Derailed

ATTICA

It was my last class.

I’d circled it in my calendar. I’d rehearsed it in dreams.

When I walked through the metal detector, a CO named Stewey said, “Last day, huh,” and I thought he looked almost despondent. Maybe people get used to the people they belittle, and who knows if they’ll ever find anyone as good again?

Before I went to my classroom, I stopped off in the COs lounge.

It was just a room with folding chairs and tables and a thirteen-inch TV usually tuned to Dukes of Hazzard reruns. The COs evidently had a thing for Daisy Duke — those high-cut shorts of hers, probably — because an old poster of her still hung on the wall. Someone had penciled in nipples on her white blouse.

I poured myself some coffee. I put powdered milk into my cup and stirred it with a plastic swizzle stick.

I casually walked over to the COs museum situated in the left corner of the room.

“You got your twelve oh-one, brother,” Fat Tommy said. He was spread across two metal chairs with a Jenny Craig TV dinner on the table in front of him.

It’s only natural that employees pick up the lingo of the workplace; Attica guards often talked like Attica prisoners. And 12:01 meant gaining your freedom — getting your walking papers.

Maybe, I thought. We'll see.

I sipped my coffee, I perused the collection of gats and burners, as Fat Tommy chomped away on a meal he could only find ultimately dissatisfying. He was the only other person in the lounge.

When I finally turned and left, Fat Tommy looked up but didn’t say good-bye.

From the lounge to the classroom, I first had to go through a black locked door — knocking twice and waiting for another CO to clear me. Then I walked down the “bowling alley,” what they call the prison’s main walkway. It’s dissected down the middle by a broken yellow line, like a state highway. One side is for prisoners. The other side is for COs. Or for people who fall somewhere in between.

I passed a CO called Hank.

“Hey, Yobwoc,” he said. “I’m gonna miss you. You were my best boon coon.”

Translation: best friend.

“Thank you,” I said, but I knew he hadn’t meant it.

When the class settled in, I told them it was the last time I’d be seeing them. That it had been fun teaching them. That I hoped they’d keep reading and writing on their own. I told them that in the best classes, the teacher becomes the student and the students the teachers, and that that’s what had happened here — I’d learned from them. No one looked particularly moved; but when I finished, one or two of them nodded at me as if they might even miss me.

Malik wasn’t one of them. He’d passed me a note last time. Where the writer would be waiting for me.

I told the class we might as well use this last class for creative reflection. I wanted each of them to write an essay on what the class had meant to them. This time, I told them, they could even put their names to them.

Then I excused myself to go to the bathroom.

I passed the black CO who was supposed to be stationed outside the door and who, this time, actually was. I said I’d be back in ten minutes, and he said, “I’ll alert the media.”

He’d be waiting for me near the prison pharmacy, the note said.

He worked there.

A pharmacy job gave you shine, a student had explained to me, since it gave you access to drugs.

It also gave you access to something else, I knew. Drug manufacturers. You could call them up to find out things if you wanted to. Like maybe where a certain rare insulin was being distributed.

It probably hadn’t taken him years to track me down after all.

I walked back down the bowling alley. I followed the signs.

The pharmacy consisted of one long counter protected by steel mesh. There are prisons within prisons, I noted, an axiom also true of life. The kind of insight I might’ve pointed out in my class, if I still had one.

I continued past the pharmacy, striding down an empty hallway that veered sharply left and seemed to lead to no place in particular. But it did.

Malik had told me where he’d be waiting for me, and I’d gone and scouted it.

An alcove in the middle of the hall.

A kind of blind. In an older institution like Attica, there were lots of them, hidden little corners where the prisoners conducted business, where they sold drugs and got down on their knees. Where they evened scores. A blind. An appropriate description, except I was walking in with my eyes wide open.

I walked into the alcove where it was quiet and still and stopped.

“Hello?”

I could hear him breathing in there.

“Hello,” I whispered again.

He stepped out of the shadows.

He looked different — that’s the first thing I thought. That he looked different from the way I remembered him.

His head. It seemed smaller, reshapen, as if it had been squeezed in a vise. He had a scar running down from his forehead. That was one thing. And he had a tat on his right shoulder. A prison blue clock face without hands — doing time. And farther down on his arm a tombstone with numbers — twelve — his prison sentence.

“Surprise,” he said.

No. But that’s what I wanted him to think.

“How you doin’, Chuck?” he said. He smiled, the way he’d smiled at my front door the day he’d come to my house and put his hands on my daughter.

“Larry,” I said.

“Larry. Yeah, I’m down. That was some cool shit you pulled off—playing dead like that. Had everyone fooled, huh, Larry? ”

“Not everyone. No.”

“No, not everyone. You’re right. You shouldn’t have let my girl see your wallet, Larry. Bad move. Stupid.”

The hostess in the Crystal Night Club. Widdoes . . . what kind of name is that? she’d said.

“I thought you were dead.”

“You wish.”

Yes, I thought. I wish. But there comes a time when you have to stop wishing.

“I’ve been looking for you, Larry. Like all over. You took something of mine, you know. I want it back. So I’ve been looking for you. And I found you, too. I found you twice.”

“Twice?”

“Once in Chicago. Oh yeah . . . that’s right. Surprised by that, huh? Yeah, I knew exactly where you were. Oakdale, Illinois. Then you moved on me.”

“Yes.”

