if he wasn’t ready on his own, but here he came, Little Al, popped the bar out of the grill and scampered behind the fan. He had seen the fog and been ready. So there we were, six of us hiding behind that big fan. Everything was good so far.
But Joe Benson had forgotten something he was supposed to bring with him, so he went back to his cell to get it and that’s when the guard, who must have forgotten something himself, spotted him cutting across the corridor. At first, we weren’t sure whether the guard had actually seen him, for the guard stopped and looked for just a few seconds and then disappeared, so we kept going just as planned. Buck Poe went out the window first, then Al Doolin right behind. They began crawling along the bare ground toward some high bushes that would give them cover. Me and Joe Benson were next.
At that moment, though, we spotted two guards with flashlights coming down the side of the building heading right for Poe and Doolin, who were still on the ground, crawling. The guards spotted them and moved up quickly to head them off, shined their flashlights in their faces and hollering at them to get up off that ground and surrender.
Well, at that point I figured it was over, that Poe and Doolin would be marched back to the hole and locked down and we might as well go back to bed. And I was ready to do just that. I mean, what else could we do. We were busted cold turkey. Finished.
Except Buck Poe and Al Doolin didn’t figure it that way. They came up off the ground, all right, but not to surrender. Instead they got right up in the guards’ faces and did some serious hollering of their own, then they relieved the suddenly willing guards of their flashlights, their caps, which they put on their own heads, and their badges. I saw all this with my own surprised eyes. Man, Poe and Doolin weren’t nobody to mess with, and those guards realized it real quick.
Me, I caught on real quick, too, and I squeezed my skinny ass through those bars and joined the party. When everybody was out, we escorted our captives down the foggy path to the construction area where they were building a new segregation building (our future home, I guessed). They had a bunch of lumber there, two by fours and such, and once we got there everybody started doing their jobs while the captured guards stood by and watched. We picked out the longest two by fours and a bunch of short sawed-off ends and began building our chicken ladder.
We spotted two more flashlights coming through the fog and Al Doolin, busy with the ladder, said, “Somebody go up and capture those guards.” So, all pumped up by then, I said, “I’ll go,” and away I went. Somebody came with me but I don’t remember who, for by then I was convinced that I could capture a whole army of prison guards single-handed. By the time they got the ladder built another two guards came down the path, so a couple of guys went and intercepted them. So then we had six captured guards, and since there were six of us, everything worked out just right, for we had a guard’s cap for each of us.
Ladder built, it was time to go. Surprisingly it was Little Al Brumfield who led the way. And there was nothing wimpy about his purposeful stride. He headed straight for that back wall, jaw set, back straight. And he didn’t stop till we got there, us and the six hostages coming up behind. Another setback, by then they had guards posted along the catwalk on the wall between the guard-towers. We couldn’t see them clearly, they were just gray foggy shadows, but we saw their flashlights and they saw ours. They hollered at us, must have seen our caps and mistook us for guards for they questioned us about what was going on. So we answered back, said we were looking for escaping prisoners who broke out of the hole, and we asked them if they’d seen anything. When they said no, we told them we were going to split up and scour the compound till we found them, and we retreated into the fog until we were out of sight. We stopped to talk it over, not sure what to do now. We certainly couldn’t hit the wall with all those guards up there. They had guns for sure and would recognize us before we got to the top.
It was then that Little Al Brumfield once again took the lead. “Let’s go get the box car,” he said calmly but firmly. And we followed him, still escorting our captured guards. Plan B.
The box car was parked on its track beside the laundry. The tracks led downhill, across the railroad bridge which crossed Shit Creek, and then to the back gate and thus out of the prison. But the derail was thrown and locked to its post with a padlock. No problem, Little Al took a guard with him and headed down the hill. When he neared the derail he was well within sight of a guard tower even through the fog, But Little Al paid no attention to that. He snapped that lock hasp with one hard jerk of the hardened steel sink plunger, switched the derail back to the main track and was back with us in no time at all.
Well, we asked our captured guards to help us push the boxcar, which they did. We pushed it about halfway down the hill and when it was rolling good we jumped on. The guards, left standing, decided they’d had enough, I guess, for the last I saw of them they were running for the control room. Man they could run.
Downhill we went, gathering speed quickly. I was clinging to a ladder on the side of the boxcar, on the side away from the gate tower so he couldn’t get a shot at me. Some guys were inside the car, others rode on the back. The car sped across the railroad bridge. I hung on tight. The gate was coming up fast. It was a big solid metal gate. The boxcar hit it with a loud crunch, nearly throwing me loose from my perch. I heard gun shots, more gun shots. The boxcar slowed on impact, but it was going through, going through, still going through—slowing, slowing.
It stopped dead still. It sprung the gate out far enough for us to get through. I saw freedom. I jumped down and headed that way. But then suddenly the steel gate, stretched to its limit, sprung back in pushing the boxcar with it with such force that the boxcar rolled back halfway to the bridge. And freedom was gone. The gate was back in place. I heard more gunfire. Looked up and saw the guards through the fog. They had simply left the tower and walked down the catwalk atop the wall and were directly above us busting caps like crazy.
