The first guy I saw whipped got twenty, and he couldn’t sit for a week after. The second guy I saw get it had it worse. Fifty strokes for punching a pusher. He passed out at forty and his legs slacked apart and he revived with a scream when the next stroke popped him in the nuts. Then he fainted again till it was over. He had to be carried to the sweatbox, his ripped ass dripping blood and his testicles looking like purple baseballs.
I’d learn later that only one guy was willing to bet I wouldn’t squawk for the whole thirty lashes. He lost on number twenty-three. Once you cry out it’s hard to keep from doing it the rest of the way, and I yelled again on the next stroke. But I managed to hold it to a grunt on the last six. I could feel my legs quivering with the effort of staying clamped together—and felt the piss run hot over the hand I held my balls with. I didn’t know how hard I was biting my tongue until it was over and I tasted the blood.
Then it was into the box. Four feet square and solid oak. At the bottom of one wall was a small opening about a foot long and three fingers high. That was where they slid in your bread and water twice a day. The floor was dirt and packed with the waste of the countless men who’d been in there before me. The smell was something to choke on, and at first I thought I might suffocate, but after a while I wasn’t even aware of it—there’s probably nothing you can’t get used to when you don’t have any choice. I couldn’t sit up because of my wounded ass, only lie curled up on my side. By law, a man could be boxed for up to three days at a time, and I’d heard of guys who went crazy, guys who died of the heat.
Buck said the way to beat the box was to form a red dot in your mind and concentrate on nothing but that. You’d go into a kind of trance and the time would be up before you knew it. He said it helped with pain too—you could put it all in the dot and contain it better. I tried it, and it took a while to get right, but I finally did. Sometimes I’d doze off, then snap awake and the pain would be there again, like a rat that snuck in while the room was dark, and I’d have to chase it back into the dot.
I heard things through the night—stirrings and splashings from the swamp, the rough coughs of gators in the bayou, the cries of weak things getting killed by stronger ones. I heard the camp rouse in the early morning. Heard footfalls and then the rasp of a tin plate pushed in through the slot. The shallow plate was filled with water and two slices of bread were soaking in it and I slurped down the whole soggy mess. The slot was showing gray dawnlight when I heard the cons go off to work. And I went back to the red dot.
The slot light was almost entirely faded when the cons returned to camp. I couldn’t see the slot at all by the time the bolt shot back and the door swung open and a boss said to get out of there.
The rush of fresh air made my eyes water and burned my nose and throat, and I felt the barely scabbed wounds on my ass come open as I crawled out. The boss dropped my clothes in front of me and walked off through the shadows to the guard barrack. The other cons were already at supper in the mess shack.
My cramped muscles ached to the bone as I stood up, but it wasn’t as bad as I expected, and I slowly got dressed. The worst part was pulling my pants up over my raw ass. But an amber half-moon was well up in the east and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d taken such pleasure in looking at the sky, in simply breathing the night air. On some French Quarter evening, probably. A memory of Brenda Marie lying naked in moonlight of exactly this color caught me so completely off guard I felt like I’d been seized by the throat.
I chased the image out of my head and cursed myself for a careless fool who deserved another ass-whipping. Then limped off to the mess shack.
Never think about what your woman might be doing on the outside—that was another Buck-and-Russell rule. Pretty soon you’d start imagining her with another guy and make yourself crazy. The guy who didn’t have a woman when he took a fall was the lucky one. If you did have one, forget her, forget her completely. If you had to think of her, think of her as married to somebody you never met, as a mother of six kids and fifty pounds fatter than you last saw her. Think of her as dead if you had to. If she knew where you were and wrote you a letter, don’t even open it before putting a match to it.
Brenda Marie didn’t know where I was, so there was no chance I’d be tempted to read a letter from her, and when I saw how miserable so many of the cons would be for days after receiving a letter from a woman, I was glad none came for me. She wasn’t the only girl I’d been spending time with in New Orleans but she was the smartest and best-looking, a rare combination for damn sure. I’d had a lot of swell nights in her Vieux Carré apartment. But I wasn’t in love with her. The hardest thing about imagining her with another guy was in wanting to be the guy, and that was hard enough.
You never know—that was the chief rule and the one I held to the tightest. You never know what’ll happen. I reminded myself of it every damn day. That one and the one about never believing the only way out was by the state’s permission. Buck said anybody who passed up a chance to escape didn’t deserve to be a free man. Russell only partly agreed. He thought a guy ought to escape whenever he could unless he had less than six months left to do. It wasn’t worth the risk if he was so close to getting let out anyway.
Buck said he’d take any chance that came along, even if he only had a month left to do, a week, a goddam hour. He could get pretty extreme in his arguments in order to drive home a point.
But it wasn’t just talk with them. When they were hardly more than kids they pulled down a one-year sentence in the St. Tammany Parish jail for burglarizing some rich guy’s house in Covington. They weren’t there three months before they cut a hole in the roof and escaped with two other guys. And there was the time Buck took a fall in Texas and got sent to a prison farm—and a few weeks later Russell and a partner delivered him out of there in broad daylight.
