Prisoners of the Williwaw

By

Ed Griffin

      One of the most dangerous local phenomena occurring in the Aleutians is the "Williwaw."  This is a type of wind which results from the damming up of air on windward slopes followed by an overflow of air down the leeward slopes.  These gusts often are in excess of 60 knots.

                                           U.S. Navy publication, "Welcome to Adak"

Chapter 1

Melt the bars, Frank. Walk through them. Frank Villa heard his cell mate hammering at him in his mind. Melt the bars. You're a person, not an inmate.

The guard blocked his passage down the narrow tier. "Inmate Villa, I repeat, Throw away the cigarette."

Frank showed his two hands.  "I’m not smoking."

"On your ear, Inmate Villa, there's a cigarette."

Frank reached up.  Sure enough.  He had rolled a smoke for his walk back to the cell block, but the teacher he worked for had called him back into the classroom.  Frank took the cigarette off his ear and palmed it.  "It's not lit, see?"

"Throw it away."  The cell block guard pointed to the trash can at the end of the tier.

Frank hesitated. Throw it away? The equivalent of fifty cents in prison money, an hour's work. Throw it away?

"Inmate Villa, I said now."

Again his cell mate's words: Melt the bars, Frank. Lose the battle, win the war.

He threw the smoke into the can and continued down the tier toward his cell. He bounced his left hand along the bars as he went, to let his anger dissipate into the steel.  Prison sucked the balls out of a man and left him as a passive shell.

Through fourteen years in prison he had earned a masters in sociology, become a tutor and stayed out of trouble.  And still he was Inmate Villa, nothing more.

Frank grabbed the last bar of his open cell door and pivoted himself in.  He smelled the tea Rudy had brewed for him, strong morning tea.  It was 11:15.  Rudy sat lotus style on the top bunk, reading.  The winter sun shone through the barred window on the outer wall and cast a shadow across his face and down over the book he was reading.

Frank stared at the image of the bar.   It was Rudy who had taught him all about bars, fourteen years ago.  “Melt the bars,” Rudy first told him a long time ago when he came to prison. “Walk into the world of knowledge, Frank, and the bars will disappear. Freedom is inside you.”

“Hey, Rudy, check out the sun.”

“Yeah.  How was school?”

“Okay.  Teaching a guy to read.”

Frank picked up one of Rudy’s papers that had fallen to the floor.

“Thanks.”

Frank always marveled that  the two of them had been able to create two private spaces in their 9 by 14 world.

Frank sat down at their small table. A stocky man, middle-aged, he ran a hand  over a bald spot and  sipped the tea.  Rudy flipped tea bag after tea bag into the pot during the day, only cleaning the ceramic pot at night. 

      A female voice wafted through the bars from the next cell.  It was Fitznagel’s TV. “Oh, Philip, I can’t wait ’til Friday.”  Rudy beat on the wall.  Fitznagel turned the TV down.

      “There’s your revolution, Frank,” Rudy said pointing to the next cell.  “A TV junkie who’s retired to the soft life of prison, a 13-inch RCA and three squares a day.”

      Frank smiled and flicked on his old computer.  Everybody had to figure out their own way to do time.  The soaps were Fitznagel’s way.

The guard came down the tier.  “Fifteen minutes to count. Get in your cells.”  The guard was a rookie, scared, tough.

Back to the proposal he was working on.  Where was he?  He pushed his rim-less glasses on tighter and found the place where he’d left off--establishing a police force.  A group of prisoners on an island with their families.  No guards on the island, just around it.  The prisoners to set up their own society.  But designating some convicts as police?  And arming them?  Establishing the same kind of society his proposal was meant to supplant?

Frank looked away from the screen and sipped his tea.  He put his cup down next to a stack of paper on his desk--his proposal so far. He straightened the edges.  This was his dream,  a new type of prison that would cost the Feds almost nothing.  And maybe, just maybe, his own way out of prison.

But how to get a hearing?  How to get someone to listen to his idea?

“Hey, Villa, what’s a six-letter word for dog?” someone yelled from down the tier.  Prison was a noisy place, hard to get any work done.

Frank thought a moment.  “Canine.”

The jokes started.  “What’s a five-letter word for pig?”

“Guard.”

Frank tried to shut out the chatter. In prison there were two realities: convicts and guards. On his island that division would end; there would just be convicts and their families.

