Authors: Bell Gale Chevigny
Then they waited.
One January night, during a driving snowstorm, they made their move. Each man placed an ingenious dummy in his bed after the cell-house guard finished the 2
a.m.
count. The dummy heads, papier-mache skulls pasted with human hair, were covered with blankets up to the hairline, while next to them, curled in repose on the pillows, the surgical gloves, filled with water and tied off like balloons, were left exposed, appearing remarkably lifelike. Pants and shirts, stuffed with rags and dirty laundry, lay bodylike under the covers from which feet, formed with toilet paper and covered with socks, extended. After first yanking out their bars with vice grips, they stole to the barber shop, slipped the doorlock, and yanked out the bars there. On the yard, unseen in the whirling snow, wearing the white pajamas over their prison denims, they dropped into a drainage ditch and crawled the fifty yards to the thirty-foot wall. One of the other men, a tall farmboy from Missouri with a glass eye {his name was on the tip of his tongue) tossed the hook up and over the wall; it bit into the opposite side and held true. They were on their way. The other man, the smallest of the three, started up. The rope stretched against his weight, but held. Using the footholds they had tied into the rope, he climbed up the wall; ten feet, twenty feet, almost to the top, when suddenly, irrevocably â the rope snapped,
The old man lay against the wall, shivering, trying to remember the names of the two men. Off in the night he heard another barge laboring against the current. He pressed himself to the wall, seeking warmth. Out of the murky waters of his subconscious two names washed up: Jerry Dayton and Roy Bollinger. That's who they were! He saw their faces clearly, but only for a moment as they slipped back into the dark waters of memory. They didn't make them like that anymore. Pieces of information bobbed up to him: Dayton was killed by the police during a robbery at Springfield; Bollinger died in the electric chair at the old Cook County Jail for the murder of a minor politician. Or was it Dayton who got the chair and Bollinger who was shot in the holdup? It didn't matter. The names were right. After so many prisons, so many jails and reformatories, it was hard to keep things straight, and if he got things screwed up now and then, what difference did it make? He knew hundreds of stories grounded on his long experience as a prisoner and a convict which he enjoyed telling despite his inability to keep facts straight, and the way he saw it, if he tacked on a little embellishment over the years, or if he had the wrong characters in the wrong story, or if he distorted the truth once in awhile so that he hardly knew the truth himself, what difference did k make? And who, now, would know? Or care?
He enjoyed telling his stories; they were his only wealth, and he had hoped to pass them to the boy. The cold night air caught him up, and he winked. Shifting closer against the wall, he listened to the increasing rumble of the boilers. The time was near.
He'd spent many years in this prison, and during his many stays had often watched the steam being blown off. Except for the newer additions, the prison was steam heated. The ancient, enormous boilers sat squat and Buddha-like on concrete slabs in the red-brick powerhouse close to the main wall. The three boilers, all alike and two stories high, rumbled violently, hissed enigmatically, and succeeded in giving the impression that explosion was imminent. At noon, when the convicts were eating in the prison industrial area, the boilers were blown off to let the excess steam escape. At night, the prisoners secured in their cells, the steam was bled every two hours.
From the dining room at noon, or from his cell at night, the old man had often watched the process. It fascinated him. On the black tar roof of the powerhouse, three openings were cut, from which the great steam stacks of the boilers piled seventy feet in the air. The three stacks, thick at their bases and starting flush in their openings, were made of sheeted steel that had been seamed together to rise cylindri-cally to the sky. When the steam blew, the hot jets rose like vaporous ejaculations whose high density lent them shape, substance, and color. The wail of the steam whistles was a perfect accompaniment, matching pitch with the velocity of the spewing steam. At first the steam rose in single pillars, then mushroomed into distinct caps and stalks. The caps sucked the stalks up, forming balls of steam that turned to clouds of steam that merged eventually to one single cloud that migrated toward the river. As the cloud drifted, gravity and the cooling air brought it down until it hung on the wall, enshrouding it. Only a few minutes passed from the time the whistles blew until the cloud dissipated completely.
