On the Yard

by Malcolm Braly

  Red held his arms out from his sides like a buzzard considering taking to the air, but his expression was one of misery. He pulled his wet shirt away from his skin, and squeezed his jacket pocket to make sure the fire was all out. Then he looked at Chilly. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was hot. You know I had a right to be hot. Now what am I going to say if they ask me how I got all wet?”

  “Tell them the loot pissed on you. Just to amuse himself. You wouldn’t be far wrong.”

  When he had climbed to his own level, Chilly sought out the tier tender and sent him after one of the block porters. He reached his cell just as the bell for relock rang, and he waited for his new cell partner to enter first before he followed, frowning with distaste as he slammed the metal door. The boy immediately climbed into the top bunk.

  “¿Qué quieres, hombre?” the block porter, Rooster, asked, peering into the cell. He was a tiny Mexican with one wall eye.

  Chilly took three packs of Pall Malls from an open carton and passed them through the bars to Rooster. “Deliver a clean set of blues to Society Red. You know where he cells?”

  “Sí.”

  “Do it next.”

  “¿Por qué no?” Rooster cocked his head to stare at the upper bunk. He sucked his breath hissing back through his teeth. “Está muy bonita chavalla. Ahora tú chingas todo lo que tú quieres, ¿no es verdad?”

  Chilly smiled and said, “Sí, pero tu madre solamente.”

  “¡Ai! ¡Ai!” Rooster laughed and started off, calling back, “Gracias, Cheely.”

  “Por nada.”

  Chilly settled in his bunk to read, but found himself thinking of the fifty cartons he had invested in this cell, twenty cartons for the hot water line alone, and another ten for a decent crapper, only to have some punk move in for free, and while ordinarily Chilly would have caught the six-thirty unlock to go up to the gym to cut up touches and watch the fighters train he would have to pass now because he didn’t want to leave anyone alone in his cell. He exercised as much control as possible, even though he was always aware custody could crash into his cell whenever the notion grabbed them, but he was further aware that custody learned (if you thought of them as a corporate entity like a swarm of ants) only by rote, and their notion of where inmates might hide valuable contraband was limited to those placed where they had stumbled on contraband in the past. The hollow metal bed frame was thought to be a favorite stash and custody had designed a flexible probe with which they conducted regular and secret checks. Also, they had learned to look behind the wire screen in the mouth of the hot air vent, beneath the light fixture, and beyond the first crook in the channel draining the cell toilets.

  But custody’s shakedown craft was, in reality, as obsolete as the mimeographed lists of underworld slang (where Chilly suspected Lieutenant Olson mined many of the expressions he liked to use) prepared by the prison sociologists, lexicons still defining such almost forgotten usages as “stool pigeon,” “snowbird,” “copacetic,” and “moll buzzer.” Since no guard had ever found valuable contraband hidden in the hollow handle of a cell broom, it remained unlikely they ever would. But a new cell partner, feeling uneasy, possibly anxious to please, might decide to sweep the floor, work the pressure fit loose, and discover Chilly’s stash of soft money.

  Chilly continued reading until he heard the bell ringing to begin the music hour, always close to seven-thirty, and at that time he put his book aside and stood up to make a glass of instant coffee.

  The kid appeared to be asleep, still dressed, outside the blankets. One hand, fingers spread, stretched out as if he had been reaching for something in the moment sleep overtook him. His hair, longer than prison regulation, fell across his forehead to cover one eye; his parted lips moved gently, as if, in his dream, he was speaking.

  Chilly ran hot water from his private tap until it steamed close to boiling, then he mixed coffee in a large plastic glass, and took a handful of creme-center sandwich cookies from a brightly colored tin which had originally held a fruitcake. He walked to the front of the cell and stood looking through the bars as he ate.

