On the Yard (38 page)

“Wasn't he a sissy too?”

“No, not exactly. He was very butch.”

“Well, what about Tracy?”

“That was different. You know, when you're a juvenile they can put you in for anything. My parents—my father, he wanted it. I guess he thought they were going to cure me. They cured me all right. I was done more ways than I thought was possible, whether I wanted it or not. They treated me like property, handing me around from one to another. Those big kids, they wanted to show what studs they were.”

“And you didn't like that?”

Again the subtle shifting of the shoulders—not a shrug, not a flounce, but an exteriorization of some inner uncertainty, not caused by the present question, but beneath all causes.

“I'm not a thing,” the boy said. “At least, I don't think I am. But Tracy could have been pretty wild if it hadn't been for that.” He turned and looked up at the shelves. “You have a lot of books.”

“I just have them, that's all,” Chilly said, feeling an obscure uneasiness. “They're mostly reference works I've picked up here and there.”

“Just think if you knew everything in those books.”

“Do you think that would help?”

The boy was lighting a cigarette. He shook the match out with a flourish. “Oh, I'm not looking for help.”

“Then that makes you different in more ways than one.”

“Don't get spiteful.” He was holding his cigarette pinned loosely in two fingers, his palm bent back off the stem of his wrist, forming a flat where something small might have perched. “Please, it was nice just talking to you. I won't bother you, if you don't want me.”

Chilly smiled with reluctant amusement. “Look, what's your name? Your real name. Not this Candy shit.”

“Martin. Isn't that a monstrous name? It means warlike.”

“It's a little better than Candy—what's that supposed to mean?”

Again the shifting shoulders. “It's what they call me. Candy Cane. I didn't say I liked it.”

“You didn't say you didn't like it either.”

“It's all right. A little silly.”

“Well, look, Martin, I'm not worried about you bothering me.”

“I didn't mean that. I just meant I wouldn't embarrass you.”

“I'm not easily embarrassed.”

“I know. A lot of the men on the yard are afraid of you.”

“That doesn't mean anything.”

From somewhere down the tier Chilly heard the sound of a broom hitting against the bars. He rolled the paper and handed it to Candy. “When that tier tender comes by, ask him to take this up to cell fourteen on the fifth tier.”

“All right. Who cells there?”

“Old Red. I don't know why he reads the paper. He thinks it's science fiction, long as he's been jailing.”

“That's the man you want me to cell with?”

“Yes.”

“He doesn't even look clean.”

Chilly laughed out loud. If he passed this remark on to Nunn, Nunn would never let Red forget it. “Red's all right,” he said. “You're looking for action, and Red's laying to give you all you can handle.”

“But I like to pick my own friends. You're trying to use me just like they used me in Tracy. Am I supposed to like it? Maybe you think I bend over for dogs and horses, or anything with a prick?”

“I hadn't thought about it,” Chilly said coldly. “But don't panic. So far you're not scheduled to make any move.”

“Can I stay here?”

“No, I don't think so. But I'll get you in with someone you like. Now get up to the bars and catch that tier tender.”

Martin walked to the bars and looked out at the lights. He was silent for a moment, then, “It's strange,” he said, “but I have the feeling something wonderful's going to happen. It doesn't make any sense because I know nothing's going to happen, but I feel just as if I knew it was. Do you ever feel like that?”

“That's the cotton. Tomorrow you'll be convinced it's something terrible that's going to happen.”

“I hope not. I like this feeling too well.”

“Well, that's easy. More cotton, more feeling—for a while anyway.”

The tier tender pushed his broom into sight. He paused staring at Martin. First he stared at his face, then at his feet. It was Sanitary Slim. Martin pushed the rolled newspaper halfway through the bars. “Would you take this up to the fifth tier, cell fourteen, please.”

“Please? Now, ain't that nice. But they didn't send me up here to be no errand boy.”

“I'd appreciate it.”

“You would, huh?” Slim took the paper and stuck it in his belt under his coat. “I'll take it up after I finish my sweeping.”

