Hard Sentences: Crime Fiction Inspired by Alcatraz Read online

  We worked for our hour, alone. Mademoiselle Helene turned my head, bent my back, and pointed my toes. She used her hands to mold me, to shape me, to turn me into something good. Something better.

  I was putty in her elegant, white hands.

  I stayed after our first session to watch Mademoiselle Helene with the little girls who lived on the island with their mommies and daddies, who wanted to be ballerinas just like us.

  With them, she was softer. Gentler. Her accent became less severe. I loved her less as she crept through the room, patting heads and cheeks, folding tiny arms and legs into acceptable versions of first and third positions.

  After class, as the echo of tiny voices faded from the room, Mademoiselle Helene pulled on her stiletto heels, coat, and scarf. I watched as she did, and when she left the Officer’s Club, I followed until she beckoned for me to walk beside her.

  We walked in companionable silence, student and teacher, in the long shadow of the penitentiary. We wandered down East Road, past the electric shop and toward the dock, where the ferry waited to carry her to the mainland. A tear escaped my eye, but in the wind off the water, so biting and so raw, it disappeared. I couldn’t imagine a day going by without Helene, let alone the two days it would take to carry me from Tuesday to Thursday.

  It was growing late, the salt in the air more insistent. Whitecaps swelled and crashed on the Bay. Her ride home would be a rocky one.

  The approaching ferry bounced on the water, droplets of surf splashing and catching in our hair, as a man stood at the edge of the dock, sweeping away debris. Little boys loved playing cops and robbers on Alcatraz Island, and the paper remnants from their cap guns blew around the man’s feet.

  The sweeper was a prison inmate, and though I, a longtime resident of the island, didn’t often notice inmates, I noticed him. So did Mademoiselle Helene. She took my hand as we neared him, one of the storied residents of Alcatraz. She shuddered.

  He was tree-like in height and arm span, an effect enhanced by his broom, its wooden handle a natural extension of his limbs. Later in life, I’d have called him an “Ent,” after the towering creatures in Lord of the Rings, but at that time my reading was limited to Nancy Drew or The Happy Hollisters. The prisoner faced away from us, hunched over his task.

  He whistled, though, and that, perhaps, was what stopped Mademoiselle Helene. It was the theme from Swan Lake, the song we’d danced to that afternoon. Helene began to sway beside me as the inmate’s whistle trebled and trilled, a song as lovely as a mockingbird’s. I, too, moved, a company member supporting my prima ballerina. My eyes met Mademoiselle Helene’s, and suddenly we were conspirators in an unspoken crime. She let go of my hand, and though we wore layers over our dance clothes, we broke into our steps. Jete, jete, sissone, plié, pirouette, repetez, jete, jete . . .

  We giggled, clumsy in our winter gear, taking joy in the simple pleasure of dancing to music whistled by a stranger.

  Upon hearing our laughter, the inmate turned, and we stopped. His size wasn’t the most notable thing after all. It was his mismatched, broken face. His left profile was normal, handsome even, with a sharp, clean-shaven chin and an eye of deep mahogany. But the right side? Oh, the right side. It was dizzying, blanketed with the pucker of sour pink scars and crumpled-paper flesh. His right eye was leached of all color, blind and dim, burnt crispy and never fully healed. The whistle left his lips as Mademoiselle Helene and I froze, cold in the spotlight of his ruined gaze. His broom ceased its back and forth.

  “Move on, girls, move on,” said his guard, Sergeant Cooper. “Needham, get back to work.”

  The broom began again, and the prisoner—Needham—turned away. His whistle began again, too, though this time he switched to the ”Waltz of the Snowflakes” from The Nutcracker. Mademoiselle Helene let go of my hand and walked down the dock. She began to dance again, becoming a wintery fairy, turning even the misting rain to snow.

  Our classes continued, Tuesdays and Thursdays, throughout the winter. My dance improved beneath Mademoiselle Helene’s watchful gaze and helpful hands, and my love for her grew deeper. I’d had a secret boyfriend on the island, Tommy Carlisle from down the hall in Building 64, but we’d broken off our engagement, my affections for him eclipsed by the existence of my French ballerina. Mademoiselle Helene and I had found a similar language, broken English and broken French, and though she was my teacher, we laughed together, as well, in our Officer’s Club studio. I helped instruct the smaller children, and they looked up to us both, calling me “Teacher” as often as they did my Helene.

