Help I Am Being Held Prisoner

by Donald E. Westlake

  And anonymous. I’ve read where Chairman Mao says the guerrilla is a fish who swims in the ocean of the populace, but I was already aware of that by the age of eight. The teacher invariably gave group punishments in response to my outrages, and I knew of several of my classmates who would have been happy to turn in the ‘guilty’ party if they’d had the chance, so I maintained absolute security. Besides, my activities weren’t limited to authority figures; my classmates, too, spent much of that school year awash in molasses, sneezing powder, chewing gum and exploding light bulbs, and would have loved an opportunity to chat en masse with the originator of all the fun. But I was never caught, and only once did discovery even come close; that was when a group of three fellow students entered the boys’ room while I was stretching Saran Wrap over the toilets. But I was a bright eight-year-old, and claimed to be taking the Saran Wrap off the toilets, having discovered it there just in time to avoid a nasty accident. I was congratulated on my narrow escape, and was not suspected.

  So. In the second grade, the main elements of my life were already firmly established. My name would be an object of crass humor, but I would return the insult with humor just as crass but much more decisive. And I would do so anonymously.

  Until, in my thirty-second year, I would leave a carefully painted naked female mannequin sprawled leggily on the hood of a parked Chevrolet Impala on the verge of the Long Island Expressway just west of the Grand Central Parkway interchange on a sunny afternoon in early May. Returning from a neighborhood bar forty-five minutes later, I would find that one result of my prank had been a seventeen-car collision in which twenty-some people were injured, including the three children referred to by Warden Gadmore, plus two members of the Congress of the United States and the unmarried young ladies who had been sharing their car with them.

  Neither the warden nor I had mentioned those Congressmen, but they were the deciding factor. Even with the injured children I might have gotten off with a suspended sentence and a warning; the Congressmen got me five to fifteen in the state pen.

  3

  My first cellmate, who was also the man I would be replacing in the license plate shop, was named Peter Corse, a stout wheezing old man with watery eyes and dough-white skin and the general aspect of a potato. When I met him he was a very bitter man. “My name is Künt,” I said. “With an umlaut.” And he said, “Who pays for my upper plate?”

  I said, “What?”

  He opened his mouth, showing me a lower set of tiny teeth of such porcelain-white falseness that they looked as though he’d stolen them from a doll. Above were gums that looked like a mountain range after a forest fire. Thumping these gums with his doughy thumb he said, “Oo ays uh iss?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I was beginning to believe I’d been locked in a cell with a mental case, a big overweight dough-white old man who was crazy as a loon. Wasn’t that unusual punishment? I looked back through the bars at the corridor, but of course Guard Stoon was already gone.

  Corse had finally taken his thumb from his mouth. “My upper plate,” he said in a fading whine. “Who pays for it?”

  “I really don’t know,” I said.

  He stumped around the small cell, complaining in a querulous voice, gesturing angrily with his big soft arms, and gradually I got the story. He had been in this prison thirty-seven years, for some unstated ancient crime, and now all at once he was being paroled, before he could chew. The prison dentist had taken away his teeth, but had so far replaced only half of them. In the outside world, who would pay for his new upper plate? How would he live? How would he chew?

  He truly did have a problem. He didn’t have a Social Security number, so far as he knew, and had never heard of Medicare until I mentioned it; would either of those pay his dental bills? He had no family or friends on the outside, no skills other than packaging license plates, nowhere to go and nothing to do. Even with his teeth his prospects would have been bleak.

  He insisted they were pushing him out only because the prison was overcrowded, but I believed that what had happened to him was simply some horrible misapplication of man’s humanity to man. I was convinced some official somewhere was delighted with himself for rescuing Peter Corse from oblivion and sending him out into the world again with no hope, no future, no family and no upper plate.

  I did sympathize with him. I offered to write a letter for his signature to his Congressman—I couldn’t write mine, he being one of the two in the accident that had brought me here—protesting the situation, but he refused. He came from that last generation of Americans who would rather die than ask anybody for anything, and he was determined to keep his toothless integrity to the end. He spent much of his time muttering and grumbling dark threats about how he would get back in here one way or another, but they didn’t mean much. What could a man in his age and condition do, really?

  We only had a week together, but in that time we became fairly good friends. It made him feel better to have somebody he could complain to, who would neither laugh nor ignore him. He also liked playing the role of the old pro, showing the new boy the ropes. He’d developed simple cleaning and storing rituals in his cell over the years to make life easier for himself, and I adopted them, every one. On the yard he introduced me to some of the other older cons, including the gardener I’d watched through Warden Gadmore’s window. Butler, his name was, Andy Butler, and up close he had masses of thin white hair, a round nose, and a simple beautiful smile; I wasn’t surprised when Corse told me Butler traditionally played Santa Claus in the prison Christmas pageant.

  Corse also told me which cons to stay away from. There were three groups of tough guys on the yard that I should avoid, and there were also the Joy Boys. This last bunch never caused trouble on the yard, but they had made the shower room their personal territory on Mondays and Thursdays. “Never never take a shower on Monday or Thursday,” Corse told me, and rolled his eyes when he said it.