“Thank you.”

“Your mouth is just full of pretties. How'd you like your shoes shined?”

Chilly stood up. “Just move out,” he said.

“Who you talking to—” Slim stared into the cell, past Martin, and when he recognized Chilly, he continued in a lower, whining tone, “You got no right to order me around. I'm just as good as you. We both wearing blue, ain't we?” Slim appealed to Martin. “Ain't we both wearing blue?”

Martin ducked away from the point of Slim's question, still pushing in his feverish eyes, and moved towards the rear of the cell. Chilly was coming towards the bars, and as they passed, crowded together in the narrow aisle between their beds and the wall, Martin squeezed Chilly's arm—the same grip of reassurance a woman gives a man.

“You better knock off the highsiding, you degenerate old cocksucker,” Chilly said.

Slim paled and his mouth began to work furiously. “You'll get yours—you and your pretty punk. Your time's coming. I've been walking these tiers for more years than you've been alive and I've seen a whole lot of you red shirts come and go. Don't none of you last long. You think you're running everything on the yard, but you're just a big target for anyone, bull or convict, who sees you.”

“Get away from this cell,” Chilly said.

“What you gonna do? Spit at me?”

Slim stared a moment longer, then he shifted his weight and began to sweep. He took four or five strokes, gentle as a lover, then paused to pull the newspaper from his belt and toss it over the tier. He continued out of sight.

“What an animal,” Martin said.

“Make some coffee,” Chilly told him curtly.

“How do you like yours? Strong?”

“Put a level spoon in my glass. You want some more of this cotton?”

“Yes, I guess I do.”

They both took another piece, washing it down with the coffee. Chilly sat frowning even after the coffee had cleared the foul taste from his mouth. After a moment he said, “If a little's good, then more must be better.”

“Yes,” Martin agreed eagerly.

Chilly looked up at him, his eyes remote. “I meant just the opposite.”

“What's a red shirt?”

“That's an old expression for troublemaker. If you fell out of line too many times they issued you a red shirt. Then whenever there was trouble on the yard the gun bulls had orders to shoot the cons in the red shirts first. But that was fifty years ago. The old cons took it as a mark of respect. Maybe it was. Now they assign you to group therapy.”

“They're going to assign me to group therapy.”

“Then you better go.”

“Why?”

“Don't you know how lucky you are to be on the big yard? If you want to stay off queen's row, you better lay low and do exactly what you're told.”

“I don't want to be penned up with all those dizzy bitches.”

“Why not?”

Martin smiled. “What would we do—bump pussies?”

“You might get more down like that.”

“No, thank you. I know what moves me.”

“Well, to that extent, you're lucky.”

Chilly took a swallow of coffee. It was already lukewarm. The plastic glass seemed to leach the heat from the water without ever growing hot itself. Still he was able to drink the bitter liquid with active enjoyment, and it seemed to start a chain of warmth that spread through his stomach, to his bowels, to his scrotum, and with the sense of warmth came a mindless and purely physical crawl of excitement. His glands, alerted by his unconscious and sharpened by the cotton, were sending him a message. He found his eyes fixed to Martin's face. The drug had purified the boy's features, removing all hints of grossness which had served to remind Chilly of his true sex. There was a tight fixed sparkle in the boy's eyes, and his skin had taken on a similar taut luminescence, which Chilly suddenly understood, without reasoning, is associated with beauty because it appears impervious to corruption. This skin would glow undiminished for a thousand years. As the moment expanded he had a diffuse sense of his own multiple selves, he could be anyone, anywhere, changing identities on each heartbeat. It became clear to him that as a child he had nourished himself at a witch's tit, and the volatile fluid hissing from the hot nipple had turned cold as it entered him, searching through his body to fill the large cavities, where it froze into the permanence of a malignant enchantment. Now he had a vision of how he might be free of it.

As he thought this, he talked to Martin on an entirely different level, telling old jailhouse stories, the myths he had inspected with reverence only a few years ago, and the boy listened with parted lips, pulling his lower lip between his teeth periodically to renew its shine with his saliva.

