A Short Story by Joseph Gannon
When the last guard had exited the corridor and the lights in the cell block had been turned off, the prisoners commenced fishing. The fish itself was a small piece of thin green construction paper folded several times around a quarter to give it weight. A small hole had been punched through one corner with a tack, and through this hole was tied a long strip of dental floss which formed the line. With practiced skill the first prisoner stuck his hand through the bars of his cell and began to swing the line, lasso-style, until he had built up enough momentum to propel it down to the next cell. Thus the folded square of paper was passed down the cell block in orderly fashion until it landed in front of Tyler Colvin’s cell.
As soon as he had heard the first soft slap of the paper against the floor farther down the corridor, Tyler’s heart began to race. He reached his hand through the bars of his cell and, biting through the dental floss line where it met the folded square of paper, he opened the message and read it. The message, in dark black lettering, read:
G c e RDHrfGfTb nurnqGBfuVc Ots RAsbEPreNZnY
He quickly translated it as he had been taught. When he had committed the message to memory, he tore it into little pieces and flushed them down the toilet. Climbing back into his bunk he thanked God there was no cellmate there to see him cry.
Tyler Colvin had been working in the prison infirmary for the last five months. He had been in his second year of medical school when he was arrested for drug trafficking, and based on this experience he had been given the position in the infirmary.
He was facing a minimum of four years in prison, and the job offered him a chance at relatively easy time. More importantly, it kept him away from most of the other inmates for the better part of the day. Tyler had no intention of getting caught up in prison life if he could help it. He wasn’t a hard case or a career criminal, that much he knew. He’d made one colossal mistake, but he had no intention of playing criminal ever again. Now, however, it appeared that in spite of his best efforts trouble had once again found him.
A little more than month earlier he had been approached by two men as he was exercising on the yard. He had passed them twice as he jogged around the yard’s cinder track without noticing them. On his third time around they set abreast of each other as he approached and held their hands up in a clear signal for him to stop. One look at the two men and the tattoos that covered their arms and necks told Tyler that they were Aryan Brotherhood. The smaller of the two, a stocky red fireplug of a man, addressed Tyler.
“We know you work in the infirmary,” he said, “and we were hoping you could do us a little favor. We just need you to pass along a few messages is all. A friend of ours is up there sick and we just want to see how he’s doing.”
Tyler knew instantly whom they were referring to.
“We know you’re a nice boy,” the man continued, “we don’t want to get you in any trouble. Thing is, we need to keep in touch with our friend and we can’t get in there to see him. All you’ll be doing is passing along a message or two for us, strictly clean stuff.”
Tyler stared blankly at the man, not knowing if he should answer or not.
“Tell you what,” the little man said, “we’ll give you a few days to think it over. I’ll see you out here on the yard, say, Thursday, and we can talk some more. Think it over. Name’s Red, by the way. Ask around about me. I’m a good dude to know.”
“I’m Tyler.”
“I know,” Red replied.
When he said this Tyler noticed the larger man smile. It was the first expression he’d made since they began talking.
The two men then walked away, but Tyler did not continue his run. He was terrified. The friend they were referring to was Gideon Strickland; Tyler had no doubt of that. Everyone in the prison knew that Gideon Strickland headed the Aryan Brotherhood, the prison’s most powerful white gang. He had a fearsome reputation, acquired over many years spent in prison, and until cancer had begun to break down his bulky frame he’d been an imposing figure to look at. Tyler had of course noticed him in the infirmary, but he had never spoken a word to him. He said very little, preferring to read mystery novels and newspapers from his bed, but it was understood that the Brotherhood made no moves without his consent.
Tyler couldn’t believe his luck had been so terrible. The infirmary job was supposed to be his ticket to easy time and now he was in serious danger because of it. His mind coursed with panic, and for a moment he thought he might puke right there on the cinder track. This was too much to process, too much to handle, he thought. He’d never felt so helpless in his life, not even when he listened to the judge pass down his sentence. He needed to tell someone about what had just happened, he needed to get advice from someone, though he knew there was danger in this, too. Tyler had made only one friend since he’d been locked up, and it was to this friend that he now went with his dreadful new secret.
Matthew Armour was several years younger than Tyler, he had in fact been a college student upstate when he was arrested for trafficking, but he’d been in prison almost a year longer than Tyler and had more experience in the dangerous world of prison existence. Tyler found him, as usual, in the prison library where he worked. They sat at a table in a far corner, where Tyler could observe every prisoner who walked in or out. When he had related his recent encounter to Matthew, he watched impatiently as his friend considered the problem.
