The Pistoleer (43 page)

The wheelwright was in on the plot. He was a Swede named Johansen and he’d admired Wes since long before meeting him. He took Wes at his word that five hundred dollars would be coming to him once we’d made our escape. “All you got to do or say or know,” Wes told him, “is nothing.”

We were all of us strong as oxen and the work went fairly fast. It was fall and the weather had turned cool, so the digging was easier than it would have been in summer. Every night I went to sleep with the smell of dirt in every one of my pores. It smelled like freedom. And our reckoning turned out to be perfect. In three weeks we reached a point directly under the armory. Then we dug up to its pine floor and by God we were there.

On the evening of the break I could feel my heart punching in my throat while we watched the armory from the wheelwright shop, waiting for the guards and saddle bosses to put up their guns and go eat. Wes had wanted to be the one to do the cutting through the armory floor and the first to arm hisself, but so did I and a couple of the others, so we drew straws to decide it. Weeks got the shorty and gave us a shit-eating grin.

As soon as the guards and bosses put up their guns, Weeks dropped into the tunnel and started crawling for the armory. I was right behind him, then Wes, then the others. When the tunnel turned upright again, Weeks stood up and slipped a sawblade between a couple of the floor planks over his head and started cutting. The chinks in the pine boards let just enough light into the well of the tunnel for me to make out the dark shapes of Weeks’s boots right in front of me. I could smell the sawdust drifting down and feel it on my hands.

“What’s taking that sawyer so damn long?” Wes said behind me. “Hold your horses, boy,” I said. “I reckon you’ll be free soon enough.” I heard him chuckle, and I had a powerful urge to laugh out loud. “You about there?” I whispered up to Weeks. “Just about,” he said.

He stopped sawing and gave a grunt, and I heard wood cracking and then break free. “Got it!” he said. One of his feet raised up to get a foothold on the side of the tunnel. I heard him grunt again and his other foot disappeared as he pulled hisself up.

I squirmed forward into the well on my belly and sat up. But before I could get my feet under me and stand up, there was a hell of a blast up above and Weeks came tumbling down on top of me. I knew he was dead by the weight of him. I felt his strong-smelling blood running hot and thick over my face. I kept wondering how he could be hollering so loud if he was dead, and then finally figured out that it was me doing the hollering.

O
f the ten cons we’d brought into the plan, seven had ratted it away to the guards. One got hisself a full pardon, two were made trusties in another building, and the others got reassigned to farms outside the walls.

When they found out what we were up to, the guard captain—a hardass named Brockman—and some of his men had stashed extra shotguns in the shed behind the armory. On the day of the break, they’d gone through their usual routine of putting up their guns, then they went around to the shed and got the shotguns and sneaked back in the armory through the side door and waited real quiet for us to come up through the floor. When Weeks poked his head up, Brockman blew it off with both barrels.

They give me and Wes both fifteen days in the hole on bread and water, him in one building, me in another. I heard they give him a whipping too that damn near killed him. I never did see him again. When they took me out, they put me to work in the tannery, the most miserable, most stinking work there ever was. And I had to do it with a ball and chain they clamped on my leg, which they said I’d keep until I’d proved I could be trusted without it. It didn’t come off for another eight years. To this day I walk kinda funny because of having it on for all that time.

T
he hole was a lightless cell about five feet high and four feet square. Its door was solid steel except for a small hinged slot at the bottom for pushing through the prisoner’s ration of bread and water once a day. The usual stay was three to seven days, depending, but if an inmate had been particularly troublesome—and Hardin surely was during his first six or seven years behind the walls—he could get up to fifteen days. What’s more, we were under full authority to add to a con’s discomfort in a variety of ways during his stay in the hole. His bread would certainly be moldy, and on occasion might even be soaked with “yellow gravy” dispensed from a guard’s bladder. His drinking water would likely be dipped from the privy.

