Hard Sentences: Crime Fiction Inspired by Alcatraz Read online

  I was sure he thought about those things, but we never talked about them. We didn’t have to. I could see his hope dying with each visit. It aged him, slowly killing him. To take away a man’s life is just for the crimes committed, but to take a man’s hope was cruel and unnecessary.

  While Harold maintained his innocence to the world, I knew that he belonged in prison. He had robbed that mail truck. He had killed those two men. And he had escaped from prison three times. He could not take back his actions. The most he could do was fulfill his agreement with society and atone for his sins. That meant living the rest of his life on this island. He would die here. Then he would answer to God. As we all do. As I would as well.

  I wasn’t sure where I stood with God. Harold had never told me what he did to make his money, but I knew he was doing something besides the lies he told me. Daddy had told me that he had heard stories, that Harold had a reputation. He had warned me that Harold was a bad man.

  If he was bad, I didn’t fall in love with his badness. He was nothing but good to me. Bad men aren’t bad to everyone, and bad men don’t only do bad things. Even now, it’s hard to see the man that took the lives of those other men. I only saw my Harold.

  “How’s our boy?” Harold asked.

  “Still with my parents,” I said. “I haven’t heard from them since the last time we spoke, but I’m sure they’re taking good care of him.”

  “Wish I could see him. I miss him.”

  “He misses you, I’m sure.”

  “How long you been working at that place?”

  “Five months.”

  “You like it?”

  “The work is good. The pay is fair. There have been changes in the typing pool. They had to let some girls go.”

  He nodded and looked away. It sounded like I was complaining. The fact that I worked was failure enough to him. That I showed any sense of disappointment in the job was even worse. I had to watch my words. I changed the subject.

  “Do you want to pray with me?” I asked.

  “You pray. I’ll watch. I don’t think God much cares about me right now.”

  “Of course He cares.”

  “I like watching you pray.”

  I lowered my head and prayed softly for God to look after Harold, our son, our parents, and the rest of our family, though Harold’s kin no longer spoke to us. I prayed to make Harold’s circumstances as pleasant as possible. To remind God that despite his sins, he was serving his punishment here on earth. To make the difficult days bearable. I could feel Harold’s eyes on me.

  “Amen,” I said.

  “Amen,” he repeated.

  The guard stood up from his desk, the chair screeching on the concrete. I turned with a jump. He shrugged and motioned toward the door. It was time.

  “I love you, Harold,” I said. “And remember, God loves you.”

  “Just so long as you do,” he said. “See you next month, baby.”

  A guard appeared behind Harold. I watched them guide my husband back into the mysterious bowels of the building. I imagined a prison cell like I’d seen in the movies. Small, uncomfortable, bare. I didn’t wish for my husband to be executed, but I didn’t see how 99 years of waiting was more humane. He didn’t look like he would make it another five. Twenty-eight years old and already an old man.

  The ferry ride back to the city always felt shorter. The buildings growing larger as we approached the pier. Difficult to deny their beauty.

  Back on the pier before noon, I continued my monthly ritual. My feet still unsteady from the ferry, I walked through the city. After an hour of aimless wandering, I found my way to a street-corner peddler selling flowers. He made the loveliest bouquets and greeted me with a toothless smile. I found the nearest taxi stand, and with the money I saved throughout the month, I hired a car to take me to Colma.

  I knew it was wrong to keep Jason’s death from Harold. The fever had taken him so quickly. Alive and mischievous one day, sick the next, and gone forever one day later. Once, I wrote a note to send to the prison, but threw it away. I went on my regular monthly visit two weeks after, but never found the courage to tell him. I could only see the pain it would cause, the hope it would take away. I couldn’t find a good reason to tell him other than it was the truth. That wasn’t good enough.

  My only lie was in the not telling. Jason was surely in Heaven with my parents. They had died last year. Another loss that I never saw the need to relay to Harold.

