Death Row Breakout (12 page)

Yes, he could probably get it inside the walls, but getting it into the Adjustment Center, that was something else entirely. It was as secure as Death Row. Indeed, the third floor was Death Row. Everything that came in was searched by hand and with a metal detector. No doubt there was some way to smuggle it into the building, but he had never thought about it. But then – so what? He could cause confusion and take out a couple of guards, maybe, but he wouldn’t end up anywhere except back in his cell or in the morgue. He knew that. Still… what were his choices? Better to die with a gun in your hand, than being strapped into the gas chamber and have a lot of white faces staring at you as you died. If he was to go, it would be as the black leader he was to his people.

*

On many nights the fog came from the sea and rolled across the Bay. The outside prison lights grew dim as the fog thickened around them. Soon the only sounds were the water slapping against the pilings and hulls, and the foghorn lament. San Quentin’s reservation covered a couple of thousand acres. The security area, inside the walls, was a fraction of the total. The rest was a housing development for personnel and big Victorian houses for the Wardens and Captain. They sat on a hillside and looked down inside the walls. There was a farm, and even some wetlands. All of it was hidden by heavy fog. Inside the walls there was special “fog-line” security. Certain gates were locked, others were out of bounds, and extra guards were posted in spots made blind by the fog.

The extra security was in the prison interior, not the outside reservation. A rental car with changed license plates turned off the little-used public road onto the prison property, “No Trespassing, California Dept. of Corrections” read the bullet-pocked sign. The car parked off to the side where, in the fog, it would not be noticed by the occasional correctional officer coming home. A figure got out carrying a small Macy’s bag. The figure hurried along the narrow, rutted roadway. Headlights appeared like a pair of bouncing yellow eyes. The figure ducked to the side and lay prone until the vehicle passed by.

The terrain here was a combination of mud flat and wetland. The figure followed the road bed around a jutting headland and vaguely perceived a mercury vapor street light over the entrance. Its reach was very small in the fog. The figure circled outside of the glow and stayed in the gray of the fog and the black of night as he covered the last quarter mile and put the package where it was supposed to go.

In the morning, the prison trucks went out of the rear sally port-gate to perform their duties. One was the trash truck; it picked up barrels of trash, dumped the contents into the crusher and, eventually, made it to a trash dump in Richmond, then returned to San Quentin. The laundry truck came out, made it to the officers’ reservation, delivering clean laundry and picking up dirty. It even stopped at the Warden and Associate Warden’s houses to get dirty underwear and bedding. Other trucks took out work crews cleaning up drainage ditches clogged with weeds, or shoveled hot asphalt into potholes.

A convict on one of these trucks picked up the package and carried it back through the sally port-gate and into the walls of San Quentin State Prison. A gun inside the walls was the rarest contraband of all. It was a hundred times more likely that convicts would smuggle in heroin than a gun. The last pistol smuggled in was turned in as a ploy to get parole. It worked. This pistol was no ploy. It was the key to a breakout plan of such desperate bravado that it could not conceivably work.

In his cell on the bottom floor of the Adjustment Center, Eddie was doing a hundred fingertip push-ups, twenty at a set. It was morning and nearly everyone else was asleep. They talked all night and slept until the afternoon. Nobody cared.

He was unable to see out into the plaza and Garden Beautiful because of the eight-foot redwood fence outside the building, but the windows were open and he could hear convicts crossing the walkways of the formal garden toward the pedestrian sally port. They worked outside the walls in the Employee’s Snack Bar, Gas Station, Barber Shop, or as House Boy for the very top officials.

He stopped his push-ups and stood listening at the cell bars. Every morning a few black convicts called out, “Stay strong, Eddie!” or “Power to the People, Eddie.” These, however, were not the words he wanted to hear. The tension of anticipation was a great vice crushing his chest. Where the fuck
was
he…?

He heard the key turn in the grille gate at the front. It was done softly – but a pig was on the tier.

“Hey, Eddie,” yelled the voice he waited for. “Where ya be, comrade?”

