The Unquiet

Inmates routinely referred to the prison guards as “cops.” After all, they were part of the same law enforcement edifice as the police, the prosecutors, and the judges.

“Bet you’ve never seen the inside of the SMU,” said Bill.

“Nope,” I said. The Supermax was off-limits to just about everyone who wasn’t a prisoner or a guard, but I’d heard enough about it to know that it wasn’t a place I ever wanted to be.

“It’s bad,” said Bill, and from the way he said it I knew that I wasn’t going to hear some exaggerated, hard-luck ex-con’s story. He wasn’t trying to sell me anything. He just wanted someone to listen.

“It stinks: shit, blood, puke. Stuff is on the floor, on the walls. Snow comes under the doors in winter. The vents make this noise all the time, and there’s something about it. You can’t block it out. I used to stuff toilet paper in my ears to try to stop myself from hearing it. I thought it was going to drive me nuts. It’s twenty-three-hour lockdown with one hour a day, five days a week, in the ke

Bill opened his mouth and pointed with his finger at the gaps in his yellow teeth.

“I lost five teeth in there,” he said. “They just fell out. When you get down to it, the Max is a form of psychological torture. You know why you’re in there, but not what you can do to get out again. And that’s not the worst of it. You fuck up badly enough, and they send you to the ‘chair.’”

That I knew about. The “chair” was a restraining device used on those who managed to push the guards too far. Four or five guards wearing full body armor and carrying shields and Mace would storm a prisoner’s cell to perform the “extraction.” He would be Maced, pushed to the floor or onto his bed, then handcuffed. The cuffs would then be co

“They did it to me once,” said Bill, “after I coldcocked the cop. Never again. I kept my head down after that. That was no way to treat a man. They did it to Merrick, too, more than once, but they couldn’t break Frank. It was always the same reason, though. It never varied.”

“What do you mean?”

“ Merrick was always being punished for the same thing. There was a kid in there, name of Kellog, Andy Kellog. He was crazy, but it wasn’t his fault. Everybody knew it. He’d been fucked with as a child, and he never recovered. Spoke about birds all the time. Men like birds.”

I interrupted Bill.

“Wait a minute, this kid Kellog had been abused?”

“That’s right.”

“Sexually abused?”

“Uh-huh. I guess the men who did it wore masks or something. I recalled Kellog from his time in Thomaston. Some of the others in the Max did too, but nobody ever seemed to know for sure what had happened to him. All we knew was that he’d been taken by the ‘men like birds,’ and not once either. A couple of times, and that was after others had been at him already. What was left when they were done with him wasn’t worth a nickel curse. Kid was medicated to hell and back. Only man who seemed to get through to him was Merrick, and I got to tell you, that was a surprise to me. Merrick wasn’t no social worker. He was hard. But this kid, man, Merrick tried to look out for him. It wasn’t no faggot thing either. First man who said that to Merrick was also the last. Merrick near took his head off, tried to force it through the bars of his cell. Nearly succeeded, too, until the cops came and broke it up. Then Kellog got transferred to the Max for throwing shit at guards, and Merrick, he found a way to go there too.”

“ Merrick deliberately got himself transferred to the Supermax?”

“Yep, that’s what they say. Until Kellog went, Merrick had minded his own business, kept his head down, apart from those occasions when someone stepped out of line and threatened the kid or, if he was really dumb, tried to move up the order by knocking heads with Merrick. But after Kellog was transferred, Merrick did everything he could to rile the cops until they had no choice but to send him to Warren. Wasn’t much that he could do for the kid there, but he didn’t give up. He talked to the cops, tried to get them to send a mental health worker to check up on Kellog, even managed to talk the kid down once or twice when it seemed like he was going to get himself sent to the chair again. Guards took him out of his cell on occasion just so he could reason with the kid, but it didn’t always work. I tell you, Kellog lived in that chair. Maybe he still does, for all I know.”

“Kellog is still in there?”

“I don’t think he’s ever go

“What about Merrick? Did you talk to him? Did he tell you anything about himself?”

“Nah, he was a loner. Only man he had time for was Kellog. I got to talk to him some, when our paths crossed on the way to the infirmary or to and from the ke

The final period started. I could see Bill’s attention immediately begin to transfer itself to the ice.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “What did Merrick ’s daughter have to do with Kellog?”

Reluctantly, Bill turned away from the action for the last time.

“Well, his daughter had gone missing,” he said. “He didn’t have much to remember her by. A couple of photographs, a drawing or two that the girl sent to him in jail before she disappeared. It was the drawings that attracted him to Kellog because Kellog and Merrick ’s daughter, they’d drawn the same thing. They’d both drawn men with the heads of birds.”

Three

I myself am Hell,

nobody’s here-

– ROBERT LOWELL, “SKUNK HOUR”

Chapter XV

It didn’t take long to find out the name of the lawyer who had represented Andy Kellog during his most recent brushes with the law. Her name was Aimee Price, and she had an office in South Freeport, about three miles away from the tourist-trap bustle of Freeport itself. The contrast between the towns of Freeport and South Freeport was striking. While Freeport had largely given up the ghost to the joys of outlet shopping, its side streets now converted to extended parking lots, South Freeport, which extended from Porter Landing to Winslow Park, had preserved most of its old nineteenth-century homes, built when the shipyards on the Harraseeket were booming. Price worked out of a small complex that had been created from a pair of carefully restored ship captains’ houses on Park Street, part of an area two blocks square that constituted the town center, situated just above the Freeport Town Landing. She shared the space with an accountant, a debt-restructuring service, and an acupuncturist.