DEATH ROW BREAKOUT

Death Row Breakout brings together seven previously unseen short stories that draw fully on Edward Bunker's incomparable experience of the U.S. prison system. - as James Ellroy says `by an ex-criminal, from the unregenerately criminal viewpoint...'

The following is one of those seven stories:

DEATH OF A RAT

A witness to the murder of the Soledad guard had been sent to San Quentin awaiting the trial. He was kept in the hospital's third floor. To reach him, you had to get through the hospital entrance by showing an identification card, with mug photo, name and number. That got you into the hospital Infirmary Room, normally used for treating cuts and dispensing cold pills. At the other side of this first room was a gate of steel bars painted white. A guard stood behind it, checking passes and identification. He had a board affixed to the wall with a hundred and fifty-two name tags, inmates who worked somewhere in the hospital, from laundry room to surgical nurse, clerk to the prison psychiatrist and the chief medical officer's clerk. Inmates who worked in the hospital wore green jumpers, which differentiated them from non-workers in blue chambray shirts.

A couple of weeks later the chief prison psychologist gave his clerk a list of men he wanted to see. The clerk dutifully typed up the list as a 'request for interview.' He put it on the psychologist's desk. It was signed and given back to the inmate clerk to be forwarded to the Custody Office where the actual passes were made up and distributed throughout the cell houses by the graveyard shift. This time, however, when the clerk got the signed list from his boss, he put it back in the Underwood and added two names and numbers, Clemens, B13566, and Buford, B14003. Both were young 'fish,' age nineteen and twenty-two, and neither had been a year in the House of Dracula, the nickname for San Quentin. Folsom was The Pit, and Soledad The Gladiator School. Neither would admit it, but both wanted to be the stuff of legend in the prison underworld. During the night a guard walked the cell house tiers, putting passes (called ducats) on the cell bars of convicts who were wanted somewhere by someone. Clemens was wide awake and waiting when the guard passed his cell. Buford got his when he woke up. They met on the Big Yard after breakfast. Neither had any appetite. Instead of hunger, both felt the hollowness of fear deep in the stomach. Normally they would have joined some partners hanging out in the morning sunlight near the North cell house until the mess halls cleared and the whistle blew for work. This morning they wanted to hang out quietly until it was time to take care of business.

'Is that fuckin' whistle late this morning?' asked Buford.

Clemens shrugged. 'I ain' got no fuckin' idea. I don' even know what fuckin' year it is.'

The work whistle blasted the morning, causing an explosion of pigeons and seagulls. The latter flew over the yard and shit on the cons, as if getting vengeance for the whistle's blast. They were cursed in return. 'Flying fuckin' rats,' (In an attempt at retaliation, a few convicts would put Alka Seltzer tablets inside pieces of crushed up bread. The birds swooped, ate and soon went crazy as the Alka Seltzer fizzed inside of them.)

The Big Yard gate was rolled open and convicts streamed out to their jobs in the lower yard industries. In minutes the yard was empty save for the cleanup crew and those who had night jobs. Lined up near the South cell house rotunda were those going to sick call. A guard was picking up I.D. cards. When he reached Clemens and Buford, they showed the ducat and I.D. card. He beckoned them. 'Follow me. ' The guard led them along the line to the Infirmary door. Because they had passes, they had priority over those who were in the sick call line on their own. He took their I.D. cards and put them with the others, to be returned when they left the hospital.

At the grille gate across the infirmary, they handed their passes through the bars. The guard keyed the gate. 'You know where you're goin?'

They nodded and he waved them through. The corridor ahead was long. A few inmates and free personnel were coming and going. The Psychiatric Department was halfway down the hallway. Instead of turning through the door, they kept going to the rear. On the left was an elevator. Inmates used it if they were patients or assigned. Others went up the stairwell, which was the route taken by Buford and Clemens, two and three stairs at a time. On the second floor they turned in and went to the X-ray department. They swiftly removed their shirts and tossed them under a bench. Now they wore the green jumpers. Anyone who didn't know better would assume that they were assigned to the hospital work crew. Clemens slapped Buford on the back. 'Let's do it, homes.' He opened the hallway door and out they went.

As they reached the third floor landing and started to turn in, an elderly correctional officer came out and nearly collided with them. 'Slow down. Where's the fire?'

'Sorry, boss,' said Buford. 'We're late.' If the guard had asked 'for what,' there would have been no reply, although Clemens' sweaty hand held the taped handle of the shiv in his pocket. It was 15' long overall, and the tip of the blade had been stabbed through the bottom of his pocket and the steel pressed against his thigh.

'Okay, go on...just take it easy.' The guard went down the stairs and they went through the door. To the left were the rooms. It was cleanup time and the doors were ajar. A Chicano janitor was squeezing a wet mop in a wheeled bucket and wringer. The first door was into the nurse's station. It was open; the nurse was inside.

'Where's the rat?' Clemens asked Buford.

'At the back...around the corner.'

