On the Yard

by Malcolm Braly

  “Do you really think it’s that simple?” Juleson asked angrily. “Do you really think you have everything—everything —written down here in front of you?”

  “Lower your voice,” the captain said.

  Juleson turned to look at Dr. Smith. He hadn’t moved, though his gaze was no longer directed at the window. His face was passive, eyes veiled. The CC-I, pen poised, was watching with interest. His lips were sucked in against one another as if he were tasting salt on them.

  “I felt I had to solve my own problem,” Juleson continued.

  “So again you did something violent,” Mr. Nugent said. His voice was fortified with stately intonation as deliberately as breakfast cereal is fortified with vitamin C. “Again you took a life.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “A man is dying,” the warden said. “If you had allowed me to help you the fight on the yard could have been avoided.”

  “I know that would have seemed best to you,” Juleson said, anger again adding an edge to his voice. “Don’t make waves. But I will tell you I have been ordered to commit far greater violences for reasons that were much less clear to me, and then if I had not obeyed I would have had to face a similar court and they would have been equally sure they were right.”

  “That’s enough of that!” the warden ordered. After a moment of heavy silence, he continued, “There may be something in what you say, but you have lost, at least temporarily, the right to make such distinctions. Fighting is against the regulations of this prison. There is no ambiguity as to that. And we find you guilty of the charge.”

  “It was Oberholster you owed, wasn’t it?” the captain asked.

  “No, it was Gasolino—Solozano—as you called him.”

  Again no one spoke. He felt their eyes on him. Then the warden said with a trace of weariness, “Wait outside.”

  He waited in the corridor, under the eyes of a young officer. “Pretty rough on you?” the officer asked companionably. They were both small fry under the same distant authority.

  “Not too bad.”

  “It’s lucky neither of you guys was killed out there. The Mexican lost the tip of his little finger. Did you know that?”

  “No.”

  “It must have been a fragment, or a nearly spent bullet. Sliced it off neat as a knife. Just the very end.” The officer glanced at the committee room door, then continued in a lower tone. “But you won’t have any more trouble with that punk. His guts are falling out his ass.”

  “They told me.”

  “They should have given you a medal instead of a beef.”

  A buzzer sounded and a light above the committee room door went on. “They want you back in there,” the officer said.

  This time the warden didn’t invite him to sit down. He stood to receive sentence.

  “It’s the decision of this committee that you be awarded ten days isolation, and sixty days loss of privileges. Further judgment will be in the hands of the parole board. The report submitted by this committee will acknowledge the extenuating circumstances. That will be all.”

  Isolation’s only hardship was monotony. As is customary in all detention units, a Bible was furnished as part of the cell equipment. Someone had mutilated the title page, and printed “bullshit” in the margins through most of Genesis before his zeal faltered. There was a smoky quality to the word, more suggestive of bitter disappointment than simple condemnation, and Juleson wondered if this same man would have found it necessary to deface the Koran or the Bhagavad Gita had these equally sacred books been provided for his example.

  Someone else had made a large drawing of a vampire on the wall above the toilet. It was crudely rendered, but unlike most comic book and B-picture vampires this one looked as if it might actually drink blood. There was a curious and inhuman strength in the expression of the eyes, not entirely offset by the rude fangs and a pimp’s hairline mustache.

  His cell was otherwise featureless, and he passed the time pacing back and forth from the door to the toilet, and reading parts of the Bible. It never occurred to him that he might find help or hope of sufferance in this book he had never taken seriously, and it was just at random that he came to I Corinthians 10:13 and found himself intimately addressed: There has no temptation taken you, but such as is common to man ... Still billions of others had resisted their common temptations. He had not.

  He began to pace again. There was more he might remember, and he puzzled trying to recall what it was the Biblical verse suggested. Something similar. Pacing, eyes level with the vampire’s eyes, he drew a second forgiving quotation from his memory ... There is nothing human which is alien to me. Recalling now that these were the words of Marcus Aurelius, the last of the Five Good Emperors. It went something like ... because in my youth I knew all things, there is nothing human which is now alien to me. That was the substance.

