by Jack Finney
"I'll step in," Arnie was saying, "the moment a bunch of men have passed. Soon as I do, you walk along after them. Don't catch up, but try to look as though maybe you're with them. Now, you know what to do? Any questions? You got it all, Ben?" He smiled pleasantly. "Smile, Ben; we're just a couple of cons talking."
I managed to smile. "I've got it all, Arnie. Little late for questions, isn't it?" I smiled genuinely, now; I was terribly excited and that feeling, for the moment, overrode my fear.
"Guess it is." Arnie grinned at me, as excited as I was.
Four inmates were approaching from around the corner of the auto shop just west of the furniture factory, and I saw that they would pass close by. They approached, and one of them said, "Hi, Hot Shot," to Arnie, glancing at me without interest.
Arnie didn't answer; just stared steadily at the man, who grinned. Then Arnie looked without seeming to at the wall tower.
The guard — I had to look, too — was leaning on his forearms, the upper part of his body outside the open window of the watch post. He was looking to the west, away from us, but nevertheless I knew we were within range of his vision. I turned to speak to Arnie, but he was gone, and before I could speak, he whispered at me harshly.
"Move, Ben!" he said. I saw his strained face in the shadows between the crates, and I turned and walked after the four inmates just ahead.
It was a walk of no more than twenty-five yards to the south corner of the furniture factory, and I took each step in the absolute certainty of hearing a shout from behind me.
But no one shouted; I reached the corner, turned east, and in the moment of disappearing from the sight of the wall guard, I glanced back at him. The man was leaning just as before, staring out over the prison, his posture conveying his mingled boredom and relief that one more tour of duty was nearly over.
I walked on, joining the thin straggle of men from other parts of the area, all of them moving toward the wall gate that opened into the walled prison area to the south. Then I stopped dead in my tracks at what I saw ahead, my heart began to pound, and I had to light the impulse to turn and run. There was a shakedown going on at the wall gate; Arnie had told me there would be, but I'd forgotten. Then again I walked slowly forward — there was nothing else to do — trying to calm myself and study the scene before me.
The prisoners, as they reached the open gate, joined one or the other of two loose lines of men. At the head of each line stood a tan-uniformed guard; one a thin blond man of perhaps forty-five, the other dark and younger, and apparently of Spanish or Mexican descent. As an inmate reached the head of his line he would raise both arms, extending them straight out at his sides. Then he would step forward one pace, and the guard at the head of his line would stoop, run his hands from the prisoner's hips down the outside of his trousers, up the inside of the trousers, up the man's ribs, then out along the lengths of both arms. Each prisoner, I saw, stared straight ahead, face expressionless. Then, as the guard said, "Okay," or simply nodded, the man would drop his arms, still not glancing at the guard, walk out through the gate, and the next man would take a pace forward, arms already extended.
The shakedowns were being conducted with astonishing speed — four or five seconds to a man — and the two guards, carrying on a conversation as they worked, never looked at the faces of the men they searched. The routine humiliation of being searched, I understood then, was matched by the bored unconscious embarrassment of the men who did the searching.
I moved ahead in the line, a step at a time; other men joined the line behind me, and presently there were only two men ahead of me. The first of these stepped forward, arms raised and was searched. Then he dropped his arms, and walked toward the gate as the next man stepped forward. The guard began his search, then stopped, stood upright, and called after the man who was just passing through the gate — "Hey, you!" The man turned his head to look back, frowning in puzzlement, still walking forward. "You! Yes, you!" the guard called again and gestured sharply with his arm. "Come back here."
The prisoner turned and walked slowly back, frowning, shaking his head from side to side in bewildered protest. He was a small black-haired man, perhaps twenty-five years old; a five-pointed star was tattooed in blue ink on the back of one hand.
