Vincent Zandri - The Innocent

Mike hugs his legs and stares straight ahead, but I’m not sure he’s seeing anything at all. Wash asks me what we should do about him. Nothing we can do, I say, but wait. But then I see a CO running like a bat out of hell from a gang of six rebel inmates. He is barefoot, dressed only in his uniform trousers. He tries to evade the rebels by attempting to climb from the first-story gallery up to the second-story along the steel bars that run vertically against the face of D-Block. I can see his bare chest and face pressed up against the bars from where I sit. The gang of six inmates comes after him from behind. They claw at him while he panics and holds to those iron bars for his life. But there are too many inmates. They are enraged, crazy. They climb up after the CO, pull him down off the wall. The last I hear of him, he is kicking and screaming and gagging. “They’re cutting my throat!” he screams. “Cutting! My! Throat!” I close my eyes, try to think of Fran. But it’s no use. The bloody gurgling sound is so loud it echoes throughout the yard, reverberates against the insides of my skull, kills the image of Fran.

Then there is nothing.

I go dizzy, like the entire prison has been pulled out from under me. Pelton buries his face in his hands and cries. But it’s Mike who takes it the hardest. He passes out, just like that. A little smile forms at the corners of his mouth, a slight, wry, angelic smile. Peaceful. Like he’s dreaming a sweet dream.

GILES GARVIN OCCUPIED A single ten-by-twelve cell within a row of five so-called special cells. The cells are situated on a fourth-floor wing of the administration building and accessed primarily by a freight elevator with a closed-circuit camera unit installed in the ceiling. Anyone transported up or down the elevator to and from the special cells is video-taped. For code reasons, there is a fire escape located at the opposite end of this wing that contains a Plexiglas-walled guard shack, video surveillance monitors, padlocked closets with restraining equipment, and tranquilizers. For security reasons, the fire escape is barred off and bolted closed. There is an additional wall of iron bars outside the usual set of bars that enclose the cells. It’s because of this second set of vertical iron bars that inmates and guards alike take a certain pride in calling this special place “the cage.”

The cage houses inmates who pose a greater-than-average threat to the general population. Inmates who get a special kick out of stabbing a fellow inmate directly in the face, for instance. The mutilation that results is the brand or tattoo handed down by a man of power, a man to be respected.

The cage not only protects the general population from its more lethal killers. It also serves the opposite function. It protects marked men who wouldn’t last a single day in general population from being offed with a shiv to the liver.

Inside the cage these men could be kept under twenty-four-hour supervision-no outside contact, no chow in the mess hall, no television privileges, no visitors, few phone calls, no windows or fresh air. The only exercise is one hour per day of supervised recreation in a fifty-by-fifty gravel-covered yard normally set aside for condemned prisoners. Other than that, the immediate landscape of the caged prisoner is concrete walls and floors; iron bars; stainless-steel toilets, sinks, bunks and Plexiglas shields.

This was the price of protection.

Garvin’s cell was covered with just such a Plexiglas shield. He was a twenty-nine-year-old Latino-and-black mix from the streets of New York City who, before being shipped to Green Haven, used to wait outside grade schools, lure kids into his van, take them for a ride into the country, and touch them a little before he wrapped their heads in bed sheets and plastic shopping bags. He’d then dismember their bodies, and scatter their body parts throughout Dutchess County. Maybe a head in a streambed, an arm in a wooded area south of Catskill, a full torso propped upright against a cemetery gravestone with the feet, hands, and head cut off. His most famous case involved a six-year-old beauty-pageant winner whom he gagged and bound and tossed into a dumpster alive, which he then doused with gas and set on fire. The fire inside the dumpster burned with such intensity that all that was found of the little girl some four hours later after Garvin had phoned in the whereabouts of his latest victim, were a couple of bone fragments and some teeth. Some days later, after arresting Garvin on a petty shoplifting charge, forensic scientists were able to extract enough DNA from the six-year old’s teeth to match it with skin and blood removed from under his filthy fingernails. The tiny bit of DNA evidence was all it took to put the mark on the monster and, in turn, send him away for the rest of his life. The only thing keeping him from lethal injection was the possibility of insanity.

Since Garvin couldn’t strangle, burn, or dismember kids anymore, he had become one hell of a good drug salesman, which seemed oddly out of character for him, since drug dealing, at base, was a hustler’s business, not a cold-blooded killer’s. For his own protection, he spent a lot of time in the cage. New York State wasn’t about to make the same mistake the state of Wisconsin had made with Jeffrey Dahmer.

On this Tuesday, he slithered out from the dark regions of his cramped cell and pressed his body up against the vertical bars when I was let into the cage by the presiding CO. He gave me a teeth-biting sneer that wasn’t much of a welcome wagon as the CO took his time manually releasing the locking device on the cell. He stood there with his short, well-groomed hair and his wiry, vascular, copper-colored body.

I stepped inside.

The CO closed the gate behind me and moved back to his post at the edge of the guard shack where the electronic panels powering the cell doors were located.

For now, I took a seat on Garvin’s stainless-steel bunk while he used the rim of the stainless-steel toilet as a chair. He was dressed only in gray inmate pants, his torso exposed. His chest was mapped with scars and pockmarks, trophies earned from attacks by rival gang members. On his left forearm was a tattoo of a rose. A very beautiful tattoo of a red rose. He had a thin, coarse face, like a man who had spent too much time in the sun before coming to the iron house. Tattooed to his cheek, below his left eye, were four tiny blue teardrops. His hair was bleach-blond, neatly cropped, slicked back against his head.

I gave Garvin a Pall Mall, lit it for him. He blew the smoke out slowly through his nostrils. In the meantime, I could hear shouts and jeers coming from the caged animals near Garvin’s cell. “I want my lawyer. Rehabilitation, shit. I want my lawyer…” They went on and on, not making sense, but making a plea nonetheless, because that’s all they had left to do. But like living beside a railroad track, after a while you just don’t hear the trains anymore.

“He had like this scheme going,” whispered Garvin a minute or two after I asked him his thoughts on the escaped Vasquez. “Years ago, Eddy knew he had to buy into the program. It was his way up the chain of command, so to speak. Wasn’t long before he was pushing like one thousand, two thousand pounds inside and outside the joint.” Garvin looked up at me. His smile was oddly attractive, oddly confident. “Over-the-counter trading he called it,” he said, exposing a gold tooth, a shining gem amongst a mouthful of rotting molars, incisors, and cuspids.

“What about the escape?” I said, laying my hands out flat on the cold steel bed.

Garvin faced the sky, blew perfect smoke rings that dissipated against the concrete-paneled ceiling. “Orders would come in from the inmates and visitors. Manhattan street prices prevailed, no more, no less, far as we could tell. Keep market value consistent. That was the motto, like that was the fucking rule. Orders left the prison with the visitors, along with logistical information…You know, like where and when the drop would take place. Same thing would happen if the drop was going to be on the inside. Course, that was much trickier. Shit came in and out with the visitor, hidden inside a deflated balloon stuffed up his ass. Or, more likely, stuff came through in bulk, through the service entrance, with the deliveries and the laundry.”