On the Yard

by Malcolm Braly

  He ran lightly down the wide metal steps and flashed his ID card at the check-out officer. The officer drew a line through Cool Breeze’s name on the daily movement sheet. At relock he would cross another line through the first to indicate that Moore had returned to the block. A count at ten would confirm that he had entered his cell. A loose net to hold so many dangerous and ingenious fish, but somehow no one ever slipped it. Largely because the gun towers were manned around the clock.

  These towers concerned Cool Breeze because tonight he wasn’t going to the gym. Banales, another middleweight, was waiting for him, leaning against one of the girders that supported the rain shed.

  “Is it on?” Banales asked.

  “Yeah. Le’s go.”

  “How’re we going to get into the lower yard?”

  “I’ll show you. You’d never snap.”

  They moved off, through three-gate, past four-box, past the metal stairs that led up to the gym, and on towards the Protestant chapel. In Cool Breeze’s world the Protestant chapel was a whorehouse. It was one of the places you could pay to have yourself ducated to if you were looking for a spot where you could get down, and a number of his friends appeared on the night movement to attend choir practice several times a month. Sometimes they hit on him to go with them.

  “Get you dick wet, Cool Breeze.”

  But he waved it off. He was in training, he said.

  “You training to be some kind of monk?” one jibed. And another took it up, “No, Cool Breeze training to be a sissy hisself. Ain’t that right, Cool Breeze?”

  “Training to knock your dick stiff, you don’t keep your mouf off me.”

  Now Banales asked, “We ain’t going in the chapel?”

  “No,” Cool Breeze smiled. “We going under it.”

  Just beyond the chapel steps, partially hidden behind them, another set of circular steps descended into a large brick well. Fifty years before, these steps had led down to the legendary Sash and Blind, an early isolation unit, where hard cases had been tempered down in wet straitjackets, but now the same space where men had once lain for days in total darkness was used as a warehouse. The door was never opened and the floor of the well was littered with debris. Cool Breeze tiptoed through it.

  “I hope you got your drawings straight,” Banales said behind him.

  Cool Breeze tried the door. It opened slowly. He could smell the oil recently applied to the old hinges. “They’s cool,” he said happily. He smiled with guilty excitement like a child who has discovered a secret passage within the walls of his own home, and thus restored his faith in the marvelous and forbidden world just beyond the threshold of his own experience.

  “Le’s go,” he whispered to Banales. “We blasting now.”

  They moved through the warehouse into the paint shop and climbed through a window to reach the industrial alley. Here they were far out of bounds. A tower commanded the end of the alley, but they were able to slip along the wall keeping to the shadows, and near the far end of the alley they were able to crawl across it on their bellies.

  “That’s the worst of it,” Cool Breeze said.

  They passed around the corner of the machine shop and came out on a concrete ramp that led along the edge of the lower yard. Now they could see the wall, bathed in light like a national monument, and posted with a guard tower every hundred yards. To approach the wall at this time of night would be suicide. Cool Breeze noted this.

  “Lucky we ain’t scheming on that wall,” he said.

  “Man, man,” Banales whispered. “Let’s get where we’re going.”

  They crawled across another open stretch and straightened up in the shadow of the boiler room. Cool Breeze rapped shave-and-a-haircut-sixbits on the metal door. The lock sounded immediately after his signal and the door was pulled in to leave a six-inch crack. An inmate he had never seen before looked out at him.

  “It costs to come in here,” he said.

  “Of course, it cost,” Cool Breeze whispered. “Get this door open, sucker.”

  The strange inmate opened the door and closed it quickly behind them. He reset the lock. He was wearing a mechanic’s coverall, an older dude with the white face of a night worker. A rag, black with oil, hung from his back pocket. Behind him, three huge boilers were mounted in a row—one and three were firing, but the center unit stood silent.

  “Two packs apiece, boys.”

