by Gores
Come Morning
Joe Gores
1986 this book is for
DORI
my wife, my lover. my best friend,
the still point in my turning world
CHAPTER 1
It was raining in Portland. It was always raining in Portland, thought Big Art Elliott, unless Mt. St. Helens was dumping her crap in the streets. And sometimes even then. He jumped out of the Caddy Seville with its tucked-under tail--he always thought of a hound dog getting its butt kicked--and dodged through the rain into the branch post office. He was built like a bear, with features too juvenile for his jowly face. Only pale watchful eyes suggested his 41 years. A local newspaper headline in the lobby coin box caught his eye: UNION OFFICIAL SUBPOENAED IN PENSION FUND PROBE. Yeah, tell us about it, he thought sourly. He had pushed a big rig for 14 years, he could give the fucking newspapers a few scoops himself. He'd moved to an inside job four years before, and his clothes showed it: roll-collar ivory shirt open three buttons, gold medallion glinting on his hairy chest, stacked-heel overthe-ankle boots to add three inches to his six-one.
There was a letter from Runyan in his box. Christ, Runyan! He stood at one of the tables reading it, water glinting in his thick curly brown hair and spotting the shoulders of his pinch-waist powder-blue sports jacket.
Dear Art,
I figured that if none of you ever heard from me again, it would be too soon. But here I am, right where Dolly and Ma and Sissy--maybe even you-always thought I'd end up. Prison.
State? Federal? Runyan, though his younger brother, had raised all sorts of hell after Pops had died, and had gone to Nam just to stay out of the Oregon state pen.
I'll be getting out in six weeks, and I'd like to see all of you again. If you don't want me to, just write and say so ...
Say if anyone wanted to see him again was what he meant, though he didn't say it. Ma. Sissy. Dolly.
Dolly, Art's busted marriage. Come home from a week on the road, ready for a good steak, a good screw, and 12 hours of sacktime, what'd he get? This is broke, that is broke, we need this, we need that ... So he got off the road, and when she found out he'd gotten a little something on the side--hell, what man wouldn't, given the chance?--she'd just walked off. With damn near everything he owned.
Art looked out into the rain, remembering, considering.
***
Of course during his seven years at San Quentin, Runyan had considered what it would be like to have visitors, everyone in the joint did. The call on the loudspeaker, the trek across the yard, the familiar face, the welcome smile. But his first had been only three months ago, with a call to the prison library where he made three dollars a day as a clerk.
He had barely entered the unfamiliar visitors' room when a voice had called his name.
"Runyan. In here."
In one of the meshed cages, usually used by attorneys for conferences with their clients during visitors' hours, had been an unremarkable mid-forties man, with a smart jaded face for which the world no longer held surprises. His voice had been half-drowned in the multilingual, multiracial babble, edged with hysteria, of people trying to squeeze years into minutes.
"David Moyers, investigator for Homelife General Insurance. We carried the insurance on those stones you lifted, Runyan. I'm going to bat with the parole board and I'm going to get you out. A simple thank you will do."
"Which stones are those?" Runyan had asked.
"Yeah, they told me you were a hardnose. Never admitted taking them, though they had you cold. Okay. I know you have them stashed, Runyan. Everyone else thinks you do, but I know. I also know you're going to deal. You might not think it now, but you will. I'm your ticket out of here."
That had been three months ago. Since then, Moyers playing him, him playing Moyers. If he dealt the stones away before he got out, he never would. But until he was out, he couldn't know for sure whether he could deal with Moyers. So he led him on, fended him off, kept him interested, and it had worked: His parole had come through and here he was, five days and a get-up before release. But who was it today? Couldn't be Moyers; they'd talked just two days ago. Unless he was getting as edgy as Runyan was at the days marching inexorably to release date. Could that woman journalist have come back? The one who'd gotten a pass to come interview him for some book she was writing about ex-cons? He hadn't gone to meet her on the day she had shown up.
