Hard Rain Falling

by Don Carpenter

  “That’s the best we can do,” Costigan said. “I’m awfully goddam sorry.”

  “I don’t give a shit,” Jack said. He was empty. He had been empty since the assault against McHenry. For once, everything ran smoothly. He was tried before the judge, waived the waiting period, and was sentenced at the same time. The next day he left by station wagon for Chino, chained up in the back, leaving Balboa County the same way he had entered it, only with two uniformed deputies instead of two detectives. Both of the deputies were taking courses in criminology at San Jose State, and had requested the assignment because they wanted to see the center at Chino. They were going to write a paper about it.

  Eleven

  The heavy leather belt tight around his waist buckled in the back. The chain of his handcuffs passed through two steel-reinforced holes in the front of the belt, and he could not move either hand more than a few inches. When he wanted to smoke a cigarette he had to bend his head down to his hands to take a puff, and of course one of the guards had to give him the cigarette and light it. Passed through the handcuff chains was another chain leading down to his leg-irons, which were clamped onto his ankles in such a way that he could move his feet only enough to shuffle; and the connecting chain was too short to allow him to stand erect. He and the other two hard cases had to be helped onto the bus, along with the others who were making the trip from the center at Chino to their final destination at San Quentin.

  The three hard cases sat right in front, under the eyes of two riot guns. The window next to the driver was open, and the hot wind blew into Jack’s face; but it was better than no air at all. He sucked it into his lungs as if it was to be the last air he would breathe; he had never forgotten the feeling of suffocation that would overcome him sometimes in the hole, and he could see nothing in the future but an endless repetition of the hole. He had the answer to all his questions now. He knew what he loved. He loved freedom, and this long bus ride was going to be his last chance to sense it, to use his eyes and ears and lungs on the world, the real world, before he was locked again in endless darkness. He did not feel sorry for himself. He was too busy trying to draw the world into himself, trying to be there.

  The hard case sitting next to Jack muttered and cursed throughout the hot valley morning, his chin on his chest, his eyes shut. He was completely crazy. He was about forty years old and had been a Certified Public Accountant and a Notary Public. One night about three months before, he had come home from his office and gone into the kitchen and gotten a butcher knife, gone in to where his invalid wife was sleeping, and stabbed her more than three hundred times. Then he dragged the body out the side door and stuffed it into the trunk of the car and drove off. Several neighbors saw him and had called the police even before he left the neighborhood. He drove around with the body for hours before they finally got him. He had appeared rational at the trial, and did not break down until later. Everyone at the Chino center was afraid of him, even though he behaved rationally in front of the authorities until time to leave for San Quentin, and then he broke down again. The other hard case sat behind Jack in a seat by himself. He was a Negro, like most of the other passengers. He had the tab on his file because he had resisted arrest and tried to break out of the country jail. He was going up for ten years for armed robbery. These three were the ones the guards watched.

  When the bus stopped at a small roadside diner, the sun blistering overhead, the prisoners were taken in shifts to eat and go to the toilet, and while this was going on the three hard cases were made to get out of the bus and lie face down in the ditch beside the highway, with the guards taking turns standing over them holding a riot gun. Jack lay face down in the ditch for over an hour, the sun burning his skull, the gravel hard against his cheek, thoughtless again, his mind and senses cleared of all obstructions; the nerves alive and waiting for the guards, the State, the authorities, to make one tiny mistake, open one tiny crack through which he could burst; not escape, that was impossible and unimportant; no, burst, destroy, kill, show them he had no limits and they would have either to break him or kill him, and the only way they could break him would be to kill him and he knew they, it, did not have the courage to do that, and he did. Waiting, then, for a tiny slipup, perhaps a softness in one of the guards, a momentary weakness or a careless mistake, the riot gun slipped a little too close while the guard lights a cigarette. They were all one to Jack. He knew the rules now. They wouldn’t kill him unless he killed them. Then they would kill him. And he would not have to go back in the hole.

