On the Yard (23 page)

Manning took his letter from the bars and stared at the envelope. He looked up tentatively. “It's from my wife.”

“Is that good?”

“I don't know.”

He removed the letter through the slit the censor had made and unfolded it. Juleson, watching his hands, noted that Manning's nails were still trimmed and shaped. Manning combed his hair in the morning and it stayed as he placed it for the rest of the day. Tidiness was not so much a habit with him as an effortless quality. Somehow he always had the cell clean before Juleson woke in the morning. Juleson would find him on the lower bunk studying circuit diagrams while waiting for the breakfast unlock.

After some consideration Manning had decided to study office machine repair. “Those things are always breaking down,” he had told Juleson. “Every time I turned around in the office some fellow had the face plate off the billing machine and was poking at it with a screwdriver for ten dollars an hour.” Juleson had been able to persuade Mr. Cleman to assign Manning to the vocational typewriter repair shop over the classification committee's objection that they needed the subject as an inmate accountant.

Now, under the harsh light of the overhead bulb, Juleson noted that Manning was graying, had grayed noticeably just in the month he had shared Juleson's cell. Manning did hard time and the time was hard on him. Juleson wondered how long Manning would have to serve. He realized it was possible Manning could be imprisoned longer for the statutory rape of his stepdaughter than he would serve for the death of his wife. The senselessness of this incredible dislocation shocked Juleson.

Manning lowered his letter and looked up to say, “Debbie's left home.”

“Isn't she too young?”

“She ran away with some boy.”

“Oh.”

Manning was silent a moment, creasing the letter in his hands, then he continued. “I remember the boy. He lived in the same block. He had one of those old cars they fix up and he used to drive back and forth in front of the house gunning the motor. Now I understand why. He couldn't be more than seventeen or eighteen. What are two kids like that going to do out in the world?”

“Your stepdaughter's going on sixteen now, isn't she?”

“Yes, but she's still a child.”

“Many marriages have been started at that age.”

Manning asked with sudden sharpness, “Did I say anything about marriage?”

“That's probably what they intend.”

“Is it? Is it?”

Juleson's remarks had been designed to comfort Manning, but when he saw they were having the opposite effect he decided to keep quiet. What did he know about the complex knot Manning lived within? For that matter, what did Manning know about him?

Manning opened the letter and read it again. Then he replaced it in the envelope and laid it on his side of the shelf next to his toothbrush. “This is the first word I've had from her since the day I was arrested. But she had to let me know. She blames me, of course.” He thought a moment. “Now she's alone in the house. My house. I wonder how she likes that?”

The bell rang and they heard the crashing of metal as one of the lower tiers was released for dinner. Manning walked to the front of the cell ready to throw the door open when their own bar was pulled. He looked across at the empty gun rail and said, “It shouldn't mean anything to me. But it does.”

They had stew for dinner, stew, hominy, and lemon cake. Juleson made an effort to eat, but the food turned to cardboard in his mouth. He offered his cake to Manning, who wrapped it in his handkerchief to carry back to the cell.

“What's the matter, Paul?”

“I'm just not hungry.”

Manning smiled. “That's unusual for you.”

“Yes, I guess it is.”

Back in the cell the two men took turns brushing their teeth. Manning went first and afterwards took the letter from the shelf and lay down in his bunk to read it again. Juleson brushed his own teeth. He snapped out his partial plate to wash the food particles from the roof, and, as he turned the ragged-looking red denture in his hand, he remembered for the first time in several years how he had lost this plate in a mountain stream.

They had driven up for the weekend and discovered the stream lying below the highway. In great cups of rock it had formed a series of three pools, the water so vivid, so full of the quality of light, it had seemed only a denser extension of the clear mountain air. Impulsively Paul had stopped, piled from the car, and over Anna Marie's objections he had stripped to his shorts and run out on a platform of rock to dive into the largest pool. It was ice cold and when he surfaced, he threw his head sharply to whip the hair out of his eyes. The plate popped out as if it were escaping, flicked the surface and vanished. It reappeared for a moment about a foot down, sinking off on an angle with a fluttering motion. He dove after it, but lost it in the turbulence of his own effort to find it. When he reached the bottom, seven or eight feet down, he found it covered with sand and gravel which would make the plate difficult to distinguish.

