“Why is he doing this for me?” Jack asked.
The lawyer looked surprised. “Forbes? Stanley Forbes? Hell, why do you think?”
“It beats me,” Jack said.
“You’re innocent, aren’t you?” Costigan raised his eyebrows. “Isn’t that reason enough?”
“I guess so.”
“Then you’ll cooperate?”
“Shit, why not?”
Costigan smiled quickly. “That’s thinking. Anything I can do for you? You’ll probably draw a year upstairs. You might even get out to the farm, but you’ll be out of circulation for a year, anyway. Anybody you want me to call?”
“No.”
“Okay.” The lawyer smiled. “I know it’s rough in there. Just bear up. I was in jail myself once; got caught down in Carmel with a bunch of beer in the car. Had to stay in jail all goddam night. I know how it is.”
They shook hands formally, and later in the day, at the afternoon session of municipal court, met again; Jack pleaded guilty to the charge and was held for superior court, just as Costigan had said. The judge did not even have to appoint Costigan as his attorney, because when Jack’s name was called, Costigan stepped forward and said he was acting as the accused’s counsel. It simplified matters. Everyone, Jack thought, was doing his utmost to simplify matters, to make the administration of justice run smoothly. Even he was. He could have balked, he could have been stubborn and ethical, but it wouldn’t have done anything except run him right into the gas chamber. And if he had really been guilty, it would have been different. He would have been right in there, trying to make any deal he could get.
As a final gesture, Costigan asked for bail for Jack, but the judge refused because it was a capital case and Jack was not local. When they took him back upstairs he was permitted to change his smelly civilian clothes for a set of dungarees, and they offered him a pair of workshoes, but he asked if he could keep his loafers. The deputy thought it over, bit his thumb, and finally said okay.
Jack was not really concerned about his guilt or innocence; or even about the giant abstractions of Guilt and Innocence. In his life he had already committed enough crimes to be jailed for a thousand years. Armed robbery, battery, statutory rape, and for that matter even kidnaping as it was defined in the State of California. He and two others had robbed a store and then forced the owner to come in the car with them at gunpoint and then drove him out into the country so he couldn’t call the heat down on them until they were far away. That was kidnaping. Shortly after he had quit working in eastern Oregon, he had gone all over with a partner pulling a short-change racket that involved the changing of a twenty-dollar bill for a package of cigarettes; he imagined he had done this enough times to deserve at least a hundred years in prison if he got a year on each count, so he was not feeling particularly innocent, at least in the eyes of the law. As for the true crimes of his life, the crime of being born without parents, the crime of being physically strong and quick, the crime of not having a puritan conscience, the crime of existing in a society in which he and everybody else permitted crime without rising up in outrage: well, he was purely and perfectly guilty here, too, as was everybody else. So that didn’t matter, either. The trick was to keep from being “punished” for his “crimes.” He decided that to fight the authorities, to balk, would in a sense be admitting that they were right and he was wrong. But of course there wasn’t any right or wrong. So it was better to cooperate, to do anything that would lessen his punishment.
Except that in his heart he felt deep personal rage at himself for cooperating. It made him grind his teeth together to keep from shouting out his self-hatred, from beating himself against the concrete wall of his cell; the thought kept ballooning up in his mind that they had no right to treat him like an animal, no matter what he had done or not done. All night long, in his cell, he burned with hatred. It did not matter what he thought, it was how he felt; and alone in the darkness of his cell, with the muttering noises of the tank around him, he felt like murdering the universe.
Ten
In a way, the Balboa County jail was run on democratic principles, which was not true of a jail in Peckham County, Idaho, where Jack had spent nearly three months a few years before. He had been given three months in Peckham County for rolling a drunk, and as soon as he got put in he knew that this was going to be a hard three months. The Peckham County jail was run very tightly by the deputies, with no inmate control at all. There had been no corruption and no graft. Jack had been told that a few years before the jail had been one of the worst in the nation and that a reform administration had cleaned it up. The prisoner who told him this, a tall lean man in for failure to provide child support, first greeted Jack by grinning and saying, “Welcome, Comrade, to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Don’t spit on the sidewalk.”
