Learning to do time, according to PEN writers, is to weather a series of harsh lessons. New prisoners often refuse to accept their actual surroundings and cling emotionally to lost realities — for men, typically, the world of the streets, for women the family. The dream of early release — through legal relief or otherwise — dies hard and typically leaves depression in its wake.
By stages prisoners acknowledge their new surroundings and adapt to prison culture. When they settle in, many — especially long-termers — survive by structuring their lives around religion or some other productive or creative activity. For some men, doing time means aggressively pursuing their appeals or entering into lawsuits protesting their conditions. For others, it means, according to one writer, “giving in or buying in to the jailin’ lifestyle of pumping iron, hanging with gangs, kicking back.” Women take to the courts less frequently. And, where men find protection, identity, a sense of belonging, and companionship in gangs, women find these more often in multigenerational surrogate families.
Meanwhile, daily institutional routines — like the count, work shifts, meals, yard time — supplant habits and expectations people bring from the world outside. For better or for worse, they order the prisoner’s day. But some routines, like the delivery of mail, permit a recipient like Jimmy Santiago Baca a fleeting transcendence of all constraint.
Nature, too, has routines that can’t be entirely locked away. New seasons, breaking the routines of old seasons, also color prison routine and may convert a prison guard into a dreaming fisherman, as in Michael Hogan’s “Spring.”
Prisoners’ performances, displays of personality by which they assure themselves of their own humanity and put their personal stamp on their surroundings, can also be called routines. Thus a new inmate, like Lori McLuckie’s “Trina Marie,” flaunts her style in an effort to navigate the enigmatic new society and discover whom she can trust, while clinging to fantasies of happiness. In “After Lights Out,” Barbara Saunders sets such brave performances against the real — and routine — threat of predators. Doing time is made of uneasy combinations of such competing routines.
Music can evoke familiar worlds of freedom and their cherished routines. The beat of a conga drummer in D Yard stirs the answering rhythms of poet Raymond Ringo Fernandez. “Contratiempo con el ttempo” — one beat, one time, one way of doing time calls up another, and the dissonance of a lone instrument in “culturally deprived” Attica plays against the many-voiced harmonies of a Nuyorican jam-session and home. “Lies and gossip”* (as Fernandez characterizes prison discourse in another poem) are routines that help domesticate steel-and-concrete corridors, “In the Big Yard,” by Reginald S. Lewis, catalogues the competing routines of yard gossip circa 1988. His poem ends with a tribute to Pops, the runner who has seen it all and acts as guide. But by 1997, the survival of a similar old con is menaced by the heedless young in Patrick Nolan’s poem “Old Man Motown.”
Inherent in all routine is the possibility of its rupture. Prison routines are shadowed by the mental mutinies that would destroy them. Hostility between prisoner and guard becomes reflexive, along with the repression of rage — and other feeling — in both. In Scott Antworth’s “The Tower Pig,” institutional routine is ruptured by a brief venture of keeper and kept into free air; the encounter between these two very different prison-hardened characters permits a slight but crucial opening, a moment of surprising recognition. In Daniel Roseboom’s “The Night the Owl Interrupted,” an alternative Utopian solidarity briefly emerges with the near-miraculous intervention of nature. It provides the men inner fortification against the return to institutional routine.
Ice has been cracking all day
and small boys on the shore
pretending it is the booming of artillery
lie prone clutching imaginary carbines.
Inside the compound returning birds
peck at bread scraps from the mess hall.
Old cons shiver in cloth jackets
as they cross the naked quadrangle.
They know the inside perimeter is exactly
two thousand eighty-four steps
and they can walk it five more times
before a steam whistle blows for count.
Above them a tower guard dips his rifle
then raises it again dreamily.
He imagines a speckled trout
coming up shining and raging with life.
1975, Arizona State Prison-Florence Florence, Arizona
I sit bundled in the peaceful sun.
To my right, a slip of colored sail goes downriver behind the old death house.
Two prisoners circle a dirt path bordering a green field double-fenced and walled with liberal layers of barbed wire.
Buck, a Lifer, works on the bars doing chins and dips building his house trim and strong against the long years.
George, hands scrunched in wordless pockets walks with recent loss of his young brother. We nod hello, and faded pennants snap in the wind along the fencetop.
1985, Sing Sing Correctional Facility Ossining, New York
From the cold hands of guards
Flocks of white doves
Handed to us through the bars,
Our hands like nests hold them
As we unfold the wings
They crash upward through
Layers of ice around our hearts,
Cracking crisply
As we leave our shells
And fly over the waves of fresh words,
Gliding softly on top of the world
Flapping our wings for the lost horizon.
