Cat walked in silence for a while. When he spoke again it was clear he’d given up. “I don’t know,” he said dryly. “There at the end he might of had that little freak wiping her ass with hundred-dollar bills.”
Red shrugged equitably. “Well, it was his, if that’s what he wanted to do with it.”
“That bitch spoiled a boss hustler.”
“Chilly just found something he dug more than stacking up piles of butts and playing big man in this crummy side show we got to live in.”
“Yeah, and now he’s psyched, a stone nut. They say he tried to take himself out. Cut his wrists, for Christ’s sake!”
“Shithouse rumor,” Red said scornfully.
“The captain’s office has him listed for transfer to the pie factory, and that’s no rumor. I saw the list myself.”
This news puzzled Red. He wasn’t able to imagine Chilly as a real nut. Somehow Chilly had gone on to a deeper and even slicker game, still playing nimbly with the official mind as he moved towards some secret end of his own.
“Chilly’ll be running that nut house in a month,” Red said confidently.
“Maybe,” Cat agreed doubtfully. “And maybe he’s all through. One thing, there’s no hole here on the yard where he used to stand.”
Automatically Red gazed down at their old “office”—three hobby workers stood there examining a length of red silk one of them had bought to fashion the pillows that were a traditional item in the handicraft store. They were spray painted with the legend: Souvenir of San Quentin. A few feet away, O’Brien stood making book. His cigar bobbed steadily as he chewed and sucked at it. Red had heard O’Brien was already running scared. Someone had picked a long shot at Hollywood Park and got into him for something like three hundred cartons, which he still hadn’t come up with, and now he was so nervous the only bets he wasn’t trying to lay off, according to the yard comics, were those placed by a notorious nut who liked to wager on the outcome of the races featured in the newsreels shown at the beginning of the weekend movies. Red smiled fondly. Chilly had once tried to get the same nut to make a bet on the second Dempsey-Tunney fight. But Chilly never did take the crazy bastard’s stuff, Chilly had too much class.
Red studied Cat, still plodding beside him, and Cat was just one more lightweight joint wheel, hiding behind a pair of twenty-two-inch arms, beginning to go to fat, and even if they were forty-four-inch arms Cat would never think of trying to rob Chilly’s stash, unless stoneface Blake had practically promised him personally to make sure Chilly was shipped to the nut house.
The two men neared the end of the yard, and on the cream stucco of the inmate canteen building, Red noted a drawing of a vampire. One he had looked at without interest many times as he walked, thinking only the first few times that at least he’d never been unlucky enough to meet up with something like that. Now the drawing was beginning to weather and fade, and it had been partially overlapped by a new figure, a four-legged animal of indeterminate kind, though clearly possessed of slanting eyes, and an entire mouthful of teeth, bared in a crude but vigorous display of ferocity. Scrawled beneath this animal was the single word: Simbas.
Red and Cat turned together, reversing like soldiers executing to-the-rear-march, and Cat said, “They put the sissy on queen’s row.”
“I know,” Red said. “I seen her in the line when they ran the row down to the laundry. Swishing and giggling, happy as a pig in shit.”
“I still can’t figure how the bitch ever got on the yard in the first place.”
“They didn’t make her, that’s all.”
“Bullshit. How long did it take you to make her?” Cat asked.
“About one hot second.”
“You think some of these old-time bulls don’t pick up just as quick, if not quicker, than we do?”
“I suppose—”
“And out of three thousand cells, they stick her in Chilly’s, and tear up his psych department hold to do it.” Cat was silent a moment, shaking his head. “You think they could actually be that keen?”
“What do you mean?”
“That they might have figured what was going to happen?”
“Cat, you talk like a man with a paper asshole.”
“I don’t say that’s the way it came down. I was just thinking.”
Red smiled wryly. “You’ve been doing your fair share of thinking, but far as I can make out you ain’t got no particular talent for it. You best stick to rasslin’, and” —he backhanded Cat’s softening belly—“pushing iron.”
“The new gym’s going to be double tough.”
“Nunn would be glad of that.”
