On the Yard

by Malcolm Braly

  It was a violation of the rules to allow yourself to be beaten by an unknown assailant, a strategy that sometimes improved the recall of the victim, but since Turnipseed had got his clock cleaned in his own cell it wasn’t difficult to determine who deserved the credit. The beef provided the captain with one of the levers he was looking for. He called both men to his office.

  He talked briefly to Turnipseed, a short fair-haired old young man with a dull red face and reproachful blue eyes. Turnipseed was still saying he had fallen from the top bunk, but it was clear to the captain that it wouldn’t hurt Turnipseed’s feelings to be called a liar. There was a righteous whine in Turnipseed’s tone that immediately canceled the sympathy due him for his bound wrist and bruised face. The captain could understand how Society Red, penned with this man in a narrow cell, might be goaded beyond his endurance. The captain himself, and his patience was the tenth power of Red’s, was prompted to pretend he believed the story Turnipseed was so patently anxious to repudiate. He dismissed Turnipseed and called in Red.

  Red and the captain were old sparring partners and over the years a reluctant mutual respect had grown up between them. In the captain’s eyes, Red was redeemed by his sense of humor and because he had no viciousness in his makeup. He handled Red with the amused tolerance he might have shown an old but still rebellious mule. Red respected the captain because the captain had always dealt fairly with him. The yard said that Jacob “Stoneface” Blake would rather boot a convict in the ass than off his old lady, but that hadn’t been Red’s experience with the captain. The captain had let him walk on some beefs where he should have been sloughed and Red was still grateful. This didn’t mean he was likely to ever so far forget himself as to tell the captain the truth, nor did the captain expect he would.

  “I got a beef in on you, Red.”

  “I had that figured, Cap.”

  “What’s the story? You two fall out the hard way?”

  Red feigned amazement. “Luther Turnipseed and me? We’re the tightest of buddies. That tumble he took hurt me as much as it hurt him.”

  A yellowish flicker of humor stirred in the captain’s gray eyes, which for him was the equivalent of a big grin. The other guards claimed he sometimes smiled when he was off duty, but this was something that had to be taken on faith as the existence of the abominable snowman is accepted or rejected depending upon the credence one places in remote and private reports.

  The captain continued, “Turnipseed was lacerated and bruised in different ways and in different places than could be easily accounted for by a fall from the top bunk.”

  “Accidents do happen. And some of them are downright freakish.”

  “How did Turnipseed get so badly banged up?”

  “Well, he fell dead into the center of the cap’tol building, right through the grand dome.”

  The captain picked up a pencil and examined the red rubber eraser. “You’ll have to explain that, Red.”

  “No strain. I was building a model of the state cap’tol. I figured when I got it done, I’d duke it on the gov’nor, maybe make some points, and then that unconscious rumdum bastard falls off his bunk right into the middle of it.”

  “Were you using balsa wood?”

  “No, pine, what they call white pine. You know balsa wood wouldn’t of marked old Luther up like that.”

  The captain leaned sideways, pulled a file drawer and came up with a card which he studied briefly. “No luck, Red,” he said. “There’s no entry here showing where you bought any wood on handicraft. So either you leaned on Turnip-seed, or you’re working hobby with contraband wood. Which is it?”

  “I hate to say it and maybe put heat on your clerks, but I did for a legal fact buy some wood.”

  “When was this?”

  “About six years ago.”

  The captain nodded carefully. Again he traced through the entries on the file card, and this time he turned it over. After a moment he looked up, still expressionless, but his large thumb was flicking the corner on the card.

  “That wood is the only item you’ve bought on hobby in all the time you’ve been here.”

  “That’s right. I’m not too keen for hobby work. I spend most of my time trying to improve my mind, except for the nights I put in on that cap’tol building. That’s all wasted now.”

  “I think we can forget about the capitol building for a moment and get back to your trouble with Turnipseed—”

  The captain’s phone rang, and he broke off to answer it. “Yes,” he said, and frowned as he began to listen.

