Walter “Pete” Light came from a proud line of Dannemora men. He lived in the wooden house with the wooden porch on Emmons Street, built in 1895 and first owned by the Van Gorder family, then the Cosgroves, before it was passed down to his father and finally to him. And like his father, Light too had worked at Clinton, where for thirty years he has served the state as a corrections officer. Yet his fascination with the prison began well before he joined their ranks. (At age twenty-one, Light had walked past the old Warden’s Residence as it was being torn down. He asked a construction worker for one of the lightning rods that had topped the late-nineteenth-century manor. The acquisition began a nearly fifty-year love affair with preserving prison artifacts.)
As the official village historian, Light knew the fugitives had been the first to escape the Main in the penitentiary’s 152-year history. What he did not understand was why they were the subject of such interest. There were others who had successfully broken out of Clinton—like inmate no. 13344, Lajama Mados, a convicted murderer who, on October 7, 1920, fled from Clinton’s former prison chapel. Then there was Edward Blowers, who, on Aug. 11, 1919, had jumped out of a train while being transported from Sing Sing Prison. And then there was six-foot four-inch burglar Eckert Kelly who, on July 2, 1922, simply walked out of the facility’s tuberculous hospital. None of them were ever captured.
Other, more famous prison breaks became a frequent topic of discussion in the days after June 6, 2015. The fugitives out of Dannemora were likened to John Dillinger—once America’s no. 1 desperado who, in 1934, was freed from a jailhouse in Lima, Ohio, by three friends, men who had broken out of Indiana State Prison the month before. Other comparisons were made to Alcatraz inmates Frank Lee Morris and brothers John and Clarence Anglin. These men had placed dummies in their beds and, in the middle of the night, slipped through vent holes in the back of their cells—concealed by paintings of grates that blended into the wall—before climbing down a drainpipe. Alcatraz itself imposed only the first obstacle: the trio had to survive the cold, shark-ridden waters of the San Francisco Bay. Morris found a solution in the March 1962 issue of the periodical Popular Mechanics, which featured the article, “Your Life Preserver—How will it behave if you need it?” The piece provided instructions for how to make a floatation device out of raincoats, which is just what the inmates did. (Popular Mechanics also happened to be Sweat’s favorite magazine, which he consulted before absconding from Clinton.) Perhaps the most frequent comparison was, somewhat surprisingly, to a fictional event: The Shawshank Redemption, a film based on Stephen King’s narrative of a prisoner who, while serving two consecutive life sentences at the imagined Shawshank State Penitentiary, spent nineteen years chiseling a tunnel out of his cell that led to the prison’s sewage pipe.
Of the more than five hundred photos in Light’s collection, he had none of the prisoners who had escaped—nor would he really want them.
“They don’t mean nothing to me,” Light said. “I don’t want to say it by sayin’ it, but they’re just inmates.”
• • •
By Wednesday morning the rain had finally passed, leaving Matt and Sweat free to explore an ATV trail not too far from the deer blind. After washing up they left their things and set out, not knowing where the path would lead.
Less than a mile later they came upon a dirt road wide enough for a standard-sized vehicle. A white trailer surrounded by waist-high grass came into view, as did a well-kept lodge, its lawn recently mowed. Sweat and Matt headed for the mobile home first, which appeared to be vacant—yet they approached it from behind just to be sure. Long, wet blades of overgrown grass had crept up and flattened against its oxidized surface. Sweat surveyed the structure with great attention but could see no signs of any alarms, nor a generator to provide it power. Satisfied that no one had been there in some time, the men pressed their faces to the glass. They could make out a television, DVD player, and satellite box, as well as a few pieces of furniture and a pantry, which held the promise of provisions.
Matt tried the back door first.
“Locked,” he said, giving the knob another good twist just to be sure.
Sweat went around to the front door. To his surprise, it swung right open.
The place was a sizable one, complete with kitchenette, bathroom, and bunkroom. Seeing several useful items laying out, Sweat and Matt removed the fabric cases from nearby pillows and began to raid the cupboards and countertops, placing things in the sacks like two kids collecting candy on Halloween. Crackers, coffee packets, tea, toilet paper, matches, gum, hot sauce, and hand wipes all went in, along with a few leftovers from half-consumed MREs, or “Meals Ready-to-Eat”—a nutrient-dense pre-packaged emergency food supply carried by hunters and members of the military. Sweat and Matt each took a knife and Sweat, seeing a knife sharpener, white cord, and cardboard, took those items too, hoping they might come in handy.
“Hey, look! I found boots but they’re too big,” Matt said from the other side of the room, holding up the shoes before tossing them to the side.
Sweat went to reach for the boots. “Well, in that case—”
“No!” Matt protested. “Those are for me!”
“I thought you said they were too big!” Sweat said, laughing. “Put them on if you’re going to take them. And take your old ones back with us, we can’t leave anything of ours here.” Not wishing to linger any longer, they stuffed their packs with blankets, blue jeans, camo pants, two long sleeve shirts, Band-Aids, toilet paper, and a pair of green wool gloves, and headed back to camp.
Upon returning to the blind, the pungent scent of black pepper filled their nostrils.
