Glass Cell (11 page)

“It’s
on
!” somebody shrieked in a voice that cracked.

“Come on in,” the elevator operator said quickly to Carter, but just then an inmate jumped on the operator, pinned his arms to his sides, and they both fell to the elevator floor.

Suddenly everybody was running. Carter was knocked aside by three or four men who rushed into the elevator, yelping and laughing. A shot was fired within the cell block, but it sounded faint in the roar of voices. The elevator door shut. Carter turned and saw that the door into B-block was wide open and that men from A-block were pouring through it. He didn’t know where to go, had an impulse to duck into one of the cells nearby for safety, but he had hardly started toward the cells when he collided violently with a big man who was running. Carter gasped painfully, geting back the breath that had been knocked out of him. He was suddenly furious. He headed for B-block. The crush of bodies at the bottleneck of the door was terrifying. Carter was aware of a man’s body under his shoes. A few men punched at the heads of the men in front of them. Then Carter was through the door. Men were streaming down from the tiers of B-block, all yelling. Water cascaded from one of the tiers, and the men under it, who were getting wet, shouted and pushed at the human sea around them. Max’s cell was perhaps two hundred yards away, but it might as well have been two hundred miles. He gave up the idea of reaching him, and aimed for the cells on his left. An old man was trailing behind him, clinging to Carter’s shirt like a drowning man, and saying, “I want to get to my cell! My cell!”

“Get away, bud!” a mad-faced inmate said when Carter finally reached a cell. There were four others in there with him, and they were holding the door shut.

Carter pushed toward the next cell, going in the direction of Max. The whole mob was pushing toward C-block, and Carter supposed the doors were open. The next two cells had their doors open, but they were being raided, bedding torn up, mattresses flung on the floor. A toilet had been pulled out and water flowed. It crossed Carter’s mind that a lot of toilets pulled out could flood the downstairs and drown them all. In another cell, a man was screaming in pain: six or eight men were in the cell, beating and kicking at the screaming man, who was not visible. Carter gave up the cell idea. What chance had he if hundreds had the same idea? He saw a single man desperately trying to hold a barred door shut on himself, and failing. A toilet was flung in a heavy arc over Carter’s head, and at least two men dropped beneath it.

“Here we go! Pass him on!” someone sang out, and a man was passed feet first and horizontal, laughing and out of his mind, over the heads of all, touched by many, hit in resentment and fear, helped on by other laughing men, and soon he was far on the way to the door of C-block and out of sight.

“Hang the warden! Hang the warden!” The chant grew.

Carter looked for Max. He saw Hanky, grinning and yelling, waving a homemade knife in triumph. Water slammed down on Carter and the men around him, and in the press to escape it, Carter was swept out into the center of the corridor. But there the stream moved faster, and within seconds he was abreast of Max’s cell, and he fought his way toward it.

Max’s cell was occupied by about eight men, wide-eyed with fear, all standing rigid, holding the door shut.

“Where’s Max?” Carter yelled at them.

“Who?”

“Max! That’s his cell!”

The men looked blank. Maybe they hadn’t heard him. He was shouting across a dozen men. Carter did not know any of the men in Max’s cell.

The crowd was suddenly much thinner around Carter. They were finally pushing through into C-block.

“Shove on, buddy,” one of the men in Max’s cell said to Carter.

“I’m not trying to get in. Don’t any of you know where Max is?”

A few cell doors were opening now. Some men came out yelping and screaming with laughter. They had taken refuge only during the worst, and they were ready to join in again.

“Let’s get out of here,” said one of the men in Max’s cell.

Suddenly the cell door opened and they all slipped out in a fast stream, eight, perhaps ten men.

Max lay on the floor at the back of the cell.

When he turned Max over and saw his face, he knew he was dead. Max’s face was full of blood and absolutely smashed. Carter gasped, took a few short, crazy breaths, then charged out the door. He ran toward C-block, after the ten men. One of them had done it, or more than one, fighting for Max’s cell. A large man half jokingly reached out and stopped Carter with a thick arm. Carter raised a foot and shoved it into the man’s stomach. The man reeled back and hit the wall. He went down. Carter jumped on him. He jumped on his face, his body, he kicked him. Loud voices nearby cheered him on. Carter seized the man’s shirt collar in both hands and banged his head against the stone floor.

