9

      Mike Tavarez surveyed the exercise yard and listened to the inmates counting off their sit-ups: thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three…

      Their voices rose in crisp unison into the cold afternoon air of Pelican Bay State Prison. They sounded like a small army, thought Tavarez, and in a sense they were, because the Mexican gangs here in Pelican Bay didn’t stand around like the Nazi Lowriders or the Aryan Brotherhood or the Black Guerillas.

      No, La Eme and Nuestra Familia – though they would kill one another if you put them together in the same exercise yard at the same time – worked out here in the general population yard for two hours every day. Different hours, but they worked out hard. They heaved and strained and yelled the cadence, in training to stay alive when it was time to fight.

      Give people a beat to follow and they’ll do anything you tell them to, thought Tavarez. Like a marching band.

       Forty-nine, fifty, fifty-one…

      ‘Why don’t you work out with them?’ asked Jason Post. Post was one of the correctional officers who had helped get Tavarez transferred from the Security Housing Unit to the general population. That was six months ago. The Prison Guards Union held substantial power at Pelican Bay, and Post was a union activist.

      ‘I like watching,’ said Tavarez. ‘I like their discipline. I never got to see this in the X.’

      The Security Housing Unit was known as ‘the X’ because it was shaped like one. Sometimes it was called the Shoe. Tavarez had spent his first year there. It was a living hell. The SHU was made up of pods – eight glass-faced cells per pod – arranged around an elevated guardhouse. It was always twilight in the X, never light and never dark. Tavarez was watched by guards 23/7 on television. When he used the toilet it was televised onto a guardhouse monitor. The toilets had no moving parts that could be made into weapons. For one hour a day he was allowed to exercise alone in ‘dog run’ – a four-walled concrete tank half the size of a basketball court. A guard watched him do that too, from a catwalk above. In the X, time stopped. His great aloneness swallowed him. There had been days in the X when Tavarez had had to bite his tongue to keep from weeping, and swallow the blood.

      It was solitary confinement, but in full view of the guards. The X was designed by an architect who specialized in sensory deprivation. Even the warden admitted that it was designed to make you insane. The feeling of hours stretching into years was indescribable for Tavarez, unbearable. He never thought he would actually feel his mind leaving him. Finally, he found a way to get to Jason Post and Post had begun the process that saved his life.

      The difference between the SHU and general population was the difference between hell and freedom. Or at least between hell and the possibility of freedom, for which Tavarez was now planning.

      He saw that the count was slowing as his men approached eighty push-ups.

       Seventy-six…seventy-seven…

      ‘Besides,’ he said. ‘I like having the pile to myself.’

      ‘I’ll bet you do,’ said Post. He was a thick young Oregonian with a downsloping head of yellow hair. ‘Nobody gets that except you.’

      Tavarez got an hour a day on the iron pile, where he could lift weights alone and let his mind wander. He had arranged this privilege through Post also, and paid for it by having money wired into various bank accounts. His iron-pile hour was generally between 11 P.M. and midnight but Tavarez was largely nocturnal anyway. He’d grown very strong.

      And one night per week, usually Monday, Tavarez would skip his late-night workout and instead be escorted to the far corner of the southeast compound perimeter, where he would stand handcuffed while a prostitute serviced him through a chain-link fence.

      ‘How’s Tonya?’ asked Tavarez.

      ‘Chemo sucks, you know?’

      Tavarez figured that Post would need some help.

      ‘With her not feeling good, you know, the kid doesn’t get decent meals and he doesn’t ever get his homework done. I’m here in this shithole forty-eight hours a week ‘cause we need the money, so I can’t do everything at home, you know?’

      ‘Sounds difficult,’ said Tavarez.

      ‘That’s because it is difficult.’

      ‘As soon as you get me the library, I can make a transfer for you.’

      Post was predictable and self-serving as a dog, which was why Tavarez valued him.

      ‘It’s done,’ said the young guard. ‘You have the library for one hour tonight. The laptop will be inside in the world atlas on the G shelf, down at the end, up on top, out of sight. Lunce will come to your cell at ten to take you in. Then he’ll take you to the iron pile at eleven, then back to your cell at midnight.’

      Tavarez suppressed a smile. ‘Batteries charged?’

      ‘Hell yes they’re charged.’

      ‘I’ll make the transfer.’

      ‘Ten K?’

      ‘Ten.’

      Tavarez watched the men labor and count. The ten K infuriated him but he didn’t let it show. Plus, he had the money.

       …ninety-eight…ninety-nine…one hundred!

      ‘Behave yourself, bandito,’ said Post.

      ‘Always,’ said Tavarez.

      ‘ You don’t want to go back to the X.’

      ‘God will spare me that, Jason.’

      ‘God don’t care here. It’s every man for himself.’

      ‘That’s why I value our friendship,’ said Tavarez.

      ‘Yeah, I bet. Make that transfer, dude.’

      Prison Investigator Ken McCann delivered a cloth sack full of mail to Tavarez in his cell later that afternoon. Mail was delivered to Tavarez only twice a week because he got so much of it. The Prison Investigation team – four overworked Corrections employees overseeing