Escape from Alcatraz (28 page)

He leaned over to West, ran a finger along a line of the sheet music and said, “When the time’s up, go talk to that bull—keep his head turned that way. Give me one minute.”

West nodded and at session’s end got the guard into conversation. Morris shoved the fan in with the accordion. As they passed through the gate into the cellhouse the guard beckoned to a violinist, three musicians ahead, to step out of line, then West right behind him. Morris went unconcernedly to his cell. He found the accordion slightly damaged, the fan blades bent.

After dinner, while West kept a lookout, Morris went to work on the fan. Using the small blade of the nailclip for a screwdriver, he loosened the set screw in the hub on the shaft from the motor. He then slid the hub back a fraction and picked off the fan blades.
Like pullin’ wings off a bee.
He inserted a drill snitched from the shop, moved up the hub again, and reset the screw. The drill was not tightly attached to the motor shaft. He doused the light, put the dummy to bed and took the motor to the top. Clarence was waiting for him there, with a length of pipe he had found in the utility corridor, left by repairmen.

“Better let me tackle the bars,” Clarence said.

“Okay.” Morris grabbed a raincoat off the stack piling up in their workshop. “Better wrap this around it—deaden the sound.”

Morris helped him up the shaft. In a short while he came down. “Bent one of the bars enough to squeeze past,” he reported. “Now for them goddam rivets.”

Morris plugged in the cord and piled an armful of raincoats over the motor. “Crawl out there, listen how it sounds.”

Clarence crawled out and over toward the edge above the west gun gallery. The guard was in D Block.

Morris reached under the raincoats and switched on the motor. It made a muffled whir. He let it run for half a minute, then waited for Clarence.

When he had wormed his way back to the cage, Clarence asked, “What happened? Won’t work?”

“You didn’t hear it?”

“Not a sound.”

“We got it made,” said Morris, and in the shadowy workshop they shook hands.

Clarence boosted Morris into the shaft, to the bend, then handed up the motor. Morris crawled up past the elbow, waited for the Alcatraz light to flash. In its brief glare he saw that Clarence had prized one of the two bars inward until it almost touched its mate, leaving a wide gap. Morris hung the motor over them and slid down to the dog-leg, where Clarence reached up the raincoats. He went back up, squeezed on past the bars, then straddled them. He wrapped the motor in the raincoats and, guided by the beacon flashes, set the drill against a rivet head. He held his breath, flicked on the motor. He felt a slight quiver. Nothing else happened. He pulled the drill away. It began to whir. He shut off the motor. He tried it again on the rivet head. A quiver, silence. He pulled it away. A whir. He stopped it.

“I’ll be a sonofabitch,” he said under his breath.

He tried a new tactic. He held the drill almost on the rivet, started the motor, let it gather speed, set it against the metal. A dying whine, a quiver, silence. He turned it off, sat for a while with the motor on his lap, staring up at the hood capping the ventilator shaft, watching the bright flashes of the Alcatraz light. He wrapped the cord around the raincoats, bundling the motor, and slid down to the cage workshop.

Clarence was elated. “By God, you sure worked that great! I thought sure as hell, that electric drill gets bitin’ into a rivet, smack against this tin shaft, jeez, we’re gonna have every bull in the joint swarmin’ up here. Frankie, I didn’t hear a goddam thing.”

“Neither did I,” said Morris.

“Them raincoats. I sure gotta hand it to you, man.”

“Look, Clarence, it
didn’t
work.”

Clarence squinted at him in the gloom. “No juice?”

“Not enough guts in the motor. Only a fractional horsepower. All it can do is spin a fan and maybe run a pencil sharpener. Put her up against metal and she goes
phhhh
.”

“So what now?”

“Take some more thinking,” said Morris, laying the raincoats on the stack.

“No, it don’t. Six lousy little rivet heads ain’t stoppin’ us, by God. We’ll take ’em off by hand.”

Morris stowed the motor and drill behind the stack of raincoats in the dim recess of the workshop. “You know, we could use a flashlight.”

“Fine, we’ll borrow the bull’s.”

“I’ll rustle up one, and lay off the wisecracks. Might come in handy up there too”—he nodded toward the shaft—“since we’ve got to take them off by hand. Any ideas about a tool?”

“The nailclip file.”

