Cast the First Stone (15 page)

Chump fell in behind me. “Hello, Beautiful.” I didn’t answer. “I know you got fixed up.”

I turned around. “What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. I know all about Mal.”

“The trouble with you is you’re a nigger,” I said.

He turned red. “That’s all right. It’ll all come back to you. When you want me I won’t want you. That’s the way it’ll happen.”

“Oh, go to hell!”

Our company guard knocked his stick on the chapel wall and we marched noisily back to our cells. But the holiday spirit still prevailed. The men were running up and down the range, visiting from cell to cell. Mother Jones slipped suddenly into our cell.

“Give me something,” he said, patting my pockets. Although he was a tall, slightly bald, rough-looking Negro he had a very pleasant grin.

“That beats me, Mother,” I said.

“Aw, you got everything. What we gonna do with him?” Jones addressed Starlight.

“I don’t know. Every time I say anything to him he wants to fight.”

“How’s business, Mother?” I said, realizing with a shock how easily I lapsed into the degraded familiarity of the others.

“Don’t talk about it,” he said, throwing up his hands.

“What’s the matter?”

“They got me locked up here so I can’t circulate.”

“What’s the matter with the boy friends down your way?”

“Them niggahs ain’t got nothing. They’re poor as me.”

“Why don’t you give them a break? You never know what they might come up with.”

“I’ll give them a break with this.” He held up his fist. “You the one’s got everything. Give me a quarter.”

“Price is going down, isn’t it?” I asked.

“Up,” Starlight said.

Mother Jones grinned. “I wouldn’t charge you anything.”

I blushed. “Here,” I said, giving him the quarter.

“You wait,” he said. “Somebody’s coming over tomorrow you’ll get excited about.”

“Bobby Guy?”

He nodded. “Won’t he get excited about Bobby, Squirrel?”

“Right up in the air,” Starlight said.

“Stuff,” I said.

But they didn’t tell any lie. I did get excited about Bobby Guy. He was like a doll, small and curly-headed with big brown limpid eyes, a lisp, and a pure peaches and cream complexion. For several days we didn’t speak although we looked at each other quite often. We were both waiting for the other to speak first. I knew he had heard as much about me as I had about him. I had built up quite a reputation as a soft touch for a buck, among other things.

Then one afternoon Starlight got called to the hospital. When we came in from the idle house Bobby came into my cell. He moved close to me.

I pushed him away. “What the hell!”

He looked startled then. “Don’t you want to?”

Heat came all up in my head and eyes. I could feel my breath getting fast. “I don’t know.”

Then the guard came up. “What’re you doing in here, boy?” he asked Bobby.

“I just stopped to get a cigarette.”

“Well, hurry up and get it and get back to your cell. Where do you guys get this stuff?”

When Bobby stepped out onto the range every cell door was cracked, and the whole company was peeping. For three days I avoided him. Then it got next to me like a live wire underneath my skin. I went over to Gout and asked to be put into Bobby’s cell. He was by himself at the time and the lower bunk was empty. I told Gout I wanted to be transferred to a lower bunk because it hurt my back to climb up on the upper bunks.

Gout blew up. “You smart punk! You slick city punk!” He came charging toward me, swearing and kicking. I beat it out of his office and hurried away, tight and nervous and unrelieved. I still had that live-wire edge. It was a great relief when they transferred Bobby to the hospital the following week. He was a favorite at the hospital and could get in any time he wanted to.

That was that summer. Heat, and that live-wire edge.

11

I
N SEPTEMBER THEY
began to wreck the 10&11 cell block preparatory to building another new cell block like the new 7&8 block. The 10 and 11 companies were broken up and transferred to various parts of the prison. Most of the working companies were transferred to the 3&4 and 1&2 cell blocks. Most of the convicts in the soup company and 1-10 were transferred across the well to the new, four-man cells of the 7&8 block. They were put on 2-and 3-7 and 6-8.

Chump Charlie and I were transferred back to the school company in 5-6 dormitory. Later I learned that Nick had me transferred there to cover for Chump Charlie whom he wanted back in the dormitory.