He stayed silent. He hoped the man outside would do the same. No such luck. “Hey, Eddie, are you there?”

Fuck it
. “Yeah, me and this pig.”

“I’m gone,” he whispered, “but Killer Shorty say it be okay. He has the package and he’s ready to deliver when you want it.”

“Be careful. Be silent.”

“Quiet as the grave.”

Simultaneously, he heard the jangling keys on a chain and the guard came into view. It was Sylvester, Esque’s only black officer.

“Eddie, chill on that yelling or I’ll have to shut the tier down.”

He nodded. “Yeah, okay. I’m just keepin’ up morale.”

“You start trial in a couple weeks, don’t you?”

“Uh huh… in white man’s court…”

“You never know what a jury will do. After all, the trial is in San Francisco… very liberal.”

“We both know that the verdict will be guilty. Say, how come a brother like you works in a prison?”

“I’ve got a family, and it’s a civil service job with benefits.”

“So you don’t mind helpin’ whitey keep his boot on the black man’s neck.”

“I don’t see it that way. Most of the brothers are in here for preying on black folks… including you.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“I looked in your file. Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t you rob a black man’s liquor store?”

“Yeah, I did. I was nineteen years old and I didn’t know any better. I wouldn’t do it now – and I damn sure wouldn’t sit and watch black men in a cage.”

“I’d rather watch than be watched… and my kids won’t ever be on welfare.”

“That’s good. I give that to you even if the Man has you brainwashed with his bullshit.”

“Thanks, Eddie, even if Chairman Mao has
you
brainwashed into that communist bullshit.”

Sylvester tapped his key on the cell bars as a goodbye and went about his routine patrol.

Nobody on the tier knew about the pistol. He’d withheld the information for more than one reason. He was certain that none of them would tell
the Man
, but it was possible that one or more might confide to someone he trusted absolutely, and that someone might confide to someone else, and someone might want a parole more than a good name among his comrades. He’d been stung more than once by trusting some piece of garbage that he thought was solid. He hoped there was no betrayal this time, and he was trying to make sure there wouldn’t be. Still, the fuse was already ignited and he would have to be very careful before things exploded. The plan was fantastic, but John Dillinger had escaped with a soap gun blackened with shoe polish.

He kneeled in the narrow space next to the bunk and extended his arms for another set of fingertip push-ups. This time he increased the tally to twenty-five. Oh, God, his forearms and fingers ached when he was through. He stood up and shook his arms to loosen them. Good. Should he answer mail or read a book? Every mail call brought a stack of letters. This morning he didn’t feel like it. A pistol meant for him was inside the walls. The initial exultation was now tinged with something like fear. No, it wasn’t fear.

From the front came the click-clack of the locking device being turned, followed by a key turning a cell lock. Bartlett, one of two white convicts on the tier, was coming out to shower and exercise for an hour, which consisted of walking up and down the tier, one man at a time. Men on this half of the bottom never went to the small yard. They were in super maximum custody. Those on the second floor, a mixed bag of convicts, went outside. The top floor did not. It was Condemned Row #2. Bartlett resided in the first cell, and the shower was next to that, so a guard standing outside the grille could look in at an angle, or through a small observation window in the wall. Bartlett was forty something, which made him an old timer in a world where the average age was twenty-three. Crime and prison were games for young men. He was awaiting trial for bribing a guard to bring him drugs.

Reading didn’t work. His mind refused to concentrate. Other thoughts pushed out the words, and the page might as well have been in Sanskrit. Maybe he could write a letter. He picked up the pile of letters he needed to answer. He received as much mail as everyone else put together, much of it religious, Christians wanting to save his soul by leading him to Christ. He discarded most of them after a paragraph or two. Some contained religious tracts, or a stamped envelope. Others sent him a few dollars. The prison censors confiscated any letter sympathetic to revolution, although a few got through proclaiming
power to the people
, the catchphrase of the moment. He knew there were sympathizers out there. Whenever they went to court in San Francisco, the streets nearby and the building corridors were flooded with erstwhile warriors, and the lawyers forwarded letters that arrived from around the world. The prison could open letters for contraband, but could not read nor interfere with anything written from a lawyer.

