The Animal Factory

by Bunker, Edward

  In the town of Salinas the bus took on fuel. As the driver climbed back on, he faced his passengers through the wire.

  “Well, boys, next stop is San Quentin … the Bastille by the Bay. Our estimated time of arrival is seven-thirty tonight … God willing and the river don’t rise!”

  “Well, get the motherfucker rollin’ an’ quit bullshittin’,” one rough wag said. “We wanna see if it’s bad as its publicity.”

  “You’ll see,” the driver said, swinging into his chair and starting the motor.

  Earl Copen was serving his third term in San Quentin, having come the first time when he was nineteen, and he sometimes felt as if he’d been born there. If he’d ever conceived eighteen years ago that he’d be in the same place at thirty-seven, he would have killed himself—or so he thought sometimes. He was as comfortable as it was possible to be, and still he hated it.

  Weekdays, Earl Copen slept late, a luxury afforded by his job as clerk for the 4:00-p.m.-to-midnight lieutenant, a job he’d had for twelve years, except for two periods of freedom, one lasting nine months, the other twenty-one months. The earlier years had been spent walking the yard or in segregation. On Saturdays during football season he got up early and went to the yard to pick up football parlay tickets from his runners. It was profitable and passed the autumn and early winter.

  He came out of the North cellhouse in the breakfast line, following the denimed convict in front of him along the twin white lines under the high corrugated weather shed. Outside of it, crowded together on the pitted wet asphalt, were legions of sea gulls and pigeons. When the convicts filled the rectangle of the big yard, the sea gulls would circle overhead or perch on the edges of the giant cellhouses. Or fly over en masse and shit on everyone.

  The two mess halls were inadequate to feed the four thousand convicts from the four cellhouses at the same time, so the North and West honor units ate first. They could return to the cellhouses where the gates were kept open while the other cellhouses ate, or they could stay on the yard, waiting for the gate to the rest of the vast prison to open at 8:00 a.m.

  Earl removed his knitted cap as he stepped through the door, exposing his shaved and oiled head. He checked a stainless-steel tray for cleanliness, found it satisfactory, and dragged it along the serving line. A cold fried egg, burned on the bottom and raw on top, flopped onto the tray; then a dipper of grits. He pulled the tray back so the server couldn’t give him the bitter dry fruit, but took a piece of stale bread. The convict servers slopped the food on without worrying whether it spread into two compartments. Years ago this had infuriated Earl, and he’d once spit in a man’s face for doing it, but now he was indifferent. Nor did he pay attention to the food except when it was inedible. Usually the menu was forgotten by the time he was picking his teeth.

  All the convicts sat facing the same direction at narrow tables in long rows, a hangover from the “silent” system. The tables hadn’t been replaced in this mess hall because it was also the auditorium and they faced the stage and screen. He head-jerked a greeting to a pair of Chicano cooks in dirty whites who were standing against a rear wall; then turned down an aisle. Blacks turned into one row, while whites and Chicanos turned into another. When their row filled before that of the blacks, they started another. Official segregation had ended a decade earlier; the regulations now said that convicts could enter any of three rows, but nobody crossed racial lines and nobody wanted to. Racism was a mass obsession that infected everyone, and there was continual race war. So the mess hall had a row of blacks, followed by two or three rows of whites and Chicanos, then another row of blacks.

  Earl gulped down the swill, mixing grits with the half-raw egg. The weak coffee was at least hot and took the morning taste of cigarettes from his mouth. He finished quickly and got up, carrying the tray. Inside the exit door sat a large garbage can beside a flat cart. Instead of banging the tray against the can to remove the garbage, and then stacking tray and utensils, he dropped everything into the can—cup, silverware, tray—in a token display that he was still a rebel.

  The coffee had loosened the night’s phlegm. Outside the door, he hacked and spat the goo on the asphalt and lit a bad-tasting cigarette.

  Most of the North cellhouse convicts were trudging back toward the open steel doors, a few throwing crumbs of bread to the fearless pigeons on the ground, while the sea gulls wheeled raucously overhead. When the convicts were gone, the sea gulls would drive off the pigeons and gobble whatever remained.

