Prisoner in the Kitchen Read online

  “I think this place is going to hell,” he complained. “What do you think?”

  The convict didn’t want any part of this discussion. “I don’t think anything,” he demurred. He started stacking cases of canned vegetables on the ground. Aldrich placed them on a hand truck to cart inside. Earl simply tossed a fifty-pound sack of flour over his shoulder and took off for the bakery. I checked the items off my list. At my side, Reed weighed meat on an industrial scale, calling out the numbers: “A hundred and ten pounds of pork roast,” he said. I checked it off. “Thirty pounds of bacon.” Earl and Aldrich returned for more.

  The process went too slowly for the guard. “C’mon!” he shouted at the convicts. “Get this shit on the ground!” He jumped off the truck and gestured to the checklist he’d given me. “Sign that fucking thing so I can get out of here!” he ordered.

  “I can’t sign it till I’ve marked everything off,” I replied.

  The guard had never dealt with such incompetence. He pulled the toothpick from his mouth once more. “That’s the way you’re going to play it?” he challenged.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Unless you know something I don’t know, that’s the way it’s done.”

  He sneered and leaned back against the side of the truck. I’d stood my ground and figured he’d shut the hell up.

  I kept checking items off my list: cases of vegetables, more sacks of flour and sugar, bags of onions. The crew continued to carry everything into the kitchen.

  The guard again addressed the convict who’d arrived with him.

  “How long do you think this guy’s going to last?” he sneered.

  “You never can tell,” the convict replied, deliberately noncommittal.

  “Oh, I can tell,” the guard said. “I don’t think he’ll be here very long.”

  He was a bully, and he was working way too hard. “A week, maybe,” he added. “Not much more.”

  I didn’t react.

  “What day’s today?” he asked. “Friday? Anybody want to put money on when this guy walks out of here?”

  The convicts might well have been thinking the same thing—that I’d leave soon, quit and run across the yard crying.

  “If you’ve got a pool going,” I joked, “I’ll take Wednesday at noon.”

  If the guard had had any sense of humor, he would have laughed. But he didn’t. His eyes narrowed, and he bit down hard on his toothpick.

  But every one of the convicts laughed, including the man who’d arrived on the truck. Earl and Aldrich, carrying supplies, continued to chuckle as they headed back to the kitchen. Reed’s laugh, loud and hearty, seemed to annoy the guard the most.

  “What the fuck are you laughing at?” he demanded.

  “I guess I must have thought something was funny,” Reed answered in a slow, dry voice.

  “You want a write-up?” the guard asked. It was a stupid threat, and it didn’t bother Reed at all.

  “I’m not sure laughing’s against the rules, but you do what you have to.”

  The guard did nothing. He grew silent, giving me his version of the evil eye as the rest of the truck was unloaded. When I was done, I signed the sheet, took my copy, and held out the clipboard. He grabbed it and shouted up to the guard on Tower 2.

  “C’mon, let me out of here!”

  Both he and the convict he’d arrived with got back in the truck and disappeared through the sally port.

  Reed tilted the scale back on its wheels. “I guess nobody told him he’s supposed to be on your side,” he said in his slow drawl. It was the first in a long line of understated asides, sliding out of his mouth at the pace of molasses, that Reed would make to me.

  I laughed, following him into the kitchen.

  The guard didn’t think I was going to make it, and I didn’t know if I was going to, either. Up to this point, I’d just wanted to last two weeks—two weeks’ pay would let me walk away from Deer Lodge with the same amount of money I’d arrived with.

  Now I had a different goal. The guard had tried to humiliate me in front of my crew, but he’d failed. With a small joke I’d let everyone know that I wasn’t intimidated. With their laughter the crew had let me know that—ironically—they were on my side.

  I wouldn’t give that guard the satisfaction of walking out. If he bet against me, I would make sure he lost his money.

  8

  CHARLIE

  I first met Charlie Galvin at four thirty in the morning. I was drinking coffee in a booth at the 4B’s, half an hour before I needed to be at work.

