On the Yard

by Malcolm Braly

  All through this period he continued to caution himself: “Be keen.” Involved in an actual plan of some complexity, he spent less time in the grip of fantasy. When he rehearsed what he would do, as he did many times each day, he saw himself working with his own hands, his own muscles, his own mind. True, there was an aura in these enactments, one of mastery, and his own figure was always followed by an individual spotlight, but he sometimes thought of things that might go wrong and considered how he would protect himself against them. He had stopped marking the Vampire design wherever he went.

  Still he planned ahead. He spent a major part of his mornings in the laundry adding details to the uniform he would wear. The guards’ uniforms were dry-cleaned in the same plant, occasionally the metal buttons were lost. Stick now had four of them. He needed to replace the leather band on his hat with metal, and he had managed to steal another inmate’s watch for the expansion band. He needed two more bands. There was a clothing repair shop above the laundry and he had intimidated one of the inmates assigned to a sewing machine and forced him to remodel a denim work coat into an Eisenhower jacket. He had fashioned shoulder patches out of sheeting and rendered them with colored pencils he had stolen from the desk of the inmate clerk. He needed more leather. Leather was important. But more than anything he needed boots.

  He allowed the Hit to use the library once while he drifted behind him. Keen, he was getting keener. He saw that the Hit had trouble finding anything he wanted to read. He searched the shelves from end to end, sometimes standing for minutes reading the beginning of a book only to replace it. The Hit never paid any attention to who was around him. People had to ask him to move so they could get by. He’s unconscious, Stick decided, and he saw half a dozen opportunities to come down on him before he finally checked out two books and left.

  Stick watched through the library window as the Hit walked towards the ed building. Enjoy them books, he thought.

  That night in the cell, Morris began to put the last two sections together. He had fashioned a harness from strips of cloth braided into ropes. Two more of these ropes sewn to the middle of the balloon were to act as tethers.

  “When it’s full,” he told Stick, “I’ll cut it loose, and—” Again his hand described the magic moment.

  “You speak any Mexican?” Stick asked.

  “Hell, no.”

  “How you figure to make it down there with them Pancho Villas?”

  “I don’t know for sure I’ll go there. Like I said, maybe I’ll grab a ship.”

  “Ship to where?”

  “I don’t know. I ain’t got no definite plan. Hell, if I could go where I wanted, I’d go to Fresno. I had a woman in Fresno once.”

  “You can’t be fucking around with no woman,” Stick said severely.

  “She’s gone. I looked for her a half-a-dozen times. Pretty nice old girl. She was real artistic. She used to work in a bakery icing cakes, you know, putting all that fancy stuff on them?”

  “You’re not keen enough for that balloon,” Stick said.

  Morris, who had often been told he was not enough of one thing or another, bowed his head over his work. “I was keen enough to think of it and keen enough to do it. I meet a lot of guys who talk about getting out of here—they’re hard and sharp as crocodile teeth, they say. Well, they’re still walking that big yard and they’ll be walking it after I’m gone.”

  “I didn’t say you weren’t keen on the balloon side, but you got to scheme ahead.”

  Morris was tearing out the seam he had been working on, slashing at the stiff black thread with a razor blade.

  “What’re you doing?” Stick demanded.

  “Pick, pick, pick,” Morris cried. “You’d think this was your balloon. But it ain’t, it’s mine and it’s going to be right when I use it. I ain’t building no parachute just in case. It’s got to be right.”

  “What was the matter with what you done?”

  But Morris wouldn’t answer him.

  16

  SOMEONE in the cells around Juleson was trying to learn the saxophone. Every night the first awkward and mournful notes began to sound immediately after the music bell rang at seven-thirty, and Juleson pictured the aspiring musician assembling his horn, adjusting his reed, and waiting with the instrument in his mouth so he wouldn’t waste a second of the hour allowed to him for practice, correctly assuming he needed every moment of it.

