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Chris Everley was awarded Second Place in fiction in the 2009 Prison Writing Contest.
Dead Men's Shoes
Smoke rolled up from the burning cell block in black, fire-tinged waves. The wind caught it and pushed it down over the prison yard like a thick, gray shroud, so low you could reach up and touch it with your left hand. Flames, seen through the mist of smoke, were devil’s tongues stuck out at the black night. Buildings were shadows in the crazy pattern of yellow light that streaked the black blanket of smoke.
The old cell block, stretching across the front of the prison, was a big, gray face of stolid futility with grilled steel bars checker-boarding the pale glow of the windows. Ghosts of forgotten suicides lurked in the shadows of its eaves.
The new cell block to the East was an inferno of smoke and flame, with the baking bodies of men trapped in its cells.
When Black-Jack turned left by the dining room he had an odd feeling he could hear those men a hundred yards away crying: “Oh God! Save me! Oh God! Save me!” over and over again. The words spun a sudden fear in his mind.
The whole face of the yard was open to his view. Above him the big, black water tank was a dim blot through the smoke, like a gigantic doodle-bug on stilts, looking down over a dung-hill of confusion. Yellow light shining from the open door of the hospital cut a kaleidoscopic picture in the confusion of the yard.
Black-Jack shifted his shoulders to a less irritating position in his hickory-striped shirt, pulled his baggy, gray trousers higher up his waist. He looked at the row of prone, gray figures on the bare ground. The yard was spotted with them, and still more were coming . . . Figures of charred and smoke-blackened flesh wrapped snugly in grey blankets, lying on the cold ground. He shuddered slightly. They didn’t need blankets now, he was thinking. They didn’t need a damn thing but a wooden box and six feet of ground in the potter’s field.
Suddenly a variegated color pattern formed behind his tense eyes—a black, smoke—mantled night, yellow light, red flames, gray death, crisscrossing each other into a maggoty confusion.
He ploughed through the confusion toward the hospital, feeling that each step he took was on a different color. Thoughts flashed like sheet lightning in the turmoil of his mind. He had a queer feeling that he could smell the odor of death in the smoke-thickened atmosphere.
He stumbled across a twisted body lying in the shadow of a large concrete flowerpot. He looked down at the pinched, white face, streaked with soot, at the smoke clots still lingering in the half-opened lips. Stiffs everywhere! “Short hours ago we lived, heard voices, heard keys rattling in locks, saw walls of stone and barred windows and uniformed prison guards. Now we don’t have to look at them any more.” The words made him think of God and the Mission Houses on Clark Street in Chicago, made him think of “Killer” Blonte with the jittery trigger finger, made him wonder what he’d be like when he got cut loose.
At the hospital door he paused and looked inside. White light was reflected from white walls. Gray bodies covered the floor, gasping for the breath that would keep them living the life of death. Convict nurses in white jackets were wiping away the black filth belched from the men’s tortured lungs.
He saw a convict with creased trousers and a laundered shirt being pushed through the door by a burly screw. “Come on get along,” the guard was saying.
“But I tell you, I gotta see the doc,” the fellow was protesting. “I gotta bad stomachache—I gotta get some of that Mylanta or I’ll have a serious breakdown, I tell you . . .”
The guard pushed that fellow down the steps. A snarl coughed up in Black-Jack’s throat. What the hell? A lousy John Law manhandling a con and men lying dead like blackbirds in the shooting season—men sent here by these khaki-coated bastards . . .
But a stomachache! A stomachache! He laughed . . .
Confusion was a tangible thing about him. He could feel it pressing in on his clothes, feel it pumping excitement through his mind. Hundreds of men from “outside” were mingling shoulder to shoulder with the 2,000 convicts until you couldn’t tell them apart.
At the fringe of the light, where the shadow began, smoke was a thick, gray wall. He walked into the wall of smoke. For a moment he couldn’t see. Someone bumped his shoulder hard, knocking him to his knees. He felt the side of his head strike the railing by the sidewalk. Then a heavy sound filled his ears like a roar. But it was only a voice yelling, “Gangway! Live one!” Four men swept into the stream of light up the hospital stairs. They carried a writhing body—a live one! They were dumping the dead ones out in the yard.
He got up and walked over toward the door of the burning cell block. The acrid fumes were thick here. He began to cough. He stepped in front of the smoke-filled door. Water covered the ground. Fire hoses were everywhere. Water, bouncing from the hot brick, sprinkled his face.
A huge Negro called Loomis loomed suddenly in the door with a limp figure draped across his shoulder. The unconscious figure strangled suddenly and vomited.