1976, Arizona State Prison-Florence Florence, Arizona
Walking down the prison hallway
With your scarlet-lipstick Norma Jean smile,
Green eyes inviting;
Deliberately so.
A woman-child
With translucent white skin
And the impetuous manner
Of a street child
Who knows the drill;
How to smoke cigarettes
And see people for what they really want from you.
These gray walls,
These dirty floors,
This cynicism and despair
Set off
Your vivacious and vulnerable glow;
And the deep gruff sounds
Echoing between these stark walls
Are mere background to the clear
Sweet tones of your childlike voice;
To your bold laughter
That defies anything less.
You forge your way
Through this confusion every day,
Burning your candle at both ends
And loving at whim;
Not quite sure
Who to count on,
What is solid
Or what you want to be solid.
And in your concrete room at night,
Among your cigarettes and lipstick tubes,
Your letters and pictures,
You sit on your steel bunk
And wonder when you’ll be able to settle down
To that one great love
You have always imagined.
1991, Colorado Correctional Institution for Women Canon City, Colorado
Lonely, ail angles and bones
knobs and knees and
eyes like saucers.
Fat Nugie, a billiard ball
in a baseball cap and
tennis shoes.
Rhonda, the 400 pound flasher
letting it all hang out
“not shamed o’ my body.”
Pie, strippin’ and dancin’ and
swinging a towel
and mooning the C.O.
as he walks away.
Night wraiths.
Dancers in the dark.
Forms move together, coalesce
separate and re-form.
Some singing, some laughter.
The scurry, the sneaking.
Predators come silently in the night
and whisper
“come with me.”
Those who watch
immobilized, struck
dumb
pretend not to know
pretend not to see.
1997, Eddie Warrior Correctional Center Taft, Oklahoma
on warm summer evenings
i hear the tumbao
of your sky blue conga
declamando
carrying your inspiration
over the wall
like a refreshing
Caribbean wind
if it weren’t for
the culturally deprived minds
in the gun towers
i’d swear
i was in Central Park
chilling out
by the fountain
con un yerbo and a cold
can of Bud
or
tumbao: a Caribbean rhythm played on the conga; dedamando: reciting; un yerbo: Nuyorican for a joint (marijuana; Sp. hierba, pron. “yerba”); badendo coro at un bembe: singing in chorus at a jam-session; repica vida: make life ring (in hand percussion, hits in rapid succession are called repique); contratiempo con el tiempo: lit. counter-rhythm with the rhythm. (RRF)
hacienda coru
at un bembe
on 110th street
where even the children
understand clave:
cla-cla/ cla-cla-cla
repica vida conguero
contratiempo con el tiempo
que with each slap
on the conga’s skin
you bring me closer
to home.
1982, Attica Correctional Facility Attica, New York
Rumors abound Inmate So-and-So done gotta parole date-Last Monday, but sucker don’t even Know his woman done run off with “sweet Cadillac Willie” Who spent her
welfare check on gasoline an* blow on a new pair of skins. An’ that scary lil’ wimp locks on B Block ain’t cool, man. Snitched on his rap-partner ‘bout that rape-kidnap-homicide-robbery back in ‘76. Hit goin’ down in the Big Yard.
Stay away, Homey. ‘Cause bookies layin’ ten-to-one odds some lieutenant finds the rat with his head propped up on the end of a long shank. When they find the body what they do is ship it home in a cheap plywood box, tag with his number on it swinging list lessly on his big toe an’ a “Whut have I done to deserve this?” look on his dumb ugly face.
Other day seen new blood shambling through the reception gate talking loud an’ ail cocky like he Mr, T. So a big mean lookin’ con doin’ life for mutilating his pregnant wife walks boldly up to Young-blood an’
whispers somethin’ soft an’ sweet to ‘im an’ next day Young-blood’s lips are red an’ glossy an’
his hair is long an’ straight an’ he’s switchin’ ‘round the Big Yard
Like he Diana Ross
An’ the big con man says, “Hot young punk for sale, y’all!” Squinting into the sun, Old Man “Pops” say be been down so long he done lost count.
“Kinda git used to it afta while, son,” Pops says: the big time hoods an’ their paper Cadillacs on cruise control. The Hos on the stroll down the endless lightless white-ciay strip.
Crack junkies chillin’ out on smoke-marshmallow clouds. I’seiidoinidlecruals over there rappin’ about (he struggle. An’ ihe hapless chorus of crooners tryin’ to sound like the Temptations.
