Handsome Harry (8 page)

I won’t deny the news hit me hard. She was wearing a blue dress and her hair was shorter and lighter than the last time I’d seen it. She looked so gorgeous I could hardly breathe. Until that moment, I hadn’t realized how much she meant to me.

She wanted me to know she’d married Kinder because he’d asked her to and she didn’t want to wither on the vine, as she put it, and which, at the rate I was going, was what would happen to her before I ever got paroled.

I didn’t say it, but I had to wonder how much her decision had been influenced by the fact that her little sister had already been married four years—never mind that her hubby hadn’t been around for the past three-and-a-half. At sixteen Margo had got hitched to some strong-arm who a few months later went to prison on a ten-year jolt. Jesus, those Northern girls could pick them.

Mary said I’d never given her cause to think she should wait for me. Oh sure, I’d said I loved her, but that’s not the same as asking somebody to wait.

I said yeah, when she was right she was right.

What did I expect her to do, she said, a girl has to watch out for herself.

I told her I understood and no hard feelings, and I wished her the best of luck. I really thought I’d never see her again. When I got back to the cell house I threw up.

T
he next break I tried was with a skeleton key I’d made on the sly in the welding shop. It was month after month of trial and error on my cell door lock, of constantly reshaping the key and trying it on the lock again. Then one night I put my arm through the bars and tried the key for the millionth time and…
clunk
…the lock opened.

Oh baby, I heard Russell whisper from his adjoining cell.

I relocked the door and hid the key in a corner crevice of the cell, and the next day Russ and I talked things over with Red and Fat Charley and some of the other guys in our bunch.

There were a few hardcases at M City who rarely got in fights or caused any trouble but who everybody knew you didn’t chivvy with, and Red and Charley were prime examples. Charley was from Ohio. He was in his early forties and looked like everybody’s favorite uncle—short and round and with the sociability of a born salesman. He was missing the tip of his left index finger and had a habit of keeping that hand half-closed to hide the mutilation. We’d been friends for months before I ever noticed it. When I asked what happened he was reluctant to say, so I took off my shoes and socks and showed him my toes. Born that way, I said. He smiled and said all right and told me he lost the fingertip because of the first girl he ever fell in love with. He was sixteen and she was beautiful but cold of heart and he knew it but he couldn’t help himself. She was constantly demanding that he prove his love, getting him into bad fights over her and so on. One day she said if he’d cut off his finger she would be
his forever. So he went and got a straight razor and did it right in front of her.

She was, to use Fat Charley’s word, aghast. She called him crazy and refused to ever see him again. The story he gave his mother was that the finger got caught in a machine at the bottling plant where he worked after school. He’d had his share of women since then, had even been married for a few years to a nice woman whose face he could no longer envision, and he’d enjoyed them all, but he had never again fallen so profoundly in love.

Lucky for you, I said.

Lucky for me, he said, the wench didn’t ask for my peter.

In addition to looking harmless and well intentioned, he spoke like a college professor, and it tickled all of us that once upon a time he’d been an insurance salesman. One day when he was giving his routine spiel to a prospect, telling him about the importance of having insurance because as much as we hate to think about it life is awful short and even worse it can come to an unexpectedly abrupt end and so on and so forth, it struck him that everything he was saying was true
except
for the part about needing insurance. Fat Charley said he suddenly saw his own life as so unspeakably dull he felt like he was committing slow suicide. He asked the customer to excuse him a moment and then slipped out the back door and got in his car and left. A week later he was running hooch for a bootlegging bunch in Cleveland. Shortly after that he made the jump to what he called the exhilarating trade of the brigand. He was in the third year of a ten-to-twenty for bank robbery and said his only regret was having been caught.

Because Charles Makley was the absolute picture of the happy fat man, he was often able to get out of a tight spot without having to resort to rough stuff. His looks and manner also made it easy to underestimate his capacity for self-defense. Out in the yard one morning I saw a bohunk named Markowski backing Charley against a wall as a bunch of other cons were looking on. Markowski had had it in
for Fat Charley ever since losing all his cigarettes to him in a crap game a week earlier. I couldn’t hear what they were saying at that distance, but Markowski was poking Charley in the chest with a finger and running his mouth hard. Charley was talking calmly and apparently trying to keep things from getting out of hand, but I knew he wasn’t going to take too many more of those pokes.

