The Animal Factory

by Bunker, Edward

  Some convicts had pulled the benches from the third-base dugout and were starting a fire.

  Earl saw Ronald Decker standing with Tony Bork behind second base. The young man’s hands were jammed in his pockets and he was jumping up and down to generate circulation. Twenty yards beyond him, apparently unnoticed, was Psycho Mike and three of his sullen-visaged henchmen. They were squatted, bringing clenched rags to their mouths—shoe glue, Earl knew—and glancing in Ron’s direction. Earl knew what they were thinking. They were working up courage for a ripoff.

  On sudden impulse Earl pushed away from the laundry wall and walked to Ron and Tony, who saw him coming and told the younger man. Ron had open, candid eyes; he didn’t try to look tough as did so many young men in prison, as Earl himself had in his day. As Earl came up to them, he looked beyond, gazing at Psycho Mike expressionlessly; but the combination of the gaze and his action conveyed the message. “C’mon over by the laundry,” he said to Tony. “It’s warmer.”

  Tony looked to Ron, who shrugged. As they started toward the laundry, Earl looked over his shoulder at the glue-sniffers, cocking his head sideways and jutting his chin pugnaciously.

  The clique of tough young convicts eyed the newcomer; they would have raised an eyebrow except that such an expression wasn’t in their repertoire. “Don’t be so mean, Earl,” one said, the voice unrecognized, making Earl blush and some others smile. He didn’t want to discomfit the youth, but Ron apparently hadn’t caught the implication.

  “Nobody would believe this,” Ron said.

  “Nobody cares.”

  “They killed that man—kicked him to death—for nothing.”

  “He was a damn fool for trying to cross a picket line of berserk niggers.”

  Ron shook his head. He was shivering and had his hands stuck under his armpits. “How long will they keep us here?”

  “God knows. They’re thinking about it.” And Earl was thinking that Ron was pretty. “Were you down here?”

  Ron told what he’d seen, as if describing it could erase some of the horror still within him. Earl listened, liking the precision and economy of Ron’s words, without the convict’s usual obscenity every few syllables. The manner of speech indicated a keen, logical mind.

  Simultaneously Earl watched Psycho Mike and his gang, but they had gone to where a crowd had gathered at the fire and weren’t looking toward the laundry.

  “This is really a study in stupidity,” Ron said.

  “What’s that?”

  “The races at each other’s throats to give the guards an excuse for target practice.”

  “I had about the same thought—but it’s not that simple, not just black and white, to make a poor pun. It’s something nobody can control … and nobody can stay uninvolved. I’ll run it down to you sometime … what I think.”

  Baby Boy came over to Earl. “Say, bro’,” he said, “check the play. Ponchie’s boys are gonna down somebody.” He gestured to the field where a tall pale Chicano was slipping through the scattered crowd toward the dense group around the fire. His cap was pulled low, his coat collar up, and he moved in a furtive way. Flanking him were two others. The trio was obviously stalking someone.

  “Maybe we should see if they need some slack,” Bad Eye said. “They’re our allies.”

  “They don’t need no help,” T.J. said.

  Ron sensed the heightened tension and stared in the same direction, toward the crowd at the fire, trying to pick out who was going to be assaulted.

  “Bet they nail Shadow,” Earl said, touching Ron’s arm. “That tall skinny dude in the white pants. He burned them for some money … made a bad move. They’ve been layin’ to catch him.”

  The middle Chicano with the cap, his head down to shield his face, paused ten feet behind the back of the victim, pulled a long knife from beneath his shirt, and ran forward on tiptoe. Three strides and the weapon came down, buried to the hilt in the man’s back. Ron grunted involuntarily, as if he’d felt the blow. The victim was driven forward into the fire, his hands extending reflexively to stop his fall. The two backup men were looking around, their hands inside their shirts. The stabber had spun away the instant he delivered the blow, began walking nonchalantly, sort of wandering, but heading toward the laundry. Ron lost him, looked at the man fighting his way back from the flames and hot coals, the taped handle of the knife jutting from between his shoulder blades.

  The men around the fire had pulled back, away from trouble.