He stopped in front of the thin blond guard, who squatted suddenly, grasped one of the man's ankles in each hand, then reached into the top of the prisoner's left sock and brought out a strip of heavy metal about six inches long, maybe an inch wide, and a quarter inch thick, blunt at both ends. The guard stood up. "Let's see your ID card," he said. The prisoner took his plastic-sealed identity card from a shirt pocket and handed it to the guard, who glanced at it, then put it into his own shirt pocket. The prisoners and the other guard stood watching. "All right," said the first guard, nodding at the prisoner, "stand over there," and he gestured with his head at a little gray-painted wood hut beside the wall gate, the guards' office. The prisoner, sullen and contemptuous, strolled over to the hut and stood there, facing the two lines. The guard thrust the metal bar into his pocket, turned to the waiting line, and nodded at the man who stood, at the head of it. The man raised his arms, and the shakedown was resumed.
I knew the guard's hand would feel the powerful thump of my heart, knew he would peer at me closely, stand for a moment staring at me wonderingly, then order me to stand aside and wait; I felt absolutely certain I was trapped and caught. The man in front of me dropped his arms and turned to the gate. I stepped forward, arms extended, and I knew my face was chalk white.
I felt the hands flash down the sides of my legs, move up again on the inside, felt them brush my ribs, then the hands shot out along the lengths of my arms, and — staring straight ahead — I saw the guard's perfunctory nod from the corner of my eye, and I stepped forward, dropping my arms, and strolled toward the gate. Hey, you! — I waited for the sound, like a shot in the back, putting one foot ahead of the other; then I passed through the gate, walked on, and knew I had made it. I began to tremble. I did not believe I could possibly get through what lay ahead of me now.
For some moments I was lost, and I walked blindly on, simply following the blue-shirted backs of the men ahead of me. I recognized nothing around me as anything I had ever seen before, every sight was alien and strange. Following the men just ahead, I was passing a tall flat-roofed building of ancient discolored brick, three or four stories tall. I glanced at it, eyes moving up along its side; the windows of the top story were boarded over; so far as I knew, I had never seen it before, and I did not know where I was. A part of a straggle of blue-dressed men, I moved along with them. We turned left around a corner of the big old building, then up a flight of concrete stairs, and just ahead stood a wide open steel gate in a steel fence. I walked through it, other blue-denimed men just ahead and just behind me. Three guards, one with the collar ornaments of a lieutenant, stood beside the gate talking among themselves. They stared absently at the prisoners streaming through the gate beside them; and then I was past them, and I stepped suddenly into the vast San Quentin Yard.
The sound and sight of it struck at my senses and utterly bewildered me; I walked on for a few steps, then stopped, glancing around me. The sound was a vast murmuring roar; thousands of human voices moving through the air to strike and reflect from the concrete walls that surrounded them. The sight was a great stretch of asphalt pavement on which stood or moved thousands of identically dressed men; the whole area was completely cut off from the rest of the world by the towering concrete walls of the cell blocks and mess halls, pastel-green and peach-colored, and studded with enormous narrow barred windows and heavy riveted steel doors.
It was like no other place I had ever been — this great crowded asphalt-paved square — yet somehow it was oddly familiar. It was neither outdoors nor in. Above was the sharp blue of the California sky, but its horizons were roof tops high overhead with no other glimpse of the lost world outside. Trees, flowers, and earth — women, automobiles, and neon signs — were out of
existence here, and the very quality of the light was distorted. It came only from above, clear, even, and luminous.
Then suddenly I remembered where I'd seen this before; in a dozen or more movies at least. A great paved yard, inmates lounging against narrow-windowed walls, the window openings striped with bars — I'd seen it many a time, for this was California, and no matter what prison the movie was supposed to be showing, chances were, I realized, that it had been filmed right here. Only now it was real, and I was in it. The roar of mingled voices was steady and constant; the mass of blue-clad bodies a shock to my senses. I knew that confusion could take over my mind and in the next moments I could make a terrible and irretrievable mistake.
