Escape from Alcatraz (27 page)

He reported the setback at breakfast, and a gloom descended on the table.

“You think the grille’s welded on them things?” asked Clarence.

“Sure of it,” said Morris.

“How about a file?” suggested West.

“Look, man,” said John, “that can’t be much of a weld. Get a little old wedge in there and I bet you can knock it loose.”

Morris selected a short piece of broom handle from the scrap pile at the shop and fashioned a wedge out of it on the lathe. It was fairly hard wood. Later, worrying, he took it back to the lathe when the foreman stepped out. He smoothed the other end, gave it a slight slant. He was glad of the foresight when, stepping through the Snitch Box after entering the cellhouse, he was beckoned out of line by the lieutenant for a spot frisking.

“What’s the wedge for?” asked the lieutenant.

“Wedge, sir? That’s a clothes peg.”

“With an edge like this?” and the lieutenant ran his thumb along the sharp end.

“Hold the clothes better,” said Morris. “Got the idea out of a magazine. It goes on vertical—the edge—like this,” and he demonstrated.

“Well,” said the lieutenant. “I’ll have to try that. Let me know if it works.”

“Yes, sir.”

It worked. Morris slid the wedge in and hammered it cautiously with the heel of his shoe and in a moment he heard the first one crack loose, then the others. He carefully pulled the grille free, fragments of concrete thudding lightly on his peacoat. He set the grille aside and reached into the dark hole, exploring its sides with his fingers, then the far rim. He placed his fingertips at that rim and held his forearm rigid and then, using the side of his other hand as a marker, withdrew the arm. His earlier measurement with the reed-rod was correct: the wall was about eight inches thick. He replaced the grille, pushing it gently, then tested it with a light tug. It held.

“Got her loose,” he reported to West.

“Great,” said West. “When do I start?”

“Clarence and I had better go all the way through first. Be safer that way. Also, you and John can learn from our experience.”

It was still early, so Morris turned Cell 138 into a pulp mill. He removed the blade from his safety razor and, with infinite care, cut advertisement pages out of the magazine he had borrowed from the library that day, cutting them as near to the binding as he could get to conceal the fact they had been excised. Then he got out the pages he had stashed under his mattress. He soaked them well in the basin, let the water run out, then with the spoon bowl as a pestle mashed them into a soggy mass. He heard West start whistling “Home on the Range,” pushed the sodden bulk down in the basin, grabbed up the magazine, and lay back on his cot.

In a moment he heard a guard go by on patrol, and a little later he went up front, “Wonder what got into him?”

“Just out for a stroll, I guess,” said West.

Morris gathered the pulp out of the basin, dumped it on the steel table top and kneaded it as though it were dough. Satisfied as to the texture, he flattened it out with his palms, then pressed it to the thickness he wanted with the sole of his heavy shoe. By rule of thumb, marking it off with the spoon, he measured an oblong a fraction of an inch larger than ten by fourteen inches, then cut it out with the razor blade. He shredded the trimmings and flushed them down the toilet. At lights-out, he slid the pulpy oblong off the table onto the magazine, then eased it onto the top wooden shelf at the rear. It was still quite soggy next morning, so he eased it back onto the magazine and under his mattress.

Each evening after lockup he brought the
papier-mâché
from its cache to speed up the drying process. By Monday night it was cardboard, ready to use. He centered the black grille on it and marked an outline with pencil. Then, with pigment and brush from Artist Clarence Anglin, he painted a facsimile. Next he positioned the cardboard over the vent and traced an outline on the wall. Working industriously, he chipped the outlined area to the depth necessary to accommodate the facsimile, achieving a snug fit. Only one flaw: it was off-color. He had forgotten to get the tube of green paint.

Clarence brought the green to lunch the next day, and that evening Morris, with cool patience, painted the grayish part of the cardboard. He stood back and appraised his handiwork: the cardboard blended in with the wall, and at a cursory glance the spurious grille looked real. He stopped to the front of the cell and studied it.
Sure as hell looks like the old one.
The old grille was in the hole behind its successor.

That next evening Morris began the excavation in depth, covering the stubs of strap iron with black friction tape. Evening after evening, seven nights a week, he chipped away. He grew anxious about the accumulation of rubble and began pushing it over the far edge, reaching through and spreading it along the alley wall. When the job was half completed, he squeezed his shoulders in and stuck his head into the utility corridor. Vents of lighted cells glimmered faintly along the dark passageway. A sudden burst of laughter startled him. It came out of the vent directly opposite, just three feet away, a black inmate chatting with his neighbor on Broadway. He would have to exercise more care. When he neared the end of the project he shoved his peacoat into the service corridor to muffle the sound of tumbling fragments. He finished at last and, restraining his excitement, passed the word to West.

