Gang of One: One Man's Incredible Battle to Find His Missing (10 page)

‘Er, well,’ I began, feeling the hole beneath my feet getting deeper. ‘It’s a . . . a dagger,’ I said, rousing some authority to my voice.

‘A da-gguurrrr!!’ repeated the leader, with a passable imitation of a Scottish accent. ‘Now that’s what I’m talkin’ about,’ he mused. ‘A skin do is a da . . . gguurrr,’ he said again, sounding like he was licking the words as he spoke. ‘That is some serious shit,’ he concluded appreciatively. ‘Like they use to skin some motherfucka up quicker than he can use a motherfuckin’ gun! Yeah!’ All around me, faces were nodding and smiling in agreement and appreciation. Even Malone seemed to have joined in.

‘You a’ight Scotland, you a’ight,’ said the boss, looking at me closely in my Coco the Clown outfit. ‘Just don’t go running with those white boy motherfuckin’ ABs and you be quoted, man.’ With that, he started to pull out some blankets and sheets for me, rejecting some which looked too old or dirty.

The ‘ABs’ was the second reference I’d heard to the Aryan Brotherhood, the prevalent white supremacist gang that operated in many of the prisons in Texas, Louisiana and Alabama. Although they were mainly driven by the demands and rewards of organised crime, the Brotherhood still had strong racial overtones and many of the Southern Whites joined them for protection, particularly when they found themselves in the minority in places like Big Spring. I hoped I’d never have anything to do with them.

Malone moved me forward to the next counter window and I picked up a laundry bag, two thin blankets (which I thought was at least one too many in this heat), two washcloths, four small thin towels (clean), four Bic razors – I was glad I’d prepared for them – one tube of toothpaste, one small toothbrush and one bar of soap.

As an afterthought, the big guy looked at me for a minute and said, ‘Here Scotland. Here’s a pillow.’ He pushed it through the counter to me. ‘You need anything, my name’s Tank. You can check me out. You need something, you holler . . .’ Now he pushed a second pillow my way.

Barely listening to him, I looked down. Two months of sleeping without a pillow, two months of serious neck and backache, and now they’d given me two pillows. For a moment I considered handing them back, but the stupidity of that suddenly struck me. Pulling my thoughts back together, I picked up my stuff and said, ‘Sure – I’ll holler.’

I had no intention of ever hollering.

I signed a number of forms to say that I had received the various items and to acknowledge that they were the property of the Federal Government and that I would look after them and would endeavour to return them in the same condition in which I had received them. I was also reminded that to steal said items was a Federal offence, punishable by up to five years in prison.

I said my goodbyes, relieved, as the store-house gang all got back to the serious business of doin’ nuthin’. The sun was still blazing when we got outside, but thankfully the crowd had thinned down considerably. ‘Where is everyone?’ I asked Malone as he started to unlock the large wire gate leading into the main section of the Yard.

‘Workin’,’ he replied, as we walked through the guard house between the two sections, passing under a metal detector along the way. There were a couple of officers hanging around, but they seemed completely disinterested in me or Malone. This was, after all, a typical daily scene – just another prisoner checking in. It occurred to me how few officers there seemed to be anywhere.

‘A’ight Mildew,’ began Malone. ‘You’re housed in Sunset, Bunk 003U, Range 4. Go straight over there,’ he said, pointing to the furthest away of the two large buildings, ‘and report at the front office and they’ll figure it out from there.’ Bunk? Range? ‘That’s a funny number for a cell,’ I thought, but was focused more on the fact that Malone was leaving me. Leaving me to go out there on my own and walk through the Yard. I looked from him to the wide open space that led to my cell-block. It wasn’t particularly busy, but there were still at least fifty people milling around, and I was about to walk through them with my ‘kick me’ clothes on, together with a set of sheets, pillows and blankets, making it obvious to anyone who needed to know that some new flesh was walking through. I hesitated. It looked so daunting, so dusty, bleak, and exposed. No shelter from the sun and no shelter now from the other inmates. I suddenly realised I’d grown accustomed to Malone during this two-hour, frenzied induction. I wanted him to come with me.