I saw men streaming slowly into the cell blocks—these weren't walls surrounding the area, but great high cell blocks. The men entered them through each of a number of big riveted doors around the Yard, and I knew there wasn't much time. Within minutes I had to find and be inside a cell — one certain cell and only that cell out of thousands of identical cells—in one of these vast buildings. I stood where I was, a dozen yard past the gate I had entered by, and made my mind slow down; a mistake now could not be corrected.
I'd come from the north, I reminded myself, and I turned a little on my feet, till I faced squarely south. The great cell block ahead, then, at the end of the Yard, must be the South block; my block, therefore, the East block, lay at my left. But men were apparently entering the East block through each of two doors, one far ahead to the south, the other immediately at my left across the Yard. I thought carefully. The men at my left must be entering the North block; I could see no other entrance to it; the door far ahead, therefore must lead to the East block. I began walking toward it aware that in the moments I had stood in the Yard, the great crowd had thinned appreciably. I began to hurry.
In the midst of a score of other men who filed in with me, I walked through the open steel doors beside which stood an inmate, a great brass key in his hand. Then again I stopped dead in my tracks, and a man behind me bumped into me, then walked around me, cursing. I'd expected to step directly into the interior of the cell block but instead I stood in a fairly small hexagonal room with plastered walls; at my right and at my left, stood an open steel door, and some of the men passing around me walked in through one door, some through the other. Again, my eyes actually closed in desperate concentration, I stopped to think; I had come to the far south end of the East block; therefore the entrance to the East block lay at my left. I turned and walked in.
This — the sight that struck at my eyes — was familiar to me from newspaper and magazine photographs I'd noticed since Arnie entered Quentin. I was in a great concrete shell — high, very long, and comparatively narrow, like an old-time dirigible hangar; this was the inside of the tall-windowed peach-tinted cell block. But within this great shell stood another distinctly separate structure, touching the hollow building which enclosed it only at the concrete floor on which it stood. It was a high, very long, spidery structure for it seemed from where I stood to be made entirely of vertical steel bars. It stretched off far ahead into apparently infinite distance and I understood what I was looking at. These were steel-barred cages — cells — side by side on the concrete floor and receding off before me toward the far end of the cell block in dwindling perspective. Directly on top of this long row of cells was another identical row extending olf into the same distance. And on top of that was a third row, and then a fourth, and high above my head, just under the girdered ceiling of the cell block but not touching it, was the fifth tier — all alike, door after door after door after door, the entire front of this great block of cells and their doors apparently nothing but vertical bars.
Before each of the upper four tiers hung steel-railed, concrete-paved walkways extending the entire length of the tiers. These were connected by iron stairways, I saw; men swarmed over the entire five-tier-high front of the cell block, on the stairways, the walkways, and entering their cells. The entire block was an echoing cavern of clanging iron and voices.
I followed the thinning stream of men to the nearest stairway and climbed it with the others to the third tier, Arnie's tier. I repeated the number of Arnie's cell to myself, over and over, 1042, 1042, and now, on the third tier, I looked for the cell numbers stenciled over the steel-bar doors. The first I saw read 1291 and I walked past it; 1290 was the next, then 1289, 1288 — the cells stretched far ahead of me and I began to hurry along the walkway, aware that most of the cells I was passing were now occupied; there were very few men left on the walkways now.
I was almost running — 1233, 1232 — 1196, 1195 — 1148, 1147, 1146. I reached the last cell, far down at the other end of the block. It was occupied by two men, the door already closed. The number stenciled above it was 1100, and there were no more cells. There was no 1042.
