“So okay … he’s not locked up, is he? But the associate warden doesn’t need much evidence to get him … and the others.”
When the big yard was crowded with lunch lines, Bad Eye came up to Earl and Paul. Seconds later, Ernie appeared out of the throng. When Bad Eye heard the story, he expressed fury at the “stinkin’, lyin’, stool-pigeon punk,” and vowed to make sure something happened to Gibbs wherever he was sent. Earl kept silent, planning to talk sense to his friend when he was calmer. Bad Eye had come to San Quentin eight years earlier, when he was eighteen, for a ninety-dollar gas-station robbery, but instead of becoming mature, he was wilder, like a bull enraged by pain. “Fuck,” Bad Eye said. “Another bust and I’ll never get a parole. I wish I could escape. Earl, help me bust outta here.”
“You’re gonna get a parole next year. This is going to be okay. Just hold your temper and be patient.”
“I didn’t blow it,” Bad Eye said, pointedly looking down rather than at Ernie. He hadn’t greeted Ernie when the latter joined the group.
Ernie’s earlier toughness was now diluted by fear of the possible lockup. He nagged with questions about Kittredge, whom he didn’t know. Earl reassured him that he was safe, and hid his contempt. He detested falseness, and Ernie was a pussycat trying to be a leopard, though he would probably murder someone from behind if he had ten-to-one odds. To get rid of the man, Earl advised him to go to his cell so he wouldn’t be seen with them.
Bad Eye went to tell T.J. what was happening, so Earl and Paul found themselves pacing the length of the yard alone. Walking in this fashion was a habit of years. Friends would gather if they stood in one place, but if they kept moving, they were left alone. Earl’s and Paul’s friendship had begun eighteen years ago in the county jail when Earl was going to prison for the first time and Paul for the second. Now Paul was on his fifth term, and where he had once been slim and dark-haired, he was now fat and gray. They knew each other’s faults, but this didn’t mar their friendship; sometimes they argued heatedly, but without lasting rancor.
“Well, brother,” Earl said dolefully, “we’re having another wonderful day in jail.”
“Yeah … no work and no taxes and plenty of excitement. If we didn’t have some wrong to do now and then we’d lose all our initiative. This one got fucked up good.”
“It looks like we skated. You’d better start cooling it; you could get a play from the parole board next appearance.”
“I was thinking that when I saw Kittredge looking at us. A nickel should be enough for car theft.”
“Hold it! You weren’t just joyriding. They found a ski mask and there ain’t no snow in L.A., plus some gloves … and a pistol. You should get a parole, but don’t rationalize so close to home. I know you.”
Paul laughed. “It’s still just a car theft.”
“Yeah, I figure I’ve got two or three left, depending on how politics are. Nine years is a long time, even if you say it fast. The trouble with being a criminal is that you get two bad breaks—mistake, luck, whatever—and you’ve blown a couple of decades. I’ll be nearly forty when I get out and what else can I do to catch up except put a hacksaw blade to a shotgun and run off into a bank or something?”
They walked a lap in silence. Usually Earl contracted his world to what was within the walls. Excessive fretting about the outside drove men insane. He cut himself off from everyone he knew outside because they could do nothing for him except make his time worse than it was. If he counted on them, he would be disillusioned, for after a few years in prison, you were as forgotten as a man in a coffin under the earth. During his first term, after matricu lating from reform school, he’d taken all the school courses available, graduating from high school and even getting a semester of college credits. He’d completed the vocational printing course, too. None of that had gotten him a job, nor had it made him feel comfortable except among the kinds of people he’d known all his life. He recognized that he was, indeed, a habitual criminal, with a metabolism that demanded he gamble his freedom, even his life, for real freedom—freedom from a life of quiet desperation. He would get one more chance, and he would take it. He’d gone too far and lost too much to quit the game now.
“When is that dope bag due?” Paul asked.
“Maybe this week. We’ll know when the mule gets a visit tomorrow.”
“Dennis must be doing okay out there.”