  The narrow windows in the block’s outer wall, twenty feet away, framed three almost identical views of San Francisco Bay, and the far shore burned with lights, pulsing in some alien display of life. He’d been told this shore was Richmond, and those who had fallen from Richmond claimed it made their nuts ache to watch these lights at night. But Chilly looked at them with the same dreamless detachment with which he viewed his own face in the mirror. A man was a fool to pay dues he didn’t owe.

  Lonely, cold, phony, and treacherous, a Lesbian whore simulating orgasm for an army of tricks, that was the world lit by those cold hard lights, the one Chilly saw, with a cold crotch, a numb prick, and a taste for pain, a world ready to turn on the gas and drop an overdose of sleepers.

  Yes, a man was a fool to pay dues he didn’t owe.

  Chilly sipped his coffee and listened to a guitar somewhere nearby, wandering like a gypsy from minor chord to minor chord, growing progressively more plaintive until it suddenly blazed into a brief and furious flamenco.

  Farther away, on one of the lower tiers, someone with a deep, slurred voice was singing an almost tuneless and repetitive blues:

  No more turnips and collard greens

  Yes, no more turnips and collard greens

  I say, no more turnips and collard greens

  Cause that ain’t food

  What’s fittin’ for a man ...

  And on the far side of the block another musician played scale variations on a trumpet, working higher and higher, and Chilly was just as glad the horn was as distant as it was.

  He killed his coffee, rinsed the plastic glass, and brushed his teeth. The kid was still asleep. Chilly stripped to his shorts and settled down between his sheets to continue reading. The novel was what Red called a freak book and the opening sections had developed the gradual seduction of a seventeen-year-old boy by a woman ten years his senior. Chilly read impassively, but not entirely unaware of a faint sense of uneasiness which had followed the muffled excitement he felt as he had watched the virgin boy fumbling at the older woman, who was murmuring comfortably and fondly, while she sought him with a practiced hand, pressing him close on her spreading and maternal breasts, until she felt herself captured with a sudden awkward strength.

  “I need it, I need it,” she had apologized to the boy, all motherliness vanished. “I need it.”

  And Chilly had formed an image of the woman’s body closing around the boy: arms, legs, all wrapped tight, while her hair loosened to cover his head and shoulders. Then he had shaken his head briskly and continued reading. The boy was adding the sixteen-year-old girl next door to his stable when the lights went out, and Chilly closed the novel and slipped it under the bunk. He turned his pillow and settled down, but the slight sandiness of his lids and the faint ringing in his ears warned him it might be hours before he fell asleep.

  He began to think his way into the past. Some day the scraps of accidents, the pointless incidents, the chance meetings, and forced partings, the idle whims as well as the careful decisions, his fortunes, his Jonahs—some day it would all be arranged so it made sense, even the ten years he had left to pull would be made to seem significant, some day when he found his personal philosopher’s stone ... though he doubted he ever would ... to solve the mystery of who Billy Oberholster really was.

  Chilly—Billy then—had encountered police for the first time when he was ten. A small boy, he had dared squeeze through the ventilating system into a neighborhood market to empty the till. Then, rather than leave immediately with the money, he began to explore. But he had no sooner stepped into the doorway leading to the back section when an instinct, which was to grow more dependable as he matured, warned him that someone was standing nearby in the darkness. He started to step back, heard a muffled grunt, saw a flash of white fire, and something warped the air above his head. Later he realized the night watchman had shot to kill a grown man, aimin
g center and three-quarters up in the frame of the darkened doorway.

  He fell to his hands and knees and crawled swiftly along the waxed linoleum into the shelter of the produce aisles. The watchman, uncertain of the number or the size of the burglars he had trapped, prudently covered the front door and called the police. Chilly, cut off from his retreat through the ventilators, realized he was boxed in and he hid the money from the till behind some large cartons on a bottom shelf (he discovered later they were twenty-five-pound boxes of dog food) and then moved as far from the hidden money as he safely could, which brought him to the vegetable section. He crawled into a cabinet beneath the fruit counter. The police found him near the end of a systematic search, and at first were smiling because he was so different from any burglar they’d been imagining. He told them he was only playing, and he looked so young and innocent they seemed inclined to believe him until the night watchman discovered the empty till. Then he told them some older boys had forced him to climb through the ventilator and open the front door for them. When the shot had been fired, they had fled, leaving him behind. At this point he was trying to cry, but he couldn’t so he made do by hiding his face in his hands.

