Hard Sentences: Crime Fiction Inspired by Alcatraz Read online

  Clean Shot

  by Jedidiah Ayres

  Those last months with Gerty were awful, a funhouse inversion of our early days giggling and petting behind her mother’s house in Kansas. We lived in heavy silence and terrible outbursts of anger and spite, grief all used up and left far behind. Her deterioration was easily tracked on her face, and I knew it would end badly, but I only watched, just did my rounds, accepting physical and verbal abuse as well as her hateful silences that went on for days in turn. It was exactly the way she’d described the last days of her parents’ marriage. She wasn’t sure when her mother was worse—drunk or dry—but she said it was some kind of relief when her father died and all that was left was the manic intensity of the beauty queen game.

  I’d spoiled all that, and Gerty had loved me for it once. Those final months, though, she hurled it back at me with frightful violence that only got worse when, in moments of clarity, she heard her mother in her own voice. Then she would cry and say she’d rather die than become like that bitter old bat. I should have kept my mouth shut, but instead I agreed that would be the better outcome.

  Joe Bowers had it hard. Unfit for free society, weird and unwanted, but doubly shunned in confinement where social circles were tightly shut and the warden’s rule of silence kept the nervous fount of babble that he used to relieve some of that pressure stymied and capped. The guy was sick with nerves, friendless and strange. He was a born talker just like Gerty had been, so I listened to him. Better than I ever did to my wife.

  With both of them it was a mental health thing, but with Bowers it never felt like a challenge to my authority or like some sort of test. It was easy. He said interesting things. Besides, Johnston’s no-talking policy was primarily aimed at con-to-con fraternizing, so it was a gray area with us.

  The first time he opens his mouth he says, “Belgium is cold, and so is Switzerland, but Russia? Fuckin’ no thanks.”

  I’m supervising Bowers and Stoetzel on the janitorial shift one afternoon when I walk up to him.

  “What did you say?”

  His eyes widen in alarm as if to scold me that we weren’t supposed to be conversing, before continuing under his breath and with his head turned away from me.

  “It’s cold and cruel and ugly, just like my Ma.”

  “Your mother?”

  “Never knew her, and nobody talked about her, but everyone says Pop was handsome. And Spanish.” He turned and smiled at me.

  “What are you talking about?”

  He stops his mopping and presents himself to me arms out like a fashion model. “I look like a Pollack or some kinda Beau-hunk blood. When I was in Russia, everybody looked like me.”

  When I don’t respond, he continues.

  “I don’t look Latin is all. So I figure I gotta look like my Ma.” He bends over his work again, “and she must’ve been an ugly bitch.”

  Paul returns then, and that’s all the chatter we get until the next afternoon. When Stoetzel disappears around the bend again, I say, “So, you look like your mom?”

  He nods. “The way I figure.”

  “Yeah, she must’ve been ugly.”

  That was the first time I saw him smile.

  I was saving $10 a month since moving into the bachelors’ dorm, but it wasn’t going into any bank. I hardly ever left the island. Ate with everybody else, quit going to church, picked up my laundry on Sunday. Nights I’d have a beer and throw a few frames at the rec hall or take a walk down to the pier by myself. I wrote letters I’d never send, too. Mostly apologizing.

  Feeling unusually social one day, I nod appreciatively when Montgomery picks up his split, the crack of the pins bouncing off of each other and the hard wood sounds like gun shots. I take a pull on my beer and stand to dry my hands over the vent before picking up my ten-pounder.

  “You know Joe Bowers?”

  Tom screws up his face for a second. “The, uh, postman?”

  “Says he’s been to Russia. Believe that?”

  I cock my hip, and before I let the ball go, he says, “Guy’s gonna ice somebody one of these days.”

  The seven pin jumps out and saves me from another gutter, and Tom nods to pretend it was a decent effort.

  “Really?”

  “Why do you think he’s here? Stole what, twenty bucks? From the U.S. Mail so he’s federally fucked, but not exactly the profile of our average con.”

  This time I knock down six more pins.

