On the Yard

by Malcolm Braly

  Manning shuddered. The obscenity was as intolerable as the feel of slime. He closed his eyes, but the grotesque caricature immediately came to life in his mind, and the figures began to move in a slow grind of animal pleasure. The image seemed to tip as somehow his viewpoint altered and he became involved and once again saw Debbie’s soft young face turned aside on her pillow, her profile in places almost indistinguishable from the white cloth and in others chalked vividly against the black tangle of her long hair. He saw her eye-lids flutter and once again felt the first subtle shift of her hips beneath his own, and again, as he had that night, he gasped. After years of dullness a wave of fierce and masculine energy had trapped him like a rabbit in a snare and exposed him as an object of disgust and derision. He opened his eyes. No one was paying him any attention. Nunn was rolling a cigarette, his motions precise to the point of fussiness, and Henry Jackson was watching as if he were trying to memorize how it was done. Manning looked away and found himself staring at a tall, very thin boy who was drawing still another picture on the wall.

  Sheldon Wilson, sometimes called Stick because he was over six-foot-three and under one hundred and sixty pounds, was drawing the Vampire. The Vampire had the Devil’s hairline and nostrils round and dark as pennies. The fangs, drinking teeth soon to be set to the world’s soft throat, were blunt and functional as soda straws.

  Stick’s two followers, both with the title of General, watched their leader work. One was seventeen, the other eighteen. The younger had the round dull eyes and slack mouth of a borderline defective, while the older seemed only slightly brighter. Stick, in sharp contrast to his Generals, had an air of sullen keenness. A dark, mean look. His narrow face was shaped like a trowel, and his eyes, small and set close together, were the rivets that fixed the blade to the handle. He was nineteen, and before he was sixteen he had been expelled from several high schools. Twice for hitting teachers, both women, and a third time for breaking into the school at night to paint Fascist slogans in the hallways. He had also invaded the girls’ lavatory, broken open the sanitary pad dispenser, and scattered the pads. Following this incident a school psychologist characterized him as “seriously disturbed” and recommended treatment in an institutional setting, which Stick knew in plain words meant he should be stashed in some nut house, and, in his own phrase, he cooled it. He became quiet, withdrawn, and normal enough if one ignored the large swastikas on the cover of his binder. And he wasn’t the first boy to have found a kind of negative magic in this discredited symbol; in a way its banality was almost reassuring. Then the swastikas were replaced by the Vampire.

  The three of them, the Generals and Stick, comprised the total membership of the Vampires, an organization dedicated to world domination. They stood convicted of robbery, an attempt to levy tax for their treasury, which at the time of their arrest totaled three dollars and ten cents. The money was first held for evidence, then returned to the man they had robbed. They had spent ninety cents on cigarettes, candy bars, and a bottle of Royal Crown Cola.

  A key sounded, and Stick looked up from his drawing to watch a mild-looking deputy standing in the open courtroom door. The hands holding a clipboard were slender and well kept. Stick’s eyes narrowed scornfully. He stared at the black gloss of the deputy’s boots.

  “Henry Jackson?” the deputy called from a typewritten list.

  “Yessir, tha’s me.”

  “You’re first at bat, Henry. Take off your cap and come along.”

  Jackson snatched off his paint-stained golfer’s cap and stuck it in his back pocket. “Yessir,” he said again, this time with a hint of derisive broadness. He winked a yellowish eye and grinned over his shoulder at the men behind him. “Here we goes,” he said.

  “Play it Tom,” Nunn advised.

  “Oh, yes, I plays it Tom.”

  When the door closed behind the deputy and Henry Jackson, Stick turned back to his drawing and began to trace a hairline mustache on the Vampire like the one he wore himself, although his own was as much burnt match as it was whisker.

  The youngest General leaned over to whisper, “What you think they’re gunna do to us?” He looked at the door. “Out there?”

  “I told you not to worry about that.”

  “Yeah, I know, but I keep wondering—”

  Stick regarded his Generals calmly. “Does it matter?” he asked softly, his ear appreciatively tuned to the coolness of his voice. “Does it matter what they do?”