Several nights later Clarence completed his exit. Then came a period when Morris and Clarence Anglin stood lookout while the others dug. In time four escape holes were ready, and the next phase got under way, with Morris and Clarence working, West and John standing watch.

Morris laid magazine and pages on the steel table, gathered concrete particles from the utility corridor and mixed up a batch of plaster with the aid of soap and white glue from the brush shop. He molded it into the shape of a head and neck, then used his fingers and the flat part of the spoon handle to sculpture the brow, sockets for eyes, the nose, mouth, chin. He tucked the head away in the hole.

In a few nights it was set and dry enough to embellish. He crawled into the utility corridor and groped his way down to Clarence’s cell vent, came back with a brush and tubes of pink, white, and black paint. The white itself was too white, but by experimenting with the pink he managed to obtain a Rock pallor. He lightly brushed more touches of pink on the cheeks and ears. Then the whites of the eyes, black for the pupils. Gluing on the eyebrows, hair courtesy of barber Clarence, took pains. Even more so, the eyelashes. Then the hair, a full head, brushed back, no part. Morris was his own model, in the mirror.

The paint was wet, but he couldn’t resist trying out his creation. He spread out magazine pages and arranged the dummy in bed, careful not to get paint on the sheet. Pillow and peacoat filled out the rest of the figure. He yanked off the light and walked from back to front, slowly, to study the effect.
Looks damn real.

“Substitute’s ready,” he told West.

“How’s it look?”

“Hate to brag, but looks like there’s two of us in here.”

He returned the paints and brush, then stored the dummy in the hole, on papers.

“Say, Al, I’d like to make a run to the top tomorrow night, if you don’t mind holding off a day on your dummy. Clarence is still a day or so behind.”

“Where you goin’, to the roof?” West asked.

“Thought I’d go up and check things.”

About a half hour after lockup the next night, as the cell blocks began to hum, Morris, who had been sitting with the light out to get used to the gloom, gave the signal.

“Be careful,” West said.

“That’s me,” said Morris.

He had tied a string around the accordion case. He now moved the case back from the wall, bedded down the dummy, squirmed through into the utility corridor, then pulled the case back against the wall with the string. He was wearing socks to avoid making noticeable prints in the dust. He stood a moment to get his bearings, then shinnied up a pipe to a plumber’s catwalk at the second tier. He waited here briefly. He looked up. In the glow of the house lights he could see a maze of pipes and conduits. He climbed to the third tier catwalk, then on up. He gripped the pipe with his legs and peered cautiously over the rim, inched higher, then ducked down again. The guard in the west gun gallery was visible. He waited minutes, peered again. The guard was moving toward D Block.

Morris crawled over the edge and wormed his way eastward toward the target ventilator shaft with its mesh-wire cage. He was now deep in the shadows: the unmanned east gun gallery was not lighted. He glanced back toward the west gallery and noted, with pleasurable surprise, that it was hidden from view. He stood up. Now he could see it. Standing on tiptoe, he could almost touch the ceiling with his fingertips. He noted that the shaft made a dog-leg about a foot below the ceiling. He crouched and entered the large mesh cage by a screen door. The shaft opening seemed five feet, perhaps more, above the top of the block, the dog-leg a good foot or more beyond. Morris, five feet seven and a half, stood up in the shaft, hands over his head. He could feel the bend in the shaft and that was all; he could not get a hold to pull himself up into it. He withdrew from the shaft and studied the situation. He needed Clarence to give him a boost.

He descended the thirty feet to the ground tier, wiggled back into his cell, stored the dummy, replaced the accordion case, pulled on the light, carefully brushed the dust off his trousers. He went to the front and reported, “I’m back.”

“Noticed your light go on,” said West. “How’d you make out?”

“Okay, to the top of the block.”

“Not to the roof?”

“Can’t get into the shaft without a boost.”

He reported on his trip at breakfast. “We can use that mesh cage up there for a workshop to make rafts and water wings. Also more stuff.”

“Make water wings?” asked John.

“They’re not regular issue,” West said.

“Raincoat sleeves tied at the ends,” Morris explained. “Run them under your arms, over your shoulders. What I hear, they give you about 70 percent buoyancy. We’ll make pontoon rafts with them too, if we can get enough raincoats.”