When I had left 5-6, back in the latter part of February, I had been a bewildered, big-eyed kid, half afraid that every big tough-looking convict might try to rape me, and not having the least idea what the prison was all about. But when I returned I felt that I was solid hipped. I thought I knew the joint and all the types of convicts. I had lost all the intense self-pity of those first few months. But I had gained a pity for the other convicts which was insolent. I felt sorry for everybody. For some I also felt contempt but over and above the contempt I felt sorry for them, too. I pitied them for the long severe sentences they were serving, forgetting mine. I pitied them for their weaknesses, for their degeneration, for their lack of funds. I was a sucker for a beg. I never turned down anyone who had the nerve to beg me. The soup company had set me up: it had given me confidence. Perhaps it was more because the fags recognized me as a man than anything else. Also because the gamblers had claimed me for their own.

There was only one fellow in the whole dormitory whom I hated without pity or contempt. That was Lippy Mike. When Chump and I were transferred that morning, it was too late for us to go to school. We waited in the dormitory for the school company to come in. After making my bunk I sat on the bench in the aisle, smoking a cigarette. When the company came in several convicts gathered about me.

“You transferred in here, Jimmy?” I had become a celebrity of a sort.

“Yeah.”

“Good.”

“What say, Jimmy?”

“Hello, Jimmy.”

“I know you’re glad to beat that 6-8 rap.”

“Damn right.”

“They tell me Wop lost five C’s in the crap game.”

“Sure did.”

“I know you got yours.”

“You know me.”

Most of them I’d either never seen before or couldn’t remember. A little hump-backed, sharp-faced fellow sat down beside me. He was vaguely familiar.

“Hello, kid, did you ever make that nine?”

Then I remembered him. He had been in a crap game we staged back of the grandstand during a baseball game one Saturday afternoon.

“What say, Blocker? How you doing, bud?”

“Slow.”

“Yeah, man, I made that sucker keep that bet up and made that nine up in the idle house next day.”

He grinned. It made him look like a wolf with long yellow fangs. “I knew you were going to clip that chump.”

His eyes were almost colorless and he had the longest, slimmest fingers with the longest, cleanest fingernails I’ve ever seen. His hair fell down over his forehead, his face was narrow and bony with a razor-sharp nose and a long lantern jaw. He looked like a weird story. I liked him immediately.

Lippy Mike was coming down the aisle, swaggering and walking over people. When he saw me he reached down and took the cigarette from my lips. I burnt up. “What the hell’s the matter with you, fellow!”

“I was just playing with you, little punk,” he grated. “Here, take the damn butt back.”

I brushed it away. “I don’t want it, goddammit, keep it. Just don’t play with me like that.”

He threw the cigarette on the floor and stepped on it. “Hey, pappy!” he called.

“Coming, Mike.”

“Bring this punk a pack of cigarettes.” He turned to me and said, “I’m going to give you a pack of cigarettes, punk, and don’t you never speak to me again.”

“Frig you,” I said.

“What?”

I jumped up. “You heard me.”

He dug his hand in his left breast pocket. Blocker jumped up and stepped in between two bunks. Mike took his hand out of his pocket empty and said, “You take it easy, little punk.”

“You take it easy your goddamned self,” I said.

Mike whirled and walked away. He had a swagger that was so extreme it was almost feminine. Blocker came back and we sat down again. “I went to get Herbie’s banjo hanging there,” he said. “If that chump had started anything I was going to hang that banjo over his head.”

“He’s too damn overbearing,” I said. I could still feel the blood in my face.

“Take it easy, kid,” Blocker said, grinning. “You’re still burning.” He had a way of making you feel that he was on your side when he grinned like that. I had never liked a convict so well and so quickly.

That first night we began running a poker game together. I didn’t know how much money Blocker had. I had almost a hundred dollars in cash. I had won most of it in the crap game where Wop had lost five hundred dollars. Wop’s mother had smuggled the money in to him for a pay-off to a guard who had contacts with the governor’s office. The guard had promised to get Wop a pardon for the money. But Wop had lost every cent of it in the crap game the same afternoon his mother had visited him.

