A real Man of God Malice in Wonderland a real man of god
Yüklə 1,63 Mb.
|
THE FREEDOM BUSINESS LA GRANGE 1991
The men are in the chapel preparing for Judgment Day. If the parole board says you should have counseling, get counseling, the parole officer tells the prisoners assembled in the pews. A polished wooden cross hangs on the wall behind him. If the board tells you to enroll in the sex-offender program, don't maintain your innocence, the parole officer says. A Christ figure watches over the prison chapel from a stained-glass window high on the back wall. If you wear old clothes to your parole board hearing, at least make sure they're clean, he says; If you wear your hair long, at least wash it; If you have even a few teeth, brush them. The parole officer stands on the altar as he speaks. And remember: The more tattoos you show, the longer it's going to seem you've been in prison. It's like this: Justice isn't blind. Justice can see whether you have shined your $15 prison shoes.
His name is Christopher Blevins. He is 24. His number is 100175. On this January day in 1991, his home happens to be Cell 14, Lower Left, Unit B, Kentucky State Reformatory, La Grange. The cell is just big enough to accommodate, without any overlap, a desk, a twin-size bed, a steel case of shelves and a narrow sunbeam. At $40 to $45 a night, a bed at the prison runs about $10 more than one at the Days Inn down the highway. But inmates at the prison get free cable. And taxpayers foot the bill for the room. It was this medium-security prison near Louisville that recently served as a stopover for two men who, once paroled, kidnapped a 15-year-old girl and kept her tied to a tree for three weeks while repeatedly raping and sodomizing her. The sensational case prompted a study of the parole process by the Legislative Research Commission. Its report is due by fall. Like most, Kentucky's parole system is illuminated only when it fails spectacularly. But usually it grinds on unnoticed -- a day-to-day process that works most of the time. Take Christopher Blevins. He never raped or murdered or chopped anyone to pieces. But his story is the real story of the parole process. The board will release dozens of state prison inmates like him this week -- men with bad judgment and hard luck and a history of anticlimactic run-ins with the law. Low-profile cases, the media calls them. Several inmates will be granted their freedom as you drink your morning coffee, several more as you read this article: The front door will slide open and there they’ll be, breathing the same air as you ... ... And we'll never know unless one of them turns out to be a monster.
"I've been in trouble since I was 12," he says. "The law became my number one enemy," he says. His arrest record grew. He was charged with one petty crime after another. His life was out of control; alcohol and drugs were gnawing holes in his mind. On his way home from an Ohio bar one night in 1987, he was pulled over for speeding and was arrested for having a loaded Smith & Wesson in his glove box. His conviction on a charge of carrying a concealed deadly weapon led to his first prison sentence. After he was released in November 1987, Blevins drifted. There was no construction work to be found. He moved in with a friend in Lawrence County, just down U.S. 23 from his grandfather's home on Dog Fork Road in Catlettsburg. On Jan. 16, 1988, he and his 17-year-old stepbrother strolled past a house perched on a rise above Lakewood Village Road in Boyd County. Nobody home. They continued walking -- there was no delaying them when their destination was a bar -- but the image of that house stuck in their minds like a burr. They visited a bar in Kenova, W.Va., then bought a 12-pack of beer and walked back across the river to Kentucky. They spent the afternoon drinking beer under a bridge near the floodwall at Catlettsburg. Daylight slid away like the brown water in the river below. About 5 p.m., they walked back to Kenova and met a friend in a bar who offered them a ride home in his pickup. On the way back, they saw the house again. Didn't they need more money if they were going to keep drinking that night? They smashed a window and helped themselves to seven bottles of liquor, a chain saw, a Weedeater, some money and a gold pocket watch. Blevins pleaded not guilty, then guilty. He had been state property barely five months when his stepbrother died in a truck accident. Although they had been close, Blevins did not attend the services. He couldn't. He was not eligible for a furlough, and because it was Thanksgiving, there weren't enough prison guards working to escort