The Animal Factory

by Bunker, Edward

  Ron Decker was in a more modern cell—in the adjustment center. It, too, was at the very rear, but on a solid floor rather than a tier, and instead of a toilet there was a hole in the floor beside the mattress. It was the floor where militant revolutionaries were usually kept, nearly all of them black, and when Ron had walked by with the guard they had stared out with silent, hostile faces. He could hear the sounds of voices beyond the double doors but could not decipher the words. Here he was doubly an alien, and he wished they’d put him in “B” Section where he might communicate with Earl. Buck Rowan apparently believed that Earl had stabbed him in the melee, and Ron was being torn apart by the situation. He was astounded that he felt so indifferent to Buck Rowan’s condition; it was the death of something in himself, or perhaps the beginning of something new. But he was also crucified by guilt that Earl was in trouble because of him when he was basically innocent. Ron had gone into the building alone to avoid just such a situation. The warden had promised that he, Ron, would get favorable action from the judge if he turned on Earl. It was an insulting offer and he’d sneered, refusing to make any statement whatsoever without an attorney—but it also raised hope. Maybe they needed corroboration. Whatever happened, he wouldn’t let Earl be convicted of the assault—fuck what Earl said. Yet his own freedom, which had been firmly in hand, was in danger of oozing between his fingers. Either Earl or himself convicted of the crime would face a life sentence or the death penalty, depending on what the jury decided. Even without that, if the judge in Los Angeles found out, he would deny sentence modification, which would mean five long, bitter years before he was eligible for parole, and the chances of getting it would be small even then. He’d already seen too many men psychologically maimed by the indefinite sentences of California. If one year made him capable of plunging a knife into a man’s back, what would a decade do?

  Actually, there was nothing for him to decide, not yet. He would simply wait until things became clearer. Maybe both of them would skate by—unlikely as it now seemed. He could take a few weeks in a bare cell. When it gets too tough for the average motherfucker, it gets the way I like it, he thought, grinning at one of Earl’s expressions.

  Earl came awake when the key turned in the outer door and the light stabbed through his eyelids. It took him a few seconds to recall his predicament; his mind fought to ignore it.

  He stood up slowly, his mouth tasting foul, as the guard stepped aside for the convict to enter with a paper plate of food, the wooden spoon upright in the oatmeal.

  “Hey, don’t I get a tray?” Earl demanded of the guard over the convict’s shoulder.

  “Not in the strip cell,” the guard said.

  “I wish your mother was in a strip cell,” Earl said clearly, not caring if the guards—and they were capable of it—came in and whipped him. That would be something. But the guard was going off duty in five minutes and chose to ignore the insult.

  When the first convict stepped out, a second entered the dark alcove with a Styrofoam cup in one hand and a bucket of coffee in the other—and a grin on his face. The man’s name was Leakey, and Earl disliked him because he knew he wasn’t a friend, though he was always friendly to Earl’s face. Once Earl had bruised the man’s ego, challenging him not in so many words but in undisguised anger. Leakey had backed down, though he was in the hole for a killing (with two others helping him). Since then Earl had gotten word that Leakey made snide comments behind his back. Now Leakey’s teeth shone. He didn’t say anything, but he jiggled the cup as he set it on the bars. His body shielded the move from the waiting guard. He filled the cup and went out. When the door was locked, Earl separated the two cups, one inside the other, and took the tobacco and matches from the bottom one.

  Earl wasn’t hungry, but he forced himself to dab the soggy bread in the hardening oatmeal and take a few bites. The flat wooden spoon was ridiculous. He picked the stewed prunes up between thumb and forefinger and downed them. Then he rolled a cigarette and smoked while drinking the coffee, which was at least hot. While he sat, he turned his mind’s eye inward, probing his thoughts and feelings, scanning his own attitude toward the awful situation. On the surface was a sheen of calm, even of indifference, but he could sense that deep within was a volcano of despair waiting to erupt. Indeed, that had been the real motive for his quick cursing of the guard minutes ago. Because he couldn’t handle despair, it would become nihilistic rage; it always happened when he was trapped, and he had never been so completely trapped as now. Always before he’d had youth to draw upon. The years of the future were there if he lost some now. Now the reservoir was nearly gone. He wondered why he was so detached.

