Tim Green - Exact Revenge

“Used to be you put everything up your ass, but they got smart back in ’98. Now they got the Boss Chair. It’s a metal detector you sit on, but my glasses work like a dream. It’s pretty goddamn nice, actually, not having to dig it out every night.”

I look at him to see if he’s playing with me, but his eyes are fixed on the wet steel. He stands up, fits the bit back into his thick plastic glasses, and puts them on. He adjusts the glasses on his hooked nose and, as if on cue, they announce it’s time for lunch.

Lester smiles at me and says, “Let’s eat.”

I don’t like the way we move like cattle out of the block and down through the yard toward the dining hall. I’m jumpy and there’s some twittering, but I don’t know where it’s coming from and no one touches me. I don’t look anyone in the eye. I don’t want to know them. I don’t even want to see them.

I take the boiled meat and the limp vegetables they serve me on a tray and follow Lester to a round seat that juts out from under the table on a metal arm. The tabletop is stainless steel like the tray. Two white men sit across from me. One is doughy with a bald head and a full brown beard.

“This is Carl,” Lester says, nodding toward the dough man. “Carl, Raymond. And that’s Justin.”

Justin is younger than I am-mid-thirties-with dirty blond hair, a ponytail, and a long muscular build. His arms are covered with tattoos. A green-and-orange snake’s head pokes out from beneath his collar with its tongue licking at his Adam’s apple. Part of a claw extends up toward his ear.

“Justin doesn’t talk,” Lester says. “But he’s okay.”

Carl belches and grins like an infant.

“They’re still finding bodies from Carl,” Lester says as if we were talking Easter eggs. “But he wouldn’t hurt a soul in here. He likes it here, don’t you, Carl?”

“Food’s not bad,” Carl says.

“He can’t hurt anyone,” Lester says. “And he doesn’t want to. Makes him feel safe to be locked up, I guess. He’s not the only one.”

After lunch, we go out on the south yard where the weights are. Half a football field of rusty machines and bars with the steel plates welded on so no one can use the bars as weapons. The weights are arranged in a patchwork of square spaces, and each area is painted a different drab color. Lester explains that the faded red weights belong to the Bloods. The yellow ones are for the Latin Kings, the blue for the Sunni Muslims.

“If you want to use them, kid,” he says, “the only ones who might let you are the Dirty White Boys.”

“Which ones are those?”

“The green ones,” he says, pointing. “I could probably get you in without too much trouble.”

I see a crowd of whites, mostly younger men with tattoos. Half of them have long hair. They go to work on the weights like miners. Somber and methodical. Justin is one of them.

“Think I’ll pass.”

Instead, we walk up and down the gritty pavement just outside the chain-link boundary of the weight yard. I look around me at the different men. No one looks back. I’m beginning to feel that Lester and I really are safe.

Lester says hello to a guard that I haven’t seen before. The guard smiles and says hi back. You can tell the man likes Lester.

“What about when you get to the catwalk?” I ask when we’re out of earshot. “I heard Clarence talking to another guard about a break in Elmira last month. They were saying that no one ever got out of here since it was rebuilt in ’30.”

“No one ever did,” he says, looking up at the clear blue sky, shading his eyes from the summer sun. “Once you get out of the steel cell, the block is just a solid box of concrete. If you could get out of that, you got the wall. It’s four feet thick and buried forty feet into the ground.”

“So, we’re screwed,” I say.

He stops and looks at me. His eyes glimmer and he smiles.

“It’s so simple, no one ever thought of it,” he says. “Or if they did, they didn’t have the patience to do it.”

“Do what?”

“Escape backwards,” he says, and begins to walk. “They get out of the cell, then they have to figure out how to break the block. Then the wall. The pumpkinheads in this place who do make it out of the cell just wander around down in the tunnels for a few days before they start screaming for someone to help them.

“I did it backwards,” he says. “It took almost forty years, yeah, but that’s what it takes, kid. When we break this cell, I’ve got the block and the wall already beat.”

“How?”

It’s time to go in and we do, following the crowd, milling into the back entrance of A block. I’m trying not to step on anyone’s toes when I realize that Lester’s white tufts are three deep in front of me. I am in a crowd of blacks and being squeezed. None of them look at me. One has thick glasses. I see a hairnet and bare shoulders like cannonballs. I see a cheek with two long scars and dreadlocks. I smell boiled beef and pungent body odor.

I try to push forward, but can’t and my heart races. Sweat beads on my brow and my palms are wet. Two big hands grab my ass. Moist lips brush my ear.

“Gonna make you my bitch,” he says. “Sweet little white thing.”

Fingers probe the seam in my pants. I roar and jump and flail.

“Hey, man.”

“The fuck?”

“Yo.”

Guards strain their necks and arch up on their toes. Batons are drawn. The press loosens. I push free and stumble in through the sliding steel door to First Company.

“Watch where the fuck you goin,’” a long-haired Dirty White Boy says, shoving me.

I swing a wild fist and scramble into the cell, backing into the corner. My fists are balled. My face is hot.

“What?” Lester asks, his smile fading.

“I’ll fucking kill them,” I say, pointing toward the cell door as it hums shut. “I don’t want this, goddamn it. This is why I can’t be here.”

“What did they do?” he asks.

I tell him and he shakes his head.

“You’ve been alone too long, kid,” he says. “They’re like dogs. You look them in the eye. You stare them down. You walk tall. They won’t do a damn thing. You should have heard that Colombian I did howling before he died while the poison ate out his guts and they couldn’t stop it. No one wants a taste of that.”

“That kid tried to get you in the box,” I say.

“A kid too stupid to know better,” he says. “You don’t see me worried.”

“I never let myself think like this,” I say, my voice breaking. “And, fuck, now I can’t stop. I keep thinking we can do it. That’s all I can think of.”

“We can, kid.”

“I can kill one of those motherfuckers,” I say. “Just like you. With a dumbbell.”

“Don’t,” he says. “You’ll be in the box for five years. Wait. Twelve months. Maybe fourteen. They won’t touch you. They’ll play with you if you let them. That’s the way.

“Listen, there was a women’s prison back in the 1800s. When they rebuilt this, they built right around the women’s block, and then built over it in 1934. There was a guard I knew in the seventies. I heard the rumors and I got him to get me the plans. They keep them. All of them. From the beginning. In the powerhouse. That brick smokestack you saw out in the south yard.”

Lester puts his hand on my arm.

“There was a cistern,” he says, dropping his voice to the faintest whisper, “below this block. There’s a tunnel down in this shit in the basement. The tunnel goes west toward the shop. Halfway there, there’s a manhole. Welded shut. It took me eight years to break the seal. I’ve spent ten more clearing out the overflow pipe inside the cistern. It goes through the wall. The end of it’s buried under the Owasco Outlet. It runs just the other side of the south wall. It’s full of water most of the year, but in late summer the water level drops and you can get in there. I’m almost through.