by Jack Finney
There began now the very worst moments so far, and I sat there on the bunk to endure them in helplessness For now the count was about to begin, and if today there were a hideout — if some unknown prisoner chose this day to hide out — it would be disaster, final and complete, and there was no way Arnie or I could protect ourselves against this possibility.
I sat wondering what the chances of it were. Hideouts in San Quentin, I knew from Arnie, were neither frequent nor infrequent; they happened not every day, or even every week, and a month or more might pass without one. But in a year's time there could be a fair number, and on any one day the danger of a hideout for some reason — or no reason — was real.
Please, God, I found myself murmuring silently, don't let it happen today, and I sat there on the bunk unable to think of anything except what would happen if it did. Not searching for Arnie at all — for there was a blue-denimed man, me, sitting where Arnie ought to be — they would immediately begin a search for the other man, missing from his cell. And among the first and obvious places to be searched in the industrial area — still guarded by the wall guards who stayed there for just this reason until the four-thirty count came all-clear — would be the big pile of crates in which Arnie now lay hidden. It was no place to hide, Arnie had said, unless you expected no search to be made. And the moment they discovered Arnie crouched in his crate, with me locked behind these bars in his place, that would be the end for us both.
I heard the footsteps coming down the tier walkway — the guard counting each and every occupant of this tier — and the danger of another hideout dropped from my mind, for I suddenly knew with simple terror what was about to happen. Al walked to the front of the cell and stood at the bars, and I remembered Arnie's instructions and stood up beside him. The guard had to see us, close up, face to face, and standing on our feet; false counts have been made, Arnie had said, a dummy lying in a bunk where a man should have been, so they took no chances on that. And now, in the next moments, I knew, the guard just outside would stop here at the cell door, stand staring at my face, then frown and say, Who are you? What are you doing here? You're not a San Quentin man at all!
On panicky impulse I almost turned away — the guard was far closer than I'd thought; his steps on the walkway were nearly here, only a cell or two away. But before I could move, the guard was at the cell door, as I stood rigid and frozen beside Al, and then he was past me and gone. In absolute astonishment, I realized that he hadn't even stopped; that he was counting with fantastic speed, walking rapidly and without pause or breaking his step, glancing into each cell, counting the occupants of the entire tier in only the brief time it took to walk its length.
Al was back at the wash basin with his paper, and I stood, eyes closed in relief; then they flashed wide opera again — the count had to be clear before I could possibly relax.
I waited, staring out the door; presently, on a narrow wooden walkway suspended from the cell-block wall opposite my door, a tan-uniformed man sauntered past, a rifle tucked under one arm. I turned away, then, and lay down on the bunk, trapped and helpless; and to occupy my mind with something else, I glanced around the cell I was confined in. In actual fact, it was my first real look at it, and I was suddenly astonished at what I saw.
This cell was unbelievably small; it was actually smaller, I saw in amazement, than the bathroom at home, and I sat up on the bunk unable to believe it. The bunk I was sitting on covered half the floor space. One end of the bunk actually touched the bars at the front of the cell, yet beyond its foot at the other end there was barely room for a man to stand. While at the bunk's side, there was no more, I was certain, than two or three feet of space; if I lay on the front edge of the bunk, I knew I could easily reach out and touch the plaster of the opposite wall. At the end of the cell was the tiny wash basin against which Al stood leaning, and beside it a lidless seatless toilet. Above the basin were two narrow wooden shelves, one for each inmate, the shelves crowded with Arnie's and his cellmate's razors shaving cream, photographs, and other small possessions. That was all; the tiny space was so crowded that a man could hardly walk in it, couldn't move in it, unless his cellmate lay on a bunk out of the way.
I caught myself actually shaking my head in astonishment; this wasn't enough space for one man to live in and still feel himself human. Yet two men occupied it, and, Arnie had once told me, nearly every other almost identical cell in the prison.