  The end of the hand-rolled cigarette was flushed and the makings put in a hole in the mattress. Next he searched the cell, the few niches around the toilet and under the bars where something could be stashed. Beneath the top of the mattress he found a year old Reader’s Digest. If he stayed in this boxcar for many days, he would have to arrange for Bad Eye to smuggle in reading material. He could handle whatever happened for however long, but it would be much easier with tobacco and books.

  Finished with the search, he momentarily thought about doing calisthenics—it was always a thought in the hole and never went any further. He decided to masturbate as a reasonable substitute, and wished he had a magazine with photos of women in high heels and stockings to stimulate his imagination. His memories of the real thing were turning yellow. He lay down on the mattress and pulled the blanket over him. It would be embarrassing to have the door open while he was loping his mule. In a crowded reform school dormitory he’d learned to masturbate on his side without moving the blankets. A thrashing was the penalty for “self-abuse.” Now he fondled himself, sorting through the images of memory as if selecting a woman in a whorehouse. He found Kitty, a series of pictures beginning with how her dancer’s legs had looked as she sat in miniskirt on a car seat, chubby and smooth, and then bare-breasted in blue jeans, the aureoles pink against the white, the globes white against the suntan. She was the younger sister of a girlfriend, and he’d never made a pass at her, but Jesus he’d wanted to, and he speculated on what it would be like with such clarity that it was now almost as if it had happened. Different women aroused different fantasies in him. Some had round, firm asses so he wanted to place them on their sides and fuck them from the rear, his belly against their butt. Others had big strong legs that he wanted to feel wrapped around him—but with Kitty … he wanted to tongue her, while cupping the cheeks of her ass in his hands, her legs spread. He wanted her standing up, braced against a table or dresser. Now he conjured her in bikini panties and high heels. He stroked her butt through the sheer nylon—that was in his mind, while in reality he spat in his hand for slickness and stroked himself. He slipped the panties down and she stepped from them while his tongue worked from her belly button down to her inner thigh. She raised one leg. About this time he had an orgasm. He wiped the result from the mattress with toilet paper and threw it in the toilet, wondering how many others had jacked off on this dirty mattress. “Shit! What else is there to do in the hole? Ah, sweet Kitty, you’ll be an old lady when I get a chance to give you some head. Old and cold.”

  Now he propped a folded blanket as a headrest and webbed his fingers behind his neck, waiting for whatever might happen next. A lifetime of conditioning to bare, dirty cells had given him the ability to endure without letting his mind scream in silent futility at the walls. Such conduct as that was the path to mental breakdown. He didn’t care about that either, except that it would give the enemy too much satisfaction. He knew how to be still within his own being. His one worry was Ron, who obviously wasn’t in “B” Section and therefore had to be in the adjustment center where eighty percent of the occupants were Whitey-hating blacks, many of whom had killed guards here or in other prisons in the system. Nobody could get out of their cells, but they could make life miserable. Yet nothing could be done about it, not yet. When the smoke cleared, it might be possible to have him moved
over here through Seeman—and there was the matter of his court appearance, too. It was no use thinking about it, about anything, not without more facts. Not a goddamned thing could be decided or done. He picked up the Reader’s Digest and read about someone’s most unforgettable experience.

  Following lunch, Earl had to quickly stifle a cigarette when he heard the key hit the lock. As he turned from the toilet, two guards stood outside the bars. “Okay, strip on down,” one said. “The associate warden wants to see you.”

  “I don’t know if I want to see him.”

  “They sent us for you. Either you come or we bring the stun gun and the gurney.”

