On the Yard

by Malcolm Braly

  “You’re ungrateful, boy.”

  “Just go away.”

  “You telling me you don’t want these shoes?”

  “Please, just go away.”

  “Punk! Someone’s fucking you, boy, and old Slim’s going to find out who. Then you won’t talk so smart.”

  Lorin turned to face the rear of his cell and he continued to sit like that until Slim finally gave up and left. Then Lorin wrote a letter to the psych department and put it on his bars where it would be picked up with the evening mail. That night, for the first time in several years, he cried before he fell asleep.

  The next afternoon he was paged to the psych department. He was not surprised to be called so quickly. He knew his own psych jacket was coded red. Ordinarily, this was a source of amusement to Lorin, but now it had proved useful. He walked to the hospital, walking spread-legged to ease the rash that had developed at his crotch, and found Dr. Erlenmeyer waiting for him at the main desk.

  “Come into my office, Lorin, and we’ll talk this over.”

  “Thank you, Doctor.”

  They entered the small office and Erlenmeyer sat down behind the desk. On the wall above him a printed sign read: You don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it helps. Erlenmeyer removed his tinted glasses and rubbed his eyes with his thumb and his forefinger. He held his head thrown back as if he were about to take nose drops.

  “Are your eyes still bothering you?”

  “Things get no better, Lorin.” Erlenmeyer replaced his glasses. “Now, what exactly is troubling you?”

  Lorin told him about Sanitary Slim, leaving out only Slim’s repeated inferences that he was someone’s punk, and he was dismayed to see Erlenmeyer smile.

  “A textbook specimen,” Erlenmeyer said. “An anal retentive, of course, and a useful type generally speaking. A lot of the world’s more disagreeable work is done by people of this type. They’re frightened of disorder, dissolution, they equate dirt with sin, and they’re under a compulsion to keep things cleaned up.”

  “Are you trying to tell me he doesn’t want my shoes for some dirty reason?”

  “No, I’m trying to tell you that isn’t the way he sees it. In his strange fashion he’s trying to do something for you.”

  “I don’t accept that. Whatever it is he wants it’s for himself.”

  “That doesn’t make him much different than most people. How’ve you been otherwise, Lorin?”

  “All right, except for that animal outside my cell.”

  “Just ignore him,” Erlenmeyer suggested. “Or humor him a little if it doesn’t bother you too much.”

  Lorin shuddered, and Erlenmeyer noted this with a faint frown. “How are all your projects?” he asked.

  “Progressing satisfactorily.”

  “Are you still planning to herd all of us old folks into the gas chambers?”

  “Don’t mock me. I never suggested any such disposition. The matter will be settled by computer, since that is the only method by which we’ll arrive at an impartial solution, but, offhand, I would think you will be pensioned off, and resettled in colonies in some temperate and lightly populated country such as Brazil. Until the last of you die out.”

  “Like the dinosaurs?” Erlenmeyer asked with a faint smile.

  “Again you mock. But the simile is an apt one.”

  “Uh-huh. And how’s Rita?”

  Lorin blushed. Rita had reigned in his album before Diana, but she had betrayed him when she married one of her leading men. “Doctor,” he asked eagerly, “did you ever meet a girl named Diana Dolan?”

  “Dolan? Does she make films?”

  “Yes.”

  “Lorin, people such as myself have very little opportunity to socialize with movie stars. They move in a world of their own and it would be good for you to keep this in mind.”

  “I’ll meet her,” Lorin said firmly.

  “Well, I’m sure she’s very nice.”

  “She’s wonderful.”

  “Uh-huh ...”

  Lorin looked up to catch a pitying look in Erlenmeyer’s eyes, and for a moment his self-assurance faltered. “You think that’s odd, don’t you?” he asked with difficulty.

  “I don’t know. I only know it’s nothing I ever did. When it comes down to it, isn’t that how we decide what’s odd and what isn’t? You’re in an odd place and you weren’t very old when you came here.”

  “When will I get out, Doctor? Why do they keep me? I’ve never heard of a first-termer serving three years for car theft. Eighteen months is the average.”

