On the Yard (29 page)

It was a violation of the rules to smoke in the mess hall, and this was a rule Chilly obeyed. To disobey was too much trouble for too small a reward, and he wasn't going to give some bull the satisfaction of being able to tell him to put out his cigarette as if he were some high school kid sneaking a smoke. But Red lit up and avoided detection with an elaborate technique he had learned years before in reform school. He cupped the cigarette inside the curl of his half-closed fist, and dispersed the smoke with a constant winnowing, precisely the motion one would use shaving a square stick into round, and each time he finished a drag he slapped the air smartly with his cupped palm to clear the fat puff of white smoke that trailed the cigarette from his mouth. He exhaled into his lap in a tight thin stream.

Chilly watched with idle amusement. “Red,” Chilly told him, “you look like a monkey trying to bugger a basketball.”

“Your old white-haired granny buggers basketballs.”

“My granny, huh?”

“You told me to lay off mom.”

“And you think there's a difference?”

“Be a mighty pee-culiar family you come out of if there weren't.”

Chilly smiled thinly. “Red, you're too much.” At this moment a dependable instinct caused him to look up. His boss, Lieutenant Olson, was coming towards them. “And,” Chilly continued, almost without pause, “you just bought yourself a beef.”

Red followed Chilly's eyes and immediately stuck his hand, cigarette still cupped, into his pocket.

Lieutenant Olson had been supervising night feeding, leaning, arms folded, against the back wall, watching the last of the main line pass before the steam tables. Unless there was serious trouble, a fight or the beginning of a riot, he had nothing to do except just be there. When the mess hall was secured his shift was finished and he was free to pass through the main sally port and walk up the hill to his house on the reservation where his wife, a big-hipped, thin-legged woman who worked in the inmate trust office, would be starting dinner. A shadow of weariness passed over his normally goodhumored face and he rubbed his flushed cheeks with his small pale hand. He made a fractional correction in the rakish set of his uniform cap, and started to patrol the central aisle, automatically looking from side to side. He wasn't looking for anything. It was beneath the dignity of his position and damaging to his reputation as a good head to notice the routine smuggling of chicken fried steak sandwiches, but he took a mild and familiar pleasure in the effect he was causing, not unlike a boy breaking bottles with a BB gun to demonstrate his ability to work a change in the world around him. Olson's glance was an invisible ray that caused convicts to fall silent and stare at the table in front of them.

Then he saw Oberholster, sitting with his clown and messenger boy, and he started through the tables towards them. He missed the implications of the warning Oberholster passed to Red, but since his doctor had forbidden him to smoke in the wake of his second heart attack his sense of smell had grown acute, and he caught the odor of tobacco.

“What's happening, hotshot?” he asked Chilly. He affected the hip idioms of the convicts unaware that their currency was already fading even as he became aware of them.

“I don't feel too keen,” Chilly said with a meaningful glance at his tray. “Do you think it might be something I ate?”

The lieutenant eyed the bottles Red hadn't yet returned to his pockets. “If it was,” he said in the same dry tone Chilly used, “it was some of that gow you smear all over our good state food.”

At first he had thought it was Chilly who was smoking, but now from his look of cramped inwardness, like someone trying not to fart, he realized it was Red, and understood the significance of the hand bunched in Red's jacket pocket.

“You sick too, Red?” he asked fondly, smiling like an uncle.

“Me? No, I feel swell.”

Olson looked at their trays, registering concern. “It smells like that chow might have been burnt.”

“Burnt?” Red smiled hugely. “Shucks, no. It was dandy. After we denatured it a taste.”

“Good. We don't want you getting sick.”

Olson rocked back on his heels and folded his arms over his chest. On the edge of the vision he watched Red's pocket writhe as his hand moved spasmodically inside. The smell of tobacco was lost now in the stronger and more acrid odor of burning cloth. Abruptly the clatter of pots and pans increased as the food handlers began to tear down the setup on the steam tables. Olson signaled one of his officers, the gesture of an Air Force major pointing out bandits at three o'clock, and the officer started the release. The first in began to file from the mess hall, each man tossing his silverware into a pail at the feet of a bored guard.