  “No, but I can’t help—”

  “That’s right,” Stick broke in. “It doesn’t matter. They get their licks in now. We get ours later.” He nodded with confident emphasis, and hooked his thumb at the door leading to the courtroom. “And these crud, and all the crud like them, will get scraped up in the street and shoved into the sewers.”

  The Generals nodded in hopeful agreement. For a moment they appeared as pleased as children who have been promised a favorite treat.

  Again the door opened. Henry Jackson stepped through, still smiling, though now his smile seemed numb.

  “What’d you get?” Nunn asked.

  “Well, I got enough,” Henry Jackson said, pulling a crushed and broken cigarette butt from his shirt pocket. He looked at the butt, saw it couldn’t be lit, and dropped it to the floor. “But not so much I cain’t hack it,” he continued. “Iffen the man figures he’s got it coming I guess I can do it.”

  “I guess you will do it,” Nunn said.

  “Ain’t no guessin to that, is there, pops? When the man sticks time to your ass you better be able to do it.”

  “You can hack it. You’ve worn out beefs before.”

  “That’s the troof.”

  Again the key sounded, and this time Stick heard the deputy calling their names. He stood up briskly and motioned the Generals into line behind him. They marched into the courtroom, but the martial and menacing effect Stick had planned failed when the youngest General was unable to keep in step. They lined up beneath the bench at attention, largely ignoring their parents seated in the first row beyond the rail. The lawyer hired by their parents made a brief speech, but Stick didn’t listen. He concentrated on the judge’s eyes. He wanted this judge to remember him as he intended to remember the judge. He knew his own eyes were charged with power, a cold power, and he drilled his icy strength into the judge’s brain until he could send his thoughts like commands ...

  —Let the Vampire go, he willed the judge to say.

  Then he heard the judge sentencing them to the state prison. His head jerked back as if the judge had hit him, and the youngest General was crying openly. Stick heard his mother calling his name in that same tearful whine he hated so much, and he ignored her now as he had so often before.

  Then the deputy was leading them back towards the bullpen and they followed him like stunned children, but when the door closed behind them, Stick pulled himself up tight, and told his troops to snap to. “Stop sniveling,” he told the youngest General. “So they send us up there—does that mean we have to stay?”

  And in Stick’s mind at this moment was born a curious hybrid, bred in part from his simplified re-creation of Napoleon’s triumphant return from St. Helena, mated with his recollections of the late-late show where Humphrey Bogart crouched in the shadows of a prison wall while the search-lights lashed around him like the tentacles of an enraged squid.

  Manning watched the other prisoners take their turn in the courtroom. A few won probation or short terms in the county jail, but most returned sentenced to state prison. He heard Nunn whistle softly and say, “That judge is savage. He’s killing people left and right.”

  “His woman holdin out on him,” Henry Jackson said. “No cock can sure make a man red-eyed.”

  “That’s right,” Nunn said. “He figures if he can’t get none, ain’t nobody going to get any.”

  Manning’s turn came, and he walked out into the bright sterile atmosphere of the courtroom with the sense of a diver returning to the surface after many hours in the dark
and murderous bottoms of the ocean. He scanned the seats and immediately saw his wife in the back row. He had neither seen her nor heard from her since the morning of the day she had reported him to the police. No visits or letters, nothing to indicate that she had realized her act had been as destructive as his own. Then he was close enough to see the set of her face. She had come for revenge.

  Manning’s lawyer joined him before the bench and began an unemotional plea for probation. Manning heard himself described as a “good citizen” with an “impressive service record.” Look at the judge, Manning told himself, but his gaze drifted away. His lawyer was continuing: “... crime of passion in the truest sense ... not his natural child.”

  The judge had removed his glasses and folded his hands. Manning, finally able to meet his eyes, saw they were narrowed in distaste.

  “Probation denied. In the opinion of this court the law doesn’t provide an adequate punishment for one who violates his own home and fouls his young like an animal. You should be altered by surgery.”