  “I hope it won’t be too much longer, Lorin, but you did refuse therapy.”

  “Therapy! You want me to sit around an hour a week and talk about baseball with a bunch of imbeciles. Baseball and bullshit. Where’s the therapy?”

  “Some men discharge their tensions and concern through the apparently trivial. But didn’t Dr. Smith offer you individual therapy?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you refused that too.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I didn’t feel I needed it.”

  “But surely it would have done no harm, and we could have told the parole board you were cooperating with the program. The token, Lorin, is sometimes very important to people. If they were somewhat naïvely concerned over your potential, at least they would have the satisfaction of knowing whatever could be done had been done before they authorized your release. You have left them in the dark.”

  “I don’t need therapy. I don’t want it and I don’t need it. It’s a waste of time.”

  “And you’re so busy correcting fifth grade arithmetic papers?”

  “I have my own work as well.”

  “But you did ask me why you were still here, and I have tried to give you my understanding of it. I may be wrong.”

  “It doesn’t matter. In two more years my sentence runs out, and then you have no choice.”

  “That’s true. Although occasionally when a number of doctors agree that a subject is a dangerous psychopath, we can assign him what we call a P number and transfer him to the hospital for the criminally insane, where he can be held indefinitely.”

  “Are you threatening me?”

  “No, Lorin, I’m not threatening you. Perhaps you should return to your job assignment.”

  Lorin stood up. At the door he turned back to ask, “And you’re not going to do anything about that degenerate?”

  “There isn’t anything we can do. Perhaps you can arrange to have him transferred to the Brazilian colonies.”

  “All right, Dr. Erlenmeyer. Thank you.”

  Sanitary Slim sulked in front of Lorin’s cell for an hour that evening. He pretended to be cleaning, but he was actually accusing Lorin, in a venomous whisper, of dreadful obscenities. Things Lorin could hardly imagine.

  “Please, go away,” he continued to beg.

  “You ain’t being nice. You ain’t being nice at all. What harm would it do you if I was to shine up your shoes? You tell me that, you being so smart and all. They’s plenny a free people what pays old Slim to do up their shoes, and here old Slim’s willing to pay you, and you turning him down. The Lord don’t love ugly, boy, the Lord don’t love ugly. Just let me shine them up one time, and I won’t bother you no more. Just one time?”

  “No.”

  “Please, boy.”

  “No. Absolutely not.”

  “You stink, boy,” Slim said spitefully. “You stink worse’n a he-goat.”

  Lorin woke up the next morning to find his depression had deepened. He scratched his crotch tenderly, avoiding the places where it was chafed raw. He caught his own smell like decay. He was going to have to find some way to take a bath. He couldn’t bear it any longer.

  He avoided everyone throughout the day, even Juleson, and didn’t even try to work on his Theory of Identity. He finished the class papers as quickly as he could, and went down into the basement where he sat in a darkened room which they used for audiovisual aid
s. During the third period a class filed in and Lorin sat through a film describing the operation of a turret lathe, and then another on the conservation of watersheds. The films were seldom germane to regular classwork. When a class was scheduled for audiovisual aids they were shown whatever was available. Lorin had already seen most of the films several times.

  The night when the shower bell rang he had himself nerved up to ignore Sanitary Slim as if he didn’t exist, and it was a shock to discover the tier empty when he stepped out of his cell. He looked both ways, but Slim was gone. Then Lorin expected he would encounter him in front of the showers, but he wasn’t there either. With an overwhelming sense of relief, he stepped out of his shoes, and unknotted the towel from around his waist. He turned to the crowded showers with less than his usual revulsion.

  The shouting, the steam, the soapy bodies crowded four and five to a shower head, the obscene jokes and more obscene laughter, all seemed wholesome when compared with Sanitary Slim. Lorin moved forward to stand with the men who were waiting for a chance to squeeze under the water. Lorin had long ago developed a tactic which called for him to wait until just a few minutes before his sense of timing warned him a fresh tier was about to be released, and at that point the press was at its lightest. He stood waiting, imagining the simple pleasure he would find in being clean again, and then some instinct caused him to look around just as Sanitary Slim was bending down to pick up his shoes. He shouted and Slim took off down the side of the cellblock, the shoes hugged to his chest. Lorin looked after him, and began to shudder violently.