  Jack was very much afraid now of going to prison. He remembered the long endless moments of the approach of insanity in the hole; not the coming of relief in the form of delusion, but of cold wet terrifying madness, when nothing made sense and all illusions made him tremble with fear: all sounds made his body jerk, all dreams were awakened from in cold sweat and deadening dread of the unknown—madness, an eternity of fear. He could smell the gravel and feel it cutting into his cheek. The back of his head felt as if it was going to explode from the heat. He knew he had to move his head, turn over the other way. The smell of the gravel made him want to throw up, but he was frightened; if he threw up perhaps his intestines would come loose and hang out of his mouth. He was afraid that if he turned his head the guard would misunderstand and blow his head off; yet if he did not turn his head, raise it up, let the gravel sticking into him fall loose, he would go mad. Sweat trickled down and burned into his eyes. He was afraid to blink; they would see that and the butt of the riot gun would come down on the back of his head and spill his hot brains out over his hair and down into his eyes and he would surely go mad in that instant before death and die screaming; and remain screaming for eternity.

  They had to help him back into the bus anyway, but even if he had been unchained he could not have made it alone. One of the guards gave the hard cases sandwiches and coffee after the bus got started again, and Jack felt the old wolfish hunger swelling up inside him, and made himself sit still, the sandwich in his lap, the paper cup of hot coffee in his hand, until the feeling subsided. Then he began to eat. It was a tuna salad sandwich, full of bits of celery, and it tasted very good, but the back of his neck hurt from having to bend down to eat. And the coffee was even harder. He had to suck it up from the paper container because he could not get the proper angle on it to tilt the coffee into his mouth. He got only a few hot sips before he gave up and asked the guard for a cigarette.

  “Here you go, buddy,” the guard said. Jack left the cigarette in the corner of his mouth, blowing the smoke out his nose. He looked at the guard. A puffy, tired face. Even in his summer uniform the guard looked hot and tired. There were patches of sweat under his arms. Jack saw that his fingers on the riot gun were pressed white; so the man was tense. He had probably been tense all morning. In fact, Jack thought, the man was probably tense all the time he was at work. Probably every time he came to work a piece of whatever held him together disintegrated, vanished, and he would go home that much less than he had been. He would go home from work at night, the tension still stiff in his muscles, and have a drink of beer. Chino was hot; maybe the guard had a little patio out back of his house, where he had a canvas chair. He would take his can of beer out there, let himself down in the chair, and begin to drink, waiting. Maybe his wife would be out under the late sun, gardening. He would speak to her. She would straighten up, turn, smile. The glare would make it hard for him to see her smile, but he would know, and a little of it would slip away. It would take part of him with it, but it was worth it. Then he would remember that on the next day he had the run to San Quentin again. For a few seconds he would think about trading off. Or telephoning in sick. He would take another sip of beer, and then another. He would pull his hand away from the arm of the chair and light a cigarette. He would sigh, as if to clear his chest, but it wouldn’t work. His wife would sense that something was wrong, and she would suggest that they go to the drive-in movie that night with some friends. He would nod and notice that his t
eeth were pressed together, and he would put his hands on the muscles below his ears, rubbing them gently, trying to soften them. He would know that he ground his teeth in his sleep. His wife would have told him, and often when he took naps he would wake up with the sweet deathly taste of blood in his mouth. His face was puffy because he ate too much. Eating made him feel good. It was practically the only thing that did.

  Jack daydreamed all this; the guard merely sat, his fingers on the riot gun, and sweated. Every once in a while he looked out the window at the hazy valley, as if to catch a glimpse of the view. The guard probably loathed his job, Jack thought, but didn’t have the guts or the ambition to do anything about it. But then, maybe he had no choice. He didn’t look like the kind of man who would find work easily.

  “How long you been a guard?” Jack said.

  The guard’s eyes wavered on Jack for a moment. “No talking,” he said.