“Boy, does that make the deer blind smell pretty!” said Sweat. He had doused their belongings in the seasoning earlier to throw any curious bloodhounds off course. The spice now mixed with the scent of citronella, which Sweat had also nicked from the trailer to ward off the thousands of biting bugs that had bred during the days of heavy rainfall. Wielding his new knife, he sliced up Matt’s old leather boots, and from the scraps fashioned a pair of sheathes. (It was in his nature to make do with what was available, and he could not let good material go to waste. Sometimes, as a child, he would tinker with items like a television, taking it apart piece by piece before putting the machine back together. Through these explorations Sweat learned how things worked and, if the item was beyond repair, what parts could be saved. He had a natural ability for seeing stuff beyond its intended purpose. To him, a boot was never just a boot.)
Matt and Sweat passed the afternoon at the blind before venturing out again. This time, they made for the clubhouse.
Sweat went around to the side door while Matt stayed out front. The former examined this entrance for a moment or so when he noticed a key dangling from a hook on the wall next to the jamb.
“What the hell, why not?” Sweat thought. He removed the key and pushed it into the lock. The mechanism clicked and he nudged the door open.
Upon entering, he saw Matt standing in the cabin.
“How the hell did you get in?!”
“The front door was unlocked,” he said with a grin.
Sweat smiled. “They left this for me,” he said, holding up the key.
He made his way up the stairs to a single large room with a storage cabinet, along with several dressers and beds, enough sleeping space to house a small group of hunters quite comfortably. He lifted each of the mattresses, squatting down to see if any rifles had been stowed on the springs for safe keeping. Sweat found none, but rummaging through several storage bins yielded a transistor radio, a few batteries, and Leatherman knife.
As he inspected these findings, he heard Matt’s voice come from somewhere behind him.
“Hey, look at this!”
Sweat wheeled around to see Matt kneeling beside a hard plastic case on the other side of the room. “Bet they have some nice handguns in here!”
Matt’s face dropped as soon as he unlatched the trunk: inside was a set of premium grilling utensils.
Disheartened, he went back downstairs; the only things he had found so far were a few coins and some loose bullets he had collected from around the cabin. (What he was going to do with this stuff Sweat could only guess, but Matt appeared to regard them as small treasures, and that alone seemed to negate the disappointment of the cookware.) When he reached the landing, he found Sweat in the kitchen digging through the cabinets for food, and so decided to have a look in the refrigerator.
“Dave, there’s a bunch of beer in the fridge.”
“I know.” Sweat had already looked inside. “Let’s grab a few apiece.”
They gathered all the tallboys they could carry and, with their belongings packed, they closed the door of the clubhouse.
Night had fallen by the time they went back outside. It had grown so dark that Matt could not see his hand stretched out in front of him.
“I think we’ve missed the trail,” he whispered, his voice rising an octave.
“No we haven’t,” said Sweat. They were still too close to the cabin and too close to the main road to risk pulling out the flashlights. “We’re almost there.”
The even, hard-packed road eventually gave way to a gritty, irregular surface, indicating they had reached the ATV trail. Once they were into the woods, they illuminated the path ahead until they reached the blind. Their body heat had warmed the beers, so Sweat submerged the tallboys in a bucket of cold spring water. He then went about building a fire with the logs he had gathered earlier that day and placed them against a wall of river rocks he had built to serve as a barrier against the wind.
Both he and Matt were pleased with their day’s work. Apart from the knife, radio, batteries, and pocket change, they had also procured two cans of tuna fish, a cooking pot, an emergency foil thermal blanket, one can of sweet green peas, three cans of Vienna sausage, a few candles, one flashlight, some more knives, a bag of honey-roasted peanuts, and several jars of pickles. Cracking open a Michelob Light, Sweat pulled up a seat—one of the white buckets he had found the morning before—and began to divvy the loot, listening to the radio and dining on the sausage, peas, and pepperoni, smoked over the fire and flavored with Tabasco sauce.
Matt turned to Sweat. His freedom had finally begun to sink in.
“This is the life. Let’s just stay here.”
Sweat smiled, and they talked for a minute or so before a voice on the radio interrupted the conversation: Joyce Mitchell, a civilian worker at Clinton Correctional Facility, will likely face charges for assisting two inmates’ escape from the prison…
Matt’s ears perked up. He looked at Sweat, who listened intently.
The broadcaster said Joyce told investigators she had provided Sweat and Matt tools and had knowledge of their plan.
Sweat felt a twinge of remorse, but he did not feel he and Matt were to blame. Had she done what she was supposed to do—what she had promised to do—she would not be in this predicament. (And they’d all be a hell of a lot farther along and be much more comfortable at that.) Yet he knew what this now meant: Joyce would most likely be committed to a life like the one they had left behind.
A second news update put thoughts of the prison seamstress out of his head: the announcer said the search for the inmates had turned to Cadyville.
“Where the hell is that? Sweat said.
Matt shrugged. “Dunno.”
As if the voice from the radio had heard them, it promptly explained: Cadyville was a town southeast of Dannemora, a good twenty miles plus from their current location.
“Ha!” Matt laughed. He held up a tallboy and tapped Sweat’s in triumph. Tonight, they would be able to sleep in peace.