  The high cellhouses, their green paint streaked and stained, cut off the morning sun except for a narrow patch of yellow near the weather shed. The three dozen convicts who stayed out gravitated toward the meager warmth. Neither the ticket runners nor any of Earl’s close friends would be there. They lived in cellhouses just now being unlocked.

  Earl decided to wait in the warmth of the yard office until the mess halls emptied and he could take care of his business. The East Coast games started at 10:00 a.m., California time, and he had to have the tickets by then to avoid being past-posted. He turned toward the high-arched gate with the gun tower on top. The big vehicle gate had a smaller pedestrian gate. A midnight-to-morning guard, a newcomer Earl didn’t know, stood with a list of weekend workers who were allowed to pass through. Earl took out his identification card with “third watch clerk” under Scotch tape at its top. He held it forward and spoke before the guard could check the list. “I don’t think I’m on there, but I’m Lieutenant Seeman’s clerk and he wants me to do some typing.”

  “If you’re not on the list, I can’t let you through.”

  “I’m just going to the yard office down the road.”

  “If he needed some work done, he should’ve put you on the list.”

  “Look, Big Rand comes on duty in a few minutes. Let me go and I’ll have him call you to clear it.”

  The guard shook his head, his lip raised in a sneer. “Can’t hear you, buddy.”

  “Look, be logical—”

  “Logic don’t cut wind here.”

  “Okay, pal,” Earl said, turning away before he got into trouble. Eighteen years of prison had made him hate authority worse than when he was a rebellious child. And he was unaccustomed to scenes like this. He thought of having the guard transferred to Lieutenant Seeman’s evening shift by talking to the convict clerk of the personnel lieutenant; and then he would put the fool in a gun tower on the Bay for a year. Some guards had been around too long for such things, but this one was a fish and it would be easy. A year ago another fish had resented Earl’s roaming around at night and his obviously favored position. The guard had begun searching him and making him wait to get into his cell. When a vacancy came for a guard in “B” Section segregation, Seeman moved the fish into it. There the guard had to put up with the bedlam of two hundred and fifty screaming convicts who burned cells and threw shit and piss on passing guards. He learned that some convicts are more equal than others—that even though a convict couldn’t win a direct confrontation with a guard, when that convict had worked as a clerk for a supervisor for years, he had influence. Army clerks have the same indirect power.

  Knowing what he could do calmed Earl and made it unnecessary for him to follow through. He didn’t want to spend the currency of influence on something so trivial. Yet he would make sure he had a pass to get through the gate next weekend. He went toward the North cellhouse. His cell could stand a cleaning anyway.

  He passed through the first doors into the rotunda. Ahead was the locked entrance to the elevator to Death Row on a separate floor above the cellhouse. Earl turned left and went up the steel stairs to the fifth tier. The long climb several times a day was worth avoiding the evening noise from television sets and domino games. Now, however, it was quiet. Most convicts slept late on weekends.

  A gray-haired Chicano was pushing a broom on the landing at the end of the tier. A hooked nose and protruding eyes had given him the nickname Buzzard decades earlier, but it seemed wrong for a sixty-year-old man, so mos
t convicts shortened it to “Buzz.” As Earl arrived, Buzz beckoned, put the broom aside, and dug five battered packs of Camels from his pockets and a football ticket from his sock. “Preacher’s still asleep,” he said, “and I’m going to the handball court when the lower yard opens.”

  Earl nodded and put out his hand. He examined the ticket before pocketing it. Convicts sometimes marked that they were playing a carton and handed in a pack. If the ticket won, there was no gainsaying what it said. This ticket was okay. Earl dropped the cigarettes inside his shirt; then noticed that no other convicts were around.

  “Stand point a minute, will you Buzz? I wanna check a clavo.”

  “Sure, bro’.” He stood so he could watch the office five tiers below. “Make your move. You’ll get a lot of warning.”