The lights went out. The evening had collapsed into a single hour and that hour had passed swiftly. Chilly still held the plastic tumbler, a quarter-inch of cold coffee slipping in the bottom like an exhausted acid, and his mouth tasted hot and dry and stale, a volcanic cave, from the dozen cigarettes he had smoked. He handed the tumbler to Martin.

“Get me a glass of water.”

He heard the pipes throbbing deep in the building, heard water splashing against the sink, marking how vivid and somehow significant these impressions were, and at the same time he marveled at his own detachment. His mind seemed distant from his body. He was observing everything, even his own most intimate self, from the vantage of one of his other existences, and he had lost the feeling that what was happening to his body was necessarily happening to him. He was prepared to recognize that there were entire continents of his spiritual geography which were still alien to him. Now it seemed he stood on an isthmus scenting the smell of a jungle —a smell compounded from large white flowers, with petals like flesh, the blind rut of animals and the rot of black earth charged with the dead. The odor came to him like an ancient and elementary teacher under whose discipline he must study. Without awareness he had made his preparations, now he was ready to learn, because beyond the jungle he sensed mountains where it was possible to climb and climb into a cold clear light.

“Here.”

Martin handed him the water, and sat down on the edge of his bunk, and for Chilly the movement of the springs as they adjusted to the boy's weight quickened with intimacy, his own body floated with a warm elastic buoyancy, and as he drank, the water seemed to go down in solid cold lumps. Martin's cheek was outlined against the light from the single bulb above the gun rail, and the last traces of artificiality had vanished from his face with the overhead light. He seemed to be waiting.

“Did the ten o'clock count go by?” Chilly asked.

“Yes.”

He found Martin's hand in the dark, and placed it where he wanted it and where it wanted to be, wondering as he did why he still considered it a form of surrender to take control. But then it was done, and he need do nothing more.

For a while Chilly felt nothing, or almost nothing, only a dull pleasant sensuality like the pressure of his bowels, and he wondered again if he had been wasting his time, if it were possible for him to enter the jungle at all. His eyes had adjusted to the semidarkness. He found he could see the part in the boy's hair and he traced it to its base, a cowlick, a vigorous twist of black locks, that disclosed a small gray island of scalp. He heard the noises the boy was making around him and these sounds grew louder until they seemed the restless powerful rush of the sea, and the cowlick began to spin until it became the black waters of a whirlpool opening to disclose a giant pearl. The pearl became the moon which brightened and swelled into the sun as without warning he was taken over by a sensation, which later in his anxiety to analyze anything so powerful he thought of as a glowing transparency. The opaqueness, the dross of his spirit, and the awareness of his body were briefly burned away in a burst of pure feeling.
“God!”
he said for the first time in his adult life when he meant it for more than idle emphasis.

It was only after this sensation had faded from the peak of its intensity that he was able to recognize it as merely pleasure. He groaned like a slave feeling the fresh bite of new shackles, and simultaneously he discovered his hands gripped to the sides of Martin's head, and that pressure too, the texture of flesh and hair, became informed with the aura of his pleasure. Then he realized the nature of the collaboration his hands were involving him in, and he snatched them away. Martin hadn't released him. He jerked his hips back and at the same time, in a motion so automatic it seemed reciprocal, he cuffed the boy with his open hand. Martin fell to the side, slipping off the bunk to land propped on his spread fingers, his head thrown back, his mouth still loose, and his features, now lit in a narrow fan of light, showed a contrary mingling of distress and hostility.

“I'm sorry,” Chilly said automatically.

“It's all right,” Martin said wearily. His tone was informed with the patient fatalism of someone who lives by a difficult and dangerous job, but the conformation of his eyes still suggested a painful bitterness.

Chilly stood up and went to the sink where he washed himself thoroughly, dried with an extra towel, and buttoned his pants. He took a fresh pack of cigarettes from the shelf, opened it, and held the pack out to Martin, still sitting on the floor.