So I stayed in the truck, deflated, and put the window down to ask her.
She said that she could call her son.
Control told me to tell her, “Remain in your vehicle while you wait.”
So I did.
Then, “Perimeter,” Control said. “Resume your patrol.”
So I resumed circling, which I was used to.
When I drove past the grandmother’s car, she had her hands up in the international sign for “I don’t know.”
I was on the edge of purpose there, about to finally help somebody. But had to pull back, as always, and assume the institutional front.
~
I LIVED in Rockview’s outer orbit for twenty-seven years before not helping that lady. I drove past the jail for track meets, for karate tournaments, for anything that took me east of town. I never considered stopping. But what finally brought me inside was uniforms. Uniforms for money. I had developed a dependence on them. Rockview’s gray and black and made-by-inmate-labor uniform became my fifth.
When I finished with the camouflaged army uniform, I went to college. No more uniforms for me after school—that was my plan. I figured a shirt and tie would be nice for a change. Maybe a sweater in winter. But as it turned out, I wasn’t the engineer I thought I was. Two different calculus-teaching grad students named Vladimir told me to drop their classes.
So I found a blue uniform at a water-bottling factory. I drove past Rockview’s lights and signs to get there. The factory uniform came with a name patch and a hairnet. I wore both well. But when the factory moved me onto the overnight weekend shift, then the TV factory turned me down, I went to the job center and told the VA guy that I needed a new uniform.
He said that veterans get preference for cop and prison jobs—ten points added to the civil service test. “Takes two years to be a cop,” he said. “Four months to be a guard. Pays the same.”
I could do that: rules, regulations, hair off the collar, shifts, overtime. Jail was a time-clocked relief. Something concrete, not the derivatives and functions I paid the Vladimirs to fail me at. State jobs let you retire at fifty. The VA guy had me thinking career. Bad guys will always need hired guns circling them. I liked that idea. I even got to wear a tie. A clip-on, sure, but that way I couldn’t be choked. And it didn’t matter if the pants were wrong—the crotch down low by my knees—they didn’t keep me from chasing around cat ladies or wearing a pistol. Those made-by-inmate pants got me fed.
~
WHAT drew the jail to Happy Valley in 1911 was seven thousand cheap acres of forest and farmland. One of the farms purchased was called Rockview. Spring Creek runs through the property. A nearby town stocks the creek with trout.
One inmate and one guard moved in first. Both men lived in a farmhouse known as the Merit House. The idea for the jail, then called the Honor Farm: bring in low-risk inmates and create a self-sufficient and rehabilitative farming community.
But Pennsylvania needed a central location for executions in 1915, so the fence and death house went up, soon followed by the dining hall, gym, and bunker-style main blocks. Most of the original guards came from the nearby White Rock Quarry. In high school, my friends and I hung out in that abandoned quarry. There is a cave halfway down the cliff face. It’s cold, wet, full of mud, and it broke a guy’s back two or three years after we slid around in it without ropes or helmets or common sense.
Rockview had its own quarry. A bucket line for stones, sand, and mortar ran from the Merit House up the hill. Inmates did some of the labor, but there weren’t enough at the beginning, so contractors did most of the work. When the inmate population outgrew the house, they moved into the dining hall. Those men wore civilian clothes and lived nothing like the men confined on the grounds today. They slaughtered their own cows and maintained an orchard. They stayed busy.
But when I drove the truck, I saw an overgrown orchard, fallow fields, and retired cows. Rarely an inmate outside the fence. Most jobs were in the dining hall, the service industry, like the rest of the country. The inmate workweek was thirty hours, just enough to earn money for cable and some peanut butter from the commissary.
The manufacturing jobs at Rockview shut down right after I started. The cannery, leather shop, and upholstery shop closed up, the inmates laid off. I knew about that. I lived on unemployment every winter when the bottling factory turned off the water for six weeks. But plenty of jobs had been manufactured at Rockview—the block worker jobs (jail speak for janitor jobs) filled in for actual trades. Each block had about forty workers banging trash cans down stairs, push-brooming ranges, and just barely raising pulses.
But squeegeeing the showers twice a day at least got a guy out of his cell, made him money, and made him useful for thirty minutes. Rising inmate populations made for more idle inmates. But rising inmate populations also made for rising corrections-officer populations, for which I was thankful. Industry after industry shut down in Happy Valley. White Rock Quarry: open to trespassers only. The TV factory: sold for scrap. The electronics factory where I sorted capacitors for months: vacated. But Rockview, the survivor, kept on incarcerating.
~
WHAT made the patrol truck smell like peanut butter for a week one July was the peanut butter loaded into the shotgun’s chamber. Nobody knew who did it.
Every four hours the guards rotated out. We traded the guns and goods. “You good?”
“Yep. Good. You good?”
“Yep. Good.”
Then the truck rolled on, at idle speed, by double fences, anti-climb wire, motion sensors, cameras, thirty-foot towers, and cats, groundhogs, and skunks that ate scraps the tower officers threw down. On one side of the fences: green fields. On the other: gray concrete.
If idling counterclockwise, the truck idles past Tower 1, which overlooks the main gate, parking lot, and guard locker room. The truck idles past the fenced-in wood and paint shops and former cannery. Those shops all have different roofs, some square, some stepped, some peaked. After turning left at the corner by Tower 2, the truck idles past the bucket (jail speak for the restricted housing unit, or solitary confinement), a newer stone building. Then past the laundry house, an older stone building. Then past Tower 3, which stands over the fence from the big yard with its two softball fields and weightlifting pavilion. The truck idles past where the jail used to end, at an old fence where Tower 4 sits empty during daylight. The truck idles a little farther, turns left, idles past the maintenance shops opposite the jail. That’s a good place to take a leak—not inside, around back. The truck rolls past Tower 5, which stares at the smaller yard with the handball and basketball courts. Turns left. Idles past the largest and oldest block, where one thousand inmates live in two five-story wings. It has a gray concrete finish with ridges and ledges that would be climbable if it weren’t for the razor wire. The building is close to eighty feet tall, longer than a football field, and has a central rotunda where the superintendent works on the top floor. The truck idles past the treatment building, with the control center, infirmary, and visiting room with its outside area, its few tables, its fewer umbrellas that don’t obstruct the cameras’ views. The truck turns left and idles back north to the main gate to idle and turn and idle and turn past the same century-old buildings where thousands of guards have idled away their years until finding a higher-paying uniform or receiving a beating from an inmate or succumbing to heart disease or corruption or just acknowledging that the double-fenced perimeter wasn’t worth the money and forced them to seek a paycheck elsewhere. Some retired.
The truck stops only to refuel, to reload guards, to change direction if the guard wants to fight the monotony. I switched once an hour. It didn’t help.
In jail, you are what you beat. That beat was called perimeter patrol. That job was out there on the threshold between free and not, green and not, poor and not, and right on the limit of boredom.
~
THE biggest supermarket chain in Pennsylvania has ninety-two stores. I stocked