Escape from Alcatraz (23 page)

This was the mother of Frankie, and Frankie was the boy of the delicate skin and golden brown curls that became the man now biding his time on Alcatraz, waiting to jolt The Rock out of existence.

Chapter 16

T
HE RIGOR OF THE ROCK
had eased by the time Frank Morris reached there, but it was still Alcatraz, as an associate warden had once impressed upon an inmate who had complained that harsh punishments were dealt out even when no prison regulation had been violated.

Morris was booked into quarantine, the inside half of C Block, on Broadway, where he would remain locked up, except for trips to the mess hall and the basement shower room, until he was fully processed and put to work. (This step was skipped in the case of blacks, who went automatically into the segregated black section, the inside of B Block across Broadway from the tiers for the white transients.)

Within the cellhouse, a huge structure resembling a warehouse with tall windows and skylights, were three big blocks—A, B, C—and the isolated D Block, or Treatment Unit, and the library, behind a grated partition. With the rapid dwindling off of arch-desperadoes after the doughty G-men had brought an end to the gangster era, A Block fell into disuse and was now reserved solely for storage. This block, where the Army had its solitary confinement cells on the side facing the north windows, was used in the old days mainly as an isolation quarter, particularly in the period after the dread dungeon was abolished and while the old D Block was being modernized after the break of the Doc Barker quintet in 1939.

The other big blocks, B and C, contained a total of 336 cells in double banks of triple tiers; that is, each block had two banks, each bank three tiers, and each tier had twenty-eight cells. Along the center of each block, between the banks, ran a utility corridor, commonly known as “the tunnel,” a narrow dark passage cluttered with the sewer pipes, water mains, and electrical conduits that served the cells. The solid steel doors at either end of this corridor, on all tiers, were locked, and the tunnel inaccessible to convicts. At the tier levels inside the service corridor were plank catwalks for the plumbers and electricians. (An astute guard had once suggested that these narrow walkways be replaced by floors the width—about three feet—of the corridor to prevent convicts from climbing to the top of a block and setting up a sniper’s post, as they had done during the Battle of Alcatraz. If the guard’s suggestion had been taken up, Morris could not have carried out his incredibly bold scheme.)

Broadway runs between the two big blocks, at one end the main entrance to the cellhouse, the dining room at the other. These blocks quarter the “general population.” The library occupies half the area against the south wall, across from the outside of C Block; the other half, in the southwest corner of the house, holds D Block, variously known as the isolation quarter, the Treatment Unit, or simply TU. This small block, sealed off by concrete walls and a solid steel door, has forty-two cells in two tiers, six of them, on the bottom row, set aside as dark cells for solitary confinement, each with two doors, one grated and the other solid.

This was the physical setup of the cellhouse when Morris came. A little after four o’clock on his first afternoon there, the quiet was broken by the heavy, trooping tread of the convict workers returning from the industrial shops, through the door from the yard, between D Block and the mess hall. Like all newly arrived prisoners, he would have cased this activity. The desk of the lieutenant, next to the mess-hall entrance, was out of his range of vision, as he was in the second cell from that end, but this would not have fazed a man of his ingenuity. By holding his mirror through the bars he could have watched the process, particularly the custodial part, with a convict’s habitual eye for routine and the slightest variation that could be significant.

He would have noted that the workers—as always, in manageable groups of about fifteen—upon entering passed through the high-silled frame of a movable Snitch Box like sheep into a paddock. The lieutenant beckoned a prisoner out of each batch for a spot check—a quick frisking for nonmetallic contraband that could slip by the electronic detector. The convicts climbed the circular steel stairway to their tier level and disappeared into their holes like pigeons returning to a loft—and a guard at the control box at the end of the block clanged the cell doors shut. The pattern of group arrivals varied daily, as did the pattern of their treks to the mess hall. Once all the workers were locked up, guards made a count, the lieutenant phoned the Armorer in the control center that all was well, and the tramp to dinner began, again by controllable units.

Morris, who had had only a snack in the course of his first day’s processing, welcomed this break, both to eat and to case. In the early years, when silence was a strict rule, the inmates sat on one side of long tables, all facing front. Now, he noted, they faced one another across the tables. The room, large and airy and done in green and ivory, was lighted by barred windows along the north wall overlooking the bay. Fainter light entered from the south where an outside balcony ran the length of the mess hall, patrolled during meals by armed guards. A guard also sat in a gun cage midway in that wall, a barred and mesh-wired recess dimly lit to provide better vision. Morris spotted small apertures beneath the south windows—gun ports.