Pops says lie don’t pay ‘nn no mind an’ he ain’t hstenin’ Don’i even care ‘bout not bin’ cause he ain’t neva bad a woman noway.
Old bones tuns the Big Yard through Chugging along like a locomotive thai neva slops. Runs all day long — Hookies layin’ ren-to one odds old I’ops pianinu’ to fly right over the big wall.
1988, State Correctional Institution Pennsylvania
Old Man Motown
dances toe to toe
around the prison
exercise track
throwing jabs
as he bobs and weaves,
dressed in cutoff
denim shorts
and hard soled boots,
while young cons lie
like rock lizards
bemoaning the three
digit heat.
Old Man Motown alone
with his thoughts,
shoots short combinations,
counters blow for blow
with some imaginary foe,
his five-foot-five frame
heavy with age,
pushing forward against
the concrete upgrade
that emanates a wall
of rippling heat.
Old Man Motown
his raven wing skin
streaked white with dried
sweat, knees pulsing pistons
of determination — to see
this silver haired grandpa
with the blue cataract eye,
one can’t help but smile
as he dances his dance
in the sweltering northern
California sun.
Old Man Motown
times have changed
The once noble beasts
of this barren Savannah
are almost extinct,
ravaged by the vicious sweep
of rat packs that make prey
of the aged, sick, and weak.
1997, California State Prison-Sacramento Represa, California
“Caine!” One of the East Wing hogs called after me through the crash and clamor of lunch release. I couldn’t even see the guy, lost as he was in the flood of inmates surging past him for the chow hall, but from the tone of his voice he had to be a block officer. Rookie guards actually take classes: Speaking with Authority 101.
“Caine!” he barked again because I was acting like I’d not heard him, trying to be just another face in the stampede. “Stop by the SOC office. Captain Kruller wants to see you!”
Subtle, I thought. Tell me that when I’ve got two hundred cons packed around me to wonder what business I’ve got at the Security Operations Center on a Saturday afternoon. No one goes to the SOC office for good news. Standard convict paranoia — who’s ratting who out — is enough to get at least some of them thinking.
“Spell my name right when you give your statement.” My neighbor, Hodgson, chortled from deep inside his walrus neck as he lumbered down the stairs.
“Sure.” I sneered at his back. “You spell it how, d-i-c-k-h-e-a-,” I began, but he was already gone.
Captain Kruller was six feet of spit-shine and razor-creased blues with a leathery hide looking like it’d been cut from a rhino’s ass and Superglued over an Erector Set, He kept his Marine citations and ribbons velvet-backed and under glass on his office wall to let everyone know he’d perfected his bearing on Parris Island and not behind the walls of Thomaston.
“Come in, Caine,” he said. He’d pulled my file before I showed up and glanced at my mug shot. “Take a seat,” he said, to give us the illusion of familiarity. I’d been sitting on folding chairs and wooden stools for the better part of a decade. My ass didn’t know what to make of naugahyde and cushions.
“I’ve got some bad news, John,” he said. Suddenly we were on a first-name basis.
“Who was it?” I asked.
“Your grandmother passed away yesterday morning,” he said, his hands flat and precisely spaced on the blotter in front of him. “I’m sorry,” he added as if such sentiments were foreign to him.
“Thank you,” I muttered, only half believing I’d said it. Please and thank-yous pass between cops and inmates like bricks through a keyhole.
“You’re taking it well.”
I said that I’d known it was coming. She’d been sick for a long time. Truth is, I wasn’t about to show him anything. Pain, joy, worry — whatever can be denied them — are shielded away from them until the cell doors slam and we’re secured in our solitude. I’d weathered my first chunk of grieving for Nana when she was still mostly alive. For ten days in the hole, I had nothing to do but hate Strazinski, the Tower Pig, for putting me there and to mourn a grandmother finally too sick to visit.
“I can let you call your folks,” he offered, gesturing to the phone.
“Thanks anyway,” I told him, figuring they wouldn’t know what to make of me calling them. We had nothing to say.
“But they’re letting you go to the funeral, right?” Hodgson asked, leaning against the bars of my house and trying to sound consoling. He could skip deftly from one prison heartache to the next as if they were footprints stenciled on a studio dance floor, but real world problems would always catch him short.
“Kruller told me I could,” I said. “In full equipment.”
“Are you shittin’me?” he whined. “Full equipment? You’re minimum security, bro. They should give you a car to go up there, not chain you up like a, well, you know.”
“That’s what I told him. He just gave me his that’s-just-the-way-it-is speech. Said it was up to me if I wanted to go or not.”