Lying on his back, listening to the boilers, he shivered almost uncontrollably as the night cold crept into his bones. He remembered when he was a boy and had fled from an orphanage to take a job on a river-boat, an old sternwheeler that plied the Upper Mississippi between St. Louis and Davenport. Unless the weather was exceptionally cold for an extended period, the river stayed clear throughout the winter. The cold earth below him now triggered the memory of the bone-chilling winter river. He had told the boy about the riverboats and about the men and women who rode and worked them. He told the boy about the river itself, calling it his river and telling him how it wound in a childish scrawl, down through Iowa, Illinois, and Missouri, brown and milky and always contemptuous of its banks, to its confluence with the Missouri River at St, Charles and then down, all the way through the South to New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico. The thought of the boy was depressing; he forced it from his mind and concentrated on the rumble of the boilers as best he could.
The boy, his daughter's only child, didn't like the old man. On one of his many paroles, he had lived with her and her son, Jimmy. He had been determined to make a friend out of the boy, not only for his daughter's sake and for the harmony of the household, but for his own sake too, as he knew he was old and close to death. Filled with the loneliness of the old that sprang from the inescapable self-alienation of one who wanted to live on despite the realization of approaching death, he saw his chance to do so through the boy. Jimmy, however, a hostile redheaded ten-year-old, resisted him from the start. The boy made it clear that he disbelieved the old man's stories, and the old man, much to his alarm, found himself disliking the youth, a realization that embarrassed him; yet, he persisted in his attempt to win the boy over, telling him wild stories of bank robberies, prohibition, prison riots, great escapes, gangsters, and shoot-outs until he exhausted his repertoire, while the boy, unimpressed, listened with undisguised boredom. He took the boy on walks, on trips to the zoo, to the movies, and to wherever else he thought a boy that age might want to go. Jimmy, an unwilling participant on these expeditions, went only under the admonishments of his mother, who was glad to have them both out of the house. Once, the old man succeeded in taking him fishing.
They fished in a small stream not far from home, and, sitting on the bank in the morning sun, the old man surveyed the stream: beer cans and bottles glinted from the creek bed, their reflections shimmering on the surface; old discarded tires and inner tubes lay filmed in silt, mouthing Os of protest against their abandonment; and no fish, fit to eat, lived there.
He shook his head, saying, “A goddamn shame.” He baited his hook with a bloodfat nightcrawler and tried to show the boy how to do the same. But the boy, displaying an irritating squeamishness, refused to follow the old man's lead and lapsed into a sulk, so the old man fished alone. Eventually he caught a small bullhead; its white belly flashed with an oily iridescence as he pulled it from the muddy water. As he elevated his pole the fish swung crazily toward him, dancing on its tail; he reached for it with a slow uncoordinated hand and succeeded only in deflecting it. The fish spun away as he groped after it. The boy laughed at his effort â a deep howling, self-indulgent laughter. The old man turned and saw the boy's face, and the derision and mockery published there. The boy's dull-witted viciousness scared him; yet, at the same time it served to cancel his desire for rapport, and there was some solace in that. He turned from him, gathered the fish in, unhooked it, and tossed it back into the stream where it darted for safety in series of jerks, dissolving in the alluvial depth. Kicking over the can of worms, he tossed his pole and the boy's in some scrub and said, “Let's go.” They walked home in silence.
One night, not long after that, he went to a neighborhood bar, got drunk, loud, and cantankerous. The management asked him to leave; he refused; they threatened to call the police, and he responded by throwing a full beer stein at an expensive mirror. The beer leapt in the air and hung momentarily as a droopy mustache of foam that fell with a slosh to the floor. The stein exploded into the mirror, and each burst to slivers and shards that tinkled musically to the countertop running below the mirror. The bartender called the police, who arrived in ten minutes with theatrical verve, having arrested the old man for similar misadventures. The old man, inimical to anything wearing a badge, stood ready to fight. When the first cop drew in range, the old man looped a left hook, but it flew like a hawk on the wing: swooping slowly, banking out and down, and the cop, fifty years younger, simply pulled his head back and let the hawk-hook glide by. The man fell flat on his face. The police dragged him from the bar, but only after he put up a resistance that belied his age, hollering over and over, “Oink, oink, oink.”
