The Chinese Jars (25 page)

The smell of food wafted through the block, making Mathew's nostrils quiver and his stomach growl. He realized he was hungry and wondered when it would be time to eat and what they would serve. He had a delicate stomach and watched his weight. He could hear the sounds of prisoners talking, singing, and yelling, mixed with the clang of cell doors, all made louder by the cavernous size of the building.

What a fucking mess, he thought. They told him he would only be at San Quentin for a week or so, but he hadn't realized what a shit hole it was until he got there. He never imagined that he would be thrust into such a cramped space with only a fold-down bunk, a metal table and chair, a toilet with no seat, and a piece of steel for a mirror.

Twenty-three hours a day in that dump “for his own safety.” He knew he'd get to go outside each afternoon at five o'clock for an hour, but he didn't have any way to tell what time it was. He unhooked the chains that held the bunk to the wall, pulled it down, and sat on the bare mattress staring at the sheet and the single gray blanket that lay on the table. He noticed the irony of the stripes on the bedding running perpendicular to the bars on his cell. He tried to gauge the time from the position of the shadows on the floor, but couldn't figure it out.

* * *

Time passed slowly for Mathew O'Hara until he finally heard the bar lifting. The door opened and two guards showed up at his cell. “Come with us, it's time for exercise,” one of them ordered.

Handcuffed and with one on either side of him, Mathew was escorted along eternal corridors, through several barred and locked doors, and then shoved into a courtyard of about two hundred square feet. On two sides, the one facing the bay to the south, and the one facing the Richmond Bridge to the east, there were chain-link fences with curls of barbed wire along the top. To the west was a gray cinderblock wall about ten feet high. From where he stood, Mathew couldn't see on the other side, but he figured it had to be the exercise yard for the rest of the prisoners of the cellblock. He could hear a chorus of voices coming from there. A guard tower loomed to the south on the other side of the chain-link fence. Two men holding rifles were inside its small glass enclosure. His handcuffs were taken off.

Mathew counted five other men in the yard with him, and he assumed they were separated for maximum-security reasons. They walked in circles or exercised without talking, under the guards' gaze. No one acknowledged his presence. He breathed deeply. He had not been out in the fresh air for over two months, and he missed it. It felt good. He thought about his boat, his lazy morning sails in the bay, and his beach house at Stinson. The afternoon was breezy, and he could see whitecaps on the bay through the fence and barbed wire. He watched freighters move northward under the bridge on their way to ports as far away as Stockton and Sacramento, and small fishing boats coming south, on their way back from the Delta, loaded with sturgeon and bass for San Francisco's fish markets.

The sun was still a reasonable distance from the top of Mount Tamalpais, and the air was crisp and invigorating. He walked slowly around the perimeter of the small yard, clockwise, first by the chain-link fences so he could enjoy the sun and the breeze. The part next to the ten-foot wall was in the shade, so when he traversed it, he moved more rapidly. He repeated the circle four times, accelerating his pace. Finally he could stretch his legs. He started jogging, lifting his knees, and filling his lungs. He didn't know if talking was allowed, so when he passed the other prisoners he didn't look at them.

On the fifth turn, just as he was approaching the wall, there was a sudden loud explosion that shook the ground under his feet. Mathew didn't have time to think about what happened; the force of the blast lifted him and knocked him back several feet away. He flew along with the chunks of the wall, which seemed to disintegrate as if in slow motion. He landed, and the rubble fell all around, burying him. A cloud of dust covered the yard. He didn't hear screams, he didn't feel any pain, and he didn't try to move. There wasn't enough air for him to breathe. He closed his eyes and plunged into darkness.

When the dust started clearing, he was engulfed in an eerie silence like at the bottom of the sea. He lay there semiconscious and numb. I must be dead, he thought, with a sort of fascination. But he realized that he could open his eyes and felt his mouth full of grit, the pulverized cinderblock.

