From the Chrysalis (20 page)

“Fuck you. What the hell are you going to do, you useless bag of shit? Just give me the fucking microphone and go check on our pigs.”

Chapter 14

The Do-Gooders

Guard Speaks Up.
 

The steel doors to Maitland Penitentiary slammed shut as a guard stopped to light a cigarette. He had just just finished his shift, after being forced to stand by as 600 prisoners tore up the main cell block in Canada’s largest penitentiary. Clearly upset, he reported that his friends were being held captive in the cell block, and there was nothing he could do about it.
*[
Maitland Spectator
, September 5, 1971, p.1.]

Maitland Penitentiary, September 5, 1971:

Braiding her waist-length hair over her shoulder, Liza ran through her residence lobby, straight into a waiting taxi. It was expensive, but she didn’t care. She had paced around her room as long as she could.

Mel wanted to review his high school chemistry notes. He’d tried half-heartedly to restrain her, but he couldn’t really see any harm in her going. Jesus, he’d said, who could catch the wind? He’d said a lot of other things besides. Like
what could possibly go wrong?
For one thing, Liza wasn’t a girl to make a speech and draw attention to herself. Classes hadn’t even started and she was already worried about doing presentations. It wasn’t as if she were going to get hurt by any of those cons. They were never going to see the light of day again after pulling a stunt like this.

It nagged him that she knew somebody inside the Joint. Even a cousin. He let her know it. He had to admire her loyalty, though. He doubted his family would stick by anybody damaged and misguided enough to end up in jail.
What the hell had her jailbird cousin done?
Fuck a duck, he hoped he hadn’t killed someone. That would be the living end. He tried not to let on, but it bothered him she hadn’t really said. For the first time he wondered if she had a secret, though how many secrets could a nineteen-year-old girl have?

He had wanted to take her home to meet his parents in Trenton on Thanksgiving weekend, especially if he ended up sleeping with her, although they didn’t need to know
that.
He and Liza, well, they were getting ready for that. Well, he was. His balls ached. Liza was holding back and he wasn’t sure why. When he’d reached between her legs, she’d said something about it having been a long time, but maybe she just didn’t want to seem too easy. Free love or not, lots of girls were like that.
City girls just seem to find out early,
he hummed, and she was a city girl, so she was probably experienced.
 

Well, so what? She could still be presented as another little co-ed shopping for a husband, much as they had in his mother’s time. His mother had trained as a teacher, but she had quit work the moment she’d gotten her ring. Better his Presbyterian family never finds out about the cousin though, especially his paternal grandmother, who ruled the roost from her own home, right next door to his parents’ house.

Grandma was going to find the whole mess rather unsavoury. If the cousin earned a starring role in the riot and their relationship became public, perhaps he could tell her he was just some biker who got into a little bit of trouble with the law. Goddamn it, why did they have to have the same last name? The old woman didn’t like bikers anymore than she did cons, but they were a familiar sight in Trenton and the romantic dream of many neighbourhood girls and boys. Some of them were law-abiding citizens who just happened to love bikes.
 

* * *

Liza, just the week before, had felt a slow, unexpected flush of pleasure at the lakeside Frosh dance. Mel had told her he wanted to take her home to meet his parents.
 

Now she focussed on Dace. She climbed in the back seat of the cab and told the driver where she was going. “Look,” the driver volunteered, “if you was my daughter, I wouldn’t want you going near that mess. What’s a girl like you snooping around the Pen for anyway?”

“I just want to see what’s happening,” she replied, resisting the urge to smack the back of his shiny bald head. Mel had been irritating enough, his expression so pruny-faced she had been tempted to tell him she was going downtown to striptease. At least he hadn’t asked her too many questions. Possibly because he didn’t want to know the answers.

Hurry up, hurry up!
Her mind raced all the way through Maitland. Staring out at the tidy, spacious brick houses whizzing by, she was thankful none of her inner turmoil showed in her face. She put all her early training to use, keeping her feelings hidden inside. Nobody had ever been interested or had the time to deal with her when her twin brothers had been so close to her in age.
 

The cab came to a sudden stop. The trip was so quick there was no time for Liza to reflect on the short distance between the ivy-covered stone walls of the university and the scrubbed grey walls of the penitentiary.

“Well, Miss Butter-Wouldn’t-Melt-in-Your-Mouth, I’ll drop you off here. You’re two blocks from the Big House and I’m not getting any closer. I don’t want to get my cab rolled. There’s a real carnival up on the lawn. Just listen to all that hootin’ and hollerin’. You asking for trouble or what?”

Throwing two dollars in the front seat—two days food on a diet of Coke and Cheezies—she jumped onto the sidewalk and kicked his cab door shut.

“Yeah, trouble,” she muttered. “That’s my middle name.”

If only she could have used her pent-up energy to storm Inside and get Dace Out. Her imagination raced with a fantasy of finding a helicopter pilot—some intrepid soul willing to land inside the prison gates and set him free.

Grey buildings loomed ahead, a limestone fortress pitched on a rocky outcrop beside an endless expanse of water. The prisoners lived in five-tiered cell blocks arranged in a cruciform, but with any luck visitors only got close enough to notice the grey-stoned columns guarding the entrance, some imposing double doors and a bell tower with a Canadian flag flapping in the lakeside breeze.

