Me and Burgett were doing pushups on the yard, well, he was doing pushups, I was mostly watching, though I did a few just to entertain Jack Waites and Fat Duncan, who were out of the hole again, and Benny Rayburn, who bet me I couldn’t do twenty. So I plopped down and knocked out thirty and bounced back up like they weren’t nothing. Fat Duncan laughed, and turned to Benny Rayburn. “I knew he was going to win that bet. Anybody that’s done a lot of hole time knows how to do pushups. Now why don’t you drop down and give us twenty yourself, Benny Rayburn?”
Benny grinned, said he couldn’t do pushups and wasn’t about to go to the hole to learn.
Burgett said to me, “Hey, hit me in the belly.” And he stood there straight with his arms wide to present a good target.” I knew he was toughening up for his big swim, so I punched him in the belly but not too hard.
“Hit me harder,” he said.
“Let me hit him,” Jack Waites volunteered.
Burgett just laughed, said, “You haven’t got enough ass to knock me off the spot I’m standing on, Jack Waites.” And I thought Burgett was probably right for Jack was even skinnier that I was, and not as tall. But Jack took the bet, stood up and punched him as hard as he could. Burgett flinched a little but his feet didn’t move an inch.
Well old Simmons, the little young guard who had been messing with everybody, must have been watching for he came running, came to a stop between Jack and Burgett. “Break it up!” he hollered. Surprised the hell out of everybody. Burgett just laughed and said, “No, we weren’t fighting, I asked him to punch me in the stomach to tighten it up.” And Burgett pounded on his stomach with a fist to show how hard it was.
Simmons didn’t want to give up, and for a minute he stood there red-faced and undecided, then he said, “Well horseplay is against the rules, too. Someone could get hurt or someone might get mad and start a fight. I saw Baker hit you in the stomach and I saw Waites hit you, and I know what I saw and I’m notifying you right now that if I see it again I’m writing you up, all of you.” With those words of warning he retreated down the steps, and as he did Fat Duncan let out a loud mouth fart that stiffened his back and turned his face redder than it already was but he kept on going.
Fat Duncan and Jack Waites were just a few years older than me, and both of them were good guys but they could get crazy as hell sometimes, like the time they both cut their heel strings in protest over conditions in the hole or something, which was further proof that they were quality convicts, though maybe not as smart as some. They had spent about as much time in jails as I had, judging from the way they talked.
Jack Waites was in for bank robbery. I don’t remember what Fat Duncan was in for. He didn’t talk much about his past.
Fat Duncan was jolly and talkative most of the time, but he had his times of deep silence too, and you knew there was a lot of pain there somewhere. When he was out of the hole there were times when he wouldn’t come out of his cell, even to go eat, and I saw Jack Waites carry him a sandwich or something back from the mess hall more than once. One day I asked Jack about it and he just shrugged and said, “He’s all right, he’s just doing some hard time right now.
As for Jack, he was a pretty steady guy, talked a lot but didn’t laugh and joke a lot. He was a real hard-head and a real convict.
In later years I saw Fat Duncan in the U. S. Penitentiary in Atlanta, Georgia, where he had been transferred when they closed down Alcatraz. Duncan went to the hole by his own request shortly after he got there because he couldn’t stand the wide open population of Atlanta and the big eight-man or ten-man cells. When I talked to him he was temporarily in the prison hospital in a private cell. He told me he was on thorazine. He said they had repeatedly offered to turn him out of the hole but he said he’d spent so much time in the hole in Alcatraz that he’d been conditioned to the confined space and now he couldn’t stand wide-open spaces. He was real humble when he talked about it, and despite being heavily medicated he talked rationally and honestly. It was really sad, but I guess a lot of time in the hole does that to some people.
That’s the last I saw of him. He went back to the hole and committed suicide.
