Cast the First Stone (21 page)

“That’s all right,” he said. “Just put the city on it.”

The gray prone bodies got into my eyes. White man, black man, gentile, Jew. The old and the young, the lame and the sound. Some used to be bankers, some politicians, some sneak thieves, some racketeers. Just gray humps on the bare ground now. Whatever they had been, or had ever dreamed of being—whatever their race or their nationality or their background—that foot of greenish vomit hanging from their teeth made them all alike.

Looking at them I didn’t get a thing, neither pity nor sorrow now awe nor fear—nothing. I saw Starlight there with the stink gone out of him, lying very still, no longer swaggering about the cell and poking out his fat belly, imagining himself a prize fighter. I saw Mother Jones, long and black and dead. And Blackie, small and delicate and white and dead. And Nig, big and black and tough and dead. I saw them all, scores of them on the bare ground, with their teeth bared and vomit in their lips, and their bodies grotesquely twisted, and their hands scorched and burned and gripping something, and their eyes open and staring at something. Out of the clear blue sky came the quotation with no connection whatsoever in my mind: “While you live, Drink!—for, once dead, you never shall return…”

I walked among the bodies to see if I could recognize any others. Someone began crying loudly at my side. I turned around and saw a lanky black man with a hippo-spread of lips, kneeling on the ground by the body of a little brown-skinned man who was burned all around the mouth. The lanky one was known in the prison as Mississippi Rose. When Rose saw me looking at him he started blubbering louder. “Oh, lawsamussy me!” he cried. “Mah man’s dead!”

“You dirty black bastard, robbing a dead man,” I said, dispassionately.

“What the hell you got to do with it?” he said.

I swung at his shiny black face. I missed him and went sprawling over a corpse. The soft, mushy form gave beneath me. I jumped up, shook my hands as if I had fallen into a puddle of filth. Then the centipede began crawling about in my head. It was mashed in the middle and it crawled slowly through my brain just underneath the skull, dragging its mashed middle. I could feel its legs all gooey with the slimy green stuff that had been mashed out of it.

And then I was running again. I was running blindly over the stiffs, stepping in their guts, their faces. I could feel the soft squashy give of their bellies, the roll of muscles over bones. I put my face down behind my left hand, bowed my head and plowed forward.

A moment later I found myself standing in front of the entrance to the Catholic chapel. I felt a queer desire to laugh. I went up the stairs, inside, leaned against the doorpost beside the basin of holy water. Candles burned on the white altar, yellow flames cascading upward toward a polished gold crucifix. It was a well of peace amid chaos. I saw the curved backs of several convicts bent over the railing before the images of the saints.

“I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth…” The words came unbidden. I didn’t know whether I said them aloud or only in my mind. Then they were gone and there was a sneer on top of my teeth. I could feel it underneath my lips, in my eyes. “I believe in the power of the press, maker of laws; in the almighty dollar, political pull, a Colt forty-five…”

I turned and went downstairs, around the school and back toward the dormitory.

“Hey, Jimmy,” someone called from the shadows. I looked and saw Hank the Crank. I nodded. “Say, Jimmy, that was Buck who clipped you for those strides,” he said. “He sold them to a guy in 5-6.”

“It’s all right,” I said. I went around behind the hole. Two convicts were standing in the shadows, talking.

“Leo clipped the screw and took the keys and went down the range. He’s the one unlocked those cells. That’s how they got out there.”

“Is that so?”

“Sure, that’s how they got out there. Leo let ‘em out. He just did make it to the end. He brought the kid out with him. That’s what I call love.”

“That yallar-haired punk they call Aryan Doll?”

The sound of running feet came as a relief. The deputy and a fireman came into view up the darkened areaway between the hole and the dormitory. A voice yelled from the dormitory. “We’re burning down the joint!”

A convict stepped into the doorway of the dormitory, holding a gallon can in his hand. I caught the stench of gasoline. I saw the stab of light from the deputy’s torch. The convict in the doorway was a suddenly embossed picture on the black night, tall and lanky and starkly outlined. I saw the abrupt stretch of his eyes, saw the sag of him mouth, heard the ejaculation, “What the hell!”

I saw the fireman draw his pistol, jam it into the guy’s guts. I heard the guy’s grunt, saw him back up from the pressure of the gun, drop the can. I heard the clanking of the can on the wooden steps, heard the guy’s loud laugh. Then, for an imperceptible instant, the picture hung. It was like a telescoped picture out of infinity. Then I saw the flash of the gun, heard the roar, heard the laugh choke off.

