The Animal Factory

by Bunker, Edward

  “Earl asked him what he was looking at … and the guy told him, ‘I wanna fuck you.’ Earl told him that if he kicked his ass he’d let him. The guy was a light-heavyweight prizefighter and Earl was skinny as you. They were supposed to meet in the back of the block after breakfast. When the guy came in, Earl was on the fifth tier with a big water bucket, the kind the tier tender uses to fill up gallon cans. It weighs about seventy pounds when it’s full of water. I don’t know if it was. Earl dropped it, and it would’ve put the guy’s head down around his asshole if it’d landed, but it barely missed and shattered his ankle. Earl came running down the stairs with a claw hammer to finish him, but that fucker managed to get out, broken ankle and all. He was scared to come out of the hospital. Earl could have fucked him by then.”

  “He didn’t strike me that way—crazy and all.”

  “Oh, he’s beautiful people. I talk to him. He’s intelligent and seems burned out. When you reach your mid-thirties, you tend to slow down. That’s old for a convict. He’s tired of doing time.”

  “I saw him with some youngsters up against the wall. Is that his gang?”

  “Probably part of the White Brotherhood. That’s not his gang … not anybody’s. They don’t even think God is boss. I’ve seen a lot of dangerous men here, but never a bunch of them ganged together.”

  “What about the Mexican Brotherhood?”

  “The same. Maybe worse. There’s more of them. But they get along with Earl’s friends. Those kids—hell, some of them are nearly thirty—love Earl. Paul, too.”

  “Who’s Paul?”

  “The guy with the white hair, looks about fifty.”

  “I haven’t seen him.” When he rolled back and pressed his head to the pillow, Ron decided to keep away from Earl Copen. Jailhouse lawyers were abundant. Earl was too unpredictable. All I need is a serious disciplinary report, Ron thought. The judge’ll toss the key away.

  When the morning bell wakened Ron, the land outside the cellhouse windows was covered with fog. The edge of the shore, twenty yards away, was totally invisible. The fog wouldn’t go over the cellhouses into the big yard, but the lower recreation yard would be blanketed. The factory area was beyond the wall of the lower recreation yard; it had its own wall.

  Ron dressed and washed quietly, for Jan never got up until the 8:30 lockup, arriving at work half an hour late. He was clerk to the supervisor of education, who came in at 9:00, so nothing was ever said. Neither did Tony Bork go to breakfast, so Ron stood by the bars and waited to eat alone, wondering about the rumored strike, wondering if a “fog line” would be called, closing the lower yard to everyone.

  The mess hall was abnormally quiet, the customary roaring voices a low hum, exaggerating the clatter of utensils against steel trays. It seemed as if fewer men than usual were eating. Ron’s tier was among the last to sit down.

  Ron gulped his food, dumped his tray, and stepped into the cold gray morning light. A row of guards waited just outside the mess hall door, nightsticks in hand. Perched on the gun rail above the yard gate stood a guard and a highway patrolman, one with a riot gun, the other with a tear-gas grenade launcher. Ron stopped, surprised. “Industries workers down the stairs,” a tall sergeant said, moving his head to indicate the open gate. “Everybody else across the yard.”

  In less than five heartbeats Ron’s eyes panned across the yard to where nearly two thousand convicts waited. The crowd broke in an L shape where the East and North cellhouses joined. The blacks were, as usual, along the North cellhouse wall. Ron didn’t know if he should go through the gate or join the throng. One might make him a strikebreaker, bring retaliation from other convicts; the other could get him in trouble with the officials.

  “Get moving,” a guard said to him—and at that moment three convicts stepped from the mess hall behind him and turned without hesitation to go out the gate. Their exit brought no jeers or catcalls from the crowd, so he lowered his head and followed them.

  The fog met him on the stairs. The figures ahead turned into vague outlines and disappeared altogether. He couldn’t see the prison walls. He followed the road around the lower yard; the industrial area gate was a quarter of a mile away. No guards were in sight; even on bright days when there was no trouble, the gate had several.

  Now he turned and followed the road along the base of the wall, feeling strange in the blinding landscape. Two convicts appeared, trudging toward him, caps pulled over their ears, hands jammed in their pockets.

  “Hey, white brother,” one said as they reached him, “you might as well go back. The niggers blocked this gate.”