At the visitors' room he showed his I.D. and went through into the cold narrow room where prisoners were stripsearched before and after their visits.
"Okay Runyan, bend and spread 'em."
Dressed again, he was let through into the long crowded visitors' room. Instant bedlam, a terrific assault on prisonblanded senses.
Runyan checked out the attorneys' cages; no Moyers. He went all the way down the room through the throng, past the thick glass partitions where attorneys or friends could drop their ducats in the chute to talk with hard-timers from max security behind the glass. Still no Moyers.
He suddenly realized he hated visiting days: They showed you just how much you had deteriorated in the joint. A child crying in the playpen area was enough to prevent you from holding a train of thought. In the joint, things came at you one at a time. When the lights went out, the lights were out. You got beef on Wednesday, chicken on Sunday, a movie on Friday night.
But if he couldn't handle even this much change, how could he make it on the outside?
Suddenly up in front of him popped a big man in clothes a North Oakland pimp would have found gaudy. The man grabbed Runyan's hand and started shaking it while Runyan just gaped.
"For Chrissake, Art! I didn't expect ... You didn't have to..."
He'd almost forgotten he'd written Art, it had been right after he'd heard he was going to be paroled, he'd had to touch someone, anyone on the outside to make it real inside himself. But here was Art, grinning like a fool. The 30 pounds he'd picked up since Runyan had seen him last had given him a sleek seal look, softening his features and eroding the cut granite edges of his hard, blocky body. But by God, he still looked like a truck driver. Probably was.
"I was going to write," said Art, "but then I thought that after eight, nine years ... all the changes ..."
Runyan dragged him over to a table being vacated in front of the vending machines lining one wall. A tall, sad-looking black prisoner with three kids fed in coins for candy bars.
Art went on, "See, Sissy got herself married after ... got herself married and moved to Idaho ... Isn't easy for her to get back . . ."
"After what?"
Art ignored this. "And then Dolly, she found out I had a little something going on the side, and-"
"That wouldn't be the first time," said Runyan.
Art grinned his big sheepish grin. "But it was the last. She just fucking up and divorced me, Runyan, took everything except the house."
Runyan laughed and clapped his hands, once. "No way Ma'd let her take that."
Art cleared his throat and looked down at his big truck driver's paws. And Runyan, even though there'd been no voice calling, My son, My son, wind-blown through his sleep, knew exactly what Art was going to say.
"Shit, there ain't any easy way. Ma died three years ago."
Runyan drew a deep shuddering breath and made a vague gesture. "I should have known, when she didn't write or anything after I sent that letter to you ..."
Art was abruptly loud and blustery, as he always was when he didn't quite know what to say or do.
"Don't get the idea that you aren't welcome when you get out. I mean it, now. I'm not pushing a rig any more, I've got a desk job at the union ..." He slapped the roll of belly over his trousers top. "You're looking in great shape, but I'm just getting hog fat." He sto
od up abruptly. "I've got the old homestead and an apartment downtown Portland, lots of room, you need money, a ticket, anything, you just call. .."
Runyan went back for his strip search. His mother was dead and his sister didn't want to see him and Art's offer, while genuine enough, was more family than feeling. They'd never been close, Art was a talker and Runyan was a doer. Art had the strength and the size, but not the craziness.
Art hadn't ended up in the joint, either. And San Quentin's endless hours of empty routine, strictly observed, had leached away most of Runyan's craziness, too. Now all he wanted was OUT. And once he knew nothing was coming at him outside, he'd deal the diamonds away to Moyers and walk free.
CHAPTER 2
In his dream, Runyan was always dressed in black, watching the second hand of his watch climb to 12. At two a.m. precisely, he thumbed the brass latch of the loading door and pushed. No alarms went off. He slipped through, letting it ease shut behind him with a scarcely audible click. Jamie Cardwell was already taking his key out of the alarm reset beside the door as Runyan came through; he was Runyan's age, 30, but bulkier and slower in his guard's uniform with the Sam Browne belt and holster. Runyan grinned silently at him; a line of sweat stood on Jamie's full upper lip. Runyan started up the fire stairs as Cardwell continued down the hall only 18 seconds behind his ideal patrol schedule.