  Behind the cells ran a passage filled with plumbing conduits. The padlock on the steel gate had been altered so Earl could open it with fingernail clippers. He stepped inside, took a few steps, and unscrewed a pipe that looked functional but had been bypassed. A cloth-wrapped bundle was stuffed within, and inside that was half a dozen long shivs. It was the first time in months that Earl had checked them. His friends had similiar stashes around the prison. Earl rescrewed the pipe and came out, patting Buzzard on the rump. “It’s okay. Gimme the key.”

  Buzzard brought the large spike key for the cells from a hip pocket and handed it over. Earl went to his cell and unlocked it; then slid the key along the tier back to Buzzard. In the cell, Earl took an empty gallon can from underneath the sink. The cells lacked hot water and the can was for that. Every cell had one, but by removing a tiny pin from the bottom of this one he could dump out the false bottom. Several twenty-dollar bills were flattened down. He would have to move them to a safer place this evening.

  He shaved, starting with the top of his head and working down to his jaw and chin. Then put oil on his skull and lotion on his face. Next he made the bed and swept the cell, and finally straightened up the shelves. They were shuttered with paintings of sunflowers. The cell was just four and a half feet wide and eleven feet long, but he had everything arranged for comfort. A thin glass-topped table was beside the bunk, and a tiny shelf with slots for cup and toothbrush was next to the sink. A shelf for books was on the wall between the top and bottom bunks, though he’d arranged through Lieutenant Seeman that nobody would be moved in.

  Two thousand convicts packed the yard by 8:30 a.m. Most of them sought the widening strip of sunlight. The blacks, however, congregated along the North cellhouse wall, an area nicknamed “Nairobi.” A decade of race wars had made it impossible to relax without a territorial imperative. Theirs caught the afternoon sun. Half a dozen guards with clubs stood around, reinforced by riflemen on catwalks suspended from the roof of the weather shed or attached to the outside of the North cellhouse.

  When Earl came out of the rotunda, he immediately turned left to avoid walking through several hundred blacks. The last racial killings had been six months before, but there was no use taking a chance for no purpose.

  He weaved through the crowd, looking for the runners who picked up tickets in the other cellhouses. He found them at the far end, near the canteen lines. The crowd provided cover as they handed him the rubber-band-wrapped bundles. Each one told him how much action was there, and the total was slightly over one hundred cartons, which was somewhat less than he’d expected for the last week of the regular season.

  When Earl started to walk away from the throng, someone touched his arm from behind. He turned to face his oldest friend, Paul Adams. Paul had already been to San Quentin once when Earl, who was waiting to come for the first time, met him in the county jail. Now Paul was the elder statesman of Earl’s “family.” Actually, Paul was just four years older than Earl, but white hair, potbelly, and time-worn face made him look a decade older than he was.

  “Where’s the Bobbsey twins?” Earl asked.

  “The twin maniacs. They’re down on the lower yard with Vito and Black Ernie. We got a hot one goin’—some fool named Gibbs has some narcotics and we’re plottin’ on ripping him off.”

  “Gibbs! Isn’t he that Hoosier with the crewcut in ‘A’ Section?”

  “That’s the dude.”

  “He’s slammed down. That’s restricted except for meal unlocks. How do we get to him?”

  “That’s what I came to find you for. Let’s go down and get to scheming.”

  “Can’t think of a better way to pass a boring Saturday in San Quentin.”

  The two convicts moved toward the yard gate, which had been opened to let the crowd pass to the lower recreation yard, to the handball courts and gym. The pair occasionally nodded to convicts they knew, or slapped someone on the back while passing. To the uninitiated observer, the yard looked like an anthill, but despite the sameness of the clothes—and the fact that they’d all been convicted of a crime—there was infinite variety and conflict. Indeed, sometimes murderous hatreds smoldered for years like hot coals beneath cool ashes, flaming into murder at some small provocation, or when the balance of power shifted. So although Earl was at home, it was in the way that the jungle animal is at home—cautiously. He had no enemies here who posed a threat, at least none that he knew, though some might have been threats if he didn’t have the affection of the most influential members of the most powerful white gang, and friendship with the leaders of the most powerful Chicano gang. Of course that marked him in the eyes of the militant blacks—but it was better than being powerless.

