On the Yard (3 page)

Red shrugged. “Off and on, I've been around awhile.”

“The big yard's a cold place to fuck off your life.”

Red's eyes began to grow vague as he lost interest in the conversation. Cons busted into jail, then spent half their time crying. And all the sniveling didn't make anyone's time any easier to do, any more than it shortened the length of a year. You did it the easiest way you could and hard-assed the difference. The big yard was an undercover world if you knew how to check the action, and something was always coming down. You could make a life on this yard, and you could die on it.

“What's to it, Society?” someone else asked.

“Not much. You want to grease armpits and wrestle?”

A man walked by carrying a cardboard box and sporting parole shoes. Red knew he had made his date and was heading out. By ten he'd be free, on his way to the city, and before the day was over some fish would be coming in to replace him. This happened every day. The gradual turnover was constant. Only lifers and a few other longtimers stood outside this process.

For a moment Red thought about the men waiting somewhere in some county jail, still unaware they'd be hitting the big yard before the day was out. Then he saw the bookmaker he worked for, and walked over to take his station beside him.

T
WO HUNDRED
miles to the south in the Delano County jail, Jim Nunn was the first prisoner on the court chain down from the felony tank. He was keeping his cool. He'd been through it all before, several times in different counties, and nothing in the routine of jail, trial, conviction, or sentence could any longer surprise him. Today's chain was running for sentencing, and when the deputy unlocked his cuffs, Nunn gestured into the bullpen at the hidden courtroom beyond and asked, “This where they give out the free board and room?”

The deputy smiled mechanically. “This is it,” he said and began to uncuff the next man. Nunn stepped into the bullpen. They're all the same, he thought bitterly. They all look the same, smell the same. He sat down on one of the two benches that faced each other in this narrow, featureless room.

Henry Jackson, a tall, very dark Negro, stepped in. He smiled at Nunn and said softly, “Well, sport, here we is.”

Nunn smiled back. “You come to get your rent paid too?”

Jackson winced humorously. “Mos' likely that be what happen.”

“They told me if I couldn't do the time, I shouldn't mess with crime.”

“That's the troof.” Jackson shrugged and sat down beside Nunn. “Well, they won't be gettin them no cherry.” He looked up as another prisoner, released from the chain, entered, and asked Nunn, “How many of these dudes you think we take with us?”

“Enough,” Nunn said. “They keep that prison full.”

“They do that.”

Nunn watched the other prisoners enter the bullpen. He thought of them in terms of their crime. Two Checks, a Manslaughter, a Burglary, the Baby Raper, and three kids, one a stone nut, with a four-dollar robbery to divide between them. Nunn rubbed the back of his neck and tried to remember his last good fix. The memory brought no ease. He started as the metal door leading back to the county jail slammed shut; he heard the solid thrust of the bolt. In an hour or so, whenever the judge got ready, they would be led out for sentencing. Nunn felt but slight suspense. He knew he was going back to prison. He would be sentenced and delivered by midafternoon.

He turned to ask Henry Jackson, “What's for chow on the main line tonight?”

“Friday? Tha's fish, ain't it?”

“That's right, fish.”

“And cornbread. Apple pie.”

“Yes, and all the water you can drink.”

“Tha's right, go heavy as you like on water.”

Nunn shook his head in mock sorrow. “Jackson, I think we have fucked up.”

“You bes' tell it like it is.”

“The judge'll tell it.”

“Well, he the
man
today.”

“That's right, and tonight he won't even remember what we looked like.”

Was that what bothered him? Nunn wondered. Did he wish he'd had the brains and the balls for some spectacular offense, some legendary crime, rather than be, as he knew he was, just one more small gray malcontent? Yes, he wished he was someone else. His eyes searched the faces in the bullpen and in the saddest, the weariest, he saw some furtive hope. Even the Baby Raper appeared to believe he could be forgiven. Baby raping didn't necessarily make him a bad fellow. He just forgot to ask for ID. It could happen to anyone.

“Hey, Manning,” Nunn called.

The Baby Raper looked up. “Yes,” he said.

“What're you looking for out there?”