Black-Jack looked at the slimy filth, felt his stomach turn over inside of him. He heard a voice say, “Get a blanket and give a hand here.” His lips twitched slightly as a nausea swept over him. He said, “No can do,” in a low choky whisper and walked over toward the chapel.
Didn’t know what the hell was the matter with him, getting sick like a convent girl at a cesspool. He really wanted to go up in that smoking inferno where heroes were being made and angels were being born. But he couldn’t, that’s all. It wasn’t a case of being afraid . . . Hell, he’d been born on the Marne. He’d seen liquid fire rolling across no man’s land. He’d seen men carrying their guts in their hands. But he couldn’t go up there on that sixth tier of hell and brig down a puking stiff on his shoulder for love nor money. He just couldn’t do it!
He walked through the confusion with a slow, uncertain gait. His mind was in a gray daze. Red-coated firemen were running all about him yelling instructions at each other. Prison guards were jumping about like chickens minus heads, bellowing at the cons. But the cons weren’t listening.
He stood still a moment and looked at the men. Pedestrian traffic was as thick as Fifth Avenue jam at noon . . . men working overtime at their job of being heroes, moving through the smoke with reckless haste . . . white faces, gleaming with sweat, streaked with soot . . . white teeth flashing in sweaty black faces . . . working like hell, seeming jolly about it . . . men romping here and there without purpose . . . men standing still . . . men running in packs like wolves, bent on destruction . . . men laughing, solemn, some a little hysterical . . . drunk with their momentary freedom . . . all convicts, all glad in gray—the quick and the dead . . . . To some it was just fun, excitement, something to do—a lurid break in the dull monotone of routine.
He walked on to the chapel, tried the door. It was open. He walked inside. A guy was standing in the vestibule just inside the doorway cursing God with a slow, deliberate monotone. Inside, some guys were shooting craps on the floor of the aisle down in front of the stage. He listened a moment to the snapping of their fingers, the rattle of dice. Then he heard a slow run on the bass keys of a piano.
He could hear the crackle of flame from the fire outside, see the red glare through the frosted glass.
He looked toward the stage. Somebody had rolled the cover from the grand piano over in the corner and a curly-headed youth was sitting on the stool, playing Saul’s Death march with slow feeling. A pencil streak of light, coming through a cracked door, cut a white stripe down the boy’s face. He saw that the boy’s cheeks were wet with tears.
Then the slow, steady beat of the bass keys hammered on his mind like a guard’s fist. He said, “Don’t you know people are dying outside?”
The young youth looked around and said, “Sure,” without stopping. “I’m playing their parade march into some black hell.”
He felt worms crawling in his stomach. He backed out of the chapel, got in the hospital-bound traffic followed a convict ambulance as far as the deputy’s office.
He saw two kinda guys standing by the walk-rail looking over the bodies. He heard one of them say, “Goddamn! There’s Porky. He won dam’ near five C notes yesterday shootin’ craps up in the dayroom.”
The fellow standing beside him said, “Yeah? Wonder if he’s got any of it on him?”
They looked at each other and started moving casually through the rows of bodies.
Black-Jack turned away, walked over by the school. What the hell did he have to do with it? he asked himself.
A group of fellows stood in the darkness. A short, baldheaded fellow with a vibrant voice was talking. “Listen, fellows,” the short guy was saying, “tomorrow’s gonna be another day. There ain’t gonna be no way in the world to get all these guys back in the cells. The guards ain’t gonna be able to handle ‘em and the John Laws is just gonna cause trouble. We don’t want no trouble now, with our buddies laying out there dead. But we ain’t gonna be ruled no more by bastards that burn us to death. Let’s form a committee and rule ourselves—Passive Resistance—that’s the way we’ll work it.”
Heads nodded.
Black-Jack said, “Uh huh, that’s the way you’ll work it—like hell.”
Faces turned toward him. A voice said, “Don’t mind him, Coyote.”
Black-Jack stepped inside a school-room, slammed the door behind him. Guys were sitting on the desktops, smoking, laughing, talking. He walked across to the latrine. A guy was using a commode in one end. Another was washing his face in the basin. Over in the corner he saw a big blond guy kissing a nice-looking brunette youth named Chad Vinsin, the cutest punk you’d ever seen. Nobody seemed to notice him. He turned around and walked out.
He thought, I’d give fifty dollars and a diamond ring if somebody’d just say, “Hello, Black-Jack, how’re you makin’ it?” But everybody was in a hurry, either being a hero or a damned rogue.
Nobody saw him.
He caught himself saying deep in his heart: Hell, if you weren’t yellow you’d be helping like the rest of them . . . But that wasn’t it, he argued with himself. He’d stand toe to toe and fight anybody in the world—with dukes, chivs, or smoking heats. But he couldn’t go up in that cell block—he just couldn’t do it!
