On the Yard

by Malcolm Braly

“Why?”

  “Don’t you know how lucky you are to be on the big yard? If you want to stay off queen’s row, you better lay low and do exactly what you’re told.”

  “I don’t want to be penned up with all those dizzy bitches.”

  “Why not?”

  Martin smiled. “What would we do—bump pussies?”

  “You might get more down like that.”

  “No, thank you. I know what moves me.”

  “Well, to that extent, you’re lucky.”

  Chilly took a swallow of coffee. It was already lukewarm. The plastic glass seemed to leach the heat from the water without ever growing hot itself. Still he was able to drink the bitter liquid with active enjoyment, and it seemed to start a chain of warmth that spread through his stomach, to his bowels, to his scrotum, and with the sense of warmth came a mindless and purely physical crawl of excitement. His glands, alerted by his unconscious and sharpened by the cotton, were sending him a message. He found his eyes fixed to Martin’s face. The drug had purified the boy’s features, removing all hints of grossness which had served to remind Chilly of his true sex. There was a tight fixed sparkle in the boy’s eyes, and his skin had taken on a similar taut luminescence, which Chilly suddenly understood, without reasoning, is associated with beauty because it appears impervious to corruption. This skin would glow undiminished for a thousand years. As the moment expanded he had a diffuse sense of his own multiple selves, he could be anyone, anywhere, changing identities on each heartbeat. It became clear to him that as a child he had nourished himself at a witch’s tit, and the volatile fluid hissing from the hot nipple had turned cold as it entered him, searching through his body to fill the large cavities, where it froze into the permanence of a malignant enchantment. Now he had a vision of how he might be free of it.

  As he thought this, he talked to Martin on an entirely different level, telling old jailhouse stories, the myths he had inspected with reverence only a few years ago, and the boy listened with parted lips, pulling his lower lip between his teeth periodically to renew its shine with his saliva.

  The lights went out. The evening had collapsed into a single hour and that hour had passed swiftly. Chilly still held the plastic tumbler, a quarter-inch of cold coffee slipping in the bottom like an exhausted acid, and his mouth tasted hot and dry and stale, a volcanic cave, from the dozen cigarettes he had smoked. He handed the tumbler to Martin.

  “Get me a glass of water.”

  He heard the pipes throbbing deep in the building, heard water splashing against the sink, marking how vivid and somehow significant these impressions were, and at the same time he marveled at his own detachment. His mind seemed distant from his body. He was observing everything, even his own most intimate self, from the vantage of one of his other existences, and he had lost the feeling that what was happening to his body was necessarily happening to him. He was prepared to recognize that there were entire continents of his spiritual geography which were still alien to him. Now it seemed he stood on an isthmus scenting the smell of a jungle —a smell compounded from large white flowers, with petals like flesh, the blind rut of animals and the rot of black earth charged with the dead. The odor came to him like an ancient and elementary teacher under whose discipline he must study. Without awareness he had made his preparations, now he was ready to learn, because beyond the jungle he sensed mountains where it was possible to climb and climb into a cold clear light.

  “Here.”

  Martin handed him the water, and sat down on the edge of his bunk, and for Chilly the movement of the springs as they adjusted to the boy’s weight quickened with intimacy, his own body floated with a warm elastic buoyancy, and as he drank, the water seemed to go down in solid cold lumps. Martin’s cheek was outlined against the light from the single bulb above the gun rail, and the last traces of artificiality had vanished from his face with the overhead light. He seemed to be waiting.

  “Did the ten o’clock count go by?” Chilly asked.

  “Yes.”

  He found Martin’s hand in the dark, and placed it where he wanted it and where it wanted to be, wondering as he did why he still considered it a form of surrender to take control. But then it was done, and he need do nothing more.