  Each day after class, I walked with Mademoiselle Helene to the dock, and each day the looming Needham, was there, sweeping and whistling. We relinquished our fear of his appearance as novelty gave way to routine, and he quizzed us often, whistling different ballets for us to dance to, and even, occasionally, a popular Broadway tune. We danced to it all, our steps alternating between graceful and silly, improvising spins and leaps to work with any tune. We giggled, our hands intertwined, our skin electric. Our feelings were palpable, and although we never spoke of it, I was sure Helene loved me as I did her. Could she hold me the way she did when we danced for Needham, if she didn’t? Would she look as she did, her eyes wide and liquid, when he whistled a sad tune, if she wasn’t aware we were about to part?

  We never spoke to Needham. Interaction with inmates was forbidden under the gaze of Sergeant Cooper. We pushed the limits of his patience simply by dancing, but dance we did. To us, Needham was our music box, and we were his spinning ballerinas.

  It was February, cold and damp, when I developed pneumonia. Barred from school, banned from dance class, I was locked away like a fairy-tale princess without another princess to rescue me. I missed two weeks of dancing with Mademoiselle Helene, and by the third Tuesday, I was antsy. Grouchy. Still not allowed to dance.

  I missed my love. The way she moved. The way she held me when I fell. The way she clapped her hands when I particularly pleased her.

  So when the phone rang in the front room of my apartment, fifteen minutes before the ferry on which Mademoiselle Helene would depart, and when my mother’s face lit up upon hearing her mother’s voice (long distance!), I knew I had a shot. While she was occupied, I pulled on a coat and snuck out the front door.

  The cold was a punch in my broken lungs when I stepped outside Building 64, avoiding the stares of busybody mothers pushing babies in hand-me-down prams. I held in my cough and set off on the walkway to the dock.

  The sky was frozen steel, our own prison bars. A light mist fell, salted and sharp. I shuddered. The sun sank low behind the prison walls; it was getting on toward shift change, toward dinner, toward night. I hurried, anxious to see Mademoiselle Helene, to confess my love, to apologize for my long absence. She needed me. She missed me like I missed her.

  As I hurried along, I imagined our moment. She’d be standing on the dock where we danced, watching the ferry as it rose and fell on the rumbling waves. Her hand would rest on the rail as she shivered, alone. Her face would brighten when she saw me. She’d run to me on impossibly long legs, and I’d fall into her arms. “Ma Cherie,” she’d say, holding me, our hearts pressed together and beating as one.

  I smiled despite the burning of each breath in my ailing chest.

  I approached the dock, where my first sight was Needham. He stood apart from the hustle of workers hurrying aboard to get home for dinner, swishing his broom slowly back and forth. His lips, though, were still. Silent. Pressed together in a thin line I was unfamiliar with.

  I skidded to a halt as a mournful sound rode in on the wind. Someone was singing. There were no words, though, just notes drifting through the air like snowflakes.

  I turned to find the source of the song. Deep in the shadow of the prison walls, but still within sight of the dock, and within the gaze of Needham, with his broom and his scars, was Mademoiselle Helene. Singing. Dancing. In only her thin dance clothes and pointe shoes, her coat and heels discarded beside a shrub. Sh
e sang and performed a variation of the pas de deux in Giselle, in which Giselle, dead, dances for her lost love, to tell him her feelings will thrive beyond the grave.

  Mademoiselle Helene danced slower than I’d seen her. More seductively. Each move dripped desire and an intimacy with an invisible partner, a love either lost or found.

  I saw then that Needham was devouring her with his good eye, as his tongue caressed his charred, flaking lips. Sergeant Cooper looked elsewhere, seemingly to give them privacy. Yes. Mademoiselle Helene danced for Needham. Not for the guard. Not for me.

  I knew Needham loved her. It poured out of him like waves, like the ferry returning him home. He, a criminal, an inmate at the Alcatraz Penitentiary, now filled the air with a love so stifling I could not breathe.

  Helene reached the climax of her dance, her singing growing louder and stronger along with her grande jetes. Now people on the dock stopped to stare. Their bustle slowed, and the hum ceased, until there was no one moving but Mademoiselle Helene.

