On the Yard

by Malcolm Braly

  —Stop, Vampire, they screamed.

  Beautiful! He breathed deeply, the wind rushing at his open mouth, in love with the pure night air here above the world. A sharper gust blew his cap off and whipped his long hair into his eyes, stinging like sleet. He jumped down from the pylon and ran swiftly on tiptoe to recover his cap where it rested against the base of a triangular housing. He replaced his cap and knelt to press his ear against the tarpaper. He could make out the hum of a motor and a murmur of distant shouting. He laid his cheek against the exhaust vent and felt a breath of warm air. Again he smiled to himself. “Keen,” he crooned aloud.

  He didn’t want to leave the roof, where he felt close to an important mystery. He lay on his back and looked up at the stars. He imagined the heavens were a board on which he played a game where he was the only one who knew the rules, and when he saw a dark swiftly moving object with one small red eye and one small green eye enter the playing area, he sensed a moment of genuine shock before he recognized it for an airplane. Then he began to send missiles to track the plane, and noted a brief flare of white light as it blew apart in the air.

  He crawled commando style to the edge of the roof. Below he saw the roof of the education building just on the other side of the industrial alley, and across and still lower he saw four-box. Two officers stood talking on the porch, their faces diminishing sharply under the bills of their uniform caps, and as Stick watched, one slapped the other on the shoulder and they both began to laugh. He took an imaginary grenade from his belt, pulled the pin with his teeth, released the spoon and the firing pin bit sharply into the primer. He counted one-steamboat, two-steamboat, three-steamboat before he tossed the grenade down at the feet of the guards where it bounced once and exploded. A sheet of red flame with BA-ROOM! printed across it enveloped the two men.

  Stick drew back from the edge and returned to the head of the fire escape. He climbed down one flight and re-entered the gym through a window that led into a room where the sports equipment was stored during off seasons—now it held clusters of bats, buckets of balls, bases like stacks of pillows, and racks of uniforms. He continued through a metal fire door into the weight-lifting section, into the scent of sweat, salt, and liniment and the ring of heavy metal. Several hundred men were working out, their faces stern with the gravity of ritual—acolytes still slender and sore and heavy old priests with twenty-inch arms and fifty-two-inch chests. Iron freaks, Stick dismissed them with contempt. They were as lacking in true manhood as the chess players hunched over their boards in the little room set aside for them. Stick entered the boxing section and went to the back ring where Cool Breeze was working out with one of his sparring partners. The way Cool Breeze moved around a ring was the most beautiful thing Stick had ever seen.

  When he returned to the cell at nine o’clock he found Morris reading. “Is it done?” Stick asked.

  Morris sighed and closed the book on his finger. “It’s not right.”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “It’s not right, that’s all.”

  By now Stick had developed certain techniques for dealing with Morris and he continued with the appearance of patience. “What exactly’s wrong with it?”

  “I should have nylon thread.”

  “You talking about resewing that whole bag with nylon thread?”

  Morris held his book up to study the cover. A woman sat at her vanity removing her stockings. Through the large mirror a man in a black suit was visible—he held a gun. “It has to be right,” Morris said absently.

  “There ain’t no nylon around this joint. Ain’t I told you that? I brought you the strongest thread they got. Now what the hell’s the matter with you?”

  “I don’t do nothing by halves. When I go—” Morris’s eyes beat for a moment with febrile energy—“I’m going. They can whistle ‘Dixie’ for me.”

  “You can’t go nowhere until you finish that goddam bag.” Stick managed a thin smile. “Hell, I’m looking forward to seeing you fly.”

  “Yeah, won’t that be something?” Morris sat up, laying the book aside. “Can’t you just picture that? Right over their heads—just like a goddamned big-assed bird. Oh, I’ll finish it. Don’t think I’m not going to finish it. Maybe only a few more nights ... but then I got to get that gas up on the roof and that ain’t going to be easy.” Morris lay back down and picked up his book. “No, that’s going to take some doing.”