  It was always strange that the cemetery was so much warmer than the city. I walked down the familiar trail and found Jason’s grave. I set half the flowers on the small stone, saving the other half for my kitchen. I liked the small comfort in knowing that we were sharing their beauty. I sat for hours, talking to Jason and praying to God.

  When the sky dimmed, I stood and walked through the graves out of the cemetery. Until next month. And the next.

  Bodhisattva Badass

  by Mark Rapacz

  Part I: You’s a Bitch

  The year is 1932, and you’re a prisoner, bitch. You were thrown onto a steam train and forced to ride many miles from your hometown in Nebraska to a place you only know as “The Rock.”

  You’re blindfolded, and you’ve suffered severe beatings from the prison guards who only answer to The Man. You have a friend, though, and his name is Jimmy. You met him at the train station’s Prisoner Processing Room. You’ve been praying in your cattle car since it left Nebraska and traveled over the terribly cold Rocky Mountains and descended into the sweltering heat of the California high deserts. First you were freezing, then you couldn’t breathe from the heat and stench of the future prisoners all around you pissing, crapping, sweating, and bleeding on each other. None of you know why you’ve been captured, but you’re pretty sure it has something to do with your criminal activities. You did kill that bank clerk during a badass robbery.

  The stink is overwhelming, and you’re so jam-packed in that cattle car all you hear are rumors from your buddy Jimmy—who also killed a bank clerk—that you’re heading to a place you’ve only heard foretold in ancient ass-kicking legends.

  The Rock. Alcatraz. The Big Apple’s Clink. It goes by many unsavory names.

  And you’re like, “Oh, shit, motherfucker. Shit’s ’bout to get real, dawg. And to think I was just a farm boy who got caught up in a bank robbery, and I ain’t even was the triggerman.”

  And Jimmy just looks at you dead to rights, and he laughs a big, booming laugh that makes everybody in the cattle car shut the fuck up.

  “Ain’t none of us triggermen, son. We all just bitches to the The Man.”

  And everybody lets that sink in for a while because truer words have never been spoken to a gathering of the most Free Thugs Alive. And during this time of reflection, all’s completely fucking quiet for a long-ass time, except for the dude who was just shanked with a big-ass splinter torn off the boxcar—oh, and those rabid rats feeding on his guts.

  You don’t know what to say to Jimmy. Ain’t nobody knows what to say because you’re really all just bitches to The Man. But the thing is, this cattle car ride through the California High Desert is going to forever be branded into your memory as the last time serving Hard Time at the Big Time wasn’t so bad.

  Because every man in that car was the baddest motherfucker in his hometown, sure, and every one of them killed a bank clerk.

  But now, son, you’re all just whiny little bitches about to be digested by a monster we in the United States of America know as the Federal Penitentiary System.

  Part II: You’s a Badass

  The year is 1937, and now you, The Kid, and your buddy Jimmy have been doing hard time for five years. You’ve been getting jacked, lifting weights, eating food, and doing push-ups and general health-conscious calisthenics. You’ve become total supreme badasses of the penitentiary. When you and Jimmy swagger down Broadway, everybody shuts the fuck up, even the guards. Just being around you, dudes piss their black and whites. Things are getting pretty fuckin
g awesome for you and Jimmy. You are kings of this joint, and you don’t want this dream to ever end. The whole world is your bitch.

  And sometimes there are days where you and Jimmy have to set aside your noble Ways of Peace and be total badasses and royally fuck dudes up in the mess room if they talk back. For instance, you often stab men in the neck with a fork, but they deserve the fuck out of it for being less enlightened than you. Other days, you and Jimmy are totally benevolent Bodhisattvas turning a place that is the very definition of Hell into something that is almost like the Calm of the Forever Astral Grace. For instance, the day Jimmy announced the following words in the Rec Yard, while the forlorn cries of seagulls echoed overhead and steam boats groaned on the distant waves:

  “All right, all you Thugs and Badasses, gather around these stone bleachers!” Jimmy shouted louder than usual, to drown out a biplane overhead. “I decree there ain’t going to be no more stabbing each other in the neck with forks or mutilating each other while we sleep or killing the new meat for sport. We may be criminals to that world out there, but in here we are free men if we want to be. We don’t have to make this such a bitch for each other. We can make a peaceful place, not just a place of badasses and bitches.”

