On the Yard

by Malcolm Braly

  Cool Breeze was working on the speed bag. Glossy with sweat he moved around the bag hammering as if he were a machine constructed for the purpose of destroying it. The rhythm was as precise as snare drumming. Several of Cool Breeze’s fans along with his inmate manager stood watching.

  One of the fans said, “Cool Breeze looking good.”

  “I bringing him along,” the manager said, a black gnome with battered ears and a rocklike density to his features. “I teaching Cool Breeze ever’thing I know.”

  “You think he rip the title off this time?”

  “He rip it off. Cool Breeze got great class, plus big heart. Look how he move so nice.”

  Cool Breeze’s rhythm seemed to sharpen.

  The incentive movie was a burn. The scheduled film had failed to arrive, and another had been subsituted. Still both Red and Nunn stayed to watch—they were here and there was nothing else to do. Nunn watched with idle contempt, focusing on the edges and the background of the picture, finding the unintentional more interesting than the intended. The story line followed from the supposed weakness of a man raised to wealth, a John Julian Norton III, and an early scene attempted to establish his breeding by showing him in a drawing room, in a belted silk smoking jacket, deftly manipulating brandy, cigars, and an improbable upper class accent. His bored wife sat, legs crossed, that tent of sweet and treacherous flesh, while the Best Friend, blondly handsome, leaned against the mantel exchanging significant glances with the woman whenever John Julian’s back was turned. It was laboriously apparent they had formed some scheme against him. Nunn watched the butler. He wondered about this man dressed in the butler suit, to match his butler face, and watched the actor carefully to see if lost in the background he would relax and betray that he was only an actor, rather than only a butler, but he apparently cared more for the illusion than the principals. His performance was the most convincing detail on the screen, and this seemed proper to Nunn—the illusion of reality would be more important to the props than it was to those who ordered them.

  “Chilly’s gone into something else,” Red whispered beside him, as if they could only discuss it here in the anonymity of an audience, as if they were conspirators in a TV play.

  “So?” Nunn asked.

  “What should we do?”

  Nunn smiled in the dark, not without a flavor of pity. The king is mad and it is the fool who shows concern while everyone else pretends the situation is normal. “Is Chilly doing anything you wouldn’t do?” he asked.

  “That’s different.”

  “Maybe not so different ...” For a moment Nunn fell silent with a diffuse vision, as if one of Chilly’s educations had lingered in his mind, and he considered how circumstances might draw an identical response from each of a thousand individuals as if the illusion of difference was all in how the matter of their lives had been reflected through the prism of experience. Still it was apparent that Chilly Willy was finally blowing his cool. And, as with any unique event, it was impossible to predict where and how it would end.

  “He’ll burn out on the little bitch,” Nunn said, “and pass her on to you.”

  “You think so?”

  “It’s a lock.”

  On the screen, fortune had played into the hands of the conspirators. They were all three, John Julian, the Wife, and the Best Friend, on the desert, near the Superstition Mountains, and John Julian has broken his leg in a fall. His Wife and her Lover prepare to abandon him, grateful that they will not have to shoot him since this would take a kind of guts they are not sure they have. They provide him with a few days’ food and a pistol. When he begins to suffer thirst and hunger he will be able to shoot himself. The Lover makes this suggestion with a ponderous scorn, while the Wife looks on, hip classically canted, her face marred with wantonness.

  For a while, after they have left him, John Julian stares up into the metallic sky, tears of weakness watering his eyes. They have schemed on him for his money, his manhood, and, now, his life. Gradually he begins to grow angry, and, predictably, using his rage as a rock to brace himself against, he begins to fight back. He splints his leg and fashions leather pads for his hands so he can crawl across the desert without mutilating them.

  Nunn looked away. Would he do that?

  The fire incubated for over an hour, making only minor gains. The mattresses smoldered with a faint crawl of blue flame, while the small flames licking timidly over the heavy gray planks of the flooring were yellow. Once the flash fire from the trash and cleaning fluid had died out there was little smoke or brightness.