As for Jack Waites, I saw him too in later years, and he too was in the hospital, but he was in the TB. ward and he hadn’t changed a bit. He was back in prison after a brief but colorful run in which he and some of his buddies, of which he had hundreds by now for everybody knew Jack Waites, he and some of his buddies went down to Alabama and broke another buddy out of the brand-new escape-proof jail in Selma. It was a spectacular event in which he and all his buddies, and anyone who even remotely looked like any of them, were wanted by every law enforcement agency in the land and especially by the sheriff of Dallas County, upon which land the previously unescapable jail had been built, wanted every last one of them dead or alive but mostly dead.
That was Jack Waites.
And I drove past that jail one day on my way to a fresh check-cashing territory and remembered him. The jail was out in the country, had a high security fence around it and everything. It must have been a hard jail to crack.
Jack Waites did a lot of time but he died free. He died of TB on the streets of Atlanta.
At Alcatraz, with Jack Waites and Fat Duncan out of the hole, we had enough players to make up a team for a softball game, so one Sunday afternoon that’s what we did, and we played Punchy Bailey’s team and were sure to lose but we didn’t care, we were just goofing off as usual. There was me and Waites and Duncan and Benny Rayburn and Forest Tucker and Burgett and Clyde Johnson and somebody else. Even though we didn’t know Clyde all that well, he and Burgett had become good friends so we asked him to play with us. That he and Burgett were planning to escape together, I had no doubt, but I never brought it up and neither did they.
We took the field and, as usual, we got two or three runs behind right away, just goofing off having fun. Simmons and Lieutenant Mitchell were watching from the sidelines over by first base, and Simmons seemed to be having fun watching us get beat up, so we figured it would be a great opportunity to exact a little revenge, nothing serious but just a little something for him to think about, whereupon we made up a little plot which Fat Duncan begged to be the primary weapon of. No problem, upon his next time at bat Fat Duncan took a mighty swing at the ball and as usual the ball dribbled down the third base line at a leisurely roll and Duncan took off for first base. He got up a pretty good head of steam, too, lumbering across the base at break-neck speed considering how heavy he was. And, as everybody knows, the heavier the object the harder it is to stop. Fat Duncan thundered well past the base, tried to make the turn like other runners did, but momentum and weight wouldn’t let him. Instead his feet got tangled up and he careened sideways and ran smack-dab into Officer Simmons belly first, knocked poor Simmons clean off his feet and flat on his back. And Duncan landed right on top of him.
Lieutenant Mitchell, Fat Mitchell, didn’t know what to think, but he was quick to react, as usual, pulled Duncan off the flattened officer with a mighty heave. Simmons just lay there like he’d been run over by a tractor-trailer. He gagged for breath, his face was death white.
What did Duncan do? He apologized as he offered Simmons his hand to help him up, said all kinds of “Sorry, I couldn’t stop, I tripped, I didn’t see you there,” all the while extending his hand to help the poor Simmons off the ground. Simmons got up all right, with the help of Fat Mitchell—he wouldn’t take Duncan’s hand for all the money in the world.
Duncan explained to Fat Mitchell that it was just an accident, which it had certainly seemed to be, and the game resumed with little delay, no harm intended. But the whole yard cracked up laughing and cheering when it happened and Simmons glared poison arrows at us the rest of the game. Somehow he knew he’d been had.
And that wasn’t the only bit of revenge we exacted that day.
Punch Bailey’s usual mild and friendly manner often changed during a softball game, or any competitive sport or game. He could really
get aggressive, sometimes too aggressive. And for some reason he chose to talk a little too much shit with us that day. All we were doing was having some fun bumbling around on the field like a bunch of bums, which is what we were. It didn’t matter whether we won or not. But Punchy Bailey kept chiding us to the point of being downright mean-spirited. We overlooked it for a while, but then he went a little too far and the disrespect in his words was obvious to us and anybody watching the game. Enough.
Pissed off, we huddled before the next inning. “Let’s win this fucking game,” I said. “Burgett, knock the ball over the wall.”
And we came to bat with determination on our faces.
Burgett knocked five homeruns over the wall that day, and the rest of us managed to hold our own, and we beat the heck out of old Punchy Bailey’s sacred softball team.
And that shut Punchy Bailey up for a while. After the game he had a sober look on his face. He, too, knew he had been had.