'How we gonna get by the nurse?'

'That's what these green shirts are for.'

'Let's go do him up.'

They walked past the nurse's office without a challenge, and nodded at the Chicano mopping the floors. Men in the rooms, mostly wearing nightgowns and jeans, glanced up as they went by, but suspected nothing and said nothing. With every step Clemens' tension increased. When they turned the corner and saw the correctional officer reading a newspaper, Clemens got momentarily dizzy. He expelled a lung full of air.

The officer sensed, or heard them as soon as they turned the corner. The way they moved made him stand up and put the paper down. He saw the green blouses, but the hallway was a dead end ten feet away. 'Hold it. Where're you going?'

Clemens literally lost his mind. The tension was too heavy and he snapped. 'Gimme them motherfuckin' keys, pig!' He didn't wait for the response, but pulled his shiv and stuck it straight into the officer's stomach, an inch below the rib cage.

'AhhhhhAHHHHH. God!'

Buford stepped forward and put a hand over Clemens chest. 'Cool it.' And to the officer: 'Better be givin' up them keys.'

'I don't have them,' he said, blood spraying out of his mouth.

In the cell, the witness, a Black queen, heard the officer bang his back on the door when Clemens stabbed him. The queen got up to look through the observation window. She saw what was going on and ran to the window overlooking the air well at the center of the building - and began screaming: HELP HELP HELP MURDER! OH GOD HELP!

From nearby windows came responding voices, but not of help. 'Shaddup you ding bat motherfucker!' 'Shut the fuck up, dick sucker, snitchin' nigger.'

In the hallway, Clemens and Buford had the guard seated in the chair, unable to resist, blood coming from his mouth and down his shirt. He held his belly and hunkered forward. 'Don't have keys,' he said. 'Yeah...yeah.' Buford was turning the guard's pockets inside out. Nothing.

Unexpectedly, the female nurse in white uniform came around the corner. She took a couple of steps before she realized what was going on. She turned and ran, with Buford in hot pursuit. Patients were sticking out their heads, but on seeing the nurse running and yelling they stepped back and closed the door. When they were questioned, and they would be, they would give the standard convict answer: 'I didn't see nuthin', I didn't hear nuthin' - and I don't know nuthin'.'

The nurse's office had a panic button, but Buford and his shiv were too close behind for her to turn in there. Instead she hit the stairway door and went through on the fly, screaming HELP! HELP! HELP! 'as she leaped and fell and rolled down the stairs, miraculously not breaking any bones and still screaming at the top of her lungs.

As Buford started down the stairway, his will ran out and fear filled him, sapping his strength. The nurse hit the first floor and ran into the main corridor.

Clemens came up behind Buford. 'Did she get away?'

'Yeah, yeah. What're we gonna do?'

'C'mon!'

Clemens led the way to the second floor and turned in. 'Best pray right here.'

'Pray. What the fuck...!'

'Yeah, pray they pass on by to the third floor.'

They heard the pounding feet and excited voices. 'Go...go...on three.' Four officers bounded past to the third floor.

Wordlessly, Clemens pulled Buford's sleeve and led him out of the second floor and down to the first. The main corridor had a dozen or more convicts looking toward the door into the stairwell and buzzing.

The corridor was long. The exit door was beyond the barred gate and infirmary.

'Suck it up, dawg, an' let's go.' He started walking with Buford on his heels.

The elderly guard on the barred gate was arguing with convicts on the other side. '...gonna want us,' the convict said. 'We're the surgery crew. They've been calling us on the loudspeaker. Here - 'He brought out a yellow 'Assignment Card.' It said 'Hospital - Surgery.'

'Wait,' said the guard as he picked up the phone and checked with Control, holding down his voice. 'Stand aside. When they need you they'll call.' At the same moment, he looked back over his shoulder to Clemens and Buford in their green hospital worker blouses. The guard nodded and turned the key in the barred gate. Buford and Clemens slipped out into the Big Yard.

'LOCKUP! LOCKUP! blasted the public address system. Convicts looked at one another, shrugged and began to slowly file into the vast cell houses.

In the dark hours before dawn, the sound of boots crunching, and tall shadows made by prison floodlights, gave notice that guards were on the tiers. They took Buford first and went back for Clemens. On the way down the rear steel stairs, the night sticks rose and descended. One blow gave off the hollow sound similar to that of a breaking egg. It was actually Clemens's breaking skull. He was in a coma for a week, and would be a mumbling idiot for the rest of his life. That saved Buford, for the guards were afraid of what they had done. Their reports said he had fallen down the steel stairs to the concrete floor.

The sun was rising and the baby pigeons and other birds were making an inordinate ruckus that most convicts slept through, when Buford was walked across the prison to the Adjustment Center. There was the bang and slam of gates opening and being shut until they got him into a cell on the bottom floor of the north side of the A.C., among half a dozen men the officials thought were the most dangerous in the entire prison system of sixty eight thousand.

© No Exit Press 2008