Cast the First Stone (17 page)

Before Blocker or anyone else had a chance to discover it I wrapped it in some old newspapers and sneaked down and threw it in the wastepaper bag. One of the porters found it the next morning. They wanted to know who got the bag of flour for Christmas. But I never did tell.

Blocker didn’t get a box. I shared my mother’s box with him and sent my father’s box, without the flour, to Mal who didn’t get a box either. I bought candy and fruit and meats from all those convicts who would sell them for money or poker chips, and distributed the stuff about to other guys who didn’t get boxes. I was very sorry for everyone that Christmas.

We read in the newspapers about two convicts who got Christmas pardons. But they were very remote. Only a few fellows whom I talked to had ever heard of them. I was sorry for all those convicts that Christmas.

There was a beautifully lighted Christmas tree in the yard which had been installed by the electricians from the powerhouse. Its installation had been supervised, as had been all the Christmas activities, by the warden’s wife. The convicts called her Ma. They swore by Ma. They loved her and worshiped her. She was the one who always interceded for them. She got them handkerchiefs and permission to wash them. They hated the warden. But they loved Ma.

All the convicts in the dormitory were very excited. Everybody was happy, it seemed. They all wanted to give each other something, or gamble. Everyone had a little money for a time. We gave Dave, who was our newest flunky, some cards and chips and let him run an apple and orange poker game during the season. He took in bushels of them.

Lippy Mike started a game and the guys gave him the play for a time. That was the way with every new game. Blocker and I took it easy for awhile.

It had snowed early that winter and Christmas was cold and white. It was cold in the dormitory. At night I burrowed down beneath my two new prison blankets and my outside blanket—a warm, fluffy blue and white checked creation of double thickness which had cost me thirty dollars.

My mother had been visiting me as regularly as possible but my father had not been down at all.

But on the whole everything was well under control that winter. I was doing the easiest time I ever did. Everything was hunky-dory. Mal was my old lady, Blocker said. So what? If you didn’t have an old lady, you hadn’t been out long—you weren’t even serving time. But that was long distance. In the dormitory I was little boy blue. I was the dormitory’s most eligible swain. All the whores were shooting at me. I was the institution’s prize touch. I fattened frogs for snakes. No kid could say that I refused him his beg, whether it was for a fin or a bag of weed. So what? I didn’t get anything but what I had always wanted most in life, and that was adulation. I got too much adulation.

They called me the prison’s smartest poker dealer. They said what I couldn’t do with a deck of cards couldn’t be done. They said I’d been a big shot outside, too. They toadied to me. They made up my bunk for me in the morning, shined my shoes, laundered my pajamas, underwear and socks, pressed my uniform. They considered it a privilege to talk to me. It all cost me plenty. Everything cost me plenty. But I didn’t have anything else to do with my money.

What a convict has been on the outside means very little in prison, no matter what they tell you. The convicts who were gangsters outside usually turn into finks inside, or they acquire t.b. and die, or they have money to buy their way and then they are still big shots. The toughies who had nothing but their outside reps got their throats cut by hick-ville punks who had never heard of them. Money talked as loud there as it does anywhere—if not louder.

And the days passed. Square and angular, with hard-beaten surfaces; confining, restricting, congesting. But down in the heart of these precise, square blocks of days there was love and hate; ambition and regret; there was hope, too, shining eternally through the long gray years; and perhaps there was even a little happiness.

Starting off with the morning wash-up: “Git up and knock on de rock…Ain’ quite day but iss fo’ o’clock…! Haw, hawww, hawwwwww! Ah calls yuh. yuh wanna fight. But de white cap’n call yuh dass jes awright…!

Hawwwww, hawwwww, hawwwwwwww!” Or maybe it went like this on another morning: “Rich con use his good smellin’ soap. An’ de slickah do de same. But a po’ low-down con use a bar of lye. But he washin’ jes de same…”

Ending with the rat-tat-tat of the prison guards’ sticks, the flashing of lights, semidarkness and quiet. And in between some died, some left, some entered, but most did the same goddamned thing they had done the day before, and the day before that, and the day before that. But sunsets were no less beautiful than they ever were, if you ever got to see one; nor was the sky any higher, any bluer, any grayer.