And the next weekend Burgett died in the San Francisco Bay.
Before he left he gave me some cigarettes and things he had in his stash, and he shook my hand, said, “No use getting this stuff wet.” That’s all he said. But I knew what he meant. And that weekend him and Clyde Johnson captured the garbage truck guard, bound him, and hit the water.
We first knew about it when they locked us down. The radio cop tried to censor it out of the news, but it was a waste of his time for the escape was all that was talked about on the local radio stations. They had caught Clyde Johnson clinging to a rock out on Little Alcatraz, but Burgett was nowhere to be found. Clyde Johnson was crying when they spotted him, so I knew what had happened but I hoped otherwise. In later years some bonehead prison guard reported that when they captured Clyde Johnson he was crying and clinging to that rock like a sniveling coward, and that report became part of the historical record of the escape. But I can tell you for certain that that report is pure bullshit, and something only a prison guard would say, for I knew Clyde Johnson for many years both at Alcatraz and Leavenworth, and Clyde Johnson was no coward. He was crying because he had just witnessed his partner die in those churning waters. And if you can’t cry when you see your best buddy die then shame on you; I sure wouldn’t want to be in a foxhole with you.
We were locked down for about ten days I think, though I don’t remember for sure. Maybe it was only a week but it seemed like forever. I could look out the window and see the search boat circling the island day and night, see its spotlight probing the darkness at night, and that gave us some hope. I walked the floor and read some books, I even read The Old Man and the Sea, a book by Hemmingway that I had started to read many times but hadn’t made it past the first few pages. The book made a big fuss about a fish but I made it through it and remembered it long after the dust settled in the Old West. It was a book of struggle and hope and final triumph. It was the book I read when Burgett died.
Then one day they opened our doors and the prison returned to normal operation. They had found Burgett’s body washed up in one of the holes the sea had carved into the island’s shore. They found his body but his soul was long gone.
And free of that cell my spirit returned to normal operation, as it always did, being made of Rubbermaid and all that. I once again challenged Jackrabbit to a game of bridge. Me and my partner had a secret weapon this time. We had a book by the rising authority on the game of bridge, Charles Goren. He had written that book in simple language that anybody could understand, including me. It was more geared to my generation, I figured, not Jackrabbit’s old fuddy-duddy Eli Culbertson generation. I was twenty-three years old and pretty pleased with myself.
Well, the game was on. When we settled down to the card table, I remember how Jackrabbit looked his calm confident self, probably figuring we weren’t worthy of any worry on his part, that I was the same old pushover, la de da de and all that, but I had something for his old ass this time. I tried not to snicker.
As is the rule in a bridge game each pair of players has to declare what bidding system they are using, and any special bids, slam invitation bids, so on and so forth. When I said Charles Goren I was super cool about it, just sort of nonchalantly threw it out there.
Jackrabbit nodded, didn’t seem overly impressed, and the game began.
And again he tore my young ass up one side and down the other, completely fucked me up. I don’t remember the final score, but I remember it wasn’t pretty. And when it was over I stood up and said, “Damn, Jackrabbit!” And I headed for the other end of the yard with my tail between my legs.
I remember that very well.
One day I was sitting up on the bleachers and Jackrabbit came by with a homemade birthday card in his hand, said, “Sign this for Forest Tucker. His birthday’s coming up.” And he handed the card to me along with a pen to sign it with. It was a real pretty card with a bunch of designs and a big “Happy Birthday, Forest Tucker” on it which must have taken a lot of painstaking work to make. On the back of it was already a bunch of signatures. A lot of people liked Forest Tucker. I wrote a “Happy Birthday” on it and signed my name.
“When is your birthday?” Jackrabbit asked me. Alarmed, I answered quickly to head him off. “Naw, Jackrabbit. I don’t have birthdays. Forget about that.”
He shrugged, seemed satisfied with my answer. But just to make sure I said, “A birthday is just another day.”
“Okay,” he said. And we talked awhile about other things. He said the new metal detector had come in. They’d unloaded it on the dock and would start construction on the shack to house it within the next couple of weeks. “They’re going to put it on the landing on the way down the steps to the factory.”