No. 100175 to a funeral. It isn't hard to feel sorry for Blevins. He has had no visitors in prison. His father owns a construction company and is too busy to come by, Blevins says. But there is no bitterness, no sense of loss or betrayal, in his voice. At its best, doing time is like being a good Christian: You prepare for the day of reckoning and that vast, incomprehensible reward that lies beyond. A year or so before they are scheduled to meet the parole board, inmates with blemished prison records suddenly begin shaping up. Or trying to. It's hard to stay out of trouble in a place that's full of it. Not surprisingly, inmates are forever saying they have found religion. For the most part, the parole board is unimpressed. It's not that they don't believe in God, necessarily. It's just that they don't especially believe in the desperate convict sitting across the table. Blevins' insistence on preaching the Gospel on the yard earned him a tour of the state's prison system. Corrections officials were at wit's end trying to find a place where he could adjust. The disciplinary problems cut into his good time -- that time subtracted from a sentence as a reward for good behavior. He frittered away almost half of it by October 1989. That concerned the parole board the first time it met him in February 1990 -- after he had served the obligatory 20 percent of his sentence. The board wasn't wild about his long criminal record, either. Or his lack of a high school diploma. At the end of that first hearing, the parole board told Blevins to go away and come back in 15 months. He was deferred again in May 1990, for six months; and again in November 1990, also for six months. After the third hearing, the board asked that Blevins undergo a psychiatric evaluation. Now he's ready for a fourth round. He has his papers in order verifying that he has lined up a job (with his uncle's construction company) and a place to live (with his father) -- if he gets out.
From the end of the walk comes the splatter of other inmates taking showers and the harsh, tearing sound of a toilet flushing. There come hollow voices, too, like echoes more than anything human: souls bouncing off the walls. He sits down on the plastic desk chair in his cell and takes out a can of shoe polish from an old tube sock stuffed full of such things. He is careful with the shoes. It's important they not be too shiny. He read that in Dress for Success. He has read a lot in prison. Only time will tell whether he has learned anything. He pulls a dingy tube sock on over his right hand and extends his first and second fingers inside the sock, making a ghost puppet. He slides them across the top of an open can of shoe polish, then wipes the polish on the shoe. Toe. Heel. Side. Sole. It's important to look your best for the parole board. Who knows? Basic Black on your shoes today could mean freedom under them tomorrow. Oh, just to set foot on U.S. 23. Or the loose dirt at a construction site. Or the tile floor of a McDonald's. He'd love a Big Mac. In the last five years, Blevins has been on the streets seven months. What he'd give to take a warm bath. What he took to surrender that privilege. He finishes his shoes and laces them tight on his feet. Then he pulls clean shirt on over his head. It has a stain on the front, but it's clean. He'll face the parole board in a few hours. "I believe they'll probably let me go this morning, the way I look at it. That way they can keep an eye on me." Blevins' optimism is not unrealistic. The odds are good he will be out of this place by next week. He has not had a write-up in 10 months. And Blevins has his high school equivalency diploma, which he earned at the prison's school. "I tell you one thing," Blevins says now. "I'm looking forward to a great life when I get out of here." He smiles. If he could, he says, he would fly a Boeing 747 out of here to "some faraway jungle in the middle of nowhere." "I'd rather box acrobatic monkeys or swing on vines as I would be in here. I'd rather be in a mud hut than in here." He'd like to learn how to fly planes. To scuba dive. To mountain climb. He has done none of these things. He is only 24, though. He has the rest of his life to try them -- if he doesn't come back here. He digs tobacco out of a yellow pouch, rolls a cigarette and lights up. And his mind drifts far away . . . . . . to the Sandy Cove Marina back home. Where his dad keeps a boat . . . He stands there, thinking about fishing in streams that just kept flowing, flowing after he was locked up. "I'm gonna watch myself," he says, waving the cigarette in the air, "when I get outta here."
