Sutton (38 page)

Darkness is a factor too. Drop your spade or sharpened spoon, it might take you twenty minutes to find it. Kliney hooks a thin wire into his cell’s electric socket and strings the wire all the way down the tunnel, to power a half dozen bulbs. Now there is light. And air. He also hooks up a rotary fan stolen from the warden’s office.

How long exactly did it take to tunnel out?

Almost a year. Things started going faster when we finally intersected with the sewer, so we could throw loose dirt in there. Before that we had to bring the dirt out in our pockets, scatter it in the yard
.

Sutton watches a group of children skating backwards, figure-eighting, spinning. Look, he says. They’re so graceful. So innocent. Was I ever that innocent?

Reporter spots a pay phone next to the snack bar. Mr. Sutton, I need to call my girlfriend
.

Go ahead. Free country
.

Um. Well
.

I’m not going to take a run-out powder on you kid. I’ll be here when you get back
.

Maybe you could come with me?

I’m not sitting with you in a phone booth while you call your ball and chain. Besides, better you don’t call her. Ever
.

Mr. Sutton
.

You don’t love her
.

Because I hesitated when you asked me?

You’re wasting your time. A thing you should never waste. And you’re playing with fire. You’re putting yourself in a position where you might have to leave hot. Never leave hot
.

What does that mean?

When I started running my own crew, taking down banks, I had a rule. Never leave a bank hot. I always made double sure we’d walk out nice and easy, our wits about us. Before the alarms went off, before the cops showed up—before there was any gunplay
.

This relates to my girlfriend how?

Banks, broads—always leave on your terms, before you can’t. With a girl, that means before she’s seeing someone else and you marry her out of jealousy. Or before the rabbit dies and you’re trapped. Never leave a bank hot, never leave a broad hot
.

Sutton glowers at Prometheus. Bottom line, kid, choose your partner carefully. The most important decision you make in life is your partner
.

And what should one look for in a partner?

Someone who won’t rat
.

I mean a life partner
.

So do I
.

Sutton looks down, sees a young girl, five or six, wearing thick blue ski pants, a hat with a furry red ball on top. She’s inching around the rink, held by her father. As if feeling the weight of Sutton’s gaze, she looks up. Sutton waves. She waves back—nearly falls. Sutton flinches, turns away. He looks at Reporter for several long seconds. I have a daughter, he says
.

Really? I didn’t see anything about that in the files
.

When I first walked out of Dannemora, in ’27, I bumped into a girl from the old neighborhood. I was fresh out of the joint, angry, lonely, living in a flop, and this girl was crowding twenty-five, which was old maid territory back then. It was like when I bumped into Marcus. The fuse meeting the flame
.

Reporter jots a note
.

My daughter, Sutton says—then stops himself. I don’t let myself start too many sentences with those words. I’ve got a long list of regrets, God knows, but she’s near the top. Early on, her mother would bring her to see me in Sing Sing. You know what smells the opposite of a prison? A three-year-old girl. Those visits were torture. They say a child makes you want to be a better person, but if you’re already a lost cause, if you’re facing a fifty-year bit, a child just makes you want to dry up and blow away. Hard as they were on me, the visits were harder on the kid. And her mother. So they stopped coming. Her mom filed for divorce. Disappeared. I didn’t blame her
.

I wonder why there’s nothing in the files about that, Mr. Sutton
.

Sutton shrugs, points at his head. I pulled all the files on that subject from my own mental filing cabinet—long ago
.

He rubs his leg, grimaces. People who say they have no regrets, that’s the bunk, that’s a grift. Like living in the present. There is no present. There’s the past and the future. You live in the present? You’re homeless. You’re a bum
.

Sutton takes one last look at the skaters. My daughter, he says. She must be about forty now kid. She probably wouldn’t know me if she walked past us right now
.

Sutton turns, looks at Reporter, winks: But I’ll bet you all the money I ever stole—I’d know her
.

