On the Yard (25 page)

Juleson felt an immediate shock of loss. “But why? What for?”

“I'm not accomplishing anything, nor am I able to help anyone. A prison is a nearly impossible setting for any therapeutic program.”

Juleson was struggling with his hurt and anger, trying to hide his emotions. “Are you going into private practice?” he asked softly.

“No, I have an offer from a school district up north. I'm going to take it.”

“And leave your department to Tom Swift.”

“Tom Swift? I don't understand.”

“That's what they used to call Erlenmeyer—Tom Swift and his electric shock box. And do you remember a patient he diagnosed as psychotic, and treated him personally right up to the day the poor bastard dropped dead, and the autopsy, remember, disclosed a brain tumor as big as a grapefruit.”

Smith looked down. “I remember. But it's easier to be mistaken in this kind of diagnosis than you imagine. Frequently brain damage—”

“As big as a goddam grapefruit, it's a wonder he had enough brain left to sneeze with. And, Christ, sorry as he is, Erlenmeyer's still the best of those clowns crawling around the psych department and the counseling center. Sceijec is a twittering idiot who's still trying to figure out how to interpret an MMPI, and Rossmoreland works off his smoldering sense of inferiority by a systematic intimidation of the men he interviews.”

Smith was rubbing his knee again. “Unfortunately, those positions aren't very well paid. Only a very rare kind of first-rate man would apply. And it's doubtful—” Smith smiled wryly—“that he would stay long.”

“Only the one-eyed kings stay here in the kingdom of the blind.”

Dr. Smith leaned forward. “You'll be leaving yourself, Paul, and that's what you should keep in mind. I wrote your progress report early, so I could do it myself before I left, and I have made the strongest recommendation for parole I think wise.”

“Thank you, Doctor,” Juleson said. “You know, I didn't mean that crap about Erlenmeyer. I was upset.”

Smith smiled. “Did they really call him Tom Swift?”

“A few did, yes, and that was one of the nicest things he was called when he was giving shock.”

“Yes, I can imagine.”

“Is Gasolino really dying?”

“He died yesterday. At that, he lived days longer than we thought he could. Sheer animal vitality. I don't agree with the warden's implication that he might have committed suicide. He'd been shamed, true, but he was only trying to forget it. The fumes of carbon tet didn't get him as numb as he wanted to be, so he drank some. If he knew it was dangerous, this was also a time when he needed to show contempt for danger. An odd twilight creature. I don't think he knew he was dying.”

“I hardly knew him,” Juleson said.

They talked awhile longer, mostly about what he could hope to do on parole, and Dr. Smith made him promise to write as soon as he was free. When Smith rose to leave the two men shook hands, and again Juleson felt a threatening sense of loss that continued to oppress him for fifteen or twenty minutes until he deliberately turned his thoughts to parole. Born again at thirty. A prospect as exciting in some ways as it was frightening in others. Surely he would never take anything—the firmest security or the cheapest pleasure—for granted. He tried to imagine what he would find to do, what use he would make of the rest of his life, but he discovered he did not yet know the man he had become. He fell asleep and didn't wake up until the food cart was rumbling along the corridor announcing the evening meal. His dinner was handed in. Bread, white beans, greens, and a meat pie. The meat pie was little more than stew served in a metal soup bowl, covered with a thick piece of pie crust, which was baked separately, and put on like a lid. Juleson removed the crust to eat it with his bread, and under it, partially adhered to the stew, he discovered a folded slip of paper. It was onionskin, soaked through in places with the reddish gravy. He opened it to read a typewritten note:
You had more balls than I gave you credit for, but you only won a round. If you're wise, you'll stay where you are
.