“One more down,” Olson said to Chilly. “Time for me to make it out of this nut house.” Tantalizing Red he moved to leave, then turned back. “Say, hotshot, I see on the movement sheet where you drew yourself a cell partner.”

Chilly shrugged. “I noticed someone in there when I stood count. I thought he'd wandered into the wrong cell.”

“No, he's in the right cell. I thought you were immune to cell partners?”

“I did too.”

Red was staring past Olson with the look of a man who has just had all his wind knocked out. His lips were white and his arm jerked.

“Well,” Olson said, “maybe it will be good for you not to be alone so much.” Again he turned to leave, again he turned back, still with the uncle smile. “By the way, Red, if that's a mouse you've got in your pocket, it's against regulations to keep a pet.” He grinned and walked away quickly.

“Mo! Ther! Fucker!” Red snarled and began to beat vigorously at his pocket. “Can't you keep that tame cop of yours away from here?”

“Red!” Chilly was laughing, mouth strained open, throat pulsing, completely soundless. “Red!” he said again, the word breaking and shivering with his amusement. “If you could have seen your face. Ha! You looked like—” He broke off again, overcome with laughter.

“Chilly, you dumb cocksucker, this ain't funny. I damn near burnt my ass off.”

“Like a pregnant nun.”

Red was still beating at the glowing char that rimmed a large hole in his jacket pocket. “Chilly, sometimes you ain't got the brains of a pissant.”

Chilly sobered suddenly and picked up the water pitcher. He dashed the contents at Red, wetting his whole side. The cons around them fell silent thinking a fight was starting. Chilly replaced the pitcher precisely. “I've got brains enough to know you put out fires with water, and—” He stared at Red with cool significance. “I'd like to think I'd have sense enough not to shit where I eat.”

Red held his arms out from his sides like a buzzard considering taking to the air, but his expression was one of misery. He pulled his wet shirt away from his skin, and squeezed his jacket pocket to make sure the fire was all out. Then he looked at Chilly. “I'm sorry,” he said. “I was hot. You know I had a right to be hot. Now what am I going to say if they ask me how I got all wet?”

“Tell them the loot pissed on you. Just to amuse himself. You wouldn't be far wrong.”

When he had climbed to his own level, Chilly sought out the tier tender and sent him after one of the block porters. He reached his cell just as the bell for relock rang, and he waited for his new cell partner to enter first before he followed, frowning with distaste as he slammed the metal door. The boy immediately climbed into the top bunk.

“
¿Qué quieres, hombre?
” the block porter, Rooster, asked, peering into the cell. He was a tiny Mexican with one wall eye.

Chilly took three packs of Pall Malls from an open carton and passed them through the bars to Rooster. “Deliver a clean set of blues to Society Red. You know where he cells?”

“
Sí
.”

“Do it next.”

“
¿Por qué no?
” Rooster cocked his head to stare at the upper bunk. He sucked his breath hissing back through his teeth. “
Está muy bonita chavalla. Ahora tú chingas todo lo que tú quieres, ¿no es verdad?
”

Chilly smiled and said, “
Sí, pero tu madre solamente
.”

“
¡Ai! ¡Ai!
” Rooster laughed and started off, calling back, “
Gracias
, Cheely.”

“
Por nada
.”

Chilly settled in his bunk to read, but found himself thinking of the fifty cartons he had invested in this cell, twenty cartons for the hot water line alone, and another ten for a decent crapper, only to have some punk move in for free, and while ordinarily Chilly would have caught the six-thirty unlock to go up to the gym to cut up touches and watch the fighters train he would have to pass now because he didn't want to leave anyone alone in his cell. He exercised as much control as possible, even though he was always aware custody could crash into his cell whenever the notion grabbed them, but he was further aware that custody learned (if you thought of them as a corporate entity like a swarm of ants) only by rote, and their notion of where inmates might hide valuable contraband was limited to those placed where they had stumbled on contraband in the past. The hollow metal bed frame was thought to be a favorite stash and custody had designed a flexible probe with which they conducted regular and secret checks. Also, they had learned to look behind the wire screen in the mouth of the hot air vent, beneath the light fixture, and beyond the first crook in the channel draining the cell toilets.