Then a Negro inmate pulled Carter by his shirtfront, grinned into his face and said, “Hey, man, you goin’ crazy!”

Carter threw his fist at the Negro and missed.

The Negro hit back, and Carter was knocked unconscious.

When he came to, the cell block was silent, except for two voices at the far end. Two inmates stood there with guns in their hands. A third man stood by himself, also with a gun, at the other end of the block, much nearer to Carter.

“Thought you were daid, Joe,” said the nearest man with the gun, a Negro. He danced slowly from foot to foot.

Carter tried to push himself up, and his arm gave way, bending strangely, and he realized it was broken. He got up with the aid of his other arm and staggered toward the support of an open cell door. The cell was empty. He collapsed on the lower bunk, on the bare springs, because the bedding was all over the floor.

There he passed, by his watch, twenty-four hours. The lights were kept on all the time. The inmate guards were changed, there were several of them now at either end of the corridor. A couple of them brought Carter water from somewhere, twice, because the basin in the cell where he was had been broken: water trickled from the broken pipes down the wall, but the pipes had been broken off inches within the wall, and the water was running away somewhere inside. Carter’s arm was swelling. He asked a couple of times to be taken to the hospital, but the guards said they couldn’t leave their posts, they were under orders. They said it with pride, as if they now served in an army they loved and respected. One said he would try to get permission to have a couple of men take him away. Carter’s arm throbbed like his thumbs. He longed for his morphine. He began to throw up the water a few minutes after he had drunk it. The men who took him away were in good spirits. They were also a bit drunk. Carter could smell the liquor on their breaths. One was colored, one was white.

“Yes, suh,” said the Negro. “We got a real efficient prison now. Stretchers ’n’ hot-water bottles, bamboo and moonshine!” He laughed like a soprano.

They staggered and jolted him. The elevator, they said, was broken. They took the stairs.

“You the fellow what killed Whitey?” the Negro asked in a pleasant tone, smiling.

Carter said nothing. He vaguely remembered one hard fight, remembered kicking a man. He had not the faintest recollection of the man’s face, whether he was short or tall, fat or thin, white or colored.

The hospital had been wrecked. Dr. Cassini looked like a scared rabbit. He mumbled a hello to Carter as if he barely recognized him. Smashed bed tables were piled in a heap in a corner. There were no more straight chairs. Two inmate guards lounged at the window end of the ward with guns in their pockets, handles sticking out.

“Every time somebody comes in that door, I think it’s another raid,” Dr. Cassini said. “Jesus! How much dope do they think we keep here? I been raided four times!” He was fumbling with Carter’s arm, feeling it.

“Is there any morphine?” Carter asked, automatically whispering it.

Dr. Cassini grinned, and looked around him. He bent low and said, “I keep a private hoard. Just for emergencies like this. Penicillin, too. We’ll be okay, Philip, me boy.”

Dr. Cassini pulled his arm straight in a traction device, and for this he got an extra shot of morphine. Even so, it was painful, the sharp-edged bone nipping away at the tender flesh around it. Carter pretended that he had promised Max to take it without a murmur, which was the way he took it. There were other minor matters, a cut on the forehead to be washed, cuts on his knuckles, a gash in his shin about two inches long that needed stitches and had so filled his shoe with blood, now dried like glue, that the shoe had to be soaked off. Forty-five minutes after the traction, Carter was strong enough to curse. He cursed to himself at first, then he began to mumble his curses. Sons of bitches, he called the men who had killed Max—Squiff or whoever they were. He cursed the lot of them in prison curses.

Pete told him that six men had been killed, possibly more. All the ward beds were full, and Carter’s would have gone, too, if they hadn’t saved it. Men were lying in the ward corridor. The inmates were holding six guards in C-block as hostages, and they were asking for steak twice a week instead of once, the transfers of about two hundred fellows, no three men in a cell anymore, and stronger coffee in the mess hall.

“Ah they’re nuts, they’re nuts,” said Dr. Cassini, listening to Pete. “I thought they were rioting because of that dog they had in the laundry. Half the guys who come in here to get patched up don’t know about the dog. I haven’t slept since it started. I’m afraid to sleep. The militia ought to get here soon. They’re bound to have called the militia. Then there’ll really be some shooting.”