When we were finished talking Jackrabbit left to get more signatures, but before he left he asked, “How old are you?” Just sort of slipped it in sideways.
“Twenty-three,” I answered sadly.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
We all gathered around as Jackrabbit gave the “surprised” Forest Tucker his birthday card, let him read it first, and then presented him with a sack of goodies Benny Rayburn had “secretly” collected from close friends. I contributed three precious cigars to the collection. Last Christmas they had put six cigars in our Christmas bags, and cigars were too precious and worth too much money to smoke, so I still had three of mine, well, I had none now. Somebody had put a bag of hard candy in the gift sack, and there were nuts and other goodies too. Forest Tucker had the biggest grin on his face I’d ever seen in my life as he read the card and pulled goodies from the bag, man, what a grin he had. You’d think he was a little kid the way he grinned and carried on. Maybe we were all a bunch of little kids, for we all enjoyed it as much as he, I think. After we milked all the joy out of it we could, we sat around and sucked on hard candy with Forest Tucker and felt good.
I had nothing against birthdays, they were good; they just weren’t for me. All the fuss embarrassed me. I used to have good birthdays when my grandma was alive. They were fun then, all the attention I got, and the presents, especially the presents, but the love too when all was said and done and I crawled up in my grandma’s lap and went to sleep against her soft ample bosom.
I remember when I was seven or eight that the only problem I had with life was trying to figure out which end of a girl was up.
Then my grandma died and my mother came after me and I hid in the closet when I saw the strange car coming down the dusty road to get me, which did no good, the closet, for they found me and I met those big old clod-hopper shoes from which my big old step dad grew upward from. Zeb Hackney. He was a tall, big-boned man with a shiny bald head. He was twelve years older than my mother, but it was those shoes that first caught my attention and which I still remember well to this day, for he planted each one of them in my ass a whole bunch of times in the years to come. He believed in swift retribution, Old Testament style. Never mind a switch when a boot was handy. And before you think I’m whining about it, I’ll admit right now that I deserved his swift justi
ce most of the time. I wasn’t exactly a model kid like Jack, my younger brother, when I was growing up.
Anyway, my mother and Zeb Hackney with those clodhopper boots found me hiding in the closet and took me away to Hackney Land.
And right away when my mother tried to hug and pet on me I let her know I was off-limits. I squirmed out of her arms real quick. And the next time she tried it I pulled away so violently that she never tried it again. It wasn’t that I felt any hate for her, or anything like that, it was just that it was embarrassing, this strange woman fussing over me like that. I couldn’t stand it. And for many years, until it was almost too late, I never once called her Mama or Mother or any of those mushy names kids call their mothers—until she lay dying in a nursing home and I realized how much I would miss her when she was gone.
She didn’t love me and I didn’t love her, and we both knew it, but she was always there, there somewhere in my Being, in the background of my soul, maybe, I don’t know. I just know she was always there. And through all my years on the road and all my years in prisons and jails, even though we hardly ever wrote, a card here a letter there with long lapses in between, I still knew she was there.
Hackney Land wasn’t a bad land for those who belonged in it, I guess. Everybody said Zeb Hackney was a good man, worked hard, went to church, had an obedient wife. It’s just that from the very beginning I knew I didn’t belong there. I was a round sapling that didn’t fit in the square world that was the Land of Hackney.
Hackney Land covered a hundred and twenty acres of tree-covered hills and rich bottom lands in Southwestern Kentucky. Zeb was a farmer in a time when small farms fed the nation, long before corporate farming came along and put small farmers out of business. People lived on their farms back then, and they grew their own food in fields and gardens and raised their own pigs and cows and chickens. They killed their pigs and smoked the meat and salted the bacon for the long haul, because folks in the country didn’t have refrigerators back then. They didn’t even have electricity. And they milked their own cows for milk and butter and cream. The chickens laid eggs, and as was their fate in life, a good chicken dinner was always just a neck-wringing away, happily pecking its last meal in the back yard.
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