Prison Without Walls
I was 12 years old when Kevin Cooper escaped from the California Institution for Men less than three miles from our home. That it was late and a school night didn't matter. At the time, my mother was six months pregnant and I helped her drag our royal-sized dining room chairs in front of the sliders, blocking the glass. My father, a big Greek, stood outside in his T-shirt and boxers, barefoot, yet armed with a hunting rifle. He checked the front and back doors, and inspected the garage to make sure it held nothing more than his diesel Mercedes and our Schwinn bicycles.
On the loose for less than 72 hours, Cooper already was suspected of bludgeoning a family in the hills. The carnage, the bodies, the blood were all too grisly for the local TV stations to air. We only heard the details, which somehow made them worse. Cooper had used a knife and hatchet. These were hands-on murders, the personal kind, though Cooper was a stranger to this family.
We lived in a ranch-style home surrounded by oleander bushes, perfect for hiding.
My mother parted the curtains.
"He could be watching us right now," she said. At age 40, her pregnancy was high-risk in more ways than one. An accident, she and my father said, but even then I knew that having another child was a last-ditch effort at keeping our family together. It was my father's idea to move us from L.A. to Chino, near the prison. He moved his law practice too. A change was supposed to do us good.
"An alarm should've sounded," my father said, coming back into the house. "It's supposed to go off every 15 minutes when someone's escaped."
My mother laughed at this, at him, and placed a protective hand over the hard mound of her belly.
"Who's supposed to hear it? Other prisoners?"
On that first night I slept between my parents. My father snored, and even Kleenex crammed in my ears didn't muffle his sounds. Leaning against the bed was his .300 Savage, fully loaded. If I had reached over I could have touched the cool barrel.
My father was a generic lawyer, taking on everything from divorces to drug offenses. I doubted if he was a good shot, considering he only hunted on occasional trips to Wyoming or Montana with his clients, the business ones, the ones he courted, not the criminals he also represented. (Those he visited behind the safety of bulletproof glass.)