Runyan eased open the heavy metal fire door on Seven and gave a quick look up and down the deserted corridor. Five minutes before the other guard's round. The key Cardwell had given him unlocked the opaque glass door of Suite 729. Thick wires were criss-crossed in glass which bore the legend:
HIRAM & GATIAN SHERIDAN
GEMSTONES
Wholesale Only
Inside, he leaned against the door for a moment, having trouble breathing, with a heightened pulse and difficulty swallowing. He'd never worked with an inside man before; the adrenaline was really pumping.
Light from the street showed a lapidarian litter: hot box, small gemstone cleaner, polishing and grinding wheels, an oxyacetylene torch. Across the room, the squat old-fashioned floor safe behind the heavy wooden desk which must have last seen varnish in the 'thirties.
Just over three minutes left. Runyan began jerking out desk drawers and dumping them on the floor. The last one he carried empty to the window, where he used street light to letter R12-L10-R21-L6-R13 on the back with a felt-tipped marking pen. He dropped this drawer also, then waited. Right on time the uniformed shadow loomed up against the glass, the knob rattled, then the shadow and footsteps moved on.
He switched on the desk lamp, directed its light at the dial of the safe, then worked the same combination he had written on the back of the drawer. He jerked the handle to one side and swung back the ponderous door. After wiping sweat from his forehead with the tennis band on his wrist, he removed the velvet-lined trays. Those with unset gemstones he emptied into a black velvet bag taken from his pocket; the others he dumped on the floor.
The slim attache case beside the desk was a better way than his pocket to carry a couple of mil in uncut stones, so he put the velvet bag into it, left the light on and the safe gaping. Out in the hall, he took a short steel prybar out from under his sweater and jimmied open the door with it, leaving white splinters of wood around the jamb. He tossed in the prybar and left.
In the basement he crossed to the loading door, making an OK circle of thumb and forefinger to Jamie, grinning like an idiot. Despite his doubts it had gone like glass; he'd been inside just 17 minutes ...
It was at this point that Runyan always realized he was having a nightmare. Because Jamie's hand was coming up, not with the key to switch off the alarm, but with the snub-nose .38 from his already unflapped holster. There was terror in Jamie's face but murder in his hand.
Runyan, by reflex, was already swinging the attache case, already slamming his body up against the loading door release bar. The case knocked the gun aside for the first shot; as he went through the door, the alarm started clanging and Cardwell put the second round in his back.
Runyan yelled and arched away from the tremendous thudding blow of the slug, shredding a knee painfully on the cinderblock wall of his cell. Old-timers said a horny con could circumcise himself just by rolling over in his sleep.
He lay in the bunk for a few moments, panting, then swung his feet to the concrete floor, staggered to the sink, and splashed icy water on his face in the dark. His cell was one of the relatively few singles left in Q.
The eight-year-old memory had started recurring as a nightmare when his release date had been fixed. Had some inner mechanism suspended at 15-to-life begun operating again when he made parole? The organism preparing for change, getting ready for life on the outside? Ever since he'd been short, he'd had the feeling that somebody or something was out to get him, him personally, just because he was short. Not other prisoners: the system, the bureaucratic process, the impersonal finger.
Short? Christ, today was the day. Today. This day, this morning! He rested a forearm against the bars, pressed his forehead against it; corridor light laid vertical strips of shadow down his naked muscular body. His face felt as clenched as his fist. Today.
After nearly a minute, Runyan turned and in the dim light stared around the tiny stripped cell to which he had given seven years of his life. What did he really want, outside?
Was just to be outside enough?
No. He had to make sure he never came back here again, no matter what or who was waiting for him out there.