  They opened their jackets. Cool Breeze had three cartons in his belt; Banales held two. They paid the boiler room attendant and he pocketed their cigarettes without comment. He led them to the center boiler and opened the door while they crawled in one behind the other. The interior was lit with a single bulb, hung from the pipes that ran along the upper curve of the boiler, and the air was heavy with the moist baked smell of rust and steam. Seven men were on their knees around a shallow rectangular box lined with a blanket. One held his fist above his head, his mouth open, as they had all turned to stare at the opening door. Their shadows arched up the round sides behind them like seconds hovering in solicitous attendance.

  “Oh, oh, fresh blood,” one of them said.

  “Hey, there, Cool Breeze, how you get here?”

  “Cool Breeze jus’ bogart his way in.” He worked his way towards the table. “My stuff’s good, ain’t it?”

  “Oh, yeah, your stuff good. Your stuff the best.” This was Cadillac Clemmons, running the game. “Get right in here.” He gestured at the shooter, a gray boy from the weight-lifting section. “This man got his point. He got a four. Now we seeing what he can do with it. What you think he do with it, Cool Breeze?”

  “I think he make it.” Cool Breeze put two packs on the table. The shooter came out. He rolled a ten, a six, a nine, and a seven.

  “Next man, coming out,” Cadillac said. He picked up Cool Breeze’s two packs.

  Cool Breeze lost his three cartons in a half an hour. He borrowed a carton from Cadillac and lost that too. “It ain’t my night,” he said.

  “Ain’t never a fool’s night,” Cadillac said happily. He offered another carton, but Cool Breeze shook his head.

  “No, I freeze now.”

  He went to sit on his heels near the head of the boiler where he could watch the play. The dice flashed over the gray blanket seeming to gather the light, focus it, and reflect it up into the sweat-streaked faces worshipping over them. The players murmured constantly in hoarse whispers, and Cadillac sweet-talked luck as he would a woman.

  “Oh, you fine bitch, you jus’ be sweet, you fine bitch.”

  The adventure had flattened for Cool Breeze. He had raided the big game, gone broke, and now was left with an urgent sense of danger from which all promise of fortune had faded. Losing had made him feel weak and foolish.

  The boiler room attendant opened the door to pass around coffee in peanut butter jars wrapped with electrician’s tape. The players took a short break to distribute the coffee and Cadillac threw his arm companionably around Cool Breeze’s shoulders.

  “This my fool,” he announced. “When I came to this jailhouse they showed me old Cool Breeze here, and they say, This your fool. For all the time you’re here. And should you evah get broke you jus’ come and shoot craps with your fool, and he keep you smoking. Ain’t that right, fool?”

  Cool Breeze looked up at Cadillac. Cadillac was the ex-heavyweight champ of the joint. Cadillac never could move pretty, but he had fists like leather bags full of ball bearings. Cool Breeze smiled. “You an entertainer, ain’t you, Cadillac?”

  “Offin’s my game, man, and I pimp a taste. Shoot crap, too.”

  “I be your witness there.”

  The game resumed. Banales won for a while, lost, then seesawed, and finally went broke just before Cadillac called the end of the game. It was fifteen minutes to nine.

  Cadillac held up his hand. “We break, we break together jus’ like always. I lead. We do this right we hit the gym line jus’ as they coming out.” He turned to Cool Breeze. “You pick up?”

 
Cool Breeze nodded.

  “It ain’t nothing,” Cadillac said.

  The winners banked their stuff with the boiler room attendant and one by one, about six feet apart, they slipped out the door.

  The alley tower, twelve-tower in the official post orders, was quiet duty. Too quiet. It was understood unofficially that guards assigned here were being either tested or disciplined. Eight hours of staring conscientiously into the darkened alley, a monotony broken only by the regular rounds of the old fire watchman, was harder than working the yard. The alley appeared to stretch away in a sharply narrowing perspective, intensified by the alternating bands of light and shadow caused by the irregular placement of the small night lights.