They had stories to tell, Buck and Russell.
The way the cons explained it, there was good news and bad news about escaping from Angola. The good news was that if you escaped and could make it out of Louisiana, the law wouldn’t bother to go hunting after you—you’d be free as a damn bird as long as you stayed out of the Bayou State. The bad news was that you probably had a better chance of being elected governor than you did of busting out.
For one thing, it wasn’t simply a matter of escaping from Camp M, which would be easy enough. You didn’t even have to try to go over the camp fence—you only had to sneak off past the gun bulls when we were working out in the fields or in the woods. But then what? You’d still be on the prison ground, a mighty big and truly rough piece of property. The river flanked the prison on three sides and was way too wide to swim across and get to Mississippi. Even if you had a boat or some kind of raft, you couldn’t make it halfway over without somebody spotting you and picking you off easy with a rifle. There was a ferry, yeah—and a squad of armed guards posted at the landing. You could try going out by the front fence, of course—which had guard towers and dogs and no cover to hide in. It was a pipe dream to think you could escape that way.
The one other thing you could try was running the levee.
It wasn’t impossible to get around the guards at the south end of the prison by circling through the woods, and then all you had to do was make your way back to the levee and follow it for sixty miles or so down to Baton Rouge. You had other choices, of course. If you thought you were up to it, you could cut away from the levee and try crossing the swamps to the west. Chances were you’d drown in the quicksand or get bit by a viper or eaten up by the alligators or go crazy from the mosquitoes or poison yourself with bad water or break a leg or starve to death after getting so lost the Devil himself couldn’t find you. Or you could run into some swamp rat who’d shoot you on sight so he could claim the state reward for fugitive convicts, dead or alive. They said not one convict who ever took off into the swamp was ever heard of again. But that didn’t mean you couldn’t try to be the first.
All things considered, you’d probably do
better to stay on the levee, although they’d be coming right behind you with dogs and high-powered rifles. Plenty of cons had tried running the levee over the years and some were shot down from as far off as a half mile away, but most were caught by the dogs, and more than a few were killed by them. There was no outrunning the dogs. Only two men were known to have made the run all the way to freedom, both of them coloreds, and both had done it a long time ago.
Well, if it was so goddam hard to get out of Angola, I said, why did they even bother having tower guards at every camp like they did? Why did they even bother having fences around the camps?
“Why hell, boy,” old Dupree said, “they don’t want to encourage nobody.”
One afternoon a convict slipped out of the cypress stand where we were axing timber and was gone a good ten minutes before a pusher noticed and harked the news to the gun bulls. The runner was a big old boy named Watkins, from Slidell. He’d been married less than a month when he and his wife were at a carnival one night and some galoot gave her a passing pat on the ass. Watkins didn’t see it—he’d been trying to win her a prize by ringing the bell on one of those “Test Your Manly Strength” machines you hit with a mallet. If she’d kept her mouth shut nothing would’ve happened. But she had to pitch a fit, so naturally Watkins had to do something, and since he already had the mallet in his hands what he did was hit the guy with it. Broke his head open like a watermelon. Drew fifteen years. He’d been at Camp M only a few weeks when his pining for his wife got the better of him.
The bosses rounded us up in a hurry and took us back to camp and put us in the barracks so they could all go join the hunt. Out by the pen the dogs were yelping as they were put on a truck to be taken out to the fugitive’s trail. By the captain’s standing order, the floorwalkers couldn’t hand out the musical instruments before sundown except on Sundays, but Gaylord didn’t care what else we did while we were in lockdown, and so we played nickel-ante poker and read and napped and sat around bullshitting. Everybody wished guys would try to escape more often.
We knew when the dogs got turned loose by their sudden higher howling. For the next half hour the baying grew fainter as they chased after Watkins—and then it abruptly intensified.
“Sons of bitches run him to ground,” Red Garrison said.
There was the flat crack of a distant rifle shot, and a moment later another, and then the dogs began to quiet down and then we didn’t hear them anymore.
They brought him back draped over the hood of a truck. We stood at the windows and watched the captain come out of his house and pull Watkins’ head up by the hair to have a look at his face. He said something to his foreman and went back into the house. The dogboy got the dogs back in their pen and a couple of the bosses untied the corpse and lugged it around to the back of the truck and laid it out on the bed and then drove him away. We heard they took him to the main hospital and from there notified his wife to come claim his body.
I saw what the dogs did to another con who tried to run. He wasn’t even a half mile away when they caught up to him. The hunting party brought him back and dumped him in the middle of the camp yard so we could all have a good look. He was barely recognizable, a heap of bloody rags and flesh, his throat torn and parts of his face and hands ripped open to the bone. He didn’t have any kin listed in the records, so the captain had him buried in the small cemetery on a rise by the back fence. None of the graves had markers except one with a small flat headstone that said “Rollie,” who had been the captain’s favorite dog.