Carter didn’t care. He didn’t give a damn if the militia came right into the ward and shot him, too. Everything seemed remote and unimportant. He listened as if in a dream to Pete’s rambling monologue. Some of the injured in the ward talked about the letters that the prison censor had stopped, but nobody really knew what had happened, except that it had started in C-block. A couple of fellows had jumped a guard and got his gun.

“Funny thing is,” Pete said, “I heard the warden was going to make a statement in the mess hall yesterday about letting the dog letters go through. Only he was just a little late. Just about ten minutes late. Funny, isn’t it?”

A couple of the inmates’ leaders were talking by telephone with the warden, Pete said. Pete got wild reports of what the inmates were asking for, and even he knew some of them were not true: movies every night, furlough for everybody every three months, hot-water showers in the cells—this last sent Pete into paroxysms of laughter.

There was the sound of gunfire that evening around 8, and soon afterward the ward heard that A-block was in the hands of the militia and the guards again. It was not yet dark, but there would be no more fighting until tomorrow morning, Dr. Cassini predicted.

“The objective of the militia should be the kitchen,” Dr. Cassini said with disgust. “Starve those bastards for a few hours and they’ll knuckle down. All they think about is their stomachs. That and sex, of course.”

They wrangled long into the night. Carter had thought he was so full of morphine, he could sleep, but his pains kept him awake. Somehow he did not mind. He thought of Max in a calm but bitter way. He thought of Max nearly all night. At least he had killed a man in return, not the man who had killed Max, probably, but one of the lot, and they were all alike. Carter was sure he had killed that man. And that seemed quite right and proper.

11

W
ithin a month, the riot of the State Penitentiary, which had lasted three days and got nationwide coverage, was for Carter a thing of the past. It might have become a thing of the past for him sooner, but it took a month and more for the inmates to clean up the mess they had made, to reinstall the toilets and basins, to repair the smashed locks (locksmiths had to be called in, as locksmithery was not a trade taught in the prison), to repair the broken machinery in the laundry, the carpentry shop and all the shops, and for the inmates to repair their own wounds and broken bones. These last Carter saw all around him. One of the saddest of the casualties was old Mac, who had no wound at all but was in the ward because his brain had snapped, as Dr. Cassini put it. Mac had seen his ship model smashed to bits and trampled under prison shoes and his cell torn up. He had even managed to get his cell door locked by a guard, Carter had heard, but the inmates had broken the lock with a sledgehammer, just to get in and destroy his ship model. Carter wrote to Hazel about Mac. Since the riot had called attention to the conditions in the prison, there was a chance that Mac would soon be admitted to a mental hospital, which would be a good thing for him, because nobody knew how to handle him in the ward. He was not violent, but he did not much know where he was, and even had to have his food spooned into his mouth.

The riot was simply an “incident” to Carter in an existence, a stream of time, that seemed to him one continuous riot, rebellion and hatred. He tried to explain this to Hazel. He thought he explained it very well and clearly, but she wrote back that his train of thought was so negative, not admitting of any good in human character or in the intentions of any of the officials of the penal system, that he was heading for a terrible depression and misanthropy unless he made an effort to see things differently, “the way things
are
. Nothing in life is black and white. So sorry to be trite, darling, but as David once said, all true things are trite. They have been said very often, because human experience has shown them to be true . . .” There was some truth in it, Carter admitted to himself and to Hazel, but he commented on the results of the prison riot: people like Max Sampson murdered, Mac driven berserk—and the poor fellow couldn’t even see his wife now, because he could not go down or be taken down to the visiting room and visitors were not allowed up in the ward—and the toughest of the rioters, a man called Swede (although he was short and dark) had got what he demanded, a cell all to himself. Ostensibly this was because Swede was a “riot suspect,” and as such had his number on a red shingle outside his cell; but that made no sense, because he associated everyday with other inmates in the shop where he worked, and in the corridor of his cell block. He had got the private cell because he had demanded it, and the prison authorities were afraid of more trouble from him if they didn’t give it to him.

David Sullivan moved to New York in the fourth year of Carter’s sentence, and joined a firm of lawyers with offices in a new building on First Avenue. Hazel had taken her degree at Adelphi, had considered a job overseas and sending Timmy to school in Switzerland, but had given this up in favor of a job at a child welfare agency in Manhattan on the West Side. Carter had no doubt at all that her decision to stay in the United States was based on the fact that Sullivan had moved to New York.

