The times when she moved beneath him with the heat of her own blood in her face were very rare, and often he saw the shallow glaze of impersonation.
Shortly after they were married she began to devise testing situations—propositions beginning with, “If you loved me ...” At first he was agonized. She was constantly pretending to throw their life away to see if he would retrieve it, and even when repetition had dulled his anxiety he was still heartsore to discover that she could conduct such exercises. Far more than he didn’t want to endure the trauma of their obscure quarrels, he didn’t want her to be capable of the devices she employed. He continued to hope for magical solutions, but each mechanical recapitulation of their courtship was shabbier than the preceding. Still there was something between them.
Four years passed. She refused to have a child because she was afraid he wouldn’t love her while she was fat. She formed an addiction, at least psychological, to a diet pill that dulled her appetite and prevented her from sleeping. She inhabited the house at night like a hamster, nibbling on Fig Newtons and Snow Balls. Often he would find her in the morning propped up in front of the television, asleep, the screen blank, or already into the morning testing patterns, the room blanketed with the even electronic hum that seemed loud in the quiet house and somehow shameful with its implications of waste and disorder. They made few friends. Instead of a botanist he became a landscape gardener. She was a nut. The lovely girl was a nut.
But it was as just to say the handsome boy was a nut. He beat her periodically, and thus squandered the emotional energy he would have needed to leave her. He knew it was necessary, if either of them were to realize anything from their lives, but he couldn’t leave her. He couldn’t force himself to make the break.
And that was it, he thought, closing the history of Iceland and laying the book aside. He needed a smoke. Had there been tobacco in the cell he would have broken his resolution without hesitation. He couldn’t leave her even after he understood that it was their mismatch—she had recognized it earlier, and understood it better—which was driving Anna Marie wild. The fresh young faces in the wedding pictures had been a terrible fraud.
“What time is it?” he asked Manning.
“I don’t know. Close to lights out.”
Juleson got up to wash and undress. He brushed his teeth and folded his clothes over the end of the bed. Then he got under the blankets and opened his second book. It was a stock mystery by an author he sometimes enjoyed, but after several chapters he found he could read no more. He leaned half out of bed to drop the second book to the floor.
“Remind me to take that back to the library, will you?”
“All right.”
Manning was gathering and folding his circuit diagrams. “You’re going to be ready, aren’t you, Will?”
Manning paused to consider. “No, I think I’ll need additional instruction on the more complex units, but I will have a head start.”
“That’s what I meant.”
“It may not come to anything.”
Juleson continued to watch Manning, and from his raised position he noticed, as he had before, that Manning was beginning to go bald through the crown. The course of nature, cruelly accelerated by imprisonment, continued to rob Manning, still he made every preparation he was able to make to continue living profitably. His vital energies didn’t seem to be necessarily linked to his hopefulness.
The lights went out, and Juleson turned to his pillow. He envied Manning. When Juleson had first come to prison his most significant act had been to pick up a nail in the lower yard. The nail was old and had probably been lying where he found it for several years, because it had formed a clot of rust which gave it roughly the shape of an arrowhead. He thought nothing of it when he stooped to pry it out of the hard earth—he could have picked up any of a dozen other objects—and he carried it in his hand for the rest of the day. Rubbing it with his thumb, bouncing it on his palm. Then rather than throw it away he had put it in his pocket. Without ever acknowledging to himself that he was keeping the nail he changed it from one pair of pants to another as automatically as he transferred his comb each time he took a shower and changed clothes. Often during the days he would find himself holding the nail, rubbing it with his thumb. He carried it for over two months, and when finally he threw it away, it took great effort not to pick it up again. It was only afterwards that he was willing to admit that the nail had become a charm. Then when he realized it was a charm, he wondered why he had thrown it away.
Now, lying in his narrow bunk, the night around him tense as an open mouth, he wondered why he couldn’t forgive himself. Even when he knew the entire world and all its history had acted as his crime partner. Even Anna Marie had forgiven him. Still when he saw her face it was just after he had hit her. He realized she had provoked him, as she had many times in the past, until he had done just what she wanted. Still he felt the shock in his wrist and saw the single tear that flew from her eye as her head snapped to the side. He saw it arc out glittering with pain. She turned to run, her heels flopping clumsily.
“You’re just like my father,” she had shouted.
“Baby, I’m sorry.”
He chased her into the living room and grabbed her as she was trying to open the front door. “Baby, I’m sorry,” he said again.
She pulled out of his arms to back away, her eyes furious with tears, her cheek already swelling. “Stay away from me. Just stay away from me. I don’t want your apologies. I don’t want you. Any man who’d hit a woman is rotten clear through.”
“Please, please ...”
All he wanted, all he needed was to regain the illusion of peace between them, but he knew she wouldn’t allow it. It would be days before the blow could be smoothed away, and this was so truly her plan that he felt a fresh stir of anger. She stood watching him, her thin chest heaving, her eyes seeming to glitter.
“Let me go, Paul.”
“Where are you going?”
“Just let me go.”