  Jack’s sympathy closed up. “But I have to take a piss,” he said.

  “Me too, man,” the hard case behind Jack said. “How about we taken a piss?”

  “Let’s all PISS!” Jack shouted. The words were hardly out of his mouth when he saw the gaping eye of the riot gun almost touching his nose. He giggled. “Shoot, fuckface.”

  The guard across the aisle swung his gun onto Jack. “Don’t pay him no mind,” he told the first guard. “If he smarts off, crack him one.”

  “Your mother sucks off niggers,” Jack informed the second guard.

  “Hey, man,” came a faint protest from behind.

  “Present company excepted,” Jack added.

  “Well, I don’t know if I like that,” the Negro said.

  “You guys shut up,” said the first guard.

  “Never mind,” said the second guard. “I pity these poor guys.”

  But the first guard still looked hurt. “You guys know the rules. No talking.”

  “And,” added the man behind Jack, “no pissin.”

  Jack got tired of the game. He lapsed into silence, and after a while the riot gun moved away from his face. He saw a smirk appear on the face of the second guard. He almost spoke. But it would have been useless; the second guard would think he had shut up out of fear, and nothing Jack said or did would change his mind, and anyway he was probably right. Jack decided the second guard was probably very happy in his work. That’s my revenge, he thought, to make him out a bastard. What about the driver? Bet he’s a bastard, too. The good guys are all chained up, and the bad guys have all the guns and salary. Hee hee.

  “What’er you grinnin about?” the second guard asked him.

  “Nothing. I was just plotting my escape.”

  “Take us with you,” the man behind him said, and there was an odd urgency in his voice. Then he giggled. “Oh, please, man, take us with you.”

  The second guard smiled. “Okay,” he said with a paternal gentleness.

  Throughout the whole day, the man next to Jack had been muttering and cursing.

  “Will you shut the fuck up?” Jack said to him finally. The man turned his eyes to Jack, and for a moment Jack was frightened by what he saw, an empty coldness in the eyes that seemed to go nowhere. Not dead eyes, but terribly alive and so out of place in that meek clerkly face. Jack turned away and watched the valley darken in the twilight. They were on the freeway now, among the afternoon traffic. He watched the cars surge around the old bus, almost all of them with only the driver and no passengers; hot, tired-looking men. Thousands of cars, thousands of men, free to drive home on the freeway in empty cars, and Jack envied them terribly.

  Twelve

  The Negro who had been sitting behind Jack on the bus wanted to go to prison even less than Jack. His name was Claymore. He was not a very hard case, even though he had held up a grocery store with a gun. But he kept trying to escape. When the police of Watts, California, came for him, he jumped out the back window of his apartment and they caught him in the alley with a twisted ankle. Then he tried to get out of the police car when it stopped at a red light. He did not offer the police any violent resistance, he just tried to get away. At the police station, handcuffed to one of the officers, he tried to sidle away from the desk, and when they jerked him back he said he wanted to go to the toilet. Claymore did not try to escape again until municipal court. He tried to walk out of the courtroom after being bound over for trial, and at the actual trial, three weeks later, he tried running. But that didn’t work, either. He tried to get out of the county jail three times, and once got as far as the elevator, but when the doors opened at the main floor they were waiting for him. There was nothing they could do but chain him up like an animal. They did so reluctantly, because he did not look at all dangerous.

  They had showers after their chains were removed, and sat in a corner of the gigantic dining hall in San Quentin, eating supper. “I just continually want out,” Claymore said to Jack. “Hell, I got ten years to do.”