  Charlie didn’t walk into the 4B’s like an ordinary person. He arrived, pushing the door open wide and marching in. I didn’t have to wonder who he was; his white pants and shirt gave him away. I knew of another man in food service at Rothe Hall, the minimum-security prison. This had to be him.

  Charlie was in his midfifties, a five-foot-seven Irishman with broad shoulders, well-muscled arms, and the classic barrel chest. He had a broad face, strong-jawed, blue-eyed, and handsome. He kept his wavy iron-gray hair combed straight back.

  Charlie entered as one of the prison guards was leaving. The guard had been sitting at the counter for a while, but I didn’t know him. He stopped as he passed Charlie and, looking down, murmured something I couldn’t hear. Charlie cocked his head. When the guard finished, Charlie pointed a finger at the guard’s chest.

  “You just keep out of my goddamn kitchen and we’ll get along fine!” he growled.

  If the guard had a response, Charlie didn’t hear it. He turned and walked away. The guard, with nothing but air to talk to, left the 4B’s.

  Charlie must have noticed I wore whites, too, because he ambled over to me.

  “You must be Bill,” he said, sticking out his hand. “I’m Charlie Galvin.” He sat down in my booth.

  Like a lot of people, when I meet someone for the first time I can feel uncomfortable and not know what to say. That wasn’t a problem with Charlie—he was a talker. He pointed his thumb over his shoulder to where he’d encountered the guard.

  “That’s the kind of guard you don’t want in your kitchen,” Charlie explained. “They’re nothing but trouble. They walk in and start looking around for something to raise hell about. You don’t want that. When they come in, you tell them to get the hell out of your kitchen! If you don’t, they’ll be in there the whole damned day, ordering people around. Next thing you know your whole damned crew’s in lockup.” Charlie took a sip of coffee. “Now, that no-good son of a bitch you just saw came into my kitchen yesterday, decided he was going to tell my cook to do something. It doesn’t matter what it was, it was my cook he was talking to. I won’t have that. I tossed him out.”

  Charlie went on without a pause, one of the greatest talkers I’ve ever known. He continued until Bill Perdue came in a few minutes later.

  “I see you two have met,” said Bill.

  “We sure have,” said Charlie. “We’ve been sitting here having a nice little talk. I was just telling Bonham here about that son of a bitch coming into my kitchen yesterday, telling my cook what to do. I told him he had to throw out men like that.”

  “No, no,” Bill disagreed, lighting his pipe, “you can’t tell him that, Charlie.”

  “I sure as hell can.”

  “No, you can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s part of their job to check out the kitchen.”

  “I don’t give a damn what their job is.”

  They went back and forth like that, without a trace of anger, revealing the years of friendship behind their bickering.

  The thing I liked most about Charlie was the way he swore. Bastards appeared everywhere, dropping in and out of Charlie’s stories with regularity, going to hell, going straight to hell, or going to hell in a handbasket. He repeated the same questions: What the hell, why the hell, who the hell, and where the hell. Jesus was called upon, often, sometimes arriving on a crutch with a middle initial, and God kept busy damning everything and everybody. C
harlie had no use for bullshitters, of course, because they were full of bullshit. Newspapers were full of bullshit, too, as were some guards and all politicians, even President Nixon, although he got a raw deal from a bunch of bastards who were full of bullshit.

  To Charlie, all males were sons of bitches, but the term was never allowed to stand by itself; an adjective had to prop it up. Depending on Charlie’s assessment of your intelligence, you might be a “dumb son of a bitch” or a “smart son of a bitch.” Several convicts at the prison fell into the category of “useless sons of bitches,” and at least one guard was a “sorry son of a bitch.” If Charlie thought of you kindly, you earned the title of a “good son of a bitch,” or, even better, “one good son of a bitch,” but God help the poor bastard who was “nine kinds of a son of a bitch.”

  Much as I liked Charlie, I envied him, too. We had the same job title, but he worked with convicts in minimum security at Rothe Hall, and I liked the whole idea of minimum security. I envisioned happy, nearly rehabilitated convicts; quiet and friendly men who went about their work looking toward a bright, paroled future. Although I hadn’t yet visited Rothe Hall, I knew it sat on the edge of the forest, surrounded by nothing more than a cyclone fence. That’s where Charlie spent his days, surrounded by trees and joyous convicts.

