Help, I Am Being Held Prisoner

36

LIFE, LIKE THE ARMY, is a case of hurry-up- and-wait. After all the frantic chaos of December and much of January, life suddenly settled down into something that could almost be described as placid; though a life composed of four or five jail-breaks a week can never truly be described as placid, I suppose.

Nevertheless, calmness had settled, and God knows I was grateful for it. The apartment was a boon, a base, a lovely refuge from the world, though in fact I used it less often than I did Marian’s place. But just knowing it was there, it was mine, gave me a feeling of stability and safety.

Then there was Marian. I think what I loved about her most was her inability to take me seriously. She thought it was funny that I was an escaped con, that I had been spending months walking a tightrope between various horrible contingencies. Whenever we talked, and particularly when I spoke miserably and grimly about all the problems facing me, the end result was always that Marian would become helpless with mirth. How she loved to laugh!

She also gave me a book called “The Trickster” by Paul Radin, which was all about a cycle of myths among American Indians concerning a trickster figure, a prankster or practical joker, whose symbolic meaning was much more than that. He was both creator and destroyer, both good and evil, both helpful and harmful, and by the end of the cycle he had outgrown his pranks and had gone to work to make the Earth a useful place for mankind. “The trickster is the undifferentiated form,” Marian told me, after I’d read the book. “He doesn’t know who or what he is or what his purpose is. He gets into a fight with his arm because he doesn’t realize it’s part of him. He wanders and gets into trouble because he doesn’t have any goal. At the end he matures into self-awareness, and finds out he’s supposed to help human beings, that’s why he was sent to Earth. I think maybe you were like that, all practical jokers are like that. They don’t know who they are yet, it’s a case of arrested development.”

“Seems like a roundabout way,” I said, “to tell me I’m childish.” Which also made her laugh.

As to the robbing of the banks, that had temporarily ceased to be a problem. Not that Phil or the others had given up their ideas of committing the robberies, not at all. Quite the reverse; Phil, battered by fate and failure, simply became more and more dogged, hunching his shoulders and setting his teeth and looking increasingly disgusted. And the others followed his lead; none of them wanted to quit.

Well, they might as well quit. All at once I was full of ploys. Within three days of the bomb scare phone call, I had two more stunts to pull, and the sudden conviction that I’d never run out of ideas. How silly I’d been to go into despair; my mind had come through in the clutch, hadn’t it?

The next scheduled bank robbery was for Friday, January 28th, two weeks after the bomb scare attempt. I was ready well in advance, and this time I wouldn’t stop it by doing anything to the bank. Instead, I took a walk late Thursday night, went over to where the typewriter repairman kept his truck, and did everything to that poor truck that I’d ever done to any vehicle. All at once.

I felt rather bad about that, though. Not only because it was a kind of backsliding, a return to a renounced former self, but also because of the trouble I was making the typewriter repairman. But I had no choice; it was either inconvenience for him, or utter destruction for me.

So that truck got the business. Sand in the gas tank was merely the garnish. Wiring was ripped out, radiator hoses were punctured, the gas pedal spring was removed ... I don’t want to repeat the whole catalog. Suffice it to say that when I was finished the only way that truck was going to leave that parking space was behind a tower. Which gave me my last bit of vandalism: I removed the lug nuts from the rear wheels. The truck would be towed less than a block before the rear wheels would fall off.

The following afternoon, when Joe and Eddie didn’t show up at five-thirty, Phil began to get very grim-looking. Jerry, who told me later that he’d been afraid Phil might go berserk, might leap to his feet, pull out a pistol and start shooting everybody in sight out of simple frustration, began to try to placate Phil with reassurances and hearty little pep talks that sounded as hollow as a snare drum. He was still being desperately cheerful, in fact, at ten minutes to six, when a cab pulled up in front of the luncheonette and Joe and Eddie climbed out, Joe carrying the typewriter and Eddie wearing his guard uniform beneath his overcoat. Phil just looked at them through the window, and nodded. He didn’t say a word.

'‘The truck wasn’t there,” Joe said, and though much discussion followed-everybody talking except Phil, who was dangerously quiet-there was really nothing else that anybody could add to that. So far as I know, none of the gang ever did find out why the truck hadn’t been in its proper place that day.

The next robbery attempt was on Monday the fourteenth of February, and I’d been ready with my counterattack to that one for nearly a month, but when the time came I didn’t have to do anything at all. God stepped in and gave me a hand, for which I was grateful; the northeast got one of those record snowfalls without at least one of which no northern winter is complete. Everything was closed that day, including both banks. And all the schools; instead of robbing a bank, I spent that day tobogganning with Marian. That was the day I discovered it actually is possible to have sex outdoors during a snowstorm. With a toboggan beneath you and a blanket above you, body heat will do the rest. And there ain’t nothing like sex to produce body heat.

It was just around this same time that Andy Butler got the word that he was being thrown out of prison. Clemency it was called, but it was the same inclement thing that had been done to Peter Corse: throw the old men out of jail. In Andy’s case, he was literally being thrown out into the snow.

