Free Death Row Breakout by Edward Bunker Page B

mattress. I went to take a piss and saw the layers of crud on tope of the toilet water. I flushed it before I could piss in it. I’d have to scrub it with cleanser and a rag. I pushed the sink button. It worked. The cold water ran out of the drain in the bottom of the sink and seconds later ran down into the water in the toilet.
    I hit the switch beneath the twin fluorescent tubes affixed to the wall. The light flickered and sputtered and finally came full on.
    Finally, I turned around like a dog and lay down on the bunk. Here I was – home for at least a few years, maybe many. This little cell, that runway out there – and wherever my mind could travel in time and space.
    “Hey, next door!” a voice to the right called out. There were only three more cells.
    After due deliberation: “Am I next door?”
    “Yeah, you just got here. Did you transfer from the adjustment center or come from a county jail?”
    “A jail.”
    “Whereabouts?”
    “Bakersfield.”
    “Yeah… yeah… you be the dude that iced the two cops. Right?”
    From the voice and choice of words I thought he was black, but I would discern, when I saw him, that he was white, no doubt one who had grown up among blacks, as I had done among
chicanos
.
    At the moment, however, I resented his easy familiarity. Just because we were in adjacent cells on Death Row didn’t imply that we were buddies. He might be a child molester, a short eyes, or a tree jumper rapist, or even a stool pigeon. I didn’t talk to everybody just because they were in jail.
    “That’s what they say I did,” was my eventual answer. He felt my aloofness and didn’t press the conversation. I began to make up the bunk. I had come to my final resting place. I had entered the House of Dracula. It would be a long, slow death.

Vengeance is Mine
    The prison was visible from the highway two miles away, primarily because the long valley was flat farmland with only a cluster of eucalyptus playing windbreak to farm buildings every couple of miles. The prison architecture was not the fortress variety of the nineteenth century, but rather the nondescript post-World War II design. What defined these structures was the tall smoke stack and the gun towers outside the double fences topped with rolled barbed wire.
    Every afternoon a wind rose. If it came east from the western mountains it was always cool, because it was drawn from the ocean beyond those mountains. If it came west from the eastern Sierras it was hot and dry, drawn from the vast deserts of the American southwest. The valley, when the fields were green, rippled like a lake under the wind. After the late summer harvest, until full winter hardened the ground, the wind blew endless dust. It kept the convicts off the main recreation yard, shaking the chain-link fences while the rolls of barbed wire on top danced and shivered, waiting for things to settle down.
    In ‘O’ Wing, the segregation unit, a guard walked in front of the cells with a clipboard, stopping at each one. The convicts said “yes” or “no”, to the silent question if they wanted to go out to the tiny exercise yard between the two buildings. When the guard was finished, he went back to the front and handed the clipboard to a guard standing outside the barred gate. He worked the switch box that controlled the cell gates. In the lockdown units no two inmates were allowed on the tier at the same time. The guard inside the tier went to the other end, where a third guard let him out. “Okay, send ’em,” he called, and the guard at the other end unlocked a control box and threw a lever.
    A cell gate opened. Out came a naked young black – the average age of all inmates was twenty-three – carrying his clothes in one hand and his cloth slippers in the other. He managed to swagger, muscles rippling as he walked to the rear gate and put his clothes on the bars. While one guard searched them, the other put the inmate through the ritual dance of a skin search: “Raise