How they kept from killing us all I don’t know, the excitement I guess. I mean bullets were flying all over the place and everybody was scrambling this way and that. Finally, everybody, including me, ran for the stopped boxcar, then to the bridge. We took cover on some rocks underneath the bridge.
The guards kept firing round after round in our direction, shot up the boxcar, shot the hell out of Shit Creek, kept shooting till they either ran out of bullets or got tired of shooting. The night was finally quiet.
We were pinned down and there was nothing else we could do. So we smoked some cigarettes and talked. We knew the cops wouldn’t be coming for us until daylight for they wouldn’t want any part of us in the fog and darkness.
We had failed. But not really, for we had made a good try at it, and I had learned a lot about everybody including myself. I had done my part. And I had especially learned a lot about Little Al Brumfield and about bravery.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
When the sun came up and the fog lifted they came after us. They came with guns, they came with a whole arsenal of guns: tommy guns, shot guns, rifles, pistols, they came with everything they had. Led by Warden O’Malley, himself, they came to get us out from under that bridge one way or the other. O’Malley had repeatedly restrained his guards from using physical force, including guns, on us for anything that happened
inside the prison short of murder, but he showed no such restraint now, for he drew the line on prisoners going over his wall, or under it or through it.
O’Malley looked haggard, like he’d been up all night. He also looked angry and his face was red as a beet. So we, uh, came out from under that bridge with our hands up as ordered. We were not suicidal.
They marched us back to the hole, put us back in our cells, our same cells, except our mattresses were gone. They gave us one wool blanket, a towel and a roll of toilet paper, and that’s about it. They explained with a smile that they had to tear our mattresses up looking for hacksaw blades. They didn’t bother to explain that they weren’t in any hurry to bring new ones, but we caught on after a few nights of sleeping on those hard steel bunks.
They welded all the bars back in place. They checked our doors, couldn’t see anything wrong with them, so they fired the guard who was working the hole on the night we escaped on the grounds that he, himself, must have unlocked the doors and let us out.
That first day back in our cells I noticed some blood on my pants, and on inspecting my left leg noticed that I had been slightly wounded, nothing serious but it was seeping blood so I told a guard and they took me to the hospital. An X-ray showed that I just had a bullet fragment lodged shallowly in my upper leg. The doctor squirted some freezing stuff on the wound and cut out the fragment, no problem, then bandaged it up.
While this was going on the convict attendants and nurses watched me in awe, like I was Jesse James or somebody. The newspapers and radio news programs labeled us “The Halloween Six” because our escape attempt happened to occur on Halloween night because that’s when the fog rolled in. I guess Mama Nature decided to spice up her Halloween party a bit with a wild escape to go along with her witches and goblins and things. She could have been more attentive to that stubborn railroad gate.
They eventually gave us back our mattresses and some of our personal property, pictures and letters and such. I had no pictures or letters but I was glad to get back my box of junk which included my football; I hadn’t expected to get that back, the football. And when they finally let us out of our cells again for recreation I resumed my passion for kicking out light bulbs.
Warden O’Malley still refused to let the guards come down on us hard like they wanted to do, and at eighteen-years old and having never been in a real prison I figured the way we got away with everything was normal behavior in all prisons, despite stories by Buck Poe and Al Doolin of how the old superintendent and his goon squad used to bust heads and take names before the big strike. And we took up where we’d left off banging on the bars with our tin cups and raising general hell when we got bored. Once we piled a bunch of junk, including an old mattress, out in the middle of the corridor and set it on fire and almost killed ourselves and everybody else. And once we got hungry and captured a couple of guards and demanded that the kitchen cook us some eggs and bacon and biscuits and gravy. And they did.
During the bacon and egg standoff, before they agreed to our demands, Lieutenant Francis appeared at the top of the stairs with a machine gun. He wanted to start shooting, but the warden waved him off and talked to us directly.
We won that confrontation, but we didn’t win them all. Lieutenant Francis had survived the transfer of power from the old regime to the new and he didn’t like the new at all. According to talk he had been a terror in the old days, supervising the physically crippling beatings of prisoners, ordering the practice of striping a prisoner naked in the old hole in the middle of winter with windows opened wide to let the winter wind drop the temperature to near freezing, which meant the naked prisoner had to stay on his feet and keep walking or freeze to death.
So, remembering the good old days, Lieutenant Francis seized on every opportunity that came his way to remind us of how things used to be. Him and Cold Slim, the old yard captain and another survivor of the old regime, were pretty much of the same mind when it came to control and discipline, except Cold Slim was a professional prison guard who didn’t take confrontation personally to the point of a consuming desire for revenge like Lieutenant Francis did. The yard captain always carried himself with dignity and he would bust your head if it came down to it, but he didn’t go looking for somebody’s head to bust, while Lieutenant Francis looked for any such opportunity.
