On the Yard (26 page)

“Oh, oh, fresh blood,” one of them said.

“Hey, there, Cool Breeze, how you get here?”

“Cool Breeze jus' bogart his way in.” He worked his way towards the table. “My stuff's good, ain't it?”

“Oh, yeah, your stuff good. Your stuff the best.” This was Cadillac Clemmons, running the game. “Get right in here.” He gestured at the shooter, a gray boy from the weight-lifting section. “This man got his point. He got a four. Now we seeing what he can do with it. What you think he do with it, Cool Breeze?”

“I think he make it.” Cool Breeze put two packs on the table. The shooter came out. He rolled a ten, a six, a nine, and a seven.

“Next man, coming out,” Cadillac said. He picked up Cool Breeze's two packs.

Cool Breeze lost his three cartons in a half an hour. He borrowed a carton from Cadillac and lost that too. “It ain't my night,” he said.

“Ain't never a fool's night,” Cadillac said happily. He offered another carton, but Cool Breeze shook his head.

“No, I freeze now.”

He went to sit on his heels near the head of the boiler where he could watch the play. The dice flashed over the gray blanket seeming to gather the light, focus it, and reflect it up into the sweat-streaked faces worshipping over them. The players murmured constantly in hoarse whispers, and Cadillac sweet-talked luck as he would a woman.

“Oh, you fine bitch, you jus' be sweet, you fine bitch.”

The adventure had flattened for Cool Breeze. He had raided the big game, gone broke, and now was left with an urgent sense of danger from which all promise of fortune had faded. Losing had made him feel weak and foolish.

The boiler room attendant opened the door to pass around coffee in peanut butter jars wrapped with electrician's tape. The players took a short break to distribute the coffee and Cadillac threw his arm companionably around Cool Breeze's shoulders.

“This my fool,” he announced. “When I came to this jailhouse they showed me old Cool Breeze here, and they say, This your fool. For all the time you're here. And should you
evah
get broke you jus' come and shoot craps with your fool, and he keep you smoking. Ain't that right, fool?”

Cool Breeze looked up at Cadillac. Cadillac was the ex-heavyweight champ of the joint. Cadillac never could move pretty, but he had fists like leather bags full of ball bearings. Cool Breeze smiled. “You an entertainer, ain't you, Cadillac?”

“Offin's my game, man, and I pimp a taste. Shoot crap, too.”

“I be your witness there.”

The game resumed. Banales won for a while, lost, then seesawed, and finally went broke just before Cadillac called the end of the game. It was fifteen minutes to nine.

Cadillac held up his hand. “We break, we break together jus' like always. I lead. We do this right we hit the gym line jus' as they coming out.” He turned to Cool Breeze. “You pick up?”

Cool Breeze nodded.

“It ain't nothing,” Cadillac said.

The winners banked their stuff with the boiler room attendant and one by one, about six feet apart, they slipped out the door.

The alley tower, twelve-tower in the official post orders, was quiet duty. Too quiet. It was understood unofficially that guards assigned here were being either tested or disciplined. Eight hours of staring conscientiously into the darkened alley, a monotony broken only by the regular rounds of the old fire watchman, was harder than working the yard. The alley appeared to stretch away in a sharply narrowing perspective, intensified by the alternating bands of light and shadow caused by the irregular placement of the small night lights.

Shortly before nine o'clock, the officer on duty thought he detected movement in one of these patches of shadow. He had just poured a cup of coffee from his thermos and turned back to his vigilance when the darkness seemed to wrinkle and flex. At first he thought it an illusion, then he considered that it might be one of the cats. He turned his spotlight in that direction, but it showed him only the empty alley floor. He turned the spot off and, as his eyes were readjusting to the darkness, he caught another movement, more definite this time—a large body, too large for a cat, moving quickly.