And then the fear rushed back to the pit of my stomach. I could not stand this place, and I knew it. I believed I would kill myself if I had to live this way. And I knew that if I had understood this earlier I would never have done what I had; I would not be here, whatever that might mean to Arnie. I knew I could not possibly have brought myself to even risk confinement in a space like this; and for a moment I wondered about the great and lavish State of California. How could its people permit men to be confined in this tiny few feet of space? And then I was swept by the renewed realization that I was confined here now, that I still had to get out, and the sudden thought of freedom, of being out of this cell, and the walls around me, brought the smart of beginning tears to my eyes. One or two minutes had passed since the guard had gone by the cell; I didn't know how long a count took, and I supposed it took a considerable time. I lay down again, face to the wall, trying to keep control of my feelings and emotions, trying to find something to turn my mind to.
Arnie's first job at San Quentin had been as a clerk; he was a college graduate, a fair typist, and he could spell accurately, so he worked as an inmate clerk in the set of offices of which the Captain's office and the prison control room were a part. He'd lost his job in a little over a month; he'd gotten into a fight, and been deprived of his job, and it was a long time till he got another. But I'd visited him once while he still had this job, and he told me something of what went on in the control room during a count. So I had some idea of what was happening now, and I thought about it trying to estimate how long the count would take.
The guard who counted this tier, I knew, would report his total to the cell-block office—the little hutlike wooden structure I'd seen down on the main floor, roofed so that objects thrown from the cells high in the tiers, as frequently happened, would not strike the guards. The guards who were counting the other four tiers would report their counts, then the total for the whole East cell block would be phoned to the control room.
Arnie had been fascinated with the atmosphere of the control room during count time; he watched the room and the men in it every chance he got. There'd be a sergeant at the desk, he said, waiting at the phone for the counts to come in. Maybe half a dozen uniformed men would be standing around talking in an easy casual way about the World Series, the fight on television last night, a vacation one of them had just come back from—anything. What interested Arnie was that it seemed to the eye to be a relaxed kind of scene, but in actual fact it was not. The guards in the cell blocks were never told what the correct count for their blocks should be; and they never knew, for new men arrived, others left, and others were transferred every single day. Each time the sergeant answered the control-room phone during count time, Arnie said, the men around him would lower their voices or actually stop talking — while the sergeant checked the count he'd just received against a master sheet listing the correct totals. When it was correct, Arnie said, you could actually feel the concealed tension in the room relax momentarily — till the phone rang again. What was happening was routine, repeated time after time, day after day, uneventfully, but you knew, Arnie said, that in the consciousness of these man was a knowledge made up of certain inescapable facts. They were part of a handful of men who kept over four thousand convicted criminals in prison. Most of these inmates were normal in intelligence and psychology, and most were serving comparatively short terms. But scattered among them were murderers, both convicted and potential, dangerous psychopaths, both known and undetected, and every other variety of dangerous personality. There were two men, Arnie said, up on Condemn
ed Row then, and I knew they were there still, awaiting execution; they'd beaten two guards to death with hatchets, and severely wounded two more. Some of the men who stood in that office every day at count time had known the dead guards, and one of the wounded guards was still at the prison.
So at each count, Arnie said, there'd be an unacknowledged, almost unrecognized tension in the control room; for if a count came in short, with no error of counting or arithmetic discovered to correct it, a hunt had to begin immediately, ranging through the entire prison, for the missing man or men. No one in the prison would go home, the green light above San Quentin would turn red, and men off-duty would report to the prison and join the hunt. And so, for each of the waiting guards, it meant immediately prowling through buildings, hunting through stacks of clothing, laundry baskets, food crates, air ducts — everywhere and anywhere a man might conceivably be hiding. And for the guard who came on him — this had happened, and would happen again—there might be a knife or gun waiting in the hiding man's hand.
