Marching Powder

by Rusty Young

  I looked at him and he tried to smile at me. I didn’t smile back. I could tell that he was about to say something, but when he saw the expression on my face, he thought better of it. I looked up again. It was at that moment that I saw a La Paz bird darting across the sky, my first one since arriving at La Grulla. I turned back to Jorge to check whether he had seen it also and he smiled at me again. Everyone had seen it and was smiling, even Samir. It was the first time I had seen him smile since we had been in solitary. Samir was crazy, but he never smiled.

  41

  SAMIR

  Samir continued smiling at me strangely, and then he stood up and came over too. Jorge Velasco moved over to make space. The other inmates usually avoided Samir because he could go from being very serious to completely out of control in the click of a finger. But of all the inmates in La Grulla, Samir was my best friend. The others didn’t know him like I did. Samir and I had spent a lot of time together and he had told me a lot of things about his childhood and his experiences in prison. He had grown up on the streets stealing cars and had spent more of his life inside prison than outside. Jail no longer worried him and solitary confinement was like his second home.

  ‘Nice day, hey?’ I prompted him. The Brazilian poked out his thick, bottom lip to show that he agreed, more or less. Even though he was smiling, that day appeared to be one of his silent ones.

  Sometimes I worried about what would become of him. I like to think that everyone has a chance to change, but it seemed that Samir was born to a life of crime. I tried to encourage him to use all his crazy energy to do positive things, but it was often hard to talk with him seriously. These days, all he wanted to do was party. I guessed that he would keep pushing the limits further and further until one day he ran into a wall. And there was nothing that I, nor the best psychiatrist in the world, could do about it. It didn’t matter, though; Samir was mad and dangerous, but he was my friend.

  ‘What more could you ask for on a day like this?’ I tried again, poking him in the ribs to liven him up. Samir’s grin broadened, showing his teeth, which were all out of alignment and one of which was black.

  He responded with a single word – ‘Beer’ – although he used the Portuguese ‘cerveja’ instead of the Spanish ‘cerveza’. He often did that, especially when he was drunk, so I had trouble understanding him.

  Samir wasn’t talkative that afternoon, but he did have that look in his eye that meant he was up to something. I eventually got him to tell me what it was: he was going to escape.

  ‘When?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he shrugged his shoulders. ‘Soon.’

  ‘But how?’

  ‘Easy.’ He pointed upwards with his index finder and then back down, whistling the sound of something falling. He was planning on climbing over the wall, or through the wall, or something of the sort.

  ‘Are you loco?’

  It was pure madness and I tried to tell him so. San Pedro was like a castle. It had been built over a century before with walls that must have been at least fifteen metres high. Even if someone managed to get up to the top, he would die or break his legs from the fall to the pavement below. Digging under the wall was impossible since the ground was solid cement, and digging through it was also out of the question since there were actually two walls, an inner and an outer, and each was several metres thick.

  Although he couldn’t tell me how, Samir insisted that he would escape and I knew that he was crazy enough to try. I couldn’t prevent him from attempting to carry out his ridiculous plan, but it was worse than that: he wanted me to break out with him! There was no way I was going.

  ‘Forget it, Samir.’

  ‘You’re a fucking coward, inglés,’ he said angrily, spitting on the concrete just in front of my feet. ‘You know that? A coward.’

  Samir persisted, but I kept refusing until he got sick of asking. I didn’t care if I was a coward; I wasn’t going over that wall, and certainly not with a crazy Brazilian as my escape partner. It was suicide. Finally, he abused me in Portuguese and stormed back inside, banging his fists on each of the cell doors as he went along the corridor. Which was probably when he had the idea about having a fiesta.

  Samir was back in the yard almost immediately, all excited about something. He had obviously forgiven me.

  ‘Thomas. My brother, I need you to get us something good,’ he whispered, moving his hand closer to his face and flicking his wrist slightly towards his nose. I shook my head.

  ‘I can’t.’ I hadn’t touched cocaine since being set up and I had no desire to. I was too scared.