She came down to see him three or four times a year, and stayed at the only hotel in Bowman, The Southerner. Money was no problem now, but Hazel’s time was, because of her job. Some of her visits were for no more than a weekend. She wrote him two or three times a week. There were often pictures of Timmy in the envelopes, and Carter had a scrapbook of photographs, mostly of Timmy, several of Hazel, and a few of the friends Hazel had met in New York and talked about in her letters: the Elliotts who lived in Locust Valley, Long Island; Jeremy Sutter; a man Hazel had met at Adelphi who had married a girl called Susan; people whom Carter was not interested in but whose pictures he pasted in his book nevertheless. Their old friends, Blanche and Eddie Langauer, for instance, Hazel never mentioned. Eddie and Blanche had written to him twice in the first year of Carter’s imprisonment, and Carter had answered. Later, the Langauers had moved to Dallas, because of Eddie’s work. They had not written for a long while. And so it had gone with other New York friends, a startled, sympathetic letter or two, and then silence.

Timmy was now eleven. Carter got two letters a month from him on the average, but he felt they were rather squeezed out. Things would be better when he finally saw Timmy, Carter thought. Things would be difficult, of course, but he intended to play it cool, not expect his son to fling his arms around him or expect them to become buddies in a week or a month.

Carter now had a glass front on his bookcase with a door that locked: too many men had been borrowing his books without his permission. But he lent his books to ward patients, if they asked for them. Among his books Carter now had Swift, Voltaire, Stanley Kunitz, Robbe-Grillet, Balzac, a volume of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
that had part of the E’s and part of the F’s that had been mysteriously left by a departing ward patient, an American dictionary, a manual on plumbing. All these books he had read through. He kept a locked, flat wooden kit of draftsmen’s pens and compasses under the mattress of his bed (the springs sagged, and the box filled out the hollow somewhat). His drawings of remembered machinery and machinery that he invented he kept in a cardboard letter holder on top of his books in his bookcase. He had overcome the handicap of weak thumbs, so far as drawing went. He mentioned this to Hazel—it was important in regard to a future job—but Hazel still talked about an operation. She had discussed his thumbs with a hand specialist in New York. Carter knew he had let the matter slide through the years and knew that Hazel knew this, too. He was used to his thumbs now, but he did not say this to Hazel in so many words.

In the fifth year of his sentence, he tried to stop the morphine entirely. He backslid innumerable times, mainly because he did not think the situation very serious. His withdrawal symptoms were no more than sweats and jitteriness on the second or third day, for about twelve hours, which Carter considered a mild form of suffering. He proved he could go two months or more without morphine, if he took a milder painkiller like Demerol. The pain in his thumbs was less. In the sixth year, he did without morphine for eleven months. He had an important objective in this, because once he got out of prison, morphine would not be so easily obtained. He also wanted to be able to tell Hazel that he could do without it completely.

The hundred-dollar-a-week payment of Mr. Drexel had stopped when the time that Carter would have been working for Triumph, ten more months, had run out. There had been two more building jobs scheduled after the Fremont school. Mr. Drexel promised to write for Carter a letter of the highest recommendation, but said he would wait until Carter was out of prison so that the letter would be “up to date” when Carter looked for his next job. Carter was rather amused. “Up to date” meant up to date of end of prison stretch. This man can be “highly recommended” as an endurer of prison stretches. Carter was going to be out by December. A “good conduct” grading for his service in the hospital ward had removed three years and several months from the ten years he might have served.

Dr. Cassini praised Carter effusively in his report, which he showed to Carter. David Sullivan had also written for him. So did Mr. Drexel, at Carter’s request. Carter would be home for Christmas that year, and, unlike so many men who had to start from the bottom up again, he would have a wife, a child, a home, and money. He would be able to give them presents with his own hands, wrapped presents that no one else had opened, whose contents nobody but himself knew. By December 1, in fact, he would be in the apartment in New York with Hazel, a free man with a good conduct record, though he had killed a man in prison. In the months after the riot, Carter had often thought some inmate with an unpleasant face might approach him in the carpentry shop, in a cell block when he was delivering medicine, anywhere, and say, “I hear you’re the guy who killed Whitey,” and then “pop goes the weasel,” as Dr. Cassini would say. But things had not turned out that way.