On the Yard (41 page)

On the landing below the flames were gushing from the open doorway, and those men just ahead of him were crossing one at a time; some crawling, others rolling, while a few plunged blindly like terrified horses and seemed to be swallowed in the flame before they staggered out to stumble down the next flight, their clothes beginning to burn.

Manning turned to the inmate just behind him and shouted, “Please, help me.” But the man's face was stupid with terror, and he instinctively seized this opportunity to shove past Manning and dive headlong across the landing.

Another hose had now joined the first, and they combined to play directly into the blazing doorway, but the water appeared to have small effect on the flames, other than to release hissing clouds of steam. The man who was now waiting behind Manning began to kick him in the small of the back, and Manning staggered up under the weight of the boy, took a deep breath which he remembered he must hold, and began to run awkwardly, weaving from side to side. He felt himself burning and cried out just as one of the high pressure hoses knocked him down. He sprawled, fighting panic. The boy lay across him, but he managed to free himself without standing, and on his hands and knees began to pull the body towards the head of the next flight. He did this mindlessly as an ant burdened with an aphid.

The final flight of stairs angled sharply away from the face of the building, leading down to the bridge that spanned the industrial alley, and except for flaming debris falling from the burning roof, the danger was sharply diminished. Manning pulled the boy down the stairs, gripping him under his armpits, too exhausted to make any effort to stop the boy's legs and feet from banging against the metal steps.

Then he was aware of a broad, powerfully built inmate, in a white sweatshirt, stooping to lift the boy out of his hands, as he said, “Relax, pop, I'll handle this.”

Manning watched him run lightly down the stairs, holding the boy across his arms as easily as if he were a child, but Manning could only think that help hadn't come until he had no longer needed it, and he stumbled to his feet without any sense of gratitude, but only the half-formed conviction that he had been used, though he didn't have any idea by whom, or what.

Then he heard someone shouting below him: “It's another of those college kids.”

“Thank Christ,” a deeper voice added. “That's the last of them. Good job, Caterpillar, a damn fine job.”

“Thanks, Loot.”

Manning recognized the voice that had told him to “Relax, pop ...” He made his way across the bridge and was immediately turned over to the hospital orderlies by a sergeant. He was determined not to faint, and he was aware of the gurney ride through the big yard. He listened to the diminishing roar of the fire, and a sudden eerie rush of gaiety caused him to smile up at the smoke-blackened sky. “Sure, relax, pop,” he told himself, and continued to smile at this fine joke.

Society Red lay unconscious on the roof of the education building for almost three hours, and the fire was beginning to burn itself out before he groaned and rolled over to stare up at the gutted brick shell. He pulled his blistered lips apart to whisper, “Jesus.”

He found the window he must have jumped from, now only an indentation in the ruined wall, and he couldn't understand how he had done it. He remembered the boards and looked at his hands to find his nails torn and bloody. You old fart, he told himself gently, you still got some fight left in you.

But then he remembered Nunn, and was immediately sickened and distressed. He remembered pleading with Nunn, whose face was stained orange as a pumpkin in the swiftly mounting fire, and his eyes as empty, even while the tears rolled from them, and he had cried like some brokenhearted child, sitting huddled on the floor. Then Red had had to save himself.

Now he crawled stiffly to the edge of the roof and began to shout and wave his hands. A ladder was raised to him, and he climbed down slowly, whistling softly as his feet touched ground.

T
HE INDUSTRIAL
building fire became the single most important event in the warden's administration—to his chagrin, since the disaster was not relevant to the prison, but could have happened anywhere, in any public or private facility. Officially, his responsibility was nominal since the building had been condemned for years, and the appropriation for razing and the construction of new units had been passed over many times. Still a young state assembly man on the make was pressing for an investigation, and the newspaper accounts were shadowed with dark hints of negligence. The usual pattern following any public disaster. The warden was conditioned to the popular taste for the dramatic, the violent, the spectacular, and he rode with the tide of feverish interest. Still he could not help considering that the fire would permanently overshadow many developments which would finally be of far greater significance, and there were times when he felt an unaccustomed weariness. In these moments he thought of himself as the custodian of the public dump. Was it reasonable to expect people to grow enthusiastic over new methods for processing and reclaiming their garbage?