But what a treat for the ears! Sounds of life waft in through the windows: Birds sing, faraway trains wail and, this morning, construction workers shout and laugh as they labor under a bright spring sun. It's the call of the wild, and it provides an appropriate sound track for what happens here. This room is as close to freedom as many inmates will get for a while. This is where, once a month, those who are eligible meet the parole board. The taste of freedom inmates get here has been known to drive some of them nearly crazy when denied parole. Two years ago, one of them stood up and slugged board chairman John Runda six times after being told he would have to complete his sentence. That's why, as parole board members take their seats this morning, they all sit at the same side of the long table. On the other side is a single chair -- safely more than an arm's length away. Forget judges and pistol-packing guards. The gatekeepers of Kentucky's prisons are sitting right here, in suits and ties, and there's not a gun or a gavel among them. Theirs is a full-time job. The board is the small end of a funnel. No matter what jury convicts someone, no matter what judge sentences him, that criminal probably will come through this panel of seven on the way out. Last year, the board conducted 5,800 individual parole hearings. They will meet with 52 inmates today. All that paper work. All those hearings, one right after another, lasting just five minutes each. There's nothing spectacular about it. "Pretty boring, actually," Runda says. Board member Phil Hazle asks inmates questions he already knows the answers to. It's a way to see if they're still scamming. "What the parole board attempts to do," Runda says, "is to predict human behavior." In many ways, the process is a gamble. On both sides. You study the eyes, you bluff, you play the game. The stakes are high. For many inmates, facing the board alone behind a closed door is traumatic. Some choose to serve out their complete sentences just so they won't have to go through the ordeal. Look. You can see the emotion of this ordeal right there in William Cabbil Jr.'s face. Runda's just told him to go away and not come back for 48 months. "Forty-eight months?" Cabbil says softly. "I haven't killed anybody." "No," Hazle says, "but you stole everything in Louisville, so step out."
He is the third of four men inmates see as they look across the table from left to right. The first is a former college professor, the second a retired coroner and the fourth a former liquor store owner. This is the hand Blevins has drawn. Among inmates, the board has a tough reputation, but some members are tougher than others. And because the board's quorum is set by law at three, all seven rarely appear together. The makeup of the board on any given day conceivably could affect the outcome of a hearing. Out in the hallway, an inmate is passing two of the longest minutes of his life waiting for these men to vote on his bid for parole. He sighs: "Whew, man." He whispers: "Shew, God." The guards and parole officers are paying $2 each to draw horse names in a Derby pool. One guard opens the heavy, barred door at the end of this cramped hallway, looks down the main hall and barks: "Blevins." And Inmate No. 100175 suddenly appears, holding his hands above his head for the patdown.
"State your name for the record," parole board member Richard Brown says. "Chris Blevins," says inmate No. 100175. "Mr. Blevins, you were received on 6-17-88, sir: Burglary two, for which you received five years. The board last saw you 11-1 of '90. Since that time, sir, what have you been doing? . . ." What has he been doing? What has he been doing? Oh, not much. Just preparing for this moment. Blevins has decided to jump at this last chance for parole even though his sentence would end Nov. 1, anyway. He wants to leave now, not in November -- even though it would mean being on parole until his maximum serve-out date in February 1993. Some inmates who get this close to serving out choose to stay in prison rather than endure the nagging presence of a parole officer. But Blevins knows staying in prison is a gamble. "I'd stay in here and get another write-up and be in here another seven months." Brown asks him: "Did you previous have a substance abuse problem, sir?" "Uh, yes I did," Blevins says. "OK, what type of treatment have you been receiving for that?" Brown says. "I've been studyin' the Bible." Brown gets that look. "The Bible?" he says. That's it. The board has decided society would be better served if Christopher Blevins is paroled so that he can be ordered to undergo the counseling he has never received. "And you think you can go out of here and lead a law-abiding life?" Runda says. "Yes, sir, I do." Blevins leaves the room grinning and gives the guys in the hallway the thumbs-up sign. Blevins peers out at the parking lot through the bars of the front door. His hands are clasped in front of him and two big mesh bags of clothes sit at his feet. It's been a long weekend waiting to leave . . . How ya gettin' home? another inmate asked him just this morning, back in the cellhouse. Dad's comin' to get me, Blevins said, smiling way too big for a man who had not been able to get to sleep until 3:30 a.m. He was clearing out his cell then, and he