In the prison day the one high spot was in the evening after supper when they called out mail. Everyone who had ever received a letter, or ever hoped to receive a letter, ganged about the guard as he stood atop the table and called off the names and numbers on the slit envelopes, stamped with the red emblem of the prison censor. And there were plenty who had never received a letter and did not hope to receive one, who stood there with the others, because, I suppose, the human being is a companionable animal and is not made to live alone. I could get so goddamned filled up just thinking about them I wanted to cry. I could feel so goddamned sorry for them then. The years didn’t trouble me then; the twenty years were nothing in my sorrow for all those other convicts. Nothing mattered very much then, not even God; least of all God.

To see a twelve-year robber with a six months’ continuance. That was pitiful. That was like looking at a pregnant whore. That was like catching God sloppy drunk. A convict who’d served twelve long, tough, hard years getting a six months’ flop by the parole board for “investigation.”

“What the hell they been doing all those twelve goddamned years?” he asked, his lips quivering, his hands trembling, his eyes bewildered.

The findings of the parole board were returned with the mail. After a board meeting when word had gotten about that the slips were in the mail everyone who had had a hearing was tense and nervous. They’d gang about the guard when they saw the batch of brown envelopes. As soon as each one got his return he’d rip it open furiously, while others hemmed them all in, to read with avid eyes the cold, irrevocable, unappealable announcement: “…
continued until
—”

Seven years! Continued for seven years!
“Jesus Christ!”

Some of them would keep their envelopes unopened until the dead of the night when they could look at them in secret. Sometimes they’d never tell what they got.

Some of them got paroled.

Some of them tried to escape.

Some of them did escape.

Blocker stopped by my bunk on his way to wash up that January morning. “All of 1-3 broke out last night.” They had moved the redshirt desperadoes from 1-11 to 1-3 when they began tearing down the old 10&11 cell block.

I jumped from my bunk, excited. “Yeah? Last night?”

Another convict came from the washtrough, looking more excited than either of us. “There wasn’t but twelve that got out. The rest wouldn’t go.”

“I wonder how they got out,” I said.

“They must have tunneled out,” Blocker said.

“Frankie Kane tunneled out two years ago and was almost ready to scram when someone squealed on him,” another fellow said.

Suddenly we had a crowd. But we weren’t the only crowd. They were bunched together in little knots all over the dormitory. Everyone had forgotten to wash, in their excitement.

“How long’s Frankie been in the redshirters?”

“About three years now. You know he was in there when those seven guys crushed through the gate that day.”

“He was the leader.”

“Yeah, he was the one who knocked old Bringhurst down when he tried to stop them.”

“They tell me the warden’s daughter came running downstairs with a big forty-five in each hand, trying to stop them.”

“Annie get your gun.”

We laughed.

“Was Frankie in this bunch?”

“He must have been.”

“I bet he was the leader.”

“I bet Jiggs was in it too.”

“And Earl Linn.”

“And Phil Potosi.”

“And Tank Tony.” They called the role of the desperadoes.

“When’d they miss ‘em?”

“I don’t know. When the morning guard took his count, I suppose.”

“Hell, they count them guys every hour.”

“I don’t know, then. I guess they must have missed them right away.”

“Hey!” someone called from the corner of the dormitory. “Chump’s got the flashes on his radio.”

We all made a break for Chump’s bunk. I snatched up my bathrobe and put it on going down the aisle. So many convicts were jammed up down there I had to climb up on top of an upper bunk in order to see the radio. It was as if I couldn’t hear the radio unless I could see it. The others who had radios had them turned on, too, and convicts were grouped about their bunks also. Chump sat there looking as important as if he had planned the break himself.

“…
John Sidney Bippus
…” the loud metallic voice of the radio blared…“
John Sidney Bippus…Better known as Sid Bip…Five feet, five and one half inches…Five feet, five and one half inches…Weight—one hundred and thirty-two pounds…Weight—one hundred and thirty-two pounds…Blue eyes…Blue eyes…Brown hair…Brown hair…Probably dressed in gray prison uniform…Probably dressed in gray prison uniform…Serving life for first-degree murder…Serving life for first-degree murder…Very dangerous if armed…Very dangerous if armed…CAUTION…Do not attempt to capture this man as he is very dangerous…If seen, notify police…If seen, notify police…CAUTION!…Do not attempt to capture this man as he is very dangerous…If seen, notify police…Karl Luther Mueller…Karl Luther Mueller
…”

“Sid wasn’t in 1-3. Sid was in the heart-trouble company,” someone said.