I saw guys deliberately break their arm to go to the hospital and get off the work parties for a time. They’d position their forearm between two logs and let another guy bust it with the flathead of an ax. Some guys knew just how to hit the arm to fracture the top bone, but some did the job with a little too much enthusiasm and the poor bastard’s arm looked like a battlefield wound. After the guy regained consciousness he’d go staggering off to show the misshapen arm to the bosses and tell them he’d broken it in a fall. They knew it was bullshit but what could they do? Some guys preferred to have a leg busted because it kept them off work longer. But as soon as a broken arm or a leg was sufficiently healed, sometimes even if it was still in a cast, the man was put back to work.
Some cons went for more lasting damage by cutting their heelstring, the Achilles tendon. They figured it was worth a permanent hobble to get out of hard work for good. It didn’t always turn out that way. Sometimes they got sent back to the fields anyway, back to labor made all the harder for being crippled. That’s the way it was for the weaklings of the world, in prison or out of it—when nobody else was making it hard for them, they were making it hard for themselves.
I saw a crazy guy named Verhoven brandish a cane knife in the face of a hardcock named Burnett and threaten to cut his head off for being an agent of Satan. Burnett knew Verhoven was a lunatic, we all did, but he stood there with his thumbs hooked in his belt loops and a cigarette in one hand and said, “You couldn’t kill me if you tried all day.”
The last word was hardly out of his mouth when the blade swiped through his neck. Burnett’s head rolled off his shoulders as blood sprang up in a pair of bright red twirls and fell in a spray. The body stayed upright for a moment like it wasn’t sure yet what happened, the shoulders blooming deep red, then toppled backwards, the thumbs still in the belt loops, the cigarette still smoking between two fingers. Burnett’s head on the ground stared up at nothing and had lost most of its sneer.
They said when Verhoven went to the gallows six weeks later he was chatting happily with God right up to the minute the trap opened under him.
I saw a con get down on his belly to rinse out his bandanna in a bayou and a cottonmouth struck him over the eye. The man jumped up shrieking and started running, the snake snagged to his face by one fang and whipping every which way. A couple of cons wrestled him down and one severed the snake just under the head and flung the writhing body into the water, then pried the fangs out of the man’s brow and pitched the head away too. By the time a truck carried him off, the convict’s darkly swollen face looked like a spoiled melon. They said he was dead when they got to the hospital, that the doctor listed the cause of death as “excess of venom in the brain.”
I saw these things and more through the summer and the fall and into the first cold days of a new year.
And every morning when I woke to the clanging bell in the dark, I’d remind myself once more: You never know.
B uck and Jena didn’t quite make it to their first anniversary before she ran off. She left a note saying she’d had enough of being bored and for Buck not to hold his breath till she came back. He was half drunk and close to tears the night he came over and told us about it. It was storming hard and a gusting wind flung the rain against the shutters like handfuls of gravel. He said he knew she hadn’t been happy staying at home all the time while he took care of business. He knew she thought he was having a high old time playing cards and dealing hooch while she was home with nothing but the radio for company. But he hadn’t known things were so bad she’d leave.
My mother went over to sit beside him and put an arm around him. “It’s for the best, Buckman,” she said softly. “You’ll see.”
Later on I’d realize she knew better than the rest of us how much he loved that woman and what terrible things it could mean.
But because he was in love he could not let it lay. He had to try to find her. He made inquiries around the neighborhood, thinking that maybe she’d told somebody where she was meaning to go. What he learned from several of the nosier folk on the street was that she’d frequently had a visitor these past weeks. A man, yes, they told him—sorry to say, but yes. An insurance salesman named Wilkes who one day had called on several houses along the block until he got to the LaSalle place and then called on no others. He came back almost every evening. Drove a green Lincoln. Always parked it at the end of the street and then walked up to the house and knocked on the door and was let inside.
We learned all this from him one evening when he and Russell had supper with me and my mother. Daddy was out to sea. Buck told it in a voice I hadn’t heard from him before—sort of flat, like he was talking about somebody else’s troubles, somebody he wasn’t all that much concerned with. My mother said for him to please not do anything foolish, and he looked at her like the request was too strange to comprehend.
They disappeared for a while after that, both of them, without having told us where they were going. When Daddy next came home we hadn’t seen them in over six weeks. I checked at their place a few times but the landlady didn’t know anything except they were paid up through the next two months.
Then one breezy Saturday morning when Daddy had been back about two weeks and the Spanish moss was fluttering in the oaks and the banana leaves swaying in the courtyard, right after my mother left for the library, Russell showed up.
My mother had said all along that they’d probably gone to Beaumont to look for Jena and maybe do something to the Wilkes fellow. She hoped they wouldn’t find either one—which they probably hadn’t, she said, and that’s why they were taking so long. Daddy’d said maybe they were just off larking somewhere. But my mother was right—Beaumont’s where they’d been.
A World of Thieves Page 4