I was sitting at the head of my bunk, my back to the wall, feeling like I should be doing something but not having a clue. Hodgson’s company with Nana’s hands so firmly on my shoulders was intolerable. I wanted to be left alone but knew the minute he wandered off I’d be crushed by the silence.
“It ain’t right, Caine, chaining you up like that when you’re so close to getting out.” He shook his head in disgust, warming to his subject. He was back in familiar territory; inmates treated like dogs and pigs riding roughshod over us because they were the ones with the dimestore badges and the power-trip egos.
“Full equipment.” He sneered, lighting another roll-your-own cigarette. “You know they’re just busting your balls over Strazinski.”
“Naw,” I said quietly. “They’re screwing with me because they can is all. The pigs like that friggin’ Straz about as much as they do us. Did you ever see him when he’s off that wall? They damn near shake their drawers loose acting like he’s not there.”
He grins his best Hodgson smirk, the one that looks like it’s been slashed in with a rusty straight razor.
“It must be a stone bitch,” he said, “to be a pig and have even your own kind think you’re a piece of shit.”
I figure that’s why Strazinski stays up on the wall whenever he can, sequestered in North Post, the gun tower that commands the prison street from where the road arches inelegantly past the craft shop, from the cell house to the yard. The only times I’ve ever seen him among the living was when he was pulling extra shifts. He clings to the periphery when he’s not on his wall, glowering disdainfully at the inmates and avoiding the knots of officers gossiping and playing grab-ass. He looks as out of place in a crowd as he must feel, pressing his back to the wall and trying to be invisible. Older cons will argue how long he’s been the Tower Pig, but none deny he’s been on that wall longer than most of us have been inside it. His brother officers, doing their eight hours in the towers and loathing their isolation, don’t know what to make of him. He’s a freak, just like the mental cases who stand in the middle of their cells for hours at a go, staring at nothing.
“You ever wonder what he’s like at home?” I asked presently.
“All the time,” Hodgson purred, waiting for me to bite. “The hell’s the matter with you? I ain’t thinking of him at all when I ain’t got to. Besides, I don’t figure he’s any different there than he’s here. Donnelson tells me his ol’ lady ditched him years ago. He ain’t got no kids. The friggin’ guy must put in sixty hours a week. Might as well stick a cot in the tower and crash there.”
“I didn’t know he was married,” I said.
“He ain’t, at least he ain’t been long as I’ve been here. You’re getting sentimental on me, Caine. Save it for your folks. All that guy’s done for you is get you ten days in the hole.”
Hodgson was hoping he’d get a rise out of me. He knew I was thinking of Nana again and was doing his best to try and keep me distracted. “All I’m saying? You can go on thinking that their making you go to the funeral all chained up ain’t got nothing to do with you and Straz, but they still thought enough of him to put you in the Seg Unit over it. You hear what I’m saying? Just because he ain’t real popular with them doesn’t change his being one of their own kind.”
He was right, but I didn’t want to be thinking of any of it; not pigs and inmates, not the last of my bridges over the wall collapsing with Nana’s passing — things as unyielding as the metal bunk, bolted to the wall, on which I sat. I don’t know how long he stayed there talking, jumping from one subject to the next. The more I listened, the more his voiced dissolved into a drone. I offered monosyllables and halfhearted grunts to try to convince him I wasn’t shutting him out completely. Finally, he drifted off with a “see you in the morning” and a sympathetic thump on my bars. I listened to the scuff of his footsteps and then I listened to nothing, already dreading the caverns of a Thomaston night.
I would not cry for Nana, but I would want to, wringing myself out through the hours after lock-down with alt the recriminations and should-have-been’s chanting in my head. I’d shed all my teats in the hole and in the weeks before.
Though Hodgson blamed Strazinski for my stretch in the hole a month ago, I’d gotten myself in that jam. It began the day Cassidy, the aspiring vegetable — who’d huff dry cleaning solvent if it was the only way to get high — stalked into my cell and pulled out a joint the size of his finger. “You want to burn this with me, just say the word,” he said, tossing a book of matches down onto the table like a dare. Cassidy’s the kind of refugee who ambles through life like everything’s casual, drifting in unannounced at the oddest moments to flash enough dope to get us both an extra year as if it were a candy bar. He must have tried to get me stoned fifty times through the year, but that day I didn’t want to btood anymore about Nana wheezing from her hospital bed, those tubes in her arms, alone with the night. I didn’t say no.