The guard patrolled past his door again. “You smoking, Inmate Villa?”

Frank would never light up in here.  Rudy’s heart condition couldn’t take any second-hand smoke.  “No, sir.”

The guard moved on.

Frank looked up at Rudy.  The winter sun had now cast two bars across him.  Rudy smiled at him, but said nothing.  He didn’t need to.  Frank could almost hear the words he would say.   “Relax, Frank, this kid doesn’t even exist.  He is not in the world of ideas.  You live with the masters, the great sociologists, the men who have written about prison: Papillon, Jack Abbott, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn.  You have walked through the bars, you live a new life.”

Frank muffled an angry growl deep in the back of his throat.

All the doors on the cell block slid shut.  The guard started his count.

Frank turned back to the screen. “Any ideas about arming my police?”

      “That’s not the problem.  Your problem is getting a hearing.”

      “How?”

“Cause a riot, Frank.  Trash the prison.”

“Sure. Sure.”  Rudy was tweaking him.  He knew of Frank’s solemn oath of non-violence, lived out since his reform in the first year of his imprisonment.

“What you need is a politico, a—­”

Rudy stopped in mid-sentence.

Frank spun around.  Rudy was clutching his chest. “Frank, help me.  My—”

      Rudy half rolled, half fell out of the upper bunk.  His arms grasping his chest, he thrashed on the floor. “My heart!” he said through clenched teeth.

      “21A!” Frank yelled.  “We need the doctor.  Heart attack.”

      Frank pulled a pillow off the bunk and placed it under Rudy’s head. He heard the guard muttering something about the infirmary after lunch.

      “This is an emergency.  Rudy Jungbluth is having a heart attack.”

      “Hey, pig,” somebody else on the block took up the call.  “Let Doc out.  16A.”

      Frank stepped to the bars.  He could see the guard outside the bubble at the end of the tier.  “Let Doc out or call the prison doctor.  Jungbluth’s having a heart attack.”

      The guard stepped into the bubble and picked up the phone, moving slowly.  Never let the inmates hurry you.  Frank clenched the bars. Damn arrogant kid.

      Frank could feel the presence of everyone in the cell block.  They were all at their doors.  “Let me out, you dumb motherfucker.”  This was Doc Raymond, a MD doing hard time for selling drugs. “For shit’s sake, asshole, I can do something.”

      The guard stuck his head out of the bubble, his words maddeningly slow and deliberate.   “I’m calling for procedure.”

      Frank slammed the palm of his hand onto the bars.  An older guard would have let Doc out or called the prison doctor, hack that he was. Procedure could take half an hour.

      “Frank!” It was Doc calling from five cells down.  “Flat on his back, head back, keep the air passages open.”

      “Right.”

      “Now pressure directly over the heart.  Let me out, you motherfucker.”

      Somebody started to bang a piece of metal on his cell door.  Clang.  Clang.  “Send the doctor.”   Clang.  Clang.  “Dial 355, asshole.  That’s the doctor.”

      Rudy’s eyes stared up at him, pleading for help.  “Now what, Doc?” Frank yelled.  “Shut the fuck up.  I can’t hear Doc.”

      Frank went to his bars to silence the noise.  The guard stood by the phone, a dull I’m-waiting-for-orders look on his face. Frank yelled into the tier.  “Shut up, so I can hear Doc.”

      Instantly the cell block, a riot of noise a minute before, was pre-dawn quiet.  “Now, Frank, a little up from the bottom of the breastbone, push down with the heel of your hand.”

      Frank did this.  As he felt the breastbone, an image of a skeleton flashed into his mind.  He shook it off.  This was no skeleton.  This was Rudy, his cell mate, his friend.

      “Now repeat it, about twenty times.  Once a second.” 

Push down, let up.  Push down, let up.  Come on, Rudy.

      “Now inflate his lungs, Frank.  Mouth to mouth.”

      As Frank did this he glanced up to see the prison doctor at his cell door.

      “Hurry, Doctor, he’s dying.”

      “I’m not going in there without a guard.”

      “Guard.  Escort the doctor, will you?”

      “I’m not going in there until the backup arrives.”

      My God, what’s the matter with these people? Frank thought.

      Rudy’s eyes stared at the ceiling.   Motionless.  “He’s dead.”  Frank whispered.

