“You’ve got no business being in a place like this,” he said to Lina a month into his sentence. In the visiting room, every chair was filled at the long chain of tables.
“I could say the same for you.” She smiled with strained levity.
It had taken her a streetcar, two buses, and three days of train rides. Far too much to brave on her own. He was about to tell her so when she reached over the chin-high glass dividing them, seeking a connection. Shan hesitated, afraid of jeopardizing the armor he needed now more than ever.
“Hands back!” a guard barked.
Lina pulled away. It was the only time she flinched in spite of her surroundings. The powdery scent of her perfume clashed with the room’s stench of sweat and despair.
“How are Ma and Pop?” Shan diverted, part of him wishing he had taken her hand.
“They’re doing all right.” Her answer sounded genuine, for which he was grateful. “Of course, they’d be better if you were home.”
Unlike Shan, she hadn’t given up.
“We can still appeal this,” she insisted, the same message from her letters.
“Lina, I told you. There’s no point.”
Even his lawyer had agreed that unless the faces of the accomplices were suddenly jogged from Shan’s memory, the ruling was sure to stand. Besides, where injustice was concerned he was hardly unique. Every inmate at Leavenworth claimed he’d gotten a bum rap.
“Anyway,” he told her, “it’s not as bad here as you’d think.”
At times that was true.
Other times, it was worse.
He spent his days surrounded by every form of criminal, from small-time to big. Roughly three thousand, in fact—housed in a prison built for half as many. With just seventy guards, inmates had to look out for themselves.
The day after his visit with Lina, Shan was released from “A&O,” the admissions and orientation cells reserved for new arrivals, and joined the general population. A fellow called “Mitty,” built like a former lineman, invited him to share a cell. At first Shan was wary of any inmate seeking too close of a companion, but soon discovered the guy just craved fresh company. What’s more, he had Italian roots. No different than in Brooklyn, guys here took care of their own.
Serving a ten-bit for racketeering along with some lesser offenses, Mitty would rattle on like a jalopy about old pals and sweethearts and fellow inmates of notoriety, but he was also generous with advice. He’d list off which meals, cons, guards—called “screws” or “hacks”—and work details to avoid. Otherwise, you followed the rules and stuck to the routine, always with ears and eyes open.
It helped when Shan picked up on the jargon. For some reason everything in the pen had a nickname. Shan’s, for example, became “Monkey”—for one con anyhow.
It was Shan’s second Saturday with the population. On the recreation yard, a guy named “Pudge” used his heftier middle to bar Shan from passing. “I hear you was in the circus. Like one of those dancing monkeys. How ’bout you show us some of your tricks.”
Shan felt stares stacking up around him. He shook his head. “It wasn’t the circus.”
He’d only meant to correct the misunderstanding, which must have evolved from the few tidbits he’d shared with Mitty, but the darkening of Pudge’s eyes said that wasn’t how it was received.
“You saying I’m a liar? Huh? That it?”
More stares, more tension. More inmates edging over. He could see them drooling for a fight, no doubt putting their bets on the challenger. While Shan might be quicker, Pudge’s physique gave him an obvious upper hand.
Shan cut a glance toward the catwalk. The nearest guard held a rifle across his chest, his attention roaming elsewhere.
“What’s wrong, Monkey?” Pudge sneered. “You all outta words? Maybe a few cracks to the skull will knock some outta ya.”
Shan’s stomach tightened, reverting to the bundle of knots that had only partly loosened since his first, endless night in prison. Reason and diplomacy held no value here. Yet an alternative remained. A skill he had relied upon time and again for survival.
The men wanted a show. And Shan the monkey would oblige.
Crouching down, he battled back with the wild movements and “ooh-ooh” sounds of an ape. After all, any vaudeville acts starring animals—real ones, at least—had always been a hit.
Sudden confusion contorted Pudge’s face. “Knock it off,” he ordered, but his flustered words spurred chuckles among the incarcerated audience. When Shan pretended to eat a flea from Pudge’s back, the laughter escalated. Goaded to anger, Pudge took a swing at Shan, whose squatting position made it easy to duck. Hecklers called out over a ragged rhythm of claps. Pudge appeared to gear up for a second strike, his thick neck reddening, but the alert sounded over the speaker.