  For a while Chilly felt nothing, or almost nothing, only a dull pleasant sensuality like the pressure of his bowels, and he wondered again if he had been wasting his time, if it were possible for him to enter the jungle at all. His eyes had adjusted to the semidarkness. He found he could see the part in the boy’s hair and he traced it to its base, a cowlick, a vigorous twist of black locks, that disclosed a small gray island of scalp. He heard the noises the boy was making around him and these sounds grew louder until they seemed the restless powerful rush of the sea, and the cowlick began to spin until it became the black waters of a whirlpool opening to disclose a giant pearl. The pearl became the moon which brightened and swelled into the sun as without warning he was taken over by a sensation, which later in his anxiety to analyze anything so powerful he thought of as a glowing transparency. The opaqueness, the dross of his spirit, and the awareness of his body were briefly burned away in a burst of pure feeling. “God!” he said for the first time in his adult life when he meant it for more than idle emphasis.

  It was only after this sensation had faded from the peak of its intensity that he was able to recognize it as merely pleasure. He groaned like a slave feeling the fresh bite of new shackles, and simultaneously he discovered his hands gripped to the sides of Martin’s head, and that pressure too, the texture of flesh and hair, became informed with the aura of his pleasure. Then he realized the nature of the collaboration his hands were involving him in, and he snatched them away. Martin hadn’t released him. He jerked his hips back and at the same time, in a motion so automatic it seemed reciprocal, he cuffed the boy with his open hand. Martin fell to the side, slipping off the bunk to land propped on his spread fingers, his head thrown back, his mouth still loose, and his features, now lit in a narrow fan of light, showed a contrary mingling of distress and hostility.

  “I’m sorry,” Chilly said automatically.

  “It’s all right,” Martin said wearily. His tone was informed with the patient fatalism of someone who lives by a difficult and dangerous job, but the conformation of his eyes still suggested a painful bitterness.

  Chilly stood up and went to the sink where he washed himself thoroughly, dried with an extra towel, and buttoned his pants. He took a fresh pack of cigarettes from the shelf, opened it, and held the pack out to Martin, still sitting on the floor.

  “Smoke?”

  “Sure, daddy.”

  Chilly lit up and in the glow from the paper match he saw that Martin was holding his cigarette to his mouth, obviously expecting a light, and his unconscious pose was identical to all the women waiting for the same male attention in a thousand cigarette ads. Chilly smiled and offered the match and as he did Martin reached up and lightly touched his hand with her fingertips.

  “You might as well be a skunk,” Chilly said.

  “What?”

  “A skunk. A broad. You might as well be a broad. If they tacked balls on you it was an accident.”

  “I know that.”

  “But they did, didn’t they? And nothing’s going to wish them away.”

  “You liked it,” Martin said calmly. “You liked it a lot. A woman couldn’t do it as well.”

  “I don’t know why not. That and a lot more.”

  “Get yourself a woman then.”

  Chilly laughed and caught Martin by the hair, holding him lightly. “You’re not going to do that again?”

  “You want me to?”

  “It might be all right.”

  “Did you like it?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re really a nice person,” Martin said.

  Chilly smiled to himself in the dark, a peculiar strained smile. “I wouldn’t count on that,” he said.

  20

  STICK WAS on the nigh
t gym list for ten days before Morris would say the balloon was finished and even then Stick had to goad him into it. Stick had continued to caution himself to be very careful with Morris—Morris was both the most important and most fragile component in a great machine, still if it didn’t function the urge to shock it to life was irresistible.

  Morris had been saying: Almost ready.

  “It’s been almost ready for days,” Stick said scornfully. “I don’t think you want to fly at all, I don’t think you have the balls for it.”

  Stick was squatting on the floor by the cell door, his thin face white and fierce between his sharp knees, staring in at Morris, where Morris was again trying to find shelter in the small cave created by Stick’s bunk above him. The balloon was folded in his lap. A double loop of stiff black thread stuck up like antennas where he had been strengthening the fittings of the harness.

  “I got the balls,” Morris said thinly. “I got more balls than a pool hall.”

  “Mouth,” Stick said scornfully. “Mouth’s all you got. You’re long on mouth.”

  Morris lifted the folded balloon and shook it. “You call this mouth? Does it look like mouth? If it’s any of your fucking business—it’s done. Done-dee—done! All I got to do is move the gas.”