  “You goin’ to the movie tonight, Paul?” Earl asked.

  “I was thinking about it. The flick’s supposed to be good.”

  “The Graduate, huh?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Paul also worked at night, one of the crew that hosed down the big yard after the evening count. It gave him the opportunity to enter the mess hall-auditorium early.

  “Save a row of seats,” Earl said. “I think I’ll go.”

  They passed through the arched gate and started down the long flight of worn concrete stairs. In the distance they could see an inlet of San Francisco Bay beyond the wall; and beyond the inlet the windshields of cars crowding a highway reflected the coldly bright morning sun. It might as well have been a thousand miles away.

  “I got a good book you might like,” Paul said. “At Play in the Fields of the Lord.”

  “Who wrote it?”

  “Some dude named Matthiessen. I never heard of him before, but it’s not bad.”

  “Bring it to the movie.”

  “I got another one you might like … but I haven’t got the patience to wade through it. Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man.”

  “Lemme try him, too. I’ve been hearing his name for about a year, but I’ve never read anything by him.”

  The vast lower recreation yard, in addition to a baseball diamond, handball courts, and full gymnasium, held the laundry and some shops in Quonset huts. The sunlight, which was blocked by the buildings in the big yard, shone bright here, but it gave little warmth.

  Some convicts were jogging the circle of the recreation field, while others gathered in clots here and there. The usual group of country boy singers were getting their guitars ready beneath the high wall, while the jazz group unlimbered instruments next to the laundry.

  The quartet that Earl and Paul sought was hunkered in a circle beside a Quonset hut: two Mexicans, Vito and Black Ernie, the first a close friend, the second merely okay; two whites, T.J. Wilkes and Bad Eye Wilson, both under thirty and physically dangerous with and without weapons. T.J. could stretch on a bench, legs straight, and lift five hundred pounds off his chest; Bad Eye did a thousand pushups and ran five miles every day. They were the most influential members of the Brotherhood, and they adored Earl and Paul.

  Long before the two older convicts were within earshot, Vito saw them, said something, and the others swiveled their heads to watch them approach. When Earl arrived, T.J. uncoiled and squeezed an arm around Earl’s shoulders. “Sit on down here, boy,” he said
, “an’ help us scheme on gettin’ them narcotics.”

  “How much has he got?” Earl asked.

  Black Ernie answered, “Half a piece. It come in on a visit a couple days ago and he kept it cool, just selling to some dudes over in the South block.”

  “He won’t have half an ounce now,” Earl said.

  “He’s got a couple, three grams left,” Paul said. “When Ernie told us, we sent a runner in to see if we could buy some … told him we had a couple hundred dollars. He sent word that was just what he had and to send the money in.”

  “An’ that, folks, is just where we are now,” T.J. said.

  Earl grinned, his hard-angled face turning warm. “So okay. I know you motherfuckers had a reason to send for me. What is it?”

  “Ah, brother,” T.J. said, “you’d have gotten fixed if you all was layin’ in the hospital with a broken dick.” He hugged Earl again, and although the older man was an inch taller and weighed one hundred and ninety pounds, he felt like a rag doll in the grip of a grizzly bear.

  “I believe that,” Earl said, “but in the heat of a scheme you didn’t call my name just because you love me.”

  “Hunch on down here,” Bad Eye said. “We’ll run it to you. Ernie brought it to us because it’s a white boy … and the motherfucker didn’t throw us our end. We’re the motherfuckers that be fightin’ when the rugs start wasting people around here.” Bad Eye’s face was flushed and he was blinking rapidly, a mannerism of his whenever he was angry, and he tended to anger whenever the clique was into something tense.

  “We’ve got to get him out of the cellhouse,” Paul said. “We can’t get in there. One of us might sneak in, but it’s a restricted section and this crew here carries too much heat.”

  “You want me to get him out?” Earl said.

  “You can do it,” Bad Eye said. “You’re the juice man around this camp.”

  “Uh-huh … And what if you crazy motherfuckers kill him!”