On the Yard

by Malcolm Braly

  After some consideration Manning had decided to study office machine repair. “Those things are always breaking down,” he had told Juleson. “Every time I turned around in the office some fellow had the face plate off the billing machine and was poking at it with a screwdriver for ten dollars an hour.” Juleson had been able to persuade Mr. Cleman to assign Manning to the vocational typewriter repair shop over the classification committee’s objection that they needed the subject as an inmate accountant.

  Now, under the harsh light of the overhead bulb, Juleson noted that Manning was graying, had grayed noticeably just in the month he had shared Juleson’s cell. Manning did hard time and the time was hard on him. Juleson wondered how long Manning would have to serve. He realized it was possible Manning could be imprisoned longer for the statutory rape of his stepdaughter than he would serve for the death of his wife. The senselessness of this incredible dislocation shocked Juleson.

  Manning lowered his letter and looked up to say, “Debbie’s left home.”

  “Isn’t she too young?”

  “She ran away with some boy.”

  “Oh.”

  Manning was silent a moment, creasing the letter in his hands, then he continued. “I remember the boy. He lived in the same block. He had one of those old cars they fix up and he used to drive back and forth in front of the house gunning the motor. Now I understand why. He couldn’t be more than seventeen or eighteen. What are two kids like that going to do out in the world?”

  “Your stepdaughter’s going on sixteen now, isn’t she?”

  “Yes, but she’s still a child.”

  “Many marriages have been started at that age.”

  Manning asked with sudden sharpness, “Did I say anything about marriage?”

  “That’s probably what they intend.”

  “Is it? Is it?”

  Juleson’s remarks had been designed to comfort Manning, but when he saw they were having the opposite effect he decided to keep quiet. What did he know about the complex knot Manning lived within? For that matter, what did Manning know about him?

  Manning opened the letter and read it again. Then he replaced it in the envelope and laid it on his side of the shelf next to his toothbrush. “This is the first word I’ve had from her since the day I was arrested. But she had to let me know. She blames me, of course.” He thought a moment. “Now she’s alone in the house. My house. I wonder how she likes that?”

  The bell rang and they heard the crashing of metal as one of the lower tiers was released for dinner. Manning walked to the front of the cell ready to throw the door open when their own bar was pulled. He looked across at the empty gun rail and said, “It shouldn’t mean anything to me. But it does.”

  They had stew for dinner, stew, hominy, and lemon cake. Juleson made an effort to eat, but the food turned to cardboard in his mouth. He offered his cake to Manning, who wrapped it in his handkerchief to carry back to the cell.

  “What’s the matter, Paul?”

  “I’m just not hungry.”

  Manning smiled. “That’s unusual for you.”

  “Yes, I guess it is.”

  Back in the cell the two men took turns brushing their teeth. Manning went first and afterwards took the letter from the shelf and lay down in his bunk to read it again. Juleson brushed his own teeth. He snapped out his partial plate to wash the food particles from the roof, and, as he turned the ragged-looking red denture in his hand, he remembered for the first time in several years how he had lost this plate in a mountain stream.

  They had driven up for the weekend and discovered the stream lying below the highway. In great cups of rock it had formed a series of three pools, the water so vivid, so full of the quality of light, it had seemed only a denser extension of the clear mountain air. Impulsively Paul had stopped, piled from the car, and over Anna Marie’s objections he had stripped to his shorts and run out on a platform of rock to dive into the largest pool. It was ice cold and when he surfaced, he threw his head sharply to whip the hair out of his eyes. The plate popped out as if it were escaping, flicked the surface and vanished. It reappeared for a moment about a foot down, sinking off on an angle with a fluttering motion. He dove after it, but lost it in the turbulence of his own effort to find it. When he reached the bottom, seven or eight feet down, he found it covered with sand and gravel which would make the plate difficult to distinguish.

  Anna Marie had called from the road, “What’s wrong?”