  ‘You can’t or you don’t want to?’ He placed his hand firmly on my shoulder.

  ‘I can’t,’ I lied, not wanting to give him an opening. There was a way, but he didn’t need to know that.

  ‘Yes, you can. If anyone can, you can. You know all the guards.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Come on! We’re having a party tonight.’ Samir’s eyes sparkled and his face got that mischievous look again.

  ‘What party?’ The others turned towards us and started listening to our conversation.

  ‘The human rights party.’

  I laughed. ‘But you haven’t got any alcohol. How can you have a fiesta without alcohol?’

  Samir smiled broadly for the second time that day. ‘OK, then, inglés. I’ll get the drinks, if you supply the dessert. What do you say?’ He winked at me and held out his hand.

  It seemed a safe enough bet. There was no way that anyone could get alcohol past the guards, not even me. Maybe you could persuade one of them to sneak a few grams of coke in, but not alcohol; even a single can of beer would be difficult to hide. And enough for eight of us? Impossible.

  ‘Whatever, Samir.’ We shook hands.

  What I hadn’t reckoned on, however, was that there was already alcohol in La Grulla. A whole mountain of it, in fact. The seventh cell.

  Everyone was in on the plan. Even so, I don’t know how the Brazilian picked the padlocks. There were two of them and they were the expensive type, made of thick, heavy-duty steel. But he did. He was back in the yard inside of sixty seconds: about the same time it took him to hotwire a car. Two of the others distracted the guards while the rest of us transferred as much alcohol as we wanted into our rooms. It was going to be a big party.

  It was then time to keep my end of the bargain. I sent Pizza Boy to get some toilet paper from the shops. I gave him directions on how to find Orlando’s tienda in Alamos and exact instructions on which brand to get.

  ‘It has to be Nacional. And pink. I don’t want any other colour. Understand?’

  I handed him five bolivianos. He looked at me strangely, wondering why he had to go all that way when there were shops that were closer and cheaper.

  ‘And why do you want to buy Nacional? You could buy twice as many if you bought another brand.’

  ‘My arse is very precious, Mario. It “demands the best”,’ I said, paraphrasing an advertisement I had seen on TV and he laughed. ‘And the change is yours.’

  This time, he understood perfectly. He went off to Pinos to buy a twin pack of pink Nacional toilet paper, which was my code with Orlando for ten grams of cocaine.

  When Pizza Boy returned, he was acting strangely. He had the toilet rolls, but he didn’t hand them to me straight away. Instead, he walked through the yard and into the cell block, clicking his fingers for me to follow him. I found him leaning casually against the wall, throwing the toilet rolls up into the air and then catching them, waiting for me. One of the rolls was bulging slightly, but I hoped that he hadn’t noticed.

  Pizza Boy stopped his little game and held out the package. But when I went to take it, he snatched it back, holding it just out of my reach. I looked at him questioningly.

  ‘And my share?’ he said, remaining straight-faced.

  ‘You’ve still got the change, haven’t you?’

  ‘But what about the rest?’

  ‘What do you mean? What rest?’<
br />
  ‘You don’t have to lie to me, Thomas,’ he said, bending the packet in the middle to reveal the small cut where Orlando had inserted the bag of cocaine. ‘Just give me what’s fair.’ I had to give him another ten bolivianos.

  That Pizza Boy was a fast learner. I had trained him too well. He was heading for promotion; he would definitely make sergeant one day, maybe even governor. And his wedding fund was coming along nicely, too.

  It was only early, but the party got under way immediately. We went into the common room and took it in turns to stand at the end of the corridor, keeping watch for the guards. It had been weeks since anyone had touched alcohol, so we were drunk very quickly, but the coke sobered us up instantly. It made my mouth go numb for the first time in months. After such a long break, it felt the same as it had the very first time I tried it. I felt fantastic. I even found myself talking to Jorge Velasco and not hating him at all. And once we were high on cocaine, we could keep drinking as much as we liked.