  Again Juleson met the eyes of the vampire and he smiled, wondering if Aurelius might not concede that here was something alien, and, yet, perhaps no more alien than he must have found his own son, Commodus.

  He continued pacing, aware of his persistent conviction of his own ... evil, he could put no lesser word to his feelings, “evil” was precise, though he knew he didn’t believe in the existence of evil, just as he was aware that his conviction he was evil betrayed some inverted and ravenous vanity. Perhaps it was as great a presumption to think oneself evil as it would be to consider that one was good. Weren’t both extremes equally attractive when they were needed to escape the conclusion that one was, after all, ordinary? An ordinary man who beat his wife for all the ordinary crummy little reasons.

  On the sixth day, Dr. Smith stopped by to see him, telling the shelf officer, “Just lock me in, please ... I’ll call when I’m ready to leave.”

  “Any way you say, Doc,” the guard agreed, turning the key.

  Dr. Smith appeared as colorless as always, except for his soft russet eyes, slightly magnified in the lenses of his glasses, searching Juleson’s face with warm concern.

  “You look none the worse,” Smith said.

  “After a while, any change, even isolation, is stimulating.”

  Juleson automatically sat on the toilet, leaving the bunk for Smith, who settled himself somewhat deliberately, lifting his pants from his knees to show his black socks and small black shoes. He glanced around the cell.

  “These are Spartan enough,” he said.

  “That’s the whole punishment.”

  “Are you taking it as punishment?”

  “No, but I miss my books.” Juleson smiled. “All I have is the Good Book. I’ve been learning to detect leprosy. Whoever shall develop a sore on his head which does not heal, shall be declared unclean, for the sore is in his mind and the Priest shall come and declare him to be utterly unclean—”

  “In his mind?” Dr. Smith asked blandly.

  Juleson grinned: “For he is utterly unclean.”

  Dr. Smith laughed softly, smoothing his hands on his pants. Then he turned soberly to Juleson to ask, “How do you feel about your hearing before the disciplinary committee?”

  Juleson shrugged. “It was pointed out to me I had broken a rule.”

  “Is that how you see it?”

  “I see it several different ways, but it comes to this—I did what I thought I had to do. I believe they did the same.”

  “Yes, perhaps, perhaps,” Smith murmured as he crossed his leg and rubbed his knee. “But I find it disturbing. I’m not going to tell you the choice you had to make was easy. To consult your rule book as the warden suggested. But, as your friend, I’d have much rather seen you accept protective custody.”

  “You’d want me to hide? Like a child?”

  “Why not like a child? Children are eminently sensible in many of the ways they deal with an environment still strange to them and over which they exercise little or no control. So the simile is apt. And I find myself wondering why your healthy instincts didn’t demand that you hide from danger, rather than pro
mpting you to measure yourself against some alien code of honor at the risk of your life.”

  “The code isn’t alien,” Juleson said. “Any schoolboy would know it. There’re boys out on that yard who have refused to grow up. They look forty, but they’re still twelve. One of them ordered me off the yard. He said he was going to cure himself of having to look at me. It was like I’d been told not to come out on the school grounds during recess. I wouldn’t submit to a bully. No more, no less.”

  “But, Paul, they’re boys, you’re a man.”

  Juleson slapped his leg lightly and turned away though there was nothing in the cell he could pretend an interest in. “I hope I am,” he murmured without conviction.

  In the silence he heard the slamming of a distant door, then a tuneless humming closer by. Then Smith was saying, “You have a sinister guest there.” And Juleson turned to see Smith frowning at the vampire drawing just above his own head.

  “He hasn’t tapped me,” Juleson said lightly. “Apparently the moon isn’t full.”

  “I’ve had several talks with the boy who drew it, a very strange boy, and curiously passive now. That figure is his ... totem, his real identity, and he gets something of his own expression into the eyes ...” Dr. Smith paused, his gaze still fixed on the drawing as if there were something about it he failed to understand. Then he sighed, and added, “But the boy will shortly be Dr. Erlenmeyer’s responsibility, not mine—Paul, I’ve decided to resign.”