  Jack was still in isolation when Claymore tried his first escape attempt from Quentin. He was missing for three days. He had been assigned to one of the factories and on his first day at work he vanished. Everyone was mystified. They found him near the end of the third day, stuffed up into a ventilating shaft. They put him in isolation for a while, and a couple of the counselors tried talking to him. They convinced him that it would just hurt his chances of early release if he kept trying to escape. He agreed with them and they sent him back to work. He worked for three weeks in the varnishing room of the furniture factory and then disappeared again and was not caught for well over a month. They got him in Colorado, in a stolen car. The authorities of two states and the Federal Government talked it over and the Federal Government said they could handle him, so they tried and convicted him of crossing a state line in a stolen car, and sentenced him to five years in Federal prison; after which he would be returned to California to serve the full ten years of his previous conviction. Because of his record, Claymore was sent finally to Alcatraz, and when the news of his capture and trial filtered back to San Quentin Claymore was already serving time only a few miles across the bay. Nobody ever escaped from The Rock.

  “That Claymore boy has a lot of heart,” Jack’s cellmate said. “But I do wish I knew how the hell he got out of here. Don’t you?”

  This cellmate was a Negro who refused to be classified as a Negro; his name was Billy Lancing, and he and Jack had known each other briefly several years before. When Jack got his job in the kitchen, Billy pulled some strings and they became cell partners. Billy looked different: his hair was paler red, his face sallower, and at one point in his career as a crossroader and pool hustler he had lost all his front teeth, which had been replaced with brilliantly white, obviously artificial teeth. To set them off, Billy had capped both his eyeteeth in gold, and all this gave his frequent grin a multicolored look. Otherwise he was much the same as Jack remembered him, small, narrow, giving the appearance of being in the last stages of tuberculosis.

  Jack did not know how to take him. Billy talked a lot, and Jack wanted to be let alone. There was something wrong with San Quentin, and he wanted time to think about it.

  “Can you figure it, man,” Billy continued. “He gets out of here and then gets caught in a stolen car. Surrounded by evidence! Man, if I ever get shut of this place I won’t spit on the street!” Billy laughed. His voice was high and soft, but his accenting was comical, almost a parody of how a Negro was supposed to talk. Of course, when he had been shucking the authorities about his racial background, he had been entirely white in his accenting and posture. The only things negroid about him, really, were his lips and nose, and he argued vehemently that this was surely not enough to make him eat and sleep with, as he phrased it, “a bunch of boogies.” When the authorities finally gave in, Billy collected twenty-eight packs of cigarettes from other inmates who had bet him at two-to-one odds he wouldn’t make it. He had no cell partner until Jack came.

  Jack’s placement in the kitchen instead of one of the factories came about in t
his way: When he first came in he was placed in isolation, “on the shelf,” until he was brought before a counselor. The counselor had not been wary with him, and did not pretend that he knew more about Jack than Jack did, which was an unusual experience right there, and made Jack begin to feel uneasy. And yet, the counselor was not a con-lover. Jack knew these: men and women—an enormous number of women—who were simply fascinated by institutional types. They were always showing up at the orphanage or the reform school, ostensibly to observe or even to help out, but actually, as far as Jack was concerned, to satisfy their urges, to look through the bars at the wild animals. They had a certain glassy look to their eyes which Jack recognized, and the trick was to spot these people and make them give you money or candy, or, at the reform school, get the men among them aside somehow and ask them if they had a bottle in the car and would they sneak it in. On visitor’s day at the reform school some of the boys would be given the job of handling the parking lot, and these would rifle the glove get the bottle, it would probably already be stolen. Jack imagined compartments, and when the sucker sneaked out to his car to these con-lovers liked the idea of being stolen from.

  But the counselor wasn’t one of these. He was a short round man with a pink face and delicate fingers, who looked as if he had a hangover. He looked through Jack’s institutional records, blinking wearily, and then smiled at Jack.

  “Well, how about it? What do you want to do here?”

  The question stunned Jack. Nobody had ever asked him before. He sat there and didn’t say anything. He felt very uneasy. The counselor talked on, about other matters of adjustment, and then came back. “Well, you’re here, and you’ll be here a while. Why waste the time? What do you want to accomplish?”