“You haven’t any place to go at this time of night.”
“Are you going to let me go? You think you can just hit me, then say, ‘I’m sorry,’ and it’s all right?” She touched her cheek and her mouth hardened. “Get out of my way.” She moved to shove past him, and, suddenly furious again, he smashed her to the floor and kicked her in the ribs.
She curled into a tight ball, her head buried in her arms. “Oh, God,” she screamed. “God!” Piercing as an animal baffled with pain.
He dropped to his knees beside her, dismayed. He touched her arm.
“Help!” She yelled it at the top of her voice. “Help! Please, someone, help me.”
“Annie, Annie, Annie, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Please, baby, I’m sorry.”
“Police! Someone get the police!”
He picked her up, holding her tightly to muffle her struggles. Still her legs pumped wildly and she thrust at his face with her hands. “I could have you put in jail. That’s where you belong, with all the rotten wife beaters.”
He carried her into the bedroom and placed her on the bed.
“Did I hurt you bad?”
But she wouldn’t answer now. She turned her face away on the pillow, crying quietly. He stood above her, sick with shame.
“Annie, I love you.”
He sat on the bed and pulled her to him, feeling her face hot with tears. “I love you,” he repeated brokenly.
“Oh, Paul, I never thought you’d hit me. I never thought you’d hit me. I always told myself I’d never marry a man who’d hit me. Not after listening to my mother all those years.”
He rocked her as if she were a child, and after a while she stopped crying. Still he brooded over her, broken in the strength of a young girl’s dream of the perfect husband who would never hit her as her father had hit her mother.
For two days, she limped around, her face ashen, and on the third day she began to hemorrhage. She died an hour after she was admitted to the hospital, the same h
ospital where she had been born, twenty-two years before.
Paul pled guilty to second-degree murder.
The next morning it was raining on the yard, and Juleson walked up and down just under the edge of the rain shed. There were a number of restless men trying to walk in the same narrow way and it was necessary to turn and twist in order to keep moving at all. Several times he stopped to stare out over the rainswept yard. Once he saw two seagulls descending in a perfect double helix only to end in a squabble over a scrap of orange peel. Once he was aware of Chilly Willy on the far side of the rain shed, standing with his two lieutenants in the shelter of the bakery door. Again he urged himself to make an effort to pay Oberholster. He supposed in a sense he no longer owed Oberholster since he had survived the other man’s attempt to collect, but should he also pay now it would put a better end to the situation. He would have to make the effort. He shifted his library books to the other arm, and continued walking.
When he went to the library at noon, he still retained from the previous night the half-formed conviction that he should begin to study something of real use, but faced by the massed weight of all the books he found it difficult to concentrate. A language maybe—he had often thought of studying French or Spanish. He walked back to the aisle where the language books were shelved. Perhaps he should start with Latin. It had often seemed to him that this language of law and medicine held powerful secrets in its rounded sentences. He took a first year Latin from the shelf and opened it.
He was vaguely aware of Stick passing behind him—a quarter-glance at the face above and just behind his shoulder —and he thought briefly of a baby bird, a hawk or a falcon, left to starve in the nest. Then he turned to the first verb and read: porto, portas, portat ...
17
THE FIRST blow was solid, directly across the dome of the head. The Hit’s knees buckled and the book slipped from his hand and dropped to the floor. He sagged forward and his chin hung up on one of the shelves, causing his head to pull slowly to the side drawn by the weight of his body. Stick hit him twice more, knocking him loose. He fell full length, and, except for the twitching of his legs, lay quiet.
This happened in less than three seconds. Stick was amazed. It was so easy. He stared down for a moment, seeing where the blood was just beginning to leak through the broken wave that had crested in the Hit’s hair, then he shoved the bar in his belt, buttoned his coat, and walked unhurriedly out of the library.
It was another five minutes before someone found Juleson and reported it. Two other men who had seen him earlier had quietly left the library without saying anything.
Stick had gone directly to the big yard, where he found Chilly Willy standing on the edge of the crowd just leaving the mess hall after the noon meal. He stood ten feet from Chilly and waited until he could catch his eye. When Chilly left his friends to come over, Stick said, “It’s done.”
“When?”
“Just now.”
“Did you do a good job?”
“Yeah, I did a good job.”
“You’ll be on the gym list tonight.”
Chilly walked back to where Nunn and Society Red were waiting for him.
“What’d that rumpkin want?” Nunn asked.
“He wanted to borrow a box.”
“Did you loan it to him?”
“Have I started to look foolish to you?”
“I just wondered,” Nunn said.
“He’s a weird-looking sucker,” Red said.
“I wonder how you look to him?”
Nunn smiled. “Like an old punk looking for revenge.”
“I got your revenge—” Red indicated his crotch. “Right here.”
“Shit,” Nunn said slowly, “you can’t do nothing with that thing. That’s just a handle to turn you over with.”
“You try me,” Red challenged.
But Nunn had turned to stare after an empty gurney wheeled at a brisk trot by two hospital orderlies. “There’s someone’s trouble running to meet him,” Nunn said.