  “You ever see him throw one of his fits? Got himself some time in solitary last time. Shouting gibberish, throwing rocks. Nobody knows what he was even worked up about. He’s here ’cause he makes other cons, normal ones, nervous. Don’t he make you nervous?”

  I shrug.

  “Most of these guys got friends or mothers or wives or something waiting for ’em, keeps ’em healthy, keeps ’em in line a little, but he’s . . . squirrelly. Like a squirrel. Guys like that, they reach a breaking point. He does his stretch without blowing his top and killing somebody, I’ll eat my hat.” He bends over to tighten his laces as I take my seat again. “You ever seen Gowran’s wife though? Imagine having to go home to that? Maybe Bowers is lucky after a—” Montgomery looks up at me, red-faced.

  I waive my hand like it’s nothing.

  “Jesus, Ray, I’m sorry. Got a size-nine boot in my mouth over here.”

  He dumps to me the rest of the game, and he picks up our tab. I appreciate the effort, but the night’s already a bust. I write another letter before bed.

  Over the next couple months, I get stories from Bowers in small daily doses. Odd, bordering on fantastic, claims of being raised by circus folk, traveling the world, working as an interpreter in a half-dozen languages. I find most of it unbelievable and difficult to reconcile with the dumpy, middle-aged, former civil servant who’d violated the sanctity of the U.S. Mail, but once in a while, he lets slip a burst of nonsense that sounds like German or Portuguese curse words, and I do think he seems a little healthier for having our secret outlets of conversation.

  I watch him in the mess hall, and it’s like Montgomery says. No friends. Shunned or shy, I can’t tell. The other cons stiffen a little when he gets near.

  When he rotates off of janitorial, I hardly see him at all. Near the end of winter, I hear he’s getting his head shrunk after a suicide attempt.

  I found a suicide once when I was at Leavenworth. Strangled with his bed sheet, toes barely grazing the floor. Face was purple, tongue was swole. I didn’t even check for a pulse, just blew my whistle and cut the poor bastard down.

  Gerty didn’t look anything like that when I found her on the floor. She still looked pretty. Empty, but pretty, lying on her back, even the spit foamed between her lips looked nice somehow. I’d stuck my fingers in her mouth, and then turned her over. I’d made a fist and pumped her guts, got her to cough up enough of the poison so her heart didn’t stop. Doc Twitchell told me I’d saved her life, but I knew better.

  Twitchell didn’t think so much of Bowers’s try. Said Joe’d had a real good shot at ending his life if he’d been sincere—he’d broken his eye glasses and slashed his throat with the shards—but all that he’d managed to do was give himself a tiny pink scar under his chin and get out of work for a few weeks.

  Next time I see him up close, he looks like he finished the job. Sallow toned, listless, unkempt. When our rotations match up again, I can hardly get him say boo. Won’t even look me in the eye.

  This time I do the talking. Joe doesn’t say anything, but he hovers near me as much as he can while he works. I tell him about Gerty.

  I say she was a runner-up Miss Sunflower State once, only lost to Miss Wichita in ’27 to go further. When we met, she was sixteen, and I was twenty-one, the son and grandson of farmers who didn’t want to go into the family business. Gerty’s old man was a consumptive who had moved the family to western Kansas before succumbing, and her mother never forgave him for taking them out of Chicago to the driest tit of the Volstead sow. Mom had been a dan
cer and planned to use Gerty’s pageant purse to move them back east. While Gert’s flapper frame may have won in a more cosmopolitan setting, Kansas standards of beauty still favored powerful legs and bust lines that took generations to cultivate.

  When Gerty became pregnant, we got married. I got on at the prison, and we moved out of Ulysses to start our family. Her mother never forgave me, even though Gerty didn’t lose her figure. As far as her mother was concerned, she was damaged goods. We lost little Dickie to a fever, and I won’t talk about that, but around that time the Army sold Alcatraz to the Bureau of Prisons, and I put in to Warden Zerbst to recommend me for a transfer. San Francisco sounded exotic and as far away from bad memories as we could possibly get.