  Shortly before nine o’clock, the officer on duty thought he detected movement in one of these patches of shadow. He had just poured a cup of coffee from his thermos and turned back to his vigilance when the darkness seemed to wrinkle and flex. At first he thought it an illusion, then he considered that it might be one of the cats. He turned his spotlight in that direction, but it showed him only the empty alley floor. He turned the spot off and, as his eyes were readjusting to the darkness, he caught another movement, more definite this time—a large body, too large for a cat, moving quickly.

  He stood up, senses tingling. In the weeks he had worked this post, this was the first thing that had ever happened. He lost a moment adjusting to the novelty. Again the spotlight surprised nothing, but now he was certain he had definitely seen something, and continuing to work the spot with one hand he reached for the phone with the other. He told the operator to connect him with control. As he waited for the watch lieutenant to come on the line, he was troubled by the impression that the direction of the movement he had observed had seemed to be towards the main part of the prison, not away from it. But that was impossible. Why would anyone be returning to the security area?

  He reported a possible escape attempt.

  Karpstein, the second watch loot, asked, “Are you sure?” and listened to twelve-tower’s guarantees. “All right, all right. Keep your eyes open. And good work.” The Karp punched the general alarm and got on the bitch box to all the towers on the perimeter. An unknown number of inmates were seeking to escape somewhere in the lower yard. He alerted the flying squad and phoned the warden, who authorized an emergency count. The night unlocks were already on their way back to the blocks, leaving the school, the gym, the chapels, the library, and the drama workshop. They were hurried into their cells and a quick count was taken. The count was correct. By this time the bachelor officers from the BOQ were standing around the captain’s office waiting assignment. The Karp ordered another count. This time a paddle board count. They checked cell by cell, through all the blocks, identifying each inmate by his ID card and checking him off on a master tally. Again the count was clear. The Karp called off the search, notified the towers, sent the bachelor officers back to their rec hall, and phoned the warden at his residence. Then he dictated a “turd” to be placed in the personnel file of the officer on duty in twelve-tower.

  The turd was removed several weeks later when they learned, as always through an informer, that a crap game was being held several times a week in the boiler room. They were able to surprise the game and determine the route these men had used to gain access to the industrial alley. The door that had once led to the Sash and Blind was welded shut.

  The warden had been viewing television when Lieutenant Karpstein called. He had immediately phoned the sheriff’s substation and the San Rafael city police to notify them of a possible alert involving an unknown number of inmates. They would begin to cover the roads around the prison as a routine precaution. Then the warden called the captain of the guards at his residence. After that he returned to the television to watch the end of the program.

  He was relieved when he received Karpstein’s second call. Though trouble was routine, he still hoped to prevent major trouble, and the publicity that would follow in the wake of a multiple escape would damage not only his personal security but the future of the programs he had dedicated himself to. The press might well raise the question as to whether it was more important to advance the grade level of subliterate prisoners from the second grade to the sixth grade than it was to confine them successfully. They would have a valid point.

  A few minutes after Karpstein’s second call the doorbell rang and Charlie Wong answered it to let in the captain. To people who knew him in uniform, Jacob Blake never looked quite complete without it. Tonight he wore slacks and sports shirt and in place of a tie he had a strap of rawhide, tasseled at the ends and cinched up with a clasp in the form of a bull’s head. The ornament seemed grotesquely frivolous beneath his somber face.

  “It was a hummer,” the captain said.

  “I know, Jake, the duty officer told me.”

  “Yes—I just thought I’d drop by as long as I was out.”

  “I’m glad you did. Would you like some coffee?”

  “I don’t know, it’s a little late.”

  “How about some tea?”

  “All right. Thank you.”

  “Charlie,” the warden called.

  Charlie appeared at the kitchen door. “Yessir.”

  “Make the captain a pot of tea.” He pointed at the television. “And turn that thing off.” When Charlie had withdrawn to the kitchen, the warden smiled. “Sit down and tell me what’s on your mind, Jake.”

