“It looks funny,” I said. It didn’t seem right.
“He’s a big shot,” someone said.
That evening after supper the convicts in the dormitory went straight to the windows that looked obliquely toward the death house. I tried to start a poker game but no one was interested. Blocker said finally, “Come on, kid, let’s catch the show.”
I got up reluctantly and followed him. The windows were jammed. We tricked a con out of his place by telling him someone was breaking into his lockbox. It was an old gag but he went for it; he didn’t think we were the kind of fellows who would kid him.
“That’s her,” Blocker said.
From where I stood I could see the death house, etched in the twilight glow. I had looked out those windows a hundred times and had it in my sight each time, but I had never seen it before. It was a square, squat house of dull red brick about the size of a two-car garage. It seemed superimposed against the gray stone of the west wall. The guard turret, where Tap Spence and the Veeders brothers staged their midnight shooting spree, was outlined against the darkening sky. There was the end of the brick walk which led from the prison yard, where it was chopped abruptly off by a waist-high iron railing, and looking at it and at the green door to the right, I wondered, fleetingly, how a man would feel after walking the bitter half mile from death row to come to it. Then the twilight suddenly paled and the glare of the prison lights became more obvious. A group of noisy, chattering, well-dressed men came excitedly down the walk and entered through the green door.
“Who’re they?” I asked.
“Reporters, mostly,” someone replied.
“Did you see the warden?” another convict asked.
“Yeah, I saw the pig,” was the reply.
“I saw the doctor,” I said.
“Old horse ass.”
“They’re the witnesses,” Blocker said.
Later the purr of a motor sounded. I saw the black sheen of the hearse as it idled across the rough areaway outside the window. It turned, backed up to the green death-house door, and came to a stop. We had become very quiet in the dormitory. After a short time I heard a sullen whine, very faint, come from within the death house.
“Thar she blows!” someone said.
Into the silence I heard someone say, “Murder seems such a little thing when you’re doing it.” I looked around and recognized the moralist as Metz. I looked back at the death house.
The green door opened and a hand beckoned. Two men got down from the hearse and went around and opened the back and took out a wicker basket. They took the basket inside and after a moment they brought it out and shoved it back into the hearse. They got in and started the hearse and drove away. That was all there was to it. I could feel a vein throbbing quickly, steadily at my temple. I went back to the poker game and began dealing. “Come on, good gamblers,” I called.
Down at the lower end where the colored convicts bunked a voice was singing loudly: “Uncle Bud…Uncle Bud…Uncle Bud got ‘backer ain’ never been chewed; Uncle Bud got women ain’ never been screwed…Uncle Bud, Uncle Bud…”
13
IT WAS IN Lippy Mike’s poker game that I first noticed Metz. Three of the players had stayed for the last card but when the player, Frenchy Frank, bet two dollars and forty cents the third player turned down. Mike said, “I call it,” and Frenchy said, “Put it in the pot,” and Mike said, “Goddammit, I’m the dealer, I call it,” and Frenchy turned over his cards and threw them into the discard. Mike reached for the pot and Frenchy said, “Let’s see what you got,” and Mike said, “You don’t need to see it, you said I won it.” Frenchy said, “The hell I ain’t supposed to see it.” Mike shuffled in his hand and raked in the pot and said, “I’m taking it and if you don’t like it, bastard, you can pat your foot.”
Frenchy got up and walked away from the table and Metz said in an angry, intense voice, “Boy, you’re lucky, you’re lucky, man! You’re lucky…lucky!” shaking his head quickly, violently. “Lucky to be living…lucky someone hasn’t killed you…Boy, you’re lucky…lucky!”
It was then that I looked at him. He had a narrow, rather handsome, very reckless face with curly black hair cut GI fashion, and the arteries stood out in his large-fingered hands, jerking nervously on the table. There was a ragged scar down the middle of his forehead to the bridge of his nose and now, in his hot red face, it was livid like a jagged line of clotted blood; and as I watched it seemed to twitch as if it was a separate living entity from his face. I had never seen a man who seemed so completely ready either to kill or die.
Mike was looking at him too. “You’ve said it all,” Mike said. He seemed more cautious than afraid.
“What do you mean?” Metz challenged, in his clogged intense voice.
“I mean you’ve said it all.”
Metz looked at him, weighing the words, then passed it. He threw away his chips in the next pot, betting on nothing, then backed away from the table, looking at Mike, undecided, then turned away and went down to his bunk which was at the head of the aisle. Standing, he was tall and flat with the slight stoop that tall men seem to have, but none of the recklessness that was in his face and hands was in his body. There was an indication of rigid control in his body motions, as if his life had been repressed or severely disciplined.
The incident left me with a vague sense of letdown. I had hoped that he would try Mike. He seemed like a man who would be towering in his rages. After a time I quit also and cashed out and went over to see how Blocker was making out in our game. Mike hadn’t been open long and most of the play had gone to his game for the time being, making our game slow, so I left Blocker to hold it down and sauntered up to Metz’s bunk. He had an upper and he was sitting with his back against the frame, with his feet up on a newspaper spread over the blanket, reading a book.
