Chapter eighteen
Sean had never been so scared in his life but he figured the worst they could do is kill him and he’d rather be dead than go though that again. He was a bundle of nerves. He was deathly afraid to get near anyone. He avoided situations where people were crowded together like the plague. Two days later while in the exercise yard a con stepped up close to him and said he’d see him in the showers that night. Sean jumped like if he’d been poked with a cattle prod making the con smile. He tried to walk away, but the con followed and continued to harass him.
“Aint no point in hide’n asshole. You gonna be my bitch. If you treat me good I’ll see that the rest these assholes leave you be.”
When he was back in his cell, Sean taped the shank like he’d been told and practiced ripping it loose and making the stabbing motion over and over. The problem was he wasn’t sure he could do it when the time came. All the time he was practicing his cell mate sat on his bunk watching.
That night three of them came at him in the showers and pulled him off into a corner. They pushed him against a wall and one of them came up against his back. Sean grabbed his shank from under his arm and whirled around in one smooth motion, just as he had practiced. Sean drove the razor sharp knife into the guy’s neck all the way up to his fist and immediately pulled it back out in anticipation of further attack. The carotid artery had been severed and a stream of blood was gushing from the man’s neck. The man was trying to talk but only managed to make gurgling sounds. Blood bubbled and spit out of his mouth with each sound. Sean backed against the shower room wall shocked and somewhat sickened by the site. By the time Sean got a hold on himself and thought to check what the other cons were up to, he was all alone. The con he had stabbed was now on his knees with his hand clasped to his throat as if he was trying to hold in the blood.
Sean ran to the sink, wiped down the shank with paper towels, and dropped it along with the towels in a waste can. He quickly stepped into a shower stall and scrubbed down. He was dressed and walking out of the shower area when the first guards arrived. By the time the guards were over the shock of what they in encountered Sean was long gone and not one of them could remember who had passed them on his way out.
The following day in the exercise yard, Sean walked up to a group of cons working out with weights, and said hi.
“Hey Cochise take yo skinny red ass over and play with them nigger’s. This area’s for white folk.” Sean wasn’t about to push it, the guy's biceps were bigger than Sean’s thighs. It wasn’t hard to see how things were in La Tuna and Sean figured if he was going to survive the next five years he better learn the rules fast.
Sean walked over by the wall, found an unoccupied bench and sat down. He hadn’t been there long when the skinny little guy from the mess hall came up and sat down beside him.
“Names Weasel, you did good.”
“It’s okay to talk to me now that I’m a killer?”
“Hey, it is what it is. You don’t want to hang around them skin heads.”
“Skin heads?”
“Lordy, how’d you get in here? You rob some Girl Scout cookies? Skinheads is white supremacists. They don’t like your kind, they don’t like my kind, they don’t like no kind.”
“Well thanks for the help Weasel.”
“What help? I didn’t help you. I don’t help no body. Aint nobody in here help nobody.”
Weasel was from Flint Michigan. He was sent up for sticking up a 7-Eleven with a squad car sitting next door at the Krispy Kreme. One of the cops had seen him go in, walked over and watched through the window. The cop knew Weasel well. He had been hauling him in since he was fifteen. He only got sixty-five bucks but drew a twenty-year sentence because he used a gun to get it.
Weasel was born George Armstrong Custer in a shack two miles north of Arnold Michigan. His father was Leon Custer. Leon had served in the eighth cavalry. When he got home from the army, he shacked up with a chubby little Indian girl of Huron descent named Betty. When Betty gave birth a year later Leon, who wasn’t the brightest bulb on the tree, decided it would be a great joke to name the boy George Armstrong Custer. As it turned out, no one got the joke except him. George was even less intelligent than his dad. However, what George lacked in brain power he made up for in cunning.
By the time he was twelve years old everyone just called him Weasel. His dad had long since disappeared. Leon hadn’t stuck around long enough for George to even remember him. George wasn’t able to comprehend most of what they tried to teach him in school and consequently quit attending school by the time he was ten. No one seemed to care. He supplemented Betty’s income by stealing anything he could lay his hands on. During the winter months, his target of choice was vacant cabins. He would get food, mostly canned, cameras and various electronics that were easy to sell. He would occasionally get a gun from one of the cabins. Those were not only easy to fence but brought the best money. The problem was that not having a car, or being old enough to drive even if he had one, his working area was severely limited which made for a dwindling supply of places to rob.
When he was fourteen, he raped a thirteen-year-old neighbor girl. It had started out as consensual but Weasel not being experienced in the ways of love, got over excited. He ripped her panties off with such force that the elastic cut her leg. She screamed and he slapped his hand over her face with enough force to cut her lower lip. At this point, she decided that she had about enough sex for one day. Weasel wasn’t about to quit at that point and when it was over she made the mistake of sobbing out that she was going to tell.
He left her body in the woods covered up with brush and leaves and never went back home. He walked and hitchhiked east with no idea of where he was going. When he got to I-75, he sat down on a rock by the entrance ramp and stuck out his thumb. It was an hour before a car stopped. He was just about to start walking when he finally got a ride. The guy that picked him up was going to Flint and he thought Weasel looked like an easy mark. Weasel although dirty and poorly dressed, wasn’t bad looking for a skinny fourteen year old.
