On the Yard (43 page)

“You slimy black bastard—” Chilly began, but then broke off as the full weight of the situation hit him.

“Oh, yes,” the Spook agreed equitably, “I'm slimy enough, but then I don't have no shit on my dick. Now you better get dressed. You won't be spending the night here.”

As he pulled his clothes on, Chilly thought of the money in the broom, but there would be no chance to get it, or even if he could he was sure to be shook down before the night was over.

There were two other guards, ordinary second-watch block guards, waiting on the tier. One of them held a camera and they both looked angry and disgusted. As they were marched down the tier, Chilly was aware of shadowed faces pressed against the bars.

“What is it?” someone whispered.

And someone else answered, “I think they busted some guys with the pot on.”

They were taken to the clinic, where they had to wait, sitting on a white bench in front of minor surgery, until the MTA came in off a call. He came in ten minutes later and stopped to make some entries on the 103-K cards. Then he came over to them, rubbing his arms, which extending from the clean smooth whiteness of his medical smock seemed hairy as the legs of a bear. He looked down at them with an amused scorn that carried flickering somewhere in it a quality as far removed from amusement as healing is removed from murder.

“Are these the lovebirds?” he asked the Spook.

“Yes, indeed.” He nodded solemnly. “Came on them just whipping up a batch, but there was no way to tell for sure just who was doing what.”

“To whom,” the MTA added. “Well, we can clear that up.”

They were taken into minor surgery, one at a time, bent over the enameled table and subjected to what the MTA would record as a proctological examination. The MTA made no effort to be gentle, and Chilly, when the rubber-gloved finger was rudely in him, was horrified to experience a curious, almost languid sense of weakness as if something were urging him to slip from the table and sink to the floor where he would be freed of a large burden he had only been dimly aware he was carrying at all. He felt his knees loosen, then some darkness plucked at him and the finger was suddenly gone. He straightened to meet the MTA's blunt and speculative eyes, aware he was trembling.

When he had finished both examinations, the MTA pointed to Chilly, and said, “This one was pitching.” His finger moved to Candy. “And this one was catching.”

The Spook smiled easily at Chilly. “It must have been your night to play daddy. But the disciplinary committee, they don't make fine distinctions.”

They were taken up to the shelf and locked in separate holding cells, and it was only after the solid metal door had closed behind him that Chilly realized not once since they had been taken from their cell had Candy so much as looked at him. And as he sat down on the bunk he realized he had something more to remember. Something still clouded in his mind as the source of an even more dreadful apprehension, a deeper shame, and then he began to remember the printed form routinely sent to any female relation. He had once studied a carbon copy in a confidential file he had paid to have smuggled from the records office. He had been trying to determine whether the inmate in question was a snitch. The form letter was a complete surprise. Chilly had read it through several times. Now he remembered his amusement as the text came back to him.

The form letter didn't make fine distinctions either. Chilly drew his knees up to hug them. His throat felt hot, and he closed his eyes, beginning to rock back and forth, trying not to think of his mother opening the official envelope that irrevocably condemned her son to a way of life beyond her understanding, and beyond her capacity to forgive, as no sentence of the courts ever had. Her pain and bewilderment, her instinctive disgust, were vivid to him. And his own ancient ambition to replace his father, never entirely repudiated, ended here as it occurred to Chilly he had replaced him only too well—in kind, a source of further misery and even more punishing desertions.

But as he rolled over to push his face against the coarse wool blanket, it was no longer his mother he missed and mourned, but Candy. The idle little tramp. The vain, empty bitch, it had all ended for her in the moment the flashbulb blazed, though the moment before she had been moaning softly in a manner he realized now he had always known, just beyond his willing awareness, if it were genuine at all, was certainly exaggerated. Before he was even out of her, she was gone, projected ahead to whatever sissy she would pick out on queen's row to turn flipflops with. They had to snatch and run on the row. Chilly saw a brief but vivid picture of Candy bent over in the showers, taking her most genuine pleasure from her sense of humiliation, while some butch freak rammed at her like a billy goat ...

Again Chilly experienced the warm sense of weakness, and for an instant it seemed
he
was there in the shower, and the MTA's finger had swollen cruelly to punish him as deliciously as he had punished Candy, and then the blackness began to pluck at him again, wrenching his awareness wildly, but not before he felt a shuddering crawl of shameful delight.

Take this hammer, take it to the Cap'n

Take this hammer, take it to the Cap'n

Take this hammer, take it to the Cap'n

Tell him I'se gone, boy, tell him I'se gone

S
OCIETY RED
walked the big yard alone. With summer coming on the cons were wearing tee shirts, and a lot of them spent weekends lying around the lower yard catching a suntan, and for a few months they looked as if they'd been hanging out at the beach. But Red knew the tans would fade in the fall, without ever having been admired, and winter would find the same white-faced cons huddled under the rain shed, telling each other the same lies.

Red had to walk slowly. His hip was giving him trouble, and one of these mornings he'd have to catch the sick line and con the croaker out of a shot of oil or something before he blew a wheel bearing.

He paused beneath the north block wall to roll a smoke. He was back to smoking state issue, but he'd smoked dust often enough in the years before Chilly had befriended him, and now that Chilly was gone he'd smoke it again. For at least one more year. He lit up, and continued limping along the blacktop.

The parole board had given him another year to beat the yard. They had handled him with the cool remoteness of a research team conducting a vivisection on a cancerous monkey, and he had sensed the numb stirring of his almost forgotten resentment as he answered to their empty formula:

—How do you plan to support yourself?

—I figure to go back to my old trade.

—And that is?

—Pimping for your mammy.