“Say, your name’s Metz, isn’t it?” I asked.
He turned his head, then swung around to face me, dropping his feet over the edge of his bunk. “Hello, Monroe,” he said. “Yes, it is,” he added. “Why?” In repose his skin was whiter and he looked older, perhaps thirty-five.
“I just heard you talking to that starker, Mike,” I said. “You certainly told him right. He’s a lucky man to be living, as overbearing as he is.”
“You know,” he said, grinning apologetically, “when I see that fellow run over someone like that I get so angry I can’t see. I’d like to just take something and whip him to death.”
“He doesn’t do that outside,” I said. “He just does it in here because he knows he’s got protection.”
“You know, he’s the sort of fellow I despise.” His grin was one-sided and showed several gold crowns.
“He’ll get his some day,” I said.
“More than likely some little fellow whom he thinks is weak will be the one to kill him.”
“That’s just about the way it’ll happen,” I said. While he was rolling a cigarette I picked up the book he’d been reading. It was a textbook on short-story writing. “What you doing, studying short-story writing?”
“Yes, it’s rather interesting.”
“I was sort of under the impression that you had to be gifted to write short stories.”
“Maybe you’re right,” he said, “although the good doctor here seems to feel, unless I have misunderstood him, that he can teach you the art without your being gifted.”
“Maybe he can,” I conceded, grinning slowly.
“Oh, I don’t ever expect to really write any stories,” he said. “I’m a jeweler by profession. I’m just studying this for something to do. You know a fellow has to do something.”
“Damn right. I’d like to look it over sometime.”
“Sure, come on down and study it with me,” he invited. “I’d like to have you. Maybe we could get together and swap some ideas. You know, the most of these fellows are difficult to converse with. They’re so damned set in their opinions. It wouldn’t be so bad if they weren’t so damned ignorant too.”
“That’s the kind who’s the most positive,” I said. “I’m going to take you up on that writing course,” I said. “I’d like to know something about writing.”
“Sure, I’d be glad to have you.” That had been shortly after Thanksgiving.
I went down the next night and we ran through a few pages of the text and then we began talking about ourselves. Within a week or so we had developed a close companionship. It came out that he had owned a part interest in a jewelry store in Lake City from which he received a comfortable income, but he had been unfortunate enough in marrying a slut by whom he had a child and whom afterward he had killed. If it had not been for the child he would simply have divorced her.
However, the details of his crime did not come from him, they came from other convicts whom I talked to about him. He seldom spoke of his home life, and never of the woman he had killed. The way it was told to me is that one night he saw his wife riding down Western Parkway in a taxi with another man, kissing him in the taxi, after she had told him that she was going to visit her sisters. He’d gone home and got his pistol and begun searching for her. He was in a taxi also and he had his driver drive up one street and down another, intending to comb the entire city. Finally he had run across his wife and the man, getting into a taxi in front of a restaurant in the shopping center at Western Parkway and Grand Avenue. They were headed in the opposite direction. He had his driver turn around and overtake them down near the Christian Science chapel, not far from the Grand Avenue precinct station. He had leaned from the window of his taxi, aimed the pistol at his wife, and shot her dead. His attorneys had gotten the case down to manslaughter, and he’d been sentenced to seven to twenty years. At that time he’d been in prison three years.
Our companionship was strangely separate from all my other prison activities. Although Blocker and I were still running our poker game and Mal and I were still good cousins, the companionship between Metz and myself did not include either of them, nor the poker game, nor any other phase of prison activity. It was as if we were members of the same club and had discovered a common interest in chess and conversation.
Blocker used to stop by Metz’s bunk sometimes and ask, “How’re you and the professor doing, kid?”
And Metz would say, “I guess you’re cheating everybody’s eye teeth out, Blocker.”
“You better come down and let me get some of you, professor,” Blocker would say.
Metz would shake his head. “No, you’re too slick for me. You know, I never gamble with a man with fingernails as long as yours. You might not be slick, in fact you might even be a square—”
“I am,” Blocker would cut him off, winking at me. “You can trim me. I ain’t nothing but a square.”
“No, sir, any man who has fingernails as long as yours, I let them go.”
They were all right with each other. Neither of them ever said anything disparaging of the other that I knew of. But they had nothing in common except gambling and Metz had just about quit gambling after his flare-up in Lippy Mike’s game. On the other hand, Mal didn’t seem to care so much for the idea. “Are you still fooling around with that short-story writing?” he would ask.
“Sure, I like it. I think it’s interesting.”
“That guy can’t teach you anything. He doesn’t even know as much as you do.”
“He’s not teaching me anything. I’m just taking a course with him.”
“I’ll bet before it’s done with he’ll want you to help pay for it.”
“Aw, you’re nuts!”