  When Sanitary Slim returned the shoes, gleaming with polish, later that night, Lorin didn’t even complain. He had the feeling he had been raped, and it was several weeks before he could bring himself to open Diana’s album, and when he did he found himself staring at an empty-faced girl—a stranger.

  11

  ONE MORE morning—a few days before Christmas—and as always Chilly Willy stood in the big yard with Nunn and Society Red. The rain was bad, coming down in gray sheets whipped by the wind, and they were under the rain shed at a particular spot they thought of as Chilly’s Other Office. Experienced cons avoided this spot on a rainy day and should a fish blunder into it he was invited to move on. It was a small alcove that held the back door to the bakery, but it offered enough shelter to make book.

  The three friends were silent. Action was slow, and Chilly was in a grim mood. They had already talked bad about the weather and discussed the opinion, an article of faith to many, that the big yard was probably the only place on earth where the wind blew from all four directions at once. Except naturally in the summer when the asphalt topping was about to boil, and old cons were falling out from the heat, then the wind would come straight and cool from the bay only to pass about twenty feet above their heads. The wind, they decided, confirmed the conspiracy that all nature joined—to screw them around whenever possible. And while Chilly Willy was willing to agree that the big yard was probably the most miserable stretch of real estate in the western hemisphere, he privately couldn’t lay it all to the weather.

  They had tried to remember what was for chow and then had been sorry they were able to because it was one-eyed hash, a scoop of hash which looked at if it might have already been digested, at least once, half hidden under a chill and rubbery fried egg.

  The goon squad had gone by, buttoned to their chins in green foul weather gear, on one of their mysterious errands, and they had told each other what a dog sonofabitch the guard they called the Indian was, and how the Farmer was all right if you didn’t try to shuck him, but if you did shuck him and he caught you, you might as well try to climb the wall. And the Spook—no one could hope to understand the Spook, they could only hope to avoid him. Chilly thought of some half-wild thing driven mad by the daily burden of its own pain, but he also considered that the Spook might be playing a part, as all the goon squad might, to make their jobs easier. He tried to picture them at the end of the day sitting in some bar, drinking beer and laughing over how they put the convicts on. Nice guys really, family men—Chilly smiled. The picture wouldn’t quite come clear.

  And they had talked about who was stuff and who wasn’t. Stuff was anything of value and faggots and sissies were of great value to many, and it was a treasure hunt of sorts to search for the signs, the revealing and half-unconscious gestures, that sped the word of fresh stuff on the yard. And they talked about others they thought might be stuff, but who for one reason or another were pretending not to be, and no one was entirely free from these speculations, which even penetrated the circle of their closest buddies.

  Chilly had said, “I don’t play that game, but if I ever start I’m going to have to try old Red here.”

  And Society Red had answered, “Tough enough, if you got eyes to swap out. A little tit for tat and you promise to let me go first.”

  And Nunn, “You’re so anxious to go first, Red, makes me wonder if you haven’t been cheated before.”

  “Yeah, your old mother cheated me. You know I don’t play that stuff. I’ve been known to pitch, but I’m no catcher.”

  “No one cops to playing it, but there’s sure a whole lot of suckers going around talking it.”

  And Chilly Willy had said, “It’s something to talk about.”

  They had talked about everything else and now they were just standing around half hoping something would happen so they could talk about that.

  Chilly knew the rain in the big yard was different from that which fell in the free world. Once in a while you might have to run a half a block in the rain, maybe get your topcoat wet, and you might have to stand a few minutes waiting for a bus, or a taxi, but you never had to walk miles in it, or stand for hours watching it come down, imagining every few minutes that it was letting up a little when it was only getting ready to rain harder. Rain served to turn a day which might have just been dull into one that was actively miserable.