  The other one laughed, the caw of a crow, showing gaps where teeth should have been. “The fuckin’ bulls got slick and opened the yard gate early. The rugs got slicker and blocked this gate. With the fog and shit, it’s worse for the bulls.”

  “Nobody’s going to work?” Ron asked.

  “They’re waitin’ down there ’bout a hunnerd yards, waitin’ to see what happens. The people blockin’ the gate are after that.”

  “I think I’ll go see.”

  “I learned to get away from hot spots. Some shit is likely to kick off down there. I wanna miss it.”

  “Don’t stay too long. Stoneface is gonna be mad as a Jap. He’ll be wantin’ to kill somebody, an’ convicts all got the same color to him.”

  “It’s the color of shit,” his friend said, and they went off through the fog toward the big yard.

  Curiosity and excitement flecked with fear grabbed Ron as he went forward upon the back of the crowd. From beyond he heard a voice with a Negro accent screaming, “They can kill me! I ain’ no mammyfuckin’ dawg!”

  Ron stepped to the left, where a fence bordered the opposite side of the road from the wall. There was room to push through and he did, coming to the front ten yards away.

  Across a space from the crowd was a tightly knit group of about fifty. Most of the faces were black, but a few whites were there. Some of the strikers had baseball bats and lengths of pipe. One roly-poly black was in front of the strikers, exhorting the workers: “Whatcha gonna do? Get on over here. We all together. Don’t be scared!”

  A white convict beside Ron shook his head. “I’d go over there if it wasn’t all spooks. My fuckin’ partners would turn on me if I did.”

  Ron looked along the summit of the wall. A single guard in greatcoat stood in silhouette, his rifle hanging like a half-mast phallus. Did the officials know that was happening? What would they do?

  The cold was insidious. Because there was no wind, it did not cut; rather, it ate slowly like acid. Ron began to shiver and chatter. He wished something would happen, wondered if he should trudge back to the yard.

  A flurry of movement in the workers’ crowd made him stand on tiptoe and crane his neck. A chubby middle-aged Chicano was pushing through with a yellow card held overhead. He walked resolutely toward the strikers. The yellow card was a checkout slip that had to be signed by his work supervisor before he could leave the prison on parole. “Yo vaya … la lebere esta mañana.”

  The front rank of strikers opened like lips to swallow the man without protest, and a moment later the innards churned and crunched and Ron heard the splat of blows and a gurgled scream. His excitement fell away, replaced by horror. “Oh God, they’re … killing him.” He fought away nausea.

  “He shoulda waited,” the con beside Ron said. “I’d have waited. Now he’s goin’ out the back—in a box.”

  The crowd around Ron suddenly crushed into him, split by some force he couldn’t see. Then he did. Men in helmets with Plexiglas masks were wading through, swinging long clubs. One man went down. He wasn’t a striker but blood spurted from his head as he drew his legs up. The guards were in formation.

  The young convict beside Ron leaped to the fence. Ron was thrown against it. He struggled, turned, dug his fingers through the holes in the wire and scrambled up. The baseball field was on the other side. The fog provided a hiding place of sorts.

  Earl’s ce
ll on the fifth tier was a perch overlooking the yard. Just before 8:00 a.m. he looked out. The herd of convicts against the cellhouse walls stood quietly. He spotted his friends halfway down. They’d gathered together in a moment of possible trouble, but it seemed that trouble was passing by. Earl put on his heavy coat and gloves and went out of the cell.

  As he came out of the rotunda he met other, more timid men, coming in. But Earl had looked and it seemed okay. He ran his eyes along the gun rail. Half a dozen guards were there, weapons held casually except for a sergeant—a weightlifter with a Thompson submachine gun at port arms.

  Earl walked along the rear of the crowd until he saw Baby Boy’s red hair. Then he pushed through to where his friends were.

  All the other convicts were quietly serious, but the clique was grinning and laughing, coming alive in the threat of chaos, which Paul was reducing to absurdity.

  “All they want is a white ho an’ a Cadillac. That’s sure as hell reasonable after all white done did to ’em … Check that bull.” He pointed to a chubby rosy-cheeked guard facing the crowd fifteen yards away. The guard couldn’t decide how to hold his club, at his side, across his chest, behind his leg, in one or two hands—and he kept glancing nervously at the protective cover of rifleman. “Fool don’t know whether to shit or go blind,” someone added.