  It seemed clear to me that gruff Charlie should have had my job. He belonged in maximum security, running the kitchen, and I couldn’t figure out why Bill hadn’t assigned him there.

  I didn’t have to wonder long.

  Not long after our first meeting, I ran into Charlie again at the 4B’s. I don’t remember what we were talking about, but at one point I noticed that his hand trembled.

  “I think you’re drinking a little too much coffee, Charlie,” I said.

  Charlie looked down at his hand. He held it out flat. There was a decided tremor. The same with his other hand.

  “That doesn’t have a damn thing to do with coffee,” Charlie replied.

  He picked up his cup and held it in both hands; the coffee rippled on the surface.

  “If it’s not coffee, what is it?” I asked.

  Charlie held the cup tightly and took a few seconds before he answered. Then: “I had a little breakdown a while back,” he admitted.

  He took another sip of coffee and let the words lie there. A breakdown. He didn’t seem embarrassed about it, although if I’d been smart, I would have noticed he didn’t expand on the subject, either.

  “A breakdown?” I asked.

  Charlie nodded and looked out the window. “Yup, I had a little breakdown. I can’t work inside anymore.”

  I heard irritation in Charlie’s voice that time, so I let it go.

  Bill didn’t join us that morning; he must have had a day off. A week later, when I had coffee with Bill, I asked him about Charlie’s hands.

  “Well,” Bill said, “Charlie had a breakdown a while back.”

  I knew that. But what had happened?

  “He had a breakdown,” Bill replied, sounding annoyed. “He can’t work inside anymore.”

  That was it. I wouldn’t get anything else out of Bill.

  In a way, the mystery was solved: I now knew why Charlie worked in the woods with the soon-to-be ex-convicts at the prison ranch. But that left me with a new mystery; now I knew of two men—the ex-marine who’d walked out on my first day, and Charlie, who’d had a breakdown—who couldn’t take the pressure of working in the maximum-security kitchen.

  Given the way our last conversation had ended, I worried that I might have crossed a line with Charlie, even though he’d brought up the word “breakdown” himself. The next time I slid into the seat across from Charlie, I wasn’t sure how it was going to go.

  Relations did feel stiff for a few minutes, but if Charlie had any real hesitation, it didn’t last long. Margie brought coffee and the ritual began. I listened to Charlie, who always had a lot on his mind. He had a few recently discovered bastards to discuss, and he leaned back in the booth.

  Things went back to normal, and I let sleeping dogs lie, never again asking about the breakdown, even on the mornings when Charlie gripped his cup hard and the coffee shimmered on the surface.

  9

  SMOKY BOY

  When I first met Smoky Boy, I thought he might have been mentally impaired. He came into the kitchen one day at midmorning, moving slowly, his face a blank. As he passed, Aldrich and Walker stopped what they were doing and murmured, “Good morning.” Smoky Boy’s head turned toward the sound, as if he’d heard something in the distance. He gazed at them—through them, really—as though he didn’t recognize them. He passed Stutzke, peeling potatoes; Stutzke, too, wished Smoky a good morning. Once more, Smoky Boy’s head turned toward the sound, but he showed no recognition. When he reached the center of the kitchen, he stopped in front of the storeroom.

  Smoky Boy didn’t move. His eyes remained blank, and his arms hung at his sides. He stood there, waiting for something he couldn’t recall, a man with nothing left inside of him.

  This is what a convict looks like when he comes out of the hole.

  The old-time convicts and guards, the ones who’d been around in the forties and fifties, would contend that Montana State Prison didn’t even have a hole anymore. Back then, the hole was a small cell into which they tossed convicts stark naked. They handcuffed them to the bars and sprayed them down with a fire hose. They left offenders beaten and in the dark, often for months, with nothing but bread and water. In summer, the temperature could reach 110 degrees; in winter it could fall to near freezing.

  Unfortunately, a convict had died in the old hole in 1966, which had upset the officials in Helena. They decided to put a new, upgraded hole in the prison hospital building.