  The rain shed could have housed a dozen locomotives, but so acute was the overcrowding that even packed in nearly solid only about two-thirds of the inmate population were able to find shelter under the shed. The rest were left to tough out the rain the best way they could. A few walked the yard ignoring the rain. A small cluster sheltered in each of the block doorways. And one isolated man stood on the wooden bench that lined the far side of the yard. He stood hunched, unmoving, letting the rain run down the sides of his face. No one paid any attention because he was a known psych case who most days carried a large bundle of ragged newspapers and had his shirt pocket stuffed to straining with the stubs of lead pencils, all sharpened to needle points. He hadn’t dared to risk his precious papers in the rain, but his freshly sharpened pencils saved him from the day’s worst terrors. If he stood quite still, dared nothing, avoided any notice, he might be able to survive until lockup and the safety of his cell.

  Those who had been quick enough had found seats in one of the chapels and sat there listlessly, listening to one of the inmate organists practicing the selections he would play during the Christmas services. Some in an agony of boredom might even read the Christian literature put out for them.

  Others waited out the rain in the library sitting at the reading table leafing through the back issues of the National Geographic looking for the occasional photographs of native women posed with uncovered breasts.

  Chilly Willy, though he could ease many of the discomforts of the prison, couldn’t do anything about the rain. He and his friends bore it with the rest. Except they wore yellow oilcloth raincoats and rainhats, like those the old fisherman wears in the tuna ad, and this rain gear was boneroo, which meant the average mainline inmate could be in water up to his ass seven days a week, and still stand no chance whatsoever of being issued a raincoat. The control of raincoats verged on high politics, and like, say, the baton of the French Academy they were the symbol—more symbol than actual protection against the weather—of power, position, influence, even honor in their society. The yellow raincoats were worn by their
proud owners on days when there was even the barest chance of rain, and frequently they blazed to full sunlight standing out against the faded denim of the mainline inmate with the relentless authority of ermine.

  Nunn and Society Red owed their raincoats to Chilly Willy. Red had attempted to block his rainhat into a style currently in vogue with pimps and hustlers called the Apple, but the heavy oilcloth, stubborn and style-blind, was reasserting its former shape. One of the woolen earflaps, intended to button under the chin but folded by Red into the crown, had slipped loose to dangle unnoticed. Nunn pulled at it, extracting its full length, fusty as long-handled underwear.

  “That’s very sharp,” Nunn mocked approval. “Makes you look real clean.”

  Red tucked the earflap back out of sight. “I’m known to be clean, lean and clean, like your old mom.”

  “That’s right,” Nunn agreed. “Mom was clean.”

  “Clean out of her skull. Otherwise she’d have done you up as soon as she dropped you.”

  Chilly stared out at the space beyond the rain shed where he could see the water striking against the glistening blacktop. The only sign that he had been listening at all was that he began to tap one highly polished and expensive shoe against its mate. He watched the men walking in the rain—nuts, exercise freaks, claustrophobes—they dug their chins into their upturned collars, and plunged their hands into their pockets. The wind whipped the bottoms of their pants around their ankles. Chilly noted scornfully that a good third of these aggressive outdoorsmen wore sunglasses.

  Then he saw Juleson, also walking in the rain, with his library books, wrapped in plastic, dangling from a belt as kids dangled their readers. The books looked thick and dense.

  Who’s he trying to shuck, Chilly wondered.

  Chilly did a lot of reading on his own, but he would have been quicker to parade the yard in lace trick pants than to make a show of himself carrying books. Big thinker, he told himself contemptuously. And deadbeat, he added.

  Chilly chose his reading material from the select books that never saw light on the mainline shelves, but were hidden in the back room as a rental library operated by the head inmate librarian, who charged from a pack to five packs a week depending upon the demand for a specific book. Most of these books were L and L’s, derived from Lewd and Lascivious Conduct, hotdog books heavy with sex, and they were always in demand. But unless they were brand-new, most of the L and L books in the institution had suffered a specific mutilation. An unwary reader would pursue a slow and artfully constructed fictional seduction, feeling the real and tightening clutch of his own excitement, turn the page and fall into an impossible aberration of context. He would discover several pages missing, sliced out of the book so neatly it was difficult to detect even when the pages numbers clearly indicated they were gone, and almost impossible to detect before actually reading the book.