  Bad Eye caught Earl’s attention and put two fingers to his mouth, asking for a cigarette. Earl started to reach into his pocket when the flatulent report of a rifle echoed, followed by a hollower firearm, either a shotgun or a tear-gas gun using a shotgun charge. The two thousand men on the yard fell instantly and utterly silent, frozen, as hearts leaped to a faster beat and atmosphere pulsed with tension. The chubby guard fell back a step, and riflemen shook off their casualness.

  Even Paul was quiet.

  A figure came hurtling through the gate, jerked to a walk, and tried absurdly to be nonchalant. The guards started to close on him, but then others came and the guards let them through.

  Two blacks came up out of the fog, one guiding the other, whose hand held a blood-sopped rag to his forehead. They turned left, heading for their brothers. Two guards went to cut them off, but a massed spontaneous moan that turned into a roar stopped them—a wall of sound. And as they hesitated, the black crowd broke forward, surrounding the arrivals while the guards fell back. The riflemen braced their weapons on their shoulders, squinted along sights, but the blacks stopped.

  Earl’s heart pumped like a bird’s wings. Bodies surged against him, blocking his view. He saw some whites and Chicanos run from the gate into the crowd, and seconds later got word that a Chicano had been stomped to death by the blacks.

  The racially divided crowd now pulled apart, like organisms mutually repelled. Earl almost fell, but T.J. grabbed his belt and kept him erect. The sound of voices was like the lowing of cattle before a stampede.

  Moments later the spilled gasoline of madness was ignited. A whump sound from a tear-gas launcher and grenade arced down between the crowds, sending them farther apart as it exploded, gyrating and spinning as it gave off its fearful fumes. Again Earl was buffeted so that he had to fight for balance. It was like struggling to keep his head above water in a stormy sea. The motes reached his eyes and fluid began to run from them and from his nose. “Cocksuckers … bastards,” he cursed silently.

  Like some mindless beast driven without purpose, the twelve hundred Chicano and white convicts swung in a clockwise motion so that they were against the mess-hall wall. Driven by the tear gas from the North cellhouse wall, the blacks were where the whites had been along the East cellhouse. The two groups, twelve hundred whites and eight hundred blacks, faced each other across a hundred and fifty yards of open space.

  A hundred convicts were jammed against the East cellhouse gate, trying futilely to get in away from trouble.

  “Lockup! Lockup! Mandatory lockup!” the loudspeaker blared.

  “Open the fuckin’ gates,” someone near Earl said. Both sides were now spread out. Earl’s friends stuck together and his fear became fury. He was certain the officials had deliberately turned a strike into a racial confrontation.

  A window of the mess hall crashed out. Then another. Men were yelling in fury. Stacks of stainless steel trays were being passed to the raised hands of whites and Chicanos. Then came other things that would serve as weapons—mop wringers, pieces of the dishwashing machine, heavy wooden ladles used on the kitchen vats.

  Across the yard the blacks were ripping benches apart to get hunks of lumber. Earl did nothing, knowing the groups would never get at each other across the no-man’s-land. The rifles and submachine gun would erect an insurmountable barrier of death.

  A convict pushed against Earl to leap to the window to get something. He landed on Earl’s foot when he came down.

  “Asshole!” Earl snarled, ramming the heels of his hands into the man’s chest and knocking him back. The convict bumped into someone behind him and kept from falling. His face was already contorted with rage at the blacks. His curse at Earl was drowned in the churning, screaming crowd as he tensed to spring. He had a piece of pipe in his hand and lunged. Earl stepped back, raising an arm, intending to rush under the swing if he could. He wished he had a knife. The convict rushed without seeing T.J., nor did Earl see him until the powerful weightlifter swung the flat of a stainless steel tray as if it were a baseball bat. The man rushed into it, and his feet kept going as the tray curtained his face. His shoulders hit the ground first, and it was a few seconds before the blood came from his squashed flesh. His legs trembled in spasms.

  Bad Eye came from somewhere and planted a steel-toed brogan against the man’s head, as hard a kick as he could deliver. T.J. gave him the accolade of a pat on the back.