  “I lost my teeth.”

  “You what? Oh, Paul ...”

  “I’ll find them.”

  “You’d better. We can’t afford any more dental bills.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll find them.”

  But it had been necessary to drive all the way back to Bakersfield and buy a child’s skin-diving outfit—faceplate, flippers and plastic snorkel tube—before he had been able to locate the plate. He remembered that after hours spent in a random and futile search, drifting on the surface of the pool, watching the bottom through the faceplate, he had finally realized that the currents at the bottom of the pool were different from those on the surface. These deeper currents were betrayed by the shifting sand, and following them he discovered his plate where it had been deposited along with several bottle caps, a fishing spinner, and a plastic tube which had once held suntan lotion. He surfaced grinning triumphantly with the plate in place, but Anna Marie hadn’t been able to share his feeling that he had met and mastered some challenge on the bottom of the pool. For her the weekend had been ruined.

  Now as he brushed the plastic teeth, which were starting to yellow in defiance of their guarantee, he found it difficult to realize that this was the same plate. The continuity of his life had been so implacably broken that it wasn’t unreasonable to imagine that the very atoms of this acrylic had been disorganized and recombined in a different pattern. He sometimes had the same feeling when he soaped his genitals in the shower. It was impossible to grasp that this was the same flesh with which he had entered the girls of his life. He had loved these girls, but not with this flesh. This person he had become could never have known such pleasures because if he had, the daily pain of loss would have been unbearable.

  He wasn’t able to read and he lay on his bunk looking at the ceiling eighteen inches above him. The night slid by. Manning went to the gym for a meeting of the chess club, returned, and settled down for another hour of study before the lights went out at ten. Then Manning was moving quietly putting his papers away in the dark.

  “Are you asleep, Paul?”

  “No.”

  “Sorry, I thought you might have fallen asleep with your clothes on.”

  “I’m just lying here tripping.”

  “Do you want half of this cake?”

  “No, thanks. I’m still not hungry.”

  When Manning was in bed, Juleson got up to undress. He hung his clothes over the head of the bed, washed his face and hands and climbed under the covers. Already his sheets seemed warm. He didn’t expect to sleep.

  “Good night,” he said.

  “Good night,” Manning replied, his voice already muffled.

  At breakfast Manning asked, “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “I may hit the sick line. In case they check me into the hospital, there’s something I’d like you to do for me.”

  “Of course.”

  “Those four packs of Camels on the shelf, see that Redman in the library gets them, will you? They’re his.”

  “Do you think they’ll put you to bed?”

  “I don’t know.”

  During the night he had resolved to attack Gasolino as soon as he could find him rather than leave the initiative in the hands of the other man. The chances were that Gasolino had left his shank stashed somewhere in the industrial alley when he heard the Eye was working, and if this were the case he wouldn’t be able to pick it up until after the gate was open. Juleson knew this for his best chance. Even without his knife Gasolino wasn’t negligible, bu
t neither was he deadly.

  Acting on this plan Juleson separated himself from Manning as soon as they left the mess hall and began to comb the yard looking for Gasolino. The men were gathering into social groups, large and small, some stationary, some walking the asphalt. The long wait in the morning was the time to take care of personal business, keep contacts, exchange prison rumors, and tell the lies you had imagined the night before.

  The sky was clear for the first time in a week, but it was still cold this early in the morning. A gun bull with his coat collar turned up stood the rail that ran along the top of the east block. He was hugging his rifle to his chest and his breath came in white plumes. Another gun bull paced the top of the north block. Juleson no longer saw these armed guards as anything more than familiar details. He looked for Oberholster, but he wasn’t on the yard yet. He saw Lester Moon waiting at the place where Oberholster always stood. Their eyes met, and Red smiled. Suddenly, as if Red’s smile were a match tossed in kerosene, Juleson was angry. All right, all right, he thought, turning on another tack, where was that ape?