  Ron expected the man to fall. He had to be dead. But he got to his feet, began walking in a circle, a hand groping unsuccessfully to reach the thing in his back. Then he suddenly began walking away, off the baseball diamond and toward the stairs in the direction of the hospital.

  “Unnnnh,” Earl grunted. “That’s the weirdest thing I ever saw. He’s got fourteen inches of blade in him.”

  The man who’d done the stabbing passed by the Brotherhood, grinned, gave a clenched-fist salute, and kept going. Ron saw a gang of Chicanos farther along the laundry wall who were waiting for their associates.

  “That wasn’t how to collect,” Ron said wryly. “He can’t pay them in the morgue.”

  “He can’t pay anyway. He’s broke. And there’s no small claims court so it’s a lesson to others.”

  Ron said nothing.

  A pale sun hinted through the overcast without noticeably raising the temperature. Now three fires were burning. Some of the clique wanted to break into the laundry to get warm or to find fuel so they could start a fire on their own.

  Stoneface had come to the wall, a battery-powered bullhorn in hand. “Attention in the lower yard! All inmates will form in the left field grass—”

  A halfhearted Bronx cheer was the reply. The men were playing out their roles, their hot fury long since chilled. They were ready to go to their cells—and many stirred to follow the order.

  They didn’t have a chance. Stoneface gave a signal. Without warning, the rifles and shotguns began firing and the bullets fell like rain. The shotgun pellets percolated patches of lawn. Some men were swatted down, as if struck by an unseen fist, and the others dived for the ground though it offered no protection.

  A window above Ron’s head disintegrated and a rattle like a handful of pebbles came from nearby. He found himself on the pavement, and Earl was chanting, “Shit, shit, shit….”

  The gunfire echoed from the walls. It seemed to go on forever, but it actually lasted just thirty seconds. When it stopped, the silence exaggerated the moans of the injured and the cries of frantic sea gulls beating through the mackeral sky.

  Every convict except one was face down on the earth, and the exception was running doubled over holding his belly where he’d been shot.

  Stoneface raised the bullhorn: “You have thirty seconds to form on the outfield grass.”

  No defiant yells answered the order; men were hurrying, but under their breaths they cursed and their eyes were filled with bitter hate.

  The tactical squad, highway patrolmen, and other guards had been waiting in the wings. They carried clubs, pick handles, shotguns, and cans of mace. As they closed around the convicts, Stoneface spoke again, ordering them to strip to their underwear. Everyone complied; the choice was between that or more bullets. A dozen men were still down on the grass and dirt, some moving, some not. One was missing the back of his head. The sea gulls were swooping down to scavenge what had sprayed from his skull.

  Now the convicts were driven up the stairs in a line—or a chaotic stream. It was a driven stampede of seminaked bodies. Guards and patrolmen were on the flanks, jabbing with clubs and shotgun butts. The guards, terrified earlier by the mass beast, now gave vent to the rage engendered by that terror. Many who were usually decent turned brutal. Any convict who faltered was immediately attacked.

  Earl lost his friends and his senses. He struggled to keep his feet and push forward. Once he slipped to a knee on the stairs and a highway patrolman’s shotgun butt crashed into his spine, making him ye
lp involuntarily and sending him upward despite the pain. He wanted to fight, but it wasn’t worth the consequences.

  In the cellhouses the men ran single-file up the stairs to the tiers. The police swung clubs as they went by. When one went down, he was beaten for faltering.

  Earl got into his cell, fell on the bunk, panting and sweating. After a few minutes be began to laugh. “It sure as fuck broke the monotony,” he said, laughing again.

  An hour later the San Francisco radio stations gave news bulletins the convicts could hear on their earphones. Officials reported that four inmates had been slain and nineteen injured in a racial altercation between neo-Nazi white inmates and black militants. The situation was now under control with all inmates in their cells. Ringleaders were being isolated, and there would be an investigation.

  All during the afternoon and evening Earl heard security bars being raised and cell doors being unlocked, and then the dull sound of blows and falling bodies. Sometimes pleas of “No more,” or from guards, “Asshole troublemaking nigger … how tough are you?” And more blows.