Among all her other research, Liza had studied Maitland Penitentiary. It had been built about 1833 by the convicts themselves. They had heaved the buildings out of broken rock from a limestone quarry, creating a legacy of nineteenth century Ontario. In those days there was no pretence that men were imprisoned except to be punished. Boys as young as eight were tossed inside, and the lash was employed through the 1960s.
 

Some of the boys grew old there. Like most people, they succumbed to natural causes such as heart disease, old age and unspecified cancers, but many of their maladies, like appendicitis, blood poisoning, nephritis, pneumonia and tuberculosis, were now treatable with antibiotics. Some of the men killed each other, some were hanged. There were no accidents. Family members—if the dead men had any—rarely came to claim the bodies and most were buried in unmarked paupers’ graves in the prison cemetery. Fifty years before, the cemetery had been cemented over by the recreational yard, which was something none of the recent inhabitants knew.

Liza approached the compound, an unwelcome visitor.
What am I doing here?
What can I do? What’s Dace going to do?
Her desire to know he was safe was so strong that her mind flitted from one outrageous possibility to another. Maybe he wasn’t even inside. Maybe he had been transferred over the weekend to a medium security prison to prepare for his parole. Anything was possible. Why, he could have tunnelled out to Argentina! Or barricaded himself in a bulletproof closet! Did they even have closets in the cells? Where did the prisoners keep their clothes? How many changes of clothes did they have? Just one?
 

If only a miracle had taken place. Anything that could keep him whole, unbloodied, safe. She clung to the memory of the way he had looked just a couple of days before.

Oh God. Why did she feel so bad? She had tried so hard to accustom herself to blood and gore. The Hinkley murders had scarred anyone living in Britain. Some people coped by pretending nothing bad had happened, but there had also been a sudden surge in true crime stories being published. Like so many people, the first true crime story Liza had ever read was Truman Capote’s
In Cold Blood
. The motives behind the crimes were always insufficient, but she had kept reading those kinds of exposés, longing for explanations, looking for some way to anesthetize herself, to stop feeling, to convince herself evil would never touch her or her kin.
 

Closer to the main prison building she noticed an entrepreneur had slung a white sheet marked with red, hand-painted words in a smashed window.
Under New Management
, she read and snorted, then was forced back onto the grass opposite the compound. Scowling, uniformed policemen strode up and down the sidewalk nearest the prison, flapping outstretched arms and shouting, “Keep your distance! The cons are actin’ up in there.”

The cops almost outnumbered the crowd they were trying to control, about two hundred or so spectators circling and huddling together. Liza blended right in. Dressed in the same blue jeans and T-shirts people would wear for the next four decades, everybody looked like reporters, desperately hoping news would be made before their covetous eyes, hoping they alone might become privy to the secrets of prisoners living behind impenetrable stone walls.
 

“Christ. Who really knows what happens in these places anyway? Who the hell wants to?” a reporter clone beside Liza remarked, his eyes riveted on the besieged walls.

“Well, you sure look like you wish you had x-ray vision,” she replied to his rhetorical question.
 

The long-haired man looked at her. Later he told her he’d estimated she was a clever seventeen. Maitland University’s logo was visible over her right breast. “Where you from, baby, the school newspaper?”

She must have hesitated just a moment too long. She
could
write a story for the university paper. And she
should
. From the prisoners’ point of view. How they needed better conditions so they could behave better. She supposed she would have to try to sound less naïve, because some of the men at Maitland Penitentiary were murderous fiends. Who among a conservative student body would sympathize?

The reporter leaned closer to her, eyes squinting in his full face. He had a large head, even for a male. She judged he was in his late twenties, with long brown hair which was already receding. He was quite tall, but a little stooped. He might have once had broad shoulders, but he didn’t now. Involuntarily Liza stepped back, repelled by the odour of stale cooking grease emanating from his dark sports jacket and buttoned down shirt.
 

“Hey, look. My name’s Joe—Joseph Accardo,” he volunteered. “Now tell me, pretty little lady, have I got a story here? You aren’t related to one of the hostages, are you? Could you be one of the guards’ girls? One of their daughters?”

Liza smiled and shook her head, her bangs falling into her eyes. Christ, she had to watch herself! Stupid to end up in a stranger’s story instead of her own. If she did, she wouldn’t do Dace a damn bit of good in this town. Every Maitland resident was bound to be worried about the hostages. If something happened to the guards who dwelled among them, it could happen to them, too. Of course she was also concerned about the hostages, she decided. What if they got hurt? Some of the guards might be a little overzealous, but the poor buggers were just doing their jobs. It wasn’t their fault. It was the fault of the Warden and the Administration.
 

“No, Joe, I’m not related to a hostage,” she replied. “My name’s Liza,” she added, deliberately omitting her surname. “I’m at the U. I’m just a first year student with an interest.”

“Well, lucky you. Those hostage takers are gonna end up as minced meat,” Joe remarked. “Those poor suckers get out alive they’ll be missing so many body parts they won’t have enough left over to splice together a single human being.” He stopped short, which Liza assumed was due to her sudden green skin tone. Then she tracked his gaze across the street.

A Ford pickup had pulled up close to the police parading outside the prison door. As they watched, eight to ten blue-jeaned activists jumped out the rear end. Liza was delighted to see their homemade placards carrying messages like
Power to the Prisoners
! Joe whipped out a notebook so fast she felt a slight breeze. She was also clutching a pen in her pocket, but she couldn’t make out what the protesters were saying. For the second time that September, she wished she had a tape recorder. Fortunately the roar of the police was audible enough.