  Stick shifted on his heels, folded his arms over his knees, and rested his chin on them. “Just the gas,” he said in a different tone. “Maybe I was wrong. Morris, I got to give you credit. You really got it ready to go?”

  “It’s ready.”

  “So I’m going to watch you fly. And here I thought you were just jacking off your jaw.”

  Morris nodded, gratified. “That’s how much you knew.” He traced the thread to the needle and continued sewing. “And you ain’t alone. There’s a whole lot of people thought they could shit on Morris Price, they were crowded in line waiting for the chance.”

  “But you’re going to show them now,” Stick said steadily, wondering if there might not after all be a page in the history for Morris, the humble and tireless worker.

  Morris looked up—not seeing the webbed springs of Stick’s bunk, or the blistered paint of the cell ceiling or even the I-beams and galvanized iron of the block roof, but UP, a magical abstraction. A glaze of light passed over his dull eyes. “Yes, I’ll show them.” Then the light faded. “As soon as I get the gas on the roof.”

  The next evening at lockup, Stick had the metal pipe he had already used so effectively once before. He waited until after dinner, then while Morris was washing his face, he slipped the pipe from his belt, tiptoed forward and hit Morris above and behind the ear. But Morris was much harder to kill than Juleson. The first blow knocked him to his knees but didn’t put him out and he twisted around to look up at Stick with an eerie blend of shock and ferocity from which was missing any element of surprise. He cried out and lunged forward to seize Stick around the legs in an effort to upset him. Stick went on hammering at Morris’s head, but the angle robbed his blows of much of their impact, and then he was tumbled over on his back, falling the length of the narrow aisle. For an instant he was vulnerable, but Morris, rather than pursue the advantage, ducked behind the end of the bunk and began to scream for the guards.

  Stick snapped up and threw the pipe between the braces that supported the top bunk. It brushed aside a towel hung there and hit Morris in the pit of the stomach. He doubled over, breathless, no longer able to cry for help, and Stick picked up the pipe to finish the job.

  He placed Morris in his bunk, with the covers drawn to his chin, leaving his unmarked face to show for the benefit of the guards making the various counts, and he arranged a towel under his head to soak up the blood so it wouldn’t leak out and stain the pillow.

  Next he removed the balloon from the hobby box and placed it in a ditty bag he had sewn from denim, the same type of bag, though half again as large, as the boxers and wrestlers and other athletes used to carry their personal gear to and from the gym.

  Then he began to assemble the uniform he planned to wear. He had new shoes with six-inch tops, dyed black and polished to a high gloss—each thread of the stitching along the rim of the sole had been covered with rubber cement, rendered impervious to the dye, and now formed an ornamental border. Only the basic shape of the work shoe spoiled the effect of high style. He had had his pants reshaped so the narrow legs emphasized the blunt male power of the heavy shoes, and his Eisenhower jacket formed a wedge of equal maleness. The shoulder patches, the Vampire in a circle of blood, the brass buttons, the bits of ribbon and decorations formed a blaze of personal ornament as dense as that of a savage painted for a feast. His hat, now fitted with three expansion bands and another Vampire patch, he hid in the ditty bag along with the balloon, and he covered the gaudy Eisenhower jacket with a larger and shapeless coat. When the bell rang for unlock he left the cell and passed unnoticed in the crowd heading for the gym.

  Over seven hundred men were turning out for gym. Wrestling matches were scheduled, the chess club was hosting a team of students from a local college, and the weekly incentive movie would be shown in the primitive auditorium adjoining the weight-lifting section.

  Both Nunn and Society Red left their cells—they had heard that the incentive movie was a tough flick, full of boss broads who didn’t mind flashing. Will Manning had decided to take a few hours from his studies, the still empty cell depressed him, and he headed towards the chess club with the mildly pleasurable anticipation of meeting a new opponent. He was a thorough, steady player, and, unless rattled by some brilliant stratagem, usually won.