“Sid was on 1-4.”

“Weren’t none of them out of 1-3?” someone else asked.

“Shut up and let us hear.”

“Well, listen then!”

“Well, shut up then!”

“Kiss my ass!”

“Kiss your mother’s—” There was the usual fight.

We hung about the radio until the breakfast bell rang. Our guards had been listening at another radio and hadn’t heard the breakfast bell. They didn’t knock for us to line up until one of the sergeants came in to investigate. I had to rush to get dressed. They scrambled pell-mell through the doorway. There was no semblance of order in the line. I was left. I had to run across the yard to catch up.

It was all we talked about at breakfast. The guards were grouped about the walls, talking about it too. The noise of all the talk was a loud, steady hum, like the sound of a powerful dynamo. Excitement was so thick you could feel it.

“Man, if that Sid Bip gets a gun it’ll be just too bad.”

“You sure ain’t told no lie. That Mueller is a desperate sonofabitch too.”

“Yeah, but not like Sid. It took the G-men to get Sid in here.” Bippus had been convicted of being the trigger man in the murder of Ben Levin, a La Fayette newspaper editor. “They never will forget him around La Fayette.”

“You heard what the radio said.”

“Damn right.”

“Said he was the most dangerous of all five.”

“Damn right.”

“Wonder what he was doing in 1-4.”

“Oh, his ticker went bad.”

“You mean he wanted to chisel in on that special diet?”

“Now that’s right.”

“It’ll be just too bad if he gets a gun.”

“They never will get him without somebody being killed, if he gets a gun.”

“Without a whole lot of ‘em being killed.”

“They’ll never get Sid Bip.”

When we left the dining room we saw guards mounting machine guns on tripods in the yard. The convicts marched under the blunt snouts of the machine guns, excited and tense and ready to explode. Another machine gun was mounted on top of the warden’s quarters, overlooking the prison yard.

“You better watch out, kid,” Blocker said, grinning. “Don’t you take a notion to get mad today.”

“No worry, with all that artillery about,” I said.

By dinnertime we had learned that five convicts from 1-4 had crawled up the ventilator in the 3&4 cell block and lowered themselves from the roof to the front yard with sheets tied together. The night guard had missed them shortly after twelve o’clock.

Sid Bippus was the first to be captured. A housewife on the outskirts of town had seen him slinking through her back yard and had called the sheriff’s office. An old, feeble, gray-haired deputy sheriff named Kingman, whom I had cursed out many times when I’d been in the county jail out there, had gone out to this lady’s house and had taken Sid out of the barn loft where he had been hiding half-frozen and had brought him back. Sid had been armed with a pistol, the newspapers said, but had put up no resistance.

Mueller was shot and killed a week later in a public park in Indianapolis. Another of the men was arrested and returned from Kansas City, Kansas. By then we had forgotten about them.

And then one day, weeks later, I said to the guy next to me in school, “Say, wake up, Freddy, the sergeant just came in.”

He straightened up, rubbing his eyes and grinning sheepishly.

“Damn, you sleep every day,” I said. “You must be digging out at night.”

“I am,” he said, grinning.

He was a good-natured kid of about twenty with a very pleasant smile, and corn-colored hair that flagged across his forehead. He was out of Stateline, they said.

That night about twelve o’clock I was awakened by a shot. I heard several scattered shots and then a sudden fusillade. And then there were some shots which punctured the thin walls of the dormitory and drove the men, rushing and excited, from that entire end. There was some shooting around the corner of the dormitory, and some more shots through the dormitory walls and another fusillade, and some more excitement inside of the dormitory. The excitement inside of the dormitory was more dramatic than the shooting. The shooting was over in about a half hour, although a half hour’s shooting was plenty of shooting in prison. It was almost too much shooting without the National Guard being called. But the excitement lasted all night and ‘way up into the morning.