He nodded but didn’t take his hands out of his pockets.
“How long have you been watching us?” I asked.
“Since before the first period,” he replied.
“You’re being pretty careful.”
“I figure it doesn’t hurt.”
“Frank Merrick’s in custody,” I said.
“Yeah, well I didn’t know that, did I? What did they get him for?”
“Stalking.”
“They’re going to charge Frank Merrick with stalking?” He snorted in disbelief. “Give me a break. Why don’t they add jaywalking, or not having a license for his dog?”
“We wanted him held for a while,” I said. “The ‘why’ didn’t matter.”
Bill looked past me to where Louis was sitting. “No offense meant, but a black guy kind of stands out at a hockey game.”
“This is Maine. A black guy stands out just about anywhere.”
“I suppose, but you could have made him blend in some.”
“Does he look like the kind of guy who’s gonna wear a pirate’s hat and wave a plastic cutlass?”
Bill looked away from Louis.
“I guess not. A real cutlass, maybe.”
He sat back and didn’t say anything more for a time. With 3:18 to go in the second period, Shane Hynes hit a rocket from the right point. A minute and a half later, Jordan Smith made it 4-0. It was all over.
Bill stood.
“Let’s go get a beer,” he said. “That’s four consecutive wins, nine wins in ten games. Best start since the ninety-four-to-ninety-five inaugural, and I had to watch that in jail.”
“That count as cruel and unusual punishment?” asked Louis.
Bill gave him the eye.
“He’s not a fan,” I said.
“No shit.”
We walked outside and picked up three microbrews in plastic glasses. There was a steady stream of people already leaving the arena now that it looked like the Pirates had sewn everything up.
“I appreciated the ticket, by the way,” he said. “I don’t always have the funds to come here no more.”
“No problem,” I said.
He waited expectantly, his eyes fixed on the bulge in my jacket where my wallet was visible. I took it out and paid him the fifty. He folded the bills carefully and placed them in a pocket of his jeans. I was about to ask him about Merrick when, from inside the arena, came the unmistakable response to a Falcons’ goal.
“Goddammit!” said Bill. “We jinxed ’em by leaving.”
So it was back to our seats to wait for the start of the third period, but at least Bill was content to talk for a while about his time in Supermax while we did so. The Supermax system was designed to take out of the general population prisoners who were deemed to be especially violent, or escape risks, or a threat to others. Often, it was used as a form of punishment for those who broke the rules, or who were found with contraband. The Maine Supermax was opened in 1992 in Warren. It had one hundred maximum-security, solitary-confinement cells. With the closure of the old Thomaston State Prison at the start of the century, the new eleven-hundred-inmate prison was eventually built around the Supermax, like fortress walls around a citadel.
“We were both in the Max at the same time, Merrick and me,” he said. “I was doing twenty for burglary. Well, burglaries. You believe that? Twenty years. Goddamn killers get out in less. Anyway, the cops busted me for possession of a screwdriver and some wire. I only had the stuff to repair my goddamn radio. Told me I was an escape risk and sent me to the Max. After that, things got crazy. I hit a cop. I was pissed at him. I paid for it though. I stayed in the Max for the duration. Fuckin’ cops. I hate them.”
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 kennel. That’s what we call the exercise yard: thing is six feet wide, thirty feet long. I should know: I measured it myself for five years. Lights are on twenty-four/seven. There’s no TV, no radio, just noise and white light. They don’t even allow a man a toothbrush. They give you this useless fucking piece of plastic for your finger, but it’s not worth a damn.”
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 connected to leg irons and his clothes cut from his body, and then the prisoner would be carried, naked and screaming, to an observation room and there bound to a chair with straps where he would be left for hours in the cold. Incredibly, the prison authorities argued that the chair wasn’t used for punishment but only as a means of controlling inmates who were a threat to themselves or others. The Portland Phoenix had obtained a tape of an extraction, as all such operations were recorded by the prison, ostensibly to prove that the prisoners were not being mistreated. According to those who had seen it, it was hard to imagine how extractions and the chair qualified as anything other than state-sanctioned violence bordering on torture.
“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.”