  At work, too, Corse was my Virgil. It was his job I was taking, and during the week which was his last and my first he showed me how it was done. It was a simple job, but satisfying in its way. I was to sit at a wooden table, with a stack of thin paper envelopes on my left and a stack of just-painted license plates on my right. In front of me I had a rubber stamp like a supermarket price marker and a stamp pad. I would take the top two plates from the stack, check them to be sure they were both the same number and that the paint job had been properly done, and then insert them together into an envelope. I would then adjust the rubber stamp to the same letter-number sequence as the license plates, wump it onto the stamp pad, wump it onto the envelope, and toss the package of plates and envelope onto the far side of the table in front of me, where a rawboned tattooed man named Joe Wheeler would check the number off on his packing list and put the plates into a cardboard carton, ready to be sealed up and shipped out to the Motor Vehicle Bureau in Albany.

  There was a strangeness about the week I shared with Peter Corse. He had been here thirty-seven years, prison had freeze-dried the juice and the life out of him—like a cancer victim frozen after death to await a cure—and now he was leaving. And I had arrived, to take over his cell and his job and his relationships with his old cronies. I’d been looking forward to the new life I’d lead in prison, but this was maybe going too far.

  Corse always kept his lower plate in a glass of water under his bunk while he slept, and the night before he left I hid it in the foot of the bed. When he found it he would think he’d left it in his mouth last night, lost it in his sleep, and that it had traveled to the other end of the bed because of his movements while asleep.

  Except that he didn’t find it. I can’t think why not, it wasn’t hidden that well. He was frantic when he got out of bed, of course, but he was poking through his blankets when I left for my license plate job and I assumed he’d have his teeth back in his head in just a few minutes.

  That night, however, when I transferred to his bunk,
the lower plate was still there. That made me feel bad for a while—particularly because this was the kind of thing I was trying to stop doing—but after all half a set of teeth hadn’t been that useful to him. He was better off starting from scratch than trying to suit a civilian upper plate to these institutional monstrosities.

  4

  After three weeks my job was changed. A guard named Fylax, who disliked me in a brooding sullen way, called me out of line after breakfast and told me not to report to the license plate shop any more, but to get over to the gym at ten o’clock. “You’ve got a new job,” he said.

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t thank me. A whole lot of us tried to talk the warden out of giving you anything at all.”

  I didn’t understand that attitude; I hadn’t done anything to anybody since I’d been here, except for Corse’s teeth and the warden’s doorknob and a little business with pepper in the mess hall on two occasions. Nothing that could be traced to me. Fylax had simply chosen to dislike me, that’s all. Who all those others were who had talked against me to the warden I didn’t know, but I suspected they existed principally in Fylax’s mind.

  Though maybe not. At the gym I had to report to a trusty named Phil Giffin, and he laid eyes on me. “I don’t know where you think you get off,” he said, giving me an angry look from under thick black brows. “This is a goddam plush job. It isn’t for new fish, and it isn’t for short timers, and it isn’t for cons outside our own group.”

  I was all three, a new fish and a short timer and a con outside Giffin’s own group. Looking apologetic, I said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t ask to change. It just happened.”

  “It just happened.” He stood frowning at me, a wiry narrow leathery man with a cigarette smoldering in the corner of his mouth, and I suddenly realized I’d seen him several times out on the yard. He belonged to one of the groups Corse had warned me against.

  I said, “I’ll ask for my old job back. I don’t want to be in the way.”

  I found out later he’d been trying to decide whether or not breaking my legs would be the best way to solve the problem. If I were to spend two or three months in the hospital, his group could arrange for someone they approved to take my place here. But for reasons that had nothing to do with me and everything to do with not making himself and the gym overly noticeable, he finally shrugged and said, “Okay, Kunt, we’ll try you out.”

  “Künt,” I said. “With an umlaut.”

  But he had turned away, heading off across the gym floor, and I moved quickly to catch up with him.

  There are monetary seasons of thaw and frost in institutions dependent on government funds. During a rich thaw ten or so years ago, this gymnasium had been constructed on a site formerly outside the prison walls. A number of lower middle class homes had been condemned, purchased by the state, razed, and the gym put up in their place, tied in at one end with the original prison wall. It was a huge structure containing three full basketball courts, a warren of offices and locker rooms and shower rooms, and an extensive supply area filled with sports equipment, but with no windows anywhere except in the wall facing the rest of the prison compound. It was like being in some converted nineteenth-century armory; I half expected show horses to appear, practicing their drill routine.

  None did. However, the prison football team was doing calisthenics on one basketball court, dressed in sweatsuits and helmets, and two intraprison basketball squads were playing a non-league practice game on another. Giffin led me through all this activity, and I spent the time admiring the precision and persistence with which the basketball players fouled one another, tripping and kneeing, hooking fingers in waistbands, rabbit-punching wrists, and still finding time to take an occasional shot at the basket.