But we kept right on with it all through the winter. It was more the companionship of Metz than the course in short-story writing that interested me. His conversation was a relief from the stale, monotonous babble of the prison. I’d get away from that when we talked. I’d get away from all the sex. I’d get away from all those fags that had leaned on me, surrounded me; and those would-be wolves who had kept shooting at me on the sly, long after they’d concluded that I wouldn’t go. Metz was the first really decent fellow whom I had met in prison, although Blocker was my only true friend. After Mal had moved away from the coal company, that first month I was in prison, I had never really liked him. But it was as if he had come to be my responsibility. In some strange way I’d gotten to feel I had to support him, keep him supplied with things he needed, give him money and time. But I liked to talk to Metz.
Almost any subject that came into the conversation was enough for us to argue about. He was so intense in his assertions that many times, knowing I was wrong, I would argue for the sheer delight of trying to outwit him. And because he was a very reasonable fellow I would often convince him of the logic of my viewpoint when I wasn’t even convinced of it myself. He was always quick to see the other fellow’s point and that made our arguments interesting, without rancor.
Neither of us, it came out, was religious. But Metz claimed to be an atheist. I told him that I didn’t believe it possible to be an atheist and he said, why, and I said because I didn’t believe any man could live without believing in some force superior to the human being, and he said there wasn’t anything superior to the human being, that it was the human being who created the God.
And I said, “I believe that, all right. And I believe, in addition, that each person who believes in a God has a separate individual God of his own.”
“Do you believe in an afterlife?” he asked.
“Not for me,” I said, “because I don’t believe in it. But I believe if a man did believe sincerely in an afterlife that his belief would create an afterlife. I believe that this life and God and religion and an afterlife, and everything, exists only in the belief that it exists; and if one believes in an afterlife, as he believes that he is living in this life, that for him there will be an afterlife. I believe that the only time anything comes to an end is when belief in its existence comes to an end, and I believe that life and the world will only exist for persons as long as their belief that it exists, exists. I don’t know whether I’m very clear,” I said.
“Oh, I understand what you mean,” he said. “It is your opinion that things only exist in belief.”
“Yes, that’s it. For us humans, I mean. I don’t think it is like that for everything. I think that is why humans are given the power to believe or reject. I believe that afterlife is like flying—as long as people believed they couldn’t fly they couldn’t fly, but when they believed they could fly they did.”
“What about a person flying like a bird without the aid of machinery?” he asked, grinning. “Do you believe that a man with sufficient faith could go up to the top of a building and jump off and begin flying like a bird?”
“I do,” I said solemnly. “I believe that if a person could believe he could fly he wouldn’t need any building but could fly up from the ground. But I’ll never believe that a person can believe that until some person does believe and does fly and I see him and then—” I added, grinning, “I might not even believe it.”
“I see what you mean,” he said. “But that doesn’t give me any argument.”
“That’s it,” I said.
Or we’d argue about sex perversion in prison. He contended that it was unnecessary and spiritually and morally injurious to those who participated in it. He would begin upon the premise that any form of perverted sex was both physically and spiritually degrading, and I’d say, just to make an argument, “They tell me that married people do everything; they say that’s part of the sex act itself.”
And he’d grin and say, “But these convicts aren’t married.”
And I’d grin and say, “Don’t be too sure about that.”
Once I said, “You’re right, of course, but I’m not as positive in my judgment as I was when I came in. I suppose I’ve changed a little.”
“You don’t want to change too much,” he said, looking at me.
14
I HAD GOTTEN TO the place where I left the greater part of the running of our poker game to Blocker. Almost every
evening after supper found me perched atop Metz’s bunk, feeling him out for a discussion.
We were sitting there that Easter Monday evening, talking about the fatalism of Omar Khayyam. “You know, I like the sound of his work as well, if not better, than the content,” he grinned. “Listen to this: Then to the Lip of this poor earthen Urn I lean’d, the Secret of my Life to learn: And Lip to Lip it murmur’d—While you live, Drink!—for, once dead, you never shall return.’”
“Look, there’s a fire in the 10&11 block!” someone yelled.
We sauntered over to the window. At first there was no great excitement. “Hell, what’s to burn over there? They’re still working on that block.”
“There’s all that wooden scaffolding and stuff where they’re pouring the concrete.”
“Let her burn. There ain’t nobody in there.”
“And the 7&8 block is fireproof.”
“Fireproof and every other kind of proof.”
“There ain’t nothing to burn in that 7&8 block but the convicts.”
From the dormitory window we could see the north end of the 7&8 cell house. As we watched, talking and excited, the smoke thickened, rolled up from the roof, came out of the windows. Behind the smoke the sun set, red and majestic. Fire trucks came in through the stockade. We could hear the clang of the bells, the motor roar. We could see convicts beginning to run across the yard. Negro convicts came running from the coal company in a sudden surge, carrying blankets in their arms. Then white convicts came running from the dining-room company, around the corner of the dining room, cutting across the yard toward the burning cell house. Guards came running. Everyone was running. In all that mob that passed before our view I did not see a single person walking. Excitement ate into us, watching from the window, gutted our control.
“That’s bad!” someone said. “That’s bad! That’s too much smoke!”
Someone else said, “Goddammit, I’m going out! My brother’s in 5-8. I’m going out! Everybody else is already out. I’m going out, goddammit, I’m going out!” He broke away from the jam and ran toward the door.
Cast the First Stone Page 15