His roving eye caught another feature: silvery ornaments that embellished the ceiling. He might have guessed, accurately, their purpose was more functional than decorative. The pretty pendants were tear gas bombs, inspiration for the convicts’ grim baptizing of the dining room as the Gas Chamber. They were deterrents to trouble in the mess hall, traditional focal point for prison riots. At the touch of a button by the sentry in the gun cage, they would explode into clouds of blinding, choking, nauseous fumes.

As he moved along the steam tables in the cafeteria-style line, Morris observed inmate cooks at huge copper kettles in the kitchen beyond. His tray held a plastic bowl, a compartmented plastic plate, metal fork and spoon—no knife, an implement issued only on the infrequent occasions when a steak or roast was served. This night’s menu, the Thursday regular, offered soup du jour, now thick with the daily dumping of leftovers since Monday; Polish sausage and potatoes; bread, coffee or tea.

Something else had changed radically since the old days. Although the men had only twenty minutes to eat, they did not bolt their food, for this was a break in routine, a gap in the monotony that stamped all the days of the year with an almost unvarying sameness. But the nonravenous devouring was not the notable change: the men did not eat all they had taken. Many, either without an appetite or lacking a relish for Polish sausage, left half their dinner. Even more striking was the obvious fact that mealtime on The Rock had truly become a diversion: around the room playful convicts chunked doughy wads of bread at one another.

A convict said with a grin, “Recreation period.” And then he explained: “What can the bulls do? Put everybody in TU? It’s not big enough. Club them? Shoot them? Pop those pretty gadgets on the ceiling and gas everybody? Nope, they don’t want the SPCA in their hair.”

At the end of the allotted time a guard glanced down both sides of the table to check the flatware, then gave the nod to a group. The meal schedule was so precisely clocked that the first unit was marching out as the last unit came in.

After dinner the convicts lined up at their cell fronts, inside, for the last stand-up count of the day. It was now 5:30, and they were sealed in for the long night, thirteen hours. They had four hours until lights out, four precious hours to use as they pleased, within the limited confines of their cubicles, separated from their neighbors by steel-plate walls.

As this was his first night on The Rock, Morris’s curiosity about the security setup would have been too acute to listen to crooners on the radio headset or thumb through the library catalogue. He would have, in the manner of most newcomers, yanked the light cord and stood at the front bars, the darkened cell affording him a sharper view of the scene, like a box at the theater.

The winter night had already blacked out the skylight. The big globes overhead cast a cold glare, and the scattered lights of the occupied cells in the bank of tiers across Broadway vaguely resembled a huge bingo board. The concentration of the convicts imparted to the beehive cell blocks a strange elfin quality—captive dark elves of the caves, bent to the night’s mischief. Not so strange at that, for these studiously engaged men had a distinction in common: they were known to the world outside as unredeemably evil—murderers, kidnapers, robbers, rapists, thugs.

Morris became aware of sounds. Someone playing a guitar, softly. A thin voice from the tier above: “King knight to black bishop three,” and shortly a gruff response: “Queen pawn captures.” Chatter with a Deep South lilt drifted up from Broadway: two blacks in conversation, sight unseen, in adjoining cells on the bottom tier across the way. Several inmates—there were at least three voices—had been talking quietly below him, but an argument was developing: the pitch was rising. Above all the confusion floated a note like the insistent moan of a muted wind instrument.

Morris studied the officer on the floor. He caught every slight movement as a guard patrolled Broadway, observed the casual way he glanced at the cells on either side, the pace of his stroll, like that of a monitor indifferently looking for cribbers during a classroom exam. The guard had good reason to feel secure in his pottering patrol: he was as safe from the reach of Morris, or any of the others, as a zookeeper from the claws of a caged lion. As the officer turned right at the corner and disappeared behind B Block, Morris glanced in his mirror at the clock on the wall above the lieutenant’s desk: 6:42.