“How long will that last on a rivet head?”

“We got four.”

“Too soft.”

“Banjo or guitar strings, then.”

“I’ll try to find us some Carborundum string.”

“What the hell’s that?”

“Mechanics use it on the machines in the glove shop. Cut through anything.”

An inmate-mechanic produced the convict-dubbed Carborundum string—a cord impregnated with an abrasive such as raw grains of silicon carbide, aluminum oxide, or diamond powder and used for intricate repairs, such as fine grooving, on the sewing machines in the glove and tailor shops. Because of its nature, it was kept locked up and the mechanics had to request a piece when needed. Normally, the guards measured the string when issued, measured it again when returned, but lately were apt to be forgetful. Morris’s friend received a two-foot length, took back one foot.

On occasion a careless guard will toss into a trash can a flashlight bulb and batteries not quite dead. A convict on a garbage detail will salvage them: held together with plastic tape, they might be useful some day. Here was a possibility for the shaft workers, but Morris obtained a handier one for their purpose—a “pen” flashlight pilfered from the breast pocket of a guard’s coat.

When the conspirators returned to the task in the shaft, Morris said, “I’ll start each rivet with the Carborundum, then we switch over to this,” indicating a banjo string.

“Why not cut right through with that thing, if it’s so all-fired good?” asked Clarence.

“This is all we’ve got, we’d better save it. No tellin’ what we might run into beyond those rivets.” Morris produced the pen-shaped flashlight. “This’ll give us a pin-point light, better to work by and a lot less risky. Don’t have to hold it.” He stuck it between his teeth, flicked it on, then off. “Batteries are scarce, so only use it if you think you’re about through a cut. We don’t want a rivet head clattering down the shaft. West knows, you warn John. Okay, give me a boost, I’ll get the first cut goin’.”

It was a long, tedious job. Pairs alternated nights on the top of the block, and while one work away at a rivet, the other busied himself with getaway preparations. Morris noted one night that the workshop was getting cramped for space, and he took stock with the flashlight that West had put together for use there. He counted fifty-five raincoats, some still piled up, others sealed in layers for two rafts in the making, with rows of sleeves—stuffed with toilet paper and both ends tied—along the bottom; plus sets of water-wing or life-preserver sleeves tied only at one end. He checked the other items: the liquid plastic used as a sealer; the ineffectual fan motor, and an extra electric cord; part of a vacuum cleaner motor that had likewise proved useless; two electric drills; six small saw blades; a file; two short pieces of steel and an eight-inch length of scrap metal; two plywood oars he had shaped on the shop lathe.
Quite a hoard.

There were also the two sham heads of the conspirators on watch below. When they had started the painstaking work on the rivet heads, Morris had said: “We’d better store the dummies up here nights till we’re ready to take off. Some bull might go pokin’ through the tunnel with a flashlight. He finds those heads, we’re cooked.” Thereafter, when they finished an evening’s work they brought their dummies to the workshop for storage. Morris was now glad of his foresight: plumbers had started repair work in the service corridor of their block.

After taking the inventory, Morris told John: “Lay off the raincoats. Enough’s enough. No need to take risks.”

In spare moments, Morris perused magazines for ideas. Early in the conspiracy, he had run across a useful suggestion about resin—an item on how to make a lamp shade in a hints-for-home-crafts department in the November 1960 issue of
Popular Mechanics:
“… Apply to cloth and allow to harden. After that the cloth and resin hold their shape.” Resin was not available in the shops, but liquid plastic was, and it served nicely to seal and stiffen the edges of the raincoats for the rafts.

Thumbing through
Sports Illustrated
for May 21, 1962, he found a fascinating section on “The Joys of Water,” with a piece on boating and a pertinent page, “Signposts of Water Safety,” with color illustrations of channel buoys indicating proper course and warning of navigation hazards. In the March 1962
Popular Mechanics
he came across an article, “Your Life Preserver,” reporting on tests of various types. He read with acute interest, and a wry smile, the final paragraph:

“Like insurance, lifesaving devices are hard to value. If you don’t need them, they’re useless, even a bother. If you do need them, they’re priceless. Get the type that suits your need, then take it swimming and try it out. You might be glad you did.”