But nothing we did to their food and water was as punishing to most inmates in the hole as the cramped darkness itself. Some men adjusted to it, but many could not. Isolation in total and prolonged darkness will unleash the demons in a man’s mind like nothing else can. Prisoners of weak will would start to scream within hours of the door closing on them. Others lasted a day or two before they began to howl. And once a man started screaming in the hole, he’d still be screaming when we came to take him out, even if his vocal cords had quit on him. They’d come out with eyes like loco horses and blood in their mouths and wouldn’t be able to talk for days. The whole time they were in there, they were obliged to relieve themselves on the floor and wallow in their own waste. They’d come out smelling worse than you could believe possible of a human being. They’d be purblind in the sudden light. After fifteen days in the hole, some never recovered their proper vision. Some couldn’t stand up straight or walk steadily for days afterward. A prisoner once described the hole as being as dark and foul as the devil’s asshole. It was a crude but apt description.

Hardin always got through his stays in the hole a whole lot better than most. When we opened the door at the end of his first time in there, he was on his back and had his legs straight up against the wall—a position the smart ones figured out as a way to keep their knees and back muscles from knotting up on them and losing their stretch. He seemed indifferent to the cockroaches crawling over his filthy nakedness. He squinted hard against the light and said, “
Already?
” He was a genuine hard case, all right, and I was certain he would never leave Huntsville alive.

A
fter his first escape attempt, we riveted a ball-and-chain to his ankle—a punishment usually reserved for the worst of the repeat offenders—and put him in a cell with a lifer named John Williams, a big mule-faced con who was the row turnkey. He was also the best snitch we had on the row. He could convince the hardest cons of his loyalty to them. And because they believed he had the trust of the authorities—his position as turnkey was proof of that—they considered him a valuable confidant. We would have been at a grave disadvantage against the cons if it weren’t for snitches like Williams—but most of us saw them the same way the cons did: as worthless, dishonorable trash who would betray anybody for cheap gain. It is satisfying to know that a snitch’s luck will sooner or later run out. Williams’s ran out two years later when somebody overpowered him in his cell, sliced his tongue off at the root, and held his head back until he drowned in his own blood. Rumor had it that a row guard had tipped the cons about Williams. Perhaps so.

It took Williams more than a month to gain Hardin’s trust, but eventually he did. He informed us that Hardin had somehow managed to cut through the rivets that held the ball-and-chain shackles around his ankle and had replaced them with a clever tap-and-bolt assembly. “He can take that ball off as quick as slipping off a sock,” Williams said. He also said Hardin was planning another escape attempt. The worst punishment we could give him for cutting off his ball-and-chain was a trip to the hole, but if we caught him trying to escape again, we could whip him. So we let him think he had us fooled about the ball-and-chain, and we bided our time.

A few weeks later Williams knew most of the details of the plan. He was in on it himself. Hardin had formed wax impressions of all the padlock keys on Williams’s ring—which Williams had to turn over to the guard sergeant every evening after locking down the row. It was Hardin’s intention to fashion keys from pieces of tin to fit the locks on every cell on the row. Some night after lockdown, he would release the other cons on the row; they would overpower and disarm the night guards, and then shoot their way out or die trying.

A few days later Williams said Hardin had finished his keys. He’d had Williams test them on the locks and they all worked perfectly. “That boy’s a right wonder with his hands,” Williams said. “I believe he could make him a pocket watch from a tin can if he wanted.” The break was set for Christmas Eve.

Just after Williams locked down the row that evening, I posted guard details with shotguns at both ends of the row, and then Ballinger and Meese and I rushed into Hardin’s cell. He’d just taken off his ball-and-chain and was retrieving his keys from under a floor stone. He fought like a wildcat, breaking Meese’s nose and nearly biting off one of Ballinger’s fingers. I kept clubbing at him with my hickory stick, but it was hard to get a clear swing at him in all the rolling and tumbling. I finally landed some hard ones square on his head and took enough fight out of him for Ballinger and Meese to get him pinned and cuff his hands behind him. The rest of the row had been roused by the sounds of the fight and was roaring like a zoo at feeding time.

