On the Yard (12 page)

“You owe me?” Chilly asked when Larson was shuffling unhappily in front of him. Larson nodded. “And you've been owing me for some time?”

Nunn and Society Red watched, but without any pose of menace. Menace wasn't their game. Each of them in his own way was interested in the discomfort Larson was so obviously experiencing. Society Red inserted his left index finger in his right nostril and his eyes grew somber as he mined this lode. He removed something, examined it, then wiped it on his pants leg.

Chilly was nodding thoughtfully. “I may have to sell your debt to Gasolino for collection. You've heard of Gasolino?”

Larson had. Everyone had. Nunn and Society Red were smiling now watching the dismay on Larson's face. They were Gasolino's buddies and this was their share of his power. Nunn had come up in the same four-square blocks with Gasolino, the lapland between a poor white neighborhood and an even poorer Mexican neighborhood, and they had smoked their first pot together, tea they had called it then or gage, and banged their first bitches and gone on heavy together. Now they all knew Gasolino had flipped—the evidence was clear in his round mad eyes. For years he had been sniffing the carbon tet from the joint fire extinguishers. The Mexican boys had named him Gasolino because he drank gasoline mixed with milk.

He was an excellent collector of bad debts not because he was the most dangerous man in the prison, though he was dangerous enough, but because he didn't seem to be afraid of anything. He was always laughing even when he was sticking shoe leather to someone's head.

“I'll get it up, Chilly,” Larson was saying. “Everything's been going sour on me, but I got stuff coming. You'll get paid.”

“I better. And for now, suppose you jump in that canteen line and get me a package of rolls and three jars of coffee.”

“Sure, Chilly,” Larson said already moving. “Glad to.”

Nunn watched Larson take his place at the end of the line. “Fear's an awful thing to see,” he said lightly.

“Yeah,” Chilly agreed. “We'll brood about it while we scoff them rolls.”

The big yard was beginning to clear. The last men had moved reluctantly from the warmth of the mess hall and now the sluggish traffic was shifting through the big gate at the head of the yard. The guards stood with their hands in their pockets, neither looking nor not looking. Occasionally they said “move along” to no one in particular. Assigned men were supposed to be going to work, but since out of the five thousand there were over fifteen hundred unassigned it was impossible in most instances to know who was supposed to be heading towards their jobs and who didn't have to—or didn't get to, depending upon their individual attitude. The guards watched the blue figures moving along with denim collars turned up and long-billed caps pulled down and they quickly became a shuffling blur. “The bastards all look the same,” the guards said. They were like cowboys riding the edge of a vast herd—and only the exceptional or troublesome animal ever became fixed in their minds as an individual.

By seven-thirty Chilly's horse was fifty men from the head of the canteen line, and the sun they still couldn't see was beginning to glow on the breasts of the seagulls drifting restlessly from wall to wall. The domino games were starting, and a quartet of Negroes were loud-talking each other, their voices clearly audible a hundred feet away.

“Sucker, you bes' be keerful. I stick big-six to yore ass.”

“Now, you jus' signifying, fool. I got big-six myself.”

“Maybe you eat it too.”

“Get on! You can't play no dominos, you jus' play mouf.”

They slammed the dominos at the wooden table with furious energy.

The yard crew, all outpatient psych cases, came sweeping down with street brooms. They moved in a line like beaters attempting to flush a tiger. They flushed orange peels, apple cores, and empty cigarette packs.

Chilly was beginning to take a few bets. He was currently booking football. In the winter he booked basketball and in the spring and summer baseball. When the tracks were running he booked horses. He was prepared to make some bet on any fight, national or local, or any other sports event except marble tournaments and frog jumping contests. He felt he did well.