He now focused his attention on the gun gallery that ran along the west wall, at twice a man’s height from the floor, accessible only from the outside. Presently that guard walked into view, his patrol also deceptively casual, like a ship’s watch on a calm starry night. The guard stopped, directed a glance down the inside tiers of B Block, then the inside tiers of C Block. He sauntered on out of sight toward the Treatment Unit. Morris clocked him. His sharp eye very likely detected something surprising: the guard in the
gun
gallery was
unarmed.

Morris cased the opposite gallery, on the east wall. It was dark. Perhaps that officer preferred the advantages of a dim post, just as Morris chose to be a spectator from the shadows of his own cell. He kept his gaze riveted on the gallery section visible between the blocks, straining for a movement. At length, a motion did attract his notice, but it was below the gunwalk: the floor guard was rounding the far end of B, into Broadway. Morris glanced at the clock in his mirror: 7:28. It had taken him roughly forty-five minutes to go around the block.

The guard in the west gunwalk passed slowly north, and Morris again studied the east gallery. Still no sign of activity. The gallery was dark apparently because it was empty. Then he caught a motion, a blur that ran upward, then streaked slanting down the mesh: a huge rat. That settled it. He could tot up his observations: the east gunwalk unmanned; the guard in the west cage unarmed; only one officer, unarmed, on the floor. It added up to an air of security that seemed audacious, and it must have given Morris a sinking sense that he would spend a large slice of his life in a cell such as this, enclosed by thick concrete, solid plates of steel, and bars that would take a stick of dynamite to spread. Once in the cellhouse, he could be certain, he was barred, bolted, buttoned up. In the work area outside? A chance, perhaps, a chance.…

Morris glanced ceilingward. A skylight ran along the roof, directly over Broadway, but there were no rafters to crawl along, and the skylight was beyond the touch of fingertips standing tip-toe on the cell block. Atop a cell block? Steel bars, close together, ran from the block to the ceiling. He could not even get on the top.

Abruptly the bright cells blacked out. The house lights now shed a ghostly twilight on Broadway. It was 9:30, bedtime. The curfew silenced the calls of the chess players, the laughing chatter of the black convicts, the argument downstairs. For a time the stirring of the inmates shucking off their clothes and settling down for the night filled the corridor with a sound like the swash of waves on a beach.

Without the rivalry of the voices, the moan of the muted horn grew suddenly sonorous, and Morris could distinguish it for what it was: the wind. As he lay in his bed, head to the bars, it seemed to rise to the force of a gale, howling through the cavernous cellhouse.

Soon another uproar came racketing into the cellhouse—the hoarse bellowing of foghorns, one upon another, from either end of the island. Fog had swirled in through the Golden Gate on the night wind.

A convict new to The Rock usually sleeps the sleep of exhaustion on his first night. He has heard such tales about the place, and has built up such anxiety en route, that even the shrieking wind and vibrant foghorns have no effect against the sedation of fatigue. Morris must have experienced that, and if so it would take the rise-up-and-shine blast, like that of a foghorn at his very cell door, to yank him out of his deep slumber. Six
A.M.
Twenty minutes till the head count; twenty minutes for personal and housekeeping chores.

Morris, informed of regulations, would wash quickly in the cold water from the single tap and brush his teeth with the powder, then get into his clothes and cinch the belt—a wooden buckle to keep the electronic eye of the Snitch Box from blinking. Make the bed, straighten up the cell, take a position at the front bars. A guard came along, gave cell and occupant a cursory survey, passed on, the first of twelve official counts of the day. Then the lieutenant’s command, “Ring in outside B!” and the trek by units to breakfast began.

Upon leaving the mess hall this time, the convicts filed through the Snitch Box, rolled over from the yard door—one of the unscheduled mechanical friskings designed to discourage the pocketing of a fork or a spoon, items the prisoner sometimes purloined just for the thrill of it or possibly to be caught and sent to the Treatment Unit as a break in the monotony. The men marched back to their cells, were counted, then rung out to the shops. Morris watched them go from his quarantine cell. After the cross-country journey in an air-conditioned Pullman compartment, he was still sensitive to the mild odor of disinfectant that pervaded the prison. He would soon grow accustomed to the scent, just as he had at other institutions; just as a printer or a fish dealer or a fertilizer-plant worker becomes inured to the distinctive aroma of his trade. He stretched out on the cot for a nap.