Blocker was one of those gamblers who have one rigid rule—
never give a sucker a break
. It wasn’t just a saying with him. He practiced it. For the first three nights we used brand-new decks of red-backed
Bee’s
and got a fast, furious play from all the heavy betters. One convict, called Sailor, who had the reputation of being the institution’s hardest better, tied up with me in several pots, the largest of which I took on a pair of deuces. Whenever he stayed he raised the ante to a dollar, bet six dollars on the second card, sixteen-fifty on the third, and on the last he would turn down, or bet forty dollars. You never knew what he had from the way he bet. When I beat him with the deuces I’d caught a flash of his ace in the hole. He started off betting like a man running down a hill and by the time he had bet himself broke, leading it all the way down, chips were piled on the table six inches deep and money was stacked to one side. We had a gallery of onlookers that had dormitory traffic stopped. When I raked in the pot Sailor stuck a fresh cigarette into his holder. He smoked one every deal.

“All I want a man to do is gamble,” he said, and got up to go borrow some more money.

I gave these chumps a play. “Come on, Johnnies, let’s bet ‘em up,” I’d say.

Blocker used to spell me on the deal and we’d take turns selling chips. But our game grew so fast we had to hire a couple of assistants. Blocker was a natural poker player. He had poor poker judgment although he had plenty of betting nerve. His best game was dice. He could do more with a deck of cards than a monkey can with a coconut, but he didn’t get a chance. The players watched him like a hawk. Even when he was dealing strictly from the top they didn’t like him to deal. They all wanted me. They all believed they could beat me, simply because I was young.

Blocker had given one of the guards money to bring us in some cards. The guard brought us a dozen decks of expert-back Bicycle cards. We spent the next two days at school running them up from the fours to the aces. All we had to use was pen and ink. His work was so fine that I couldn’t read them rapidly enough. I always dealt very fast; when I had a full game the cards would come off in a blur. The convicts used to gather around just to watch me deal. But by the time I’d take a flash at a player’s hole card he’d have it covered by the second. We never played anything but stud poker. For the first couple of days after we’d put down our new paper I shot so many blanks it would have been a dead giveaway to any smart gambler. When you’re playing with paper you depend more on knowing what the other fellow has than on your own poker judgment. When you make a mistake it can look pretty obvious.

So we took the cards back to school and painted “horses and mules” on them. And still those players didn’t pick it up. I think Sailor did. But I’d deal so fast he couldn’t read them. He’d cover his own hole card with his hand, as soon as it was dealt to him, and then lean over and try to read mine. It kept both of us shooting blanks and horsing at each other until we had players crowding in so sometimes I’d have to deal to twelve. From that time on we never used an unmarked deck of cards.

My bunk was the same as I’d had before—a lower on the center aisle by the guard-stand. Captain Charlie was still on as night guard. Chump Charlie was farther down in a corner bunk out of sight, for which I was grateful. Nick had given him a big, flashy, electric guitar. They said Nick had paid four hundred and fifty dollars for it. Chump kept to himself down in his corner and mothered it. For a time he had tried to be friendly. But I had told him, “Off me, sucker.”

Mal was still in 5-5. Every night he sent for me to come to the peephole. Blocker asked me once was he really my cousin. I told him no, we’d just made that up. After that Blocker referred to him as my old lady. “Your old lady wants you at the hole, kid.”

“Aw, cut it out,” I’d say.

“You’d better go down and see what your old lady wants. First thing you know she’ll be slipping up on you out on the yard giving you some love licks with a straight-edged razor.”

But I kind of liked it though. It gave me something.

Blocker was a queer sort of fellow. I don’t think he’d ever liked anyone in all his life but me. He was crazy as hell about me. But not in any funny way. He took great pains to make that obvious. We were straight friends. He understood that I didn’t want those convicts to get the idea that I was his kid. He would rather they thought that he was my kid, if there was going to be any misunderstanding. So he always made it very clear that we were only gambling buddies. The quickest way to get him in a fight was for someone to make a crack about me. Most of the fellows thought he was treacherous. He looked like a man who’d slip up behind you and cut your throat. He was really a very good-natured guy. But he didn’t talk a lot. Still water runs deep, they said. Quiet men are always dangerous. They did not bother the silent, untalkative men. I don’t know why. Most of the quiet sons of bitches were quiet because they didn’t have anything to talk about, or else they were simple-minded.