But that was only what he wished he could have said, if he had been able to play the dozens with the board instead of trying to suck up to that one outside chance they might cut him loose. He knew this chance, like all life's wonderful luck, never fell to his hand, but he couldn't control his native hopefulness. Hopefulness continued to come to him like some beautiful bitch who had him pussy whipped. He read the promise of further rejection, further torment, read it clearly in her cold and sometimey eyes, but one flash of her long white legs and he was ready and aching. Next year it would be the same.

“Hey, Red, you antique old mother, what're you limping for?”

It was Cat, cutting across the yard towards him. Red smiled. “I fucked my leg up booting young punks like you in the ass.”

“Go ahead on, old man. I heard the board dumped you.”

“They shot me down a year.”

“You didn't carry them enough time.”

“I figured it was plenty.”

Cat pulled a pack of tailor-mades from his shirt pocket. “They're cold dudes,” he said absently as he took a cigarette and offered the pack to Red, who snapped his roll away to accept the tailor-made.

“Thanks, Cat,” he said as they lit up off the same match.

Cat nodded, inhaling deeply so his heavy chest swelled to press against his denim shirt, and, then, exhaling said, “What's a butt between old partners?” He matched his stride to Red's and leaned closer to continue. “I've been doing some thinking since Chilly got busted. You know?”

Red turned his head to find Cat watching him closely. He frowned. “What's there to think about?”

Cat lowered his voice. “I figure Chilly must of had a pretty fair-sized soft money stash. He turned a lot of butts into cash, a lot more than he needed to pay off that gimp-legged freeman he had on the send, and he must have taken in still more cash off the yard. I know Chilly's style, and he was going to the stash with it, putting it aside against some notion he was turning in his mind, but they scratched him—” Cat snapped his fingers. “Quick! He didn't have time for no cleanup, and I figure that stash is still sitting. Just like he left it. You got any idea where it is?”

The question, just slipped in casually, reminded Red of the interrogatory technique of the kind of detective who came on buddy-buddy. Red shook his head amiably, just as he would have for the buddy detective.

“Nope, I don't. But I wish I did.”

Cat leaned still closer, crowding Red. His eyes had grown noticeably cooler, and his voice lost the buddy tone as he asked, “
You
didn't swing with that gold, did you, old man?”

“Shit!” Red said angrily, snatching the bag of dust from his shirt pocket to dangle it before Cat's eyes. “Does this look like I swung with anything? And don't come on heavy with me. I don't like it. And if you'd gone a little further with all that thinking you were doing, it might of come to you that Chilly never flashed his hand to nobody. If he had a stash, you can give long, long odds he was the only one who knew where it was. I sure as hell didn't.”

Cat walked in silence for a while. When he spoke again it was clear he'd given up. “I don't know,” he said dryly. “There at the end he might of had that little freak wiping her ass with hundred-dollar bills.”

Red shrugged equitably. “Well, it was his, if that's what he wanted to do with it.”

“That bitch spoiled a boss hustler.”

“Chilly just found something he dug more than stacking up piles of butts and playing big man in this crummy side show we got to live in.”

“Yeah, and now he's psyched, a stone nut. They say he tried to take himself out. Cut his wrists, for Christ's sake!”

“Shithouse rumor,” Red said scornfully.

“The captain's office has him listed for transfer to the pie factory, and that's
no
rumor. I saw the list myself.”

This news puzzled Red. He wasn't able to imagine Chilly as a real nut. Somehow Chilly had gone on to a deeper and even slicker game, still playing nimbly with the official mind as he moved towards some secret end of his own.

“Chilly'll be running that nut house in a month,” Red said confidently.

“Maybe,” Cat agreed doubtfully. “And maybe he's all through. One thing, there's no hole here on the yard where he used to stand.”

Automatically Red gazed down at their old “office”—three hobby workers stood there examining a length of red silk one of them had bought to fashion the pillows that were a traditional item in the handicraft store. They were spray painted with the legend:
Souvenir of San Quentin
. A few feet away, O'Brien stood making book. His cigar bobbed steadily as he chewed and sucked at it. Red had heard O'Brien was already running scared. Someone had picked a long shot at Hollywood Park and got into him for something like three hundred cartons, which he still hadn't come up with, and now he was so nervous the only bets he wasn't trying to lay off, according to the yard comics, were those placed by a notorious nut who liked to wager on the outcome of the races featured in the newsreels shown at the beginning of the weekend movies. Red smiled fondly. Chilly had once tried to get the same nut to make a bet on the second Dempsey-Tunney fight. But Chilly never did take the crazy bastard's stuff, Chilly had too much class.

Red studied Cat, still plodding beside him, and Cat was just one more lightweight joint wheel, hiding behind a pair of twenty-two-inch arms, beginning to go to fat, and even if they were forty-four-inch arms Cat would never think of trying to rob Chilly's stash, unless stoneface Blake had practically promised him personally to make sure Chilly was shipped to the nut house.

The two men neared the end of the yard, and on the cream stucco of the inmate canteen building, Red noted a drawing of a vampire. One he had looked at without interest many times as he walked, thinking only the first few times that at least he'd never been unlucky enough to meet up with something like that. Now the drawing was beginning to weather and fade, and it had been partially overlapped by a new figure, a four-legged animal of indeterminate kind, though clearly possessed of slanting eyes, and an entire mouthful of teeth, bared in a crude but vigorous display of ferocity. Scrawled beneath this animal was the single word:
Simbas
.

Red and Cat turned together, reversing like soldiers executing to-the-rear-march, and Cat said, “They put the sissy on queen's row.”

“I know,” Red said. “I seen her in the line when they ran the row down to the laundry. Swishing and giggling, happy as a pig in shit.”

“I still can't figure how the bitch ever got on the yard in the first place.”