Anna Marie had called from the road, “What's wrong?”

“I lost my teeth.”

“You what? Oh, Paul ...”

“I'll find them.”

“You'd better. We can't afford any more dental bills.”

“Don't worry. I'll find them.”

But it had been necessary to drive all the way back to Bakersfield and buy a child's skin-diving outfit—faceplate, flippers and plastic snorkel tube—before he had been able to locate the plate. He remembered that after hours spent in a random and futile search, drifting on the surface of the pool, watching the bottom through the faceplate, he had finally realized that the currents at the bottom of the pool were different from those on the surface. These deeper currents were betrayed by the shifting sand, and following them he discovered his plate where it had been deposited along with several bottle caps, a fishing spinner, and a plastic tube which had once held suntan lotion. He surfaced grinning triumphantly with the plate in place, but Anna Marie hadn't been able to share his feeling that he had met and mastered some challenge on the bottom of the pool. For her the weekend had been ruined.

Now as he brushed the plastic teeth, which were starting to yellow in defiance of their guarantee, he found it difficult to realize that this was the same plate. The continuity of his life had been so implacably broken that it wasn't unreasonable to imagine that the very atoms of this acrylic had been disorganized and recombined in a different pattern. He sometimes had the same feeling when he soaped his genitals in the shower. It was impossible to grasp that this was the same flesh with which he had entered the girls of his life. He had loved these girls, but not with this flesh. This person he had become could never have known such pleasures because if he had, the daily pain of loss would have been unbearable.

He wasn't able to read and he lay on his bunk looking at the ceiling eighteen inches above him. The night slid by. Manning went to the gym for a meeting of the chess club, returned, and settled down for another hour of study before the lights went out at ten. Then Manning was moving quietly putting his papers away in the dark.

“Are you asleep, Paul?”

“No.”

“Sorry, I thought you might have fallen asleep with your clothes on.”

“I'm just lying here tripping.”

“Do you want half of this cake?”

“No, thanks. I'm still not hungry.”

When Manning was in bed, Juleson got up to undress. He hung his clothes over the head of the bed, washed his face and hands and climbed under the covers. Already his sheets seemed warm. He didn't expect to sleep.

“Good night,” he said.

“Good night,” Manning replied, his voice already muffled.

At breakfast Manning asked, “Are you sure you're all right?”

“I may hit the sick line. In case they check me into the hospital, there's something I'd like you to do for me.”

“Of course.”

“Those four packs of Camels on the shelf, see that Redman in the library gets them, will you? They're his.”

“Do you think they'll put you to bed?”

“I don't know.”

During the night he had resolved to attack Gasolino as soon as he could find him rather than leave the initiative in the hands of the other man. The chances were that Gasolino had left his shank stashed somewhere in the industrial alley when he heard the Eye was working, and if this were the case he wouldn't be able to pick it up until after the gate was open. Juleson knew this for his best chance. Even without his knife Gasolino wasn't negligible, but neither was he deadly.

Acting on this plan Juleson separated himself from Manning as soon as they left the mess hall and began to comb the yard looking for Gasolino. The men were gathering into social groups, large and small, some stationary, some walking the asphalt. The long wait in the morning was the time to take care of personal business, keep contacts, exchange prison rumors, and tell the lies you had imagined the night before.

The sky was clear for the first time in a week, but it was still cold this early in the morning. A gun bull with his coat collar turned up stood the rail that ran along the top of the east block. He was hugging his rifle to his chest and his breath came in white plumes. Another gun bull paced the top of the north block. Juleson no longer saw these armed guards as anything more than familiar details. He looked for Oberholster, but he wasn't on the yard yet. He saw Lester Moon waiting at the place where Oberholster always stood. Their eyes met, and Red smiled. Suddenly, as if Red's smile were a match tossed in kerosene, Juleson was angry. All right, all right, he thought, turning on another tack, where was that ape?