Everybody felt bad about it, even the guards and the warden. The prisoners got up a petition, asking the Governor of the state to permit Andy to stay, but nothing came of it. We did have a speech from the warden in the mess hall one noontime that I happened to be present for-I was the only tunnel insider there-in which he tried to explain that it was impossible to get the message across to administrators or Civil Service people or public officials that there were men who wanted to be in prison, who were better off in prison, and who should be permitted to stay in prison. “Ideas like that contradict everything such officials believe,” he said. “They’re trying to punish you men. Telling them some of you want to be here could only confuse them at the best, or actively annoy them at the worst.” Most of the prisoners were more direct individuals than that, and rather than try to work out the intricacies of the warden’s thought most of them merely decided the son of a bitch didn’t care and was only protecting himself and was the enemy anyway, so what can you expect?

Andy had been given a month’s warning, meaning he had to leave on Saturday March 10th. He himself told me, though, in one of the few evenings we shared together in the cell, that he had known of this for a long time. “I knew it was coming when old Peter got it,” he said. “I was given private word from one of the trusties that my name was going to be on the next list.”

“I’m really sorry, Andy,” I said.

He gave me a smile that wasn’t quite as sunny as usual. “You take the good with the bad,” he said. “It won’t be so rough on the outside. Maybe I’ll get a gardening job somewhere.”

“You won’t see your garden here come up.”

His smile shifted a bit more, but he said, “That’s all right, Harry. I know how I planted it in the fall. I can see it in my mind’s eye. I’ll know when it’s growing, and what it looks like.”

“I’ll get somebody to take a picture of it,” I said, “and send it to you.”

“Thanks, Harry,” he said.

My harping on the garden like that was, I must admit, only partly caused by my sympathy for Andy. His removal also, of course, meant that I wouldn’t be transferred from the gym in the spring to be his gardening assistant; the eviction of Andy Butler had saved for me the life I’d been constructing for myself, and though I truly did feel very badly for him, I must admit I also wallowed somewhat in my own sense of relief.

Then there was the ongoing bank job. The next date for its launching was Friday, the twenty-fifth of February. This was the sixth try at robbing those two banks, and in my conversations with the others it seemed to me the general consensus of opinion had divided itself into two camps: those who were dogged and fatalistic, and those who were ready to forget it and go think about something else. Phil was the captain of the dogged ones, and Max was the most outspoken of the defeatists, with the rest of us more or less raggedly lined up behind one or the other.

Eddie Troyn was strongly on Phil’s side, of course, he being a man who had already expressed his belief that one never aborts the mission. Billy Glinn was also with Phil, but in his case I think it was because his attention span was so short that he wasn’t truly aware of the grinding frustration of all this to the same degree that the rest of us were.

On the other side, Jerry was almost as big a quitter as Max, and I also permitted myself a statement from time to time doubting the wisdom of persisting in the teeth of all these indications of a jinx on the job. Neither Bob .Dombey nor Joe Maslocki would ever allow themselves to be pinned down to an opinion on the subject, but public opinion believed that Joe leaned toward Phil’s point of view and that Bob leaned toward Max.

Which left us split down the middle, four and four. But even if it had been lopsided, if it had been seven against one, with Phil the only one wanting to go on, I believe that his determination, his bulldog refusal to let go, would have carried the day just the same. Phil was going to rob those banks, he’d decided to rob them, and he was damned if anything was going to stop him.

I must admit I did do some idle thinking from time to time about providing Phil Giffin with the kind of accident he’d once considered for me. But I’m not a violent man by nature, particularly against somebody as all-around frightening as Phil Giffin, so I did nothing.

And February 25th arrived. That was all right; I was prepared. Earlier in the day I had made my visit to Western National, the other bank, and left my two little packages in wastebaskets there.

More bombs, yes, but not stink, not this time.

Smoke.

When, at five past five, the billows, the clouds, the profusions of thick black smoke began dribbling from every nook and cranny of that pseudo-Greek temple, when the ten-foot-high gold-painted metal front door was thrown open by a coughing wheezing guard, followed by an unrolling sail of cloud that came beating out of that bank like the ghost of one of those tanks out at Camp Quattatunk, and when, in addition, the distant sound of sirens was heard yet again, coming this way, Phil did not lose his temper. No, he did not.

What he did, he got to his feet, slowly, deliberately. He stood next to the table, looking straight out through the luncheonette window at the shimmying wall of smoke now obliterating the entire other side of the street, and in a quiet, calm-yet grim-voice he said, “I am going to get those banks. I’m telling you, and I’m telling those banks, and I’m telling God and all the saints, and I’m telling anybody who wants to hear it. I’m not giving up. I’m going to be here twice a month, every month, for the rest of my life if it takes that long, and you fucking people are going to be here with me, and those fucking banks are going to be waiting over there, and one of these times, I’m going to rob those two banks. I’m going to do it.”

Saying which, he left, and went straight back to jail, and stayed in his bed for the next three days. But we all knew that on Monday, the fourteenth of March, we would be back in that luncheonette.

And, apart from my growing terror of Phil, I had run out of tricks again.