“Jesus, Tyler,” he finally spoke, “I don’t know what to tell you. I mean, I don’t know what choice you have. Those are the wrong guys to have pissed off at you. I mean, you know their reputation.”
“I can’t fucking believe this is happening to me, Matt. I just can’t. What the hell am I going to do? What the hell do they want from me?”
“It might not be that bad, Tyler. At least they’re not trying to recruit you or anything, you know? They just want you to be a messenger for them is all. As long as you don’t screw it up they won’t bother you, right?”
“Are you kidding me, Matt? They want me to pass messages to the head of the fucking Aryan Brotherhood! At the very least I’d be up for conspiracy charges if the guards ever got wind of this!”
“Keep your voice down, Tyler.”
“At the very least they could pin some shit on me if they knew I was working for them,” Tyler said in a whisper. “And what if I fuck it up somehow? What if they decide I know too much about whatever the hell it is they are doing? These guys would kill me in a heartbeat.”
“I think you’ll be okay, Tyler,” Matthew said, “these guys don’t mess with people who aren’t affiliated, you know? I haven’t heard of anyone since I’ve been in here who got in trouble with the AB’s who didn’t insult one of them or wasn’t black or Mexican or something like that.”
“Jesus. Jesus Christ.”
“Besides I don’t see what choice you have, Tyler”
“I know. I know it.”
“If it was me I would just do it and say my prayers at night and make damn sure I don’t screw anything up. You know you can’t go to the guards or the warden with this. They wouldn’t do a damn thing about it and the AB’s would probably find out anyway. I’m telling you, Tyler, I think it’s your only option.”
There was little more Tyler could say. Walking out of the library a few minutes later he felt dizzy from trying to think through every angle. Matthew was right, he realized that. He had no real choice. His best efforts at avoiding trouble were for naught because the Aryan Brotherhood needed a conduit to their leader. He sat in his cell the rest of the day trying to think up some other solution, even writing down the different possibilities on a piece of notepaper. Refusing the Aryans could mean a beating, rape, or even death. The prison staff could offer him little help. At best they might send him to another prison, where the Brotherhood could no doubt track him down. The guards might even ask him to go through with it and act as a double-agent of sorts. Tyler knew he would never have the nerve to play Donnie Brasco with the Aryan Brotherhood; they would find him out immediately. After long consideration he finally admitted to himself that they had thought out everything in advance. There was nothing left to do but submit.
When he was approached a few days later on the yard by the same two men, he told them he would do it. Both men smiled at him, and the smaller one, Red, gave him an avuncular pat on the shoulder but said nothing more. Nor did he give Tyler any further instructions. Instead, the two men headed back across the yard towards the basketball court, where several of their number had a game going.
Two days later another new face approached Tyler, sitting down next to him in the cafeteria while he was eating his lunch.
“I’m Darren,” he said. “You’ll be communicating with me and only me, you understand? Meet me in the library at 5:00 and we’ll talk further.”
When Tyler entered the library at the appointed time the man Darren was already seated at the far end of the room, the same table where Tyler and Matthew had sat a few days earlier. He had in front of him a pad of yellow legal paper and two sharpened pencils. Tyler saw down across from him, trying in vain to appear calm. Without greeting Tyler, Darren began:
“It’s going to work like this: when I want you to communicate with my friend I’ll hand you a piece of paper with a message on it, written in code. I’m the only one who gives you the message, you got that? Now, the message is in code, as I said, but I’m going to teach you the code right here and now so you can learn to translate what I give you. After you’re done translating it, you memorize it and destroy the original message, you got that?”
Tyler nodded his head in assent but said nothing.
“Good. Here’s how it works: each letter in the message is either an upper or lower case character, okay? If it’s an upper case letter, you count thirteen letters up in the alphabet, you got that? Thirteen letters up. So if the letter was a capital Z, you’d count thirteen letters up until you arrived at ‘M’. If it’s a lower case letter you do the opposite, you count down thirteen letters. If it was ‘Z’ you’d count down thirteen letters until you came, again, to ‘M’. This making sense to you? I did some research on you, kid. I know you’re a smart college boy so I don’t expect this to be any problem for you. Now let’s give a try. Practice makes perfect. Make absolutely sure you understand it right now, though, because it won’t be explained to you again.”
With that he took up a pencil and positioned the pad of yellow paper in front of him.
“Okay, let’s give it a shot. You’re going to translate what I write down. And make sure to switch the letters up some. Don’t make them all one case or the other, you got that?”
“I got it,” Tyler said, “thirteen letters up or down.”
Darren wrote slowly and methodically. When he was finished he passed the pencil and paper toward Tyler, who reached for the pencil with a sweaty, trembling hand. Taking a deep breath, he looked at the paper and read: “I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands.”
“Now I want you to translate that, Tyler. Take you’re time, make sure you get it right.”
Tyler took another deep breath and began. For the first letter, “I”, he counted thirteen letters down until he arrived at “v”, which he wrote upper case. He did the same for each of the other letters in the sentence, counting twice and even three times in his head to make sure he got it right. He wanted to finish quickly to appear competent, but he dared not make a mistake either. As he worked he could feel Darren staring at him from across the desk, watching as his hand slowly wrote each new character on the paper. The translation took him almost ten minutes, he was sure he had taken too long, but when Darren had finished reading Tyler’s work he simply smiled and said, “Good job.”
“It won’t always be that easy,” he said, “but you’ll get the hang of it. Now I’m gonna give you a little homework assignment. Write out the entire ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ like you just did and bring it to me, right here, tomorrow. Same time. You got that?”
“Yeah … yes … I got it.”
“You’ll do fine, Tyler,” Darren replied. “I know you’re a smart boy. Just make sure you learn it, and when I’m confident you know it, we’ll get started.”
As he rose from his chair Tyler noticed his thick, heavily tattooed forearms. He had large black swastikas at the base of each wrist just above the hand, and further up each forearm the double-s logo of the German SS. He turned to walk away but, thinking better of it, he faced Tyler once more.
“One last thing, kid. It’s best you forget any message you get as soon as you’ve passed it along. They won’t mean anything to you anyway and it won’t do you any good to know them. See you tomorrow, kid.”
Watching Darren walk out of the library, Tyler again thought he would be sick. He rested his forehead against the cold metal of the table for a full five minutes, taking deep breaths every so often and trying in vain to reassure himself.
The next day, after he had labored over his translation for hours, checking and rechecking it to make sure he had it right, Tyler met Darren again in the library and passed him his coded Pledge of Allegiance. Darren read it through quickly, nodding his head in approval like a teacher grading a student’s paper.
“We’ll be in touch,” he said, and with that he rose up and left the library.
The man’s whole manner, and his cryptic comment, reminded Tyler of the job interviews he’d gone on after graduation. He almost laughed out loud in the library, but when he remembered the context of the joke his smile faded instantly.
A week passed and Tyler heard nothing more from the Aryan Brotherhood. He had not seen Darren again, not in the cafeteria, or on the yard, or anywhere about the prison. He thought, wishfully, that they might have decided to use someone else. Perhaps they didn’t trust him; perhaps they didn’t need a messenger anymore. A variety of reasons occurred to him why they had not made further contact, and in his mind each one he entertained had him being safely removed from the situation. In his heart, however, he knew better. He knew that one day soon he would see Darren approaching him with his slow, short-stepped walk, a walk that advertised, for all to see, that this was a dangerous man. After a while the waiting only made it worse for Tyler. He only wanted to get on with it if he was going to have do it. What was perhaps most unbearable was that there was no one he could speak to about it. He had decided that it wouldn’t do Matthew any good to know more than he already did. Anything Tyler might tell him now could only put him in danger. So he kept to himself, he thought about it night and day, and he waited.
A few days later, Darren sat down next to him at breakfast and slid a folded piece of paper under his tin food tray. No words were exchanged. Darren sat next to him for a few minutes more, silent, and then departed. The enormity of the situation now sent Tyler’s heart to pounding, and he felt again an acute sickness in the pit of his stomach. Quietly he pocketed the folded note and returned to his cell; he could eat no more. In his cell he picked up a Bible that lay next to his bunk, so that anyone looking in would think he was copying scripture rather than translating a coded message. Calming himself with deep breaths, he translated the message quickly and then went over it again to make sure he had it right. Darren had been right, the translated message meant nothing to him. It contained only what Tyler guessed was a set of initials, followed by the words “Do you approve?”
When Tyler arrived at the infirmary the next day he waited until the other orderlies were nowhere near Gideon Strickland before he approached him. The cart he wheeled held a dozen or so small paper cups, each containing various pills with the names of patients written on them in black marker. A metal carafe of cold water rested on top of the cart to help the patients swallow their medicine.
Tyler had followed the same routine since he had first started working in the infirmary, making his way down the row of beds and administering pills to each patient that required them. Strickland’s was the last bed in the row, and the last one Tyler stopped at every day. From his bed Gideon Strickland could look out the window to the yard below, or up to a sky that seemed to hang just a bit lower to inmates who had been inside long enough. Today Tyler was thankful that the bed was as far away from the doctor’s office, and from the two guards who occupied it, as possible.
When he arrived at Gideon Strickland’s bed, Tyler approached the man from his right, so that his back faced the rest of the infirmary. He doubted anyone would notice him, and talking to the patients was not strictly forbidden anyway, but he didn’t want to take any chances. Handing the cup of pills and a glass of water to Strickland, Tyler said as calmly as possible, “I’m the new messenger. G.B. and T.M., do you approve?”
Strickland looked at him for a moment, sizing him up, and said, “So Darren drafted you, huh, kid?”
Tyler nodded his head in assent, to which Strickland replied, “Give me that message again, kid.”
When Tyler had done so, Strickland looked at him fixedly for a moment, before turning his gaze to the window and the yard below for what seemed to Tyler an eternity.
“Yeah, I approve it,” he said.
That was it. He said no more to Tyler, who quickly wheeled the cart back towards the doctor’s office at the other end of the hall. A wave of relief passed over him, and as he pushed his cart forward he felt that perhaps he had worried for nothing. If that’s all there is to it, he reassured himself, I might just be okay.
The next month passed much the same for Tyler. He only had to pass messages to Strickland on a few occasions, and each one was as cryptic as the first. He was never given any advance notice of when the next one was coming. When he saw Darren or the two men who had first approached him on the yard or in the cafeteria, they never acknowledged him. It was if the first frightening encounter, and the subsequent assignments, had never occurred. Tyler felt safe in the mystery of it all. He truly knew nothing, and he felt this would act as a guarantee on his safety. So when he looked at the folded square of paper in front of his cell that night he felt no apprehension.
Tyler knew that there was an Aryan Brother a few cells down from him, and that it was possible they were using him to reach Tyler now, but he didn’t think this very likely. He had only ever received messages from Darren. When he heard the sound of paper hitting he floor he knew a message was being passed. The practice was commonplace in prison, it had, in fact, been one of the first of many ingenuities Tyler had seen since he’d been inside. When the folded square of paper landed in front of his cell, he reached his hand through the bars to retrieve, still unsure if it was meant for him. Only when he read his name, in code, in small black letters on an upper corner was he certain. He was puzzled at this new method of communication but he wasn’t worried. He had become comfortable with the role he was forced to play.
A few minutes later, after he had translated the message, he was quite certain he might die. The message, translated, read, “TP requests go ahead to ship BGF enforcer Amal.” It was clearly a request for permission to kill a member of the Black Guerilla Family, the prison’s most powerful black gang. Tyler had been inside long enough to know what the prison’s many acronyms meant. Likewise, he understood clearly what the term “ship” meant. He didn’t know any inmate named Amal, but that meant very little. He had done his best to avoid becoming acquainted with any of the prison’s gang, be they black, white, or Latino. Now he was being asked to play a key part in a chain of communication that could ultimately end with the murder of another inmate and, quite possibly, a resulting race riot.
When the weight of it had sunk in, his mind again raced over the limited options available to him, just as it had when the Aryan Brotherhood first approached him. If the Brotherhood did murder a BGF member, if Strickland gave the go-ahead, the Black Guerilla Family might very well find out the role Tyler had played in it. In which case he’d be killed for sure. Likewise, the Brotherhood might decide that he’d served his purpose, and that as a non-member with intricate knowledge of the plot he posed too great a risk. In the event of a race riot, he could be in grave danger just for being white. The last possibility, and by far the least frightening, was that the prison staff might figure out how Strickland had passed orders out from the infirmary. Surely it wouldn’t take them long to figure out that a white orderly who had daily contact with Strickland had been involved. He could end up with more time tacked on to his sentence, time Tyler knew he couldn’t do.
These are my options, he thought to himself, and how I play this now may decide whether or not I’m killed.
After a sleepless night, Tyler Colvin ate breakfast in the cafeteria with his friend Matthew Armour and reported to the infirmary for work. He waited until his shift was almost over before he approached the bed of Gideon Strickland. Afterward, on his way out, he managed to palm a hard plastic tongue depressor, thinking he might be able to fashion a decent weapon out of it.
_______________________________________________
Joseph Gannon is a native of Ohio who currently lives and works in New York City. His work has also been published in The Minnetonka Review.