Meanwhile his desk was clogged with reports. Of the seven hundred and thirty-two men checked out to the gym that night, eighty-six were presumed to have died in the fire. Nevertheless, on those victims where an identification could not be established, the warden ordered an APB sent out, and he expected in time they would discover that a few of these men had taken advantage of the confusion to make successful escapes.

Stick, Sheldon Wilson, was discovered the morning after the fire beside one of the access roads leading to the institution. He was alive, but his back was broken. The warden could hardly credit the implications of the bizarre equipment and the equally bizarre uniform, and he ordered the balloon sent to the criminology lab at the University of California. The analysts were able to add little that was not apparent from a superficial examination except that the seams had been sewn and resewn many times. They suggested an analogy to hesitation marks in a suicide. The repeated stitching had weakened the cloth, but this alone had not caused the bag to rupture. Along the section of the seam where it had blown the stitching had been only tacked in, and the most reasonable inference to be drawn from this was that the subject had somehow been panicked into using the balloon before it was completed.

By the time the report was delivered, Morris Price had been found dead in the cell he had shared with Sheldon Wilson, and a careful examination of his personal property brought more of the story to light. It was difficult for the warden to see these men as real—he could envision them in the cell together, the balloon between them, but the scene was without life, a tableau in a wax museum, yet here was the trigger that had resulted in over a hundred deaths and injuries. He studied Stick's ID photo, noting the pathetic arrogance of the pose, the lacquered gloss of the shuttered eyes, the wasted appearance of the face, deeper than any scar of malnutrition. Despite the absence of any human characteristic, Stick's face still did not invite comparison with the purely animal, not even the primordial mask of a lizard, because the overwhelming effect of his appearance was a sense of incompleteness. How was it possible a single such defective could end or alter the lives of so many others—the realization was numbing—yet until he made the fatal move his life had to be considered as valuable as any other.

Now that he could be punished, if only by making him understand what he had done, Sheldon Wilson had slipped around a corner in his own mind. He never did return from his flight. Paralyzed from the waist down, he was confined in the psych ward. He had pieced together a uniform—a Sam Brown belt of twisted sheet, epaulets from Bull Durham bags, medals of washers and bottle tops. From somewhere he had acquired a necklace of toothbrush handles.

The afternoon the warden had found time to observe him through the one-way glass, Stick had been propped up in bed, wearing his uniform, and the warden could almost picture the phantom army he commanded, so powerful was the impression that Stick was shouting real orders to soldiers just out of sight. But when he fell silent, his face relaxed into a baffled and painful smile of terrifying innocence.

The single redemptive feature of the fire was the rescue of a member of the college chess team by an inmate, who had carried the boy from the burning building at obvious risk to himself. The inmate, a Walter Collins, was known to the warden as the notorious Caterpillar Collins, and he could think of very few inmates he would be even less happy to see honored as a hero, but the fact remained that it had been Collins, and probably there was better stuff in him than his past had given any cause to suspect.

He released the story to the papers, and arranged for an interview with Collins, who handled himself creditably, except for suggesting they print his chest and arm measurements, which most of the reporters took for a joke, and the coverage was generally dignified, except for one tabloid that ran a head: CONVICT STRONGMAN SAVES STUDENT.

A local fraternal order voted Collins one of their yearly citations for extraordinary public service, and the VFW conferred on him a medal for Valor in the Face of Great Personal Danger. These awards were made on the athletic field before the crowd assembled to watch the Lincoln's Birthday boxing card, and since they knew Caterpillar for a regular they were willing to remain quiet, if unenthusiastic. They respected an artful shuck, but the fundamental insincerity had to be clearly apparent, and Caterpillar appeared to believe himself that he was some kind of hero.