An hour later and on the way to the craft shop, anyone would have thought we were the best of buddies, telling war stories. I felt freer than I had in a very long time, bouncing down that road with a stoner jounce. I didn’t feel the walls of Thomaston crushing me, leaving me unable to do more for Nana than wait for her to die.
Pausing at the foot of the craft shop stairs, out on the road and in the shadow of North Post, Cassidy was going on and on about this lady friend of his, a flaked-out hippie chick. I was digging it, and I was more interested in letting him finish than I was in getting upstairs to spend the afternoon acting like I was working. The river of inmates on their way to wherever had thinned to a trickle.
“You!” Strazinski roared from the wall above us, looking like he was having a raging hangover. “Yeah, you! How many times have I got to tell you people to get moving?!”
“Me?” I asked, my hands on my chest. I always play dumb with the pigs, It makes them nuts.
“Who the hell do you think I’m talking to, you moron?!”
“He’s talking to us,” I snickered, turning to Cassidy, but Cassidy had turned to vapor, bolting up the stairs when Strazinski started his tirade.
“What do you need, someone to hold your hand to get you upstairs? Or do you need to be locked in for the day? What’s your problem, Caine?!”
“What my problem?” I shouted back at the wall, “What’s your problem? I’m the one that’s going to work and you’re the one acting like a headcase about it. Go on back inside your tower, Straz. You wouldn’t know real work if someone rolled it in sand and shoved it up your ass!”
His face, chalky and time-furrowed, went the sweetest shade of vermilion.
“That’s it! God damn it, that — is — it! Back to the blocks! You’re tagged in!”
Seething, I managed to laugh at him as I turned back for the cell house with him still raging behind me.
“Have a nice day!” I yelled back over my shoulder while I snatched at the waistband of my sweat pants. I figured if he really wanted to see my butt headed back for the blocks, he might as well get the fifty-cent view. So I gave it to him. Both sun-starved cheeks and a vertical smile to remember me by.
Reviewing my case a week later, the chairman of the disciplinary board actually giggled when Straz’s statement was read into the record. It had been months since anyone had mooned an officer. But amusement didn’t prevent him from finding me guilty of a Class B Provocation charge and giving me ten days in the hole to contemplate my sins.
I didn’t cry for my Nana the night before her funeral. Neither did I sleep. I rolled and tossed and jerked in disgust on a mattress little wider than my shoulders until, exhausted, I lay very still and watched the night pass on the bricks of the cell house wall. Across the way the steam pipe sputtered on, spitting hateful secrets to the twilight. I knew all the accusations, chapter and verse. I could already hear the hissing murmurs of the dozen remaining in my family as they gossiped busily in the pew, darting glances over their shoulders at me, shocked that I’d been allowed to attend and not in the least bit surprised that I’d disrespect my grandmother by showing up handcuffed to a chain around my waist, with a guard hovering to make sure I didn’t bolt for the door. I could even hear the bolder ones giving me their glad-you-could-make-its and offering me their insincere bests after the service, convinced I’d never amount to more than all the hardware hanging off me. I couldn’t blame them. Junkie thieves are rarely a prized seed among those who worked themselves to death for everything they owned. Every last one of them had given up on me a year before I managed to get myself thrown in Thomaston for a ten-year sabbatical.
Only Nana refused to surrender me to the void, for only she was too stubborn to let me go. She played ambassador right till the end, giving me all the family gossip and browbeating my parents into their annual Christmas visit, only to keep the conversation going when the silences got so thick you couldn’t hack through them with a machete.
The morning of the funeral began with my toilet plugging up with the first flush of the day and ended with the intake officer wrapping a belly chain around my waist and cuffing my hands to it. Between was the chaos of scrounging and making do. I finally got something of a shine on my weathered biker boots and spent half an hour pawing through the wardrobe of the prison commissary until I found a suit that was a close-enough fit. Having found no needle for the thread I’d managed to scrape up, I tacked up the hems of the trousers with an office stapler.
“Caine,” Strazinski greeted me curtly as I was escorted into the intake area to find him not in his uniform but in a proper suit at least a size too small. “You’re with me. Strip.”
No inmate enters or leaves Thomaston without a thorough strip-search. I’ve gotten naked for more cops than I have for former lovers. I stripped down mechanically, knowing the drill, all the while searching the room for someone else in civilian clothes, hoping this was some sort of joke. There were four officers in that room with me, and only Straz wore a suit. He’d pulled the short straw to be my escort home.
In the prison garage, he neither spoke to me nor looked me in the face. He held the car door open long enough for me to fumble into the back, then buckled the seat belt over me.