Time to line up and return to their cells.
A guard hollered down from the catwalk. “You heard it! Fall in!” He drew down on his rifle, a warning Pudge heeded with reluctance.
In a comedic sketch, two contentious characters often shook on a truce, sometimes winding up pals. But that wasn’t how real life worked, certainly not at Leavenworth.
“Better watch yourself,” Mitty told Shan as they made their way inside. “Jokes are nice and all, but only for so long. Take a beatin’, they’ll label you weak. Get pegged as a coward, and you’re done for. And not just by Pudge.”
Shan nodded, though he preferred an option that didn’t require being pummeled.
As it turned out, there was nothing Pudge wanted to do more. By suppertime the next day, his thirst for revenge outweighed any threat of consequences. In the mess hall he marched over in front of everyone—surely that was the point—and tossed Shan from his seat. When Shan scrambled to stand, Pudge walloped him in the jaw and voices erupted through the room.
Shan’s vision went hazy, yet still he detected eyes of judgment surrounding him. Heeding Mitty’s warning, he summoned his strength and charged back, plowing Pudge into another table. Food splattered about, and a ricochet of punches flew between them. The blows to Shan’s body no doubt caused more damage than the reverse. So much so, he felt relief when guards flattened them to the ground.
Shan, same as Pudge, was sent to solitary. A barren single cell, the “hole” contained a sink-and-stool unit and nothing else. A mattress was provided in the evening, removed at dawn. The two meals a day were served cold in a loaf pan, piled up like pig slop. He was warned to finish every bite.
It wasn’t a mansion, but in a distant life Shan had lived in a manner not much better. In a way, given the rare semblance of privacy, he welcomed the reprieve. He just wished the quiet hours didn’t revive so many thoughts of Nick, of their last minutes together, of the Capellos losing another son.
Then again, what was Shan doing now if not atoning for it all?
By the third week in the hole, the sense of nostalgia and privacy had run its course. By the fourth week, Shan had recited every comedic act he’d ever performed at least fifty times. While this helped pass the hours, mostly he did it to keep from going mad. He was starting to doubt anything could prevent that when the cell door swung open.
His thirty days were up.
Upon his return to the general population, finally showered and shaven, he noticed small signs of approval. An acknowledging look, a flick of a nod. A hierarchy ruled Leavenworth, as it did throughout history wherever humans reigned. Although Shan was far from the top—such spots being reserved for the FBI’s Most Wanted—he appreciated not scraping the bottom.
“Consider it an initiation,” Mitty told him with a toothy grin.
Pudge had a different take. For him, the conflict was far from over. His steely glares made that abundantly clear.
Shan tried his damnedest to avoid crossing paths, a strategy that didn’t always work. On several occasions, Pudge closed in on Shan with a spew of taunts, looking to finish the job he’d started. But before they could go to swings, a guard’s presence cut the scraps short. On
ly twice did they make it to brawling. In both instances a couple of cons, including Mitty, were able to break up the fight before an approaching guard could intervene.
So far, Shan’s injuries hadn’t surpassed small cuts and hefty bruises, but it wasn’t going to stay that way. Pudge’s filed-down toothbrush, which Shan had barely dodged during the last scuffle, indicated as much.
Now seated in the library, watching Pudge enter the room, Shan was tempted to keep quiet. Instead he found himself declaring, “Ah, shit. Too bad we’re fresh out of picture books.” Though he didn’t direct this straight at Pudge, the guy’s flushed face said he understood the target, as did other cons, who snickered over their magazines. If not for the deputy warden popping in right then, nothing would have held Pudge back.
Really, Shan wasn’t looking to make things worse. He’d just spent enough of his life in fear. In contrast to his days with Uncle Will, he now had the guts and ability to fight back.