  On the roof, Stick grew impatient. He walked restlessly up and down keeping to the blind center of the roof, fighting the temptation to return to the second floor to check on the fire. Repeatedly he held his hand over the mouth of the ventilator exhaust and each time it seemed the stir of air had grown warmer—still the balloon lay slack.

  Stick had made the mistake of closing the window and the fire was starving for oxygen. It might have burnt itself out if Angelo hadn’t opened one of the doors leading into the mattress room. He was on his first round of the evening, mechanically padding along, lost in an ancient dream the form of which had worn away until the dream coursed his mind as nearly pure feeling separated from its original stimulants. In the dream he had not killed the wife he loved. She lived. He had grown old with honor.

  He shouldered open the heavy door and it seemed to him a sheet of flame rose from nowhere. He stared at it stupefied, unable to connect this demonic presence with the danger he had patrolled against for so many years. Instead he thought of punishment. Finally it had come for him and he was no more ready than he had been fifty-seven years before. He screamed hoarsely and turned to run, with a slow heavy old man’s hobble, towards the illusion of safety.

  In an instant the whole character of the fire changed. The room roared like a kiln. Where it had licked, the flame now spurted. It wiped the far wall and left it burning. It gushed through the door Angelo had left open. The entire soft dry inner structure of the building lay open to it.

  The balloon stirred like something coming to life. Stick sucked in his breath and watched like a fascinated child. It wasn’t until this moment that he realized he hadn’t expected it to work. The balloon lumped and straightened, shifted, lumped again, and straightened, growing firm. Stick found himself remembering a general science flick where a moth had been shown struggling to free itself from its cocoon. The insect had rested periodically, and the balloon too seemed to pause to regain strength before renewing the struggle.

  With the game in its forty-third move, Manning had been able to shift the balance and gain the initiative. Now that he was certain he had him defeated, Manning could begin to feel sympathy for the boy across from him. They had not exchanged a word since they were introduced, but Manning had followed the game in the boy’s face—at first he had been tentative, then as the game began to go his way, confident and determined, and, now that he was beginning to realize he might lose, his face was cankered with anxiety. Early frost. Throw the game, Manning told himself. It means nothing to you. But the generous impulse wouldn’t solidify. He continued to plan the moves by which he would press a mate. If he lost deliberately he would only be telling another lie—he had most likely already heard too many. Why else would the prospect of defeat in the artificial world beneath them score so heavily into the young face? Vaguely Manning realized they were beginning to shout in the main part of the gym. He assumed a boxing match was in progress, but when he tried to look through the window, he found it difficult to see into the boxing section. He rubbed his eyes.

  On the dual anvils formed by the desert and his own lust for revenge, John Julian was forging himself into a man. Nunn didn’t believe it. He stared up at the screen, caught now in the story, but unwilling to allow himself to be persuaded. Red, however, wanted the bitch to get hers. He watched her swimming in the cool waters of John Julian’s pool and drinking martinis from frosted shakers while her husband lay in the desert sucki
ng cactus pulp, and Red felt a burning resentment, a storehouse from all the broads who had thrown him for a shine. His mind was fully tuned to this form of entertainment, he knew he would see her humbled and struck down, and he needed to see just this.

  “You burning?” Nunn asked.

  “What?”

  “I smell something burning.”

  Red quickly patted himself down. He was clean. Then he too caught the acrid scent of charred cloth, and even as it came to him it seemed to grow stronger. The odor excited him.

  Out in the main part of the gym someone yelled, “Fire!” And the word was repeated in a ragged chorus.

  Red grabbed Nunn’s arm. “Something’s going up.”

  Nunn pulled free. The ring of gladness in Red’s voice was unendurable to him. He stood up, faintly aware of the rattle of his chair as it fell behind him. The quiet concentration invoked by the film broke in an instant. At first the noise of the crowd had a holiday sound. Then someone cracked the door and a thick cloud of black smoke coiled in on them. The man who had opened the door slipped through it as soon as it was wide enough to pass his bulk. Then a surge of men knocked over the projector and the image left the screen, lofted dizzily across the beams of the roof, and collapsed into darkness. Panic came in that instant.