Every time that phone rang, it might mean somebody standing beside it would die or be badly hurt in the minutes that followed. And I knew, lying here, why Arnie actually enjoyed that scene; scared as I was, and anxious as no one else could be that the counts be correct today, I took a prisoner's pleasure at the fear of his captors.
They joked, Arnie said, to obscure their tension. Half a mile outside the prison gates was a tiny green-painted building; the pumping plant which drew salt water from the Bay, used in the prison plumbing system. It was manned by a single inmate, trusted and unguarded; there was nothing to stop him from simply walking away. Just the same, a prison guard drove out to this post to make certain the inmate was there at the all-important count time. And the joke was this. "Control room," the sergeant would answer each time his phone rang. And once each count, a voice would answer at some point, "Count ready from the pump station." Then the sergeant, accepting his part in the old, formularized prison joke would reply, "Okay; what's your count?" The man at the other end of the line would say, "One." The sergeant would say, "One? Go back, and recount," and the men standing around him would smile.
I tried to picture that room now; the counts coming in regularly from the four main blocks, the old Spanish cell block, the hospital, the kitchen and mess halls, now preparing to feed four thousand men, the farm at the western end of the prison reservation, each office, residence, and every other part of the prison in which there were inmates to be accounted for.
It would take a long time, I thought, waiting it out, lying there on the bunk; and then Al, lowering his newspaper, said, "Slow count tonight; damn it, I'm hungry."
I couldn't help it; I lifted my head to stare at him. "Slow count?" I said.
"Yeah; should have had the all-clear by now."
I couldn't help it. "A hideout?" I said.
He shrugged. "Maybe. Could be. Hope not, though, or they'll have to make a paddle count of the cells; find out who's missing. And no telling when we'll eat then. Probably some dumb screw can't count straight, or add; it usually is." He lifted his paper, and resumed his reading.
I just sank back on the cot; there was nothing I could do but lie and wait, my muscles like jelly from fear. Somewhere, right now, a second count was being made; the men in the control room waiting to know whether they'd go home now, their watch over; or move through the prison in the manhunt they hated. Two minutes, three — I had my watch up before me — then four minutes passed. The second count must be almost ready, and at any second I'd know whether I'd be a prisoner here for the next few years to come or still have a chance to get out.
Then an electric gong sounded in the block, the merest tap of sound; and I didn't know what it meant. Al tossed his paper onto his bunk. "Chow," he said casually. "You notice what we're having?"
I knew I couldn't trust my voice, and shook my head, wondering how I could be supposed to know what the prison was serving for supper. Then I remembered; the week's menu was posted at various places throughout the prison.
From far below I heard a crash of heavy metal, then an immediate and continuing iron clatter, and I knew what had happened. A tier bar had been lifted, the men of the first tier were pushing their cell doors open, and now I could hear the rising murmur of their voices as they came out of their cells. Again there came the crash of heavy metal, closer this time, and the sound of many voices intensified. Then, in only the time it takes a guard to run up a flight of stairs, the heavy crash sounded just outside my door as the great bar rose from its slots; and Al immediately pushed open the cell door, stepped out, and was gone. The runway before the cell was suddenly crowded with blue-clad men moving toward the stairways, and I lay on the bunk for a moment longer, then made a sudden decision.
I'd intended to skip supper; to simply remain in the cell; you didn't have to show up for a meal, Arnie had explained to me, unless you wanted to, and for one reason or another men occasionally omitted a meal. Arnie and I had agreed that obviously my wisest action would be to stay here, lying on the bunk, either asleep or apparently so. But now I had to get out of this tiny cell. I couldn't possibly stay in it a moment longer without relief from it. Knowing how potentially dangerous it was to needlessly take the risk of some disastrously revealing blunder, I nevertheless stood up and stepped out onto the runway, closing the cell door behind me.