As I started toward them, Markowski jabbed him one time too many. In a blink Charley snatched him by the shirt and the hair and spun him around and rammed his head into the wall so hard it must’ve rattled the paperweights on the warden’s desk over in the next building. Even as the bohunk dropped to his knees and fell over, everyone was moving away from him like ripples from a splash, moving in that deceptively fast-walking way of convicts. In a matter of seconds, there was nobody within twenty yards of Markowski as he lay there with his brains oozing out his ears. Red and I covered Charley’s flanks and back as we headed for the other end of the yard, in case any of Markowski’s pals might want to make it their fight too, but nobody made a move on us.

We mixed into a crowd of convicts and looked back to see the yard hacks converging around Markowski. Charley looked almost rueful. He said it disturbed him deeply when a man refused to listen to reason. He said reason was the bedrock of orderly human relations.

Goddamn right it is, Red said. Anybody wants to argue the point I’ll kick him in the nuts.

That was Red Hamilton for you. His real name was John. He’d come to M City a year or two after I did. A beefy, big-boned guy with rusty-red hair and huge hands, he was only two or three years older than me but he looked closer to Charley’s age. He’d worked his way up the robbery ladder to bank jobs and was doing fairly well until one night when he was on his way to a date with some girl and realized he’d left his wallet at home. So he decided to pull a filling station stickup to get some quick cash. He was holding his piece on the attendant with one hand and rifling the till with the other when two
police cars pulled into the station to gas up and the cops saw what was going on. Next thing Red knew he had four guns pointed at him and the jig was up. He still hadn’t gotten over the embarrassment of being taken down on such a two-bit job. It was his second robbery conviction and he got twenty-five years.

Little on the harsh side, if you ask me, he said. There was only twenty-two bucks in the till. That’s more than a year for every fucken dollar.

He had Charley beat in the missing fingers department, lacking part of both the index and middle fingers of his right hand. Naturally some of the guys called him Three-finger Jack. He said he’d lost them in a sledding accident when he was a kid, but some of the stories that followed him into M City told it differently. One version had it that he’d been a bagman for the mob in Kansas City, got caught skimming and paid for it with the fingers. According to another, a St. Louis gambler caught Red putting the blocks to his woman and opened fire on both of them, killing her and clipping Red’s fingers before he got hold of his own piece and shot the gambler through the wishbone.

When I told Red the St. Louis story he laughed and said it was a new one to him but he liked it and might start using it. Those hands of his were so large he could still work a trigger with the stub of his index finger.

He wasn’t one to talk about himself very much, but he did divulge that, like Charley, he’d been married once. He was still somewhat bitter about the divorce settlement. If the bitch had fucked me as good in bed as she did in court, he said, I never would’ve divorced her.

As dangerous as they were, Red and Charley were basically cool types and usually managed to avoid trouble with the hacks. Charley thought the Red Shirts were courageous fools to fight so openly against the system. The way he looked at it, the more attention you drew to yourself the worse your chances of ever breaking out. We had
talked a lot about escape, but every plan I came up with had too many holes in it to suit them. They weren’t afraid to take chances but neither were they reckless, which is what my breakout plans always seemed to them. On the other hand, they hadn’t been able to come up with a worthy plan either.

My skeleton key took them by surprise. I’d been making it on the QT and now that it worked I had every intention of using it.

Fat Charley said the key was a nice piece of work but it didn’t constitute an escape plan. All it did was get us out of the cells.
Then
what?

Then we cut the bars out of a cell house window with the saw blade Russell had swiped from the tin shop. We’d let ourselves down on sheets tied together and sneak over to the admin building and jump a guard or two and disarm them and take them hostage. We’d force the hacks posted on the doors to open up and let us out or we’d shoot their pals.