  She ended her solo with a pirouette, an arabesque, and finally, a bow.

  The dock erupted in applause, and Mademoiselle Helene looked abashed. She hadn’t noticed them; she had only danced for him.

  And then she found me, standing at the edge of the crowd. She reached out. “Flora,” she called, as though to stop me. “Flora, s’il vous plait . . .”

  I turned. I ran. My broken heart would never dance again.

  Spring in San Francisco was very blue and green that year. I was walking down Folsom Street one day after school when I saw Mademoiselle Helene for the first time since her soloon the dock. She tripped gaily down the other side of Folsom, as breathtakingly beautiful as ever. Doubly-so, backlit by a ray of springtime sun.

  No, I won’t talk to her, I thought. Better to stay away, to not let her know that she’d broken my heart into a thousand puzzle pieces that could never be reassembled. But still I crossed the street, the better to see her, ducking behind a car to make sure I remained unnoticed.

  Sometimes life is kind. Sometimes a chance encounter with the love of one’s life ends only in a forgotten, fleeting glance, a mild hummingbird’s thrum of one’s heart. But other times life is cruel.

  I neared Helene, drawing up behind her. For a moment, my hand ached as I marched in rhythm with her graceful steps, my thick school skirt nothing to her swinging spring dress. I almost reached out to hold her hand like so many times before. But I didn’t. Perhaps I should have, but from the dark shadow between two buildings, another hand emerged, scarred, the skin puckered and diseased.

  I knew that hand.

  I’d watched it wield a broom often during my weeks with Mademoiselle Helene. It grabbed her, pulling her into the shadow. Mademoiselle Helene cried out, a sound that was stifled so quickly I was certain no one heard but me.

  I followed her into the darkness. Needham, the whistling inmate, now relinquished of his broom and free, stood against the wall, his hand on her heart, hers on his.

  “Mine,” he growled, in a voice as broken and gravely as his face. A voice so incongruous with the fleeting beauty of his whistling, I blinked and rubbed my eyes to be sure of what I was seeing. I have never been entirely sure.

  “You’re finally mine.”

  Mademoiselle Helene’s eyes widened. I watched in silence as Needham pulled her further into the shadows.

  I was a girl without a teacher. I was nothing.

  “S’il vous plait,” she said.

  I would never dance again.

  Live at Alcatraz

  by Nick Kolakowski

  The Man in Black lights his tenth cigarette of the morning, his blood crackling electric, and wishes he had swallowed another couple pills with his coffee. Maybe it’s how the boat rocks in the hard chop of the Bay, or maybe it’s the way one of the guards onboard keeps looking at him like a cockroach, but his stomach feels ready to hit the eject button. Cigarette pasted in the corner of his mouth, a draw of smoke tingling his lungs, he clenches his hands into fists.

  “You okay, chief?” asks Luther Perkins, his guitarist, from the neighboring bench. When he’s onstage, Perkins is the anchor that keeps the Man in Black from spinning out of control. But on this bucking ferry, he seems a little panicked, almost tumbling from his seat.

  “Nothing good about a prison you can’t walk out of.” The Man in Black nods across the water, toward the dark silhouette of the island off starboard. From a half-mile out, they can already see the tiny windows stitching the concrete cellhouse atop that slab of rock. Behind those windows, he knows, men in chains watch their approach. Waiting. Wanting. Aching for any scrap of hope.

  Perkins offers a tight smile. “Nothing good about a prison at all.”

  The Man in Black destroys his cigarette in four long pulls and tosses it over the side. His tongue tastes like burnt iron. The three diet pills with breakfast are usually enough stimulant to crush any crows of doubt flying around his skull, fill him with the lightning to stride onstage and blast the walls down with the power of his baritone. Not this morning, though. The dark birds still roost in the bone prison behind his eyes, pecking at his thoughts, making his guts lurch.

  “Chief?” Perkins leans forward, brow furrowed with concern. The Man in Black waves him off and shifts his view to the foredeck, where the guard with the bright red face keeps trying to stare him down. The meanness in the man’s eyes reminds him of those hard sharecroppers back in Arkansas, the ones who lived and died alongside his Daddy. In another life, he might have become someone like that, holding a shotgun on his fellow sinners. Instead, the angels filled his fingers with grace, and the Lord offered him the chance to lift souls up.