  Juleson passed along the domino tables, already filling for the day’s action, and skirted a group of hobby workers burdened with their products like old-fashioned peddlers. Another group of men were reliving the football game they had won Saturday in the lower yard. Ten Negroes with shaven heads performed calisthenics. They called themselves Simbas.

  Then he saw Gasolino. He was standing on the bench that ran alongside the north block, leaning back against the concrete wall. Another man was standing on the bench beside him and a third stood below them. Despite the cold Gasolino wasn’t wearing a jacket. His chambray shirt was starched and pressed. His jeans had been bleached to a pale blue. He wore a thin black belt fastened with a silver buckle, inset with abalone shell. His pants were rolled up to reveal white gym socks and black loafers. The two men with him were also bonerooed. Regulars was how they would think of themselves.

  Gasolino was telling a joke, acting it out using the bench as a stage, and he was pantomiming abjection, pretending to cower and tremble, when Juleson walked up to ask, “Are you looking for me?”

  He hadn’t known what he was going to say and his question surprised him with its blurred ring of cliché. He felt briefly foolish as if he had been discovered in some adolescent pretense, and Gasolino, as if he understood this, was parodying an elaborate amused annoyance, wincing and smiling at the same time as if to say: Is that the best you could do?

  “Hey, man,” Gasolino said softly. “I was telling my friends a story.”

  Again Juleson felt a snap of anger as if a faulty connection had for a moment made firm contact. He reached up and, grabbing Gasolino by the belt, pulled him from the bench. In the same motion he slapped him. Gasolino’s eyes dilated with amazement.

  “What’re you going to do about that?” Juleson asked.

  Gasolino’s smile slowly reformed. He stood lightly in a posture of compact authority and reached for his hip pocket. Juleson felt his breath jerk and catch as instinctively he sucked in his stomach and took a half-step back. Gasolino’s eyes glittered with delight. He produced a comb and ran it through his hair.

  “You nervous?” he inquired, still softly.

  The two men who had been standing with Gasolino had moved off and were watching from ten feet away. Other heads were beginning to turn towards them.

  “No, I’m not nervous,” Juleson said.

  Gasolino’s face turned flat and ugly as if the slap were just now registering in some distant center of his awareness. “Then what the fuck you slap me for, punk? You think you start some shit on the yard, the bulls come break it up?”

  “Are you afraid of the bulls?”

  “I ain’t afraid of shit. I’m going to kill your ass. I’m going to cut your guts out.”

  Gasolino scowled and, moving with incredible swiftness, lunged forward with the comb to make three slashing passes an inch from Juleson’s shirt front. Juleson swung at Gasolino, but the other man sidestepped easily.

  “Not now, punk.”

  But Juleson lunged forward and managed to grab Gasolino by the collar, and when Gasolino sidestepped again the buttons were ripped from his shirt. They rattled on the black-top. Suddenly a crowd had formed around them and now they made a sound as if they had all sighed together. Gasolino’s exposed chest was so densely tattooed it appeared blue and the figures pulsed with his breath. His eyes were wild.

  “Hey, Gasolino,” someone said in the crowd, “you’re called out, man.”

  Gasolino shook his head as if to drive away an irritation. His lips remembered their smile as he began to shuffle lightly towards Juleson, and Juleson took three hard punches before he was able to grab Gasolino and begin to use his weight and strength. Dimly he heard a whistle shrilling. Gasolino was pummeling him around the stomach and chest, but he was steadily forcing the other man towards the north block wall where he intended to batter him unconscious.

  A shot sounded. The crowd roared like the ocean and then fell dead silent. Another shot scored this silence. Juleson realized there wasn’t an inmate within fifty feet of them now. They had scattered like litter blown from the eye of an explosion only to re-form at a distance, ringing the two men against the north block wall.