I watched until the convict fell forward, down the steps on his face.

And then I was running. I ran back to the deputy’s office. Several convicts with crocus sacks of Bull Durham smoking tobacco had congregated there. They were giving it away.

“Here, take a bag, kid,” a guy said, thrusting it at me. “Take two bags. Take all you want. There’s plenty more over to the commissary. We’re looting the joint, taking everything.” I took a bag and tore it open with my teeth. I rolled a cigarette and stuck it in my mouth and stood there watching them. I didn’t have a match. I sucked on the dead cigarette. “They’re getting new clothes over to the commissary,” the guy said.

I turned and started running. I ran through the bodies on the yard, past the fire trucks bunched at the end of the cell house, through the mud, underneath the ladder of a hook-and-ladder truck, up the commissary stairs. I grabbed a pair of new gray pants and put them on, snatched up a new coat, and ran down the stairs again.

“They’re firing the woolen mill!” someone yelled. I turned in that direction, without slowing. I saw convicts inside the mill on the ground floor, sprinkling gasoline about and lighting it. I kept on running. I heard the roar of the fire trucks behind me as they moved down toward the woolen mill. I ran across the ball diamond, looked up and saw the tower guard leveling a machine gun on me, curved back toward the dining room.

The dining room was lighted. Several convicts were sitting inside, eating steaks. To one side several policemen and firemen sat, drinking coffee. A convict looked up from his steak and said, “Go on back in the kitchen and get something to eat, kid. They’re giving it away.”

“And wash your face,” another one said.

I went back into the kitchen and heard a wild, savage yell ring out. I looked up and saw a wide-mouthed colored convict standing on top of the kitchen range. He had a butcher knife swinging from one hand, a cigar in the other.

“Go-on git wut yuh want, white chile,” he said to me. “Ef’n aim roach set foot in heah Ah gwina cut his throat.” Scars were shiny ridges in his black face. I believed him.

“Old Dangerous Blue,” someone said jokingly.

I picked up a piece of cheese, tasted it, put it down. Then I ran out of the kitchen into the yard and kept on up into the tin shop. Mal was sitting in the guard’s office behind the desk, reading a magazine.

“What you doing?” I asked.

He looked up. His eyes stretched. “Jesus Christ, what’s the matter with you?” he asked.

Weakness came over me in waves. I felt as if I was going to faint. “Nothing.”

“Why don’t you wash your face? Your face is black. And your eyes look crazy as hell. What’s the matter with you, Jimmy?”

I rested the palms of my hands on the desk, leaned my weight on my arms. “Listen—” I began. My tongue felt thick.

He got up and came around the desk and put his arm about my waist. “Come on and sit down and take it easy,” he said. “What the hell you been doing? Have you been bringing down those burnt-up guys from the block?”

“Listen—” I said, thickly, pulling away from him. “I want you for my woman.”

I felt his arm go rigid. “I don’t understand what you mean.”

I wet my lips, swallowed hard. The words were difficult to get out and I felt very weak and lightheaded. My eyes felt hot and dry and sticky. “Listen, don’t give me that stuff. You know what I mean.”

“You don’t know what you’re saying, Jimmy,” he said. “Come on and sit down.” He tried to pull me around the desk. “Come on and sit down and take it easy. You’ve gotten too excited.”

“I know what I’m saying,” I said. “I want you for my woman—my old lady. I want you right now. I don’t want no more of this goddamned cousin stuff. I’m through fattening frogs for snakes.”

He released me and stepped away. He was looking at me queerly. “You don’t want that really, Jimmy?”

I looked at him but I couldn’t see him well. I wondered if he asked the question straight or in rebuke. He was smiling in a funny sort of way. He looked strangely inhuman, like neither man nor woman. His eyes looked sick. I rubbed my hand hard down my face, bowed my head, then looked up steadily at him.

Suddenly I felt repulsed. “You can go to hell,” I said. “Once and forever.”

I went back down the stairs and kept on back of the hospital. Blocker was standing there with a convict called Pete. Pete was sitting on the ground, wrapped in three blankets, leaning back against Blocker’s legs. “Old Blocker saved my life,” Pete greeted me. “If it hadn’t been for old Blocker I’d be a dead son of a bitch. I’d be buzzard’s meat Old Blocker saved my life. Yes, sir, this old son of a bitch saved my life.”