He, Lieutenant Francis, was on duty one night when we were raising hell down in the hole. And it just so happened that the warden was away on vacation and his associate wardens had quit, so Cold Slim was in charge of the Oregon State Penitentiary. So here they came, the captain and Lieutenant Francis and about a half-dozen guards they must have hand-picked for I didn’t recognize any of them, here they came wide open and ready with clubs and tear gas guns and real attitudes.
I was standing up close to my door minding my own business banging on the bars for some reason, I don’t remember why exactly, but I was banging on the bars minding my own business when Lieutenant Francis, himself, appeared in front of my door, and before I could say hello he raised a teargas gun and shot me right in the chest and knocked me stumbling backwards all the way to the back of my cell where I sat down with a plop right on the commode. I was stunned, unable to speak for a good minute. The breath was knocked clean out of me. And I couldn’t see because I had tears in my eyes.
In addition to being physically stunned by the blow of the tear gas bomb or grenade or whatever it was, I was surprised that a prison guard would do that to me when I had previously been invincible. That was me, invincible, bullet proof, the baddest eighteen-year old kid in the State of Oregon, badder than Billy the Kid by a country mile, and here I was sitting on my ass on the toilet stool with the breath knocked out of me and worst of all, I was crying.
Finally, when I got over the shock, I jumped to my feet cussing, ran to the front of my cell in a sea of tears and grabbed the bars still cussing. Lieutenant Francis was no longer in front of my cell. I heard other bangs and more cussing down the line, so I guess they were popping everybody. And pop everybody they did, whether they were raising hell or not, and then they left just as suddenly as they’d come.
Buck Poe, my cellie, had been reading a book when it all happened, but he was no longer reading because he was crying like me and cussing too, but he had sense enough to grab a towel and wet it in the sink and smack me in the face with it. “Breath through that,” he hollered and then covered his own face with a wet towel.
Well, with everybody choking and crying and cussing there wasn’t anything left to do except raise some more hell, only louder this time because everybody in the hole was pissed off by now. We rocked the building.
Which did no good. Lieutenant Francis and his gang ignored us, hoping we’d drown in our own tears, I guess, but when we didn’t here he came back, him and his whole goon squad. The gas had cleared out enough to see by then. He stopped in front of my cell again. This time he ordered the cell opened and when it was he stepped back and a big burly guard grabbed me by the front of my shirt and snatched my skinny ass out of that cell and slung me up against the corridor wall like I was nothing. And then they started whacking me with bully sticks and when I went down they kicked me and whacked me some more, and when Buck Poe started out of the cell to help me out they smacked him so hard he landed in a broken heap in the back of the cell.
That really pissed me off, when they hit Buck Poe like that, for he was just a little old man who couldn’t have done much damage in the first place. When I was eighteen I was made out of rubber, so their blows hadn’t really hurt me that bad. I came up off that floor swinging. I mean I fought like crazy. I got in one good blow to Lieutenant Francis, smacked him right in his big nose and heard him yelp with pain, but then I was on the floor again. This time they beat me and kicked me till I was dead, or at least I thought I was dead. They beat me until I couldn’t move any more. And then they beat me until I lost consciousness.
I woke up the next day sore all over. Somebody had put me in bed, which is where I stayed most of
the time for the next few days. Buck Poe fared no better. That one big blow that had sent him flying, had hurt his tail bone when he landed and he had to sit on a small rubber inner tube for a long time after that.
Me, I healed quickly and was up banging on bars again within a couple of weeks. I had taken my first ass-whipping and had my first taste of what a real prison was like. And I didn’t complain about it, for as stupid as I was I was still smart enough to realize I may have had it coming. So call it even.
But Lieutenant Francis didn’t see it that way. There was no such thing as even with him. He dogged me every chance he got for the rest of the time I was there.
They kept no record of that incident, of course; they only keep records of what you do to them, not what they do to you, thus no incident report was written.
Why were we banging on the bars and raising hell to begin with when all we had to do was behave like decent law-abiding convicts and they wouldn’t be dogging us at all? What? Are you kidding? Do I really have to explain that? We were in prison. We were in the hole in prison. Imagine yourself locked in your bathroom. Imagine your bathtub replaced with a double bunk so that now all you have is a sink, a toilet and a bunk and a door that won’t open, that won’t ever open except when they let you out into your living room once in a while for exercise but you can’t go outside, you can’t ever go outside where the sun is shining, you can see it out the window but you can’t go there, you can’t go there for days and weeks and months, maybe you can never go there for when they lock you in your bathroom they don’t tell you how long you’re going to be there, you’re just there, period. I’ll guarantee you’d be banging on the bars, probably with your head. At least we had sense enough to use tin cups to bang with.
Now imagine they throw Buck Poe in the bathroom with you to tell you stories and I’ll guarantee you’ll commit suicide long before he quits talking.
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