  Gradually, the lookout became bored. When it was Chino’s turn, he kept returning to check on how we were doing, staying longer and longer each time to join in on the conversation. Finally, the post was abandoned entirely when Samir refused to do his shift.

  Just as our party was getting into full swing, the delegation from the Bolivian Human Rights Assembly arrived. Chino, who was seated next to me with his back to the wall, was in the middle of telling a joke about the president’s wife, when the others looked up suddenly. We didn’t need to turn around to know that someone important was standing behind us; we could tell just by their expressions.

  Chino was clever. He pretended that his sudden pause was deliberate, and carried on telling his joke as if nothing had happened, slowly moving the bottle of rum under the table. Following his lead, I slipped the bag of cocaine into my underpants. However, the others were stupid; they scrambled madly to hide all the beer cans.

  The human rights visit was only short. They inspected the bathroom area, tested the water, checked the conditions in a few of the cells, and looked in the exercise yard. The head of the delegation then told the guards to leave the room while he interviewed us privately. He wrote down our responses on his notepad.

  ‘Do they give you enough food?’ he asked, looking over to the cooker where we had put some rice on to boil, to make it look like we were preparing to eat. None of us seemed concerned that the water had evaporated and the rice was burning. We obviously weren’t starving. We nodded our heads.

  ‘How often do the guards let you out?’ All the time. All day sometimes. Chapako was sunburned.

  ‘Do you have any specific complaints?’ he asked, concluding his investigation. None whatsoever. In fact, we were all really enjoying solitary confinement.

  He must have noticed that something was going on. We were far too happy for prisoners who had spent several weeks locked in solitary confinement. He didn’t say anything, but I wondered what he was going to write in his report. Whatever he wrote wouldn’t have made any difference to us anyway; the president of the Bolivian Human Rights Assembly was later taken off a minibus by police in full view of the public, arrested and beaten. The front page of the newspaper showed him sitting in his hospital bed recovering. He knew the names of the police who had beaten him, but the high-ranking officers who had ordered the beating were never charged. If he couldn’t protect his own human rights, what chance was there of him protecting ours?

  After the human rights delegation left, the guards locked us back in our cells and left for the night. Each of us still had a private stash of alcohol, so we kept drinking. I still had the cocaine in my underwear. After a while, the others started coming down.

  ‘Thomas, can I have some more?’ Samir called out.

  His cell was next to mine, so I split the remaining stuff into two bags and then made what the Bolivians called a pista, by tying a shoe to the end of a bed sheet and swinging it back and forth out my observation hatch, like a pendulum. Samir couldn’t catch the end. We tried several times, and I even stood on a pile of clothes to get my arm further out, but it still didn’t reach. Or maybe Samir was too drunk. Then he mumbled something I didn’t understand properly.

  ‘What did you say?’ I asked, but he seemed to say the same thing again: ‘Just a moment. I’ll come out and get it.’

  I leaned my head against the top of the hatch, trying to see what he was doing. Suddenly, there were two eyes in front of me, less than two inches from my face. I got the shock of my life and jumped back, thinking it was the guards. My stomach sank – I was busted. I was holding a beer in one hand and a bag of cocaine in the other, with no time to hide either. However, it wasn’t the guards; it was Samir. He had somehow broken out of his cell.

  ‘Quick, Thomas,’ he whispered urgently. ‘Give me the coke.’ I handed him the bag without thinking. I didn’t even have time to ask him how he had escaped before he had sniffed some and was off, banging on doors and offering everyone cocaine.

  ‘Do you want one?’ he asked me, coming back to my door and tipping some coke onto the skin between his thumb and index finger and holding his hand up to me, Brazilian-style.

  ‘No. What if the guards come, Samir?’ He was making too much noise. ‘Are you crazy?’

  ‘Yes.’ He sniffed it himself before disappearing again.

  Samir spent the next few hours out of his cell, running riot in the solitary confinement section. At first, the others thought it was funny, but then they started to worry. There would be hell to pay if the guards found that we had stolen and drunk their alcohol. Samir became worse. He yelled. He spilled beer everywhere. He banged on our doors to offer us more cocaine. He threw pots and pans against the walls in the kitchen and smashed whatever he could find. Then he broke into the seventh cell again to steal more rum.