  We made a run at it, too. Joined the Presbyterian Church, went out with friends Gerty made on the mainland where she got a job as a hostess. We may have had more children. I wanted to, and I’m pretty sure Gert did, too, but she was given to hard swings in her emotional state—happy as I’d ever seen her and full of hope, next thing I know, low and dull and hardly able to get out of bed. Occasionally violence visible in her eyes. I slept uneasy.

  I asked Twitchell about her, and he said it sounded like fairly common female problems—that losing a child and moving across the country were bound to cause some disruption, and that she’d settle down soon. He said I should do my best to make sure she kept a regular schedule, and that I’d have my wife back any time.

  But she didn’t get better. The bad times got worse. Darker and more prolonged. She complained about everything and, like an unhelpful husband, I took every complaint as a personal attack instead of really listening to her.

  Some of it was undoubtedly personal though. She said I’d stolen her away from the life she’d been destined for, she said her mother had been right about me and that she was just as much a prisoner as the men in the gray clothing that I was paid to watch.

  We’d always enjoyed a drink, but she was doing it more all the time, and that was when I saw her mother beginning to emerge in my wife. I didn’t say it, but she was thinking the same thing, and she knew that it had crossed my mind.

  Some things I don’t tell Bowers. Some things I keep to myself. Like I don’t know if I believe in God. I have no idea what happens after death, but when I interrupted the attempt to end her life, I hadn’t hesitated. If I had paused just a moment, I may not have kept her from dying, and she might now be at peace. Some say what she was doing was a mortal sin, and that she’d have passed on not in a state of grace, unfit for paradise, but that’s not a certainty for me.

  I didn’t save myself any suffering, I’m certain of that.

  I don’t know if she still suffers, locked inside her body, unable or unwilling to speak, fulfilling bodily functions without will or purpose. I took her back to Kansas by train, and rather than sending my income to a sanitarium I pay Gert’s mother to take care of her.

  She finally got her baby back.

  Bowers is on incinerator detail when I’m shifted to tower duty. I watch the men move in patterns like ants, single file along the grounds. The Bay feels like a fish bowl, and the wind is constant and bone cold. And Bowers is at low-ebb again, I can tell. He mutters and spits fitfully to himself, free to do so without fear of breaking the silence rule as long as he doesn’t shout. It’s a solitary duty.

  He glances up at me, and I raise the fingers of my right hand off my rifle in salutation, but he doesn’t recognize me or is not currently present in body, his mind wandering elsewhere, seeking who knows what? His ugly mother or handsome father? The traveling circus folk among whom he claims he was raised? A girl, like the Florentine flower retailer he claims he flirted with badly and pined for dedicatedly during a year in Italy, or the Lubbock prostitute he’d first transacted with as a teenaged boy?

  Maybe he was spinning new stories from history imagined or lived. Freedom must have been on his mind, exposed as he was to the open air, his view of the world clear, obstructed only by a chicken-wire fence, but hopelessly separated by a seventy-foot drop onto sharp rocks and cold waters with impossible currents.

  Johnston says that flight was pre-occupying his thoughts. He tells me this while we are alone in his office and he is shaking my hand. I don’t contradict him, but the Warden insists that I prevented Bowers’ escape, and that’s where I disagree.

  That day, as I watch the men move through their routines and Bowers burning the trash, I think of Gerty and her mother again, both of them trapped in that house with each other, their lives reduced to routines dictated by clocks, mechanical and biological, one mute and the other alone, and I wish I’d just let her go. I wish I’d let her die young and pretty and sad. I wish I’d turned my head and let her escape.

  Just before he bolts for the fence, Bowers looks up at me and waves. Before I can return the gesture, he’s hauling his dumpy frame up the wire barrier, his final obstacle. The warden will ask me to tell him again how many shots I fired. I’ll tell him “three,” and he’ll nod.

  The first, fired as a warning, draws the attention of the other guards, who draw their weapons and shout at the convicts on the yard to drop to the ground. The second I place near his head, but he doesn’t slow down.