Just then a line of fish began to enter through the gate at the head of the yard, and they moved closer to search for familiar faces among the new arrivals, as well as to draw some measure of security from the awkward uncertainty of the fish, their skins bleached dead white in the county jail, their hair mutilated from the amateur barbering they practiced on one another. Red saw one man he thought he might know. An old man, wrinkled as a prune, bald except for a few strands still straggling across his white scalp, who moved with the indefinable air of one who had entered many strange jails and prisons, and found them all much the same. His face was oddly familiar to Red, but for a long moment he couldn’t summon a name, or place this old con in either space or time, then he suddenly remembered a kid he had always paired off with to chop cane, or pick cotton, his running mate in the Southern prison farm where he’d pulled his first jolt. Anson Meeker. The name came back over the years, and he saw a cocky kid grinning at him from the other side of the row as they worked furiously through the last hours of the afternoon to just make their task, having spent the morning coasting while they planned in excited whispers the big scores they’d take off once they were free.
But even as he recognized him, Red knew this old man couldn’t really be his long forgotten buddy, and he called out, “Hey, Meeker,” to prove the impossibility, not to see, as he did, the old man turn and cast along their faces trying to determine, almost anxiously, who had hailed him. His eyes met Red’s, flickered, and passed on.
“Someone you thought you knew?” Cat asked.
“For a minute. Might be an older brother.”
But Red knew it wasn’t an older brother. Red realized Anson’s identity clearly enough, but he couldn’t begin to form any notion of the terrible and mysterious forces that had so swiftly transformed Anson Meeker from a husky, good-looking kid into a creeping old man. It was only—
Red had to stop and figure. Rather than mark his age and so the year, he counted slowly back through his own confinements, marveling at the growing total, until he realized it wasn’t “only” at all, but somewhere well over thirty years ago that he and Anson Meeker had squatted together in the fields eating the usual dinner of boiled cabbage, while they swore to each other (always in whispers) the moment they were free they’d light out for California where they’d heard, at the very least, they had decent-feeding jails. Red had jumped good to his word. But it looked like Anson had held off awhile. Red congratulated himself for once having the good sense to avoid the years of Southern jailing that had worked and starved Anson Meeker into just one more of the beaten and hopeless old bastards who drift in and out of prison, staying on the streets only long enough to drink up their gate money, because they find behind the walls the only life which doesn’t frighten and overwhelm them.
For a moment Red experienced an unfamiliar sense of depression, a massive aching dullness as if he had been systematically beaten, but had somehow forgotten it and could now offer himself no explanation for his discomfort. Again he sensed Anson Meeker’s eyes crossing his own, saw them stir faintly, grow flat, and pass on.
He turned to Cat and said sharply, “You done thinking, or can I score another of your tailor-mades?”
“It won’t break me,” Cat said, producing the pack. Red took a smoke and lit it quickly, flipping the match, which fell spinning towards the blacktop, like a burnin
g plane seen at a great distance.
“Thanks for the light,” Cat said tonelessly.
Red shrugged, smoking hungrily. He found himself listening to two kids, just brats, who were standing a few feet away, whispering together over a score they were going to take off as soon as they made parole. Some third kid had clued them to an old broad who lived alone, and kept a half-million cash in a shoe box under the bed.
Red shook his head in sour wonder, trying to remember how many times he had heard of this same shoe box.
“Well,” Cat said finally. “What else is new?”
“Nothing,” Red said.
This is a New York Review Book
Published by The New York Review of Books
435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
Copyright © 1967 by Malcolm Braly
Introduction copyright © 2002 by Jonathan Lethem
Cover photograph: Felice Frankel, Player Piano Roll; © 1997 by Felice Frankel, courtesy of the photographer.
Cover design: Katy Homans
The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:
Braly, Malcolm, 1925–
On the yard / Malcolm Braly ; introduction by Jonathan Lethem.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-940322-96-X (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Prisoners—Fiction. 2. Prisons—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3552.R28 O5 2002
813'.54—dc21
2001006227
eISBN 978-1-59017-610-8
v1.0
For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:
Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
On the Yard Page 34