looking to make a reputation. He kept his own counsel and gave the screws no excuse for writing him up, resisted eyeballing them during the frisks and shakedowns. By forgoing trips to the commissary he amassed a small fortune in scrip, which he could use to bribe the COs who swapped it with the mules for drugs and smuggled loot. In this way Cholly accumulated favors he could call in along with the kites he floated for a release to labor details that might otherwise take years to obtain. Still, a season passed before he was given permission to work in one of the “shops.” Cholly’s was a concrete warehouse with huge fans expelling a hot elephants’-breath, where for eight hours a day he treated rubber gaskets by plopping them into a skillet of boiling water with a pair of tongs. Over time he graduated from vulcanizer to grease monkey in the small engine shop, and always he kept a weather eye open in his movements from building to building for some crack in the facility large enough for a big man to slip through. But Brushy appeared to Cholly Sidepocket to be seamless, its stone cell blocks hermetically sealed by center gates, end gates, and sally ports. Everywhere you looked there was hardware in the service of captivity: tiller-size brakes operating a multitude of deadlocks, systems of brass-handled levers protruding from their panels like organ stops. True, there were windows, unwashed in memory, through which nothing could be seen but the hazy outline of concertina wire and octagonal towers—and beyond them, what?
Sometime during the following fall, after considerable finagling, Cholly was promoted from the shops to the status of building tender. This was a porter primarily assigned to scut work, mopping and sweeping the trash-strewn galleries, emptying ashtrays in the dayrooms, carting dirty linen through a quarter mile of tunnels to the laundry. But while the work itself was menial, the porters were given virtual run of the facility, often entrusted with keys to secure parts of the prison and even access to inmate files. Instead of being cranked up by his greater liberty, however, Cholly felt sandbagged at every turn by his increased exposure to the type of incident that crippled your will. Plodding the prison corridors with his mop and pail, soap balls swinging from his waist, he was called upon almost daily to clean up the aftermath of routine atrocities. He scrubbed the “dressed out” cells on Six Wing, a kind of bedlam where the most depraved prisoners were housed, who flung their night soil about with gleeful abandon—that is, if they hadn’t sewn up their assholes to keep from being sodomized. Once, on Six, Cholly saw a young fish being jocked by his cellmate, who’d stood his victim in a toilet while applying a charged wire to his parts. When he reported the event to the day-shift wing bull, the insouciant officer took a look and remarked wryly, “That’ll sure cure yer rheumatiz.”
A storm came up one afternoon in mid-winter—a violent thunderstorm mixed with snow. Cholly and a few other porters were sweeping garbage from the flats on C Block when Boss Wilcox, prodding Cholly in the small of the back with his quirt, sent him solo to the third-tier gallery, saying, “You don’t need but to dry-mop it one time.” As he trudged up the cast-iron spiral with the mop and bucket from which he’d become inseparable, Cholly, grown mightily tired of late, thought that his own clanking joints echoed the sound of the closing cell-block gates. These days he staggered like the dopers in their thorazine shuffle and wished that his mind were as muddled as theirs, because the only way to fly this miserable bid was blind. Meanwhile the storm that was buffeting the penitentiary challenged the din of the raucous population within, until a cannonade of thunder cracked open the dome of the firmament and the lights went out. Cholly paused on the pitch-dark stair in the momentary quiet, waiting for the generators to kick into gear and the power to return; there would be chaos in the house—already the cons were banging tin cans on the bars—if the power didn’t return. But the blackout continued and the little heat the building retained had dissipated, as Cholly clumped the rest of the way in the dark up to Tier 3, where the entire gallery was illumined in a burnished glow.
Candles had been lit along the row of cells in which the