As they smoked their after-breakfast cigarettes, McHenry asked, “Well, how about it? You coming along?”
“What about tonight?” Jack bargained. “I guess you want to give me those fifty whacks.”
“I never did tell you what a whack is, did I? Well, it’s one whack across the bare ass with this-here belt.” McHenry was wearing a thick leather belt, and, Jack saw later, was the only man in the tank who had a belt at all. More cooperation from the deputies, he thought. Oh, how everybody cooperates. But this was tangible, just plain old naked force. You don’t cooperate with naked force, you just sit there and take it. Which made Jack wonder why McHenry was asking for his cooperation, instead of just enforcing, since he obviously had the power to do so.
“I’ll tell you about them fifty whacks,” McHenry said. “I’ll drop that if you’re willin to go along, and if you just transfer about twenty-five dollars into my account downstairs. Above the fifteen. Hell, you got lots of money.”
“Okay,” Jack said. “That’s fine.” He understood now. McHenry was afraid of him, afraid that Jack might just want his job as judge, and might be strong enough and determined enough to take it away from him. “I’d be happy to cooperate,” Jack said, and they shook hands again. There appeared to be an expression of guarded relief in McHenry’s eyes. Jack remembered what the tall prisoner in Idaho had said, and he hoped the man had been wrong; but he could see, now, that even in here and with these rules of self-government there would be no such thing as fairness; that the big and the strong and the rich would naturally be better off. That was why he was being offered a way out.
“I wouldn’t touch your racket,” he said to McHenry. “You know what you are? You’re just another screw. You’re in here, but you’re just like the deputies. Don’t worry; I wouldn’t want to be you and have to worry about guys like me.”
“Now, you got a point there, Levitt,” McHenry said, not bothered at all. “I was worried about you. But man, if I don’t run the tank, somebody’s got to. These guys don’t know what’s good for them, they’d live just any ole way if there wasn’t any rules. And the deppities can’t control from out there; you know that. If there wasn’t a sanitary court guys’d be rattin on each other inside ten minutes, just to get special treatment. Now, that’s shitty and you know it.”
“Sure,” said Jack, “so you run things for everybody’s benefit. And I’ll help you, too, because I dig that special treatment myself.”
“Doesn’t everbody?” McHenry grinned.
They understood each other perfectly now, and for a few weeks Jack was permitted, with a nod and a thank you to his strength and his ability to use it, to remain on the edges of the simplified social structure of the tank. For a while this suited him, because, as he reflected ironically, he had been wanting some time to think. Except for the more or less constant noise, the county jail was a fine place to think. Of course there were distractions. New prisoners were brought in and old ones released, and it was always interesting to find out who the new people were, and how they reacted to the tank. Most of them had been in jail before and would be again, and considered jail only a transitory phase; some were citizens, upset, angry, baffled, frustrated, frightened, terrified that they would stay in jail the rest of their lives. But most of the citizen trade went to the drunk tank downstairs. One night an old man was brought in for assault with a deadly weapon. They got the story from the deputies: The old man lived with his son’s family, and his granddaughter had been gotten pregnant by a boy, and there had been a conference of the two families in an attempt to fix the responsibility and decide what to do. At first it was decided that it was the boy’s fault for making the girl go all the way; then they blamed the girl for allowing the boy to take these liberties with her (they were only juniors in high school), and then both sets of parents decided to blame themselves for not raising their children properly, and finally, after much self-recrimination, it was decided that modern society itself made it impossible to raise children properly, what with the movies and television and violence, too much sex in the magazines, and the way girls dressed these days; and the old man, who had been sitting in the background listening in disgust, finally went upstairs to his room and came back down with his double-barreled 12-gauge shotgun and terrified everybody by pointing the deadly weapon at the boy and telling him by God he would do the right thing by the girl or the grandfather would come looking for him and would find him no matter how far he ran and when he found him he would blow a hole through him, by God. The boy let out a scream and jumped through the picture window, and cut himself pretty badly, and the boy’s parents called the police right after they called the ambulance. It did not occur to them to blame the grandfather’s actions on society.
The consensus in the tank was that the old man had done right, and what young people needed was to be shown who was boss. It was remarked by Mac McHenry that the most difficult and noisy prisoners were invariably young. The old man, his eyes bright and interested, told the others, “Boys, that old bird gun of mine has come handy more than once. When that little girl, the same girl, mind you, was about four years old, we lived in Santa Rosa—that was just after I retired, I was a plumbing contractor for thirty-two years, boys—the people next door had this Doberman pinscher, meanest-looking dog I ever saw in my life; I told the owners of the dog, I said, `If that dog gets loose and comes around here you’d better look around for some place to bury him,’ that’s what I told em, but that man was just so proud of his big dog, and the dog stayed out there in their backyard on a long rope, and roamed around crapping on the lawn and digging up the flowers and looking mean. Hell, that was no dog to have in town. If I had my way all those big dogs, especially the Dobermans, would be taken out and done away with. Well, anyhow, boys, little Darcy (aint that a hell of a name for a child, boys?), she went on over into their yard one afternoon to have a close look at that dog, and naturally, the dog, being a brute with no more brains than a nitwit anyway, just bit that child right on the arm, and Darcy came running home to me crying and bleeding like hell, and I fixed up her arm and called the hospital and went upstairs and got my bird gun and went over and blew that there dog right into dog heaven. Then I got in my car and drove Darcy to the hospital and left her there and went on down to where this man worked—he was in the life-insurance business—and went in and told him, `Sir, I shot and killed your dog. Here’s seventy-five dollars; that’s what you paid for the beast, take it.’ He stared at me, his lips working, and wanted to know what happened, and I told him, and he looked at that money in my hand—I always carry plenty of cash, you never know—and started cursing me under his breath, but by God he took the money and he even counted it, and I went home. His wife never spoke to me again.”
