“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.
“I see what you think,” he says. “The way you roll your eyes sometimes when I talk. But it’s real, kid. It’s all real.”
23
THE SLIDE CHANGED, and Lexis stared hard at the low country cottage surrounded by a brooding sky. A small peat fire, a single splash of brilliant orange in a world of gloom, fought bravely, if hopelessly, against the bold brushstrokes of van Gogh’s tempest. The screen went black and the lights went on.
Everyone around the long table clapped and blinked in the direction of the curator, who took a slight bow and thanked them all for coming. He’d see them next month and he hoped they would enjoy the exhibit. Lexis left the room, passing by the others piling up outside the elevator. Important people pushing and jostling like everyone else. Lexis would rather walk.
On the outside, the Guggenheim is like an upside-down wedding cake. Inside, the exhibit space is the walls along a long slow spiraling walkway that climbs from the ground floor to the top. Lexis was halfway down the ramp on the Level 4 Rotunda when she heard her name and stopped.
Hurrying after her was Pablo Truscan, the long-legged art critic from the New York Times. Truscan looked more like an undertaker with his gray skin and sunken eyes. He had an old-fashioned, droopy mustache. When he caught her, he touched behind his ear before taking her hand.
“I heard about your paintings,” he said. “I’d love to see them.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I’m flattered but I’m afraid I don’t show them.”
Lexis turned to go, but Truscan hurried after her.
“I understand,” the critic said, touching his ear. “It’s just that I’ve heard about all the pain and emotion in them.”
Lexis continued down the museum’s broad spiraling walkway, her shoes slapping against the smooth floor. She could hear Truscan breathing hard. At the second level she stopped in front of a Chagall painting, Around Her.
Pointing at the face of Chagall’s dead wife, she said, “He lived for her. That’s pain people want to look at. Not mine.”
Lexis began to walk more quickly and Truscan dropped back. Outside, she squinted and made a visor of her hand against the summer sunshine. From the corner of her eye she saw a man in a blue blazer and gray slacks stand up from a bench and approach her. There was something familiar.
“Lexis?” he said, stepping in front of her.
She jumped.
“It’s me, Dan Parsons.”
Raymond’s mentor still had that round red face, but he wore glasses now instead of contacts, thick ones with brown plastic frames that magnified eyes whose sparkle had dimmed. His nose seemed bigger and the curly white hair had receded nearly to the top of his head. He offered her what was left of that once-broad smile and she smiled back.