He got outside and started moving fast. A fellow by the personnel office stopped him and said, “Send a telegram home. Tell ‘em you’re living.”
He looked at the yellow Western Union blanks in the guys hand, said, “Gimmie half a dozen.”
The guy asked, “Who do you wanta send ‘em to?”
He said, “My wife.”
The guy said, “Hell, you must be a Mormon. You can’t send but one.”
Black-Jack laughed raggedly. “It was just a joke, don’t nobody give a damn whether I’m living or not.”
He sauntered over to the sidewalk, leaned against the post, looked out over the yard. The gray, prone bodies got into his eyes. Some were the bodies of old men with gray hair and weak eyes, some of young men, some of white men, some of black men—some used to be bankers, once upon a time, some used to be sneak thieves, some big shots, some chiselers . . . But now they were all just stiffs with a gray sameness. No more banquets and cocaine balls!
He saw the dead face of a guy he had hated. He caught himself quoting, “Take off the paint, no need to longer clown.” And then he caught himself wondering if he still hated the guy now that he was dead. He picked his way gingerly through the rows of corpses to see if he knew any more of them.
Somebody started crying loudly beside him. It sounded phony. He turned about searching for the source of the sound. A tall, black boy called Beautiful Sam was kneeling on the ground by the body of a little brown-skin fellow who was burned up around the mouth. When the black boy saw him, he blabbered, “Oh lawd, ma man’s dead.”
But he had seen the boy slip a tobacco sock of money from its hiding space in the dead fellow’s underwear.
The Black boy snarled, “What the hell you got to do with it? I give 'im tha money. A' now that he’s croaked, do you think I’m gonna let some other nigger bitch get what I give 'im?”
Black-Jack swung a hard, wild haymaker at the shiny, black face. He missed and went sprawling across the corpse. He felt the soft, mushy form beneath him. He got up, started shaking his hands and feet with quick jerky movements like a cat walking in molasses. He didn’t see the black boy any more, but he saw other guys, white guys, stripping the shoes from the dead men’s feet. “Dead Men’s Shoes”: Hell, that was the name of the story he had read. Well, what did he have to do with it anyhow? he asked himself.
Suddenly he felt an insane desire to laugh. Something sticky was crawling about in his mind. He felt for a moment that he was going crazy. He started moving fast, trying to get away from the dense crop of corpses. His feet slipped on leg bones. The scalp rolled under his hair.
A second later he found himself standing in front of the entrance to the Catholic chapel. A guy standing there, had a potato sack full of Bull Durham, giving it away.
“What the hell is this, Christmas or donation at the Y.M.C.A.?” he asked.
The guy said, “We’re looting the joint, taking everything—everything!”
Black-Jack said, “Well, don’t forget me when you start to taking time!” He went on up the stairs into the Catholic chapel, leaned against the wall beside the bronze basin of Holy water just inside the door. Candles were burning on the white altar, their yellow flames tapering up toward the polished bronze crucifix . . . a well of peace amid chaos.
He noticed the curved backs of several fellows bent over the railing before the Images of Saints. He caught himself reciting, “I believe in God, The Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth . . .” Then he thought of the prone, gray figures on the cold ground outside, of the smoke, flame and confusion. He felt a sneer form on the bottom side of his lips next to his teeth . . . “I believe in the power of the press, maker of laws, the almighty dollar, political pull, a Colt 45 . . .”
He turned around and went back downstairs; turned to his left and walked through the darkness by the long wooden dormitory.
From where he stood he could see the death house, a low, red brick building at the end of the cell block. Just above it was a wall parapet. A guard stood on the cat-walk with a sub-machine gun cradled in his arm. Two searchlights shone in opposite directions down the sides of the gray, stone wall. The green door of the death house looked blocked in the vague light.
The end of the parade! The last mile! What a joke! The death house was on the other side of the yard tonight, he was thinking. It was quiet over here in the shadows with the scared ghosts of executed men.
He heard a freight train puffing by outside, heard the scream of its whistle. “I wish to God I was riding you,” he muttered.
He walked down by the dormitory. Two guys were standing by the “hole” talking. One guy was saying, “Tuck clipped a screw, took the range key and went down to the end of the range through all that smoke to let those guys out. He just did make it. That’s what I call love.”
A heavy voice answered, “You goddam right, a sucker’s got to love his fellow man a hell of a lot to risk his life like that.”
The first guy said, “Hell, I wasn’t talking about his fellow man. I was talking about his kid—he was in the last cell down.”
He caught himself wondering what made heroes and what made cowards . . .