It wasn’t long before Jack saw what he meant. The reform administration saw to it that there was no outside food or anything else for the prisoners with money. The tank was very well lit all the time, and the inmates were under constant supervision, to see that there would be no gambling, arguing, fighting, or unnatural sex practices. Each man had to do his share of the work, and long-term prisoners spent most of each day in a gravel quarry out in back of the jail. During the day the prisoners who were not in the gravel quarry sat around the tank and did nothing. At night they were locked in their cells. The county authorities were proud of the fact that there was no sanitary court in their felony tank, and that all prisoners got equal treatment.
“And it works, too,” said the tall prisoner. “This is a very humane place. We all get equal treatment, and we are all simply desperate to get out of here and never come back. There is no coddling, and money is not king, and a prisoner who does not cooperate is placed in isolation to brood over his antisocial behavior. And the rest of us, according to the depth of our imagination, just sit here and go out of our minds. But quietly, of course. When I came in here, I was a mild socialist. I suppose I dreamed of a world in which all men received equal treatment before the law, and the function of the law was to see that everyone received equal treatment. Perhaps I even dreamed that in a mildly socialist world, we might even stop murdering each other’s children, since there would be nothing to gain from it. I have been in here two weeks now, and when I get out I’m going to make a very formal ceremony of going down and registering as a Republican. I have been in here two weeks, and like all the rest of us I have been stripped, absolutely stripped, of every single emotional and intellectual value, every basic urge, every desire; everything that distinguishes me as a human being from other human beings, or even from other animals. My privacy is gone, my pride is gone, I have no status, nor is there any way to get any status in here. My sexual urges, as weak as they are, have no possibility of satisfaction. My other appetites have been reduced to the point where I eat, drink, sleep, crap, piss, scratch, and yawn all for the same thing—the mere satisfaction or rather, reduction, of a primal itch I’d be better off without. Which has all made me realize that I do not want your supper, because it is just like my supper. And I had always thought that this would be a good thing! `Remove,’ I said to myself, `the impetus to private ownership, and you have made the first giant step toward removing the causes of injustice in the world. There would be no greed if there were no possessions, no jealousy, no envy, perhaps even no hatred.’ “
The tall prisoner laughed. “What a dream! I’ve been in here two weeks, and already I know that I would give my right arm for something to be jealous about, for something I desired enough to steal, or even kill for. I feel dead; even though I know I’ll be out of here soon, I can’t really believe it, and even the quality of my daydreams has changed to the point where I now realize that everything I dream of and desire could cause that same desire in another man, and that I might have to fight another man to get it. Even my wife. Do you see? Suppose I loved my wife: Couldn’t somebody else love her, too? And then wouldn’t we have to fight over her? And if we fought, would
n’t one of us have to lose? And if one of us lost, wouldn’t he be the victim of injustice? Because by what right does he lose the object of his desires?
“You see, I’ve always dreamed of a world in which this wouldn’t happen. And here it is, right here in the tank. A perfect socialist utopia, in which those desires which cause conflict are satisfied by being lopped off. Just think what it would be like if some evening one of us, just one of us, got something extra for supper? Wouldn’t we all be excited! We’d all scheme and dream about how we could get it away from him. Say, a banana cream pie. We would lust after it passionately, because it would be the only thing in the tank to lust after; and we would dream of getting one of our own somehow. We would look up to the fellow who had it, admiring and hating him at the same instant, kissing his ass and wanting to murder him, just so we could be the one with the banana cream pie. And if I were the one with the extra something, wouldn’t I be in a terror for fear somebody would take it from me, or simply murder me just because I had it! But at least we’d be involved.