  The tumult made it impossible to talk, but they pushed through the crowd toward others of the Brotherhood a few feet away, leaving the supine figure to be walked on—or to die for all they cared.

  The two crowds were screaming at each other, brandishing makeshift weapons.

  Bad Eye cupped his hands to Earl’s ear. “We’ll get the black motherfuckers this time. All they’ve got is some sticks.”

  Earl said nothing, but looked again at the riflemen. The two crowds started to surge toward each other and the submachine gun hammered three short bursts, tearing up chunks of asphalt in stitches. Then the rifles volleyed. Bullets swept down the open zone and the crowds froze and fell back. The gunfire silenced the screaming.

  One black was twisting on the ground. Obviously a guard had shot into the crowd instead of in front of it. The black was holding his thigh and trying to get up. Two blacks started forward to help him, but a bullet whipped over their heads to drive them back.

  Some of the hysteria had drained away. Glazed eyes began to narrow, madness was replaced by questions about what to do, what was going to happen.

  “Attention in the yard! All inmates by the mess hall will go the the lower yard.”

  The answering bellow of defiance was a shadow of a few minutes earlier. Some men yelled and shook their fists, but they would have done the same if told to stand fast or go home.

  The tear-gas grenades flew over the men, landing under the shed beyond the fringe of the crowd. The gas drove convicts crashing into others, sending a reverberation through the crowd and jamming bodies together again. The route of escape was through the gate. They couldn’t go down the road because the visored tactical squad was waiting with clubs and mace, so they surged down the stairs, some falling until another body stopped them.

  They were herded like cattle into the thinning fog. All was gray under the lightless sky; the walls looked soft in the fog, lined by faceless silhouettes with rifles. The lower yard was big, and the convicts spread out like water on a plain. Everyone searched for a friend, sensing that this was a dangerous situation, for no guards were on the ground and those on the walls were too far away to see what was going on. It was a chance to settle old grudges. The law of brutality was replaced by no law whatsoever.


  The Brotherhood gathered near the wall of the prison laundry. Or at least most of them, about thirty men, all younger than Earl and Paul, but all with wizened, bitter faces and hard eyes. Most were dangerous, though a few were faking, using the Brotherhood for protection. Those who counted among them respected and listened to Earl and Paul as much as to anyone. They had to listen to T.J. and Bad Eye.

  The temperature was below freezing. Because there was no wind, it took a while for the cold to seep in, but soon the convicts were stomping their feet, trying to keep warm, and vapor issued from their mouths and nostrils. Faintly they heard the loudspeakers in the big yard order the blacks into the cellhouses to lockup. “Typical shit,” someone said. “Let the niggers go in while we freeze our asses off.”

  “Sheeit!” Paul said. “What you bet them redneck bulls ain’t clubbin’ the shit out of ’em?”

  “The bulls’re scared of ’em,” Bad Eye said.

  “That’s where hate come from, baby—fear.”

  “And Whitey’s slicker,” Earl said bitterly, thinking how the officials had turned a strike against them into a race riot by the simple expedient of separating the two groups and letting nature run its course.

  “Fuck ’em,” Bad Eye said. “I hate niggers and bulls—but the bulls ain’t no threat to kill me just for walkin’ around, and the niggers are …”

  “The boy’s got a point,” Paul said. “Ya’ll sho nuff a smart young motherfucker,” he said, grabbing Bad Eye’s arm and shaking it playfully. “How’d you get so smart?”

  Earl was unable to dispute Bad Eye. It was impossible not to be a racist—whatever one’s color—where blacks and whites murdered each other indiscriminately. Nevertheless, he was bitter about tomorrow’s headlines that would scream “San Quentin Racial Disturbance.” Not a word would be printed about the protest of conditions. He lit a cigarette, hunched his shoulders, and stared out across the canyon of the yard.

  Flocks of sea gulls swooped, soared and circled overhead, emitting shrill cries. The twelve hundred shivering convicts were now quiet, spread across the baseball field, most of them in left field, the farthest point from the wall with the armed men. The laundry where Earl’s group stood was in deepest center field. The building hid them from another wall. More guards with weapons were hurrying along the skyline. Maybe three dozen were positioned for a clear shot.