lighted a match and burned through the string holding a needlepoint cross against the cabinet. The odor of burning twine was like someone had just made a birthday wish . . . "Briscoe!" the guard barks suddenly, and another inmate being released steps forward. "Bye, everybody," Briscoe says. Chuunngg. The front gate closes behind him . . . Just think: Freedom. When Blevins signed his parole agreement this morning, he wrote his prison number after his name. But parole officer Vaughn told him to scratch it out. Don't need your number anymore, Vaughn said . . . "Blevins!" He walks to the cashier's window and signs his name twice more. He collects his bus ticket, the standard going-away gift of $50 and a paycheck for $26.25. His janitor's job already is posted on the bulletin board back at the cellhouse. "Good luck," the cashier says. It's strange: Everyone knows when you're free. Maybe it's the look in your eyes. As Blevins made his last walk across the yard this morning, other inmates wished him well. You gone, Chris? Good luck, buddy. You'll make it. Don't come back. Blevins descends the front steps into the biting gloom of a lost May morning and soon spies a man with white hair walking toward him. He hugs the man right there in the middle of the parking lot. Hel-lo father. "Long time," father says. "Yeah. Long time," son says. They put the bags in the back of a red pickup truck, and Tom Blevins looks up at the tower nestled against swollen gray clouds. He shakes his head. "I don't see how he could stay in that place," he says softly, to no one in particular. "That's the reason I didn't come. I couldn't have slept, seeing him in that place." Then he turns to his son. "Got a lot of catchin' up to do," father says. "A lot of catchin' up," son says. The stiffness that made their first embrace seem awkward suddenly dissolves, and for just a moment, their eyes shine with tears. Then they drive off, away from all the concrete, toward spring, in search of new life and a big, juicy steak. THE FLAME STILL BURNS LEXINGTON 1991
His face tightens. It takes a lot to get him down. If you don't believe it, just look again at that old newspaper photograph from the state championship game he played in two years ago: There he is, running along with some big, would-be tackler dangling from his ankle. Conwell breaks free and lunges for extra yardage! With a slight lurch upward and forward, Delandual wills his leg ahead, determined to beat this thing that's holding him back. You can almost hear the crowd roar. He walks slowly, each step stiff and labored, as he clutches the steel bars on either side of him. Victory is in sight. He makes it all the way down the steel-and-rubber ramp, then back. "Go again?" the physical therapist asks, "or are you tired?" "Just a few seconds," Delandual says. And he smiles as he lowers himself into his wheelchair.
Doctors at the University of Kentucky Hospital found the growth in January after Delandual complained of numbness and tingling in his stomach and legs. They operated on Delandual four times to remove the growth, rebuild part of his spine and deal with subsequent complications, such as the blood clot that left him paralyzed from the waist down. They installed new vertebrae made of the same stuff used to make false teeth. Then they inserted a stainless steel rod on each side of his beleaguered backbone. No more football forever. But this might tell you all you need to know about the youngest son of Deotis and Dorsey Conwell of South Seventh Street in Ironton, Ohio: He doesn't feel sorry for himself for never again being able to play the game he loves ("Too many artificial things in me now . . ."). Instead, he feels lucky to have received the horrible diagnosis the way he did. "I'm blessed I didn't find out about it the hard way" -- on the playing field. Had Delandual taken a hard hit, he could have hemorrhaged and died, Deotis said. As it is, Delandual, a sophomore majoring in computer science at UK, figures he has a lot to be thankful for. Thanks to some good luck and lots of hard work -- Delandual visits Cardinal Hill for an hour every other day to walk and to ride the exercise bike -- he will be able to shed his wheelchair some day in the not-too-distant future, Dr. Gerald Klim said. And although Delandual, who sat out his freshman year as a running back, has never played a single down for Kentucky and never will, he's still part of the team. "It goes to our whole approach," Coach Bill Curry said, "which is: Once you're a part of us, then you remain a part." Still, this is the first time Delandual can remember not playing football in the fall. Even with all those tough opponents Ironton used to play, even with all those appearances in the state playoffs, this is sure to be Delandual Conwell's most trying autumn. "The hardest thing I have trouble with is watching them play," he said. Delandual's parents are the only people in Ironton who seem surprised at the strength Delandual has shown. "I don't know how he could have coped with that," Deotis said. Everybody else has come to expect that kind of resolve, strong faith and unflagging optimism from every one of the Conwells. They're a solid, Christian family in a steel and industrial town that seems never to have made it very far out of the 1950s -- a