  Red half turned in his chair to look at the weapon display. He had examined it previously, had in fact seen some of the weapons before they had found their way to the captain’s wall. In a prominent spot he noted the handmade gun with which Reynolds and Hahner had attempted their break in ’48. They had kidnapped a member of the parole board and held him as a hostage. The last break with any class to it. Now when they were scheming on some roadwork, they laid up quiet for a couple of years until they could ease themselves into a minimum security job, and then they slipped off in the night. Still even those who managed to creep were reapprehended with stifling regularity. Small town heat stopped them in stolen cars, their new neighbors saw their wanted flicks on TV, their wives turned them in out of spite, their mothers for their own good. One way or another they came back with a new story to tell.

  The captain was still on the phone. Red wasn’t worried. He knew he was going to draw a pass. When Stoneface had you he didn’t waste time on jawbone. Red allowed himself no alternative but to continue lying—it was the only honorable thing to do—but even should he bust out with the truth, the captain wouldn’t believe that either.

  Turnipseed, the lousy little Jesus freak, had moved into Red’s cell with a Bible, a plastic crucifix, three rolls of Tums, a bottle of Alka Seltzer, a paper cup full of C.C. pills, and a box of Dr. Scholl’s foot pads. Red had regarded this plunder with dismal apprehension. It was bad enough trying to cell with someone halfway regular, let alone some knickknacking nut. Turnipseed wasted no time in exposing his principal obsession. The world was coming to an end.

  It was going to be worse than Red had thought. “Oh, God,” he groaned involuntarily.

  “Yes! Yes! Amen!” Turnipseed affirmed what he had mistaken for a prayer.

  “How long we got?” Red asked.

  “A month, maybe. Maybe more.” Turnipseed glanced at the concrete ceiling. “Only the Man up there knows.”

  “You mean Hogjaw on the fifth tier? He knows?”

  “Hogjaw! I mean the Risen Christ.”

  “Well, let me know if he gives you a hint. I got some stuff owed me and I want to collect it before it’s too late.”

  By then Turnipseed understood he was being mocked and he began to threaten Red with the particulars. Red was going to swell up and burst like a beetle in a bonfire. But before that he was going to be parched with thirst until he strangled on his own swollen tongue. Red assumed since he had already dominoed twice Turnipseed might let him rest, but Turnipseed had an imagination as vivid as it was vigorous and he went on to revive Red for a second time so he could freeze him slowly and see him devoured by savage dogs—

  “Look,” Red broke in. “If the world ends, the world ends. I didn’t buy no round-trip ticket. Now give your north-and-south a rest so I can read this freak book. I got to give it back to Chilly in the morning.”

  Turnipseed released a series of snuffling sounds, a drumroll of disapproval, and began to make up his bunk. He produced four large safety pins with which he anchored his sheets. After, he stripped to his shorts and sat on the toilet to trim his toenails with a razor blade.

  Red was finding the freak book a burn, too wholesome for authentic L and L—the sexual passages were abbreviated and they might as well have concerned the matings of Ken and Barbie dolls for all the resonance they evoked in Red. He liked his bitches funky. After a while he laid the book open on his chest and soon was studying something far more
interesting on the outrageous cinemascope of his inner eye.

  In his fantasies Red swelled into the role of Cracker hipster and boss stud, a part he played at in life, but missed filling by light years. Now his lashless eyes were cool, insolent, and knowing. His hair, thick and vivid as the brush of a fox, shelved out over his forehead like the bill of a cap. His lean hips were wrapped in Levi’s and the muscles of his legs strained against the sun-bleached fibers of his tough and richly symbolic cloth. What he met, he mastered.

  When he walked into a beer joint or a honkytonk there was always a moment of respectful and appraising silence as his boot heels struck the floor with total male authority and even the dullest imagination could supply the ghostly jingle of phantom spurs, and there followed a cloud of discreet whispering as those who knew him told those who didn’t: That’s Sassiety Red. He’s got a pecker longer’n fifty dollars worth of shoestrings, and an understanding so small you could lose it in a gnat’s ass. You best walk right careful around him.

  And the bitches—they got soft eyes and weak knees, all except one, always the boss bitch of the lot. She has a mean white face and a sullen mouth; she watches Red with a cool contempt as he walks up to her.