  I sense Tom Montgomery preparing his own shot, and I shout at him to stop. It’s my shot to take. Bowers hoists himself over the top of the fence, and climbing down the other side makes him face me.

  No one who witnesses the incident will report this later, but I see the pleading in his eyes. When he pauses on the downside of his climb, it’s believed that he didn’t know which path to choose, which jump into nearly certain death, but I know that he holds still so I can get a clean shot.

  And by God I do.

  The Ballad of Easton Tucker, the Last Man Out

  (or, Eat Shit and Die)

  by Michael Paul Gonzalez

  “Fuck the Anglin brothers, and fuck Frank Morris, too. Fuck Allen West, for that matter. Fuck this prison. Fuck this island. Fuck this country!”

  Easton Tucker’s words echoed off the wall in sharp buzzing notes, the fear of discovery long-abandoned. He inhaled, a sharp rasp as his leg slid deeper between the wall and a water pipe, a jagged piece of metal strapping tearing through his pants.

  “Fuck dying. Fuck dying trapped in the walls of this fuck-infested fucking fuckbag island prison,” he chanted, rhythmically working his ankle into a raw, bleeding frenzy. “Fuck you, too, you dirty rat. You dirrrrty raaat. Ha. Fuck giving my last will and testimonial and dying words to someone like you.”

  The rat in question, a sleek grey thing, perched on a pipe a few feet away, casually running its paws through its whiskers.

  “I’m gonna eat ya. You give it time, you keep sniffin’ around here, and I’m gonna just bite clean through your little stupid neck.”

  Easton Tucker had been burdened with the worst kind of sentence a man could get on Alcatraz. He was a clerical error. He didn’t exist. He wouldn’t be coming up for parole, and he wouldn’t be eligible for any hearings, because somewhere across the country a man named Tucker Easton was serving out his twenty-five years in Leavenworth. Somehow, Easton Tucker and Tucker Easton were on the same bus for transfer, and Easton Tucker had slept through the entire thing. It was only when he stumbled off the transport bus to see a ship waiting in the bay that he realized something had gone wrong.

  The past few months, he’d pleaded his case to anyone who’d listen, but the guards who did lend a friendly ear told him there was nothing they could do. Patience, that was the refrain. They were closing this joint soon, sending everyone back to dry land before this little rock eroded and crumbled into the sea. He didn’t buy it, not a word. They loved to screw with your mind here, they loved to watch a glimmer of hope spark and fade.

  Tucker knew the only boat that would carry him back across the water was one he built himself. To that end, he’d stolen six pairs of pants from the laundry and rolled them tightly into a knapsack that was lashed to his back with twine. He’d learned a
trick back in the Navy, how to turn a pair of pants into a flotation device, and if one pair would hold a man up, surely six would convey him to safety posthaste.

  But perhaps six had been too many, as the backpack was currently keeping him lodged between the two cinderblock walls of this narrow maintenance tunnel.

  “How long you in for?” he asked the rat.

  The rat scampered back three steps, then turned to continue staring at him.

  “I’m not gonna squeal. I ain’t asking for help.”

  He thought he’d add his name to the legends list with the Anglins and Morris, the ones who made it out. They were somewhere in the city by now, or rumbling through the hills nearby, stealing cars, drinking, screwing, dancing. The guards told everyone they didn’t make it. Said they found chunks of their boat, a wallet, a paddle. They inspired a host of others to try, most recently Darl Parker and John Paul Scott. Parker messed up pretty good at the beginning and got caught, but Scott made it all the way to the Golden Gate. Yeah, he was half-dead and drowned, and they brought him back, but he proved it could be done.

  Possibility, that’s what Easton Tucker clung to.

  He fumbled in his pocket for a blade, his favorite shiv crafted from the handle of a toothbrush. It was so finely sharpened on one side that he sometimes used it to shave. He swung his arm around to his chest and picked fitfully at the ropes that held his backpack. If he could get that off, he would have more room to work on getting his ankle free.

  “How’s about a hand here, pal?”

  The rat blinked at him.