10
There was no decision to make about where to walk; I immediately became part of a moving crowd of men flowing toward the stairway I'd come up on. Then I reached it and moved down with the others around me. The voices — hundreds of conversations — were a great drone: the sound of voices in a crowded auditorium or any other vast enclosed space. Down on the floor of the cell block, I continued to move with the crowd, fighting confusion of mind, trying to fix in my memory the route I was following. We moved out through the doorway I'd come in, its metal door held open by a tan-uniformed guard, and then we were in the Yard again. I crossed it, a part of the crowd, toward a smaller brick building, walked around a corner of it and then into it through an open doorway. I knew that my mind was registering only chaotic impressions, and I felt no assurance that even from here I could retrace my steps. And I wished with all the strength of my heart that I'd stayed, temporarily safe, in the cell, and knew I'd done an utterly foolhardy thing in leaving it.
I passed on through the doorway, turned right with the others, joining a stream of men from somewhere else, then stepped onto red tile and into sudden brightness, and the quality of the roaring drone of countless voices suddenly changed with the shape and size of the vast room I'd entered. I had a confused impression of hundreds of identical tables, enormous silvery coffee urns, white-coated men urgently busy, and then by an effort of will I took rigid control of my mind, and made myself see and try to understand what was going on around me.
For the moment, at least, it was simple enough; I was in the largest cafeteria I'd ever seen. Just ahead of me, the crowd had stopped moving and turned into a waiting line of men; and within half a dozen steps, I stood still and became a part of it. I knew I could never eat. My throat was locked against food, to chew and to swallow a simple impossibility, and my heart pounded relentlessly as I stood looking around me in a rigid observant panic.
Each of the men upon reaching the head of the line took a compartmented metal tray from a great stack of them, then walked slowly past the row of white-coated men on the other side of the long food counter. There were no choices to make, I saw, no words to speak. With deft haste, each white-coated man an inmate passed ladled up, or forked over, or passed out a portion of food of some kind or other. Then, his tray full, and still part of a line, supervised by standing guards, each man carried his tray down a wide main aisle and sat down at a table.
Even in the table where a man sat, there was no choice or decision to be made. The room was filled with rows of square tables made of clear varnished wood tops each supported by a single metal standard sunk into the red-tile floor. From the metal supporting
standard, four metal arms protruded, a round wooden disk at the end of each arm: stoollike seats. There were no table or chair legs, only that single metal column supporting the whole rigid structure; and I saw that none of this furniture could be picked up, thrown, or used as a weapon. The rows of tables were filled evenly, one at a time; the back half of the great room was filled with eating men; in the front half of the room, every table stood empty.
I took up a tray, and immediately a bundle of silverware wrapped in a paper napkin was slapped onto it by a white-sleeved arm, and an instant later, as I walked slowly on, four slices of bread. The men behind the counter never once even glanced at me, their arms and bodies endlessly repeating their individual rhythms. Two slices of meat loaf appeared on my tray, were immediately covered by a ladleful of brown gravy, and an instant later, a compartment of my tray was filled with creamed boiled potatoes. Green beans, a dish of rice pudding, a mugful of coffee; with each step I took, the tray grew heavier in my hands. Then, always following the man ahead of me, I turned from the table into the main aisle, and my eyes on my coffee, as though to avoid spilling it, I kept my face turned from the guard who stood at one side of the aisle, arms folded, weight on one leg, wordlessly supervising the filling of the table rows. In the steps of the man ahead of me, I turned into an aisle, and when the man sat down at a table already occupied by one man, I sat down, too, and an instant later, the fourth seat was taken by the man behind me.
Did you speak? I wondered. Did you say, Hello, or Good evening? What was dinner etiquette at San Quentin Prison? I raised my eyes from my tray to the faces of the other three men. One man, eyes on his tray, was forking a piece of meat loaf to his mouth; a second man sat chewing, eyes staring into space. The third man, directly opposite me, was unrolling his silverware from his napkin and his eyes caught mine. He lifted his chin and a corner of his mouth in a brief nod and faint smile of greeting, and I responded in the same way. Then we each turned to our trays.