It’s a plan, said Red. Risky bitch but it’s a plan.

Charley said it was too hastily conceived, there were too many unknown factors. Some of the inmates on the row might’ve been aware of me trying the key on my door night after night and one of them could’ve finked us already.

I said if somebody had finked the warden would’ve come down on me by now.

Not necessarily, he said. Could be the warden was only waiting for us to try the break so he could hit us with everything in the book. In any case, the wall guards would be sure to spot us as we went down the sheets like a bunch of cartoon convicts.

No, they wouldn’t—the wall under the window we’d cut through was the only one not in view of any of the towers.

It felt great to have all the answers. I mean I was
ready.
I let every man have his say, then said I was going out that night and whoever wanted to come with me was welcome.

Russell said count him in. Everyone else nodded except for Red
and Charley. Red ran his three-fingered hand through his hair and sighed, then said What the hell, me too.

Charley looked glum. He said his intuition told him the plan was folly but that we’d caught him in a moment of philosophical weakness. To paraphrase Socrates, he said, the unrisked life is not worth living. I’m in too.

Who’s Socrates, John Burns wanted to know, some outlaw you partnered with? Burns was doing life for murder. Sounds Mexican, he said.

Sounds like a guy with no use for insurance, Red said, winking at Charley.

Charley always did his best to be patient with the untutored. He told Burns that Socrates was most definitely an outlaw, a true enemy of the state who had been executed.

Tough break, Burns said. What state was he enemy of? Texas I bet. They’re quick to fry your ass in Texas.

Even Charlie couldn’t resist. Oklahoma, he said.

Oh hell, Burns said. Them Okies are just as bad.

I’d be the last one to call myself an educated man, but it’s always been fairly obvious to me why most guys in prison are in prison.

T
hat night I unlocked my cell and then let out the others. Russell and I took turns with the saw blade, working like we were in a contest, while some of the guys started rolling up bed sheets and tying them together to make shinny ropes.

We’d almost finished cutting through the first bar when the guards came charging in, all of them armed with shotguns, yelling for us to drop on our bellies and put our hands behind our heads—
Now now now
! By chance, Red and Charley had just gone into their cells to get their sheets to add to the shinny rope. When they heard the hacks come crashing in they shut their cell doors before the guards even looked their way. Like I said, very cool customers Red and Charley.

Charley’s hunch had been right—somebody on the row finked, and the warden had been waiting to catch us in the act. A lookout in an adjoining building had been keeping an eye on our tier through the windows.

Every man caught outside his cell was punished with a beating and a month in solitary. Except for me. The warden knew about the cell key and he instructed Captain Evans and his apes to give me an extra-special treatment before clapping me in the hole for two months. Big Bertha smiled like he’d been given a present.

I’m sure the warden thought I wouldn’t come out alive, and he wasn’t the only one. I was conscious enough to hear the guards making bets on it as they dragged me down to the solitary cages. My vision was blurred for days and I pissed bloody fire for more than a week and it was longer than that before my ears stopped ringing, but I never doubted I’d make it.

I admit I wasn’t looking my handsome best when they took me out of the cage at the end of that stretch. I was the color of the newly dead and my skin was scabby and felt loose on my bones. It would be another week before I could walk right again. As a pair of hacks were helping me across the yard toward the cell house, I saw the warden watching us from his office window, and in a crackly voice I started singing “The Best Things in Life Are Free.” I could faintly hear inmates laughing from the cell house windows. One of the guards said to knock off the shit but the other one told his partner to take it easy. The warden’s mouth looked like a tight little scar and then he yanked the drape closed.

While I’d been in the hole, Red found out who ratted on us about the key and had attended to the matter. The warden had tried to protect the fink’s identity by transferring him among two dozen other guys from our cell house to another. But Red still learned who it was, and he put out the word to some friends in the guy’s new block. A few days later the fink somehow went tumbling over the second-tier railing and his head shattered on the concrete floor. More than a hun
dred inmates had been out on the tiers at the time but none of them witnessed what happened. We heard that the warden was in a fury but there was nothing he could do except write it up as an accident.