  And the Rec Yard roared that day, and you, The Kid did, too, because there were a lot of dudes out there who didn’t want to be assaulted anymore. And Jimmy had to make everyone pipe the fuck down as he carried on.

  “Also, some of you have found covert partners here to shack up with. I may have killed a lot of women and children, but I know true love when I see it. I know a lot of you men have true loves here today listening to these words. So I think that’s okay.”

  And the men were embarrassed at first because it went against their old-fashioned 1930s ideas of marriage and love, but then they looked into their hearts and knew that good men should like other good men and receive no judgment.

  Then, suddenly, the prison guards came, and with them was a man named Clarence Rex, who was as dumb as they come and believed in those outdated biblical values and ruled his roost with ideas forged in the Middle Ages.

  “What’s this I hear about you and non-Christian ideals of love?” he asked, jabbing a fat finger in Jimmy’s chest.

  Jimmy got right in his face and said, “I, as a straight, badass motherfucker, said all men should be free to love whomever they want and do what the fuck they want.”

  And then Jimmy took his huge fist and swung right into Clarence Rex’s face, killing him dead instantly. Everyone stood horrified for a moment, until the horde of guards swarmed them. First thing they did was make an example out of Jimmy, the new Savior of the Yard. They shot him exactly thirty-three times in his pelvic region, then twice in the head. It was gruesome, and you still ponder the significance of that number.

  After that, a riot broke out in honor of Jimmy’s Decree. Many brave men died that day, while you, The Kid, ended up in solitary just for being such a badass. And you spent the next seven years remembering Jimmy’s words about freedom and justice and love and hope and compassion, and that’s all you thought about as you planned your amazing escape and revenge.

  Part III: You’s a Bodhisattva (but still a Badass)

  You’ve been in The Hole for probably like ten years now, but you haven’t been wasting your time. You’ve continued your exercise regime to an obsessive degree. It’s all you do. It’s become your religion, your path to Enlightenment. With every push-up, you think one thing:

  Get the fuck out.

  You also think another thing:

  Remember what Jimmy decreed.

  So each time the guard comes around and lets in that precious moment of light when he drops a plate of gruel through your slot, you lick your chops, not because you want to eat the food they surely pissed in, but because you can taste that little bit of sunshine. You taste revenge and freedom, fried to perfection on our nearest star, and it tastes like Taco John’s classic Super Potato Olés®. Meaning delicious as fuck.

  What the guards don’t know, and what you never let on, is that you’ve been spending each day carefully toughening up your fingernails and doing a special finger exercise you learned in a dream about Yoga Jesus. And it’s taken years and years of hellish shit to become hard as adamantium and strong as a neutron blast. Anthropomorphized.

  And more than once you thought about killing yourself. Hell, by year five in The Hole, and with triple finger workouts every day, all you’d have to do is flick yourself right in the Adam’s apple and you’d be sleeping with those petunias made out of Alcatraz concrete made from the calcified remains of the shellfish in the Bay below.

  In fact, one day you were about to do it. Had your finger cocked at your throat until the guard comes by, opens the slot, drops the gruel in, and says, “You whore-bitch of a man, hope you choke on this shit today so I don’t have to see you tomorrow,” like always.

  And you’re about to release your trigger finger, crushing that little neck bone, but you’re just thinking, “That’s the last fucking time The Man says that shit. I’m making his bitchass wish come true.”

  So, you, The Kid with your Hindi-level asceticisms and ninja-like abilities to meditate all the damn time (because there’s jack else to do in the dark), decide to put your super hands to super use.