  “You fuckers discovered technology,” Earl said. He stepped to the rear of the cell and stripped off his shorts. When he was naked he went through the dance while one of them held a flashlight on him. “I feel like Liza Minnelli,” he said, moving to the bars to get the white coveralls with the zipper. They were baggy on him. Then, through the bars, they put a chain around his waist and fastened his wrists in handcuffs holding his arms tight to his hips. One unlocked the door and he stepped out. Several feet of extra chain were put between his legs—front to rear, from the belly chain—and one guard held it. He could be jerked off his feet with one hard tug. It was how everyone was taken from the hole since guards had been slain in recent years. Men even went to visits that way.

  Somehow T.J. and Paul had known that he was being brought out, for as soon as the procession hit the yard, which was still packed because the work whistle hadn’t blown, the two men were there. T.J. jerked his head toward the hospital, clenched his fist, and then turned his thumb down in the classic gesture of the Roman arena. Earl knew instantly that Buck Rowan was either already dead or soon would be. A guard would be seated by his door, but Earl’s friends had found a way to get around that.

  “You look like a Christmas package in all that shit,” Paul said.

  “They’re overrating me,” Earl said. “They think I’m tough.”

  “Knock it off, Copen,” one guard said while the other waved the two convicts away.

  Following the procession from a parallel catwalk was one of the yard’s riflemen. After another stabbing, the suspect had been under escort when someone knocked the guard down and killed the assailant. Now the officials took no chances.

  The crowd parted, and several convicts called his name and waved, their faces blurs in the gray light. He kept his face hard under the scrutiny of so many eyes, but inside he saw the humor of such excessive drama. As they passed the yard office, Fitz stuck his head out and asked, “Need anything over there?”

  “Some high-grade heroin,” Earl called back, grinning.

  The custody office was now full of people, with a dozen clerks and half a dozen lieutenants and several guards, all behind their desks. One lieutenant—his face permanently lumped and reddened by booze—glared at Earl. He’d spent twenty years in this office, going from guard to sergeant to lieutenant from one desk to another, and never going out among the main-line convicts. Lieutenant Seeman thought the man was afraid of convicts, and Earl had mused at the time that it was indeed tragic for a man afraid of convicts to spend his life working in a prison. It showed that he was also afraid of life.

  Stoneface was behind his desk, the drapes behind him opened to expose barred windows and the panorama of the bay. The associate warden got his nickname from the ravages of acne that had scarred and removed the flexibility of his skin—that and his long, square jaw. Earl remembered when the man’s hair was black; now it was streaked heavily with gray. A movement to the right turned Earl’s eyes to the man sitting there, a chubby young man with pudgy mouth and modish tattersall suit.

  “You can wait outside,” Stoneface said to the guards.

  When they withdrew, Stoneface introduced the man as Mr. McDonald from the Marin County district attorney’s office.

  “How you doing, Copen?” Mr. McDonald asked, reaching down beside his chair to flip on a tape recorder, and then, perhaps because he was thinking of that, he stood up to shake hands, blushing when he saw how Earl was chained.

  “I’m fine,” Earl said. “How’s your mother?”

  The matter-of-fact question stopped the man cold for a few seconds; then he took a card from his pocket and read, “I’m advising you of your constitutional rights. You have a right to remain silent. If you choose to give up that right, anything you say may be used against you. You can have an attorney present before you’re interviewed. And if you can’t afford an attorney, one will be provided free of charge. Do you understand?”

  “Run that by me again.”

  Earl smirked while the red-faced man repeated the litany. When he finished, Earl looked around the room, bent over, and feigned peering beneath the desk. “Where is he? The lip?”

  Stoneface had been sneering with his mouth and staring with his eyes during the charade. “I told you this one was a smartass. He’d think it was a joke until he walked to the gas chamber. Only we’d probably have to carry him with shit running out of his pants.”

  Earl flushed, momentarily considering spitting in the man’s face, but realizing he’d be beaten to a pulp if he did so. He looked down at the carpet.