      Frank checked for a pulse.  “There’s no pulse.  Get in here, will you?” he yelled.

      “Not without an escort.  You could be faking.”

      The cell block exploded with sound, metal clanging on bars, men shouting profanities.

      Tears filled Frank’s eyes. He was closer to Rudy than he’d ever been to any human being.  Rudy knew him, the depth and the surface, the good and the bad, and he knew Rudy.

      Frank stood and grabbed the bars.  Now the warden stood outside his cell with the doctor and the guard.  “What the hell’s all this noise about?”

The guard explained, dragging out words like Inmate Jungbluth and Inmate Villa.  “Did you call for backup?” the warden asked impatiently.

      “Yes.”

      “Open 21A.  Only 21A.  Hurry.”

      “Yes, sir.”

      As the guard moved toward the control bubble, the public-address system blared out that all inmates should now proceed to the mess hall.  Out of habit the guard punched the ALL button and the cell doors slid open, something the warden obviously didn’t want to happen.

      The bars to Frank’s cell began to move.  Finally the doctor was coming in.  But there was shouting and running and suddenly there were ten men outside his cell. The guard himself was grabbed from the bubble and dragged to the front of the cell.

      “Get the fuck out of the way.” Doc Raymond shoved the warden and the prison doctor aside.  “Let a real doctor in here.”

      Doc knelt by the lifeless figure of Rudy, while Frank put his arms out, blocking everyone from entering.  Suddenly the press of men pushed Frank backward, almost making him trip over Rudy.  Somebody knocked the treasured picture of Frank’s son off the wall.  Carl Larson, the I-65 killer, pushed the warden, the guard and the prison doctor into Frank’s cell.  Frank was wedged in a corner. His typing table was pushed into the other corner and upended.  His computer smashed to the floor and the printout of his island prison proposal slid to the floor and fanned out. He heard the glass of his picture scrunch under someone’s foot.

      “A death for a death,” Larson said, his squinty, mean eyes focusing on the warden, his bull neck and shoulders dwarfing the smaller man.

      Doc Raymond stood up.  “Rudy’s dead.”  He grabbed the prison doctor by his sweater.  “You asshole motherfucker.  You let a human being die right in front of you.”

      “Kill ’em all,” someone shouted from the back of the mob outside the cell.

      “We can talk this out,” the warden said to Larson.

      “Talk?  What’s to talk about?  I already got three life sentences.  What’s a few more?”

      On the tier Frank heard the sounds of a full riot, chairs and tables being thrown over the railing, porcelain fixtures being pried from the wall.  He smelled the smoke of a mattress fire.

      Behind Larson a path cleared. Boss Gilmore slid in next to Larson and said in a low voice, but one that Frank could hear, “Let the prison doctor go.  We need him.”

      Frank knew, as everyone on the tier did, that the prison doctor was Boss Gilmore’s drug connection.   Fourteen years in prison and Frank had never seen a smoother operator than Gilmore.  The man even knew how to make prison blues look like an executive suit.

      Larson snarled and shoved the doctor out of the cell.  Then he grabbed the warden by the throat.  Frank pushed his way out of the corner and summoned everything from his years as a con, everything Rudy had taught him about control and about the power of human presence.

      “Out, Larson,” he said in a calm voice, pushing his way between Larson and the warden who was already red in the face.  “Rudy’s dead.  We’re going to honor his spirit.”

      Larson’s dull face stared right into Frank’s.  His hands were still tight around the warden’s throat.   Frank put his hand out flat on Larson’s chest and pushed.  His voice got lower, more deadly.  “Out.  I said out.”

      Larson didn’t move.  Frank’s neck was now right next to the big man’s arm.  Frank felt Larson’s arm shake as he throttled the warden and he felt the warden thrashing behind him.  For a second Frank shut his eyes.  Rudy was still there with him somehow. “Larson,” he said in a voice he himself did not recognize, a voice of restrained power, “Get out.”

      Larson stared at Frank for a few seconds as if it were taking a long time for messages to reach his brain.  He slammed the warden to the floor, muttered “Fuck!” and left the cell.

      It was then that the riot squad hit the cell block, putting everyone including Frank in the hole.

      The warden lifted himself off the floor.  As he struggled up, his hand came to rest on the first page of Frank’s print out, A New Society: An Island Prison.

© Copyright Ed Griffin 2003.  All rights reserved.