“He always makes money and he usually lasts a few years. He’s been out less than three months and he’s sent back about five grand worth of dope. A couple bags to Folsom, too. I sent word if he wanted some money and he said he’d freeze if I tried to pay him.”
“We can use it when it gets here. I owe Vito’s clique twenty papers.”
Earl laughed. “You’ve been sneakin’ around on me again.”
Paul answered with lips pursed into a cone and opened his very blue eyes in a parody of innocence. Responsibility of any kind was beyond him, but he was a good friend nonetheless. The one quality that mattered to Earl was loyalty. It outweighed a thousand other flaws. He gave it and he wanted it, and his close friends gave it to him and to each other.
As they approached the North cellhouse, they heard a brief roar of voices from within.
“That fuckin’ game,” Earl said. “All of ’em play the ticket, so I’d better see what’s happening with the scores—and make sure sleazy ass Preacher doesn’t run in a couple of bogus tickets with winners.”
“I’ll see you at the flick if I don’t see you after count.”
“Bring those books.”
Earl went in and took his seat. Preacher had a checklist of games on the ticket and scores, some partial, some final. Although Earl hadn’t checked each ticket, he had a good idea of how they ran. From the scores he could see that he was in no danger of being bombed out. He sat down to watch the game, knowing that nearly every ticket had picked Navy because they were a seventeen-point favorite and he’d listed it on the ticket at thirteen. Ten years of running a ticket told him that traditional rivalries often ended much closer than handicap form indicated. Navy was ahead by fourteen and he forgot Kittredge, Gibbs, and Seeman. Two minutes before the end Army scored, the convicts groaned, and there it ended. When Earl stood up in the front row, he faced the crowd, yelled “Hurrah,” and clenched his hands over his head. Most of them had lost a couple of packs, but not enough to bother them, so many laughed. Earl liked being known and respected, but moments later as he trudged up the steel stairs toward his cell, the thrill of winning disappeared. He’d won—a lot of tobacco.
At 4:20, when nearly all the convicts lined up in the yard and then returned to their cells for count, Earl went to the yard office. At count time it became a hangout for sergeants and lieutenants coming on and going off duty. Sometimes closed-door conferences were held in the back room, and Earl eavesdropped by going into the washroom, locking the door, and putting an ear to the wall. Today Hodges and a couple of sergeants were in the back room, but the conversation Earl wanted to hear was taking place fifty yards away, beside the plaza fish pond outside the chapel. Kittredge was talking and Lieutenant Bernard Seeman listened stolidly, nodding occasionally. Seeman was a heavy-shouldered man in his midfifties, starting to get a belly, and he wore his billed cap tilted to the side like a Navy man; he’d been a submarine bos’n for twenty years. Earl crossed his legs on the typewriter stand, seemingly uninterested while he watched through the window.
When the count cleared, a bell clanged from atop the building with the main gate. Before the tones died, convicts and guards spilled from the custody office across the plaza, the former heading toward the road to the mess halls, the latter making a beeline for the sallyport. The yard office disgorged all but one guard, and other guards hurried by in a stream, carrying coats and lunchboxes. Those with seniority counted the nearest cellhouses so they could get away a couple of minutes earlier.
Usually Earl went to eat early, but today he waited for the conversation to end and his boss to head towar
d the mess halls. Seeman stopped at the open Dutch doors. “You and your mob be over here after chow,” he said.
“Who’s that?”
“Bad Eye, T.J. Wilkes, and Vito Romero. There’s another one, but Kittredge doesn’t know who he is.”
“Then I sure don’t.”
Seeman smiled, his square weathered face showing good humor. “Hell, I didn’t think you did.”
“Somebody’ll have to clear ’em out of the cellhouses.”
Seeman leaned his head over the door and looked at the old man behind the desk. “Take care of that, Colonel, will you?”
“What time do you want them?”
“Six twenty is okay. Earl will tell you who.” The irascible Army retiree nodded, but his face expressed distaste at taking orders from a convict. The colonel was kept away from groups of convicts where his martinet tendencies could cause trouble.
At 6:20 in December it was dark, though the ubiquitous prison lights left few shadows.