He stood up, senses tingling. In the weeks he had worked this post, this was the first thing that had ever happened. He lost a moment adjusting to the novelty. Again the spotlight surprised nothing, but now he was certain he had definitely seen
something
, and continuing to work the spot with one hand he reached for the phone with the other. He told the operator to connect him with control. As he waited for the watch lieutenant to come on the line, he was troubled by the impression that the direction of the movement he had observed had seemed to be towards the main part of the prison, not away from it. But that was impossible. Why would anyone be returning to the security area?

He reported a possible escape attempt.

Karpstein, the second watch loot, asked, “Are you sure?” and listened to twelve-tower's guarantees. “All right, all right. Keep your eyes open. And good work.” The Karp punched the general alarm and got on the bitch box to all the towers on the perimeter. An unknown number of inmates were seeking to escape somewhere in the lower yard. He alerted the flying squad and phoned the warden, who authorized an emergency count. The night unlocks were already on their way back to the blocks, leaving the school, the gym, the chapels, the library, and the drama workshop. They were hurried into their cells and a quick count was taken. The count was correct. By this time the bachelor officers from the BOQ were standing around the captain's office waiting assignment. The Karp ordered another count. This time a paddle board count. They checked cell by cell, through all the blocks, identifying each inmate by his ID card and checking him off on a master tally. Again the count was clear. The Karp called off the search, notified the towers, sent the bachelor officers back to their rec hall, and phoned the warden at his residence. Then he dictated a “turd” to be placed in the personnel file of the officer on duty in twelve-tower.

The turd was removed several weeks later when they learned, as always through an informer, that a crap game was being held several times a week in the boiler room. They were able to surprise the game and determine the route these men had used to gain access to the industrial alley. The door that had once led to the Sash and Blind was welded shut.

The warden had been viewing television when Lieutenant Karpstein called. He had immediately phoned the sheriff's substation and the San Rafael city police to notify them of a possible alert involving an unknown number of inmates. They would begin to cover the roads around the prison as a routine precaution. Then the warden called the captain of the guards at his residence. After that he returned to the television to watch the end of the program.

He was relieved when he received Karpstein's second call. Though trouble was routine, he still hoped to prevent major trouble, and the publicity that would follow in the wake of a multiple escape would damage not only his personal security but the future of the programs he had dedicated himself to. The press might well raise the question as to whether it was more important to advance the grade level of subliterate prisoners from the second grade to the sixth grade than it was to confine them successfully. They would have a valid point.

A few minutes after Karpstein's second call the doorbell rang and Charlie Wong answered it to let in the captain. To people who knew him in uniform, Jacob Blake never looked quite complete without it. Tonight he wore slacks and sports shirt and in place of a tie he had a strap of rawhide, tasseled at the ends and cinched up with a clasp in the form of a bull's head. The ornament seemed grotesquely frivolous beneath his somber face.

“It was a hummer,” the captain said.

“I know, Jake, the duty officer told me.”

“Yes—I just thought I'd drop by as long as I was out.”

“I'm glad you did. Would you like some coffee?”

“I don't know, it's a little late.”

“How about some tea?”

“All right. Thank you.”

“Charlie,” the warden called.

Charlie appeared at the kitchen door. “Yessir.”

“Make the captain a pot of tea.” He pointed at the television. “And turn that thing off.” When Charlie had withdrawn to the kitchen, the warden smiled. “Sit down and tell me what's on your mind, Jake.”

The captain returned the warden's smile. They had worked together for years, and read each other well. “It's Oberholster,” he said. “The one the cons call Chilly Willy. I want to break him.”

“You don't need my clearance for that.”

“I can't nail him. He doesn't seem to have any weaknesses. I can't touch him within the rule book, unless I bust him for gambling. I might be able to make that stick. But it's light-weight. The committee'll give him a little shelf time, then he'll be right back on the yard.”

The warden was shaking his head, his expression troubled. “If you're not willing to bust him for gambling, then you'll have to wait until you can prove something stronger.”

The captain slapped his leg. “I knew you were going to say that. But I'll tell you something, Mike, I'm full up to here with that white-faced punk—” He pulled the edge of his heavy hand across his throat. “If it were up to me, I'd throw him in seg and bury the key.”

