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In seventy-five years, even seamless half-inch-thick steel gets weak.
He looks over his shoulder, then smudges his thumb against the metal wall
close to the toilet. I detect a small hole, filled with a black substance.
 I fill the holes with shoe polish, he says,  Every night. We work at night.
After lights-out, they do a walkaround every hour to check. On the end cell,
you hear the keys to the box before the guard opens the door to get in. You
have plenty of time to get to your bunk.
Lester looks wise again. My fingers shake as I reach out to touch the hole.
I m a basket case. Up. Down. Up. Down.
 What s behind there? I ask.
 Catwalk, he says.  Access to all the pipes and wires and ductwork. Three
times since  77 I ve broken drill bits off when I m working in there and let
them drop down. This one took a year to find. Down below is the basement, a
holding tank of shit and piss and ten inches of scum. They left me in there to
unclog a sewer pipe in  99 and I hopped down into it and got this bit.
 Used to be you put everything up your ass, but they got smart back in  98.
Now they got the Boss Chair. It s a metal detector you sit on, but my glasses
work like a dream. It s pretty goddamn nice, actually, not having to dig it
out every night.
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I look at him to see if he s playing with me, but his eyes are fixed on the
wet steel. He stands up, fits the bit back into his thick plastic glasses, and
puts them on. He adjusts the glasses on his hooked nose and, as if on cue,
they announce it s time for lunch.
Lester smiles at me and says,  Let s eat.
I don t like the way we move like cattle out of the block and down through the
yard toward the dining hall. I m jumpy and there s some twittering, but I
don t know where it s coming from and no one touches me. I don t look anyone
in the eye. I don t want to know them. I don t even want to see them.
I take the boiled meat and the limp vegetables they serve me on a tray and
follow Lester to a round seat that juts out from under the table on a metal
arm. The tabletop is stainless steel like the tray. Two white men sit across
from me. One is doughy with a bald head and a full brown beard.
 This is Carl, Lester says, nodding toward the dough man.  Carl, Raymond. And
that s Justin.
Justin is younger than I am mid-thirties with dirty blond hair, a ponytail,
and a long muscular build. His arms are covered with tattoos. A
green-and-orange snake s head pokes out from beneath his collar with its
tongue licking at his Adam s apple. Part of a claw extends up toward his ear.
 Justin doesn t talk, Lester says.  But he s okay.
Carl belches and grins like an infant.
 They re still finding bodies from Carl, Lester says as if we were talking
Easter eggs.  But he wouldn t hurt a soul in here. He likes it here, don t
you, Carl?
 Food s not bad, Carl says.
 He can t hurt anyone, Lester says.  And he doesn t want to. Makes him feel
safe to be locked up, I guess. He s not the only one.
After lunch, we go out on the south yard where the weights are. Half a
football field of rusty machines and bars with the steel plates welded on so
no one can use the bars as weapons. The weights are arranged in a patchwork of
square spaces, and each area is painted a different drab color. Lester
explains that the faded red weights belong to the Bloods. The yellow ones are
for the Latin Kings, the blue for the Sunni Muslims.
 If you want to use them, kid, he says,  the only ones who might let you are
the Dirty White Boys.
 Which ones are those?
 The green ones, he says, pointing.  I could probably get you in without too
much trouble.
I see a crowd of whites, mostly younger men with tattoos. Half of them have
long hair. They go to work on the weights like miners. Somber and methodical.
Justin is one of them.
 Think I ll pass.
Instead, we walk up and down the gritty pavement just outside the chain-link
boundary of the weight yard. I look around me at the different men. No one
looks back. I m beginning to feel that Lester and I really are safe.
Lester says hello to a guard that I haven t seen before. The guard smiles and
says hi back. You can tell the man likes Lester.
 What about when you get to the catwalk? I ask when we re out of earshot.  I
heard Clarence talking to another guard about a break in Elmira last month.
They were saying that no one ever got out of here since it was rebuilt in
 30.
 No one ever did, he says, looking up at the clear blue sky, shading his eyes
from the summer sun.  Once you get out of the steel cell, the block is just a
solid box of concrete. If you could get out of that, you got the wall. It s
four feet thick and buried forty feet into the ground.
 So, we re screwed, I say.
He stops and looks at me. His eyes glimmer and he smiles.
 It s so simple, no one ever thought of it, he says.  Or if they did, they
didn t have the patience to do it.
 Do what?
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 Escape backwards, he says, and begins to walk.  They get out of the cell,
then they have to figure out how to break the block. Then the wall. The
pumpkinheads in this place who do make it out of the cell just wander around
down in the tunnels for a few days before they start screaming for someone to
help them.
 I did it backwards, he says.  It took almost forty years, yeah, but that s
what it takes, kid. When we break this cell, I ve got the block and the wall
already beat.
 How?
It s time to go in and we do, following the crowd, milling into the back
entrance of A block. I m trying not to step on anyone s toes when I realize
that Lester s white tufts are three deep in front of me. I am in a crowd of
blacks and being squeezed. None of them look at me. One has thick glasses. I
see a hairnet and bare shoulders like cannonballs. I see a cheek with two long
scars and dreadlocks. I smell boiled beef and pungent body odor.
I try to push forward, but can t and my heart races. Sweat beads on my brow
and my palms are wet. Two big hands grab my ass. Moist lips brush my ear.
 Gonna make you my bitch, he says.  Sweet little white thing.
Fingers probe the seam in my pants. I roar and jump and flail.
 Hey, man.
 The fuck?
 Yo.
Guards strain their necks and arch up on their toes. Batons are drawn. The [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]