“Close the door,” Seeman said.
Earl shut the door to the outer office and stood beside it. Vito was stiff in the chair across the desk, while T.J. and Bad Eye braced their rumps on window ledges. T.J. was at ease, but Bad Eye was wary and angry; he reacted to all unpleasantness with anger.
Seeman’s hat was off and his steely hair was pressed to his skull. “I’m not asking questions because I don’t need to hear any lies.” He looked around at their expressionless faces. “The story I heard seems pretty far out even for you desperadoes.” He took an envelope from the desk and dumped the red balloon on the green desk blotter. Earl was surprised. Regulations said that all contraband was to be placed in the associate warden’s evidence locker. Earl also felt the sliver of an evanescent idea, and in hindsight would realize he knew the truth at this moment.
Seeman looked at the balloon as if it were a crystal ball; then glanced up at Vito. “What’s it worth on the yard?”
Vito blushed, looked down, and tossed his shoulder. Seeman looked at each face, ending with Earl, who spoke: “Thought there weren’t gonna be any questions, boss.”
“Oops, that’s right. My apologies. Besides, I know Mr. Wilkes here doesn’t know about this.”
“All ah know ’bout is some white lightnin’,” T.J. said.
“Just an old country boy, huh?”
T.J.’s face lit up. “How’d you know, boss?”
Seeman’s pale eyes blossomed with laughter. “Okay, quit the bullshit,” he said. “I’ll talk.” He told them that he and Kittredge liked them, but other lieutenants and the associate warden didn’t, and they should think about getting out of prison instead of all this bullshit inside. He was going to let this go because if he locked them up, someone would kill Gibbs wherever he was sent. He wanted them to forget Gibbs if he forgot the situation. He didn’t expect an answer, but he’d watch what happened.
Earl liked Seeman, considered him a friend, though he would never dare admit it. Seeman gave him free run of the prison at night and never asked questions; in return, Earl made sure that all paperwork going to the administration was done correctly. But he knew that some of the license given tough white and Chicano convicts by certain other guards was because of the racial conflict. Blacks had killed several guards in the three tough prisons during the past two years, and guards who had once been mild bigots were now outright racists. Certain of them would frisk a white or Chicano convict, feel a shiv, and pass the man by. It was an unholy alliance, alien to all of Earl’s values. All his life the police had been his enemy, and if he had a political creed it included Marxism. People would never be equal, but the difference should be between a twenty-thousand-dollar home and a fifty-thousand-dollar home, not between a rat-infested hovel and a half-a-million-dollar estate. And the difference should be decided by ability. So he was inclined to the Left, which favored the oppressed blacks. On the other hand, here in San Quentin the guards, while searching cells, found poems describing the joy of bayoneting pregnant white women, and six years earlier, when the racial conflict had only involved small groups of Black Muslims versus Nazis, blacks had escalated matters by sweeping down a tier and indiscriminately stabbing every white man they saw. Now both sides did it whenever the war was renewed. There were huge gangs, and Earl, though not officially a member, had as much influence as anyone on the White Brotherhood, especially since T.J. and Bad Eye were its unofficial leaders.
Seeman, though hated by the black convicts, was not a racist. Rather, he was politically conservative; he saw the militant rhetoric of revolution, with its emphasis on Mao and Che, as a declaration of war on the United States.
It was an odd friendship—the former submarine bos’n who epitomized Middle America and the hard-core convict so ravaged by moral confusion that he believed in nothing except personal loyalty.
Lieutenant Seeman was still talking, and the convicts listened expressionlessly. All of them spoke the same language, but to these men moral abstractions were babble. He ended with a warning that they should rein in, that too many complaints were getting to the higher officials. He told them that if they had any problems, he would do all he could.
Nobody answered. If they wanted something, they would go through Earl, just as he would go through other clerks. Seeman stood up, put on his hat, and put the balloon back in the desk drawer.
Earl’s eyes widened when he saw that Seeman was leaving. Seeman was indirectly giving them the balloon. His eyes met Earl’s as he came around the desk to usher the others out. “Be cool, Earl,” he said. “You’re going to get out in a couple more years.”