  “Your friend got that gas in those cans?” Stick asked.

  “Sure.”

  “What’s he getting out of this?”

  “Satisfaction.”

  “He must be strong for satisfaction.”

  “He’s a buddy.”

  “Well, you got good buddies, Morris.”

  19

  AFTER LOCKUP Chilly had settled down with the papers, reading them with closer attention than usual, able to involve his mind in events that were without real significance to him. He could have been reading fiction, and if it were fiction his taste ran to the macabre—PLANE HITS HOUSE, 3 PERSONS DIE. POLICE PROBE PHONY BENEFIT SHOW FOR BLIND. 8 PERISH IN GREEN BAY FIRE. He found these three items on a single page. And while he had been looking for a charm of negative power, he laid these deaths, these corruptions, against the death of Juleson, and against the echo of Red’s voice mourning, not that he had no hope of improvement, but only the state of consciousness that forced him, however briefly, to realize his condition. Red was old now. Everything he had said stunk of old man. On some buried level of his mind he knew he was finished and it was his principal fortune that he seldom was forced to review this intimate accounting. Red had been walking the big yard off and on for twenty years, more on than off, and before that he had busted his ass down South chopping cane and picking cotton. What could he hope for? Even if he could have taken himself apart and built a new man with the same pieces, this Red would take one look at the cold deck he had been handed to play with, and cash himself in. But Chilly—he stared in at himself—he felt he could have played their game and won. He had chosen not to. But there was so much he had not known and would now necessarily never know, and sometimes, like tonight, he wondered. Pausing with the paper open to the society page and its daily crop of brides, he wondered. He studied the photos intently as if he could somehow crack the bright smiles and expose the secret lives behind them. It was important he find nothing there.

  The boy—Chilly still didn’t know his first name—had been shaving, whistling cheerfully. Now he was starting to clean the cell.

  “Do you want me to wipe off your books?” he asked.

  “If you get anything out of it.”

  “I just feel like doing something.” He ran the back of his hand along his freshly shaven cheek. “That stuff’s total.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “Where do you get it?”

  “From a friend.”

  “He must be a good friend.”

  The boy was rinsing an old tee shirt in the sink, and Chilly sat up to ask, “You going to wash those books or just wipe them?”

  “With a damp rag. That’s all.”

  Chilly stood up and went to the bars. He reached up and seized them with his hands, unconsciously falling into the classic pose associated with all prisoners, but his posture was devoid of despair, or entreaty, or even defiance—he held there as routinely as a commuter holding to a strap on a crowded bus. He had felt a sudden impulse to look out at the narrow strip of lights, and he stood watching the flickering neons, and the cold blue fluorescents that marked the course of a hidden freeway. In his heightened awareness it seemed strange, a freak of his own consciousness, to consider the people in the cars passing along the freeway, aliens in a distant land, only a mile away. The consideration recalled the first time he had passed from one state to another, from Arizona to California, as his mother had driven West in the hope of finding his father. His conception of the essential separateness of these two states had been so distinct he could still recall the shock of surpr
ise he had felt when the earth and the trees did not turn red as the colors had changed on the map.

  He allowed his thoughts to drift twenty years in the past recalling the impressions gathered along that southwestern highway—the dullness of the desert, crumpled brown wrapping paper, the clouds of dust moving on the horizons and the distant mountains seeming no more substantial, the listless officials at the border station, their old car faltering along the sun-softened blacktop, the same dusty licorice of the big yard on a warm day, his mother’s face struggling to contain her anxiety, but showing it nevertheless in the feverish tenderness she bathed him in—these sensations swept across his mind like the motley tail of a kite, and then rose swiftly and diminished into some high and unenterable part of his mind, but he thought: Even then you were on your way. He remembered how, huddled in the corner of the seat, his resentment and determination had knotted over his feelings of helplessness as he had hung there with an enforced passivity in the grip of events largely set in motion by others. Carried along.

