Death Row Breakout (8 page)

When the escorts arrived, George was seated on the bench and the old guard told them, “I frisked him already.”

So they motioned for him to come along, and walked him the fifty yards across the plaza to the adjustment center.

After all these years nobody has figured out how he got the pistol. I wish I knew the truth.

The R&R door opened and four parolees appeared. All wore khaki pants, sport shirt and windbreaker. Each windbreaker was a different color. I’d been in a cell adjacent to one of them. He looked at me and turned his head away as they passed by. He was afraid to speak to me. I said nothing and watched them step out of the Sally Port into the sunlight of freedom.

I was then out of the other Sally Port door and into San Quentin. Beyond the door was a moderately-good-sized plaza. On one side were the chapels, Catholic and Protestant, and on the other, the Adjustment Center, a newer three story building that held the troublemakers on its bottom two floors – and Condemned Row #2 on the third. A handful of convicts loitered by the fishpond outside the chapels. One or two I knew by sight but not by name.

They walked me down a road past the Quonset hut library across from the education building. One guard walked whilst waving convicts away with a hand signal and the admonishment: “Dead man walking.” A second guard followed me and, on a walkway along the North Cell-House, a rifleman looked down upon us. Ahead was the arch of the Big Yard gate, atop of which was yet another rifleman.

The Big Yard was enclosed by three cell-houses and the mess halls and kitchen. The high cell-houses closed out all but a patch of sunlight. Except for a few of the cleanup crew, the Big Yard was empty of convicts.

The entrance to Condemned Row #1 was through the North Cell-House rotunda. An open steel door on the left provided entrance into the cell-house. Another steel door, locked tight, was straight ahead. Beyond that door was an elevator and stairway to Condemned Row. A door next to the elevator was to the overnight condemned cells where those scheduled to die in the morning were moved the night before their execution.

One of the escorts pressed a buzzer to summon the elevator. As we rode it to the top, a bell rang to herald our arrival. At the top, a pair of eyes looked us over through a small observation window. Seconds later, the key turned and the door opened.

Three guards waited inside. Two were young, and one was a true rookie, still wearing khakis instead of the standard olive twill. The third was Sergeant Blair, and his presence surprised me. “Hey, Sarge, what’re you doin’ up here?”

“Just for a couple days. I work vacation relief. Sorry to see you here, Troy. Never would have thought it.”

“Things get away from you, Sarge.”

The escort sergeant handed Blair the paperwork and waited while Blair leaned on the shakedown table and signed them. I could look down the walkway in front of the cells. Perhaps a dozen men were out of their cells for exercise. At the far end a blanket was spread on the polished concrete floor for a card table. Four men sat cross-legged and played while two more kibitzed. Near the front was a heavy punching bag, and the only man familiar to me was slamming a gloved fist into it. He was muscular and handsome, with silky, ebony skin. The bag jumped when his fist landed. I think he was borderline retarded, or perhaps just very poorly educated. Out of Compton, someone had taken him to Santa Monica to rob a white kid who was peddling cocaine and marijuana. Richards, for that was his name, almost immediately shot the youth between the eyes. In the jail he looked up to me, and I felt sorry for him.

“All right in there, clear the tier,” a guard called out.

“Hey, exercise isn’t over.”

“You’ve got one coming in. So grab a hole.”

The inmates went into their cells and the guard dropped the security bar, then went inside and key-locked each cell. He could do it without breaking stride. When he was done, he waved and the security bar went back up.

“C’mon, Cameron,” said Sergeant Blair.

With the Sergeant beside me, we went through the gate onto the tier. I noticed that, on the other side of the bars and wire beside us, walked the guard with the pistol and tear-gas sap. The guard with the key waited, holding an open cell gate. It was three cells from the bars and gate to the rear. Beyond the gate were ten more cells. Each had an extension jutting out three feet. There was a solid oak door with a tiny window. With the door closed, anyone who screamed was welcome to do so until laryngitis silenced him.

Someone in a silent cell was aware of us out here. The outer door of his cell began to thud, and a muffled voice came through the cracks. “Sarge! Damn, Sarge, lemme talk to you.”

