On the Yard
Page 33
“How much tooth powder did you send the north block on their last regular requisition?” Olson asked.
“A drum—fifty pounds.”
“They say they’re out. I wonder if someone over there’s dealing that stuff?”
“State tooth powder? You couldn’t give it away. Someone probably spilled water in it and threw it out to cover his goof.”
“You hear something?”
Chilly smiled. “That’s just one hypothesis. Someone might be bagging it up in balloons and selling it on the yard for dope.”
“I don’t doubt it. You probably handle it.”
“No, I use chalk dust from the ed building—it’s got a better texture. I can probably get the south block to send them some over.”
“What’s that?”
“Tooth powder for the north block.”
“Okay. Do that then.” Olson stood up. “I’ll be out at the snack bar.”
Chilly waited until Olson left the office before he said, “Where else?” Then he called the head cell tender in the south block and arranged to have some tooth powder taken to the north block. The cell tender wanted to know was his clean underwear being delivered to his cell every night, and Chilly said he had no complaint. He hung up and went to heat a pot of water. He made a glass of instant coffee and sat smoking while he sipped it. There was nothing else to do.
He had persisted on this job because it was the only way to earn an assignment somewhere outside the walls, but he was beginning to doubt it would work at all. The classification committee wasn’t foolish. They trusted no one. But there was a growing breed of career convict, largely alcoholic check writers, whom they distrusted less than most. They trusted them to be harmless, and these were the men, regardless of time served, who were being assigned to minimum security jobs. Sometimes they ran off, but their escapes seldom amounted to more than drunken sprees where they ran wild for a few weeks with someone’s checkbook or credit cards before they were caught and returned like runaway boys. A new inmate was emerging, the waste product of a new society.
Chilly recognized that his chances of being assigned outside the walls were growing more remote rather than improving, and now he had to doubt he could gain such an assignment in less than ten served, and by then the balance would have tipped well past halfway and it would no longer be intelligent to risk his investment by escaping into a world where the odds against success were daily tightened by the growing sophistication of police methods. Yes, the slobs knew their business. It would still make sense to run this year, or next year, but he didn’t ache for the chance as he had previously. This was as much as he would admit.
He rolled a piece of inmate stationery into his typewriter and tried to think of something to write to his mother. It was slow going and it always was. His mother had lately taken the position that he was being crucified by the authorities. Somehow she had formed the conviction he was innocent, that he had always been innocent, and Chilly didn’t understand how she could support such a notion—if she were sane enough to earn a living, she must be sane enough to suspect her own delusion, but the theme was beginning to dominate her letters to him. She had announced sometime back that she was going to see the governor, and apparently she was still waiting for an appointment. Lately she had met some man who claimed to have connections within the legislature, and Chilly had pictured an aging player driving on his dippy old mother through this most obvious soft spot. Nothing he could find to write her seemed to have any effect on her growing conviction and he had given up with the thought that if it made her any happier what difference did it make?
He had trouble writing half a page, double-spaced, and finally called upon the fire to fill the page down to where it seemed decent to type “Love” and sign it “Billy.” He addressed an envelope and walked out on the yard to mail the letter. One of the domino games attracted him, he knew the players to be expert, and he stopped to watch. He tried to determine the bones each player held by his style of play. O’Brien, who had been standing on the other side of the table, came around next to Chilly.
“Hendricks and Rooster,” he named two of the players, “are my horses.”
“You got good horses,” Chilly said.
“They got a lock here.”
Chilly, watching the pattern form, rock by rock, nodded in agreement.
“I hear you’re easing out of everything,” O’Brien said. Chilly turned to look up at the other man. O’Brien’s face was large and red, his eyes as gray as rain water. He chain-smoked cigars; there were always five or six stuffed in his shirt pocket, along with several leather-bound notebooks, which Chilly guessed to be full of blank pages, and a good pen.
“Where do you hear that?” Chilly asked in a form of idle contradiction.
“Here and there. Is it true?”
“I might lighten up for a while.”
“You taking to other interests?”
Chilly looked at O’Brien again. There was something in the too full lines of his face that suggested a taint of foolishness, and for a moment the cigar in his mouth seemed to be made of candy, a boy’s token of vice.
“What do you want, O’Brien?”
“Your connection.”
“And what connection is that?”
“Your cotton connection.”
“Someone’s putting you on. I’ve never had any part of the cotton.”
“Don’t come on like that, Chilly. You’re not talking to some fish now. Everyone knows you’re behind the cotton.”
“Then everyone’s full of shit.”
O’Brien nodded thoughtfully like a man deciding to play his ace. “Then I’ll have to hit on Caterpillar.”
Chilly smiled. “That’s a good idea.” Over O’Brien’s shoulder he saw that the canteen line was down to just a few men. “You do that,” he continued and walked away towards the canteen. At the window he bought two bags of cookies, one applesauce, one oatmeal, and a package of rolls, and he had these in his arms when he appeared in front of the cell at lockup. Candy rolled over in her bunk, still half asleep, to see Chilly standing there like a husband coming home from work carrying groceries and to her it didn’t seem at all a pathetic farce. “Hello, daddy,” she whispered.
