The one other thing you could try was running the levee.
It wasn’t impossible to get around the guards at the south end of the prison by circling through the woods, and then all you had to do was make your way back to the levee and follow it for sixty miles or so down to Baton Rouge. You had other choices, of course. If you thought you were up to it, you could cut away from the levee and try crossing the swamps to the west. Chances were you’d drown in the quicksand or get bit by a viper or eaten up by the alligators or go crazy from the mosquitoes or poison yourself with bad water or break a leg or starve to death after getting so lost the Devil himself couldn’t find you. Or you could run into some swamp rat who’d shoot you on sight so he could claim the state reward for fugitive convicts, dead or alive. They said not one convict who ever took off into the swamp was ever heard of again. But that didn’t mean you couldn’t try to be the first.
All things considered, you’d probably do better to stay on the levee, although they’d be coming right behind you with dogs and high-powered rifles. Plenty of cons had tried running the levee over the years and some were shot down from as far off as a half mile away, but most were caught by the dogs, and more than a few were killed by them. There was no outrunning the dogs. Only two men were known to have made the run all the way to freedom, both of them coloreds, and both had done it a long time ago.
Well, if it was so goddam hard to get out of Angola, I said, why did they even bother having tower guards at every camp like they did? Why did they even bother having fences around the camps?
“Why hell, boy,” old Dupree said, “they don’t want to encourage nobody.”
One afternoon a convict slipped out of the cypress stand where we were axing timber and was gone a good ten minutes before a pusher noticed and harked the news to the gun bulls. The runner was a big old boy named Watkins, from Slidell. He’d been married less than a month when he and his wife were at a carnival one night and some galoot gave her a passing pat on the ass. Watkins didn’t see it—he’d been trying to win her a prize by ringing the bell on one of those “Test Your Manly Strength” machines you hit with a mallet. If she’d kept her mouth shut nothing would’ve happened. But she had to pitch a fit, so naturally Watkins had to do something, and since he already had the mallet in his hands what he did was hit the guy with it. Broke his head open like a watermelon. Drew fifteen years. He’d been at Camp M only a few weeks when his pining for his wife got the better of him.
The bosses rounded us up in a hurry and took us back to camp and put us in the barracks so they could all go join the hunt. Out by the pen the dogs were yelping as they were put on a truck to be taken out to the fugitive’s trail. By the captain’s standing order, the floorwalkers couldn’t hand out the musical instruments before sundown except on Sundays, but Gaylord didn’t care what else we did while we were in lockdown, and so we played nickel-ante poker and read and napped and sat around bullshitting. Everybody wished guys would try to escape more often.
We knew when the dogs got turned loose by their sudden higher howling. For the next half hour the baying grew fainter as they chased after Watkins—and then it abruptly intensified.
“Sons of bitches run him to ground,” Red Garrison said.
There was the flat crack of a distant rifle shot, and a moment later another, and then the dogs began to quiet down and then we didn’t hear them anymore.
They brought him back draped over the hood of a truck. We stood at the windows and watched the captain come out of his house and pull Watkins’ head up by the hair to have a look at his face. He said something to his foreman and went back into the house. The dogboy got the dogs back in their pen and a couple of the bosses untied the corpse and lugged it around to the back of the truck and laid it out on the bed and then drove him away. We heard they took him to the main hospital and from there notified his wife to come claim his body.
I saw what the dogs did to another con who tried to run. He wasn’t even a half mile away when they caught up to him. The hunting party brought him back and dumped him in the middle of the camp yard so we could all have a good look. He was barely recognizable, a heap of bloody rags and flesh, his throat torn and parts of his face and hands ripped open to the bone. He didn’t have any kin listed in the records, so the captain had him buried in the small cemetery on a rise by the back fence. None of the graves had markers except one with a small flat headstone that said “Rollie,” who had been the captain’s favorite dog.
I saw guys deliberately break their arm to go to the hospital and get off the work parties for a time. They’d position their forearm between two logs and let another guy bust it with the flathead of an ax. Some guys knew just how to hit the arm to fracture the top bone, but some did the job with a little too much enthusiasm and the poor bastard’s arm looked like a battlefield wound. After the guy regained consciousness he’d go staggering off to show the misshapen arm to the bosses and tell them he’d broken it in a fall. They knew it was bullshit but what could they do? Some guys preferred to have a leg busted because it kept them off work longer. But as soon as a broken arm or a leg was sufficiently healed, sometimes even if it was still in a cast, the man was put back to work.
Some cons went for more lasting damage by cutting their heelstring, the Achilles tendon. They figured it was worth a permanent hobble to get out of hard work for good. It didn’t always turn out that way. Sometimes they got sent back to the fields anyway, back to labor made all the harder for being crippled. That’s the way it was for the weaklings of the world, in prison or out of it—when nobody else was making it hard for them, they were making it hard for themselves.
I saw a crazy guy named Verhoven brandish a cane knife in the face of a hardcock named Burnett and threaten to cut his head off for being an agent of Satan. Burnett knew Verhoven was a lunatic, we all did, but he stood there with his thumbs hooked in his belt loops and a cigarette in one hand and said, “You couldn’t kill me if you tried all day.”
The last word was hardly out of his mouth when the blade swiped through his neck. Burnett’s head rolled off his shoulders as blood sprang up in a pair of bright red twirls and fell in a spray. The body stayed upright for a moment like it wasn’t sure yet what happened, the shoulders blooming deep red, then toppled backwards, the thumbs still in the belt loops, the cigarette still smoking between two fingers. Burnett’s head on the ground stared up at nothing and had lost most of its sneer.
They said when Verhoven went to the gallows six weeks later he was chatting happily with God right up to the minute the trap opened under him.
I saw a con get down on his belly to rinse out his bandanna in a bayou and a cottonmouth struck him over the eye. The man jumped up shrieking and started running, the snake snagged to his face by one fang and whipping every which way. A couple of cons wrestled him down and one severed the snake just under the head and flung the writhing body into the water, then pried the fangs out of the man’s brow and pitched the head away too. By the time a truck carried him off, the convict’s darkly swollen face looked like a spoiled melon. They said he was dead when they got to the hospital, that the doctor listed the cause of death as “excess of venom in the brain.”
I saw these things and more through the summer and the fall and into the first cold days of a new year.
And every morning when I woke to the clanging bell in the dark, I’d remind myself once more: You never know.