I stood blankly, my mouth actually hanging open a little, shoulders slumped, and I did not know what to do. I'd entered the wrong cell block, I thought first. Then suddenly I remembered and, actually running now, I turned the corner, ran twenty-five feet, rounded the next corner of the walkway, and was on the other side of the cell block — a second great bank of cells, back to back with the first, stretching ahead before me. 1001, 1002 — there were only three other men on the entire length of the walkway ahead, and now two of them turned into a cell, pulling its door closed behind them, and I ran at top speed — 1034, 1035, 1036. Then here was 1040, 1041, and with the walkway deserted now and every other man in his cell, I stopped at the half-open door of cell 1042, stepped in with the other occupant who stood staring at me, and pulled the door closed. An instant later, just outside the door, there was the chunking sound of heavy metal dropping a few inches onto metal, and I knew what it was. An immensely long steel bar, half the length of the tier, had been dropped into place by a guard-operated lever, to slide over the top edges of the row of cell doors into heavy L-brackets riveted to each door. I was locked in cell 1042 of San Quentin Prison.
9
"Just made it," the man in the cell with me said expressionlessly.
I nodded. "Yeah," I said, and he turned away toward the tiny wash basin fastened to the painted plaster end of the cell. Turning on the single tap, he began splashing water on his face from his cupped palms. He was a tall man, his once-black hair nearly white, the back of his neck tanned, wrinkled, and strong. His face, I had seen, was lined and neither young nor old.
I sat down on the lower bunk — there were two brown-blanketed bunks fastened to the wall, one above the other, and the lower, I knew, was Arnie's — and I began reassuring myself with what Arnie had told me would happen now.
This morning, I knew, Arnie had told his cellmate, this man at the wash basin, that tonight he was going to switch cells; that he intended to visit an unnamed, friend in another cell. This, Arnie explained to me, was absolutely forbidden, severely punished when detected; and yet it happened regularly for a variety of reasons, because it was almost impossible, or at least extremely impractical to detect, as long as the men switching cells drew no special attention to themselves. There were over four thousand men confined in four cell blocks, and just counting them — four times every twenty-four hours — was time-consuming enough. To check the actual identity of each man in each of several thousand cells was a near impossibility, practically speaking, and on those rare occasions when it had to be done for some extraordinary reason, it took hours. Right now, as on day after routine day, for this cell to contain two blue-denimed men of the same race was enough for the guard who would soon glance in, lips moving as he counted the tier.
Al — I remembered his name, now — was drying his face on his towel; then he took a newspaper from the upper bunk, and half sitting on, half leaning against the wash basin, he opened it and began to read. This man, Arnie had said, would not betray the fact that Arnie was, so far as Al knew, in the wrong cell tonight. This was not out of loyalty to Arnie but from simple lack of motive for doing so. For even if the switch were somehow detecte
d, Arnie's cellmate need only say, if he were even asked, that he thought it was a legitimate cell-change ordered by a prison official; there were thousands of such cell-changes here every month. Whether this was believed or not was unimportant; San Quentin inmates were not expected to be their own police.
So it was nothing to this man, I reminded myself, it was none of his business that Arnie had apparently switched cells tonight with the prisoner who now sat on Arnie's bunk. I told myself this, but just the same, I made no further move or remark that might conceivably reveal that I was actually not a San Quentin prisoner. The thought would never enter the man's head; that I did know. I sat on the edge of the bunk in faded, shapeless blue denims, blue work shirt with snap fasteners, and black shoes — and even more important and fundamental, was the simple fact that I was here It was inconceivable that I was anything but another San Quentin prisoner, and the fact that Arnie's cellmate had never seen me before meant nothing. However long this man had been at San Quentin, he no more knew every face in it than the resident of a town of four thousand knew every last soul who lived there; and particularly with the population changing every day.
"Hot today, wasn't it?" the bored voice said, and I looked up to see Al looking down at me over the top of his lowered newspaper.
I nodded. "Yeah," I said.
"You workin'?"
I decided to say no; any place I claimed to be working in the prison might turn out to be where this man actually worked; Arnie had forgotten to brief me on this "No; unassigned; I'm in the Yard." I felt foolishly pleased with the way these terms came to mind.
Al nodded. "You a fish?"
"Yeah," I said; I knew a fish was a comparatively new prisoner or guard. I turned to glance boredly out through the cell door; I wanted this conversation to end, and after a moment, I heard the sound of Arnie's cellmate raising his paper again.