CHAPTER 3
Louise Graham examined her carefully wrought image in the motel room mirror. Recalling the Oscar Wilde character with the epigraph, she had a long 29, Louise shoved an impatient hand into her cold cream and smeared it all over her face to wipe out 20 minutes of makeup. Men were always telling her she was beautiful, but now, at 29, she couldn't see it. The narrow oval face had too strong a chin and faint permanent laugh lines at the corners of a mouth a shade too generous. Straight narrow nose, but too much flare at the nostrils. Good brow, though, and if she did say so herself, great eyes. A sensual face: She'd always known she looked like a great lay, but beautiful, no. Sophia Loren, that was beautiful. At 90 that woman would be beautiful.
Louise impatiently jerked back her shoulder-length black hair, tightly, severely, and flicked around two turns of elastic to keep it that way. There. Better. Add a pink man-tailored blouse and grey two-piece suit with grey pumps, big round sunglasses to mask the stunning almond-shaped emerald eyes, and she was ready. Repressed sexuality, all the fires banked, all the appetites controlled, that was the look for a surly, dangerous, angry man who hadn't touched a woman in eight years. Nor answered her letter, nor come to the visiting room on the day she'd suggested. She checked her watch. No other chance to catch him so vulnerable as today, when he emerged from San Quentin like butterfly from chrysalis, tender and fluttery and unprepared for the world into which he was being reborn.
Louise was halfway out the door when she stopped, went back, and shoved the pages of manuscript into an unlabeled manila folder. The story, written last night when she couldn't sleep, was the first fiction she'd tried in six or seven years. Apart from letters to her folks, of course.
***
When the automatic lock bar at the top of his cell door slid back, Runyan rolled, fully clothed, off his bunk for the last time. His cell was stripped except for him and his clothes; the day before he'd given away all the makeshift possessions which had crowded it, and the curtains, pieced together from fabric scraps scrounged from the upholstery shop, which had shielded him from the corridor. His shaving gear and the miniature chess set carved in the woodworking shop would be waiting with his civvies at Processing.
He had observed one other ritual the day before: flashing the ace from a deck of cards as he moved about, to let others know he had one day left. Turning the knife in those remaining, as it had been turned in him scores of times. At the same time giving a little hope--if he can make it, so can I. He crossed
the lower yard through weak morning sunshine to Processing--despair on the way in, hope on the way out. Seven years before he had been herded in here from a bus at gunpoint; only a prisoner who had served out his time, or made parole, could walk out. Everyone else rode--in a bus or a meat wagon.
"Runyan," he told the guard at the door.
The man had the cheery russet-tinged face of a beer drinker, but the face was totally without animation.
"LD." Runyan handed him the heat-sealed plastic yellow card with his name, face, and prison number on it. "Inside and strip."
The clothes Runyan stepped into were seven years out of date, but that was all right; so was he. It was like running a film backwards, a film which had lain in the vault unchanged for seven years while the world unrolled around it.
Accompanied by a guard, carrying his sheaf of release papers and his old yellow gym bag, he walked across the upper yard. Bright with grass and plantings, it might have been the plaza in some old California Mission town--except for the guard runway above, garnished with coils of barbed wire to discourage those hoping to leave on their own.
Getting closer to the outside skin of the prison was like coming up from a deep dive, the gloom around you turning progressively lighter, more delicate shades, as more and more sun filtered through, until you burst out with a huge WHOOSH of spent air. The final door was massive steel with iron latticework gates which could be clapped shut in case of a break.
One more check-out between him and the East Gate, beyond which the clock of time would start again. Here, no one was friendly, no one was hostile. They did this every day; Runyan would do it only once.
"Your check-out order, please."
Runyan handed the cheery-faced woman guard his papers as a Chicano prisoner drove a prison bus up to the high chainlink gate. She put the papers aside.
"Wait here a minute, I got to shake down this bus." Runyan's escort pawed through his gym bag while she looked inside the bus and into its engine compartment; the driver stood for her quick body frisk with his arms wide and his legs slightly apart, a blank look on his face. She came back and Runyan emptied his nearly empty pockets so she could shepherd him through the metal detector. It squealed.