He didn't hear the sirens, the shots, or the screams because the explosion had left him numb and temporarily deaf. He opened his mouth and tried to call out but it seemed that no sound came from his lips. I'm dead, he repeated, but then a shooting pain on the left side of his body brought back some lucidity. He remembered it like in a dream: the prison, the yard, the gray wall. With a gigantic effort, he managed to move his head and lift his shoulders out of the rubble but couldn't move the rest of the body. At that point he saw his lower left leg. It was twisted in an impossible angle, with two bones protruding and blood gushing from the gaping wound. I am going to bleed to death, he thought with indifference. He fainted again.

* * *

Hell had broken loose in the prison. Later, they would find out that a missile of some kind had been fired from somewhere on the West Tower, but during those first moments no one knew what had happened, or what to do. Several guards ran around in total confusion, screaming orders that no one followed, while those in the tower south of the chain-link fence, who were not involved in the explosion, came out on their platform and started shooting in the air, thinking that would somehow restore order; it only contributed to the chaos. They looked toward the tower to the west, supposing that whatever hit the wall had come from there, but that was the extent of their reaction. If a guard from another tower had fired something, they thought, there had to be a good reason for it.

Rafael, who had been getting his daily exercise on the other side of the wall, was one of the first to react. He bolted over the pile of cinderblocks and entered the other yard. He saw five prisoners and a couple of guards who were just beginning to get back on their feet after being knocked down by the explosion, and he realized that they weren't injured. Then he noticed the man crushed under the rubble and the pool of blood gushing from him. Frantic, he started throwing material to one side to disengage him.

When Rafael was able to free the wounded man, he recognized, to his amazement, his former boss, Mathew O'Hara. One look was enough for him to realize that the man needed immediate first aid. He saw that the blood was spurting from his leg in rhythm with what he estimated was the man's heartbeat. The artery looked like it had been severed. He tried to stop the bleeding with his fingers but it was immediately obvious that a tourniquet was needed. Without hesitation he tore his own shirt and shredded a sleeve while he tried to reduce the bleeding by pressing the wound with his foot. He wrapped the fabric around Mathew's thigh and twisted it. The flow of blood diminished but didn't stop. Over his shoulder he saw his cellmate who, like himself, had come from the other yard.

“Pancho, ayúdame! This cat's on the way out.”

“What do you want me to do, carnal?”

“Get a piece of wood! I have to tighten the tourniquet! Hurry up, vato!”

Pancho whistled and two other Mexicans showed up at the rubble.

“Corten un pedazo de leña, about six inches long!” Pancho ordered, measuring with his hands.

One of the men looked around, saw he was protected from the tower's view, and pulled a shiv out of his pants pocket. They got to one of the picnic tables. While the other one covered him from the view he sliced off a baton-sized piece of wood from the table and hid the knife back in his pants. He threw the wood to Pancho, who caught it in mid-flight and ran with it to Rafael. He then helped Rafael, who inserted it in the strip of shirt and twisted it until the bleeding stopped. Rafael realized that Mathew was in shock and started to shake and slap him.

“Wake up, Mr. O'Hara! Make an effort! Come on! Pancho, get some help!” he yelled, and Pancho ran off.

Finally the wounded man opened his lids. His eyes looked vacant and glazed in his dust-covered face. He yelled in pain.

“Help is coming,” said Rafael, but even if Mathew could hear he wouldn't have understood the words. He was too dazed.

Only a few minutes had gone by but already there were armed guards in both yards shouting order at the inmates to stand back. One approached Rafael and pointed his gun at his head.

“Didn't you hear me, fucker? Hands up!”

“I can't let go of the tourniquet, sir. This man needs immediate help,” he tried to explain.

“Goddammit, did you hear me?” the guard yelled, kicking him in the back and forcing him on top of Mathew.

“Leave him be,” a voice came over a loudspeaker from the south tower. “He's the only help we got right now for the prisoner that's down.”

The guard backed off, still pointing his gun. Rafael, now back on his knees, saw a blank and frightened look in the man's eyes that he recognized from his experience in the streets of his rough neighborhood. It meant that anything could tip the delicate balance in which they found themselves and make him start shooting. The other prisoners from Rafael's side of the yard recognized it, too, and they started moving in mass toward the cellblock gate to get back inside before any of the guards lost control.

