On the Yard (37 page)

Chilly had the grace not to smile.

“I look around, and I see the shape I'm really in and don't see no way to scheme on no improvement. That make sense to you?”

Chilly pointed at the bread. “What're you wasting that for? Little kids over in Viet Nam would be glad to have it.”

“Fuck little kids over in Viet Nam! What does that mean to me? If I don't tear it up, they'll stick bread pudding to us.”

Chilly laughed. “They'll stick bread pudding to us anyway ... Lighten up, Red. I hardly know you.”

“I hardly know myself. I know one thing.” He looked over at Chilly, his expression almost hostile. “I wish I had that sissy in my cell tonight.”

“That's what you keep saying.”

“You hanging on to him, Chilly?”

“Would it be all right if I was?”

“I guess it would have to be.”

“You guess. I haven't got enough juice right now to light up a sick firefly, and on top of that I got to listen to you nitshitting about that punk. If you haven't got your hand halfway straightened up by tomorrow, stay in the cell because I'm not going to be in no mood to listen to you snivel.”

“Yeah ... all right.”

As they filed from the mess hall they passed Lieutenant Olson, standing behind the officer checking silverware. He smiled at Chilly. “Well, hotshot, you still walking?”

“Shouldn't I be?”

“You're the best judge of that.”

“I might make it for a while yet.”

“Yes, you're known to be lucky.”

Olson was still smiling after them as they passed into the black and Chilly said to Red, “I'd like to know what's making him so happy.”

“I thought you were tight with him?”

“That's his story. I've never quite believed it.”

They climbed the wide metal stairs, and paused on the fourth tier landing. Red managed a faint smile. “I didn't mean to oversport my hand.”

Chilly studied him thoughtfully. Then he shrugged. “I'll see you in the yard in the morning.”

“Yeah. Ain't neither of us going no place.”

S
TICK FOUND
it cold on the gym roof. He came over the top of the fire escape and into the wind Morris was counting on. The wind blew steadily from off the water and Stick shivered and turned his collar up. He walked in a crouch over the graveled tarpaper, his steps crunching softly, passing through the black snouts of ventilator exhausts to climb halfway up the metal pylon that held the television antennas. From this vantage he was able to determine that he was above the normal range of vision from the guard towers positioned below him—to see even the edge of the gym roof the tower bulls would have to stick their heads out the windows and deliberately look up. Morris was keen enough in some ways—and in other ways he was a champion fool. Stick smiled to himself as he thought of Morris still in the cell, stitching away fussy as a broad, while he imagined Stick was singing in the choir.

Turning his head slowly, Stick saw the three bridges, brilliant over the black water, and the towns—he thought of electric flowers—scattered along the edge of the bay, and San Francisco itself, glowing as if it were on fire. The richness impressed him—the power of all these lights, the machines, the people—a treasury. He experienced a thick crowded feeling in his chest, which he took for a sense of his destiny, and his ears rang with elation. He could almost reach out to those distant lights, banding the throat of the bay, and crush them one by one.

—Stop, Vampire, they screamed.

Beautiful! He breathed deeply, the wind rushing at his open mouth, in love with the pure night air here above the world. A sharper gust blew his cap off and whipped his long hair into his eyes, stinging like sleet. He jumped down from the pylon and ran swiftly on tiptoe to recover his cap where it rested against the base of a triangular housing. He replaced his cap and knelt to press his ear against the tarpaper. He could make out the hum of a motor and a murmur of distant shouting. He laid his cheek against the exhaust vent and felt a breath of warm air. Again he smiled to himself. “Keen,” he crooned aloud.

He didn't want to leave the roof, where he felt close to an important mystery. He lay on his back and looked up at the stars. He imagined the heavens were a board on which he played a game where he was the only one who knew the rules, and when he saw a dark swiftly moving object with one small red eye and one small green eye enter the playing area, he sensed a moment of genuine shock before he recognized it for an airplane. Then he began to send missiles to track the plane, and noted a brief flare of white light as it blew apart in the air.