Strazinski wedged himself into the driver’s seat, the wheel shoved into his starched white shirt, cleaving his belly. Growling and grumbling, he tried to adjust his seat, but the security mesh between us kept it permanently in place. He kept glancing into the mirror to see if I was amused by his predicament.
“It’s going to be a hot one,” he said, addressing me for the first time since I stripped for him in Intake. “When we get to where we’re going, you might want to take that jacket off and carry it inside.”
“I’ll be fine,” I told him. “It might get warm, but it still covers most of the hardware.”
“Yeah, well,” he said. “Kruller said full equipment, so you get full equipment.”
I wanted to tell him to go screw himself as he pulled the Chevy into brilliant sunlight. By blaming it on the boss, he didn’t have to admit he was loving it. I slouched against the door and rested my cheek on the glass, watching the cracked asphalt of Route 1 hurtle past with cars in the opposing lane racing east. We were better than two miles down the road before I realized it was me and not they who were moving too quickly, their rush amplified by my starved perceptions and by the years I’d been inside.
“I got a messed-up question,” the Tower Pig said after we’d turned onto 17 and were torpedoing for Augusta and the places I once called home. “You do know where we’re going, don’t you?”
“You get us to Augusta and I’ll get us to the church,” I told him, wanting to rub his nose in his ignorance.
“Fair enough,” he grumbled. “You’ve been away a long time, haven’t you?”
“Eight years,” I said, watching the trees whirr past in kaleidoscope glimpses. Eight years, five months, and… eleven days, I thought.
“Long time,” he announced, studying me in the mirror. “I bet it ain’t changed all that much, has it?”
“Not much,” I muttered to the window, still watching the trees and the undergrowth rioting in so many forgotten shades of green, green in a flood, all so impossibly thick and lush. They could not have been this dense when I bounded through them like a deer, the black earth and wet leaves like a sponge beneath ten-year-old feet. Through the hum of the Chevy I could hear the summer cicada shrill, knifed through by the buoyant cries of half-remembered friends frozen in child-voices.
“No,” Straz said presently, having thought it over. “Home never changes much.”
I said nothing. My stare drifted from the window to the security mesh to the floor.
“I’m sorry about your grandma,” he said.
I flinched. Back behind the walls, if he wasn’t barking at inmates he may as well have been a mute. I didn’t want him talking about her; I didn’t want him talking. It seemed the farther we got from Thomaston the harder it was for him to keep his mouth shut and leave me to my silence.
“I lost my mother last year,” he said quietly. “This stuff’s the worst, but what’re you going to do, right? Get up, go to work, do your time. It gets easier someday.”
“I’m sorry about your mom,” I offered weakly, looking at him for the first time in miles. I stared at the back of his head the rest of the way into Augusta, watching the roll of fat at the base of his skull, pinched by the threadbare collar of his jacket, and waiting for him to speak.
Like every other city in Maine, Augusta bounds from the urban to the suburbs to the sticks in seconds. The broad wedge of St. Andrew’s — the Roman Church meets seventies architecture — is shoved into the spine of a knoll wreathed in the conifers and hemlock walling out the erratically spaced lots and sagging roofs from the proper monotony of homes with identical floorplans and freshly mowed lawns.
I watched the church growing from its hill, remembering the masses I attended with Nana and how we’d go out for ice cream afterward. I scanned the faces of the mourners moving solemnly up the narrow asphalt path toward the rectory, recognizing none of them. Dumpy white-haired ladies in orthopedic shoes and old men in hom-burg hats despite July like a blast furnace. These were Nana’s friends, I reckoned, pinochle players and retirement community denizens, all the faces who gathered for twice-weekly High Mass and for all the funerals as their members slowly fell away.
In the lee of the hill, in the broad oval of the parking lot behind St. Andrew’s, Strazinski hid the Impala in among the hulking Buicks and salt-rusted Toyotas.
“So this is it?” he asked, and craned his neck to study the shingled cliff of St. Andrew’s south wall.
“Funny-looking church,” he said, glancing back at me when 1 didn’t comment. “I guess I’m just used to them big stone Franco churches they got around here.”
“I think that’s why I liked this place when I was a kid,” I told him when he opened my door and the heat hit me like a wall. “It wasn’t like everywhere else.”
At the base of the wall, ignoring the mourners drifting past them from the parking lot and hiding from the padre, two altarboys in black cassocks and white bibs pecked at a forbidden cigarette as if the filter burned their lips. I tucked my wrists in closer to my waist and pinched the tails of my jacket in with my arms, hiding what I could of the chain. Straz stood off away from me, his hands parked on the roll where his hips should be.