  Juleson released Gasolino and struck him a hammering blow to the side of the head. Gasolino fell back, his hands held low and outstretched. He looked up along the east block rail where the gun bull was aiming down at them as he jacked another shell into the chamber.

  “He can’t shoot straight,” Juleson taunted, but his voice sounded breathless.

  A third shot sounded and the slug tore the blacktop between them, cutting a ragged furrow, and in the same instant Gasolino cried out, whipping around as if he had been stung by a bee. He started running towards the edge of the crowd as an animal caught on the plain runs for the shelter of the surrounding trees. The crowd began to hoot.

  “Run, you sissy cocksucker,” someone howled with delighted scorn.

  “Run, run,” others joined in. “Run, you yellow punk.”

  Juleson stood where he was. He realized he was panting. Two officers broke through the edge of the crowd and made an attempt to head Gasolino off, but he pivoted like a halfback reversing field, and managed to elude them. The crowd opened and closed around him, and Juleson saw someone throw a jacket over Gasolino’s shoulders to hide the torn shirt. The gun bull on the north block was running along, blowing his whistle, trying to keep Gasolino in sight, but by the way his head was twisting from side to side it was apparent he had already lost him among the hundreds of nearly identical figures.

  The two yard officers, abandoning Gasolino, closed on Juleson. They grabbed his arms, levering them behind his back.

  “You don’t have to do that,” Juleson told them.

  “Move!” one of them said.

  They marched him directly to the north block rotunda and rang for the elevator to the shelf. He was placed in a holding cell where he remained for two days. No one spoke to him, not even when his meals were served. On the morning of the third day he was taken out and prepared for disciplinary court. They let him wash up, and handed him a new comb, which, after he had used it, they took back and tossed in a wastepaper basket. Then they shook him down thoroughly, and sent him through the door into the committee room.

  He was surprised to see the warden in the center seat. His presence measured the gravity of the hearing. Captain Blake sat on the warden’s right and he was the only uniformed official present. His hat was on the table before him, but the ridge along the side of his straight black hair still held the square uncompromising line at which he wore it. At the warden’s left sat the Reverend Mr. Nugent, the Protestant minister. A young correctional counselor, grade I, acted as recorder. Off to the side of the conference table, as if deliberately emphasizing the ambivalence of his position, sat Dr. A.R. Smith. His small feet were set side by side on the floor, and his two forefingers making “here is the steeple” seem
ed to support his chin. When his eyes met Juleson’s he nodded slightly, and the forefingers communicated the motion to his clasped hands.

  “That was a stupid thing to do, Juleson,” the warden said severely.

  There was no adequate response to such a statement. He stood quietly aware that the captain was staring up at him with what appeared to be anger. The minister too was watching him, but his eyes seemed remote. Dr. Smith was looking out the barred window. The CC-I was writing.

  “Sit down,” the warden ordered. He waited until Juleson had settled himself, then he asked, “Do you know an inmate named Memo Solozano?”

  “No, sir.”

  “He’s known on the yard as Gasolino,” the captain added.

  “I know him by reputation.”

  “Do you know he’s dying?”

  “Dying?” Juleson repeated. His voice sounded fragile.

  “Yes, he can’t live more than a few days.”

  “I don’t understand. Was he shot?”

  “Do you understand that if he had been shot you could have been held responsible under the laws of this state?” This was the captain.

  “No, sir, I didn’t know that.”

  The warden continued, “Solozano is dying from the effects of carbon tetrachloride. Apparently he’s been sniffing it for some time, but the afternoon of the day you two fought he drank the contents of one of the fire extinguishers located in the gym. This is a deadly and irreversible poison. There’s a warning on each unit in English, but he was unable to read English—” The warden paused. There was nothing now of the father in his face. “Did you imagine something like this might happen?”

  “How could I?”

  “Your intelligence is superior. You have a history of violence.”

  “I only wanted to force the issue so I had a chance of coming out of it alive.”

  “And I offered you that chance. And you refused me. You lied to me.”