A few moments later they were asked to observe a period of silence, while the bell at ringside stroked off a count of ten, in memoriam for Reuben “Cool Breeze” Moore, who had perished in the fire. The coach spoke briefly, ending, “and a sweet, sweet boy has hung up his gloves.”

Yes, a number of the silent crowd had much the same thought: if Caterpillar wanted to pack someone out of that fire why the hell wasn't it Cool Breeze?

W
HAT GOES
around, comes around,” Red said, expressing his sense of all that had happened.

Neither Chilly nor Candy made any answer, though Chilly shifted his lips disagreeably, as if Red's observation were either too routine or too foolish to answer. It was noon and they had been in the mess hall for a bowl of split pea soup because Chilly liked it.

Sometime in the days just after the fire, spring had slipped in on them. Its effect on the big yard was muted, filtered through the concrete and the dead air of the cellblocks, but the rain had stopped, and by midmorning the sun had usually burned away the overcast. On the lower yard the landscape gardening crews were working up the earth in the ornamental borders—they planned to plant azaleas and shooting stars —and the grass of the athletic field was beginning to show new growth—irregular islands of green marking some random pattern of water distribution beneath the earth.

Baseball players were throwing in teams to loosen up their arms, as if some of winter had entered the hollows of their bones and needed to be carefully thawed. The previous weekend they had held the first batting practice, but the pitcher, anxious to reaffirm his stuff for the new season, had thrown so erratically that hardly anyone had been able to get a bat on the ball. The baseball equipment was all brand-new, purchased on emergency requisition and stored in a quonset hut formerly used for spray painting. The administration knew it as axiomatic that it was better to have inmates swinging at a ball than at each other's heads, just as long before, in the same spirit, a prison bandmaster had coined the phrase: “The man who blows a horn will never blow a safe.” That he might instead blow pot hadn't been considered. Only a few were ever able to play baseball; the selection of a team was closely controlled by a powerful clique of jockstraps. Others, in pursuit of recreation, now that the gym was gone, played handball against the lower yard wall, pitched horseshoes, threw quoits, or walked around and around the athletic field.

Out in the far-flung camp system, staffed with minimum security inmates, spring was known as rabbit season, and four camp men ran off during the first week of good weather. Three were caught and returned to the prison and the fourth was found floating face down in the Sacramento River.

Candy had filled the place left vacant by Nunn. Not that she performed any of his former functions, but she stood where he had stood, and it was Red who had taken on some of Nunn's acid tone as if he were the principal heir.

“We should start getting some of it back,” Red persisted, stirring the cooling fire. He was rewarded with a flicker of thin blue flame.

“Is that what
we
should do?” Chilly asked.

“Enough's going out, something ought to be coming in. Why not at least get the book going? Here it is the middle of spring training, and you don't have no idea who's signed and who hasn't, how the rookies are shaping up. Or the Vegas odds, or anything.”

“That's what I need to know—the Vegas odds.”

“You always had a fair idea what teams were going to end up close to the pennant.”

“Not from no Vegas odds, I didn't.”

“Well, however you figured it.”

Chilly smiled. “However I figured it, I'm not.” Chilly didn't want to argue, he was just batting lightly at Red. Some of the acid had drained from his personality.

Candy was admiring the way the sun seemed to set tiny fires on the dial of the watch Chilly had given her. One, two, four, five, seven, eight, ten, and eleven were each marked with a rhinestone chip. Three, six, nine, and twelve were indicated by a small rectangular garnet. It was a man's watch, but Chilly hadn't been able to imagine the man who would wear it, not that he any longer thought of Candy as a man, and in those rare moments when he was reminded—she had her own curious modesty—he thought of her excess organs as a biological accident. Now he watched her with possessive admiration and it seemed to him that the movement of her eyes behind the dark green glass of her shades, another of his gifts, was like muted phosphorescence in dark water. When she caught his smile on her, she smiled and moved closer until the point of her hip touched his. Then she looked back at her watch.