At that moment, out of the crowd, came a shiv, thrown by an expert hand that no one saw, flying toward Mathew and Rafael. Maybe Rafael saw the metal shining in mid-air or maybe he acted by pure instinct. Without thinking, in a fraction of a second, he moved forward and the knife hit him in the neck. He fell back on top of Mathew.

The action was so swift, clean and silent, that several seconds went by before somebody in the yard reacted. The guard next to Rafael saw him fall, but he hesitated, confused. Then he bent over him and saw the knife in his neck. He poked Rafael with his knee and only then realized that he was dead. He cursed and automatically pressed the trigger of his gun. The bullets penetrated the ground, lifting shards of asphalt and cinderblock.

Panic broke out in the prison yard. The inmates ran to get into the building: pushing, falling, crawling. The guards kicked them and hit them with the butts of their guns, while the loudspeakers blasted away telling them to freeze and raise their hands. Nobody was about to wait around for that. All the alarms went off and a line of men in combat gear poured out of the building and occupied the yard, hitting left and right with their batons. Several of them rushed to Rafael and Mathew.

“What happened?” asked a sergeant.

“No fuckin' idea,” replied the pale guard at the scene.

Soon the medical team arrived. By then Mathew O'Hara was unconscious. He had no idea that his Mexican janitor had saved his life twice in a span of fifteen minutes.

* * *

Mathew was in the hospital for several weeks before he regained any semblance of mental coherence, numbed as he was by drugs, and hovering between life and death. Then, there was still the question of whether he would lose his leg. Grime from the pulverized cinderblocks contaminated his wounds, and there was severe vascular damage due to the comminuted fractures. But the medical staff at San Francisco General Hospital prison ward, where he was taken, included a woman doctor of Japanese descent who considered his case a personal challenge. She wanted to prove to her colleagues that she was as good as the best of them. During the war she had spent four of her teenage years in an internment camp for Japanese-American citizens. When everything else failed, she came up with the idea of using maggots to combat the gangrene that had set in, and then leaches to get rid of the stagnant blood.

They had fixed the fractures internally with steel plates and screws, but they couldn't close the wound because there was no live tissue surrounding it. While the other doctors were talking amputation she insisted on a graft technique to avoid osteomyelitis.

After three weeks, the orthopedist in charge was able to perform a cross-leg flap operation by taking Mathew's good leg, opening it up with a scalpel at the calf, and attaching it surgically to the injured area of his broken one. He hoped that after six weeks or so, the tissue of the legs would grow together. Then he would again operate to separate them, cutting off the part of the calf that had grown onto the injured site, literally transplanting it. Then only skin grafts would be required.

At that point in the treatment, Charles Perkins and Samuel Hamilton came to see Mathew. An armed U.S. marshal escorted them into his room that had bars on the windows on the sixth floor. Mathew had both his legs elevated by a pulley system, the right one crossed on top of the left shin where the legs were sutured together, all covered by bandages. When the visitors entered, a nurse was massaging both of his legs and feet, in an attempt to stimulate circulation.

“Gentlemen,” saluted Mathew.

“Mr. O'Hara,” responded Samuel and Charles at the same time.

“I bet you thought you'd never see me alive, eh?” said Mathew with visible effort.

Samuel knew him only slightly from the bar, but he noticed that the man had lost a lot of weight; his cheeks were sunken, his skin sallow, and his hair was growing out of the jailhouse buzz cut, like an unmowed lawn. Very little was left of the handsome and confident man that he'd been.

“I'm Samuel Hamilton, a patron of your bar, although now I drink mostly soda,” was how he introduced himself.

“Melba talked to me about you.”

The nurse adjusted the pillows to prop him up, then left the room.

“Mr. Hamilton is with me. He's helping me coordinate the investigation. He gives it an outsider's view,” explained Charles.

“I see.”

“You can speak openly in front of him with our usual understanding that everything you say is off the record,” added Charles.