T
he lanterns in the drafty whipping room threw trembling shadows on the stained stones. It was so cold our breath showed in pale puffs. Wales was waiting for us, his sleeves rolled up on his muscular arms and the whip coiled in his fist. Ballinger and Meese each held Hardin by an arm and Lawrence had him in a choke hold from behind. It was all he could do to breathe. The warden had ordered us to give him a full whipping, then throw what was left of him in the hole for a week.

We stripped him naked and tied the end of one rope around his wrists and the end of another around his ankles, then stretched him facedown on the stone floor, Ballinger tugging on one rope and Lawrence on the other. He wriggled like a fish on a line and cursed us in a fury. Wales stepped up and uncoiled the whip with an easy twitch of his wrist. “You already got you some good scars, boy,” he said, “but you ain’t seemed to learn much by way of getting them.”

The whip consisted of four leather harness straps, each about three feet long and two inches wide, attached to a foot-long hickory handle. Wales was a master with it and made every lick crack like a pistol shot. He’d snap his wrist one way to cut into the flesh, and another to pull the wounds open wider. The limit on lashes was thirty-nine, which was enough to kill a man. I knew because I’d seen it happen. But if a man couldn’t take it, that was his bad fortune. He should not have done whatever he did to bring the whipping on himself. The convicts had a saying: “Don’t make a slip if you can’t take the whip.” It was an admonition worth heeding.

With the first twenty-five licks, Wales opened him up from shoulder blades to tailbone. His ribs showed through in several places, and we’d all been spotted with his blood. I told Wales he would kill him if he persisted in hitting him in the same places. He glared at me and said he didn’t need anybody to tell him how to do his job. His face was dripping sweat and his shirt was soaked through. He was in a temper because he’d been unable to make Hardin cry out until the seventeenth lick. No con had ever before lasted past the twelfth stripe before screaming, and none had ever taken all thirty-nine without losing consciousness. Only Meese had thought Hardin would go past twelve without yipping, and he won big in the betting among the guards. Nobody had been foolish enough to bet he’d be conscious at the end.

After one more to his ribs to remind me who the whipping boss was, Wales gave him the rest across the buttocks and the backs of his legs. When it was over, Hardin had fainted and looked like he’d been attacked by wolves. We took the ropes off him and poured water over his head, then pulled him to his feet and half dragged and half carried him down the hall to the hole. He left a smeared trail of blood behind him. On our way back to the block, Lawrence said, “He don’t look all that good. No salve on them bad wounds, nothing to eat the next seven days hardly, nothing to
drink?
I don’t reckon he’ll make it.” Ballinger said he didn’t think so, either, and they both looked at Meese, who smiled and said, “Five dollars says he does.”

Meese won again, though not by much. When we took Hardin out of solitary he couldn’t walk on his own. His back was a massive ugly wound, oozing pus and blood and festering with maggots. He was on fire with fever and half out of his head. The warden thought he was exaggerating his pain and refused to admit him to the prison hospital, but he did permit the doctor to treat him. It was a month before he was up on his feet again—with a fresh new set of scars to carry to the grave.

F
or years he wouldn’t quit trying. He took more beatings than any con I can recall. And then one day we got a new deputy warden, a former Ranger named Ben McCulloch. It so happened he and Hardin knew each other from some ten years or so before when they drove cattle together. He told Hardin he was sorry to see how poorly fortune had treated him. Hardin laughed and said it hadn’t treated him as poorly as it had McCulloch. “Ain’t much lower a man can get than a damn prison hack,” he said. “You must of displeased the Lord a good bit more’n I have.” Some guards took offense at such talk about our profession, but not McCulloch. He laughed along with Hardin and said, “Maybe so, Wes, maybe so.”