solid, family-oriented time if ever there was one. "We kidded with them and said when Delandual moved off to college, could our oldest son just move into his room so we could let Dorsey raise him," said Steve Harvey, Ironton High's team chaplain. "They did such a great job with him." And with Darwin, Delandual's older brother. Both times Ironton High has won a state championship, in 1979 and 1989, one of the two Conwell brothers has been on the team. Darwin, now a medical resident at a Cincinnati hospital, explained to his brother what would happen before every test, every surgery. Every procedure brought some risk of paralysis or even death. It helped a lot to have his brother's knowledge and advice, Delandual said. If he was sad, he never showed it. "He laid in that bed and never once cried or anything," his mother said. "I know his heart was hurting." One day in the hospital, Delandual told his mother he guessed he was like Moses. "You know, he always did want to play SEC ball, that fast ball," Dorsey said. "He got his wish. He went to UK, got into SEC football. Yet he couldn't play. "It's like Moses. He got to the promised land, but he couldn't go over." The twilight sky looks huge, flowing to the horizon in big, bold rivers of pink, blue, purple, green and orange, and it makes even 250-pound football players look tiny. Number 41 looks especially small, sitting down there near the corner of the field with no pads under his jersey, no helmet on his head. That's Delandual. This is where Delandual spends parts of Kentucky's home games. The rest of the time he can be found in the press box. That's where he goes when he think the weather will get cold. The cold makes him stiff and sore, sitting in his wheelchair. Delandual never got to play one down for Kentucky. Except for All-Star games, the last game of his life was that one in 1989, when his Fighting Tigers beat Campbell Memorial in Columbus' Ohio Stadium for the Ohio Division III championship -- the one in the photo. They still talk about him up in Ironton. It's a football-crazy town. Not many high schools have covered stadiums. Not many fill their stadiums every home game. Delandual was the starting tailback his junior and senior years. "He was a hard runner," said Jim Walker, sports editor of The Ironton Tribune. "Not blazing speed. Just a good kid and a hard worker." Lots of people remember that game his junior year, the state final game, when he took off for (pick a number; everyone remembers it differently) yards on the very first play of the game. Bam! Just like that. This is what he learned from Coach Bob Lutz at Ironton: Take what you've got and roll with it. "That's always been the philosophy of Ironton football," Walker said. "Whatever the defense is going to give you, you run with." Now, two years out of that orange-and-black fishbowl, he sits in quiet anonymity at Commonwealth Stadium, waiting for his team to take on Kent. The team runs out, and the crowd roars. Fireworks explode in the dark, eastern sky over one end zone. Look closely, now: On each player's left sleeve are the initials "DC." "They're living the dream for me, man," Delandual says, grinning. "A part of me's out there with each of those guys." He's up in the press box when the game starts, and he has the team rosters on the counter in front of him. He stares down at the field, seems to notice nothing else. The players are no bigger than one section of his finger. Kentucky takes a 14-0 lead quickly, then begins coasting. A woman in the press box walks up and asks Delandual if he wants more Coke. She smiles. He doesn't change expressions, barely looks at her. "Not right now," he says, shaking his head. The Kent quarterback completes a long pass. "Oooooh," Delandual says. His eyes still fixed on the field, he places his hands, thumb sides up, in front of him as if he's getting ready to give the counter a karate chop. Instead, he slices the air with them, moving them forward toward each other, converging, then crossing and moving away. He does it again. He does it a third time. It's as if his hands are moving on their own, that he's not aware of it. He's trying to figure out how the play worked. Nobody seems to notice, and he's concentrating too hard to care if anybody does. "That's part of football, man," he says: "Being into the game. "You can't let the crowd distract you." "The flame," Harvey said, "still burns in that guy." Just a few days before the Kent game, Delandual left his apartment and was on his way to his rust-color '87 Oldsmobile -- the one with the tiger tail dangling from the rearview mirror. His parents had the car fixed up with a hand-operated accelerator and brakes. "A professional job," his mother calls it. You can still use the foot pedals if you want. Someday.
Someday. It was a great morning, so cool and crisp and clear. This is football weather, Delandual Conwell thought: "Time for the real season." And for just a moment, a feeling of melancholy and longing washed over him. He breathed the magic air. You could smell it -- the sweetness of autumn, of grass, of pigskin. It felt good, even if it made his heart ache a little, and it filled up his lungs like the folks back home fill Memorial Stadium for each and every home game.
Yüklə 1,63 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
|