“Just say how many,” John said. “I can get ’em for you wholesale.”

“Better start bringing them up. We’ll need plenty.”

“I’ll wear one up tomorrow.”

“Since it’s safer for me, with a dummy, I’ll run them on up to the workshop,” Morris said.

Several nights later West reported disturbing news to Morris: “They got me paintin’ the ceilin’ from a stepladder top of our block.”

“Bull up there with you?”

“Nope, but I thought sure the jig was up. But then, after he opens the door to get up there, he just says, ‘Watch your step,’ and stays behind.”

As it happened, West worked days up there and finished the job—alone.

John Anglin wore a black plastic raincoat up from the basement after work each afternoon, passing it through the vent to Morris. The guard, coming on duty in a change of shifts, was not aware that he had not worn the coat down; but he halted Anglin once, out of curiosity—at a moment when Anglin, growing bold in his thievery, was wearing two raincoats.

“Leak down there?” the guard asked.

“No, why?” said Anglin, brazenly.

“Why?” The guard touched a sleeve. “Why this raincoat every day?”

“Gets chilly. I’m from the South, and this Rock ain’t Florida climate.”

“Get yourself a peacoat.”

“None left, waitin’ for a new batch.”

The guard nodded, and Anglin walked on to his cell. Thereafter, he limited his daily pilfering to one coat.

At lunch one day Clarence reported: “Heard about flesh-colored paint today and ordered a tube. By God, they sure make things easy here.”

Morris frowned. “What’s on your canvas?”

“Like, what’m I paintin’? A barn, sort of.”

“Well, wipe it off and start on a
portrait.
Ordering flesh paint—Christ, Clarence, use your head.”

Finally, each had both access to the utility corridor and a copy of his head reposing to the ventiduct. On a Friday evening, dummies abed, Morris and Clarence made an exploratory trip to the top of the block. John and West remained behind as lookouts. John sat on his cot with a periscope stuck through the bars—a homemade affair, fashioned out of cardboard and his mirror, that let him see the length of the corridor. West had his accordion slung over his shoulder and, in the event John whistled him to signal the workers overhead, he would grind out, fortissimo, “Come Back to Sorrento.”

Clarence sized up the situation in the mesh cage. Then he got down on his haunches; Morris, standing in the shaft, stepped on his shoulders, and Clarence slowly rose, boosting Morris up around the bend. But before Clarence got to his full six feet, he felt Morris stamping his shoulder, and he held there. After some minutes, at a toe-jabbing signal, Clarence withdrew and helped Morris ease out noiselessly. He sensed Morris’s dejection and whispered, “Well?”

“After all that work,” Morris whispered back. “Months of hard work. We’re trapped, can’t get out.”

“The hell you say. Bars?”

“Two bars, near the top. And the shaft’s got a cap on it, a rain hood.”

“Okay, we’ll spread the bars and knock the goddam cap off.”

“Not this one. It’s held by six iron uprights riveted to the shaft. They also hold a grid with crossbars, at the top of the shaft. A rat couldn’t squeeze through.”

At breakfast, Morris waited until he had eaten half his stack of pancakes, then broke the glum silence: “Well, I gave it some thought last night.”

“Come up with anything?” asked John.

Morris nodded. “Maybe. Like Clarence said, the two bars are easy. We can use a spreader on them. Then the six rivet heads.” He forked up a bite, gave them a level look. “A drill will bust ’em off. That means a motor. There’s an outlet in the mesh cage, probably juice for the blower they took out. It’s somethin’ to think about.”

It was Saturday, and that afternoon West and Morris, as teacher and pupil of the accordion, sat off to one side of the orchestra, over near a corner, in the stuffy room in the basement. Morris was fingering the keys in an achingly slow “Home, Sweet Home” when his mind gave gradual recognition to something his eyes had been staring at for a long time. It was a small fan, with cord wrapped around its base, sitting idle in the corner, almost hidden by his accordion case. He studied the big, squarish case, as wide at the top as the bottom. He remembered how the instrument fit inside, wide at the bottom but narrow at the keyboard top, with an empty space about four inches wide and five or so deep. The fan might fit—it
would
fit if he crushed it down into the keyboard. It might damage the accordion.
So what? I’m not takin’ the damn thing along.
There was the risk of a check getting back into the cellhouse: all instrument cases must be opened for a guard’s inspection at the gate at the top of the stairs. Lately, however, Morris had noted, this rigid routine had been relaxed by some guards to a spot check.