  At other times Juleson tried to picture the animal he would imagine if he didn’t know these sounds were made by a man, and he saw a small—the big voice was obvious camouflage—sorrowing, cowardly creature the color of sunbaked mud, crouched in the far corner of its cage, its feet soiled with its own filth, but its eyes hopeful in spite of their manifest stupidity. Large, round, dull eyes, stained with hope, while its bell-shaped muzzle throbbed and quivered with a frustrated need to communicate.

  For several evenings the saxophonist had been trying to learn “I Only Have Eyes for You.” He rushed anxiously through the first bars like a broad jumper gaining momentum for some final leap and invariably tripped over the accidental in the eighth measure, sprawled, fumbled around, and, undaunted, started over.

  For Juleson this tune formed a key that held the power to unlock painful memories. The key didn’t always insist upon its right to union with the lock, the memories were not always painful—their brighter hues and darker shadows had been scorched and faded by too many repetitions of his remorse. Even if he had felt it as an obligation he could not have maintained the vigor of his original suffering. For months at a time he did not remember at all, and at other times he seemed to be engaged in a ritual. He sensed that his entire inner show of concern was overstructured, that except for rare moments even his grief and shame lacked naturalness.

  At seven-thirty he was reading the first of the two books he had checked out—A Short History of Iceland—when the bell rang and the horn sounded behind it, the small creature roused by the larger, and Manning said, from the bottom bunk, “There’s your friend.”

  “Where does he get the energy? The hopefulness?”

  Manning, busy with his own work, didn’t answer, and Juleson allowed himself to see another saxophonist of not much greater skill, standing in solo stance, his posture more practiced than his music, on the small stage at the end of the Italian-American Social Club where the friends and relations of the bride had gathered to acknowledge the union of Anna Marie Patello and Paul Juleson. A function of the tribe, he had thought, but he had been uncomfortable as a stranger. “Who is this boy Anna Marie’s marrying?” Several times during the course of the evening he had been asked if he were Italian. His dark hair and deep tan prompted the question, and he would have been glad to answer yes.

  The five-piece band, high school musicians, had been an economy. For days before the wedding various amateur groups had been phoning Anna’s home to offer their services at the reception. The leader of a western group had been particularly persistent, blandly unable to comprehend that his recitation of the costumes and specialties offered by his group seemed as inappropriate to Mrs. Patello as a chorus of Bantu drummers.

  “Get an accordion,” Mr. Patello hollered. “That’s all you need—an accordion.”

  “Papa, these kids don’t want no accordion.”

  “What’sa matter with an accordion?”

  It was impossible to tell him. The leader of the high school group—“combo” was the word they used—turned up as the son of one of Mrs. Patello’s friends. He and the other boys were willing to perform for five dollars apiece and all they could eat. They were not a bargain.

  Anna Marie had requested “I Only Have Eyes for You,” and presented herself to him, moving through the gathering dancers, tiny, finally, on this night, confident, her luminous complexion, fine eyes, and off-center teeth all held up to him, all she had to give, as they danced.

  “I had this played for you,” she said.

  “I saw you talking to young Stan Kenton.”

  �
�His name’s Raymond Florio.”

  “Your mother told me. I was just making a joke.”

  Her arm tightened around his neck. “Do you know what Mother’s Avon lady said? She said we danced beautifully together and if we passed through life as beautifully as we danced everything would always be wonderful for us.”

  “Is the Avon lady here?”

  “Everyone’s here.”

  It was true. For Anna Marie, everyone was there. Close to five hundred people, only a few of them known to Paul. An Army buddy had dropped in to haunt the bar like a stained shadow, and a former teacher, who now lived in San Francisco, had put in an appearance.

  “You look tired, Paul,” she had observed.

  “It’s the excitement.”

  She turned to study the hall. “Somehow I never pictured you having a big wedding like this.”

  “Anna Marie’s family arranged it.” He smiled. “I paid the priest myself.”