“Bennington. Right down the fucking road. How’s that for lucky?”

“That’s lucky.”

“Uh-huh. You know how I found you?”

“No.”

“Your kid. Through the drugstores. First Chicago. Then Bennington. And then the next thing I know, the very next thing I know, you’re waltzing in through the fucking front door.”

“Yes.”

“I said to myself, Here’s your twelve oh-one, nigger. Here it is on a platter.”

“Why didn’t you say hello?”

“I did. I did say hello. I got my boy to write up my hello for me.”

“Your boy? He can’t even read.”

“Not Malik. My boon. A Jew literary professor who eighty-sixed his wife. Writes all the pleas for parole here. And very cool jerk-off stuff. ‘Charley Schine Gets Fucked’ — his latest. He thinks I made it up in my head. He thinks I’m creative.”

“Yes — it was very effective.”

“I thought you might run. Seeing your life story and all.”

No, I thought. If I was going to run, I would have done it back in Oakdale. It’s what Deanna said to do — Let’s run, and I said, Okay, but if we run, we will have to keep running. For all time. So maybe we shouldn’t. So I’d taken a leave of absence and we’d come here.

“You have something of mine, Larry, ” he said.

“Some of it was mine first.”

Vasquez smiled. “You think this is a fucking negotiation? You think I’m bargaining with you? You’re fucked. It’s your role in life. Accept it. Get down on your knees and open your mouth and say please, Daddy. I want my money. ”

Someone was shouting in the pharmacy: “The doc says I need this shit, understand?”

“You’re in prison,” I said.

“So are you. You’re locked up. You’re doing time. You think you’re safe out there? Think again, motherfucker. I can turn you in—I can tell them, Here's Charley . If you’re lucky I could. ’Cause I might send someone to your house to fuck your wife instead. I might. How old’s your daughter now — ready to get stuck with something else now, huh?”

I went for him.

Reflex simply took over my body and said: Listen up — we’re going to stop this man, we’re going to shut this man up forever. We are. But when I lunged at him, when I went for his throat, his knee came up and caught me in the stomach. I went down to my knees. He stepped behind me and slipped his arm around my neck and squeezed. He whispered in my ear.

“That’s it, Charley. That’s right. Got you mad, huh? Here’s the thing. How lucky was it that you showed up in Bennington? Forty miles from here. In my own fucking backyard? And then, if that isn’t lucky enough, you walk in the goddamn door and start teaching here. How lucky is that? Is that lucky or what? Or is that like, too lucky? What do you think, Charley? You think that’s too lucky? I don’t know. You got something for me, Charley, do you?” He reached his hand down and patted my right pocket. He felt it there — the gat, the one I’d taken from the COs museum. “You got something you want to stick me with? Huh, Charley?” He took it out of my pocket — he showed it to me.

“You ought to know me better by now, Chuck. Sure I’ll meet you by the river. Sure I’ll come alone. Sure. But I met your mail boy at the river first, huh? Took his head off, huh, Charley? Who the fuck you think you’re dealing with here? You think this is punk central?” He put the knife against my throat. He pressed it against my jugular. Then he smiled and pushed me to the floor. I could smell something acrid — urine and ammonia.

I wanted to answer him now.

To tell him yes, I did know who I was dealing with. To tell him that that was why I’d waited six months in Bennington before applying for the teaching job here. Why I’d made sure he’d found me there first, living in Bennington and teaching in high school, so that it would just seem like some kind of fortunate coincidence that I’d later taken a teaching job here. In the very prison he was incarcerated in. And I wanted to tell him that’s why I’d purposely left my keys in my pocket that day I walked through the metal detector—to see if it would be possible to smuggle in a weapon. A gun. And that when I learned it wasn't possible to smuggle in a gun, how I’d started making visits to the COs lounge because I’d heard they had a kind of museum there.

I wanted to tell him that it was true — I hadn’t known who I was dealing with when I sat with Winston by the river, and later back in the Fairfax Hotel — even then I hadn’t. But that I did now. That I’d learned.

And one last thing. One very last thing. How when I stood there in the COs museum with my back to Fat Tommy, I'd whispered this thing I’d learned to myself. Like a prayer to the God of screwed plans. Because I’d learned if you want to make God laugh, that’s what you do — you make a plan; but if you want to make him smile, you make two.

Two.

I reached into my left pocket. I took out the spring-loaded gun made of soapwood and tin that I’d carefully loaded in the COs lounge.

I shot Vasquez directly between both surprised eyes.

Times Union

Prisoner killed in Attica attack

by Brent Harding

Raul Vasquez, 34, an Attica prisoner, was killed yesterday when his intended victim managed to wrest a prison-made gun away from him and fatally wound him. Lawrence Widdoes, 47, who teaches English to Attica prisoners two nights a week, was assaulted by Mr. Vasquez near the prison pharmacy. A witness who works in the pharmacy saw Mr. Vasquez physically attack Mr. Widdoes. “He was choking him good . . .” Claude Weathers, an Attica prisoner, stated. “Then pop — Vasquez goes down.” Mr. Widdoes, who suffered a bruised neck, is unsure what provoked the attack, but believes it might be related to some negative criticism he leveled at a student who is the cellmate of Mr. Vasquez. Mr. Widdoes, whose teaching duties are ending due to state budget cuts, is simply glad to be alive. “I feel like I’ve been given a second chance,” Mr. Widdoes said.