‘Now before you go, Mildew, the one piece of advice I give to every inmate, but is especially true in your case because of that Enron stuff you did, is . . .’ he paused here as if for emphasis, ‘to do your OWN time,’ he announced with a self-satisfied flourish.

I looked at him blankly. ‘What the fuck does that mean?’ I thought, as I surveyed the emptiness of the Yard in front of me.

‘Go on, Mildew; they won’t bite,’ he said, grinning at my reluctance. The panic rose unchecked within me as I started out on the 250 or so metres across the Yard towards the entrance of Sunset.

I had only taken a few steps before the catcalls started and the questions flew in from everywhere.

‘Hey Scotland, how long d’you do in Pollock?’ (News travelled fast, I thought).

‘Escosais, Escosais, did you see Rosario when you were there? Manuel Rosario, everyone call him Manny? D’you know Manny?’

‘Scotland, look over here motherfucka!’ And so it went on. Some came right up to me, but I resisted the temptation to cuddle my blankets or my new luxury pillows higher on my chest, instead holding them down by my side and walking as calmly as I could across the Yard.

That resolve lasted about ten steps before I started to waver. Sergei had said that everyone was scared, but there was one dude sticking his face right into mine who just didn’t look all that afraid to me! Reluctantly, I found myself glancing repeatedly at him and couldn’t help but notice a series of spiders tattooed from his neck in a precise journey around his chin, up his cheek and across to his left eye. No, this guy wasn’t scared; he was fucking crazy.

‘Ahhhhhh!!!’ my mind screamed. ‘Run, fucking run!’ I managed not to, though.

‘
Que cabrone. Cómo estás?
’ Spiderman mumbled, looking me up and down, his breath stinking of eggs or fish or something horrible. ‘
Que cabrone?
’ he kept saying over and over again as he kept up with me, maybe fifty steps in, a good two hundred to go to my destination. He didn’t look like a Latino; he looked white. Small, thin, gaunt, bad teeth, unshaven and dangerous; the spider shit on his face definitely did not help the look.

I shrugged my shoulders a few times at some of the questions being hurled at me and kept walking. Halfway across the Yard, my attention was caught by a beautiful hand-carved bird house. It was brilliantly white; and stood out like a beacon against the dull brown buildings stretched out on either side of the Yard. There were birds flying in and out and busying themselves all around it. How incongruous, I thought, to see free birds living against the backdrop of barbed wire fencing and all these caged men. ‘What you looking at,
cabrone
?’ said the white nutcase, in English this time, again moving uncomfortably close to me.

‘That,’ I said, pausing briefly as I shifted the pillows and blankets to my other hand so I could point at the bird house. It appealed to my sense of irony that the birds would hang out here, in this place. Maybe they wanted to see humans caged, because we did it to them so often. This distraction seemed to work, as Spiderman had stopped in his tracks with me and was looking at the bird house like it had just miraculously appeared. Making the most of the opportunity, I strode on quickly and, as I had imagined I might do many times when I thought about this moment, I repeated some of the words from Psalm 23 over and over again in my head:

And comfort me it did as it carried me across the rest of that Yard into the promised land of Sunset. A few people in the Yard kept calling out to me and asking questions – mainly, to my mounting discomfort, questions about life in Pollock prison – but the shouts started to blend into each other and I didn’t hear them the same way any more. Thankfully, most of the onlookers quickly lost interest and got back to doing, well, seemingly nothing. As I got closer I noticed that I’d picked up an audience at some of the windows, each member of it assessing the new guy, each wondering whether or not I’d crack, survive or end up as someone’s bitch. They were probably already aware that my name was ‘Scotland’ or ‘Escosais’, as I was never known as anything else from that day forward.

6

SCOTLAND, SOUTH DAKOTA

S
TEPPING INTO SUNSET FELT LIKE STEPPING
into a sports arena minutes before kick-off. There were inmates everywhere, queuing for the phone, queuing to use what looked like a little microwave area, and cramming into a tiny room that housed a TV. Everyone seemed to be moving about frantically as if the day was about to end. It felt like there was some air-conditioning, but it was stifling hot and there seemed to be little oxygen in there as I stepped into the chaos. Ahead of me, and right across from the entrance to Sunset, was a small office with two officers sitting, seemingly oblivious to the bedlam outside.