Willie and Freddie are the first ones who spot roots. April 1945. Willie sees Freddie’s face light up, then Freddie frantically pointing. Roots mean grass, and grass means they’re directly under the strip of lawn that runs along Fairmount Avenue. At the same moment they both understand—technically they’re
free
.

Freddie starts clawing upward. Willie holds him back.

We have to wait for the others, Freddie.

But Freddie won’t stop. Six feet from the surface, four feet, he’s clawing up, up. Willie grabs Freddie around the neck, pulls him back down into the tunnel. Freddie pushes Willie away. Willie grabs Freddie by the collar. By the hair. Freddie turns, swings, hits Willie in the nose, grabs a fistful of Willie’s shirt and punches him again in the nose, and again. The nose would be broken if there were anything left to break.

Freddie resumes clawing. He’s nearly at the surface. Willie, his nose streaming blood, yells at him: You can’t do this, Freddie. You’re betraying the others. We’re all in this together. If you do this, you’re no better than a rat.

Freddie stops. He slides down, slumps against the muddy wall of the tunnel. Heaving, gasping, his rash-covered face bright pink, he says: You’re right, Willie. I lost my fuckin head. The idea of bein out. I got crazy.

They crawl on all fours back down the tunnel and spread the word among the tunnel crew. It’s time.

The next morning everyone gathers in Kliney’s cell. They’ve always planned for the escape to take place right after breakfast, when the greatest number of prisoners are moving about. Now, with no discussion, no need for discussion, they line up and jump through the hole, one by one, like paratroopers over the target. Kliney takes the lead, then Freddie, then Botchy, then Akins, then seven other guys, then Willie. One by one they slide down the shaft, into the tunnel, crawling crab-like toward freedom.

Nearing the hole, seeing the sudden shaft of white daylight, Willie is overcome. A kind of religious ecstasy floods his heart. He erupts in a prayer of thanks. Oh God I know that I’m a sinner and I know that I’ve led a sorry life but this moment is clearly a gift from you and this shaft of light and this fresh air is your blessing and I can’t help but believe it means you haven’t given up on me yet.

He climbs up up up, through mud, roots, grass, pokes his head out of the hole. It’s one of the first warm days of spring. He smells the moist earth, the new flowers, the warm sweet syrupy sunshine. He pushes his shoulders through the hole, then his hips, his chest, and flops onto the ground, covered with blades of grass and mud. A second birth.
He wasn’t born, he escaped
. He lies on his side and blinks up at the black walls of the century-old prison. Hand-cut stone, jagged battlements, long narrow slits for windows. He’s been inside this place for more than a decade and he never knew how hideous it was.

He gets to his knees, looks up the street, catches a glimpse of Freddie and Botchy rounding a corner. He looks across Fairmount and sees a truck driver, mouth agape, who chose this moment to pull over and open his thermos and check his map. He hears heavy footsteps behind him. He turns. Two cops. He jumps to his feet and runs.

Bullets spark along the pavement beside him. He dashes around a car, across a lawn, leaps a child’s tricycle, sprints down an alley, bursts through a door that leads into some kind of warehouse. He shuts the door, crouches in a corner. Maybe they didn’t see him.

Come out or we’ll shoot you through this fuckin door.

He walks out, drenched, filthy, inconsolable. All that work, all those months of chipping, scraping, digging, for a three-minute jog in the spring sunshine.

Along with Willie, eight of the others are captured right away. One manages to stay free for a week, then knocks at the front gate of the prison. Tired, hungry, he asks to be let back in. That leaves just Freddie and Botchy still at large.

Each member of the tunnel crew is brought in chains before Hardboiled. The crash-out is front-page news across the country, around the world, and Hardboiled sees that this will be his legacy. He’ll forever be the laughingstock who let twelve prisoners dig a hundred-foot tunnel under his nose. He’s not the sort of man who can shrug off being laughed at. Someone must pay.