Juleson passed along the domino tables, already filling for the day's action, and skirted a group of hobby workers burdened with their products like old-fashioned peddlers. Another group of men were reliving the football game they had won Saturday in the lower yard. Ten Negroes with shaven heads performed calisthenics. They called themselves Simbas.

Then he saw Gasolino. He was standing on the bench that ran alongside the north block, leaning back against the concrete wall. Another man was standing on the bench beside him and a third stood below them. Despite the cold Gasolino wasn't wearing a jacket. His chambray shirt was starched and pressed. His jeans had been bleached to a pale blue. He wore a thin black belt fastened with a silver buckle, inset with abalone shell. His pants were rolled up to reveal white gym socks and black loafers. The two men with him were also bonerooed. Regulars was how they would think of themselves.

Gasolino was telling a joke, acting it out using the bench as a stage, and he was pantomiming abjection, pretending to cower and tremble, when Juleson walked up to ask, “Are you looking for me?”

He hadn't known what he was going to say and his question surprised him with its blurred ring of cliché. He felt briefly foolish as if he had been discovered in some adolescent pretense, and Gasolino, as if he understood this, was parodying an elaborate amused annoyance, wincing and smiling at the same time as if to say: Is that the best you could do?

“Hey, man,” Gasolino said softly. “I was telling my friends a story.”

Again Juleson felt a snap of anger as if a faulty connection had for a moment made firm contact. He reached up and, grabbing Gasolino by the belt, pulled him from the bench. In the same motion he slapped him. Gasolino's eyes dilated with amazement.

“What're you going to do about that?” Juleson asked.

Gasolino's smile slowly reformed. He stood lightly in a posture of compact authority and reached for his hip pocket. Juleson felt his breath jerk and catch as instinctively he sucked in his stomach and took a half-step back. Gasolino's eyes glittered with delight. He produced a comb and ran it through his hair.

“You nervous?” he inquired, still softly.

The two men who had been standing with Gasolino had moved off and were watching from ten feet away. Other heads were beginning to turn towards them.

“No, I'm not nervous,” Juleson said.

Gasolino's face turned flat and ugly as if the slap were just now registering in some distant center of his awareness. “Then what the fuck you slap me for, punk? You think you start some shit on the yard, the bulls come break it up?”

“Are you afraid of the bulls?”

“I ain't afraid of shit. I'm going to kill your ass. I'm going to cut your guts out.”

Gasolino scowled and, moving with incredible swiftness, lunged forward with the comb to make three slashing passes an inch from Juleson's shirt front. Juleson swung at Gasolino, but the other man sidestepped easily.

“Not now, punk.”

But Juleson lunged forward and managed to grab Gasolino by the collar, and when Gasolino sidestepped again the buttons were ripped from his shirt. They rattled on the black-top. Suddenly a crowd had formed around them and now they made a sound as if they had all sighed together. Gasolino's exposed chest was so densely tattooed it appeared blue and the figures pulsed with his breath. His eyes were wild.

“Hey, Gasolino,” someone said in the crowd, “you're called out, man.”

Gasolino shook his head as if to drive away an irritation. His lips remembered their smile as he began to shuffle lightly towards Juleson, and Juleson took three hard punches before he was able to grab Gasolino and begin to use his weight and strength. Dimly he heard a whistle shrilling. Gasolino was pummeling him around the stomach and chest, but he was steadily forcing the other man towards the north block wall where he intended to batter him unconscious.

A shot sounded. The crowd roared like the ocean and then fell dead silent. Another shot scored this silence. Juleson realized there wasn't an inmate within fifty feet of them now. They had scattered like litter blown from the eye of an explosion only to re-form at a distance, ringing the two men against the north block wall.