  “Well, that after all is traditional. The bride’s parents pay for the wedding, and we must assume they have bought what they wanted.”

  “I’m enjoying it.”

  “Good.” She paused, studying him. “I hope you’ll be happy, Paul. You deserve to be.”

  He remembered that her lipstick had seemed like tinted grease. His brother-in-law, his wife’s sister’s husband, had drunk himself sick and vomited all over his rented dinner jacket. It was impossible to clean and had to be paid for. This furnished talk for a month.

  When he and Anna Marie left the reception they went straight home to the apartment he had rented and undressed in the dark. He wore a new pair of shorts he had bought just for this moment. It never occurred to him that she might be even shyer than he was. Shy and frightened as well.

  Her mother and an older aunt had taken her aside during the day for the purpose of sharing a woman’s knowledge with her, and they had terrified her with their stories of a man’s excesses. The aunt whispered, “Your uncle clawed me all along the sides. He was like a maniac. I carried the marks of his teeth for months.” The aunt sighed, her eyes fluttered. Her mother gave her a bottle of petroleum jelly. “This will make it a little easier,” she said.

  Anna Marie never said a word, lying in the center of the swaying bed. The Vaseline was in her purse. He found her in the dark and pulled her to him. Rubbing her sides. She was so small. He was vaguely surprised to discover that her hidden skin was not as smooth as that of her arms. He put her on her back and tented himself over her on his knees and elbows. He pushed in gently, and even when this was done without difficulty he continued softly. It was all over quickly and he found he was still excited.

  “May I ... again?” he asked.

  And she said quietly there in the dark, “If you think you should.”

  Later, as he was on the verge of sleep, she said, “I thought it was supposed to feel different than that.” And sketched one of the lines along which their future battles would be fought.

  The next day, the sister and her husband came by, eager to see what they could glean, and the husband asked, “How many bullets did you shoot last night?”

  Paul shrugged, declining to answer, but Anna Marie had squared around to challenge him, though at the time he didn’t recognize it for what it was. “You were like a baby,” she said. “I had to hold you in my arms both times.” He nodded, thinking to please her.

  And the sister said, “Look, he just nods.”

  They acted as if he had convicted himself of something. What did it mean? That she took even the small consideration he had shown her for weakness, or only that she was willing to represent it to her family as weakness? Or was she punishing him because the night had been a disappointment to her? He didn’t know. He still didn’t know ... and was it worth all his anxious reappraisals? He knew it wasn’t. A marriage had gone violently sour. Marriages were going sour all over. Still the first flecks of rot had seemed tragic, and even when the fruit was mush in both their hands, neither of them had been able to let go of it.

  The truth, then—they had held nothing else in common.

  He tried to see her as he had seen her first, carefully reconstructing her air of freshness and untouched passion, the bright, new, unopened container, and listening carefully to the inflection of her voice, studying the lulls in her expressive face, he was forced to realize he should have known better. He had superimposed a dream over her face. And the dream hadn’t even been his own, but one he had borrowed. The fault remained his.

  “You going to shave, Paul?” Manning asked.

  He felt his cheeks. “No, not tonight.”

  “I think I will.”

  Now Juleson heard the heavy metal wheels of the water truck a few cells away, and watched Manning place their can at the bars. The water man came into sight, pulling his truck like an ox. He filled the can, using a frayed red rubber hose.

  Manning shaved with face soap, they had nothing else, but with his light beard he found it less uncomfortable than Juleson did. He worked the soap into a stiff lather and patted it on his face. Through the mirror he saw Juleson’s eyes over the edge of his book.

  “No good?” Manning asked.

  “It’s all right. I just can’t hold my mind on it. I suppose I should have taken up something like you have. Made some use of my time.”

  Manning was sharpening a razor blade on the heel of his palm. “You have lots of time.” He smiled. “I don’t mean to do. I mean in your life. For myself, I can’t afford to waste anything.”

  “You’re not that old, Will.”