  Chilly and Candy, for that was what he now called her, stayed in the cell. They were both at the ragged end of a cotton trip, exhausted but still unable to sleep. They had spent the better part of the previous night in the same bunk, separating only for the twelve o’clock, two o’clock and four o’clock counts. A line drawn in Chilly’s mind, which he had thought he would never cross, had fallen away like a strand of cobweb the first time he had touched it, and he had pitched into an area of awareness that had either been beyond or forbidden to his imagination. He no longer cared when his hands, or even his mouth betrayed him. Still the cotton seemed a necessary preparation to the miracle he had discovered, and he had entered a cycle, controlled by the drug, where he knew brilliant peaks and leaden shallows. Just now it was the latter.

  He lay in his bunk, shading his eyes with his forearm. His mouth was foul. At some point in the abandon of the previous evening he had bitten the inside of his lip; now it was infecting. He found it painful to talk.

  Candy, still restless, was trying to read. Once she sat up to ask, “Would some hot cocoa help?”

  And Chilly, whispering carefully, said, “Just cool it, baby. Let me wear this out.”

  As soon as he was able to slip unnoticed into the supply room, Stick climbed to the gym roof. He had been up here several times now and he felt secure as he unpacked the balloon and spread it out. It covered the space of two sheets, rounded, seeming to float against the black tarpaper like an enormous jellyfish, the harness stretched out as the tendrils. He took off the larger coat and fitted his hat to his head—his narrow eyes were lost in the shadow of the long bill—and circled where he stood trying to sense the quality of the night. He wet his finger and held it up to determine the direction of the wind. It blew steadily from the bay towards the nearest wall fifty yards away.

  Satisfied, Stick began to tether the balloon, using eye screws he had positioned a week before, and when he was finished the slack mouth was draped over one of the larger ventilator shafts. Next he recovered a quart bottle of cleaning fluid he had hidden and started back down the fire escape. For security reasons that had nothing to do with fires, the escape ended level with the second floor windows. The additional thirty feet to the ground would be bridged by a portable extension ladder, should the need ever arise.

  Stick opened the second floor window, and stepped into the stale dry air of a small room used for the repair and storage of bedsprings. One wall was s
tacked with discarded mattresses. The inmate assigned to bedspring maintenance had for months swept his trash into a corner where it was piled up over a foot high, seemingly contained by the worn broom angled over it. Stick ripped apart several of the old mattresses and added the cotton waste to the pile of trash; he broke the broom on his knee and added that, then he laid other mattresses around this mound as if it were a fuse, and, finally, he poured the cleaning fluid over it and lit it. It ignited quickly. When he was satisfied the fire would spread, he climbed back to the roof. Long before the building burned and collapsed, the superheated air rushing through the ventilating system would have filled his balloon, and in the confusion and panic his flight would go unnoticed. Keen! He squatted down to wait.

  Manning was playing second board against a sophomore, a small, neat, nice-looking boy, and Manning couldn’t help considering that he was, at most, only a few years older than Debbie, around the same age as the boy she had run away with. His opponent, leaning over the board to study a concentration on the right side, impressed Manning as vulnerable. His skin was fresh and soft. His slender white hands didn’t look as if they had ever held anything heavier than the rook he was now moving. Still there was nothing soft in his game —he was making a firm and resourceful attack from a strong central position. Manning felt the pressure, but he didn’t believe the boy could beat him. At some point his concentration would falter, he would overlook some minor pivot, or he would simply not be able to drive the shaft home.

  Between moves Manning looked over the boy’s head through the narrow windows that led to the main part of the gym. They were shut off here as if they might dilute the virility of the recreation program, a narrow compartment partitioned off with plywood panels into the shape of a freight car. They were playing twenty boards on a single long table and Manning was aware that the air was already growing stale. He shrugged mentally and reminded himself he was a prisoner and fortunate to have this recreation and, perhaps, fortunate to be alive. He thought briefly of Juleson, but drew away from a subject as painful as it was incomprehensible. If he moved a little to the side, he could see a narrow slice of the boxing section, and he watched a young Negro working out.