  “We gotta do this,” the Man in Black says, and stands on trembling knees, sweat stinging his eyes. Something flaps across his vision, fast and black, and he grips the railing. “We gotta.”

  Perkins also stands, placing a warm hand on his shoulder. “Be strong.”

  “With God’s help.” The Man in Black straightens, feeling a little livelier.

  Ten minutes later, the ferry bumps against the concrete dock. Three guards await them, caps and guns glinting in the summer sun. The Man in Black waves, and none wave back. He resists the temptation to flash his middle finger. No sense in starting things off on the wrong foot. He lights a fresh cigarette as the band begins to wrestle their gear off the boat.

  Moving in well-rehearsed sync, the guards step forward to unzip bags, shake instruments, open the panels on the recording equipment. They pat down every member of the band and the recording crew, the Man in Black grinning as they jam their hands in his pockets, feel his cuffs, make him strip off his shoes. Left all my good stuff at home, boys, he thinks. This ain’t my first rodeo.

  When the guards finish their search, a bird-faced fellow in a decent suit appears at the far end of the dock. His hard stance and pursed lips remind the Man in Black of tax collectors, government agents, recording-label executives. A type he doesn’t like, in other words.

  “I’m Warden Blackburn,” the man announces. “I’m going to be direct with you: I believe the inmates on this island are entitled to food, water, a roof, and medical attention when necessary. Not entertainment. But I’ve been persuaded, let us say, to let you perform.”

  “That’s mighty big of you,” the Man in Black says. He remembers a similar speech from the screws at Folsom and San Quentin.

  “The administrators tell me it might lessen some of the pressure on the cellblock,” Blackburn continues. “The men have been tense lately. But I know your history, mister, and I’m here to tell you: if you do anything to encourage their antisocial tendencies, or your own, I will end the concert immediately, do you understand?”

  “Yessir, bossman,” the Man in Black says, suddenly convinced this prick can sniff the chemicals sweating out of his pores.

  “Live at Alcatraz,” the warden snorts. “What kind of name is that for a record?”

  “My last one,” the Man in Black says as he stoops, grabs
the handle of his long guitar case, and strides toward the looming hulk of the prison.

  The band is halfway through the third song when everything goes to hell.

  Two hundred inmates line the long benches and tables of the Mess Hall, hollering and hooting as the Man in Black tears ass through the music, playing the finale of his fastest song, a blistering tune about the Rock Island Railroad Line, even more breakneck than usual, like a truck barreling down a rutted dirt road, the band behind him scrambling to keep pace. Hunched over his guitar, fingers blurring as he rides the notes, he fails to see the tattooed man leap atop the dining table to his left.

  Only when the inmate roars with high-octane rage does the Man in Black glance up, taking in the coal-dark eyes, the bald skull etched with scars, the words and flames inked on the muscular forearms. In one gnarled hand, the tattooed man holds a sharpened toothbrush handle, which he jams hard into the neck of a seated inmate.

  The stabbed prisoner tumbles backward with a gurgling squawk that the whole room hears over the clash of the band losing its rhythm, their train jumping the rails.

  Within seconds, the Mess Hall explodes into a storm of furious bodies. Screams of fear buried under howls of triumph. The Man in Black sees two guards near the barred portal to the kitchen dragged down by a grasping sea of hands. Through the blur of running legs, he spies bodies on the scuffed linoleum, leaking red.

  “Let’s go. These boys ain’t fans of what we’re playing,” the Man in Black announces, oddly calm, as he juts his chin for the band to skedaddle.

  He doesn’t need to tell them twice. Because they are seasoned road musicians to the bitter end, they hold tight to their instruments as they sprint for the nearest doorway. A lanky inmate with a shock of red hair charges at the Man in Black, who rears back and lashes out with his left leg, planting a boot in the redhead’s stomach that sends him flailing to the floor. Marshall Grant swings his bass like an axe, shattering it along with another inmate’s nose. One of the recording boys brandishes a microphone stand, clearing a path through the wide corridor outside the Mess Hall, which the guards call Times Square on account of the large clock looming on the wall.