“In court?”

“Yes, what do you expect?”

“I don't know.”

“You think you'll get the joint?”

“I don't know.”

Henry Jackson leaned over to whisper to Nunn, “Iffen he don't get the joint the ducks in Mississippi wear rubber boots.”

“Yeah, and there ain't a cow in Texas.”

Both men smiled at Manning, the Baby Raper, without a trace of friendliness.

Will Manning sensed their mockery and distaste. Could he blame them? How might he have once felt, before he had made his incredible discovery? After more than half a lifetime, during which he had considered himself—what comfortable shorthand would he have used? Honest? Honorable? Decent? No, he would never have claimed so much. Halfway decent is precisely how he would have classed himself. And after better than half a lifetime of halfway decency he had suddenly discovered, in a few vivid moments, that he was a filthy degenerate. The phrase was not his own. His wife had supplied it.

He took the display handkerchief from his breast pocket and wiped his forehead. The bullpen was too crowded. They shouldn't herd men together like livestock. Too much body heat. The air was hot and stale, depressed somehow with a profound fatigue. A naked two-hundred-watt bulb burned through a haze of cigarette smoke.

Manning folded his arms across his chest, trying to compress himself to avoid touching the men seated on either side of him, but the less room he managed to take, the more they took. They seemed to swell and flow around him as if their clothes were full of some warm, corrupt, half-fluid gelatin. The rhythm of their breathing seemed as intimate as his own.

He stared down over his folded arms, past the points of his neat black shoes, and tried to think only of the stains on the metal floor. One, a ragged oval, seemed briefly like an island, a tobacco-colored island in a flat green sea. He moved his foot to cover it. Island population destroyed in senseless accident. Would senseless accident imply there could be a sensible accident? It would be better if he didn't have to think.

He took a comb from his inside coat pocket, awkwardly, trying not to jostle the men crowded against him, and began to comb his hair. Automatically he shaped the pushed-up wave he still affected over his narrow forehead. Year by year, since his last year in high school, this crest had grown steadily smaller, a visible record of the hidden shrinkages taking place somewhere within his spirit, and now, suddenly, he felt a strong wave of disgust. The tattered plume of an aging stud, who never had the occupation, only the ornament. He raked his comb straight back to destroy his modest crest and accidentally dug his elbow into the ribs of the man on his right.

This individual, wrapped in a filthy tan overcoat many sizes too large, jerked around and fixed Manning with sick, accusing eyes. “Take it easy.”

“I'm sorry,” Manning said automatically.

“Buddy, sorry's a word I'm tired of.”

Manning turned sharply away to avoid the odor of decaying teeth, and, as if a signal had been given, everyone stirred. The prisoner on the other side of Manning, a heavy man in suntans, wearing a maroon sport shirt with six small black buttons at each cuff, lifted his head from his hands. His cheeks were mottled from the pressure of his fingers and his eyes were miserable.

“What're they doing out there?” he asked of no one in particular.

From the opposite bench Nunn leaned over to inquire in a parody of polite interest, “You pressed for time?”

The other prisoners laughed, and Henry Jackson joined in. “You jus' hold yore cool,” he told the man in the maroon sport shirt. “They got an assload a time out in that cou'troom —alls you got to do is back up and get it.”

“That's right,” Nunn agreed. “We're all about to get screwed, and without the benefit of intercourse.”

“No Vaseline neither,” Henry Jackson added.

The prisoners laughed again. “What's funny?” asked the sick-eyed man Manning had jostled. “What's supposed to be so damn funny?” he asked again with forceless bitterness.

“It'll come to you,” Nunn said.

“That it do,” Henry Jackson added.

“Like, when rape's inevitable,” Nunn continued slyly, “relax and enjoy it.”

Manning felt the blood burning in his face as he stared at the metal wall above the heads of the prisoners seated on the opposite bench. He wouldn't look at them for fear they were all smiling at him. Instead he found himself studying a crude drawing of a man and a woman making love. The genitals were grossly exaggerated, and in the balloon above the woman's head she was saying:
Moan! Oh, do it to me, Big Daddy!
While Big Daddy had been made to say:
Shake that thing, Bitch!