There are ancient punishment cells at Eastern State. Prisoners call them Klondikes. They’re belowground, barely larger than sarcophagi, and they haven’t been used in decades. Hardboiled orders each member of the tunnel crew stripped and dropped into a Klondike.

They will stay there, he decrees, until the last two are recaptured.

It takes eight weeks. Cops in New York City finally catch Freddie and Botchy in a nightclub. Botchy is wearing a tuxedo. Freddie is wearing lifts. Hardboiled removes the tunnel crew from the Klondikes. They’re all near death. He has them clothed, scrubbed, fed, then ships four of them, the worst of them, to Holmesburg, a maximum-security prison ten miles up the road.

Sutton looks around. Where’s your partner?

Reloading
.

He’s reloading all right
.

Yeah
.

Is he a good—what did you call him? Shooter?

The best
.

You like working with him?

That’s a different question
.

Mm
.

Talent aside, he’s like all the other shooters at the paper. No more, no less
.

Faint praise. Listen kid, I left my smokes in the car. Why don’t you walk me back, leave me with Bad Cop, then you can run and call your girlfriend
.

Sounds good
.

They walk through Rockefeller Plaza to Fifth Avenue. The Polara isn’t where they left it. They look up and down the street. There it is—fifty feet away, in the shadow of the statue of Hercules. Windows up, Photographer talking on the radio. Why did Photographer move it? They approach warily. Reporter opens the passenger door. The cloying, giddy odor of marijuana wafts out
.

Photographer lowers the radio. Cop made me move the car, he says
.

Uh-huh, Reporter says
.

I’m talking to the City Desk. They want us to shoot Willie at some bank a few blocks from here
.

Fine. I need to leave him with you for two minutes
.

Cool
.

Sutton climbs into the passenger seat. Reporter runs back across the Plaza to the pay phone
.

We’ll head there in a few, Photographer says into the radio. Yeah. Manufacturers. I got the address. Yeah. Ten four
.

He sets the radio on the dash, looks at Sutton. Sutton looks at him. Life Saver eyes again. You look—happy, Sutton says
.

Happy?

Peaceful. Almost
.

Photographer laughs nervously. If you say so
.

You been smoking that shit a long time?

What shit?

Kid. Please
.

Photographer sighs. Actually, no
.

What made you start?

Photographer unwinds his barber pole scarf, rewinds it slowly around his neck. Once upon a time, he says, I was pretty good at not letting this job get to me. I was bulletproof. I was known for it. I took pictures of the most horrible shit you can imagine, and none of it stayed with me. But a couple years ago the paper sent me up to Harlem. A young mother with too many kids to feed, not right in the head, threw her baby daughter out a sixth-floor window. The reporter and I got there before the cops did and we found the girl, this beautiful one-year-old girl, lying in the street. Eyes open. Arms spread wide. I did my job, fired off a roll of film, same as always, but when I got home I couldn’t sit still, couldn’t stop shaking. So I went out, asked the guys on the corner for something, anything, to get me through the night. They sold me a few tabs of acid. I dropped one, and instead of getting better, I got worse. A whole lot worse. I had what they call a death trip
.

What’s that?

I won’t describe it. It wouldn’t be fair to you. And besides, I honestly can’t. Let’s just say I went to a very messed-up place. I felt like I was in the land of the dead. I felt like, for the first time, I really and truly understood death, understood how awful, how bottomless, death is. Which was about the last thing I wanted to feel at that moment. I started freaking out, started screaming, crying. My old lady wanted to call an ambulance. I wouldn’t let her. I thought it might cost me my job. She went back down to the corner, bought some weed, and that mellowed me out. Stopped the sweats, the horrors. Weed brought me back, got me over the memory of that little girl. So I started turning on every night. Right after work. Then before. Then during the day. Weed is still the only thing that works
.

They sit quietly for a minute
.

There used to be a guy, Sutton says. At Attica. He grew a little weed in his cell
.

No kidding
.

The hacks thought it was some kind of fern
.

Photographer laughs
.