“You killed a dog?” said one of the prisoners. “That was tied up and couldn’t get away?”
“I did just that, sonny. Damn brute.”
“You had no right to do that.”
“Horse-frocky, sonny,” said the old man. “Now, if you boys will excuse me, I got to get some sleep.”
The old man got out on bail the next day, and Jack heard later that he had been convicted and given a one-to-five sentence, suspended, and two years on probation. Jack thought the old man had done right in both cases, but most of the men in the tank were upset and angry about shooting the dog.
Citizens like the old man usually got out on bail, or if convicted of a misdemeanor were sent right out to the trusty farm, but there were a couple of exceptions.
The first of these was a man in his middle twenties who lived in Sausalito, in the adjoining Marin County. He had, according to the wry tale he told, been driving home from a party in Redding, horribly drunk from the last few hasty nightcaps, and not long after he crossed the Balboa County line he decided he was just too drunk to go on, too sleepy, and so he pulled his car over and went to sleep. He was awakened by a flashlight in his face. The police made him get out of his car, turn around, lean against the side of the car and
be searched. Then they made him walk a line, and they smelled his breath. They searched the car, too. He was taken in and thrown into the drunk tank, and in the morning, with the rest of the night’s crop of drunks, he came before the municipal court. He was charged with being drunk on a public highway. He explained to the judge that he was not driving, but sleeping. The judge asked him if he had gotten to where he was arrested by driving in a drunken condition, and he said yes, but that he had stopped driving because he realized he was drunk. The judge said that didn’t matter. He fined the man $250 and the man lost his temper and yelled at the judge, and was given ten days in the county jail for contempt of court.
“So I’m in here for not drunk driving,” he explained. “Ain’t that enough to frost your balls?”
Jack corrected him. “No, you got sent here for yelling at the judge. You got fined for not drunk driving.”
This particular citizen was very popular while he was in the tank. He played shrewd poker and won a lot of money, marveling that the men got to play cards all day and saying he wouldn’t mind coming here every so often just to get in the game. He appeared before the sanitary court, took his few token whacks and fines with good humor, obeyed the rules of the tank, was friendly to everybody and did not act superior, and at the end of his ten days went downstairs to the cafeteria and left money and orders for packs of cigarettes to be delivered in his name to “the boys on the top floor.” He was a chemist by profession and everybody admired him for his education, breeding, and good manners.
Jack envied him; he had his work, which he loved, and he had a good life and a good attitude toward life. He and Jack were the same age, too.
The other citizen was different. This man was in his fifties, an executive for a hardware company, and his case made all the newspapers. He, too, had been driving home drunk, but instead of pulling over to go to sleep he fell asleep behind the wheel while going sixty or seventy, and his car plowed into a parked car full of necking teenagers. Three of them were killed at once, both girls and one of the boys, and the other boy was in the hospital with a bad concussion and a broken collarbone. The executive got out of his car, saw what had happened, and ran off. Two policemen found him hiding in a backyard, and he offered the policemen fifty dollars each if they would let him go. It was stupid; his car was back there, wrecked, but the executive seemed a little out of his mind. When the police refused the money, he hit one of them and tried to get away. So he was booked for manslaughter, attempted bribery, and assault on a police officer. When they brought him into the felony tank early in the morning the first thing the prisoners heard him say was, “You can’t do this to me!” So everybody knew he was a citizen. They all said that.
After his indictment for manslaughter (the other two charges were dropped) the man was returned to the tank and had to dress in dungarees. His bail had been set at fifty thousand dollars and no one had put it up for him. He was a pompous, florid man with silvery hair, and he looked absurd in dungarees, like a millionaire going to a costume party. There was a subdued excitement among the prisoners; to most of them this man represented their chief enemy, respectability, and cruelly they wanted to see him come up before the sanitary court and have his pants pulled down and his ass whacked, to watch him silently while he discovered that his dignity could be taken away from him so easily, and that for once he was at the mercy of the underdogs. Nobody spoke to him all day, and he sat in his cell, alternately holding his head in his hands and groaning, or jumping up to pace back and forth in his cell. All the prisoners knew this was a violation of tank rules, but they said nothing.
The executive, however, was not brought before the sanitary court at all. The next day, McHenry went into his cell and stood in front of him, and they talked for almost an hour, and McHenry came out and called the deputy at the desk over to the bars and whispered to him, and then the deputy went out and came back later with a tray of food for the executive.