Manning shuddered. The obscenity was as intolerable as the feel of slime. He closed his eyes, but the grotesque caricature immediately came to life in his mind, and the figures began to move in a slow grind of animal pleasure. The image seemed to tip as somehow his viewpoint altered and he became involved and once again saw Debbie's soft young face turned aside on her pillow, her profile in places almost indistinguishable from the white cloth and in others chalked vividly against the black tangle of her long hair. He saw her eye-lids flutter and once again felt the first subtle shift of her hips beneath his own, and again, as he had that night, he gasped. After years of dullness a wave of fierce and masculine energy had trapped him like a rabbit in a snare and exposed him as an object of disgust and derision. He opened his eyes. No one was paying him any attention. Nunn was rolling a cigarette, his motions precise to the point of fussiness, and Henry Jackson was watching as if he were trying to memorize how it was done. Manning looked away and found himself staring at a tall, very thin boy who was drawing still another picture on the wall.

Sheldon Wilson, sometimes called Stick because he was over six-foot-three and under one hundred and sixty pounds, was drawing the Vampire. The Vampire had the Devil's hairline and nostrils round and dark as pennies. The fangs, drinking teeth soon to be set to the world's soft throat, were blunt and functional as soda straws.

Stick's two followers, both with the title of General, watched their leader work. One was seventeen, the other eighteen. The younger had the round dull eyes and slack mouth of a borderline defective, while the older seemed only slightly brighter. Stick, in sharp contrast to his Generals, had an air of sullen keenness. A dark, mean look. His narrow face was shaped like a trowel, and his eyes, small and set close together, were the rivets that fixed the blade to the handle. He was nineteen, and before he was sixteen he had been expelled from several high schools. Twice for hitting teachers, both women, and a third time for breaking into the school at night to paint Fascist slogans in the hallways. He had also invaded the girls' lavatory, broken open the sanitary pad dispenser, and scattered the pads. Following this incident a school psychologist characterized him as “seriously disturbed” and recommended treatment in an institutional setting, which Stick knew in plain words meant he should be stashed in some nut house, and, in his own phrase, he cooled it. He became quiet, withdrawn, and normal enough if one ignored the large swastikas on the cover of his binder. And he wasn't the first boy to have found a kind of negative magic in this discredited symbol; in a way its banality was almost reassuring. Then the swastikas were replaced by the Vampire.

The three of them, the Generals and Stick, comprised the total membership of the Vampires, an organization dedicated to world domination. They stood convicted of robbery, an attempt to levy tax for their treasury, which at the time of their arrest totaled three dollars and ten cents. The money was first held for evidence, then returned to the man they had robbed. They had spent ninety cents on cigarettes, candy bars, and a bottle of Royal Crown Cola.

A key sounded, and Stick looked up from his drawing to watch a mild-looking deputy standing in the open courtroom door. The hands holding a clipboard were slender and well kept. Stick's eyes narrowed scornfully. He stared at the black gloss of the deputy's boots.

“Henry Jackson?” the deputy called from a typewritten list.

“Yessir, tha's me.”

“You're first at bat, Henry. Take off your cap and come along.”

Jackson snatched off his paint-stained golfer's cap and stuck it in his back pocket.
“Yessir,”
he said again, this time with a hint of derisive broadness. He winked a yellowish eye and grinned over his shoulder at the men behind him. “Here we goes,” he said.

“Play it Tom,” Nunn advised.

“Oh, yes, I plays it Tom.”

When the door closed behind the deputy and Henry Jackson, Stick turned back to his drawing and began to trace a hairline mustache on the Vampire like the one he wore himself, although his own was as much burnt match as it was whisker.

The youngest General leaned over to whisper, “What you think they're gunna do to us?” He looked at the door. “Out there?”

“I told you not to worry about that.”

“Yeah, I know, but I keep wondering—”

Stick regarded his Generals calmly. “Does it matter?” he asked softly, his ear appreciatively tuned to the coolness of his voice. “Does it matter what they do?”