It was unsigned. Angrily Juleson crumpled the note and threw it at the toilet. It bounced off the rim and fell to the floor. He pursued it as if it were a crippled hornet, grinding it beneath his slippered foot. Then he picked it up, smoothed it out, and read it again. A detached part of his mind automatically noted that it had been a long time since Oberholster had cleaned his typewriter keys. The lower case “o” was almost solid. This led him to realize that he had Oberholster right here in his hand. If he were to call the guard and report the note, they would be able to demonstrate that it had been typed on Oberholster's machine. Oberholster had paid him the implied compliment of assuming he wouldn't report the note, and was now warning him as an equal to stay off the yard because he would be embarrassed by Juleson's return to the general population and forced to take some further step. Against his will Juleson was flattered. He sat down, with the note in his hand, wondering at the extent to which his habit of detachment had been eroded. A man had needs, he decided, this was a constant and primary fact of his nature. Drag Lucullus from his banquet table and cage him with swine, and in a matter of days he will be fighting for his share of the swill. Unless he's killed or chooses to die. A rancid truth, if it were a truth—yet look what was happening to him. He had expected demolition, but instead had been subjected to attrition, and was finding it harder to bear. He had thought the prison would demand some sacrifice of his identity, but no one had asked for any part of him—still cell by cell he had merged with the uniform he wore.

He finished his dinner, and when he scraped the tray into the toilet, he tossed the note in after the food scraps and pressed the button. He watched the note, skimming the surface like the paper boats he had folded as a child, then it darted, circled into the throat of the commode, and was gone.

On the morning of the tenth day he was released from the shelf and reassigned to his former cell and job program. He was glad to see Manning at the end of the day.

S
TICK LAY
on his bunk, staring out through the bars. For a while he had imagined he could adjust the atoms of his body to pass at will through the walls, but when he reached out to grab the bars he found them solid. Now he was thinking about Morris Price. Morris had stopped working on the balloon. He said he couldn't get the right kind of thread. Stick had recently been assigned to the laundry in the mornings, and in the loft above the laundry floor he had noticed men working at sewing machines. He should be able to score any kind of thread Morris needed. He leaned over the edge of the bunk. Morris was reading again, curled in the lower bunk as if he were sheltering in a cave. “Hey, Morris,” Stick called in a conspirator's whisper, “what kind of thread will fix that thing?”

Morris looked up from his book, seemingly startled. “Strong thread,” he said.

“I know that, but what kind of strong thread?”

Morris sucked in his cheeks judiciously. “Nylon would be the best.”

“They use nylon on clothes?”

“No, I guess not.”

“Well, you tell me what I should ask for, and I'll get you some thread.”

“What for?”

“For your bag, what do you think?”

“I mean why should you help me?”

“Why we're cell buddies, ain't we? It don't mean nothing to me, if I can get it easy I will.”

“Get the kind of thread they use to sew canvas. Do you think you can get that?”

“I don't know. But if there's any down there in the laundry, I'll get it.”

“Hey, that's great.”

“It ain't nothing.”

The bell sounded for night activities and Stick turned back to watch through the bars as the men passed to the gym. He had spent a lot of time in the gym and he already knew most of the prominent athletes when he saw them. Particularly the boxers. He admired them at the same time that he imagined how he would cut them to shreds if he were able. If he had time to train. Reach and height, he thought, he had reach and height, he could be a marvelous engine of icy punishment. He saw Reuben “Cool Breeze” Moore, the best of the middleweights, walk by, and he wanted to say,
Hey, there, Cool Breeze
, as he heard so many others say, and he was only dimly aware that Cool Breeze was a Negro. The splendid fraternity he belonged to placed him above all other considerations. Still Stick knew one day he would destroy Cool Breeze.

Cool Breeze was unaware of Stick, except as a thin awkward kid who hung around ringside, and if he had been aware of the content of Stick's mind it would only have amused him. The studs loved a classy boxer, a man move nice they don't see nothing more, and if a man's bad with his hands every-one want to whip him. That's nature. But he wasn't studying fighting tonight, he was in another bag altogether.

He ran lightly down the wide metal steps and flashed his ID card at the check-out officer. The officer drew a line through Cool Breeze's name on the daily movement sheet. At relock he would cross another line through the first to indicate that Moore had returned to the block. A count at ten would confirm that he had entered his cell. A loose net to hold so many dangerous and ingenious fish, but somehow no one ever slipped it. Largely because the gun towers were manned around the clock.