  Juleson felt an immediate shock of loss. “But why? What for?”

  “I’m not accomplishing anything, nor am I able to help anyone. A prison is a nearly impossible setting for any therapeutic program.”

  Juleson was struggling with his hurt and anger, trying to hide his emotions. “Are you going into private practice?” he asked softly.

  “No, I have an offer from a school district up north. I’m going to take it.”

  “And leave your department to Tom Swift.”

  “Tom Swift? I don’t understand.”

  “That’s what they used to call Erlenmeyer—Tom Swift and his electric shock box. And do you remember a patient he diagnosed as psychotic, and treated him personally right up to the day the poor bastard dropped dead, and the autopsy, remember, disclosed a brain tumor as big as a grapefruit.”

  Smith looked down. “I remember. But it’s easier to be mistaken in this kind of diagnosis than you imagine. Frequently brain damage—”

  “As big as a goddam grapefruit, it’s a wonder he had enough brain left to sneeze with. And, Christ, sorry as he is, Erlenmeyer’s still the best of those clowns crawling around the psych department and the counseling center. Sceijec is a twittering idiot who’s still trying to figure out how to interpret an MMPI, and Rossmoreland works off his smoldering sense of inferiority by a systematic intimidation of the men he interviews.”

  Smith was rubbing his knee again. “Unfortunately, those positions aren’t very well paid. Only a very rare kind of first-rate man would apply. And it’s doubtful—” Smith smiled wryly—“that he would stay long.”

  “Only the one-eyed kings stay here in the kingdom of the blind.”

  Dr. Smith leaned forward. “You’ll be leaving yourself, Paul, and that’s what you should keep in mind. I wrote your progress report early, so I could do it myself before I left, and I have made the strongest recommendation for parole I think wise.”

  “Thank you, Doctor,” Juleson said. “You know, I didn’t mean that crap about Erlenmeyer. I was upset.”

  Smith smiled. “Did they really call him Tom Swift?”

  “A few did, yes, and that was one of the nicest things he was called when he was giving shock.”

  “Yes, I can imagine.”

  “Is Gasolino really dying?”

  “He died yesterday. At that, he lived days longer than we thought he could. Sheer animal vitality. I don’t agree with the warden’s implication that he might have committed suicide. He’d been shamed, true, but he was only trying to forget it. The fumes of carbon tet didn’t get him as numb as he wanted to be, so he drank some. If he knew it was dangerous, this was also a time when he needed to show contempt for danger. An odd twilight creature. I don’t think he knew he was dying.”

  “I hardly knew him,” Juleson said.

  They talked awhile longer, mostly about what he could hope to do on parole, and Dr. Smith made him promise to write as soon as he was free. When Smith rose to leave the two men shook hands, and again Juleson felt a threatening sense of loss that continued to oppress him for fifteen or twenty minutes until he deliberately turned his thoughts to parole. Born again at thirty. A prospect as exciting in some ways as it was frightening in others. Surely he would never take anything—the firmest security or the cheapest pleasure—for granted. He tried to imagine what he would find to do, what use he would make of the rest of his life, but he discovered he did not yet know the man he had become. He fell asleep and didn’t wake up until the food cart was rumbling along the corridor announcing the evening meal. His dinner was handed in. Bread, white beans, greens, and a meat pie. The meat pie was little more than stew served in a metal soup bowl, covered with a thick piece of pie crust, which was baked separately, and put on like a lid. Juleson removed the crust to eat it with his bread, and under it, partially adhered to the stew, he discovered a folded slip of paper. It was onionskin, soaked through in places with the reddish gravy. He opened it to read a typewritten note: You had more balls than I gave you credit for, but you only won a round. If you’re wise, you’ll stay where you are.