They took him to jail and charged him with public drunkenness and desttuction of private property. The next morning he went to coutt, his clothes soiled from jail and the fight. The young assistant prosecutor apprised the court of the charges pending, calling the court's attention to the fact that the defendant was a parolee on a life sentence, and though blind, Justice was attentive: With judicious economy the court dismissed the charges and revoked the parole.
That afternoon he was back in prison.
He had been paroled many times. When first convicted of armed robbery some forty years ago, he was tried as an habitual criminal, and as his record was already extensive then, his conviction netted him a mandatory life sentence. (The state's criminal code has since been revised. One of the revisions served to erase the mandatory life sentence clause of the robbery statute; however, the state's supreme court held that the revisions were not retroactive.) The parole board, on the other hand, was sympathetic toward him: his sentence was excessive; he was old, harmless; he had served more time than anyone in the prison system; his prison record was fairly good; and, probably more than anything else, he was a living anachronism, something left over from another age, and they simply felt sorry for him. Hence he was granted a lot of paroles, which, for one reason or another, he would violate and return to prison where he would stay until his next scheduled meeting with the parole board, which usually dispatched him on another pilgrimage to society. He became a veritable penal commuter, shuttling to and fro, from prison to society and back again, and he came to deeply resent the game, the pattern that society chose for him. He became determined to break the chains of conditioning that had held him for so long. But he was quite unable to do that, for the interminable years in prison had thoroughly institutionalized him. He had been polarized by prison steel, and no matter what he did or tried, it drew him like a magnet. Yet, the more it drew him, the more determined he was to exercise his will upon it, and now he had finally found a way. He doubted that there would be any more returns to prison or paroles from prison, for he knew his death was near. Whenever, in the last few yeats, he did make a parole, he stayed, not with his daughtet and the boy, for he knew that they did not really want him, but at a rooming house near the prison and near the river. It was convenient.
He lay against the wall, opening and closing his hands, fighting the numbing cold. This time they would not take him back. He turned up his collar and wished he had a watch. The steam should have blown by now. Yet, despite his waiting, despite his preparation, when the steam whistles shrieked through the night with their deafening howl, he was caught off guard. His heart grew big in his chest and beat wildly. He tried to get up but found that he couldn't move, that he was frozen in the moment. Then it passed, and he scrambled to his feet. He was going over. That was that.
Letting the rope uncoil and fall to the ground, he held the loose end in one hand, with the hook poised in the other. The grappling hook had been wound with gauze and then rewound with electrical tape in the hope that k would hit the wall with a muted thud. He looked up the side of the wall, realized he was too close, stepped back, and locking his elbow and keeping his arm relaxed, he gave the hook a few imaginary practice pitches; then mightily, with every fiber of his being, he let it fly: It sailed into the night and arched magnificently over. The hook bounced on the other side and sent a tattoo of vibration to his hand. Slowly, he pulled it up. A few times it snagged on the rough contour of the wall, but jiggling his end a bit, he got it started again, until finally, two of the steel fangs bit resolutely into the slate lip that capped the wall. A good hold: This rope would not snap. But he had to hurry, for high above the gray, vaporous caps and stalks of the steam, mushrooms appeared against the darkened sky. The moon had vanished.
From the start he felt he wasn't going to make it. He had knotted the rope every eighteen inches which permitted him to stand on a knot, to reach up and to grab hold of the highest knot he could, and to pull himself up to stand on a higher knot. But the going was rough. He had only gone a few knots when the pain began to burn through his arms. His breathing came in shallow gasps, and he had to rest. He started up again: a knot; another. His feet slipped off a knot, and he hung from the rope, his arms stretching in their sockets. The pain raced up and down his shoulders, and his lungs ached to scream. His feet groped wildly for the knot. He turned on the rope, his back to the wall, and the rope came to him. He caught it with his knees, and his feet found the knot. Turning, he started up again. Up and up he climbed. The pain, like fire now, rolled over his back in waves, burned hot and sandy in his lungs, and surged through his legs and arms. It emanated from his chest where his heart pounded erratically, a chaotic drum to whose intense beat the pain quickstepped to every part of his body. Yet, up and up he climbed until, exhausted, he turned his back to the wall and rested, hanging squat and deadweighted, his feet quivering on a knot, sweat beading his forehead.