“Looks like you been fighting smoke, kid,” Blocker said, grinning his yellow-fanged grin.

“I’m tired,” I said. “Goddamn, I’m tired!”

“Sit down and take it easy, kid,” he said. “Here, wait a minute.” He pulled Pete back against the hospital wall and took one of the blankets and made a place for me beside him. “Here, sit down with this redheaded bastard and take it easy.”

I sat down. Blocker sat down on the other side. The three of us sat there talking intermittently. “Boy, I thought I was a goner,” Pete would say. About three minutes later Blocker would say, “Out of all those fine young kids up there I had to get a horny son of a bitch like you.” After some more minutes had passed I would laugh. Sometime later Pete would say, “Old Blocker. Man, why don’t you learn to cook?” And after another interval Blocker would say, “I said to myself, goddamn, there’s Pete; if I let him croak then all the chumps’ll be dead.”

We felt very friendly, sitting there in the darkness back of the hospital.

“I wish I could go to sleep,” I said.

Blocker said, “Give it time, kid. You know what I told you—never rush your luck.”

15

S
ITTING THERE BETWEEN
Blocker and Pete, beside the hospital, through the slowly passing night, trying to fight off nausea, memories kept going through my mind like the fire itself. I tried to shake them off. I tried to unhook the whole damn thing, my mind and the memories. I tried frantically, as one tries to get off clothes that are burning. I finally got it unfastened from within my skull but I couldn’t get it through my skull. The memories just kept on going around loosely in my head. But, finally, when they came to the pawnshop in Chicago I got rid of them. I didn’t get rid of the pawnshop and how I stood there and let them come and arrest me. But I got rid of all the rest of them. That was the last time I remembered them.

In the early morning sunrise there was an eerie quietness over the prison. Most of the convicts had gone somewhere to sleep. Those few who still wandered about were like the early vultures about a carcass.

“Let’s look her over,” Blocker said, stretching.

“Okay,” Pete said, getting up.

I followed. I felt dirty and disheveled, weary and stiff. My joints felt a thousand years old and the inside of my head felt hollow and queer. I kept feeling an impulse to laugh; I wanted to cackle. But I repressed it. I knew it would sound weird.

Rounding the corner of the hospital we came into a line of police reserves that reached from wall to wall, like a human blue-coated fence, separating the cell houses from the industrial buildings. They stood erect and silent and somber in the early light.

“Jesus, all the police in the world must be here,” Pete said.

Blocker gave his sly chuckle. “Better watch yourself, kid,” he said to me. “There’s the law.”

“I bet they’d cook and eat those dead convicts,” I said.

Blocker jerked about and looked at me. ‘Take it easy, kid,” he said.

“Hey, where you boys going?” one of the policemen asked.

“None of your goddamned business,” Pete said. The cop reddened. We walked past, slowly, indifferently, secure. We knew that the policemen weren’t looking for trouble that morning. “You hear that rotten bastard?” Pete said in his high, breaking voice. “Asking me where I was going after I damn near burnt to death last night.”

“I know you don’t want that stuff,” Blocker said.

“I ought to go back and hit him in the mouth,” Pete said.

“That’s original,” I said.

They both looked at me. Blocker said again, ‘Take it easy, kid.”

“Say, looka there, look what they’re doing,” Pete said.

As we came into the yard we could see the dead. They looked very dead in the sunlight. There was a truck backed up to the middle walk and a group of convicts were bringing the bodies over and stacking them neatly into the truck, one on top of another.

“Just like they were logs of wood,” Pete said. “They don’t care,” Blocker said.

The deputy stood to one side, directing the work. As we passed we heard him say, “Hurry up, hurry up, hurry up, boys, get them away before they begin to spoil, get them away before they begin to spoil.”

There was a forlorn and forsaken look about the yard. It reminded me of a fairgrounds after the circus had left. The bodies were like the litter that has been left behind, like the scraps of paper and rags and crushed boxes and faded wet posters and piles of trash.

We kept on over to the 7&8 cell block and went up and looked at the cells. All that remained was the smoke-blackened walls and charred remains of the wooden rafters of the cell-house roof, and the half-burnt mattresses and the Sunday shirts half burned away; the remains of a coat, a blanket, a pair of pants, a wooden box, a pair of shoes shrunken into curled knots, a bathrobe burnt down the middle of the back. In one cell we saw a blanket draped over something over the commode, and when we pulled it away we saw a convict bent over the commode with his head rammed down in the water.