  Now he was able to call the tune, and Juleson, poor tightassed snob, had danced to the end of it, but there was no pleasure in that, not even a dry cold lunar satisfaction. Juleson’s props and postures, all the second-hand furniture of his mind, they were all back in stock, waiting for the next man who could come to try the part—to use and be used by them, to act, and be acted upon. But Juleson was out of it—so maybe he should have put the gunsel on Red and done an ultimate favor for an old friend.

  Chilly returned to his bunk and began to read the sports page, and by the time he was finished the boy had cleaned the entire cell. He stood by the sink looking at what he had accomplished. The painted concrete floor still bore the thin gloss of water, and the back wall was faintly dusted with scouring powder.

  “It looks better, don’t you think?” the boy asked.

  Chilly folded the paper. “Yes.” He smiled faintly, noting that his lips felt brittle. “You’re on a work kick.”

  The boy shifted his shoulders. “I never minded working.”

  “Then why do you make the joints?”

  “Oh, checks. My friend was passing checks. I was helping him.”

  “And he let you ride the beef?”

  “I offered.” The boy smiled sweetly, but it seemed the sweetness of an artificial flavoring. “It’s easier for me to be here than it would be for him.”

  “Wasn’t he a sissy too?”

  “No, not exactly. He was very butch.”

  “Well, what about Tracy?”

  “That was different. You know, when you’re a juvenile they can put you in for anything. My parents—my father, he wanted it. I guess he thought they were going to cure me. They cured me all right. I was done more ways than I thought was possible, whether I wanted it or not. They treated me like property, handing me around from one to another. Those big kids, they wanted to show what studs they were.”

  “And you didn’t like that?”

  Again the subtle shifting of the shoulders—not a shrug, not a flounce, but an exteriorization of some inner uncertainty, not caused by the present question, but beneath all causes.

  “I’m not a thing,” the boy said. “At least, I don’t think I am. But Tracy could have been pretty wild if it hadn’t been for that.” He turned and looked up at the shelves. “You have a lot of books.”

  “I just have them, that’s all,” Chilly said, feeling an obscure uneasiness. “They’re mostly reference works I’ve picked up here and there.”

  “Just think if you knew everything in those books.”

  “Do you think that would help?”

  The boy was lighting a cigarette. He shook the match out with a flourish. “Oh, I’m not looking for help.”

  “Then that makes you different in more ways than one.”

  “Don’t get spiteful.” He was holding his cigarette pinned loosely in two fingers, his palm bent back off the stem of his wrist, forming a flat where something small might have perched. “Please, it was nice just talking to you. I won’t bother you, if you don’t want me.”

  Chilly smiled with reluctant amusement. “Look, what’s your name? Your real name. Not this Candy shit.”

  “Martin. Isn’t that a monstrous name? It means warlike.”

  “It’s a little better than Candy—what’s that supposed to mean?”

  Again the shifting shoulders. “It’s what they call me. Candy Cane. I didn’t say I liked it.”

  “You didn’t say you didn’t like it either.”

  “It’s all right. A little silly.”

  “Well, look, Martin, I’m not worried about you bothering me.”

  “I didn’t mean that. I just meant I wouldn’t embarrass you.”

  “I’m not easily embarrassed.”

  “I know. A lot of the men on the yard are afraid of you.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything.”

  From somewhere down the tier Chilly heard the sound of a broom hitting against the bars. He rolled the paper and handed it to Candy. “When that tier tender comes by, ask him to take this up to cell fourteen on the fifth tier.”

  “All right. Who cells there?”

  “Old Red. I don’t know why he reads the paper. He thinks it’s science fiction, long as he’s been jailing.”

  “That’s the man you want me to cell with?”

  “Yes.”

  “He doesn’t even look clean.”