She was up brushing her teeth when the bar was thrown and Chilly entered the cell. She turned around and moved to squeeze him intimately. He felt an immediate throb of warmth.
“Don’t start that unless you’re going to do something about it.”
“Now?” she asked, smiling, the word hollowed and blurred through the toothpaste.
“That’s what I mean.”
They skipped the dinner line, eating the rolls with hot instant chocolate. Chilly spent the evening reading—first the paper, which he handed up to Candy, then a novel. Candy shaved every night and spent a long time inspecting her face in the mirror, looking along the edge of her jaw for blackheads. They had a snack at eight; cookies, this time with coffee. Candy wanted to talk about one of the places where she had hung out in San Francisco, and Chilly listened for a while before he returned to his book.
When the lights went off after the ten o’clock count, Candy immediately slipped from the top bunk. For a moment, feeling some vague disinclination, he almost waved her away. Then the monotony, the essential emptiness of the day, seemed to compel him to some expression of life and he opened the blankets for her, moving far to the side of the narrow bunk so she could get in. If this is it, he thought, then this is it, and then she had him turned on so he didn’t have to think about anything.
He was mounted over her in the somewhat awkward posture they had both found they liked best when the first flashbulb went off outside the cell. Instinctively Chilly turned to look towards the bars, while he heard Candy murmur, “Daddy?” with a presentiment of dread.
A familiar voice said, “Hold it right there, Oberholster,” and the flash went off again like a blow aimed directly into his eyes.
A second voice said, “That’ll do it.”
“You slimy black bastard—” Chilly began, but then broke off as the full weight of the situation hit him.
“Oh, yes,” the Spook agreed equitably, “I’m slimy enough, but then I don’t have no shit on my dick. Now you better get dressed. You won’t be spending the night here.”
As he pulled his clothes on, Chilly thought of the money in the broom, but there would be no chance to get it, or even if he could he was sure to be shook down before the night was over.
There were two other guards, ordinary second-watch block guards, waiting on the tier. One of them held a camera and they both looked angry and disgusted. As they were marched down the tier, Chilly was aware of shadowed faces pressed against the bars.
“What is it?” someone whispered.
And someone else answered, “I think they busted some guys with the pot on.”
They were taken to the clinic, where they had to wait, sitting on a white bench in front of minor surgery, until the MTA came in off a call. He came in ten minutes later and stopped to make some entries on the 103-K cards. Then he came over to them, rubbing his arms, which extending from the clean smooth whiteness of his medical smock seemed hairy as the legs of a bear. He looked down at them with an amused scorn that carried flickering somewhere in it a quality as far removed from amusement as healing is removed from murder.
“Are these the lovebirds?” he asked the Spook.
“Yes, indeed.” He nodded solemnly. “Came on them just whipping up a batch, but there was no way to tell for sure just who was doing what.”
“To whom,” the MTA added. “Well, we can clear that up.”
They were taken into minor surgery, one at a time, bent over the enameled table and subjected to what the MTA would record as a proctological examination. The MTA made no effort to be gentle, and Chilly, when the rubber-gloved finger was rudely in him, was horrified to experience a curious, almost languid sense of weakness as if something were urging him to slip from the table and sink to the floor where he would be freed of a large burden he had only been dimly aware he was carrying at all. He felt his knees loosen, then some darkness plucked at him and the finger was suddenly gone. He straightened to meet the MTA’s blunt and speculative eyes, aware he was trembling.
When he had finished both examinations, the MTA pointed to Chilly, and said, “This one was pitching.” His finger moved to Candy. “And this one was catching.”
The Spook smiled easily at Chilly. “It must have been your night to play daddy. But the disciplinary committee, they don’t make fine distinctions.”
They were taken up to the shelf and locked in separate holding cells, and it was only after the solid metal door had closed behind him that Chilly realized not once since they had been taken from their cell had Candy so much as looked at him. And as he sat down on the bunk he realized he had something more to remember. Something still clouded in his mind as the source of an even more dreadful apprehension, a deeper shame, and then he began to remember the printed form routinely sent to any female relation. He had once studied a carbon copy in a confidential file he had paid to have smuggled from the records office. He had been trying to determine whether the inmate in question was a snitch. The form letter was a complete surprise. Chilly had read it through several times. Now he remembered his amusement as the text came back to him.
Dear Madam,
Your son/husband [son had been x’ed out, but on Chilly’s own it would be husband that would be struck] has been apprehended in the performance of a homosexual act. It is felt that you have a right to this information, since it may someday have a bearing on your welfare and safety. Rest assured, though this constitutes a serious infraction of the institutional rules, subject will also receive the best treatment it is within our power to provide.
Yours very truly,
JACOB BLAKE,
Correctional Captain
The form letter didn’t make fine distinctions either. Chilly drew his knees up to hug them. His throat felt hot, and he closed his eyes, beginning to rock back and forth, trying not to think of his mother opening the official envelope that irrevocably condemned her son to a way of life beyond her understanding, and beyond her capacity to forgive, as no sentence of the courts ever had. Her pain and bewilderment, her instinctive disgust, were vivid to him. And his own ancient ambition to replace his father, never entirely repudiated, ended here as it occurred to Chilly he had replaced him only too well—in kind, a source of further misery and even more punishing desertions.