Chilly nodded. “It’s been too quiet around here. Something was due to come down.”
“Let’s see where they’re heading,” Red suggested.
But Chilly shook his head. “They’ll be back.”
The three friends moved over to the edge of the shed where they would have a good view of the gurney when it returned on its way to the hospital. They stood, talking idly, looking up towards three-gate like people waiting for a parade to start. When the gurney reappeared the orderlies were no longer running. They moved at a walk, one on either side, their faces solemn, but not altogether unaware of the effect they were causing. Someone ran up to ask, “What happened?”
One of the orderlies answered, “A piping.”
“How is he?”
“He’s cooled it.”
Juleson’s head was turned to the side, and as the gurney rolled by Chilly looked into his face. The eyes were half open. Well, sucker, Chilly thought, it happens like that sometimes.
Nunn said, “It seems like I’ve seen that guy around.”
“Yeah,” Red added, “I’ve noticed him once or twice myself.”
“You went a little heavy, didn’t you, Chilly?” Nunn asked.
“You think so?”
“If you had heat before, what’re you going to have now?”
“Nunn, I don’t even know what you’re talking about. Or why you’re talking at all. Do you?”
“No, you’re right.”
Red was still looking after the gurney. “That’s a long ride,” he said slowly.
The work whistle blew and Chilly returned to his job. He found the old porter just finishing with the mop. “Hit it for a minute,” Chilly told him, and walked across the damp floor to the loot’s desk. He picked up the phone and watched until the old man had crossed the room and closed the door behind him, then Chilly dialed the gym.
“Gym office, Inmate Collins—”
“Cat, this is Chilly. Put that clown on the night gym list. But if it goes sour leave me out of it.”
“Has he got heat on him?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“Okay, call it done.”
Chilly hung up and settled back in the loot’s chair. He touched his temples with the tips of his fingers and rubbed gently as if he were manipulating something both sensitive and dangerous. He had pictured a gang beating, where everyone got into each other’s way and Juleson would have been more humiliated than hurt, but now he was beginning to realize that he had not been dealing with a gang. So the pipe. So the pipe.
Lieutenant Olson came in. “You like that chair?” he asked.
Chilly stood up, moving towards his own desk.
“I think you tore your ass this time,” Olson continued.
“And what’s that supposed to mean?”
“Don’t you ever get tired of that act of yours?”
No more than you get tired of yours, Chilly thought, but he kept silent.
Olson sat down at his desk and tipped his hat to the back of his head. He had styled his face to an expression of moral disapproval, but somehow he looked only gratified. “They want you over in the captain’s office. Maybe they can explain it to you.”
“Do I need a pass?”
“No, you don’t need a pass.”
Chilly started through the garden. Halfway across he met Mendoza, the assignment loot’s clerk. Mendoza passed him, eyes straight ahead, but he whispered, “Check yourself, Chilly, they think you had that cat taken out.”
Chilly paused for a moment in the center of the garden, where the walks crossed each other. The fountain was still plugged, but the winter grass was brighter and cleaner than anything else in the prison. The day was clear and he could feel the faint warmth of the sun through his shirt. As sometimes happened he had a fractional vision of one of the many other lives he might have lived, and he experienced a remote stir of emotion—a distant echo of that other man standing in an open field—then he turned an
d continued on towards the captain’s office.
They softened him up by making him wait. He sat for an hour and a half on the wooden bench in the corridor leading to the captain’s private office. Here everything was hushed and informed with an air of high seriousness similar to the atmosphere of hospitals, police stations, courthouses, the unmistakable flavor of responsibility and power, the control of life or death. The captain’s confidential clerk, a neat, smooth-featured young officer who held the rank of sergeant, moved back and forth carrying different cards and folders. His walk was faintly mannered and the fit of his uniform pants too snug, and this combined with his fresh face was enough to mark him in the minds of most inmates.
Chilly sat quietly. He had no case to make in his own mind. He knew nothing at all. When he was finally called to face the captain, he was surprised not to find several members of the goon squad present, the hands standing behind the brain, but there was only the confidential clerk, who sat down on a straight chair, crossed his legs, pen poised over a steno pad.
The captain was reading a file—Chilly assumed it was his. He stared for a moment at the part—straight as if it had been ruled in the captain’s thick black hair, then he shifted his gaze to the group portraits hung in a line behind the desk. Former wardens and their staffs—the style of the uniforms marked the different eras, but to Chilly the faces didn’t seem to change. Further to the left there was a series of ID photos taken in the early days—the prisoners in stripes with shaven heads glared fiercely into the lens. They had heart, Chilly thought. The bald heads looked like misshapen rocks. Now they were an idle curiosity and it was a beef to shave your head. The prison officials were afraid your mother might write the governor to complain of prison brutality. Chilly smiled.
“Something funny, Oberholster?”
The captain was staring up at him. There was nothing theatrical in the harsh white face, the remote eyes—this was the captain, and he could be respected as a known quantity.
On the Yard Page 27