These towers concerned Cool Breeze because tonight he wasn't going to the gym. Banales, another middleweight, was waiting for him, leaning against one of the girders that supported the rain shed.

“Is it on?” Banales asked.

“Yeah. Le's go.”

“How're we going to get into the lower yard?”

“I'll show you. You'd never snap.”

They moved off, through three-gate, past four-box, past the metal stairs that led up to the gym, and on towards the Protestant chapel. In Cool Breeze's world the Protestant chapel was a whorehouse. It was one of the places you could pay to have yourself ducated to if you were looking for a spot where you could get down, and a number of his friends appeared on the night movement to attend choir practice several times a month. Sometimes they hit on him to go with them.

“Get you dick wet, Cool Breeze.”

But he waved it off. He was in training, he said.

“You training to be some kind of monk?” one jibed. And another took it up, “No, Cool Breeze training to be a sissy hisself. Ain't that right, Cool Breeze?”

“Training to knock your dick stiff, you don't keep your mouf off me.”

Now Banales asked, “We ain't going in the chapel?”

“No,” Cool Breeze smiled. “We going under it.”

Just beyond the chapel steps, partially hidden behind them, another set of circular steps descended into a large brick well. Fifty years before, these steps had led down to the legendary Sash and Blind, an early isolation unit, where hard cases had been tempered down in wet straitjackets, but now the same space where men had once lain for days in total darkness was used as a warehouse. The door was never opened and the floor of the well was littered with debris. Cool Breeze tiptoed through it.

“I hope you got your drawings straight,” Banales said behind him.

Cool Breeze tried the door. It opened slowly. He could smell the oil recently applied to the old hinges. “They's cool,” he said happily. He smiled with guilty excitement like a child who has discovered a secret passage within the walls of his own home, and thus restored his faith in the marvelous and forbidden world just beyond the threshold of his own experience.

“Le's go,” he whispered to Banales. “We blasting now.”

They moved through the warehouse into the paint shop and climbed through a window to reach the industrial alley. Here they were far out of bounds. A tower commanded the end of the alley, but they were able to slip along the wall keeping to the shadows, and near the far end of the alley they were able to crawl across it on their bellies.

“That's the worst of it,” Cool Breeze said.

They passed around the corner of the machine shop and came out on a concrete ramp that led along the edge of the lower yard. Now they could see the wall, bathed in light like a national monument, and posted with a guard tower every hundred yards. To approach the wall at this time of night would be suicide. Cool Breeze noted this.

“Lucky we ain't scheming on that wall,” he said.

“Man, man,” Banales whispered. “Let's get where we're going.”

They crawled across another open stretch and straightened up in the shadow of the boiler room. Cool Breeze rapped shave-and-a-haircut-sixbits on the metal door. The lock sounded immediately after his signal and the door was pulled in to leave a six-inch crack. An inmate he had never seen before looked out at him.

“It costs to come in here,” he said.

“Of course, it cost,” Cool Breeze whispered. “Get this door open, sucker.”

The strange inmate opened the door and closed it quickly behind them. He reset the lock. He was wearing a mechanic's coverall, an older dude with the white face of a night worker. A rag, black with oil, hung from his back pocket. Behind him, three huge boilers were mounted in a row—one and three were firing, but the center unit stood silent.

“Two packs apiece, boys.”

They opened their jackets. Cool Breeze had three cartons in his belt; Banales held two. They paid the boiler room attendant and he pocketed their cigarettes without comment. He led them to the center boiler and opened the door while they crawled in one behind the other. The interior was lit with a single bulb, hung from the pipes that ran along the upper curve of the boiler, and the air was heavy with the moist baked smell of rust and steam. Seven men were on their knees around a shallow rectangular box lined with a blanket. One held his fist above his head, his mouth open, as they had all turned to stare at the opening door. Their shadows arched up the round sides behind them like seconds hovering in solicitous attendance.