“Jesus Christ!” he exclaimed, his face contorting with sudden pain. “What I wouldn’t give to be involved!”
Then he smiled again, bitterly. “But I’m the one who dragged my imagination in here with me. What a gift!”
Later on the tall prisoner repudiated everything he had said. “I told you, I’m going out of my mind. When I get out of here I’m going to toe the old line and pay that support money to my stinking wife and never come back here as long as I live.” He got out two weeks later, and then, about six weeks after that, he came back in. This time he did not even acknowledge Jack’s hello, but went to a corner, sat down, and would not speak to anybody. A few nights later he threw his plate of stew across the tank, and was led out and taken to solitary. Jack never saw him again.
Balboa County jail was different; not much better, but certainly different. Here, the inmates of the tank ran the tank. There was a sanitary court and it was run by a man named Mac McHenry, who was judge of the court because he was strong and smart and ruthless, a natural leader. Jack came up before McHenry on Tuesday night.
It was after lights-out and the deputy was gone from the desk. Jack was lying with his hands back of his head when he saw some of the men gathering out in the bullpen, under the one light. One of them seated himself at a table, and another, a tall Negro, stood on the table, his arms folded. Four other men stood behind the seated man and the rest gathered on the sidelines. Jack was the only man still in a cell, and he pretty well knew what was going to happen. The tank was absolutely quiet. Jack lay there, wondering whether it was worth it to resist. Since he had decided to cooperate with the District Attorney, the idea of resisting seemed to have lost some of its savor. He had been resisting all his life, struggling against any encroachment on his personal self, and it had gotten him exactly nowhere, or what was even worse, it had gotten him exactly where he was; if anything, worse than nowhere. It would be so much easier to drift with events and simply let things happen. But just as he had about made up his mind to do this, two men came and tried to drag him out to the court, and he reacted automatically, his body resisting, while he thought to himself how silly it was to fight.
From his prone position he gave one of the men a short jab in the face, using his follow-through to spring up off the bunk and land the toe of his right shoe a glancing blow on the other man’s chest. On his feet, he grabbed one of the dazed men by the shirt and hit him as hard as he could on the Adam’s apple, letting him go and whirling on the other man, who was leaning against the bars, his mouth open, panting and rubbing his sore chest. Jack uppercut him on the point of the chin and the man lifted slightly and then slid to his knees before falling forward on his face. The first man had gotten through the doorway on his hands and knees and was lying doubled up on the floor of the tank, holding his throat, making hawking, wheezing noises. Blood and a thin trickle of vomit were dripping from his open mouth, and his face had turned black. Jack picked up the other man and threw him unconscious out of the cell. He stood by the doorway, waiting. All of the other men were looking at him.
The man sitting at the table was grinning. “Well, well,” he said in a soft Southern voice. “Walter, turn off the light.” The Negro who was standing on the table reached up and undid the wire mesh and quickly unscrewed the bulb. The tank went black. Jack heard rustling noises as he positioned himself directly in front of the cell door. He felt, rather than saw, the first man coming in for him, and he kicked out where he thought, hoped, the man’s groin would be, and was rewarded by a surprised scream out of the darkness as his foot sank into flesh. But that was his only moment of triumph; in a couple of seconds he felt himself pinioned, smothered by men. Nobody tried to hit him, but they kept his arms behind him and he could do nothing. They carried him out of the cell, and in a few moments the light went on again. Behind him Jack could hear a man sobbing.
McHenry had not moved from his place, and the big Negro was still standing on the table. Men held Jack right up to the table, and McHenry said, “We got to hurry this. Those guys will have to go down to the dispensary.” He looked up at Jack and said, “I’m the judge of the sanitary court. You like to killed a couple of my deppities. I’m going to fine you for that. You got to learn the rules of this tank, and I’m going to fine you for not coming along. Do you have any money?”
Within, Jack was amused and distant, but all he could think of to say was, “Fuck you.”