  Red still could not comprehend the danger. He knew the building was on fire, but the novelty of it still delighted him. Then in the red glow from outer sections of the gym, he saw the press around the door. It was open no more than a foot, and with a hundred men trying to crowd against it, it could be opened no further. And those who were gaining a vantage from which they could force the door wider used the opportunity only to slip through it and vanish.

  Red was having trouble keeping his footing. Turning, he saw Nunn’s face below him. Nunn had sat down. “We got to get out of here,” Red said. Nunn’s expression didn’t change. “We got to get out of here,” Red screamed. Nunn gave no indication he had heard. And he hadn’t. His mind, which had always been so busy, was empty. He felt neither bitterness nor fear. When he began to cough as his lungs protested against the smoke, he felt his body swaying and jerking and it was as if he were once again a child, riding one of the mechanical horses that stood in front of penny arcades.

  Red started pushing towards the door but he wasn’t able to make a foot of progress. The folding chairs, half of them knocked over, formed a treacherous maze beneath the struggling bodies. The glow from beyond the door was beginning to grow ominously bright, and above the shouting came an enormous roar, the voice of the fire sucking breath through the windows of the building.

  Red had a moment of great clarity when he knew that if he didn’t do something extraordinary in the next few minutes he was going to die.

  He glanced at Nunn again, and Nunn’s face was frozen in the identical expression he had worn before. Vaguely Red realized that Nunn was in shock. He reached down wildly, trying to grab Nunn to shake him, and one of his fingers slipped into Nunn’s open mouth. He wrenched at the side of Nunn’s cheek. “We got to get out of here.”

  Nunn began to cry, and the sight of Nunn crying sparked Red’s terror because while he could see him he couldn’t hear him at all. The roar had grown elemental.

  Desperately, Red looked around. It was growing lighter and lighter and he saw that the fire was beginning to come up the walls, and the floor was hot beneath his feet. The press around the door was hopeless, but behind him against the far wall of the room, he saw two windows, long boarded up to shut out the light, and automatically Red started towards them. He left Nunn where he was.

  Manning should have been in a better position from which to escape. The chess room was no more than a hundred yards from the single door leading out of the gym, but the fire had worked into this section first, and the large area of floor in front of the exit and the walls around it were all burning. When Manning and the boy he had been playing with had worked their way over the fallen table and rolling chess pieces and gained a clear way to the door, they found a frantic circle of men who were barefoot or wearing tennis shoes. Many of them had rushed from the showers and the locker room where the alarm was first given only to find the burning floor and the locker room was now in flames behind them.

  Manning saw the floor, like a Hindu’s bed of coals, and he shouted to the boy, “Run fast. Don’t stop.” And was about to take his own advice when he saw the boy crumple beside him. An inmate had hit him over the head with an Indian club, and immediately dropped to his knees to wrest the shoes from the unconscious boy. The attacker was in nothing but his jockstrap, and his frenzy was so extreme he was trying to remove the shoes without untying them. Instinctively, Manning kicked the man in the temple. He rolled over twice in a sprawl of hairy legs, and came to rest staring back at Manning. He shook his head and jumped up with wiry strength. Manning shifted to stand over the fallen boy.

  At this moment, a number of men came running in from the wrestling department carrying a large mat which they threw over the area of burning floor. The attacker swerved away from Manning to run across the mat. A rush of men followed. Manning stared after them. Already the edges of the mat were beginning to smoke.

  Manning was halfway across when he remembered the boy. He had no feeling except that he couldn’t leave him. Turning, he started back, fighting his way through the men pushing behind him. They plunged into Manning, without awareness of him as if he were an obstacle of wood, and their eyes, like the numb eyes of sharks, were more terrifying than the fire.