By convict standards he was a millionaire. In various places throughout the institution he had approximately three hundred cartons of cigarettes. Several men who had reputations for holding big stuff were little more than the managers of one of Chilly's warehouses. He never exposed their floor shows. They took heat off him and when occasionally they were busted and the cigarettes lost to confiscation, Chilly accepted it as a business reverse. If he cornered every butt in the joint and a year of futures he still wouldn't have anything, but the slower and more difficult accumulation of soft money could some day mean something. In the hollow handle of the broom leaning carelessly in the corner of his cell he had a roll of bills totaling close to a thousand dollars. If the Classification Committee became careless he might get a chance to use it.

This was money he had made handling nasal inhalers. The economics of this trade were fierce and the profits, by anyone's standards, enormous.

Chilly had hit the big yard broke at twenty-three. He had borrowed enough to subscribe to a national sports sheet, and by consistently following the picks of the experts, rather than betting by signs, hunches and hometown prejudice, he had won far more than he had lost. A steady flow of cigarettes had moved into his hands, but they had proved an inconvenience and he had decided to put them to work. He needed an important horse, a free man horse, and he had finally settled on a clerk in the mail office, a small man with meager eyes and a sad fringe of soft hair. His name was Harmon and he was partially crippled. Chilly had made friends with Harmon and had spent hours telling Harmon how different kinds of girls were, thinking with some bitterness that he probably knew even less from actual experience than the small brown man who listened to him so avidly. On Harmon's birthday Chilly had given him a hand-tooled wallet he had taken in lieu of a debt from an inmate hobby worker. In the secret compartment he had placed a twenty-dollar bill. Harmon hadn't returned the bill to Chilly, and he hadn't reported it to custody either. He's ready, Chilly had decided.

But it had been another month before Harmon would start packing. He had been scared, but he had been greedy, too, and he had wavered, and once had almost cried. But Chilly had continued to press him until Harmon agreed to smuggle the nasal inhalers in his lunch. Then, of course, he hadn't been able to stop. Chilly paid him well.

These inhalers of various brands were packed with an average of three hundred milligrams of amphetamine sulphate or some similar drug with the same properties, and retailed in any drugstore for approximately seventy-five cents. Harmon was paid two dollars for each tube he smuggled in, and Chilly, without ever touching them, turned them over to his front man in the gym.

At this point the inhalers were cracked open and the cottons in which the active drug was suspended were removed. It was tacitly understood that if a tube were cut into thirds, the thirds were sold for halves, and if it were cut into fourths, the fourths were sold for thirds, on down to tenths which were actually fifteenths. Such a fifteenth, wrapped in wax paper, was sold for either three dollars soft money or a carton of cigarettes. The profit was approximately thirty-five dollars on a single inhaler.

The wads of charged cotton were known as leapers because of the energy and optimism they released in the men who choked them down, but except for those just below Chilly no mainline user ever managed to secure enough of the drug to do more than mildly stimulate himself, and having already paid high for this, he promptly paid a second time with a sleepless night where he lay up listening to the faint jingle and creak of the guards moving through the darkness, and continued to pay through the memories of the women he had once known, more vivid now and swelling until they seemed almost tangible in the feel of his hot crumpled pillow and the lonely dream of his hand. And pay finally watching the bars emerge against the dawn of another prison day.

“No more,” they said. It was better to build time as a vegetable than to suffer as a man. But a week would pass and this powerful antidote for monotony would begin to seem attractive again, and they would find themselves thinking, “If I could just score enough to really get on.” And they would start scheming on the money that would further enrich Chilly Willy.

The money came in over the visiting table. Their women brought it—the mothers, daughters, girl friends, aunts, grandmothers, sisters, and wives. Custody was aware of this, and procedures had been established to prevent it, but there was a major flaw in their routine. It had long been observed that officers conducting shakedowns were skittish around the crotch. They slapped vigorously and thoroughly up the legs until instinct warned them that their next upward reach would encounter the mechanism hanging there and they stopped suddenly and shifted their attention to another part of the body. Some inmates had small pockets sewn in the crotches of their shorts, others carried a piece of adhesive tape to fix the bill to their scrotum.

