On the Yard (10 page)

“Go screw yourself, you slant-eyed bastard,” the lieutenant said and hung up. He took a pad from his desk and began to write his report.

The animals Charlie had the warden eating dinner with were Moose. The Loyal Order of Moose, seventy-five strong, and just now listening to their own chairman introducing the guest speaker.

Warden Michael L. Sheeley listened to his own introduction with an expression so utterly neutral that each individual Moose, once the open secret was out, could read there his own conception of an ideal prison warden. His thoughts, however, were far from neutral. He looked down, seemingly in modest avoidance of the chairman's enthusiasm, to check the fatty rim of Virginia baked ham left on his plate. He hoped he had managed to eat enough of it to avoid offending any of the brothers. Sheeley enjoyed addressing civic organizations and fraternal orders, he was able to describe and win some support for his various reforms, and he recognized enough of the player in himself to enjoy his turn, but the edge was lost to the relentlessly unvaried dinners: small stony peas, frozen mashed potatoes, and a thin oily slice of ham. Charlie, his houseboy and cook, had explained to him that ham offered the minimum expense and trouble to a caterer and that unless some alternate was specifically requested ham was inevitable. This served to add resentment to an already well-established distaste. He was once again wondering if he could successfully fake an ulcer when he heard polite applause and turned to find the chairman flourishing his palm. Sheeley rose smiling.

For the Moose he gave one of his set talks. “Prisons Are Not for Punishment” elaborated on the text that the bare fact of confinement was a heavy punishment, a sufficient punishment, and that this time should be spent by an inmate as comfortably and constructively as reasonably possible.

The applause at his conclusion was mild. He bowed into it acknowledging his disappointment that what he felt it important to say was not what they hoped to hear from a prison warden. They expected theater—stories, pictures of grotesques and human curios, and details of various executions. Some of these questions came later as the dinner was breaking up. Four or five businessmen and a possible reporter detained Sheeley as he was preparing to leave. One, a pinkfaced fat man who wore a pearl ring on his little finger, asked, “In confidence don't you think our prisoners are being coddled?”

“No, I don't think they are.”

The possible reporter—Sheeley was basing his guess on nothing more concrete than that the man wore a sport coat and needed a haircut—took it up. “Warden, I remember reading somewhere that over fifty per cent of your parolees are returned on violations. It wouldn't seem that your prison frightened them much. Perhaps it beats working?”

“They're required to work in the institution. Some work hard—”

“And some don't.”

“That's true,” Sheeley admitted. “We're badly overcrowded, there aren't enough jobs for everyone. We need larger facilities.”

“Ever larger?” the possible reporter asked meaningfully, but before the warden could answer the man with the pearl ring had interrupted.

“What about sex,” he wanted to know. “What do they do about sex?”

“The same thing most boys do.”

“Surely, you have some problems along those lines, Warden?”

“Yes, some. There is bound to be a certain number of inverts and degenerates in any group of people, and naturally in a prison population the percentage is apt to run higher.”

“How do you control these people, or do you let them run wild?”

“No, we segregate them when we discover them, but many develop a complete cover personality and are nearly impossible to detect unless the officers catch them right in the act.”

The possible reporter asked, “Do you see many of the executions, Warden?”

“I'm required by law to witness them all.”

“And how do you feel about them, are you—”

“They make me sick,” Sheeley snapped. “Now if you gentlemen will please excuse me I have to return to the institution.”

He drove to the prison by himself, using the car the state furnished him. When he turned onto the access road above the institution he slowed to watch the lights moving over the walls like golden fans. He traced the perimeter to check the green all-clear glowing secure at the tip of each tower. What an incongruously beautiful scene it made, the prison like a dense and massive castle, elfin with Christmas light, and all repeated, if magically reversed, in faithful detail on the still dark water of the bay.

He found Wong nodding in front of the TV. “You didn't have to wait up, Charlie.”

Wong smiled shyly. “I think maybe you be hungry, boss. That ham not do much for you, all right?”

“Just a sandwich then. And a glass of milk.”