“I don't like to do that. I think we have to work within the regulations. That's what we're asking them to do, and when we ignore the regulations, just to make our jobs easier, then we're only confirming what they're already desperate to believe—that we're no better than they are.”

“Yes, yes ...” the captain nodded; he'd heard all this many times before, and remained unconvinced. “But Chilly Willy is a special case—”

He broke off as Wong came from the kitchen with the tea. Wong's eyes were bland as always. “Chilly Willy,” Wong said, “he velly bad. Velly bad.” When he bent over to serve the tea, Wong's face was hidden and he smiled faintly.

Captain Jacob Blake was restless after he left the warden. He was a man of carefully controlled and balanced tolerances and the strong tea this late in the evening had upset them. He stood for a moment at the foot of the warden's walk—the darkness was mildly scented—and looked out over the modernistic dome of the officer's snack bar where the bay was beating with a faint phosphorescence. An island humped out there, slightly darker than the sky, like the back of a half-submerged animal. He recalled that from the island the prison seemed to be caught in a web of its own lights. He turned and looked up at the dark windows of the armory tower, knowing that most likely the officer stationed there was watching him through his night glasses. He raised his hand and waved it in a gesture close to a salute. Then he started back towards the main gate.

He entered the prison and went to his office where he called for the file on Oberholster. The folder was heavy with the snitch letters the warden had cited, and well worn by official interest. The captain began to study the summaries and chronos again, hoping that as he did some workable plan would come to him.

Two dried lizards, mounted on a plaque, adorned his desk. The head of the smaller lizard was in the mouth of the larger. No one knew what interpretation, if any, the captain made of this symbol.

On the wall facing his desk there was a display of weapons taken in various shakedowns over the years. They ranged in size and shape from an ice-pick knife worked out of tool steel, as carefully finished as a surgical instrument, to a huge ragged sword fitted with a wooden handle wrapped with copper wire. There were a dozen different kinds of saps and bludgeons and as many sets of brass knuckles. There was a metal slingshot, designed to shoot ball bearings, with which some con had amused himself knocking out the electric lights, and a crossbow built specifically to kill an officer. The quarrel had buried itself in the wall, inches from the officer's head. And a number of zip guns. This display was a part of the captain's antidote for the warden's bleeding heart.

By the time he closed the file, he had not one, but two plans, both of which he intended to try. He called Lieutenant Olson and talked with him at length, and when he hung up he seemed satisfied.

Events played into the captain's hands when two days later a disciplinary report on Lester Moon, AKA Society Red, was brought to his attention. It was assumed that Moon had been fighting with his cell partner. The cell partner, a first-termer named Luther Turnipseed, had left the cell on the morning unlock and reported to the block office. A subsequent examination determined that he had suffered a fracture of the left wrist, a torn scalp and numerous bruises, including an eye which had swollen and turned the glossy purple of an eggplant. When asked for an explanation of his condition, Turnipseed stated that he had fallen from the top bunk. The MTA attending him was overheard to ask, “How many times?”

It was a violation of the rules to allow yourself to be beaten by an unknown assailant, a strategy that sometimes improved the recall of the victim, but since Turnipseed had got his clock cleaned in his own cell it wasn't difficult to determine who deserved the credit. The beef provided the captain with one of the levers he was looking for. He called both men to his office.

He talked briefly to Turnipseed, a short fair-haired old young man with a dull red face and reproachful blue eyes. Turnipseed was still saying he had fallen from the top bunk, but it was clear to the captain that it wouldn't hurt Turnipseed's feelings to be called a liar. There was a righteous whine in Turnipseed's tone that immediately canceled the sympathy due him for his bound wrist and bruised face. The captain could understand how Society Red, penned with this man in a narrow cell, might be goaded beyond his endurance. The captain himself, and his patience was the tenth power of Red's, was prompted to pretend he believed the story Turnipseed was so patently anxious to repudiate. He dismissed Turnipseed and called in Red.