“Shit…” Blair muttered, simultaneously shaking his head and sticking the big key in the lock.

Clank
, the key turned, the bolt shot across, and I was locked very securely in my death-row cage. Twelve-feet long, four-feet wide. On the rear wall was a cast metal fixture – a washbasin with a water faucet that drained internally into the toilet bowl on the bottom. It was prison architecture at its most ingenious. About five-feet high across the rear wall were two metal shelves for personal property.

Along the side wall was the sagging bunk with its blue and white striped mattress. I went to take a piss and saw the layers of crud on tope of the toilet water. I flushed it before I could piss in it. I’d have to scrub it with cleanser and a rag. I pushed the sink button. It worked. The cold water ran out of the drain in the bottom of the sink and seconds later ran down into the water in the toilet.

I hit the switch beneath the twin fluorescent tubes affixed to the wall. The light flickered and sputtered and finally came full on.

Finally, I turned around like a dog and lay down on the bunk. Here I was – home for at least a few years, maybe many. This little cell, that runway out there – and wherever my mind could travel in time and space.

“Hey, next door!” a voice to the right called out. There were only three more cells.

After due deliberation: “Am I next door?”

“Yeah, you just got here. Did you transfer from the adjustment center or come from a county jail?”

“A jail.”

“Whereabouts?”

“Bakersfield.”

“Yeah… yeah… you be the dude that iced the two cops. Right?”

From the voice and choice of words I thought he was black, but I would discern, when I saw him, that he was white, no doubt one who had grown up among blacks, as I had done among
chicanos
.

At the moment, however, I resented his easy familiarity. Just because we were in adjacent cells on Death Row didn’t imply that we were buddies. He might be a child molester, a short eyes, or a tree jumper rapist, or even a stool pigeon. I didn’t talk to everybody just because they were in jail.

“That’s what they say I did,” was my eventual answer. He felt my aloofness and didn’t press the conversation. I began to make up the bunk. I had come to my final resting place. I had entered the House of Dracula. It would be a long, slow death.

Vengeance is Mine

The prison was visible from the highway two miles away, primarily because the long valley was flat farmland with only a cluster of eucalyptus playing windbreak to farm buildings every couple of miles. The prison architecture was not the fortress variety of the nineteenth century, but rather the nondescript post-World War II design. What defined these structures was the tall smoke stack and the gun towers outside the double fences topped with rolled barbed wire.

Every afternoon a wind rose. If it came east from the western mountains it was always cool, because it was drawn from the ocean beyond those mountains. If it came west from the eastern Sierras it was hot and dry, drawn from the vast deserts of the American southwest. The valley, when the fields were green, rippled like a lake under the wind. After the late summer harvest, until full winter hardened the ground, the wind blew endless dust. It kept the convicts off the main recreation yard, shaking the chain-link fences while the rolls of barbed wire on top danced and shivered, waiting for things to settle down.

In ‘O’ Wing, the segregation unit, a guard walked in front of the cells with a clipboard, stopping at each one. The convicts said “yes” or “no”, to the silent question if they wanted to go out to the tiny exercise yard between the two buildings. When the guard was finished, he went back to the front and handed the clipboard to a guard standing outside the barred gate. He worked the switch box that controlled the cell gates. In the lockdown units no two inmates were allowed on the tier at the same time. The guard inside the tier went to the other end, where a third guard let him out. “Okay, send ’em,” he called, and the guard at the other end unlocked a control box and threw a lever.

A cell gate opened. Out came a naked young black – the average age of all inmates was twenty-three – carrying his clothes in one hand and his cloth slippers in the other. He managed to swagger, muscles rippling as he walked to the rear gate and put his clothes on the bars. While one guard searched them, the other put the inmate through the ritual dance of a skin search: “Raise your arms, run ’em through your hair, turn around, bend over…” When it was done, he was let in and then out a second door to the small recreation yard. He carried his clothes over a painted red line fifteen feet from the door before putting them on. He was almost finished when the door opened and another young, muscular black came out. When not in segregation (the hole) they worked out on the weight pile and the boxing ring. The prison was called “gladiator school”, not without reason.

“You ready?” the first black asked.

“Jack ready, homeboy.”