While he waited he sat at his desk and read some of the memos he hadn't found time for during the day. There was one marked Confidential, from the captain of the guard, stating that his informants were still reporting large quantities of contraband nasal inhalers within the institution, but he couldn't trace the source. Also there were rumors of marijuana which could mean a new route had been opened up.

The warden removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. Their tireless ingenuity! He recalled the time he had ordered the locks changed in the prison commissary, and two days later an inmate had been apprehended with a complete set of keys to the new locks. If only there were some way to reach into their minds and switch such intelligence and energy into constructive channels, but if this were possible the prison would never have been built.

He replaced his glasses and noted
Keep watching, they'll slip
on the margin of the captain's memo. It was true. Sheeley had worked up through the ranks and he was quite familiar with the inmate weakness they called showboating. The prisoner who held the power to regulate the traffic in inhalers would have to talk about it, floor show, and let it be known that he was Big Dad to all cotton freaks, and he would be subtly pressured into this dangerous admission because there was so little in the prison routine that could make a man feel important, or in any way special, or, for that matter, even simply feel like a man. The need for recognition grew like hunger. In time he would showboat and the captain would hear about it.

Wong brought a turkey sandwich and a glass of milk on a tray.

“You better go on inside, Charlie. Thanks for waiting up.”

“Okay. What time you get up?”

“The usual.”

“You be plenny tired, boss, better to sleep in.”

“No, I've a lot coming up tomorrow. Good night, Charlie.”

“Okay. Night, boss.”

Wong left by the front door, but turned quickly and ducked into the garage where he loosened the right front hubcap on the warden's car. In the space behind it he found a kilo of pot and—he grinned happily in the dark—a small cake of yen-shee where they had been hidden for him by Sammy Low, Charlie's cousin and fellow member of Hop Sing, while the warden was addressing the Moose.

Charlie made no effort to hide his loot. He dropped it into his jacket pocket, replaced the hubcap and started towards the front gate. He passed through the double doors, grinning, nodding, and wearing the invisibility that shrouded him as a joint character, who could move with no more notice than “that crazy Chinaman” into the most closely controlled areas of the prison.

Once inside he took a deep breath and started through the Garden Beautiful towards the brightly lit trap known as four-box. Four-box was the main custodial nerve center within the walls, and all traffic from one part of the prison to another passed in front of its large curious windows. At night Old Tom sat in this web's center like a huge, benign, and drowsing spider. Old Tom was regular, a good bull, which meant he didn't like going through all the red tape involved in reporting a beef, but neither could Old Tom be taken for granted. About one night a month he was prodded into wakefulness by an intense and smoldering irritation and on such nights he would literally beef you because he didn't like your looks. This peculiar and curiously regular trait was popularly attributed to menstrual snappishness, an attribution as mean as it was unlikely, for Old Tom, whether male or female, was thirty years free of the moon, and his appearance was so gross as to make Dog Breath, an awesomely homely Negro fruiter, appear a vision of feminine loveliness.

Charlie, still playing it bold, walked by four-box with no more than an airy wave for Old Tom, who appeared half asleep, sprawled so deep in his swivel chair his hooded eyes were just visible behind the khaki mountain of his belly. Charlie made another twenty feet.

“Hey, Wong,” Tom said, ominously out of his chair, standing in the four-box door motioning him back. “What would I find if I was to shake you down?”

Charlie stopped five feet away and grinned delightedly. “Plenny, you find plenny. Much mari-ha-ha, maybe a little yen pox—and a flied egg sandwich. You keep sandwich, okay, boss?”

Old Tom smiled sourly and waved him on with a hand that looked like a softball mitt left out all winter and chewed by anything hungry enough to waste time on it.

“That Chinaman's a goddam nut,” he said to Angelo. Angelo didn't answer and Tom hadn't expected him to.