As Seeman followed the convicts through the front office he told the colonel that he’d be at the movie. Ten minutes later, Earl followed, the balloon making a tiny bulge in his pants pocket.
Some December days in the San Francisco Bay area exhale pure spring, and this was one of them, a Monday between Christmas and the New Year. The sun had burned off the freezing morning fog, and although the lower recreation yard was still crisp, it was dazzlingly bright. Earl sat shirtless on the worn bleachers along the third base line, finishing a joint in the nearest thing to solitude the prison allowed. A red bandanna was tied around his forehead to keep the sweat from his eyes, though it had dried ten minutes after he left the handball court. A still soaked glove lay limp beside him, and his legs ached from the hard hour of exercise. He played poorly but loved the game. He couldn’t bring himself to jog or do calisthenics, because he quit the moment he began breathing hard, but when there was competition he kept going until his body screamed in protest and he had to bend at the waist to draw a good breath. Winter closed the handball courts for months at a time, so he played whenever they were open for a few hours. He sucked on the joint, muttering “dynamite shit” inanely, and the aches went away. He was reluctant to make the long trek to the big yard, and then five tiers to his cell to get a towel to shower with. “Too beautiful a day to be locked up,” he muttered, liking the bittersweet ache of longing for freedom. It told him that he was still human, still yearned for something more than being a convict. He still hoped …
He’d decided to follow Seeman’s advice and avoid trouble by avoiding the situations. He was keeping to his cell during the day, reading a lot, and when something happened, it was over before he heard about it. One of the Brotherhood had killed a man in the East cellhouse, and the next day during the lunch hour two Chicanos had ambushed a third and cut him up pretty bad. If he’d died, it would have tied the record of thirty-six murders in a year; the record for stabbings, one hundred and seven, had already been broken. T.J. and Bad Eye worked in the gym, and he saw them only at the night movie when the Brotherhood filled two rows of reserved benches. Earl would have come out during the day if heroin was on the yard, but the prison had been dry since he’d gotten an ounce three weeks earlier. Pot, acid, and mini-bennies were abundant—through the Hell’s Angels—but Earl was not interested. In a paranoia-laden atmosphere, he couldn’t risk being spaced out.
Earl did know
about a strike that was to happen the following morning, but it was known by everyone, including the warden. Someone had illegally used a mimeograph machine to run off thousands of copies of a bulletin calling on all convicts to either stay in their cells in the morning or not leave the big yard at work call. The first demand, an end or a modification of the indeterminate sentence—a term anywhere between a year and eternity until the parole board decided—was something Earl fiercely agreed with. It was the cruelest torture never to know how long imprisonment would last. And the demand that prison industry wages be raised above the present maximum of twelve cents an hour was also reasonable. But then the writer had turned irrational, demanding that all “Third World” people and “political prisoners” be released to the various People’s Republics. This absurdity would attract whatever coverage the press gave the strike and blunt any consideration thoughtful people might give to the other demands—not that many cared about what went on in prison. A strike was futile, yet at least it showed that the men had not surrenderded. It would bring a lockdown of everyone while the leaders were rounded up, clubbed, and segregated. “And I’d better go get some cigarettes, coffee, and food to last until the unlock. Four salami sandwiches a day won’t make it.”
As he stood up on the top row of bleachers, he saw two convicts climbing toward him at an angle. One was Tony Bork, a chunky young con who was the East cellhouse plumber, not a tough guy but personable and known as a “stand-up dude.” He had in tow a slender youth in the stiff, unwashed denim of a newcomer. Even without the clothes, Earl knew the youth hadn’t been long in San Quentin, for although he often saw faces for the first time after they’d been around for months, this one he would have remembered. He was too strikingly good looking and young looking, especially because of a clear, pale complexion set off by dark blue eyes that were serious but inexpressive. There was nothing effeminate about him, but there was an extreme boyishness that by prison standards would be considered pretty. Pretty was a bad thing to be in San Quentin.
The Animal Factory Page 5