McHenry laughed, his gray eyes almost disappearing behind wrinkles of merriment. “I’m going to fine you for that, too. Matter of fact, I happen to know exactly how much money you got downstairs. Tomorrow, you just tell the deppity to transfer fifteen dollars from your account to mine. It ain’t legal, but he’ll do it. My name’s McHenry. You’ll get the rest of your fine tomorrow night. We got to hurry. Rest of the fine is fifty whacks. You want to know what a whack is? You want to know the rest of the rules, so’s you don’t go around busting the rules?”
“Fuck your mother,” Jack said.
McHenry shrugged, as if it was out of his hands now. “Beat shit out of him and put him back in his cell. Tomorrow night court con-venes again. Get the deppities in here for them guys been fightin.”
The Negro jumped down from the table, and while the men still held Jack, began hitting him in the chest and belly, hard short chops, his breath coming in grunts at each blow, until Jack went blind from the pain and heard himself distantly whimpering. After that he could remember nothing. He was told later that after he was put on his bunk unconscious all the other prisoners started yelling, and after a while the deputy out in the foyer came in, and then brought others up from downstairs, and they carried out the men Jack had wrecked. The one Jack had knocked out came back the next day, but the other two went to the county hospital and Jack never saw them again. If he had he would not have known them.
The next morning he was sitting by himself on one of the benches while the “outs”—men without money who had to do the work—cleaned up. He felt all right, he was still in pretty good condition, and if he ached all over it was not a new sensation. He noticed McHenry sitting at one of the tables with two other men, a big man, heavy, thick, as hard as teakwood. McHenry turned toward Jack and nodded to him, smiling, and then said something to the others and got up and came over. He sat down on the bench beside Jack and said, “A few aches and pains, Levitt?”
“A few,” Jack said.
“We got to have rules,” McHenry said.
“I know it. All you had to do was ask me.”
“Send you a subpoena, hey? Okay, I did it wrong.” He held out his hand. “Shake?”
It was impossible to refuse the hand.
“Breakfast on me this morning,” McHenry said. “While we eat I’ll tell you the rules of the tank. That is, if you want to learn them.”
They sat alone at one of the tables and had buckwheat cakes, bacon, scrambled eggs, and coffee, while McHenry told Jack the rules. They were really very simple
and logical, and their function was to make the tank livable. Everyone in the tank is automatically a member of the sanitary court and is fined three whacks or three dollars; everyone must wash himself thoroughly in the weekly shower and keep as clean as possible the rest of the time, or is fined three whacks or three dollars; no one is allowed to make unnecessary noise after lights-out or is fined as the judge sees fit; no one is allowed to resist the judge or is fined as the judge sees fit; no fighting is allowed; no one is permitted to steal from his fellow inmates; no one is allowed to speak out against his fellow inmates, or is brought before the court and fined at least fifty whacks; no one is allowed to make a fuss in the open visitor’s room; anyone caught cheating at cards is banned from the game and fined all the money in his pocket automatically, etc. etc. They were, Jack realized, reasonable rules, and it was either have a sanitary court to administer them, however badly, or be at the mercy of the deputies. Jack already knew what that was like. This way, everybody had a sense of being at least partly responsible for his own welfare, and of course it made life a lot easier and more profitable for the deputies. It also made life easier for the inmates who had money, and it wasn’t even too bad for those who had to do all the work. Because by the end of every week they had six dollars clear and could get into a poker or crap game and run it up into a fortune and not have to work any more. This almost never happened, but then it could happen; at least there was hope.
After the delicious three-dollar outside breakfast, Jack was more than willing to listen to reason and to cooperate. He knew that if he didn’t his life would be made miserable. He would have to eat inmate food. The hell with that, he thought. There was also the matter of his being beaten half to death every night or so if he didn’t cooperate. He remembered what his rebellion had cost him at the reformatory in Oregon, the long endless time in the hole, and he thought, the excellent breakfast warming his belly, what a fool he had been.
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