The news that reached Eddie deep in the bowels of San Quentin was a distortion of reality, so he really believed revolution was underway. The bombs exploding on university campuses, American cities burning in the hot summers, these were all he saw from his worm’s eye view, just enough to support his delusion that
Amerika
was being overthrown by the colored peoples inside and outside.

Paul Johnson, his sixteen-year-old brother, called “Boo” by both Eddie and Catherine, the oldest sibling, had been first in the visiting room. He was seated at the long table with the chin-high partition for almost an hour, looking at the entrance door whenever it started to open. The visiting room was half full, there was a buzz of conversation, and still no Eddie. It always took them a long time to deliver Eddie. He needed two guards for escorts, and they were not always available because of other duties, or so he had been told when he made enquiries.

Finally, he came through the door. Boo smiled. His big brother managed to swagger even in handcuffs. He sat down on the bench across from Boo. “What’s shakin’, Boo?”

“Nuttin’ but the trees,” Paul Johnson replied. “How you doin’?”

“Tryin’ to stay strong in the belly of the beast.” “If anybody can, you can. Your book is doing good?”

“Yeah… but they edited it and made it less revolutionary than I wanted it, y’know what I mean?”

“I can dig it. When I read it, I thought, Man, this is my brother, but it ain’t all of Eddie.”

“I’m starting another one… not letters, but what I really wanna say about overthrowing this fascist mess that runs things and keeps colored people down on the bottom. Whoever controls the means of production controls everything.

“I’m not a
bona fide
Marxist scholar. I’ve been reading what I can get for about five or six years – and I know a few things. I’m a follower of Chairman Mao. You know what he said…?”

Paul shook his head.

“He said to be scared of the dragon when the prison gates open.”

Paul nodded. “Oh yeah! I know where he’s comin’ from.”

“You get that book I recommended?”

“Which one? You tell me to read so many.”

“The one by Debray, about urban guerrilla war?”

“The book store ordered it for me.”

“Did Jimmy C call you?”

“The day after he got out. He’ll be in the courtroom for you.”

Eddie nodded with a smile on his face.

“That’s not the trial, is it?”

“Just for hearing motions.”

“How long you goin’ to let this show trial go on?”

“Next week. All the world’s media will be there.”

“I know,” Paul leaned closer and lowered his voice, simultaneously brushing his mouth so nobody could read his lips if they were trying. “I’m ready to make that move for you and whoever is with you. I got a fuckin’ arsenal of guns.”

“Where’d you get ’em?”

“Better you don’t know.”

“You didn’t tell my lawyer? I don’t want her around when things go down.”

“No. Hell no! Like I know about givin’ her some cover. She don’t need to know. We got to figure a way for her to stay home that day.”

“I’m tellin’ Willy to be ready. You don’t have a signal I can give him?”

“Man, when he checks me out in the audience, he’ll know to be ready, ‘cause the shit is comin’ down any minute.”

“You’re more than a kid brother,” Eddie said slowly, nodding his head for further affirmation. “You done become a
comrade
.”

“Come on with that, Big Brother.”

“We gonna change things a
little bit, a little, little bit
, and when we fall, we leave our sword for someone to pick up.”

When Paul stood up to leave, the correctional officer phoned the Yard Office and asked for two escorts. Paul went out and raising a clenched fist, “Power to the People,” he said, looking back – but he was a foot from the visiting room guard, at the exit door.

Eddie went the other way, into an alcove about three feet long; then there was a solid steel door with a permanently fogged observation window. He knocked, still in handcuffs, and the old guard working between the gates peered through the window and unlocked the door. He was along in between the gates, but at the front exit gate were two or three guards behind steel straps that served as bars. Along both side-walls were benches bolted to the walls. Often it was empty, or nearly so, which is how he found it. The old guard motioned with a forefinger toward the bench on the other side of the corridor. It was next to a small
pissoir
. It ended at the knees and the shoulders. It only had a urinal. This was an all-male prison.