“We going?” I asked.
“Give me your hands,” he said presently, decisively, as he fished in his pocket for his keyring.
I flushed, exultant and trying not to show it, and shoved my wrists as far toward him as they would go, six inches from my waist.
“You shouldn’t have to be going in there like this,” he said as the cuffs popped free and he turned his attention to the padlock on the belly chain. The hot summer air chilled my wrists where the steel had been.
“I appreciate it,” I mumbled as the chain fell away from my waist and Straz bundled it into the back of the car, leaving me standing there unfettered in my borrowed suit, like anyone else in the parking lot. For the first time in eight years I was on the right side of the walls of Thomaston and looking like a free man. Nana would have loved it.
“If you really appreciate it,” Straz said, looking me in the eye, “you’ll remember one thing: This never happened. If Kruller catches wind of this, then it’s my butt that’s hanging out. Still, no one should have to bury their grandmother chained up like that. Got it?”
“I got it. And, look, whether you believe it or not, it’ll sure mean a lot to my family not seeing me like that… and maybe it means a lot to me, too, you know? Thanks.”
His fleshy brow crinkled, not knowing how to take being spoken to like that.
“Yeah, well,” he said, opening his jacket to show me the gleaming butt of his .38 in its cross-draw holster. “Just you remember that it’s too friggin’ hot for me to be running after you.”
“I love you too, Straz.” I grinned, stepping off for the path ahead of him.
Nana’s casket was white and shone like ivory on its gurney before the altar. The priest had not yet made his entrance. There had to be a hundred people in there, massed in a semicircle around the coffin, lined up in the pews with their heads bowed. I could hear only the whispers of pages as the organist, hunched at her bench and hidden beneath her hat’s broad brim, flipped through her hymnal, biding her time. Strazinski dipped his fingers in the holy water at the door and crossed himself.
“What?” he whispered, catching me watching him. “You figure I got to be French to be a Catholic? Hell, even the friggin’ Pope’s Polish.” Then his hand was on my shoulder. “Go on and sit with your folks. I’ll be back here by the door. Don’t get lost now.”
Taking a seat by himself, he left me standing in the aisle at the back of the church, scanning those gathered for a place to sit. My family was assembled in the pews immediately in front of Nana. My father, grayer and more railish than he’d been when I saw him last Christmas, was the first to notice me. The wrinkles of his crow’s-feet pinched, his eyes hardening as he whispered in my mother’s ear. Her shoulders trembled and sagged. I could just hear her sobs from where I stood in the rear. I watched the news of my presence ripple from them and through the pews with quick curt glances and feverish whispers. My sister leaned more deeply against the husband I’d not yet met, the crown of her head in the ginger of his beard as he sized me up from over his shoulder.
Through the ride up from Thomaston, bouncing around in the back of the prison’s Impala, I’d steeled myself up to march right in, ignoring my chains, and impose myself on them because that’s what Nana would have wanted. I barely acknowledged them before I turned from them and slipped into the pew beside Strazinski, knowing she’d understand. He tensed awkwardly as I sat, then nodded sympathetically. I watched his vast bulk relax from the corner of my eye. He shook his head and watched the altar, waiting on the organist and “Just a Closer Walk with Thee.”
1998, Maine State Prison Thomaston, Maine
Dixon said he’d lost his pump already, curling his arms profoundly, scrutinizing the bulge of biceps. Big snowflakes fused to the burrs of his green knit hat and melted over his warm sweatshirts.
I let the heavy lid slap closed over the weight box and sighed at having made it through another cold routine. The winter workouts were becoming lethargic in the blinding spotlight beams of the prison yard. I inhaled and the air crystallized and tickled my moist nostril hairs.
“It’s these cheap weights,” Dixon said, squeezing out one last curl.
He was right. It was the futile equipment, the warped barbells and spurred cables and rusty plates. It was the wicked weather and the absence of motivation. Ultimately it was the monotony of prison ambience: the razor-wire fences, the dirt and concrete ground, the Great Wall stacked with gun towers resembling tiny huts lit with big round spotlights. It was a battle with confinement and fatigue.
A flock of pigeons perched on the Great Wall and the gun towers’ shingled peaks. There was an instant ripple of feathers as they abruptly flapped away toward the black sky. It reminded me of when I used to go hunting with my father before my incarceration, when our presence in the woods was momentarily powerful and our prey sensed it fearfully.
I noticed other inmates closing up their weight courts and weaving through the maze of bulky weight boxes and machinery to get to the main yard. The routine was over and it was time to go.