  We pleaded and pleaded with him to get back in his cell. But he wouldn’t go. There was no way of telling Samir what to do when he was drunk. It just made him more determined to do the opposite. I hid the empty beer cans, pushed the remaining bag of cocaine through a tiny crack in the roof and pretended to be asleep like the others. No one could possibly have slept, though; apart from all the cocaine we had taken, everyone was worried about the guards.

  As soon as the sergeant opened our doors in the morning, we ran straight for the bathroom to dispose of the empty cans. In the toilet block, there was a concrete slab you could lift up with a shaft underneath leading down to the sewerage pipe. There was already a pile of cans at the bottom that we’d deposited after the human rights party, but the drain stank so much there was little chance of anyone wanting to search there.

  ‘What a night!’ said Chino, sighing with relief. We had got away with it. Everyone looked at each other and smiled. Everyone, that is, except one person.

  ‘Where is he?’ Chapako asked suddenly. We all knew who he meant. We had been so worried about getting busted ourselves that we had forgotten about Samir.

  ‘Quick! Let’s find him before the police do.’

  We raced out and looked in the exercise yard and in all the shower stalls, but there was no sign of him. They even boosted Ramero up to have a look on the bathroom roof, but he shook his head. ‘Check under the benches,’ suggested Chino.

  ‘We already did.’

  ‘Shit. He’s escaped! Let’s clean our cells and fix up these beer cans. Drop some toilet paper over the top of them.’ Once the guards found that Samir had escaped, they would do a full-scale search.

  The sergeant on duty didn’t suspect anything at first. He was an old guy who talked about his family a lot and he was always nice to us. He was also easy to trick. When Samir didn’t answer his name at the lista, we shrugged our shoulders and then followed the sergeant to Samir’s cell, pretending to be just as surprised as he was. None of us had bothered to check in Samir’s cell because we had seen that his door had been padlocked from the outside when we got up and the sergeant had needed to unlock it.

  In fact, Samir hadn’t escaped at all. The serge
ant swung the door back and there he was, lying fast asleep on his bed, fully clothed with his mouth wide open. The room smelled of beer and vomit. It was only then that I saw how Samir had gotten out: the bottom corner of the metal door had been prised back and he had slid his way underneath, through the small gap. He must have given up on the idea of escaping and then crawled back in there before morning. I nudged Chino behind the sergeant’s back and pointed to the door, but he nodded that he had already seen it. He was more concerned about the empty beer cans that were all over the floor.

  ‘What’s happened here?’ demanded the sergeant, shaking Samir. ‘Why won’t he wake up?’ He still hadn’t spotted the door or the beer cans, but it wouldn’t be long before he did.

  ‘He’s sick. Can’t you see he’s sick?’ Chino answered, pointing to the dried vomit on Samir’s chin and clothing, turning it to our advantage. ‘We called out all night, but no one came.’

  ‘But I wasn’t on duty last night,’ said the old sergeant defensively.

  While Chino continued to distract him, the rest of us blocked his view of the beer cans by fussing over Samir. ‘Someone should get a doctor.’

  ‘Listen. I don’t think he’s breathing properly,’ I said, giving the sergeant five bolivianos. ‘Please. Can you go? The other guards won’t listen to us. It could be serious.’

  The sergeant left and came back with the major. By the time they arrived, the beer cans had disappeared and all traces of vomit had been wiped away. But the major was suspicious. The first thing he noticed was the door, which we hadn’t been able to bend back into shape.

  ‘How did this happen?’ he demanded, studying our reactions carefully.

  ‘I’ve only just started my shift and that was how I found him,’ the sergeant responded, thinking that the major was referring to Samir.

  ‘It was already like that from before,’ said Chino. The major was no fool, so there was no point in pretending that we hadn’t seen the door. He then moved forward to check Samir. The first thing he did was to touch Samir’s shirt, which was wet where we had wiped it. Then he smelled his breath.