  —I’m Society Red.

  —That don’t tell me nothing. Her teeth are tiny and sharp-looking.

  —What’s your name, girl?

  —Naomi, she might say. Or maybe, Cora Bell. Her white skin is so fine the blue veins are clearly visible at her temples and Red knows her tits will be similarly decorated.

  —Let’s you and me make it, Cora Bell. I know a hundred ways to pleasure you.

  Her china-blue eyes glint scornfully. You don’t look like you could pleasure a stump-broke mule.

  He slaps her, his fingers tingling with the pleasure, and as she throws her head back he sees her mouth go soft.

  Usually at this point a man in a suit runs up. He is the archetypal dude, but Red never sketches him as a ridiculous figure. His pockets are full of ingenious knives, small foreign automatics, and stainless steel knuckle dusters. His muscles are sometimes trained in the various deadly arts—judo, karate, neo-sparta—at times he is a champion boxer. But always he is given away by the glint of polish on his fingernails, the part in his hair, the glow of pomade on his mustache.

  —Cora Bell, he says, is this fellow annoying you?

  After an exchange of elaborate and soft-voiced insults, they fight, and Red masters the dude without real difficulty. When the dude isn’t knocked cold, he becomes vicious in defeat, and when Red walks back to Cora Bell the dude tries to creep on him, usually with a knife or a broken bottle, but Red, warned by the widening of Cora Bell’s eyes, always turns in time to meet him with a boot heel in the mouth. Always when he rises from this encounter he catches in Cora Bell’s eyes a moment of unguarded admiration before she returns to her former expression of bored disinterest. He knows he has her.

  —You fine freak bitch, he tells her, let’s you and me go for a long walk.

  —I don’t care for long walks.

  But Red is through playing, he sweeps her up and carries her out. Her arms circle his neck. Without transition they are alone. Sometimes on the edge of a meadow in a grove of pine, the warm night air and a yielding bed of needles. Sometimes in a barn in the dry coarse hay while the cedar shakes ring with rain, and a Coleman lantern hangs hissing from a loop of bailing wire. Sometimes in her bedroom with the large soft goosedown pillows and pale blue comforters, the sweet stew of her different scents, the ruffled film of her underwear, and Red stretched out watching like a panther in a tabbycat’s silken basket.

  There is always enough light so he can watch her undress, and this takes a long time. Sometimes she parades for him, switching her ass, while she cites him: Tell me what you’re going to do to me, daddy. Tell me what you’re going to do.

  —I’m going to drive you like a truck, baby.

  Curiously, beyond this point the details became harder to focus, and Red would hold tight to a small patch of his dream still lit in a luminous corner of his mind. Perhaps only the illusion of her breath, straining and catching beside his ear, or the incredible delicacy of her tits, like globes of light, and sometimes he could feel the pressure of her ankles wrapped over his calves, but never more. He crooned, “Do it, baby, do it good. Do it good! Good! Good!”

  “Disgusting!” Turnipseed said.

  Red rolled over and found Turnipseed staring at him, his face pinched, his eyes blinking rapidly. Red shook his head. “How long you been in?” he asked.

  “Two years.”

  “You mean you’ve built two big ones in this jailhouse and you still don’t know when to leave your cell partner alone for a few minutes?”

  “I don’t hold with it,” Turnipseed said thinly.

  Red was unable to credit what he was hearing. “You don’t hold with it?”

  “It destroys you.”

  “Oh, man. If taking your hank could destroy someone, I’d of been boiled down to a grease spot years ago.”

  “I still don’t hold with it.” Turnipseed’s face was stained a deeper crimson, and he stared fixedly at a point somewhere over Red’s shoulder. “You have to control the nature in you.”

  Red exploded. “I don’t have to do nothing you say, punk. Hit your rack.”

  Turnipseed ducked and disappeared into the lower bunk, and Red, his mood broken, picked up the book again. At lights out he undertook to finish the job he had started, but when he heard Turnipseed muttering in the darkness below him the implied moral condemnation had a disturbing effect, and he couldn’t continue. Red decided to wait until Turnipseed went to sleep, but Turnipseed apparently didn’t sleep.