  Manning bowed his head, scalded with shame. The judge was rapidly repeating the legal formula sentencing him to prison. His lawyer was patting him on the shoulder, saying, “Sorry, Will, I thought we might squeak by.”

  “How long? How long is that?”

  “I’d have to check, but I think it’s one to fifty years.”

  “Fifty years!”

  “Don’t let the fifty scare you. You could be out in a year.”

  He turned to see the back of Pat’s tan coat as she passed through the swinging doors. Then the bailiff was motioning him back towards the bullpen. As he left the courtroom he found himself wondering if he would have to cancel his insurance.

  2

  TRANSPORTING convicted prisoners, now literally convicts, to the state prison is the responsibility of the sheriff, and the county had converted an old school bus into a prison van. Welded bars over the windows enclosed the driver in a separate cab, and the original orange-and-black had been repainted gray. Manning had occasionally noticed this van. It had seemed to move in a cloud, not of disgrace, or danger, but enveloped by a separate atmosphere. A stout gray bird of passage coming from one alien land, bound for another.

  Prisoners were transported in white coveralls, but it wasn’t until Manning stepped into the embarkation cage in the basement of the county jail and saw the stacks of coveralls that he remembered the men visible through the bus windows, all in white, orderly as Trappists. When he saw the piles of handcuffs and leg-irons he understood why they had been orderly.

  They were stripped, searched, and told to tag their civilian clothes. After they changed into the coveralls, the leg-irons were fastened to their ankles, and they were led out to the bus, which sat parked in an alley. The seats were filled from the rear and Manning found himself next to a window, sharing a seat with Jim Nunn. Henry Jackson was just in front of them.

  Manning looked out the window, but there was little to see. The bare brick side of the building that had held him for six weeks, and the even bright humps of parked cars. At the end of the block a woman crossed the mouth of the alley.

  “Goodbye, Mama,” Henry Jackson said.

  Two deputies worked down the aisle rapidly fastening the handcuffs, and when they finished they locked the door of the driver’s compartment behind them. The motor came to life.

  When it became apparent they were going to pass through the center of town, Manning hid his face in his hands. He didn’t want to be seen. But neither did he want to see. Still, in his mind he watched the familiar buildings, one by one, fall away behind.

  “Well, that’s it,” Nunn said, and Manning lifted his face from his hands to look at his seatmate.

  For the first time he realized how ill Nunn appeared. His bitter face was grayish, and took a clownish cast from his wide red mouth, but there was nothing of the clown in his eyes. He lifted his hands to look at the handcuffs, studying them with distaste. He made a wry noise and said to Manning in normal tones, “We haven’t left ourselves much, have we?”

  “No, I guess not.”

  “You get used to it.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “Dull,” Nunn replied without emphasis. “And that’s about it. If you’re not uncomfortable, you’re bored. No kicks. No broads. No dope. And no hope. Besides that the food’s bad.”

  “Can you study there? Take up something?”

  “You probably couldn’t find a better place. They have schools. You can take up a hobby.” Nunn smiled. “Like my hobby was smuggling dope.”

  “You’re not serious?”

  “Of course, I’m not serious.” Nunn leaned forward to Henry Jackson in the seat in front. “How’d you like a bag of that good smack?”

  Jackson turned, grinning. “Do rabbits like tender young peas? But to tell the troof, sport, I been messin with that charlotte. That stuff do burn your arm up. Make you look like vampires got aholt a you.”

  “That shit scares me. I keep thinking I’m going to go into some kind of madman act.”

  “You mos’ likely thinkin right. Your cap get pretty loose sometimes. Well, we ain’t gunna have no such worry for a while anyway.”

  “That’s a lock.”

  As the two men had been talking the bus had reached open country, and now they were passing a stretch of fenced pasture where a small herd of black-and-white cows were grazing. One looked up to watch the bus with a round and empty eye.

  Music began to come from a loudspeaker in the back corner. The song was one Manning had often heard Debbie playing in her bedroom.

  Stick and the Generals were singing along with the record. They seemed in a good mood and Manning supposed a kid could convince himself this was something of an adventure. He settled back and found himself listening to Henry Jackson describing his arrest for something he called “carpet game.”