But as he rolled over to push his face against the coarse wool blanket, it was no longer his mother he missed and mourned, but Candy. The idle little tramp. The vain, empty bitch, it had all ended for her in the moment the flashbulb blazed, though the moment before she had been moaning softly in a manner he realized now he had always known, just beyond his willing awareness, if it were genuine at all, was certainly exaggerated. Before he was even out of her, she was gone, projected ahead to whatever sissy she would pick out on queen’s row to turn flipflops with. They had to snatch and run on the row. Chilly saw a brief but vivid picture of Candy bent over in the showers, taking her most genuine pleasure from her sense of humiliation, while some butch freak rammed at her like a billy goat ...
Again Chilly experienced the warm sense of weakness, and for an instant it seemed he was there in the shower, and the MTA’s finger had swollen cruelly to punish him as deliciously as he had punished Candy, and then the blackness began to pluck at him again, wrenching his awareness wildly, but not before he felt a shuddering crawl of shameful delight.
Take this hammer, take it to the Cap’n
Take this hammer, take it to the Cap’n
Take this hammer, take it to the Cap’n
Tell him I’se gone, boy, tell him I’se gone
SOCIETY RED walked the big yard alone. With summer coming on the cons were wearing tee shirts, and a lot of them spent weekends lying around the lower yard catching a suntan, and for a few months they looked as if they’d been hanging out at the beach. But Red knew the tans would fade in the fall, without ever having been admired, and winter would find the same white-faced cons huddled under the rain shed, telling each other the same lies.
Red had to walk slowly. His hip was giving him trouble, and one of these mornings he’d have to catch the sick line and con the croaker out of a shot of oil or something before he blew a wheel bearing.
He paused beneath the north block wall to roll a smoke. He was back to smoking state issue, but he’d smoked dust often enough in the years before Chilly had befriended him, and now that Chilly was gone he’d smoke it again. For at least one more year. He lit up, and continued limping along the blacktop.
The parole board had given him another year to beat the yard. They had handled him with the cool remoteness of a research team conducting a vivisection on a cancerous monkey, and he had sensed the numb stirring of his almost forgotten resentment as he answered to their empty formula:
—How do you plan to support yourself?
—I figure to go back to my old trade.
—And that is?
—Pimping for your mammy.
But that was only what he wished he could have said, if he had been able to play the dozens with the board instead of trying to suck up to that one outside chance they might cut him loose. He knew this chance, like all life’s wonderful luck, never fell to his hand, but he couldn’t control his native hopefulness. Hopefulness continued to come to him like some beautiful bitch who had him pussy whipped. He read the promise of further rejection, further torment, read it clearly in her cold and sometimey eyes, but one flash of her long white legs and he was ready and aching. Next year it would be the same.
“Hey, Red, you antique old mother, what’re you limping for?”
It was Cat, cutting across the yard towards him. R
ed smiled. “I fucked my leg up booting young punks like you in the ass.”
“Go ahead on, old man. I heard the board dumped you.”
“They shot me down a year.”
“You didn’t carry them enough time.”
“I figured it was plenty.”
Cat pulled a pack of tailor-mades from his shirt pocket. “They’re cold dudes,” he said absently as he took a cigarette and offered the pack to Red, who snapped his roll away to accept the tailor-made.
“Thanks, Cat,” he said as they lit up off the same match.
Cat nodded, inhaling deeply so his heavy chest swelled to press against his denim shirt, and, then, exhaling said, “What’s a butt between old partners?” He matched his stride to Red’s and leaned closer to continue. “I’ve been doing some thinking since Chilly got busted. You know?”
Red turned his head to find Cat watching him closely. He frowned. “What’s there to think about?”
Cat lowered his voice. “I figure Chilly must of had a pretty fair-sized soft money stash. He turned a lot of butts into cash, a lot more than he needed to pay off that gimp-legged freeman he had on the send, and he must have taken in still more cash off the yard. I know Chilly’s style, and he was going to the stash with it, putting it aside against some notion he was turning in his mind, but they scratched him—” Cat snapped his fingers. “Quick! He didn’t have time for no cleanup, and I figure that stash is still sitting. Just like he left it. You got any idea where it is?”
The question, just slipped in casually, reminded Red of the interrogatory technique of the kind of detective who came on buddy-buddy. Red shook his head amiably, just as he would have for the buddy detective.
“Nope, I don’t. But I wish I did.”
Cat leaned still closer, crowding Red. His eyes had grown noticeably cooler, and his voice lost the buddy tone as he asked, “You didn’t swing with that gold, did you, old man?”
“Shit!” Red said angrily, snatching the bag of dust from his shirt pocket to dangle it before Cat’s eyes. “Does this look like I swung with anything? And don’t come on heavy with me. I don’t like it. And if you’d gone a little further with all that thinking you were doing, it might of come to you that Chilly never flashed his hand to nobody. If he had a stash, you can give long, long odds he was the only one who knew where it was. I sure as hell didn’t.”