He crawled commando style to the edge of the roof. Below he saw the roof of the education building just on the other side of the industrial alley, and across and still lower he saw four-box. Two officers stood talking on the porch, their faces diminishing sharply under the bills of their uniform caps, and as Stick watched, one slapped the other on the shoulder and they both began to laugh. He took an imaginary grenade from his belt, pulled the pin with his teeth, released the spoon and the firing pin bit sharply into the primer. He counted one-steamboat, two-steamboat, three-steamboat before he tossed the grenade down at the feet of the guards where it bounced once and exploded. A sheet of red flame with BA-ROOM! printed across it enveloped the two men.

Stick drew back from the edge and returned to the head of the fire escape. He climbed down one flight and re-entered the gym through a window that led into a room where the sports equipment was stored during off seasons—now it held clusters of bats, buckets of balls, bases like stacks of pillows, and racks of uniforms. He continued through a metal fire door into the weight-lifting section, into the scent of sweat, salt, and liniment and the ring of heavy metal. Several hundred men were working out, their faces stern with the gravity of ritual—acolytes still slender and sore and heavy old priests with twenty-inch arms and fifty-two-inch chests. Iron freaks, Stick dismissed them with contempt. They were as lacking in true manhood as the chess players hunched over their boards in the little room set aside for them. Stick entered the boxing section and went to the back ring where Cool Breeze was working out with one of his sparring partners. The way Cool Breeze moved around a ring was the most beautiful thing Stick had ever seen.

When he returned to the cell at nine o'clock he found Morris reading. “Is it done?” Stick asked.

Morris sighed and closed the book on his finger. “It's not right.”

“What's wrong with it?”

“It's not right, that's all.”

By now Stick had developed certain techniques for dealing with Morris and he continued with the appearance of patience. “What exactly's wrong with it?”

“I should have nylon thread.”

“You talking about resewing that whole bag with nylon thread?”

Morris held his book up to study the cover. A woman sat at her vanity removing her stockings. Through the large mirror a man in a black suit was visible—he held a gun. “It has to be right,” Morris said absently.

“There ain't no nylon around this joint. Ain't I told you that? I brought you the strongest thread they got. Now what the hell's the matter with you?”

“I don't do nothing by halves. When I go—” Morris's eyes beat for a moment with febrile energy—“I'm going. They can whistle ‘Dixie' for me.”

“You can't go nowhere until you finish that goddam bag.” Stick managed a thin smile. “Hell, I'm looking forward to seeing you fly.”

“Yeah, won't that be something?” Morris sat up, laying the book aside. “Can't you just picture that? Right over their heads—just like a goddamned big-assed bird. Oh, I'll finish it. Don't think I'm not going to finish it. Maybe only a few more nights ... but then I got to get that gas up on the roof and that ain't going to be easy.” Morris lay back down and picked up his book. “No, that's going to take some doing.”

“Your friend got that gas in those cans?” Stick asked.

“Sure.”

“What's he getting out of this?”

“Satisfaction.”

“He must be strong for satisfaction.”

“He's a buddy.”

“Well, you got good buddies, Morris.”

A
FTER LOCKUP
Chilly had settled down with the papers, reading them with closer attention than usual, able to involve his mind in events that were without real significance to him. He could have been reading fiction, and if it were fiction his taste ran to the macabre—
PLANE HITS HOUSE, 3 PERSONS DIE. POLICE PROBE PHONY BENEFIT SHOW FOR BLIND. 8 PERISH IN GREEN BAY FIRE
. He found these three items on a single page. And while he had been looking for a charm of negative power, he laid these deaths, these corruptions, against the death of Juleson, and against the echo of Red's voice mourning, not that he had no hope of improvement, but only the state of consciousness that forced him, however briefly, to realize his condition. Red was old now. Everything he had said stunk of old man. On some buried level of his mind he knew he was finished and it was his principal fortune that he seldom was forced to review this intimate accounting. Red had been walking the big yard off and on for twenty years, more on than off, and before that he had busted his ass down South chopping cane and picking cotton. What could he hope for? Even if he could have taken himself apart and built a new man with the same pieces, this Red would take one look at the cold deck he had been handed to play with, and cash himself in. But Chilly—he stared in at himself—he felt he could have played their game and won. He had chosen not to. But there was so much he had not known and would now necessarily never know, and sometimes, like tonight, he wondered. Pausing with the paper open to the society page and its daily crop of brides, he wondered. He studied the photos intently as if he could somehow crack the bright smiles and expose the secret lives behind them. It was important he find nothing there.