The man asked Weasel how old he was and Weasel told him the truth. The man laid his hand in Weasels lap and said that if he would like to go home with him he would see that he was well taken care of. He told Weasel that he was rich, and that he would be very nice to him. Weasel said, “My name is George and I would be happy to go home with you since I got no where else to go.”
The man said, “My name is Bruce, I promise you won’t be sorry.”
When they got to Bruce’s apartment, Weasel killed him with the same knife that he had used to kill the girl. Weasel spent the night in his bed. In the morning, he took the money from his wallet and ransacked the apartment looking for anything he could easily cart away and sell. It turned out that the guy had quite a lot of jewelry and kept a considerable amount of cash in the locked drawer of an antique desk. Along with what he had in his wallet, the cash amounted to nearly five thousand dollars. In Weasel’s mind he was well on his way to becoming a very rich man. Weasel stayed in the apartment until Bruce started to smell and then moved on.
Weasel and Sean became friends and Weasel made it his job to teach Sean the facts of life. Although Sean considered Weasel’s name a fair description of the man himself, he couldn’t bring himself to brush him off. He felt as though he owed him his life and he very well may have. Without Weasels tutelage, he would have never killed that con. He would probably have wound up either being his bitch or committing suicide.
Sean made up his mind to figure out how the system in La Tuna worked and to make it work for him. Sean had never thought of himself as being overly bright, but soon considered himself head and shoulders above his fellow inmates in that department. He figured that Weasel was more than borderline retarded and that most of the other inmates were not much better off. Sean made friends with the trustee in charge of job assignments and convinced him to get him a job in the library.
The library had computers and Sean was seeking Internet access. Sean had taken computer classes in high school and was familiar with You Tube, My Face and similar sites frequented by teenagers. He thought that these young naïve kids would be easy to exploit.
Sean was soon to learn, however that there was very little access to the Internet and what little was available was well supervised. Moreover, the majority of computers were antique by today’s standards. The few computers that had access were desktops with wireless connection to a central router. All of these computers were password protected. He eventually found an older lap top that was equipped for wireless but had never been set up for it. Sean hid that computer and waited to se if it would be missed.
After a month he was sure that it’s absence had gone unnoticed. He bribed a trustee to get the laptop to his cell and while waiting for it, built a secret compartment in his mattress to house it. It took Sean only one night to get the computers wireless option working and to find that there was a router within range of his cell. It, however, took him three months to access that router. In two months he gave up trying to crack the router code and set about finding someone that knew where the router was located and could be bribed to copy the codes off of it.
By the time he had Network access he had made a lot of promises and owed a good deal of money in bribes. He was stating to worry that if his plan didn’t work he would be in a world of hurt.
He immediately set about farming Myspace.com and other teen frequented sites for bleeding heart teenyboppers. His plan was to convince them that he was innocent and needed their help. The story he concocted was that he had been railroaded because he was an American Indian that didn’t know his place. He contended that in New Mexico Indians were treated worse than black people were in many parts of the country. He then wove a story about the horrors of prison life. He convinced them that if they sent him money his life would be much more bearable. He told these gullible young people, mostly girls, that for very little money he could bribe his fellow inmates not to rape him. He never asked for much on the premise that money was worth a lot more in prison. He figured that it was a lot easier to get a little from many, than to get a lot from a few, and with the same results.
Before long, he had quite a few sending him small amounts. The small amounts from many soon became quite an income. Life in prison is much easier if you have money. Guards can be bribed for a surprisingly small amount and inmates will do favors for even less. He was able to get drugs, tobacco and booze, and although he couldn’t get women, pornography was plentiful.
Sean kept in touch with his father who had made it clear that he blamed the misfortune of his son on the prejudices of the white establishment. He, however, refused to answer his sister’s correspondences, partly from shame, but mostly because he knew she felt he had brought this on himself. In his mind that couldn’t have been further from the truth. As far as he was concerned this was completely Eugene’s fault. Sean never forgot however, Molly’s look of accusation and her admonition that the things he was taking from the ranch, were not his.
Sean had no plans for what he would do when he was released other than the sure knowledge that it wouldn’t involve honest labor. Sean believed that his fellow inmates were here solely because of their own stupidity. He didn’t think it would be all that hard to make a dishonest living without being caught.
When they had been friends for a few months, Weasel told Sean that he was due to be sprung soon. He had served eight years already and word on the block was that they were way over crowded. Apparently, the system wasn’t that over crowded, it took two more years before Weasel was dumped back on society. Before he left he told Sean where to find him. He said there was some easy money to be made in the U P in the winter robbing summer homes. He said, the rich assholes build cabins in the U P to mingle with the hicks. When the season's over, they turn the key in a two-dollar lock and go back to their mansions in Ann Arbor or Grosse point.
“What the hell’s a U P?
“It’s what everybody in Michigan calls the Upper Peninsula.
Weasel said he’d had about enough of Flint, for one thing, there were too many cops and most of them knew weasel well.
Sean had just turned eighteen when he went into La tuna. He was, by criminal standards extremely naïve. He was also somewhat bitter. He believed that Indians as a whole got a raw deal and he in particular had been treated worst than most. When he walked out his attitude hadn’t improved but he was no longer naive. The past three years had made him a very hard man and he left prison determined to accomplish two things. One was to live very good on other people’s money and the other was to never get put back in a place like La Tuna. He didn’t think Weasel’s idea of robbing cabins would make much money but he intended to look him up anyway. Weasel was dumb as a box of rocks but he was loyal as lap dog and would do what ever you told him.