  This went on for a week. No matter how stealthily Red approached his pleasure Turnipseed seemed to be instantly aware of it. The snorts of disapproval would start. He would get up and stand in front of the toilet for fifteen minutes, or light matches and pretend to look for something on the shelf. Red was ready to credit Turnipseed with second sight because this happened at eleven, it happened at twelve and, if Red could stay awake, it happened at one.

  Finally relief came in the form of a wet dream, but the dream frightened Red. The girl, a girl he had once known in real life, turned to an animal beneath him and he woke himself rising out of bed to get away from her.

  It was early morning. The block was dead quiet except for the distant sighing, the breath of large lazy demons, from the hot air vents on the bottom floor. Then Red heard a tearing sound as if Turnipseed in the bottom bunk were ripping cloth with sharp, short jerks. Red leaned over to look into the bottom bunk and he discovered Turnipseed asleep and snoring. He was propped up on his pillow, almost in a sitting position, and dangling down in front of him was a handkerchief hanging from Red’s springs. Even as Red shifted his weight in his own bunk he saw how the motion was communicated through the springs, to the handkerchief, and, had he been awake, to Turnipseed.

  Red climbed down and began to pound on Turnipseed. He had already hit him two or three times before Turnipseed even woke up.

  When the captain hung up he obviously had something else on his mind. He looked absently at Red. “I’m going to give you a pass, but don’t come in here with a solid beef because you’ll wear out that isolation unit.”

  “Thanks, Cap.” Red took his hat from his pocket and fitted it to his head. When he had it square, he stood up.

  “One other thing,” the captain said. “You run for Chilly Willy—” Red opened his mouth, but the captain held up his hand. “I know, you’ll deny it. But I also know most of what comes down on the yard. I know you run for Oberholster’s book. So. A word to the wise. Back off. Oberholster’s due to be busted down to nothing. Drift away in the next week or two—find some new hustle.”

  The captain stared at Red until he said “Okay” and turned to leave, but he paused with his hand on the door. “Chilly’s honest,” he said. “He keeps straight books, square to the last butt. The next wheel to come along might be some s
hort-con punk.”

  “I have reason to believe that Oberholster has caused five men to be beaten in the last year. One of them died. He’s through. Tell him I said so.”

  “I’ll do that, Cap.”

  The captain leaned back in his chair. “Just off the record, Red, what the hell did you buy all that wood for?”

  Red smiled. “Six years ago I was still pretty ballsy, I had a little fire left in my shoes, and I figured I might build me some kind of glider and fly right over these walls of yours. I thought about it a lot, but I never got around to starting it. Pine would of most likely been too heavy anyway.”

  After Red had left the office, the captain permitted himself to smile. He wondered if there were any other place besides a prison where it would be possible to encounter a man like Lester Moon. Possibly in one of the services—he could imagine Red in the Navy, a brig rat of course, an old white hat, shipping over until the sailors’ home claimed him. Perhaps in some small Southern town he might manage as everyone’s relative and the local wise fool. Possibly in the early days of the West he could have made his way in some marginal capacity—the captain could picture Red driving a chuck wagon or a team of mules, but on closer inspection this seemed a scene from a comedy.

  The captain cleared his mind, he had other fish to fry, but first he made a note to himself to call in Nunn sometime in the next few days and give him the same word he had given Red.

  Then he left his office, passed through the main gate, and walked out to the officers’ recreation hall where the Fourth Annual Prison Art Show was in progress. A civilian visitor had been apprehended trying to slip one of the paintings into his attaché case. The captain wasn’t surprised. The year before the inmate cashiers had taken in four bad checks and a counterfeit ten-dollar bill.

  Chilly just shrugged when Red told him Stoneface had said he was through. “That don’t shake you, Chilly?” Red asked.

  Chilly looked up appraisingly at the gray sky as if he were more interested in determining the chances of rain than anything the captain might have said. He tapped one shoe against the other in a random pattern.