  “Rowan’s a paraplegic,” McDonald said evenly. “He’s signed a statement that he had an argument with Decker over some schoolwork, and you took it up. He’s ready to testify. He thinks it’s the only way he can get revenge. We found traces of blood on your shoes, O positive, which is his blood type.”

  “It’s mine, too. I cut myself shaving.”

  “We’ve got corroboration that you were in the cellhouse, too. Now if you make it easy for us, I promise we won’t ask for the death penalty.”

  “Just a natural life sentence, huh?”

  “Better than death.”

  “I think I’ll pay my money and take my chances … especially since I’m innocent as a baby.”

  “Don’t say I didn’t give you a chance. And if you change your mind, it’ll save us money.”

  “I’ll give it some thought, but don’t hold your breath.” Earl’s voice dripped disdain. It wasn’t bravado. It was knowledge that no jury would vote death for this, and if one did, no execution would take place. Only once had a convict been executed for a nonfatal assault, and he had demanded it.

  “You’d be smart to tell us your side of the story,” Stoneface said. “I looked at Rowan’s record and he’s no prize citizen. You probably had a good reason … that sweet boy of yours.”

  “No, it was your mother.” The response, though certainly not a witty retort, came reflexively, delivered with venom, and Stoneface puffed up. “Man, send me back to my motherfuckin’ cell. I don’t have anything to say. I don’t know anything, and if you’ve got a case, put a dozen in the jury box and convince them.” He turned for the door and both men jumped up. He stopped. “Don’t get nervous. I’m just getting the bulls. Whaddya think, I’m goin’ somewhere in all this hardware? You sure are scary assholes.” He kicked on the door and the guard instantly opened it.

  “Get the car, Jeeves,” Earl said.

  The confused guards looked to the associate warden. Stoneface motioned for them to take him. “And if the bastard opens his mouth, kick his teeth in.”

  The yard was now nearly empty, but when he was marched down the bottom tier of “B” Section, several friends yelled out words of ribald encouragement. Rube was the loudest, but Bad Eye was not far behind.

  As soon as the cell gate and outer door were locked, the bravado was darkened by clouds of despair. What real difference was there between the gas chamber and a life sentence; both ended hope. And even if he wasn’t taken to trial, or acquitted, the parole board would make him pay, five, six, eight years … For a moment he wished that Ron would confess, but cursed himself for the idea. It was beneath what he thought of himself. And he was legally guilty anyway. Pacing the cell, he thought of T.J.’s signal in the yard. Someone was going to somehow kill Buck Rowan, or try. The signed statement would b
e no good in court; it wasn’t a dying statement. It would leave the parole board, but, Jesus, that was better than a conviction. Yet Earl was ripped apart inside about the killing, too. If T.J. got in trouble … that would be an unbearable burden to be the cause of a friend spending years in the hole and perhaps never getting out of prison. Nor was there any telling what T.J. would do. Earl hoped it wasn’t what some blacks had done in a futile attempt to get an informer. They’d murdered a guard outside the door who didn’t even have a key. They were still in boxcars in the adjustment center after three years. T.J. certainly had the nerve for it—for anything—but he also had brains. And Paul would be an influence. They apparently had a plan …

  If the grand jury indicted him, Earl would need an attorney. No doubt Ron would have his mother cough up some money, not the thousands necessary for a top lawyer, but anything was better than the public defender. The one chance for acquittal was on insanity. Earl grinned, realizing that he knew precisely how to go about it.

  During the afternoon he heard the shuffle of feet going by. The upper tiers were being let out in the small “B” Section yard for an hour of exercise, watched by two riflemen. Someone knocked once on the outer door and several magazines slid under it, one at a time, vintage Playboys with missing pictures. He used a blanket to fish them in.

  At 4:30 the door opened for a second as a guard peeked in to count him. A minute later the stamping foot from the cell above indicated that he was wanted on the phone. The toilet was already empty. He kept it that way, except when he used it.

  “Yo, here I am,” he called.

  “That dude in the hospital croaked,” Rube said.

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “The bull just told Leakey.”

  “Any details?”