Angelo, between his rounds as night fire watchman, sat behind Old Tom on an apple box, padded by the simple device of nailing a pillow across it. Angelo was seventy-nine and serving his fifty-sixth consecutive year in prison. He was twenty-three the last time he had kissed a woman, and that woman was his wife the week before he cut off her head. Legend had it that he took the severed head, hidden in a paper bag, to the bar where he did his drinking. He ordered whiskey, and when the drink was placed before him he pulled the head from the bag, sat it up on the bar and told it, “Now nag, you sonabitch.”

This is just a story, and Angelo had been in so long, longer than any other prisoner, because he refused to leave and return to a world he remembered only as something he might have dreamed. When, on his rounds, he passed one of those points in the institution from which the lights of San Francisco are visible the sight had no real meaning to him. Once in a while he stopped to stare at the glistening and mysterious hills across the bay with the same sense of awe and apprehension with which early men viewed the stars.

His rounds were made hourly throughout the night. First he checked the education building, shuffling down the main aisle, shifting the watered beam of his old flash along the upper walls because he felt himself severely regarded by the painted eyes of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Alva Edison, Theodore Roosevelt, Justice Holmes, and the other heroes of the republic hung here for the beneficial aura of their moral charisma. His light respectfully touched each portrait, surprising the watching face in the shadow of its frame, and to Angelo this was a ritual as solemn as the Stations of the Cross because he believed these men to be former wardens, dead now, arranged in regal succession, and he thought he remembered Emerson as that sonabitch Pennypacker, who built a brick kiln with public funds and made a fortune selling labor-free brick, watered with convict sweat and baked with convict hate. Angelo had worked the kiln in the first years of his imprisonment when he still had a chest like a barrel, curved mustaches as bold as scimitars and a man's capacity for hating.

After the ed building, he checked the chapels, the dental department and the hobby shop. Then he turned down the steep and lightless hill that led to the industrial alley. Here the cats met him.

There might have been anywhere from five to twenty cats rubbing joyously around Angelo's legs depending upon how long it had been since custody had last sacked up the excess and tossed them into the bay. This routine reduction of the cat population was clearly necessary, otherwise the institution would have been quickly overrun by them, but few inmates accepted this ecological justification and it was understood by the majority that bulls were natural bastards and if nothing else to kill was handy, they'd kill cats.

Two cats had risen above this law, because for cats the law could still spare by regal whim, and both hero and fool, those mythic twins, had claimed their traditional immunity.

The fool was called Puchuco. He was tailless, cross-eyed, castrated, and all of one ear and half of the other had been chewed off. His head was flattened and lopsided like a rain-softened ball, and his right hind leg was drawn up until the paw rested an inch above the ground. When he howled at night it was painful to hear.

Sometimes the evening classes in the ed building looked down into the moonlit well of the industrial alley to see Puchuco playing there. Dancing a grotesque and halting ballet with a crumpled newspaper or a wad of cotton waste, he stalked this phantom prey with a parody of feral urgency like an overgrown and mutilated kitten. Those watching usually laughed, but a few grew angry and said, “Someone ought to pity that poor fucking cat enough to kill it.”

The hero was a giant black tom with yellow eyes, a witch's cat, seamed with honorable scars, whose expression was so steady and still it seemed a look of utter certainty. The other toms were terrified of him and wouldn't come within a dozen yards when he was eating or courting. The inmates hailed him as Joe the Grinder, giving him the same wry name they gave to the man who made it into their wife's bed while they were locked, hopeless and despairing, in jail. Joe the Grinder wore their suits, wrecked their car, dug up their stash, played with their old lady's tits as she wrote: “Dear John, I miss you so much ...” And, sooner or later, knocked the bitch up, at which point he split. The tom operated with equal ease. He was Joe the Grinder in his heart, as who might not wish to be, and the cons spun his nightly exploits into sagas of envy.

For a few moments each night here at the head of the industrial alley Angelo was the God of cats. Then the meat he had scavenged for them from the abandoned trays in the mess hall had been divided among them, and Angelo moved on into the shadows of the alley until his torch caught the unmatched and zany luminescence of Puchuco's eyes peering down from one of the metal steps of the fire escape that climbed the side of the industrial building like a rusty Z.