When the executive was not visiting his lawyer, he stayed in his cell. He refused to speak to any of the inmates except Mac McHenry, and Mac let it be known that he, Mac, wanted the man left strictly alone. He winked at Jack. “This boy has power on the outside. We fiddle with him and the whole thing goes.”
The executive got out just before Jack, his lawyer finally arranging bail.
Somewhere along the line Jack began to be angry, in a deep, personal way that had nothing to do with the tank or the inmates. They could not be blamed for the way they acted, and if Jack began to hate the sanitary court and McHenry, it was not because he did not understand the need for the inmates to run things, or at least pretend they ran things. He understood that; but he hated it anyway. He did not even get to hate McHenry in person, because he was only the toughest and shrewdest of the lot, not the worst; and if he was gone the number two tough nut would take over the court, and that could have been Jack himself. He could feel it in himself, and he often thought of the sense of pleasure that could come from the power; and he hated himself for it. And he could not hate the deputies, because they hadn’t put him in jail, they were only there to see to it that he stayed in jail. They were just doing their job. Certainly, a few of them were getting rich off the inmates, but Jack could not think of any reason why they should not. If they didn’t, somebody else would. Everybody was just doing his job, making the machinery run smoothly. And so Jack could not hate anybody, or blame anybody, but himself. And in the end he could not even hate himself, because he had not willed himself into jail; he just tried to live his life his own way and that ran against the grain and he ended up, almost accidentally, in jail. And he could not hate accident. That was crazy. He had to admit that he had been proud of himself, and that he nourished the memory of his long stay in the hole years before; that he had assumed he would be able to do his time standing on his head because the hole had been so much worse; but now he was in doubt. He was getting older. The boredom of it all, the sameness, the constant noise and smell of the tank, were driving him crazy. The fact that he was in was driving him crazy. He lost all his contempt for the executive; the executive was right, they can’t do this to me. They have no right to do this to me, or to anybody else. He hated them all. But it was crazy to hate them. So he decided he was going crazy.
It was a relief for him to go berserk at last; it was an act of pure rationality that had nothing to do with McHenry or the poor fool Mac was taking over the bumps. It was an expression of sanity, a howl of rage at a world that put men in county jails. Everything finally got to be too much and he let go of his passion.
The man was a farmworker, probably a bracero, and he could just barely understand English. He had picked fruit for a couple of weeks, on his knees under the straight lines of prune trees, and one night he got drunk in a poolhall and pulled a knife on a man. He got a year for pulling the knife, and he was not sent to the trusty farm because he had a record of disobedience from his last stay in jail. On the night of his sanitary court trial he stood in front of McHenry stupidly, not comprehending what Mac was telling him. As usual, Jack stood well back, his arms folded, watching the whole procedure. Mac was in an odd mood; he kept asking the bracero if he was willing to pay his fines, and when the man did not speak he gave him more fines to pay or more whacks to suffer.
It disgusted Jack to see Mac, in his pleasant drawl, making fun of the man simply because the man was weak and stupid and Mac had the power. The bracero probably thought Mac was a legal official, and he hesitated and stammered, and finally made everybody laugh by saying, “Wock? Wass a Wock?”
Mac was tickled. “I’ll show you what a wock is. Take his pants down.”
It tore away in Jack, and he came up. He was really out of control, but he seemed calm and possessed. Inside he felt passionate.
“McHenry,” he said, his voice trembling only a little, “you’re about the most chickenshit Southern cracker I ever saw in my life. I bet you got a hard-on right this minute. I bet this is how you get your kicks, you fuckin hillbilly. Aint you ever he
ard of women?”
McHenry understood instantly and fell back in his chair, wildly signaling, but he was too late. Jack dived at him across the table, and they rolled on the cement floor, punching and grunting, before anybody could stop it.
The fight only lasted a few minutes, and was broken up when they saw Jack beating McHenry’s head against the concrete, his fingers dug into McHenry’s shoulders. Mac’s eyes were bugging out, and blood was coming from his mouth and spattering on the floor, and when they pulled Jack loose Mac slumped down unconscious, his eyes still open. He came back the next morning with a bandage on his head. There was no concussion or anything more serious than a few stitches. Mac must have talked to the deputies before he came back, because they came in before morning and locked Jack into his cell. He stayed locked in until he left Balboa County.
Even the smoothest-running county political machines have their flaws. In this case, the particular judge who was supposed to hear Jack’s case upset the smooth operation of the machine. Costigan, the lawyer, told Jack all about it, his voice dry and bitter. The judge said he would not accept such a drastic reduction of the charge, from kidnaping to a misdemeanor charge of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. It was none of the judge’s business, but he made it his business. All in private, of course, the judge told District Attorney Forbes and Costigan that he thought Levitt ought to do some time, and not county jail time. He hinted that if the District Attorney brought the man Levitt up on a contributing charge, the judge would give him the year in the county jail, and then make it a point to get in touch with San Francisco and have them prosecute on the rape charge. So that the man Levitt would get out of his year and go right back in. