The Mars Room(79)

No one went prone. The yard was in chaos. Orange clouds of pepper spray were directed at the piles of fighters, who kept on struggling. The cops retreated to the watch office, for their own safety. There was a sound I’d never heard, like an air siren. They had a situation. It was out of their hands. Alarms and sirens wailed.

I backed behind Tower One. There was a guard up there, but he had his weapon trained on the rioters. He was shooting wooden projectiles at them.

I dug and claw-tore at the earth behind Tower One until I found what I was looking for.



* * *



The way razor wire tugs on fabric: it holds you like hands pulling you back. Saying, Don’t go. Stay. Stick around. Don’t leave. If I stayed in this place, it would be slow death until I found a way to do it quick.

I sliced myself up good making a hole big enough to get through the inner fence.

I got through to the second fence, the electric one. The alarms were wailing and I was ready to risk death. I touched the fence with the dowel I’d made in shop.

No shock.

I nudged the bottom of the fence, wedged it upward, and slid, in the dirt, underneath, breath held, prepared to fry.



* * *



But then I was on the other side, on the dirt road where the perimeter truck travels. I had reached the edge of the universe.

One more fence to cut through. I could still hear the alarm, the repeated command to heed commands, the pop of projectiles.

I clipped quickly, worked a hole, pushed it open with the piece of wood, to avoid cutting myself worse than I already was.

I was in an almond grove. I heard the alarm in the distance. I ran under the trees, crossed a road, and kept running.





27


When Gordon Hauser was twelve years old, there had been a community-wide crisis, an excitement, when a convict named Bo Crawford escaped from the old county jail in downtown Martinez. An occupying force descended around San Pablo Bay. There were stakeouts, armored military vehicles, sharpshooters, teams of dogs, road closures, and thrilling reports that Bo Crawford had left traces or been sighted in Pinole, in Benicia, in Vallejo, Pittsburg, Antioch. For ten whole days, the county was on lockdown, until they finally caught Bo Crawford, hiding in an abandoned shack along the Carquinez Strait just beyond Port Costa.

To be on the run was no vacation. You had to look over your shoulder every second. People said it was worse than prison, but, as Gordon had imagined things, it was too late for Bo Crawford to put himself back. He was forced to survive in the cracks, the margins, hiding in a world with no good places to hide. Where everyone bought guns, including Gordon’s own father, and waited to spot the escaped man on their property.

Two children saw Bo Crawford near the parking lot of the C&H refinery in Crockett.

A waitress at Flippy’s in Rodeo said he came in one morning at dawn, ordered bacon and eggs. When she ducked into the kitchen to call the cops, he fled.

He entertained the whole county, people in every community, and the loners, too, with no community, everyone hoping for and fearing his arrival. He was famous and would make them famous. They could be the ones to have been touched by his escape. He was a wanted man. A dangerous man.

What was he wanted for? Escaping. Also, armed robbery.



* * *



A woman who worked in the jail’s laundry facility, Vena Hubbard, had fraternized with Bo Crawford, developed feelings for him. She began dreaming of a new life. It all came out later, in newspaper exposés that attempted to narrate the breakdown of security at the jail. There had been talk of Mexico between Vena and Bo and, before heading there, a quick stop off at Vena’s place to kill her husband, Mack. They would drive to the border in her car, a Honda Civic. They had maps and her savings, as well as a shotgun that belonged to Mack, which they would take with them after killing him. (Would a shotgun even fit in a Honda Civic? Gordon had wondered.)

Bo had native intelligence and impeccable self-control. He did two hundred push-ups a day. He meditated. He sawed, little by little, a hole in the rear wall of a storage closet of the laundry facility, while his work crew partner ate the fried chicken and macaroni salad that Vena brought into the jail to feed the men on her laundry crew. Later, there was intense focus on Vena’s role in illegally bringing food into the laundry, a sign of her weak character and submission to prisoner cunning. “I only let ’em have what I couldn’t finish and was gonna throw out,” she testified at an inquest. She had brought in, according to inmates who worked in her laundry facility, meals to feed twenty men, which included party-sized submarine sandwiches and entire flats of Costco lasagna. Fat-Ass was how Bo referred to his work crew partner, whose real name was J.D. Joss, and who was in on the plan, but was not the same high caliber of escapee as Bo. While it was Bo whom Vena truly loved, J.D. carried on with her in a more explicit manner, which gave Bo the time and space he needed to investigate the hatch he’d breached in the laundry closet. J.D. had sewn, using the laundry facility’s machine, a secret flap in his jail pants, so that Vena could play with his cock under the supervisor’s desk where she sat, with J.D. next to her. Meanwhile, Bo was tracing an escape route through a pipe that led under the jail and, eventually, to a storm drain in the street.

On the assigned day, Vena’s one day off, she was to meet Bo and J.D. on a designated corner, with the Honda Civic, the maps, the shotgun, and the money. J.D. and Bo left the laundry facility through the opening in the storage closet, while the fill-in supervisor ate his lunch. They made it through the storm drain and walked to the corner in Martinez where Vena was meant to pick them up. A car drove past, not the Civic. J.D. jumped into the bushes of someone’s yard. Bo, as he later told police, yelled at J.D. to Act Fucking Normal. Like a free person, and not like some idiot jailbird on the loose.