Then he heard the sounds of running footsteps. He looked up the dark areaway between the “hole” and the dormitory. He saw the deputy and two firemen running toward the dormitory. He heard somebody inside yell, “We’re burning down the joint!”
He thought: I got to get my box out before the shack goes up. I got my brand new black loafers in it. He could feel the cinders roll under his feet as he ran toward the door. The deputy turned suddenly and snapped a flash dead in his face. He could feel his eyes getting big all up in his forehead.
Then he saw a guy step out of the dormitory with an empty can in his hand. He caught the faint stench of gasoline. The deputy swang the light away from him, over on the man in the doorway. He stopped and stared, breathing hard.
Damn, my mind’s short—heart’s pumping like a trip—hammer. When I fought Kid Mack in the Garden . . . but hell, that was seven years ago. A trey in stir . . .
He started suddenly as he saw the fireman draw a pistol and jam it into the guy’s guts. He heard the guy’s sudden oath, saw him back up a little from the gun and drop the can. He heard the can clanking on the pavement, heard the guy’s loud laugh. He sensed the drama of the moment. It made him shaky clear down to his feet. Then he saw the flash, heard the roar of the gun, heard the laugh choke off . . .
He turned, started walking away fast. Let the black loafers go to hell!
He turned left by the deputy’s office. It was the center of the clock here, where the hands turned from. The confusion seemed more orderly.
He heard somebody say, “They’re giving away clothes over at the commissary.” A bunch of fellows started running over that way to get new clothes. He got in with the bunch and started running like the rest.
He passed the fire trucks bunched at the end of the burning cell block. Mud oozed under his feet. Hoses were writhing snakes in the darkness. The chrome steel and red paint of the fire trucks shone in the lurid glare of the fire. It made him think of a tenement fire he had seen as a kid in Mt. Laurel, New Jersey.
He slipped between a Pump Truck and Hook and Ladder, came out on the other side by the commissary door. A bunch of guys were lined up in their shirttails.
“What the hell is this, Paramount on Parade?” he asked.
“No, a strip act on Broadway,” somebody cracked.
Another guy said, “You got to show your shape before you get new strides.”
He said, “May as well,” slipped his trousers off, threw them on the ground. He could feel the cool night air blowing through his underwear. Upstairs men were hemmed together. Odor clogged his nostrils. He got a new coat, new pants—prison fit—and hurried out. He’d rather smell the smoke.
He heard somebody yell, “They’re firing the woolen mill!” Sudden confusion sounded among the fire trucks. A motor roared. A truck backed, turned, and sped toward the woolen mill. But it was all over before he got there.
A guy looked up from a steak and said, “Go on back in the kitchen and get something to eat. They’re giving it away.”
The steak looked good. He went back in the kitchen, heard a yell ring out. He looked up startled, saw a wide-mouthed Negro standing on the kitchen range with a six-inch dirk in his hand, yelling, “Bring Dangerous Dan some ham and eggs, you kitchen rats.” Scars were shiny ridges in the guy’s black face.
Black-Jack said raising his hands mockingly, “Don’t shoot, Mr. Villa, I surrender.”
The guy jumped from the range. Black-Jack backed from the kitchen, went over into the east dining room. He saw a guy he knew down near the front door, started over to speak to him.
Several sharp reports broke above the steady hum of sound like a staccato burst of gunfire. He ducked under one of the slate-topped tables. After a few seconds he heard somebody laugh; heard a voice saying, “Hell, that was just some damn fools throwing bricks through the windows.”
He crawled out from under the table, stood up, brushed his knees off. He saw a score of other fellows coming out from under the tables too. He began to laugh himself then. Hell, he thought, if somebody really starts shooting we’ll all kill ourselves ducking.
He had forgotten about the guy he’d started to see. He went out the side door into the night. A guy coming around the corner of the tin shop almost bumped into him.
“What the hell you doin' here?” Black-Jack said.
“I’m guarding the building,” the guy answered. “They got cons guarding all the buildings since they tried to fire the woolen mill a few minutes ago.”
Black-Jack said, “I think a con who’d guard a lousy building on a night like this is a goddamn rat.”
The guy laughed, said, “That still don’t make me a damn rat.”
Black-Jack hawked, spat on the ground, and turned away.
He moved down on the area way between the tin shop and the dining room. Sound came through the night behind him, but it was kind of quiet down here. Two guys passed him hurrying back to the confusion of the yard. He kept on walking through the shadows, away from the turmoil, away from the panicked figures racing to and fro like condemned souls jumping flame pots in the anteroom of Hell. He turned the corner by the store room and walked into the darkness . . .
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