  Who were the older boys?

  He didn’t know. Just older boys. They had threatened to beat him up if he didn’t obey. They said they knew where he lived and they’d catch him coming home from school.

  Why hadn’t he told this story in the first place?

  He didn’t want to tell on anyone.

  The police made a careful search around the potato bins, but couldn’t find the money. He never knew whether they believed him or not, but they didn’t pat him on the head or call him son. They took him downtown and lodged him in the juvenile detention home. His mother came and signed him out the next day, and he was able to reach the store before closing time to recover the money from behind the boxes of dog food. Then, after having managed everything so well, he was careless enough to allow his mother to see him with a five-dollar bill. Her eyes had widened with dismay: “Oh, Billy, you did take that money!”

  The dominant dream of his youth was directed towards the day he would free his mother of all her burdens, replace his missing father. What he didn’t realize at the time, and what she never let him guess, was that he was her gravest burden. During his middle teens he started bringing home comparatively large sums of money and handing them to her without explanation. And she didn’t ask because she didn’t want to hear a lie, and, even more, she didn’t want to hear the truth. She never protested unless the nights when she hugged him to her breast, murmuring, “Billy, Billy, Billy, whatever will become of you?” could be counted as a protest. These episodes caused him intense discomfort; still, when he sensed one coming on, he made no effort to avoid it. In his way, he was as permissive with her as she was with him.

  As he considered it years later he might have done all right if he had stayed on the single-o, but though he had many of the characteristics of a loner he wasn’t a true solitary. He had a strong urge to gather a gang around himself, with results that were unfailingly disastrous. He went to reform school when he was sixteen and his mother began to write the bleeding letter she had been writing, with brief interludes, ever since.

  He was out of reform school but a few months before he staged a string of armed robberies with two other boys. They covered three states, and ended in a running gun battle with the local law, state law, and the FBI. They were sent to prison in the state of their arrest, and upon completion of that sentence they were extradited home in chains to be tried for the robberies they had committed before they left. Again they were sentenced to prison.

  Finally Chilly found himself free again at twenty-four, a two-time loser with almost seven straight years of reform school, county jail, and prison behind him. He had never held a job. He had never had a girl friend. But he didn’t leave broke. During his second jolt he had started to master the prison techniques he would later perfect and he smuggled out over two hundred dollars in the barrel of a fountain pen, converted to a keister stash. In the lavatory of the Greyhound Bus depot in San Francisco, he voided his bowels and removed the stash. He rented a cheap room. The following day he located a drop who had been recommended to him and arranged to buy a piece. He paid sixty-five dollars for a snub-nosed banker’s special, Smith and Wesson, .38 caliber, and remade the purchase price twenty times over before he had had it a week. He moved into a medium-sized hotel on Powell Street and started looking for a woman. There were a large number of single women in downtown San Francisco, but he didn’t know how to make a beginning, and confiding his need to some third person who might have arranged to have it serviced was too much like admitting a weakness. The need itself was a weakness, the inability to gratify it an aggravation. To go it alone was to risk rejection, or to expose his ignorance, and he was uncertain of his capacity to weather either of these situations calmly. He was aware of the charge he had accumulated, and he was afraid he might blow it.

  Finally, after several weeks a woman had picked him up, and inevitably it was an older woman. Chilly guessed her to be in her middle forties and from the beginning she made him inexplicably uneasy.

  He encountered her in the corridor of his own hotel when she stepped out of her room to ask him to help her open a window. He noticed her small plump hand, pale against the dark wood of the door, the fingers armored with miniature pink shields, and he saw how the thin strap of her watch cut into the flesh of her wrist.