  The balloon had swollen to straining erectness, pulling against the taut ropes. Stick watched in awe. The balloon was marvelous. Almost humbly, as if he were attaching himself to the base of a giant erection to participate in its massive copulation with the air, he tied himself into the harness. When he felt secure, he took a small knife from his pockets and began to cut the ropes. They parted, singing with relieved tension, and when he severed the last tie, the balloon seemed to plunge.

  It went straight up for fifty feet. Stick saw the gym roof, outlined in flame, shrinking beneath him, and he experienced a formless and almost orgasmic elation. He was defeating not only the prison, but the entire world. He hung suspended in the twisted sheeting, senseless with glory.

  Fifty feet up the balloon was taken by the prevailing wind, and continued its climb on a long diagonal. It passed over the guard towers, over the outer perimeter of the prison, and continued above the small round hills which surrounded it. Below and ahead, Stick could make out the vivid artery of a freeway. He gave no thought to where he might come to earth. Up here he had found air he could breathe—a sense of life as he could live it.

  Suddenly the balloon jerked and dropped twenty feet, caught for a moment, and then dropped again. Straining to look up, Stick saw a ragged flapping, like a broken wing, along one side of the bag. His legs tingled, his stomach felt gone. He was dropping much faster than he had risen. The freeway disappeared again, hidden behind the rising flank of a hill.

  Then it seemed to him the balloon took the air, and began to ascend firmly. It rose and rose, pulling towards the brightest star in the sky, and Stick understood he would never return from his flight.

  Manning was struggling down the iron staircase with the boy over his shoulder. The side of the building seemed alive with fire, but his good sense continued to tell him it could only be reflected from the windows. Below he saw the scarlet bulk of a fire engine, manned by an inmate crew, and they were unlimbering their hoses to pour futile streams of water against the brick walls, where, at the point of impact, they dissipated in searing clouds of steam. One hose was being used to cool the area around the staircase. Manning felt the spray sweep over him, and the cold water shocked him as intensely as the heat. Other men behind were trying to shove past him. The boy pulled at him like a bag of rocks. You fool, he scorned himself.

  On the landing below the flames were gushing from the open doorway, and those men just ahead of him were crossing one at a time; some crawling, others rolling
, while a few plunged blindly like terrified horses and seemed to be swallowed in the flame before they staggered out to stumble down the next flight, their clothes beginning to burn.

  Manning turned to the inmate just behind him and shouted, “Please, help me.” But the man’s face was stupid with terror, and he instinctively seized this opportunity to shove past Manning and dive headlong across the landing.

  Another hose had now joined the first, and they combined to play directly into the blazing doorway, but the water appeared to have small effect on the flames, other than to release hissing clouds of steam. The man who was now waiting behind Manning began to kick him in the small of the back, and Manning staggered up under the weight of the boy, took a deep breath which he remembered he must hold, and began to run awkwardly, weaving from side to side. He felt himself burning and cried out just as one of the high pressure hoses knocked him down. He sprawled, fighting panic. The boy lay across him, but he managed to free himself without standing, and on his hands and knees began to pull the body towards the head of the next flight. He did this mindlessly as an ant burdened with an aphid.

  The final flight of stairs angled sharply away from the face of the building, leading down to the bridge that spanned the industrial alley, and except for flaming debris falling from the burning roof, the danger was sharply diminished. Manning pulled the boy down the stairs, gripping him under his armpits, too exhausted to make any effort to stop the boy’s legs and feet from banging against the metal steps.

  Then he was aware of a broad, powerfully built inmate, in a white sweatshirt, stooping to lift the boy out of his hands, as he said, “Relax, pop, I’ll handle this.”

  Manning watched him run lightly down the stairs, holding the boy across his arms as easily as if he were a child, but Manning could only think that help hadn’t come until he had no longer needed it, and he stumbled to his feet without any sense of gratitude, but only the half-formed conviction that he had been used, though he didn’t have any idea by whom, or what.