Money flowed in steadily, saved out of the women's small salaries, saved out of their pension and welfare checks, not only as a further gift of life to their fathers, sons, husbands, and brothers, but because the women almost always hated the system of bars, locks, and badges more than their men.

The edge of the sun was beginning to show over the east block before the rolls and coffee were delivered to Chilly. The yard began to warm, the sky was clear. They unbuttoned their jackets. During the fall and winter, any day it didn't rain was a good day.

Chilly opened the rolls and squeezed one of them. He smiled wryly. These rolls sat in a supermarket until it came time to rotate them, then they were sold without reduction in price on the inmate canteen. That this practice differed in no essential from selling a third of a tube for a half was an irony that wasn't lost on Chilly Willy.

“Want some of this hardtack?” he asked Nunn.

“Try me,” Society Red said, already reaching for a roll.

“I would,” Chilly said, “if only you weren't so godawful ugly.”

“Put him face to the wall,” Nunn suggested.

“It don't help. His backs are like a bramble patch.”

“I got your bramble patch hanging,” Red countered.

“Don't trip over it.”

Red scowled in confusion. He was obviously trying to come up with something sharp.

“And don't start in on my mammy,” Chilly said quietly.

“I wouldn't do that, Chilly.”

“Just don't. Sometime I'd like to see one morning go by without dragging our mothers into it.”

Society Red nodded respectfully while Nunn watched with a faint smile. They squatted down on their heels like Yaquis, the open package of rolls in the center. There were eight rolls, two apiece and two left over. This arithmetic was of vital interest to Red. He wasn't able to enjoy the roll he was eating because he was afraid he was going to have to settle for two rolls while the others ate three apiece. It wasn't just his hunger, and he was hungry, but each time he was sloughed off with the short end of the goodies his place in the group was clearly defined for that moment—a mascot, or a pet. Under this pressure he remembered an entertainment he had planned, and he took a coverless magazine from his pocket. The edge was frayed and soiled. Opening it to a photograph he passed the magazine to Chilly.

“How'd you like to stick this fine freak bitch?”

Chilly glanced at a woman posed in a brief costume of feathers and rhinestones. He was automatically suspicious of any leading question and in addition there was something odd about the woman, something indefinable; it was sufficient to cause him to flip back to the masthead of the magazine. It was titled
Gay
. He handed the magazine back to Red.

“You were right about the freak part.”

Red looked put down. “How'd you figure it was a freak, Chilly?”

“A man in trick pants is still a man.”

Nunn said, “I've seen them when you couldn't tell them from broads. Real freaks.”

“If I couldn't tell a sissy from a broad, I'd begin to worry about myself,” Chilly said.

Red replaced the magazine in his back pocket. “As far as I'm concerned there ain't no difference. Action's action.”

Nunn rocked on his heels, sipping his coffee. He held out his hand to watch his fingers tremble. “I'm whipped,” he said. “I had an oil burner going. The nut was a bill a day.”

“I told you,” Chilly said.

“That's easy to do.”

“I still told you.”

“What do you want? A medal or some kind of a certificate?”

“I want you to stay in shape to take care of business—now that playtime's over.”

“Shit, I might just jump up and file my nut hand.”

“You already did that when you went out there and strapped that habit on your ass.”

“Ahhh, I don't know, Chilly, sometimes it was like part of me was dead, and it was worth anything to be able to forget it for a while.”

“By hiding?”

“Why not?”

“Well, there's nothing to hide in here. The joint's clean of heavy.”

Nunn shrugged. Talk faltered and they sat in silence. Red was starting on his second roll.

“¡Ese!”

They all looked up to see Gasolino standing over them. Short, massive, heavy-headed, his hair chopped off short and smoothed down over his forehead with a thick pomade. His eyes seemed mostly iris and they held no true focus. He might be looking straight at you, and he might not. No one could tell, and few wanted to ask.

“What's happening,
maníaco
?” Nunn asked.

Gasolino stared at him. “Hey, what you doing back?”