  The supply area was where we were headed. A doorway with a shelf-top half door blocking it was the entrance, guarded by a sleepy-looking pale giant in prison denim, leaning on the shelf and poking at his teeth with what looked like a blunt needle but turned out to be the pin from a bicycle pump. His flesh was slightly pink, as though just barely sunburned, and his hair and eyebrows were so pale a yellow that they almost disappeared. Him too I had seen with that tough-guy group out on the yard.

  The giant nodded at Giffin as we arrived, and pulled the half-door open to let us through. He glanced at me with lazy curiosity, and Giffin jabbed a thumb in my direction, saying, “This is a guy named Kunt. He got assigned here, believe it or not.”

  The giant gave me a look of humorous disbelief. “Your name is what?” He had a thin, high voice that reminded me of Peter Corse.

  “Künt,” I said. “With an umlaut.”

  “He’s working here,” Giffin said, emphasizing the word as though he were saying more to the giant than the simple word would ordinarily allow.

  Apparently the giant got the message. He frowned at Giffin and said, “Oh, yeah?” It seemed to me that various non-verbal statements went back and forth between the two of them, little eye movements, head shakings, shoulder shrugs. At the end of them, the giant said, “That’s gonna be a little complicated, Phil.”

  “We’ll talk it over later,” Giffin said. “In the meantime, put him to work on something.”

  “Right.”

  Giffin gave another shrug and head-dip, conveying another message to the giant, and went away. The giant went on studying me for a few seconds, continuing to poke at his teeth, and then took the pump pin out of his mouth to say, “What was that name again?”

  “Künt,” I said. “With an umlaut.”

  “Koont,” he said, bless him. “Phil must of heard it wrong.”

  “I guess so. My first name’s Harry.”

  He stuck a big pink hand out. “I’m Jerry Bogentrodder,” he said.

  “Glad to meet you,” I said, and as his big hand closed around mine I was willing to bet that no one had ever played with the possibilities of his name.

  He turned from me, looking speculatively back into the supply area, a maze of bins, shelves, aisles and storerooms. “Let’s see,” he said. “The football uniforms just come back from the laundry, you could sort them out.”

  “Certainly,” I said, demonstrating eagerness to please.

  He led the way back past bins of basketballs, shelves of bowling shoes, racks of baseball bats, rooms piled with stacks of bases, hoops, pucks, pins, pads, helmets, sticks, flags, ponchos and cans of white paint, to a small gray concrete room furnished with a large library table, several wooden chairs and a white canvas laundry cart. As with every other room in this area it was windowless, lit by fluorescent ceiling lights. In a way it was much more cell-like than my actual cell, which was furnished with two single Hollywood beds, two small dressers and two wooden chairs, and which had a nice view of the main yard through the iron mesh covering its window.

  Jerry Bogentrodder pointed at the laundry cart. “You sort everything by number,” he said. “Fold them all, stack them up nice. When you’re done, come on up front again.”

  “Fine,” I said.

  He went away, and I went to work.

  All football players have numbers, of course, but here at Stonevelt the inmates already had numbers in their roles as prisoners, so the same numbers were carried over to their football function. It was a bit strange to pick up a football jersey and see 7358648 emblazoned across the chest and again across the back. The pants had the number once, across the ass. On the jock it was printed on the waistband, and on each sock it formed a kind of design around the top.

  This was a job not unlike the license plate factory, and also involving numbers. The time passed pleasantly enough as I folded and sorted and stacked, and it must have been an hour or more later when a short, skinny, shifty, weasel-eyed fellow in prison denim went by the doorway, paused to look in at me with quick suspicion, and then hurried on. I thought nothing of it, went on working with the laundry, tying an occasional sock in a knot, and five minutes later another one appeared.

  This one, however, didn’t just walk on by. He s
aw me, stopped, frowned, looked down the corridor toward the front of the supply area, looked at me, looked back the way he’d come, looked at me again, stepped into the doorway, and said, “Just who the fuck are you?”

  “I work here,” I said.

  He didn’t like that at all. “Since when?” he said. He was medium height, stocky, with heavy features and black hair and an aggressive manner. The backs of his hands were covered with rocklike bumps and black fur.

  I said, “I just started today.”

  “Oh, yeah? Does Phil Giffin know about this?”

  “He’s the one who brought me here,” I said.

  He gave me a sharp, piercing look. “You sure of that?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. He was a prisoner like me, so there was no reason to say ‘sir’ to him, but something about his manner called forth a respectful response.

  With the same sharp piercing look he said, “What’s your name, Jack?”

  “Künt,” I said. “With an umlaut.”

  “We’ll see about this,” he said, gave me a punching kind of nod as though to say I could consider myself dealt with, and marched away.

  That was curious. I sorted and folded and stacked, and thought about things, and the more I thought the more it seemed to me something was going on.

  An illicit poker game? That could be it, that would explain why the people in this section of the prison were so jealous of their area, so suspicious of strangers.

  Could they have smuggled a woman in somehow? I could suddenly see her, spending her days and nights in a room full of duffel bags, living on food stolen from the mess hall, servicing a select clientele beneath the fluorescent lights. The sports section; yes, indeed.

  No. A poker game was likelier, that or something else along the same lines.