I knocked on the door. They ignored me. I knocked again, and one of them looked over then ignored me again. I stood for a minute feeling like a dick in my baggy clothing. Then, impatient to get into the relative privacy of a cell, I knocked for a third time and then just opened the door and poked my head in.

‘I’m a new prisoner,’ I said, instantly regretting the use of the word ‘prisoner’.

‘And?’ said the guard who had glanced over at me earlier. He was mid twenties maybe, fit and trim with the sort of tremendous handlebar moustache rarely seen since the days of the Village People.

‘I was told to report to you,’ I offered.

‘And now you have,’ said Village People, and turned back to his conversation with the other officer, who still hadn’t even so much as turned around and looked at me. I hesitated.

‘Yes?’ Mr Handlebars snapped, sounding put out that I was still there.

‘I was wondering where I am supposed to go.’

‘What bunk number?’ he asked, sighing.

‘Bunk 003U, Range 4,’ I replied smartly, feeling like I might have just passed some prison initiation test. Terminating the discussion, Village People just pointed over my left shoulder and went back to his discussion with the faceless officer. Picking my way carefully through the inmates, I walked out of the office, passing the small TV room – one TV with about thirty-five seats I noted – then a small kitchen in which I counted three microwaves and a large sink. I was surprised I was allowed to walk through all the inmates unescorted, but tried to look at it positively – hopefully I would assimilate more quickly left to my own devices. It was intimidating walking through the other inmates, trying to look assured but feeling that each one looked more sinister than the last. Many of them were staring at me, or ostentatiously eyeing me from top to bottom, and a few asked me where I was from or when I’d got in, but I ignored them. I tried to concentrate on maintaining the stern expression I had practised early that same morning. I worked my way through a warren of narrow corridors, which twisted and turned with different rooms jutting out at each turn, trying to find my cell, but being unsure of the numbering system.

All last traces of hope or positive thought came crashing to the floor as I entered a smaller corridor with a large ‘4’ painted on it (for Range 4, I assumed), walked up six short steps and turned to view my new living quarters for the foreseeable future. I stood rigidly still, too shocked to move. No cosy cell for me – I had entered an enormous noisy room about 80 feet long and 40 feet wide, crammed with nothing but cast-iron yellow bunk beds, all screwed to the floors, with small lockers squeezed in between. As I started to stumble through it in a daze, stupefied at the thought of being constantly surrounded by so many people, I could see the room could hold roughly eighty men. To the side there were two small adjoining rooms which housed the bathrooms and showers. There were maybe three or four toilets in each, no more than six or seven showers and no privacy anywhere.

I was totally crestfallen. All my coping strategies, all my preparation, all my mental cajoling, had been built on the premise that I’d be kicking back in a cell at the end of each hellish day and able to block it out for a few hours. I only had ever figured on dealing with one inmate; one cell-mate, maybe two at the most. I’d always felt I could handle one or two inmates no matter how demented or dangerous they were, but this . . . This wasn’t punishment, it was an experiment: the
Big Brother
house with wall-to-wall psychos.

I realised I’d started wandering round and round in a bit of a trance, unable to properly concentrate on finding my bunk, and people were looking at me, the new fish. So I started to look again for my bunk, this time focusing more on that than on my surroundings. What looked like a native Indian guy was sitting on his lower bunk close to me, drawing something . . . Indiany – all feathers and buffalo and stuff. It looked great, even when viewed from upside down.

‘You the new Scotty guy I heard about?’ he asked, looking up to face me, smiling. He had the demeanour of someone who had been there a long time. ‘My name is Gabriel, but you can call me Chief. Everyone else does.’ He pushed a fist out to me. Shifting my blankets from my right to left hand, I bumped him right back. He looked like he was in his early thirties, a little overweight, with a weatherbeaten face. Something in his deportment and the awkward way he sat suggested an injury of some sort.

‘How you doin’, Chief?’ I responded, trying to seem relaxed. ‘Nice drawing.’

‘You like it?’ he viewed it himself critically. ‘It’s symbols from the Zuni, my tribe. I hear your tribe is from Scotland, right?’

‘Er yeah, I suppose,’ I responded, not really seeing Alex Salmond in the same light as Geronimo or Sitting Bull.