  The captain returned the warden’s smile. They had worked together for years, and read each other well. “It’s Oberholster,” he said. “The one the cons call Chilly Willy. I want to break him.”

  “You don’t need my clearance for that.”

  “I can’t nail him. He doesn’t seem to have any weaknesses. I can’t touch him within the rule book, unless I bust him for gambling. I might be able to make that stick. But it’s light-weight. The committee’ll give him a little shelf time, then he’ll be right back on the yard.”

  The warden was shaking his head, his expression troubled. “If you’re not willing to bust him for gambling, then you’ll have to wait until you can prove something stronger.”

  The captain slapped his leg. “I knew you were going to say that. But I’ll tell you something, Mike, I’m full up to here with that white-faced punk—” He pulled the edge of his heavy hand across his throat. “If it were up to me, I’d throw him in seg and bury the key.”

  “I don’t like to do that. I think we have to work within the regulations. That’s what we’re asking them to do, and when we ignore the regulations, just to make our jobs easier, then we’re only confirming what they’re already desperate to believe—that we’re no better than they are.”

  “Yes, yes ...” the captain nodded; he’d heard all this many times before, and remained unconvinced. “But Chilly Willy is a special case—”

  He broke off as Wong came from the kitchen with the tea. Wong’s eyes were bland as always. “Chilly Willy,” Wong said, “he velly bad. Velly bad.” When he bent over to serve the tea, Wong’s face was hidden and he smiled faintly.

  Captain Jacob Blake was restless after he left the warden. He was a man of carefully controlled and balanced tolerances and the strong tea this late in the evening had upset them. He stood for a moment at the foot of the warden’s walk—the darkness was mildly scented—and looked out over the modernistic dome of the officer’s snack bar where the bay was beating with a faint phosphorescence. An island humped out there, slightly darker than the sky, like the back of a half-submerged animal. He recalled that from the island the prison seemed to be caught in a web of its own lights. He turned and looked up at the dark windows of the armory tower, knowing that most likely the officer stationed there was watching him through his night glasses. He raised his hand and waved it in a gesture close to a salute. Then he started back towards the main gate.

  He entered the prison and went to his office where he called for the file on Oberholster. The folder was heavy with the snitch letters the warden had cited, and w
ell worn by official interest. The captain began to study the summaries and chronos again, hoping that as he did some workable plan would come to him.

  Two dried lizards, mounted on a plaque, adorned his desk. The head of the smaller lizard was in the mouth of the larger. No one knew what interpretation, if any, the captain made of this symbol.

  On the wall facing his desk there was a display of weapons taken in various shakedowns over the years. They ranged in size and shape from an ice-pick knife worked out of tool steel, as carefully finished as a surgical instrument, to a huge ragged sword fitted with a wooden handle wrapped with copper wire. There were a dozen different kinds of saps and bludgeons and as many sets of brass knuckles. There was a metal slingshot, designed to shoot ball bearings, with which some con had amused himself knocking out the electric lights, and a crossbow built specifically to kill an officer. The quarrel had buried itself in the wall, inches from the officer’s head. And a number of zip guns. This display was a part of the captain’s antidote for the warden’s bleeding heart.

  By the time he closed the file, he had not one, but two plans, both of which he intended to try. He called Lieutenant Olson and talked with him at length, and when he hung up he seemed satisfied.

  Events played into the captain’s hands when two days later a disciplinary report on Lester Moon, AKA Society Red, was brought to his attention. It was assumed that Moon had been fighting with his cell partner. The cell partner, a first-termer named Luther Turnipseed, had left the cell on the morning unlock and reported to the block office. A subsequent examination determined that he had suffered a fracture of the left wrist, a torn scalp and numerous bruises, including an eye which had swollen and turned the glossy purple of an eggplant. When asked for an explanation of his condition, Turnipseed stated that he had fallen from the top bunk. The MTA attending him was overheard to ask, “How many times?”