The door opened once more; a third black came out, followed by five
chicanos
, one after another. The blacks gravitated to the half basketball court, the
chicanos
to a building wall that served for handball. Usually, they would have started warming up. They had only two hours and they liked to get all the exercise possible. Not this afternoon.

Finally, a white came out. He had stringy black hair that hung down his shoulders, and hair that grew from his shoulders and back. The hair was mixed with a vegetable gallery of blue tattoos, the kind that are handmade in juvenile hall or reform school. Among them were double lightning bolts on his neck and an especially dark and vivid swastika on his chest. Actually, he didn’t know Nazi from numbskull; to him, they meant only that he was white in a world where whites were often a minority. He crossed the red line quickly and put on the pants of the jumpsuit and tied the sleeves around his waist.

The door opened and another white came out. He was slender, soft, fair-skinned, and he, too, was defaced by a few tattoos. “Jerry, come over here,” said the biggest black; he was the one who had come out first.

The slender white, Jerry, ignored the summons. He went to where the white was pulling on the cloth slippers. Fighting barefoot on the rough asphalt was hard on the feet.

“We gonna have trouble, white boy?”

“That’s up to you. But you ain’t muscle nuthin’.”

The black looked to the other blacks, and they indicated that they were ready. They walked toward the two whites, and the fight was on.

In the gun tower, the guard had noted the tension down below. When it erupted, however, he was not prepared. He was also pouring steaming coffee from a thermos into the cap that was a cup. He tried to screw the cap back on the thermos, forgetting it was full of steaming coffee. The hot liquid spilled over his hands, and he dropped the lid cup on himself.

Still in pain, he looked down. The skinny white and one black were swinging punches, while the other two had the big white boy down and were kicking and stomping him. The gun-tower guard snatched up the carbine. The procedure manual said he should blow the whistle, followed by a warning shot -and after that he could aim at the fighters. Flustered by the burning coffee and the suddenness of the disruption below, he neglected the whistle, although he did fire a warning shot, quickly followed by three more. The sound was a flat, loud crack that sent a concussion through the air, causing a flock of blackbirds to explode from the roof and swoop away.

When the rifle echo died, two blacks were down, and the white was sitting up with blood pouring from his face. A piece of bullet had ricocheted from the pavement and cut his cheek, and the face always bleeds excessively. One black was writhing, the other lay prone, arms spread, while around him was a big pool of thick blood. It was pouring from the femoral artery. The other had broken ribs and scuttled away. With shaking hands the guards picked up the telephone, “Trouble in the ‘O’ Wing yard. Need stretchers and backup.”

The prison was designed with everything in wings jutting out on each side of the long, wide main corridor. Convicts were not supposed to hang out in the corridor, and there were always a couple of guards to keep them moving. When the shooting occurred and the stretchers went past at a run, only a handful of convicts were in the corridor, but others joined them as the procession returned – now carrying the two blacks, one with a blanket pulled up over his face. The burly white, his torso caked with blood, walked between two guards while he held a damp towel pressed against his cheek. It was soaked with blood, some dripping onto the corridor floor. The retinue turned through the door into the hospital wing. A minute later, a convict hospital worker came out and said Toussant was dead from loss of blood.

The prison grapevine is as swift as Western Union. In twenty minutes, every black face was grim, and many fought tears of fury. Toussant had been looked up to by most black convicts. One of the few inmates who failed to get the news in the first quarter hour was Eddie Johnson. He had the afternoon off duty from his job in the kitchen scullery where he scraped garbage from the stainless steel trays before feeding them into the washing machine. He started for the main yard but, when he stepped out into a gust of windblown dust, “Fuck this,” he thought, he could miss one day’s workout. He had a book by Regis Debray he needed to finish, plus letters to write. He wanted to convince his bourgeois sister that socialism was the best thing for black folks. He would stay in the cell for the afternoon until the main count lockup was finished. He’d come out for the evening meal and socialize in the TV room afterward. A few minutes before the afternoon lockup he heard the cell’s lock open. It gave the inmates a chance to go in and out for a couple of minutes – to trade magazines, make a bet on the NCAA Final Four or buy something to keep them high during the night in the cage.