To be fair, a portion of that courage did stem from knowing Pudge was serving time for money laundering and extortion, rather than first-degree murder. But as a bonus, so long as the rivalry continued, hopefully those convicted of the latter would show no interest in Shan.
Amazingly, now at the three-month mark, the whole situation had become endurable. The risks and rules, the guards and cons. Shan was reflecting on this thought when a letter arrived from Mrs. Capello. It was similar to all her others, full of kindness, concern, and updates of daily life. Yet in that moment, entombed in his cage of concrete and bars, something about her words seized him; it was the searing realization that this would be his life for the next fifteen to twenty-five years. What would be left of him when he was finally released?
He suppressed his anguish until Mitty departed with the majority of the other inmates for the weekly picture show in the auditorium. Then Shan sank into the corner of his cell and let his tears spill over. The wallowing didn’t last. For here came Pudge, strolling right in, armed with more than a toothbrush.
“Lookee what we got here,” he said, gripping a short steel pipe at his side. It was the leg of a cot, its wooden peg filed to a point. “You needin’ your mama now? Huh, Monkey?”
Against the wall, Shan was trapped. A few guards and inmates no doubt remained in the vicinity, but none in immediate view. To survive he needed to get out.
He was scurrying to his feet when Pudge swung the spear like a bat. Shan threw his arms up and the metal slammed his left forearm. The stunning pain didn’t stop him from going after the weapon. They fought for control, all four hands on the pipe, until Pudge kneed him in the stomach. The impact knocked Shan to the floor. Though curled up and gasping for breath, he saw that Pudge was determined to finally follow through with cracking his skull, or maybe driving a stake right through it.
Glimpsing the sink, Shan discovered his only hope. He scrambled to reach under the bowl, where Mitty stored a shank in a narrow divot in the wall. As Pudge moved in, Shan pulled the blade loose and swiped wildly while rising. He sliced Pudge across the chest, sending the bastard stumbling backward. As he fell to the ground, his head hit the bunk, and the cot leg went rolling. His eyes had gone dazed. Blood seeped into his shirt.
The sight should have stalled Shan, even ceased him altogether. But in that moment, his despair turned to wrath in a way he’d thought would never happen again, and he found himself kicking Pudge’s gut, harder and harder, fueled by a consuming fury. A black, sinister rage over everything he’d lost, the hurt he’d caused others, the choices that could never be reversed.
And suddenly it was over.
His memory of the fight ended there.
Shan awoke in the hole with pounding aches in his forearm and head. A solid, tender bump inches above his ear denoted a strike from a guard’s billy club. Pudge would be punished too, Shan learned, but only after returning from the hospital ward. According to the inmate who delivered Shan’s meals, the sum of the damage was a concussion, two broken ribs, and several stitches to the chest. His tone indicated that Shan should feel proud. Or at minimum, justified.
Shan didn’t feel a thing—perhaps the scariest part of all.
A week later, stinking, bedraggled, and still beat up to hell, he was delivered to the deputy warden. The man didn’t hide his agitation over Shan and Pudge’s disruptions.
“As I understand things,” he said, planted behind his desk, “you’ve become the primary instigator, suggesting your time in solitary is doing little good.”
Shan grinned widely at the joke of it, which the deputy warden mistook for mocking. His eyes and voice tightened.
“Considering your possession of a knife and the condition Elmer was left in, I can only assume this won’t be the last of your outbursts. The nature of your criminal conviction also speaks volumes.”
On paper, Shan’s robbery and attempted murder raps certainly topped Pudge’s smaller ones. An ironic coup. But in that moment, all Shan could think about was Pudge’s name being Elmer. The disparity, paired with sleep deprivation, actually made Shan laugh.
“All of this to say,” the warden cut in gruffly, “one of you needs a more suitable location.”
There was no questioning which of the two he’d chosen.
40
They called it “Devil’s Island.”
Shan discovered why before even stepping foot on Alcatraz. He still recalled the day he was ferried over with the other new “fish” on the prison launch. Bound in handcuffs and leg irons, they’d rattled in their seats while cutting through the choppy bay. San Francisco had disappeared behind them, the fog creating a sense of being swallowed, forgotten.