  They built four concrete cells, double-doored and without windows. The cells admitted no light and no sound. There was a bucket for human waste. Although this sounds bad, these cells had a mattress on the floor. The old hole didn’t. The temperature in the new hole never fell anywhere near freezing, and rarely cracked 100 degrees. Beatings weren’t allowed, and no one was left in there for months. The convicts were still naked, but they no longer lived on just bread and water; every three days they received a full meal.

  You couldn’t have convinced any of the old-timers that the new hole was anything but a nice place for coddled young inmates to vacation, but I was troubled by the very existence of the hole; it seemed completely inhuman. I had to wonder, though—how do you punish a man who’s already in prison? At first I thought they could simply be kept isolated in an ordinary cell for a long time, clothed and fed and counseled but without companionship or yard time, a condition called “segregation” in Montana. But that doesn’t work on men filled with rage; those convicts often ripped toilets from the walls or set fire to their mattresses, and sometimes hung themselves with a torn blanket or clothing.

  The convicts themselves bragged about having been in the hole; it almost served as a badge of honor to have come through it without being destroyed. Of course, a part of them had been destroyed, just as a part of the guards, who had become inured to the idea of the hole, had been destroyed. None of them, though, became aware of the damage.

  As I stood there, a few feet from this empty man, Bill Perdue walked up to Smoky Boy. “I guess you and I should have a little talk,” he said.

  Smoky Boy looked at Bill, trying to focus, and Bill walked back into the office. Smoky Boy followed. Although we couldn’t hear anything through the closed door, the office had a large window, so we watched Bill sit down and talk to Smoky Boy, who stood over him.

  I looked around for someone to ask about Smoky Boy. Asking a convict about another convict seemed like a bad idea, so I turned to the officers’ mess. I saw Max Russeck coming through on one of his twice-daily missions; he had three or four empty thermoses from the tower guards and was headed for the huge coffee maker in the dining hall. I followed him.

  “Say, Max,” I said, “who’s that guy in the office talking to
Perdue?”

  The gun cage stood between us and the office, so Max stepped back a few feet to take a look. He chuckled.

  “Well, well. Look who’s out of the hole.” He turned to me. “That’s Smoky Boy. He’s been in the hole for a while now.” He took another look. “Looks like he’s half dead.”

  Max returned to the coffee maker, filling a thermos. I had so many questions, starting with: What was wrong with Smoky Boy?

  “Oh, there’s nothing wrong with him. He’s just been in the hole, that’s all. Takes ’em a while to snap back.”

  “Why was he in the hole?”

  Max chuckled again.

  “Oh, he got into some pruno a while back. Got drunk and raised some hell.”

  What kind of hell had Smoky Boy raised?

  “You ought to ask Perdue, he’s the one put him there,” Max said.

  He couldn’t resist, though. It was a good story, he wanted to tell it himself.

  “Well, three, four weeks back, see, Smoky got good and drunk. He’s a mean drunk anyway, but now he’s drunk and he’s madder than hell at Smalley. You know Smalley?”

  “Yes,” I said. Smalley was the one-eyed convict who cleaned the dining hall after short line and main line. Max nodded and went on.

  “Smalley, see, he’d been telling everyone that Smoky Boy was a snitch! Smoky didn’t like that, and now that he’s drunk he decides to do something about it. So he grabs a knife and comes out here to the chow hall, waving it in the air and looking for Smalley. Now, Smalley’s out here minding his own business, mopping the floors, and he doesn’t know what the hell’s going on. So Smoky says, ‘I’m gonna kill you, you lying cocksucker!’ ”

  Another chuckle from Max.

  So far, I hadn’t heard anything that sounded remotely funny. A drunken convict with a knife threatening to kill another convict seemed pretty serious to me. I hadn’t yet developed the dark sense of humor you need in a prison.

  “Well, Smalley takes off like a bat out of hell, running down the aisles every which way, trying to keep away from Smoky Boy. Now, Smoky may be drunk, but he’s running pretty good! And Smalley’s shouting, ‘Help! Help!’ ”