The boy—Chilly still didn't know his first name—had been shaving, whistling cheerfully. Now he was starting to clean the cell.

“Do you want me to wipe off your books?” he asked.

“If you get anything out of it.”

“I just feel like doing something.” He ran the back of his hand along his freshly shaven cheek. “That stuff's total.”

“It's all right.”

“Where do you get it?”

“From a friend.”

“He must be a good friend.”

The boy was rinsing an old tee shirt in the sink, and Chilly sat up to ask, “You going to wash those books or just wipe them?”

“With a damp rag. That's all.”

Chilly stood up and went to the bars. He reached up and seized them with his hands, unconsciously falling into the classic pose associated with all prisoners, but his posture was devoid of despair, or entreaty, or even defiance—he held there as routinely as a commuter holding to a strap on a crowded bus. He had felt a sudden impulse to look out at the narrow strip of lights, and he stood watching the flickering neons, and the cold blue fluorescents that marked the course of a hidden freeway. In his heightened awareness it seemed strange, a freak of his own consciousness, to consider the people in the cars passing along the freeway, aliens in a distant land, only a mile away. The consideration recalled the first time he had passed from one state to another, from Arizona to California, as his mother had driven West in the hope of finding his father. His conception of the essential separateness of these two states had been so distinct he could still recall the shock of surprise he had felt when the earth and the trees did not turn red as the colors had changed on the map.

He allowed his thoughts to drift twenty years in the past recalling the impressions gathered along that southwestern highway—the dullness of the desert, crumpled brown wrapping paper, the clouds of dust moving on the horizons and the distant mountains seeming no more substantial, the listless officials at the border station, their old car faltering along the sun-softened blacktop, the same dusty licorice of the big yard on a warm day, his mother's face struggling to contain her anxiety, but showing it nevertheless in the feverish tenderness she bathed him in—these sensations swept across his mind like the motley tail of a kite, and then rose swiftly and diminished into some high and unenterable part of his mind, but he thought: Even then you were on your way. He remembered how, huddled in the corner of the seat, his resentment and determination had knotted over his feelings of helplessness as he had hung there with an enforced passivity in the grip of events largely set in motion by others. Carried along.

Now he was able to call the tune, and Juleson, poor tightassed snob, had danced to the end of it, but there was no pleasure in that, not even a dry cold lunar satisfaction. Juleson's props and postures, all the second-hand furniture of his mind, they were all back in stock, waiting for the next man who could come to try the part—to use and be used by them, to act, and be acted upon. But Juleson was out of it—so maybe he should have put the gunsel on Red and done an ultimate favor for an old friend.

Chilly returned to his bunk and began to read the sports page, and by the time he was finished the boy had cleaned the entire cell. He stood by the sink looking at what he had accomplished. The painted concrete floor still bore the thin gloss of water, and the back wall was faintly dusted with scouring powder.

“It looks better, don't you think?” the boy asked.

Chilly folded the paper. “Yes.” He smiled faintly, noting that his lips felt brittle. “You're on a work kick.”

The boy shifted his shoulders. “I never minded working.”

“Then why do you make the joints?”

“Oh, checks. My friend was passing checks. I was helping him.”

“And he let you ride the beef?”

“I offered.” The boy smiled sweetly, but it seemed the sweetness of an artificial flavoring. “It's easier for me to be here than it would be for him.”