  A hundred men were rounded up, three quarters of them black. Some went to the Adjustment Center, others to “B” Section segregation. The two hundred prisoners already in “B” Section heard the beatings and went berserk, smashing toilets by lighting fires underneath the porcelain and kicking it; the toilets collapsed. They hurled the chunks through the bars. They burned mattresses, tore bunks from bolts on the walls. One young queen and his jocker in adjacent cells used the bunks to dig through the five inches of concrete separating them. Guards couldn’t go down the tiers to count because the convicts hurled jars against the bars, spewing out glass shrapnel. Firehoses and tear gas were turned on them—“B” Section was a mass of burned, waterlogged mattresses, broken beds, shattered windows, singed paint, fragmented toilets, and miserably wet convicts. Only the Queen and her jocker were happy.

  No food was served the first day. Late the following afternoon, two cold sandwiches were passed to each man. This went on for two more days, and then the prisoners were unlocked for “controlled” feeding twice a day, fifty men at a time, under the watchful eyes of many guards. Black and white convicts eyed each other with every feeling except affection, but the security was too tight for any incidents.

  The next morning a few convicts in key job assignments were let out. Earl was still under the blankets, drinking coffee and smoking, when Lieutenant Seeman appeared outside the bars, hat cocked, hands jammed into the deep pockets of a long green coat.

  “Hey, bum, ready to go to work?” Seeman asked, simultaneously looking up and down the tier. Seeing nobody, he fished a carton of Camels from his coat pocket and pitched it through the bars onto the bunk.

  Earl sat up, took the cigarettes, but said nothing; no thanks were called for. “How many are coming out?”

  “Just a few today—captain’s clerk, kitchen workers—a few of them the officer’s dining room crew. Fitz, of course. But I can pull you out if you want.”

  “Naw, boss. I’ll wait for tomorrow. It’d ruin my image to be among the first unlocked after what happened down there.”

  “Wasn’t that a—” Seeman finished with a snort of angry disgust. “If they had an investigation … Kittredge and I were just going to go down. We knew everybody was frozen and wanted to go in. I was so goddamned mad I almost forget myself. I mean … hell, I can see coming down as hard as necessary if someone needs it, but shooting into unarmed men who weren’t doing a goddamned thing except burning a couple of wooden benches … I better be quiet or I’ll get mad again.”

  “I’ll come out tomorrow if there’s a few others. What’re you doin’ here during the day?”

  “Making lots of overtime. A lot of people are doing it the last few days. A prison can’t run without convicts working.”

  The men who ran the prison from air-conditioned offices beyond the walls, the men with faces never seen by the convicts, decided that the weekend was a good time to unlock the cells. The press had forgotten the riot within days, and now two weeks had passed. The honor cellhouses and necessary workers had been on normal schedule for several days without trouble. The known agitators were in segregation. Bonnie and Clyde was the scheduled weekend movie, and the officials knew that nothing pacifies a convict more than a good movie.

  Ron came out for breakfast with everyone else. Jan the Actress had been going to work after three days of lockup, and Ron had enjoyed the daylight hours of solitude. He’d ceased minding about the lockdown, though if it had gone on for months, he would have. Even before the Monday of madness, he had preferred cell time accompanied by books, letters, and thoughts to the crowded yard, where he felt out of place and on display. The mass violence had reinforced his aversion, not so much when it happened, because the episode was too swift for more than survival reaction, but rather after the shock evaporated and he knew the security of his cell. The animalistic screams, the racial epithets, rose anonymously from the honeycomb of cells and made Ron think of wild beasts snarling in their cages. His contempt for stupidity and his sympathy for the oppressed condition of black people in America had both been overwhelmed by fear. During the lockup, he had to pass along the tier between groups of young blacks. He could feel their hatred as if it were radiant heat. He averted his eyes, stomach upset, and in the cell’s sanctuary his fear was the acorn from which grew the oak of hate—and he disliked feeling that hate. He disliked the entire idiocy of prison and tried to hide from it.