I slipped into my state coat but left it unzipped, as did Dixon. It was imprudent to zip it, especially after a workout when one’s muscles were tired and tight. It was wise to stay as loose and flexible as possible, ready for the unpredictable dangers in the political battleground of the main yard.
I followed Dixon off the weight court and we siphoned into the stream of inmates lumbering along the main walkway through the tables divided according to racial or political decree. They sat at tables or stood in a huddle around a television drinking cup after cup of coffee to stay warm, cheering as the last minutes of a football game ticked away. Others rapped in rhythmic harmony to a metal tabletop and snap of many fingers. Some merely waited, standing erect in the snow-fail with their hands stuffed in warm pockets, rocking on their heels, wondering if the announcement to “return to the blocks” would ever crackle over the weathered speakers. The need to get into the prison blocks, into our cells, and beneath wool blankets always intensified as the cold long evening stretched on.
A damp snowflake settled on my eyelash and, just as I blinked to cleanse the blur, a feathered creature of brilliant white sailed across my path. I froze beside Dixon and other astonished inmates. The bird flapped its powerful wings and climbed to the prison block windows. It curled its steel talons into the wire mesh, adjusting thick wings against its body. Its feathery head bobbed and swiveled as it surveyed the area.
The yard was quiet. The eternal hype of rap lyrics, the shouts and whistles of football philosophy, the political arguments and subtle threats of inmate reasoning were all scooped up and tossed away. It was as if a magical wind had swept the yard of its life and carried it off to the dark sky, where it remained suspended, its essence lingering in bulky suspense.
I felt euphoric. My heartbeat thumped in my ears as adrenaline spurted into my bloodstream. Then suddenly the heavy bird plummeted down. Inches from the ground, its wings unfolded and caught a breeze that lifted it into a sensuous arc of freedom. Inmates parted for the bird’s flight up the main walkway and then turned to watch it gracefully settle on the shingled peak of an officer’s watch booth.
We gathered around the little booth and watched the owl twitch its wings. Shuffling its feet on the snow-dusted peak like a cat padding about a pillow, it found its perch. It curved its muscular neck and, with its beak, scratched the tuft of feathers on its chest. Then, with its dark round eyes, it looked at us and blinked.
Two officers inside the booth gazed at the hundred or more inmates encompassing their little haven.
“They look nervous,” I said.
Dixon elbowed an inmate at his side and they grinned in unison at the two officers. Not long after, the announcement exploded from the rusty speakers.
“THE YARD IS CLOSED… RETURN TO THE BLOCKS.”
The snow continued to layer our shoulders and hats as we remained steadfast. One of the officers spoke into a phone; the other twitched like a trapped mouse, eyes bulging and rolling from one group of inmates to the next. The officer hung up the phone and nodded to his partner.
If we refused to enter the blocks what would they do? What law were we breaking by watching a snow owl? Would they rush at us with batons and shields and beat down every last one of us? Would an officer emerge from the dark cove of the gun tower and fire hot bullets into our flesh?
Then I realized something very peculiar about this formation of inmates, this aggregation of whites, blacks, and Hispanics. We were a unit of power. There was no racial discrimination to inhibit our combined strength, no political force to determine what would go down. We were the elite of this cramped atmosphere, able to strike back if struck upon.
Inmates gazed with unblinking eyes at the fixed monument on the booth’s shingled peak. I wondered if they, too, were aware of our power. Would this power emerge as a riot where a few would take charge and eventually lose, or would everyone participate and stand proud against the threat of the system?
“THE YARD IS CLOSED,” the speaker crackled, “RETURN TO THE BLOCKS.”
And they did. Inmates smiled at the great bird, shook their heads, then turned away and headed for the blocks. The powerful elite dwindled before my eyes. The suspense split and the elements we knew so well — prejudice, ignorance, self concern — sifted back down from the void like snowflakes onto our shoulders.
Dixon nudged my arm. “C’mon, Danny.” He wiped the snow off his shoulders and gazed at the trapped officers. “We got ours.”
I followed him up the slushy steps of our block and turned to look one last time. The two officers had emerged from the small booth and were now herding the last of the inmates toward the blocks. The booth stood detached from everything else.
On its peak snowflakes settled on the white owl that had provided me with an existential moment that would last forever. Dixon’s last statement was now clear. I flexed my biceps and felt the swell of blood in the tight muscles: energy reborn.
An officer waved for me to enter the block. I realized he was one of those trapped from before. I smiled and nodded, then followed the last of the inmates into the reality of confinement.
1993, Auburn Correctional Facility Auburn, New York