One night early in June, Clarence came down the shaft into the cage workshop with excitement in his whisper: “Got the last goddam head off!” It had been almost six months since they first began chipping around the edges of the vent grilles in their cells. Morris now went up the shaft with six tiny soap balls and a paint kit. He worked each soap ball onto a decapitated rivet, shaped it to resemble a rivet head and painted it black—just in case a guard happened to peer into the shaft from the roof some day.

Next morning at table John said, “we ready to shove off?”

“Not yet,” said Morris.

“Christ, man, we can’t keep this up for years.”

Morris gave him a hard look. “Know how many men got down to the water? Around thirty. Some got shot up, some drowned, some caught, others came back, half froze. Only two—Roe and Cole—ever got away,
if
they got away.
We want to make it.
”

“Okay,” said John, “when do we go?”

Morris said, “I want to find out more about Angel Island and the channel between there and Marin. Also a point or two about our route down to the beach. I hear there’s a pile of lumber, still on pallets, near the powerhouse. Maybe we can use a few boards to stiffen our rafts.” He debated a moment. “This is Friday. We go a week from Monday night.”

The guard stepped up. “Okay, let’s go.”

That night West called to Morris, “Keep a lookout, will you, Frankie? Got a little repair work to do.”

“Upstairs?”

“No, just fix up the hole. Too damn big.”

“Go to it,” said Morris. “We don’t want any hitch at this stage.”

The Anglins had reported a shakedown of their cells the previous Saturday. John’s bathrobe, hanging over the fake vent grille, had been moved to another peg. Clarence had found evidence of an inspection, but the large towel with the original owner’s name—UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS—in block letters down the center remained draped over a low cord in front of his vest.

West had discovered no hint of a visit to his cell, but he was worried: he might be next on the list, and his cardboard kept slipping out. This was Friday evening, and he decided to play it safe. He pushed his shoes into the utility corridor and crawled through. He groped toward the west end where the plumbers were replacing a toilet pipe into an empty cell. He came upon a sack of cement and filled both shoes. He did not bother to search for a trowel; he knew they wouldn’t leave tools.

He returned to his cell, emptied the shoes in the wash basin and mixed the cement. Spoon handle for trowel, he began reducing the size of the hole. He decided to do a good job while he was at it and slapped on all the cement, then pushed the cardboard onto it. What matter if it did set with the cement, he could rip it out: the next time he crawled through that hole would be the last. He wiped off the cement that had oozed around the edges, then cleaned the basin.

“All done,” he told Morris.

“Do a good job?”

“Damn good, if I do say so.”

Morris pored over tide charts and maps borrowed from the prison library.

On the
next
Monday the Anglins appeared moody at lunch and dinner, and shortly before nine o’clock that night, Morris heard a muffled voice at his vent. He pulled the light cord, drew back the accordion case.

It was John Anglin. “Get your head, Frank. We’re goin’ tonight.”

“But we agreed—”

He was gone. Morris heard the faint rustling as he shinnied up the pipe. Then he heard Clarence Anglin notify West and climb the pipe. Morris went to the top. He met them coming back with their dummies and whispered, “Why the sudden rush?”

“Can’t wait,” said John.

“You said we got it made, let’s get to hell out,” said Clarence.

Returning with his dummy, Morris stopped at the bottom and listened. He heard the sound of digging, knelt and peered into West’s cell. West was chipping away furiously.

“What’s holding you up?” Morris asked.

“This goddam cement. Can’t get the hole open again.”

“Jesus, West, you’re running a hell of a chance of screwing up the works. Hold off till I get in.”

Morris crawled into his cell, replaced the case, hurried up front to stand watch. “Okay,” he called, and West resumed his frantic digging.

The bright cell lights blinked out, plunging the block into a brief blackness before the overhead lights filled the steel-and-concrete corridor with a stark sort of gloaming. It became even duskier as the guard in the west gunwalk went off duty and his wall cage darkened. The sudden gloom seemed to sharpen the racket of chatter in the cellhouse. It would be a half hour before the inmates settled down for the night, like roosting fowl.

Morris gave the cell a swift final survey: the personal effects on the shelves, the garments on the pegs, the shoes beside the bed, the dummy lying there so lifelike, even without the peacoat. He was taking it, after all. He squirmed out, tugged the accordion case to the wall with the string.