  It was unsigned. Angrily Juleson crumpled the note and threw it at the toilet. It bounced off the rim and fell to the floor. He pursued it as if it were a crippled hornet, grinding it beneath his slippered foot. Then he picked it up, smoothed it out, and read it again. A detached part of his mind automatically noted that it had been a long time since Oberholster had cleaned his typewriter keys. The lower case “o” was almost solid. This led him to realize that he had Oberholster right here in his hand. If he were to call the guard and report the note, they would be able to demonstrate that it had been typed on Oberholster’s machine. Oberholster had paid him the implied compliment of assuming he wouldn’t report the note, and was now warning him as an equal to stay off the yard because he would be embarrassed by Juleson’s return to the general population and forced to take some further step. Against his will Juleson was flattered. He sat down, with the note in his hand, wondering at the extent to which his habit of detachment had been eroded. A man had needs, he decided, this was a constant and primary fact of his nature. Drag Lucullus from his banquet table and cage him with swine, and in a matter of days he will be fighting for his share of the swill. Unless he’s killed or chooses to die. A rancid truth, if it were a truth—yet look what was happening to him. He had expected demolition, but instead had been subjected to attrition, and was finding it harder to bear. He had thought the prison would demand some sacrifice of his identity, but no one had asked for any part of him—still cell by cell he had merged with the uniform he wore.

  He finished his dinner, and when he scraped the tray into the toilet, he tossed the note in after the food scraps and pressed the button. He watched the note, skimming the surface like the paper boats he had folded as a child, then it darted, circled into the throat of the commode, and was gone.

  On the morning of the tenth day he was released from the shelf and reassigned to his former cell and job program. He was glad to see Manning at the end of the day.

  13

  STICK LAY on his bunk, staring out through the bars. For a while he had imagined he could adjust the atoms of his body to pass at will through the walls, but when he reached out to grab the bars he found them solid. Now he was thinking about Morris Price. Morris had stopped working on the balloon. He said he couldn’t get the right kind of thread. Stick had recently been assigned to the laundry in the mornings, and in the loft above the laundry floor he had noticed men working at sewing machines. He should be able to score
any kind of thread Morris needed. He leaned over the edge of the bunk. Morris was reading again, curled in the lower bunk as if he were sheltering in a cave. “Hey, Morris,” Stick called in a conspirator’s whisper, “what kind of thread will fix that thing?”

  Morris looked up from his book, seemingly startled. “Strong thread,” he said.

  “I know that, but what kind of strong thread?”

  Morris sucked in his cheeks judiciously. “Nylon would be the best.”

  “They use nylon on clothes?”

  “No, I guess not.”

  “Well, you tell me what I should ask for, and I’ll get you some thread.”

  “What for?”

  “For your bag, what do you think?”

  “I mean why should you help me?”

  “Why we’re cell buddies, ain’t we? It don’t mean nothing to me, if I can get it easy I will.”

  “Get the kind of thread they use to sew canvas. Do you think you can get that?”

  “I don’t know. But if there’s any down there in the laundry, I’ll get it.”

  “Hey, that’s great.”

  “It ain’t nothing.”

  The bell sounded for night activities and Stick turned back to watch through the bars as the men passed to the gym. He had spent a lot of time in the gym and he already knew most of the prominent athletes when he saw them. Particularly the boxers. He admired them at the same time that he imagined how he would cut them to shreds if he were able. If he had time to train. Reach and height, he thought, he had reach and height, he could be a marvelous engine of icy punishment. He saw Reuben “Cool Breeze” Moore, the best of the middleweights, walk by, and he wanted to say, Hey, there, Cool Breeze, as he heard so many others say, and he was only dimly aware that Cool Breeze was a Negro. The splendid fraternity he belonged to placed him above all other considerations. Still Stick knew one day he would destroy Cool Breeze.

  Cool Breeze was unaware of Stick, except as a thin awkward kid who hung around ringside, and if he had been aware of the content of Stick’s mind it would only have amused him. The studs loved a classy boxer, a man move nice they don’t see nothing more, and if a man’s bad with his hands every-one want to whip him. That’s nature. But he wasn’t studying fighting tonight, he was in another bag altogether.