  “Where is it?” he asked.

  “Right here,” she said, leading him into the room. The window was stuck, as Chilly discovered by opening the top half of the sash, because a paper match folder was wedged against the frame.

  “Here’s your trouble,” he said, holding the folder out. He noticed that it wasn’t weather-stained, but the woman looked at it with mild amazement as if he had just performed some modest conjuring trick, producing a chain of bright scarves instead of the crumpled folder. She offered him a drink—as a reward, she said. He sipped a tall watery scotch while she volunteered her name—Margaret. She was in town to attend a series of lectures. She didn’t give her last name, or mention where she was from.

  She sat tidily on the edge of the bed, leaving the chair for Chilly, and rattled on with an uneasy brightness about the unfriendliness of large cities. She was a short, solid woman with thick white calves and thin ankles. Her black hair was smartly set, waved around the sides of her round pale face. Her mouth was tiny and her eyes an alert blue that because of her coloring seemed more vivid than they actually were. The lines of her body were indistinct, blended with the compression of her foundation garments. Her room smelled of bath powder.

  “Do you stay here?” she asked.

  “Yes, down the hall. Would you like to go to the lounge for another drink?”

  “The lounge? Here at the hotel? Oh, I don’t think so.”

  “Maybe some place else? A bar?”

  She made a small show of hesitation, then accepted. “All right—I shouldn’t, but, yes, I would like that.”

  In the course of the evening Margaret became sedately but thoroughly drunk, and Chilly, turning most of her questions, managed to learn that she was a high school teacher from Dunsmuir.

  “Biology,” she said to the bar mirror, then turned to tell Chilly, “Biology One. The things I teach them, they seem so unimportant sometimes. I wonder if any of them remember, and if they do, does it mean anything to them? Other than the charts of the reproductive systems.” Chilly was surprised to see her blushing. “If I had married, if I could have married—” She looked away again, this time into her glass, and her small lips were quirked in a mirthless smile.

  “I might have had a son your age.”

  “I’m older than I look.”

  “You’re not very old even if you’re older than you look.”

  “Does it bother you?”

  “Bother—no, but it puzzles me.”

  Chilly smiled faintly, “I’ve led a sh
eltered life.”

  “I don’t mean that. I wonder why a nice-looking young man like you hasn’t anything better to do than spend an evening with a middle-aged schoolteacher.”

  “Oh, come off it. Isn’t this exactly what you hoped would happen?”

  “I’m enjoying myself. This is—” She touched her glass lightly with her fingertips as if indicating a classroom exhibit. “This is recess. But you? I was wondering about you?”

  “I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t even know why we’re talking about this.” He reached over and took her wrist. “That’s a nice-looking watch.”

  “It’s inexpensive.”

  He slid two fingers up the sleeve of her jacket. Her skin there was warm and smooth. She reached over to cover his hand with her own.

  “You don’t mind?” she asked.

  “No, I don’t mind.”

  When they returned to her room, she went into the bathroom to undress. Chilly stripped swiftly, still taking time to fold his clothes neatly, and got into her bed. The sheets were cool. He stacked the pillows and lay half propped in the center of the bed with his hands clasped behind his head. He felt more curiosity than excitement, and when Margaret came from the bathroom in a robe and crossed quickly but unsteadily to turn out the light, he watched her closely. With her body unbound and without her high heels she seemed almost squat. Her hams pumped solidly and her lowered breasts swayed against the thin material. Chilly swallowed slowly and when the light went out the darkness seemed to slap the air.

  Later he was never able to retain any of the smaller details. When they had finished, lying separately again, Chilly was left with the feeling he had been wasting his time. Not only the immediate time just past, but all the time he had spent thinking about this encounter and hoping for it. It wasn’t that he hadn’t enjoyed it, but he hadn’t enjoyed it enough to compensate for the time and money he had spent on this old woman.