  Chilly laughed out loud. If he passed this remark on to Nunn, Nunn would never let Red forget it. “Red’s all right,” he said. “You’re looking for action, and Red’s laying to give you all you can handle.”

  “But I like to pick my own friends. You’re trying to use me just like they used me in Tracy. Am I supposed to like it? Maybe you think I bend over for dogs and horses, or anything with a prick?”

  “I hadn’t thought about it,” Chilly said coldly. “But don’t panic. So far you’re not scheduled to make any move.”

  “Can I stay here?”

  “No, I don’t think so. But I’ll get you in with someone you like. Now get up to the bars and catch that tier tender.”

  Martin walked to the bars and looked out at the lights. He was silent for a moment, then, “It’s strange,” he said, “but I have the feeling something wonderful’s going to happen. It doesn’t make any sense because I know nothing’s going to happen, but I feel just as if I knew it was. Do you ever feel like that?”

  “That’s the cotton. Tomorrow you’ll be convinced it’s something terrible that’s going to happen.”

  “I hope not. I like this feeling too well.”

  “Well, that’s easy. More cotton, more feeling—for a while anyway.”

  The tier tender pushed his broom into sight. He paused staring at Martin. First he stared at his face, then at his feet. It was Sanitary Slim. Martin pushed the rolled newspaper halfway through the bars. “Would you take this up to the fifth tier, cell fourteen, please.”

  “Please? Now, ain’t that nice. But they didn’t send me up here to be no errand boy.”

  “I’d appreciate it.”

  “You would, huh?” Slim took the paper and stuck it in his belt under his coat. “I’ll take it up after I finish my sweeping.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Your mouth is just full of pretties. How’d you like your shoes shined?”

  Chilly stood up. “Just move out,” he said.

  “Who you talking to—” Slim stared into the cell, past Martin, and when he recognized Chilly, he continued in a lower, whining tone, “You got no right to order me around. I’m just as good as you. We both wearing blue, ain’t we?” Slim appealed to Martin. “Ain’t we both wearing blue?”

  Martin ducked away from the point of Slim’s question, still pushing in his feverish eyes, and moved towards the rear of the cell. Chilly was coming towards the bars, and as they passed, crowded together in the narrow aisle between their beds and the wall, Martin squeezed Chilly’s arm—the same grip of reassurance a woman gives a ma
n.

  “You better knock off the highsiding, you degenerate old cocksucker,” Chilly said.

  Slim paled and his mouth began to work furiously. “You’ll get yours—you and your pretty punk. Your time’s coming. I’ve been walking these tiers for more years than you’ve been alive and I’ve seen a whole lot of you red shirts come and go. Don’t none of you last long. You think you’re running everything on the yard, but you’re just a big target for anyone, bull or convict, who sees you.”

  “Get away from this cell,” Chilly said.

  “What you gonna do? Spit at me?”

  Slim stared a moment longer, then he shifted his weight and began to sweep. He took four or five strokes, gentle as a lover, then paused to pull the newspaper from his belt and toss it over the tier. He continued out of sight.

  “What an animal,” Martin said.

  “Make some coffee,” Chilly told him curtly.

  “How do you like yours? Strong?”

  “Put a level spoon in my glass. You want some more of this cotton?”

  “Yes, I guess I do.”

  They both took another piece, washing it down with the coffee. Chilly sat frowning even after the coffee had cleared the foul taste from his mouth. After a moment he said, “If a little’s good, then more must be better.”

  “Yes,” Martin agreed eagerly.

  Chilly looked up at him, his eyes remote. “I meant just the opposite.”

  “What’s a red shirt?”

  “That’s an old expression for troublemaker. If you fell out of line too many times they issued you a red shirt. Then whenever there was trouble on the yard the gun bulls had orders to shoot the cons in the red shirts first. But that was fifty years ago. The old cons took it as a mark of respect. Maybe it was. Now they assign you to group therapy.”

  “They’re going to assign me to group therapy.”

  “Then you better go.”