  You step to the toilet and grip it. The porcelain is cool, and you just squeeze the living fuck out of it, and it crumbles like really brittle dry putty in your hands. You whisper to yourself, “That was for Jimmy, but this next shit is for me,” and you clear the porcelain debris and just start pulling the copperworks right out of the concrete with your amazingly sculpted fingers, hands, forearms—hell, your whole body is shredded like no other, and you’re just tearing the guts out of this Concrete Beast so savagely you almost feel bad for it.

  Soon enough, there’s a man-sized hole in the floor of your cell, and you drop down it, right into the middle of the guards’ mess hall. You look around calm as fuck and say with an awesome smile, “Ain’t no slop time, bitches,” and you beat the piss out of all of them and get the keys to the front door.

  You walk up to that giant steel-riveted door, and you slip in the skeleton key, and you push those two-ton doors open like a man who’s never been more alive in his life.

  Because you haven’t till that day. And with the sun shining on the water, you know you’re about do something nobody has ever done, ever: Escape The Rock and live...

  Which you do! Only to become president of Venezuela where you rule as a Benevolent Dictator until the end of days. You’re beloved by its citizens for your charity and intelligence and remembered as the only leader to nationalize health care so damn quick, create a school system that produces the smartest badass Latin American kids the world has ever seen, and eliminate poverty completely through genius social welfare programs. But that’s not all: you sent a secret manned space mission to Mars, invented the Internet, and discovered a sustainable energy source (Hint: it’s nuclear fusion) that you won’t reveal to the world until they can prove they can handle it responsibly, since you know from your time in Alcatraz—where you learned all your guiding principles—that with great fucking power comes great fucking responsibility.

  Your only regret is that though you come close to creating an Eden on Earth, you are unable to properly forgive yourself for not going out of your way to forgive your father, who was the one who really killed that Nebraskan bank clerk so many years ago. But so goes the cycle of renewal and rebirth, as you all stumble toward Nirvana, perfection forever just out of reach of your wretched but muscular hands.

  The Ghosts of 14D

  by Joshua Chaplinsky

  As I raised the Spirit Box to the food slot, Alcatraz lived up to its reputation as one of the most haunted places on Earth . . .

  “Who are you?” Todd said into the darkness. It was more a command than a question. “What’s your name?”

  Danny peaked out from behind the camera. For a split second, his brain continued to render wha
t he saw in night vision, then everything went black. He held his breath and listened. Counted off the seconds in his head.

  Somewhere around twelve, the box spit static. The word name popped up on the digital display.

  “Name,” the box said out loud. Its robotic voice reverberated across the empty cell block.

  Name! The intake guard barked.

  Six-thirty.

  Ante or Post Meridiem?

  Post, sir.

  Time zone?

  Uh . . .

  The guard looked up from his form.

  Time zone?

  I . . . don’t know, sir.

  What do you mean, you don’t know?

  I . . .

  The guard jerked his pen over his shoulder.

  Over there, with the rest of the GMTs.

  But I—

  Next!

  Six-thirty shuffled off to the left, where he waited in line to be hosed down and deloused.

  Name!

  “Dude, did you hear that?” Todd slapped Danny’s arm.

  “All it did was repeat you.”

  “Yeah, but there was something else. You didn’t feel it?” He whipped out an EDI meter and stuck it through the slot. The numeric display took a nosedive. “It’s almost ten degrees cooler in there.”

  “Temperature doesn’t translate to good TV.”

  Todd glared at his cameraman. “But being a dick does?”

  Danny shrugged.

  “It’ll be fine,” Todd said. “I’ll add some voiceover in post.” He fiddled with a dial.

  “Ask him if he knew the Birdman!”

  “Shut up.”

  I awake naked in the hole. I know I’m awake because my eyes are open, not that it makes much difference. I scan the darkness, as if I can see through it. Despite the crushing loneliness, it always feels like someone is watching me.