Then up ahead, a guard tower had poked through the mottled grayness. A rocky shoreline had eased into view, followed by the formidable fortress, which appeared suspended in midair.
Cons considered this the end of the line. To Shan, that was precisely how it felt.
A former military prison, Alcatraz was intended to house the most incorrigible of the incorrigibles. Sometimes, word had it, a guard with a grudge was all it took to get slapped with a transfer to the Rock. But then, no cons here were angels. More than a handful of them were gangsters who’d made headlines for years, their convictions no small triumph for J. Edgar Hoover. And, of course, there were those deemed escape risks.
If Warden Johnston took pride in one aspect above all, it was the “escape-proof” title he had managed to maintain. Shan got this clear from the start. The man seemed to have thought of everything: constant standing counts, single cells with tool-proof bars, limited visitations through bulletproof glass, hawklike supervision—to the point of one guard for every three inmates. The strictness of his regimen was like no other. Rules dictated length of hair, how to eat, where to sit, when to shave, shit, and shower. Not even the way to wear a shirt was optional: only top button unfastened, sleeves always down.
“Abide by your handbooks there, and we’ll all get along just fine,” the warden announced during orientation. With the looks of a banker, he wore a suit and spectacles, his hair dove white. His manner seemed rather mild for a man controlling every facet of their lives, and that included their knowledge.
All current events were kept from prisoners through bans on radios and the censorship of mail, evidenced by marks in letters from the Capellos. Newspapers, too, were prohibited, as they featured ads that had supposedly facilitated escapes at other prisons, a tactic that would never have occurred to Shan.
Still, none of this had prevented “Dutch” Bowers from scaling a chain-link fence in the spring of ’36. Assigned to incinerator detail, he’d been outside burning garbage. Shan had been on the island six months and was working nearby in the laundry. Through a barred window, he had watched the guy ignore warning shots from a tower guard. The next bullet sent Bowers plummeting seventy feet to his death on the jagged rocks below.
Warden Johnston called it an escape attempt, a cautionary tale for others with rabbit in their veins. Some inmates said Bowers had simply lost
his marbles and was trying to feed the gulls. To Shan, it seemed a blatant act of suicide. Whatever the case, after a year at Alcatraz the fellow had hit his limit, and understandably so.
Sure, the confinement was no picnic, with a five-by-nine cell that seemed to shrink every day, the stench god-awful from a saltwater-filled john. The relentless monotony could test any man’s endurance. But the real torture came from the “Rule of Silence.”
Some softer guards looked the other way when it came to whispers here and there. Except for the yard and industry buildings, however, talking was prohibited. A rule that only heightened the feeling of isolation.
Many a night, struggling to sleep through inmates’ snores and the bellowing foghorn, Shan lamented the absence of Mitty’s company. Although Shan had forbidden the Capellos from ever making the trek, part of him regretted doing so. He missed their voices, their laughter. The sounds of his life had been reduced to cues from guards’ whistles, shoes marching over tiers, the squawking of seagulls. Not to mention the thunderous rack of automated cell doors. At Alcatraz, one never had to ask why it was called the slammer.
But then January brought a change.
After more than a year of the same old grind, Shan digested the news with wary skepticism. The silence rule had been lifted—or rather, “relaxed” was the phrase Warden Johnston used. No singing or yelling would be tolerated, and definitely no whistling, but speaking in a respectful manner and at normal volume was allowed.
Rumors credited politicians and reporters for contending that severe rules at Alcatraz were causing insanity. The argument arose after an inmate chopped off his fingers with a hatchet. Doubtful cons claimed he’d faked the loony bit to earn a transfer to a cushy hospital. Either way, none of them were complaining. The result benefited them all.
At first Shan just listened to their abounding chatter. It seemed their stored-up tales couldn’t pour out fast enough. For the curious types, the same went for questions.
One evening, from the next cell, a young, jovial con known as Digs said, “Capello, can I ask you something?”
The Edge of Lost Page 22
