Slayhoke Penitentiary was a grim, ugly place to spend a day, let alone five years of your life. Harry Teal had done his share of time in county lockups and prison farms, but he’d never seen anything like Slayhoke until that day they’d dropped him off with all those other inmates, all of them chained together with leg irons, all of them hard and desperate looking. Most of them had done real time before and they all seemed to sense that Harry hadn’t. Though Harry had been around plenty, to them he was just a piece of meat to sharpen their teeth on.
Of course, they didn’t start any trouble on the bus.
There were hacks watching them, real hard and brutal looking sonsofbitches, just looking for a reason to use their sticks. But Harry felt those eyes on him and he knew what those guys were thinking, how they were planning on extorting him and using him, maybe selling him to some old pervert in order to get a few bucks that might make their stays a little easier.
No, Harry might not have been a veteran of hardtime joints like Slayhoke, but he sure as hell knew how things worked. He’d spent six months in the Cook County Slammer and he’d seen plenty there. The overcrowding, the violence, the corrupt guards. Guys wired out on drugs vomiting and pissing themselves. Men getting knifed and raped and beaten. It was a way of life there.
But coming into Slayhoke, he felt vulnerable, felt like a virgin waiting to get her hymen busted. Slayhoke consisted of a series of narrow four-story brick buildings topped by smokestacks and surrounded by high razor-wire enclosures and guard towers. It sat roughly five miles outside of the Witcham city limits in the Black River Valley. Coming at it down that winding road through the forest, Slayhoke looked like a Medieval madhouse and that was pretty close to the mark since the facility had a long and unpleasant history as a state hospital for the criminally insane long before it was converted into a maximum security prison back in the 1930’s. You got behind those tall cinderblock walls and you could practically feel the desperation, hopelessness, and inhumanity oozing into you, making you part of Slayhoke. If that place had a soundtrack, then it was a silent scream that echoed only in your head.
The inmate who worked central processing was an Asian named Ricky Chuba. He was a short, thick-necked man who was missing two fingers on his left hand. “See here you been around, Teal…but never max?” he said, looking through Harry’s file.
“No, never.”
“That’s not so good. Says here you like to steal cars, but you ain’t so good at it.”
“I’m good at it,” Harry said, figuring that he was. He’d been stealing cars to order for fifteen years. He knew his business.
But Chuba just shook his head. “No, you ain’t no good at it. If you were, you wouldn’t be here. If I was any good at killing cops, I wouldn’t be here.”
That was logic you just couldn’t argue with.
“You from Milwaukee?”
“Yeah.”
“You been around there a lot?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. I’m gonna put you in with another white boy name of Jacky Kripp. He’s from Milwaukee, too. You do what he says, you might come out of this with your life and your virginity. And in this goddamn place, that’s the best you can hope for.”
After that, they took Harry into a five by five steel cell and stripped him. The hacks got on their rubber gloves and gave him a body cavity search and if that wasn’t dehumanizing enough, then they sprayed him with disinfectant to keep the lice down.
“We got the lice real bad here,” one of the hacks said. “We got lots of things you ain’t gonna like here, boy.”
And that was one of the truest statements any of those bastards ever made to him. Because not only were the lice bad, but mosquitoes infested the place in summer and just about all year long there was a serious rat problem. They came out mostly at night looking for crumbs. Weren’t too many inmates there that hadn’t been bitten and more than once. At night, Harry learned to sleep with his state-issue wool blanket pulled right up to his chin because those rats would nibble on anything you left hanging out. Anything. After lights out, they would come out running right over the top of you, squealing and chittering, and it did no good to tell the hacks because they were blind to the rat problem. Lots of inmates had written up motions and writs about the filthy, unsanitary conditions at Slayhoke, but it did little good. The Bureau of Prisons sent in exterminators every now and again and those boys killed so many rats they had to be hauled out in twenty-five gallon drums, but within a month they were back, biting and scavenging.
But that was Slayhoke.
It was infested by four-legged vermin, but they were nothing compared to the two-legged variety crowding in every cellblock. It was hot in the summer and cold in the winter. Everything was dirty and slimy to the touch. The smell there was a perpetual mix of bad food, rotting garbage, urine and shit and blood. Cons committed suicide regularly and knifings were a daily occurrence. The inmates went after each other with shanks and pipes and razors and the hacks sat around, pretending they didn’t see a damn thing while they paged through their girly magazines.
Harry’s first day in stir, Jacky Kripp showed up.
Harry had heard of him, of course, you didn’t run in Milwaukee’s crime circles without hearing about a guy like Jacky Kripp. He was a vicious street hood hooked up with the Chicago Outfit. Through the years Jacky had his hand in everything from drug trafficking to prostitution to contract murder, and was currently sitting on a ten-year stretch for breaking some guy’s head open with a tire iron. He was barely six feet, but weighed an easy 250 and all of it was hard muscle. He had huge Popeye arms sleeved with jailhouse tattoos, bushy black hair, and silver-gray eyes that were completely dead looking like dirty nickels.
When he came to see Harry, he brought some of his entourage. A wiry black guy called Roland Smyth, who was some kind of half-assed gun runner, and a hulking white redneck farmboy named Mo Borden…who was openly known as “Frankenstein” around the blocks. Borden went in at nearly 400 pounds, stood 6’9, and was completely bald. Didn’t even have eyebrows. Word had it Borden had taken an ax to a local farmer in Crawford County after the man had attempted to rape Borden’s kid sister. Borden chopped him up, decided to do the guy’s wife and brother, too. He bagged up the remains, put them out with the trash and then went to a local bar, covered in blood, and told everyone about it.
“You Harry Teal?” Jacky Kripp said.
Harry assured him that he was.
Kripp put the questions to him-who did he run with in Milwaukee and what crews had he been part of. Harry answered the questions satisfactorily because when he was done, Kripp said, “Okay, you’re with us now. Nobody touches you. They touch you, they touch us. If somebody insults you, you hit ‘em. You cut ‘em if you have to and you kill ‘em if you got no choice. We back you up. Somebody throws down on one us, you fight with us. We’re one, you get it? One. Any insult to one of us is an insult to all of us.”
And that’s how it was at Slayhoke for Harry.
His first days there, he saw the respect Jacky Kripp had amongst the other cons. Those that didn’t respect him, he hurt. And he hurt ‘em bad. First week with him, Harry saw Kripp stab a black inmate that cut in front of him in chow line and mercilessly beat a Hispanic punk for simply looking at him the wrong way. But that’s how it worked. Over the next year, Harry fell right in step with it all. He cut people, he beat them, and once out in the yard he smashed a gangbanger’s head to pulp with a brick when he made the mistake of jumping Roland Smyth. After a time, Harry did not remember another life. When he looked at himself in the mirror, sometimes he wasn’t sure who was looking back.
By the time of the flooding in the Black River Valley, he was a hardened con toughened by fighting and abuse and brutal conditions. He worked the weight pile out in the yard, he knocked off a hundred and fifty pushups every morning. When he looked around the yard, not many eyes dared look back. If you wanted to survive Slayhoke, you had to be an animal, so Harry grew some claws and kept his teeth sharp. And whenever any shit started, he was the first one into the fray.
And what that got him behind those walls was respect, just like Aretha said.
Life went on and then came the rain and the explosion at Fort Providence Military Reservation and after that?