  “See,” Henry was saying, “I knew I should of never played in my own neighborhood. I knew that. But I seen this chump and he looking fat, fat, and I knew I could play on him, so I shoots. Ask him did he want to juge a colored girl. Yeah, that’s what he wants. So I take him to the shitter at the Mae-and-Ida rooms, and tell him the girls get twenny.

  “Twenny! he says. He want to dick a little. Says he jus’ want to use it awhile, not buy it outright. I say, twenny the reg’lar price for high-class girls like these, and if you want to fuck get twenny outa your hide. Tight as he is I don’t think I get any backs at all, but he comes up with a twenny, and I go stand in the hall for a few minutes. Then I drives back on him and say, Now you bes’ to give up your hide till you gets done with the girl. I takes care of it for you. We been having trouble you johns getting robbed while you in the rooms. Given the house a bad name. So I bes’ take care of it for you until you finish.

  “Girl waitin, he ask? I say, oh, yeah, she waitin. She real fine. So he hands over his hide, better’n a hundred in it, and I tell him some door to go knock on and splits.

  “Well, that fool holler kidnap. Picks me out of the mug file. And they busts me right offen my own corner. Po-lice go to talkin kidnap, and I say, Stop right there, since when you callin carpet game kidnap. They say, Jackson, you got too much class to be no Murphy man, but you got real high kidnap potential. They made me sweat some, but I finally gets them to break it down to grand theft. I tole em I couldn’t build no kidnap time less’n they promised me I could live forever.”

  Manning noticed that Nunn was smiling, so he leaned over to ask, “What’s a hide?”

  “A billfold.”

  “I had something like that happen to me when I was in the Army. Only I was with the girl and the man came in an shook me down. Held a knife on me.”

  “That’s badger,” Nunn said. “Any fool with a broad can work that. The carpet game takes a schooled hustler. He makes everything up as he goes along. It’s an art. He’s got nothing but a place to stand, a hand to reach with, and a mouth to say ‘Gimme.’”

  “It’s interesting,” Manning said, hoping
his tone didn’t suggest patronage. He sensed that it wouldn’t be wise to have yourself considered a snob. Particularly since he had already formed the definite impression that most of these men would consider themselves superior to him simply because of the nature of his crime. He had been surprised to find Nunn so cordial, but then Nunn’s present mood was as somber as he had known him to be during all the weeks in jail. Everyone was quiet. The radio had moved on to an older and softer tune. The boys were no longer singing.

  Stick was on a private trip. His eyes were closed, but he was awake and on the infinite screen of his inner eyes another reality had formed in which the bus was rolling through wilderness country. It had been miles since they had passed a building of any sort, and the only thing, other than the road, recalling civilization was the telephone line, a single black thread scalloped from pole to pole.

  Stick followed the wire where it shimmered against the intense blue of the sky, and when he noted the pattern broken up ahead, the cut line dangling impotently against the pole, he permitted himself a slight smile. Around the next turn the road was blocked by a large black tank. The bus braked and swerved, stopping inches from the massive treads. The bleak muzzle of the 20-mm turret cannon swiveled to cover the driver of the prison van. A soldier, black-uniformed, jumped from the hatch carrying a Sten gun. He wore the Vampire shoulder patch. Vampire insignia were painted on the side of the tank.

  The soldier ran to the bus door, attached a shaped thermite charge to the lock, shielded his eyes at the brief flash of intense blue light, and was as quickly moving through the door, his gun at ready.

  —We intend to free our leader, the soldier announced to the deputies. Are you permitted to surrender or must I shoot you?

  —I’ve got a family, the gun bull said.

  —My mother, the driver added.

  The soldier caught sight of Stick. Instantly he shifted his gun to make a Roman salute.

  —You’re delivered, Vampire.

  The other prisoners were looking around anxiously to see who it was the soldier had addressed, and Stick, with a sense of timing he had never managed in real life, paused for three beats before he stood up and casually returned the salute.