But custody's shakedown craft was, in reality, as obsolete as the mimeographed lists of underworld slang (where Chilly suspected Lieutenant Olson mined many of the expressions he liked to use) prepared by the prison sociologists, lexicons still defining such almost forgotten usages as “stool pigeon,” “snowbird,” “copacetic,” and “moll buzzer.” Since no guard had ever found valuable contraband hidden in the hollow handle of a cell broom, it remained unlikely they ever would. But a new cell partner, feeling uneasy, possibly anxious to please, might decide to sweep the floor, work the pressure fit loose, and discover Chilly's stash of soft money.

Chilly continued reading until he heard the bell ringing to begin the music hour, always close to seven-thirty, and at that time he put his book aside and stood up to make a glass of instant coffee.

The kid appeared to be asleep, still dressed, outside the blankets. One hand, fingers spread, stretched out as if he had been reaching for something in the moment sleep overtook him. His hair, longer than prison regulation, fell across his forehead to cover one eye; his parted lips moved gently, as if, in his dream, he was speaking.

Chilly ran hot water from his private tap until it steamed close to boiling, then he mixed coffee in a large plastic glass, and took a handful of creme-center sandwich cookies from a brightly colored tin which had originally held a fruitcake. He walked to the front of the cell and stood looking through the bars as he ate.

The narrow windows in the block's outer wall, twenty feet away, framed three almost identical views of San Francisco Bay, and the far shore burned with lights, pulsing in some alien display of life. He'd been told this shore was Richmond, and those who had fallen from Richmond claimed it made their nuts ache to watch these lights at night. But Chilly looked at them with the same dreamless detachment with which he viewed his own face in the mirror. A man was a fool to pay dues he didn't owe.

Lonely, cold, phony, and treacherous, a Lesbian whore simulating orgasm for an army of tricks, that was the world lit by those cold hard lights, the one Chilly saw, with a cold crotch, a numb prick, and a taste for pain, a world ready to turn on the gas and drop an overdose of sleepers.

Yes, a man was a fool to pay dues he didn't owe.

Chilly sipped his coffee and listened to a guitar somewhere nearby, wandering like a gypsy from minor chord to minor chord, growing progressively more plaintive until it suddenly blazed into a brief and furious flamenco.

Farther away, on one of the lower tiers, someone with a deep, slurred voice was singing an almost tuneless and repetitive blues:

And on the far side of the block another musician played scale variations on a trumpet, working higher and higher, and Chilly was just as glad the horn was as distant as it was.

He killed his coffee, rinsed the plastic glass, and brushed his teeth. The kid was still asleep. Chilly stripped to his shorts and settled down between his sheets to continue reading. The novel was what Red called a freak book and the opening sections had developed the gradual seduction of a seventeen-year-old boy by a woman ten years his senior. Chilly read impassively, but not entirely unaware of a faint sense of uneasiness which had followed the muffled excitement he felt as he had watched the virgin boy fumbling at the older woman, who was murmuring comfortably and fondly, while she sought him with a practiced hand, pressing him close on her spreading and maternal breasts, until she felt herself captured with a sudden awkward strength.

“I need it, I need it,” she had apologized to the boy, all motherliness vanished. “I need it.”

And Chilly had formed an image of the woman's body closing around the boy: arms, legs, all wrapped tight, while her hair loosened to cover his head and shoulders. Then he had shaken his head briskly and continued reading. The boy was adding the sixteen-year-old girl next door to his stable when the lights went out, and Chilly closed the novel and slipped it under the bunk. He turned his pillow and settled down, but the slight sandiness of his lids and the faint ringing in his ears warned him it might be hours before he fell asleep.