  On Saturday, however, he came out. Staying in would have attracted attention, probably from the guards, who would think he had trouble, certainly from convicts who would sense his fear, evalu ate it as weakness and try to exploit it. When he entered the yard from the mess hall nearly four thousand convicts milled in the canyon between the cellhouses. The pale green walls were washed in a hot butterscotch sun. His eyes squinted and tried to focus in the glare. He’d expected a tense silence after the weeks of lockup, especially since the last meeting of black and white convicts had been so furious, but instead he was engulfed by the sound of hilarity, the voices had the timber of a party, and rock and roll music came from the speakers. The faces were bright and animated, though somewhat pasty from weeks of lockup. Friends who hadn’t seen each other during the lockdown slapped each other on the back, hugged, and laughed. The only visible signs of the recent trouble were three extra riflemen and the voluntary segregation of the blacks on the northeast quarter of the yard.

  Ron moved with his eyes down, avoiding collisions, looking around for a familiar face. Everyone else seemed to have a friend or to belong to a group. Ron had brought a paperback book along in case he didn’t find one of his few friends. Jan the Actress stood in the sun with two other queens. Ron circled the trio. He was also watching for Psycho Mike and his gang; again in the hope of avoiding them.

  “Hey, young ’un,” someone called right beside him. He turned and there was Earl Copen five feet away. The older convict was seated on the concrete abutment to which the weather shed’s pillar was attached. He wore a faded navy blue sweatshirt, its sleeves raggedly amputated above the elbow. He needed a shave everywhere but on his head. The chin stubble was gray, but the bare skull gleamed from a film of oil. His ugly face had an infectiously warm smile, and his eyes were alert. Ron instantly recalled his resolve about Copen, and the stories Jan had told. Simultaneously, his sense of lonesomeness evaporated. He went over. Earl seemed the most relaxed person in the prison yard.

  “See you survived the shitstorm,” Earl said.

  “It was shaky.”

  “This the first time you’ve been out?”

  “Uh-huh. I didn’t mind it, though. What’s out here?”

  “Just hairy-assed convicts.” Earl looked at him more closely.

  “You need some sun.”

  Ron looked down, ignored the comment. “When did you get out?”

  “Fuck, last week. Me, I’m an honor inmate.”

  The laconic way Earl spoke rather than th
e words gave his speech humor, human warmth. In coming months Ron would learn that Earl had several vocabularies and selected the one he wanted according to whom he was talking to and what it was about. He could use this soft, twangy voice and exaggerate it to buffoonery—or, he could give off the obscenely vicious radiations of a rabid doberman. When he talked about law or literature, he used perfect diction, a mellifluous voice, and precise phrase selection. Relaxed and friendly now, he was interested in the younger man, but not too much. He was offhand rather than intense. When he learned that Ron was assigned to the industrial area—at two cents an hour—he asked if he liked the job.

  “Christ, no! But that’s where classification put me. What can—” Ron tossed a shoulder to end the explanation.

  “If it’s worth a pack of Camels, go to sick call on Monday. Ask for a convict clerk named McGee. He’s just inside the door in the clinic … a big dude about forty with gray hair. He’ll get you a medical lay-in for thirty days. Actually, for a carton a month you never have to work. But it’s best to get something. Where you work is half the secret of doing easy time.”

  “The other half?”

  “Where you live.”

  “What’s the guy’s name?”

  “McGee. Ivan McGee.”

  The old con and the youngster stood talking in the shadow of the shed, indistinguishable from the teeming four thousand, two voices lost in the sea of sound. Ron was articulate when he had something to say, but he was not by nature loquacious, and in this unfamiliar environment he had become even more reticent. Not until later did he realize that Earl had him talking easily, about his case, about Pamela, about his situation. Forgotten was the discomfiture, the sense of being out of place. Earl seemed interested in his success in narcotics trafficking, and he told with some pride how he’d started selling ten-dollar bags and expanded until he was rich within a year. It was delicious to recall those days of glory. He knew that he’d made more money as a criminal than ninety-eight percent of those around him, men he now had to fear. Earl’s face indicated his interest. Once he corrected Ron about prison ethics. Ron used the term “inmate,” Earl cut in: “Uh-uh, brother. An ‘inmate’ is a weak, sniveling punk. It’s an insult. ‘Convict’ is the term that solid dudes prefer.” This correction was the first tiny lesson, gently given, the forerunner of many.