  “No, but I don’t have any real idea how old I am, because I don’t know how long they’ll keep me here. But even if they let me out tomorrow, I’d be much older in several ways than I was when I came in.” He turned back to the sink, fitting the blade into the razor. “You’re young enough to make a fresh start. I’m not.”

  “Still I could have put this time to better use. I don’t know why I didn’t. There were so many things I thought I wanted to learn when I didn’t have the time, then when I had too much time—” He grinned wryly, indicating his book.

  “Anything you learn is valuable.”

  “No, this is an indulgence. The distant—in time or place —it’s a trip. Unless you’re a specialist of some kind. I might as well read shoot-’em-ups, for all the value I get from what I do read.”

  Manning made no answer. He was guiding the razor down his cheek, his mild, temperate eyes following the stroke. A modest man. He had asked too little. And Juleson? He had asked too much.

  “Do you think she’ll come?”

  Manning looked at him through the mirror. “Pat?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know what to think.”

  “Do you want to see her?”

  “Yes, I suppose I do, but I’m not sure it’s a good idea. I keep asking myself what it is she wants.”

  “What could it be?”

  “There are a lot of legal things—title to the house, the car, insurance policies. She may want my power of attorney.”

  “Maybe she’s sorry she threw you to the police.”

  “She had a right to do that.”

  “Even so, she didn’t have to exercise it. You weren’t making a steady thing of the girl—you probably wouldn’t have bothered her again.”

  “I’m not sure of that.”

  “Still in terms of all your lives, that might have been better than what has happened.”

  Manning turned to stare at him. “It was grotesque.”

  Juleson was embarrassed by the intensity of Manning’s gaze. “I shouldn’t talk about it. My interest is ... irresponsible.”

  His interest was more complicated than it was easy for him to admit. In a sense he envied Manning his crime, and he couldn’t help contrasting the other man’s impulse to his own. Sexual aggression, even the most brutal, could be seen to stem from some basic hopefulness, and his own sterile violence appeared inhuman by contrast. He was able to concede that his view might be naïve,
lacking in sophisticated insight, or more reasonably faltering in the profusion of such insights acquired at second and third hand, but he resisted fiercely any tendency he sensed in himself to slip off the hook through a manipulation of standard values. Those values he had carried out of childhood, and no matter how he might have come to dilute them with qualifications, he still didn’t want them reversed. He didn’t want to be told, with the weight of a conviction exceeding the suspect charm of novelty, that violence might be a mask of love. Such tenets would form the foundation and ridgepole of an existence too baffling to cope with. In preference he accepted guilt. Almost, he seemed greedy for it. Still he continued to go back over the ground.

  It had been a picture wedding. When the photographs were delivered they could easily have been assembled for the pages of Bride, a mock ceremony staged with a close eye to classic detail. Running from the church in a cloud of rice and candied almonds. Cutting the cake, their hands enfolded on the knife. Anna Marie throwing her bouquet. Anna Marie throwing her garter. Anna Marie posed with her parents. Paul with his ushers, all of them in rented dinner jackets. White jackets and maroon ties like dusty moths. He did look tired. His mouth was styled in a vivid smile, but his eyes were exhausted, and the effect was to make them appear years older than the rest of his face.

  The photographs were full of a marvelous and emblematic significance as if the wedding had been purified of everything but its symbolic value, and Paul sought his own image in print after print, not to compare, but to see it there in permanent relation to those others. The orphan had stolen a family.

  But if he had planned in his orphan dreams how he would use marriage as a beachhead for his assault on some community, Anna Marie had rehearsed for life in movie houses and in front of the television set. She rendered the episodes of their life together into the stock situations common to romantic films and responded according to the models she had studied. She knew her lines. This was how life was magnified and salvaged from the commonplace, but Paul could seldom be sure whether he was dealing with Anna Marie or with Lana Turner. And most of the time he refused to recognize that there was a difference. Still something had aged the eyes in those photographs.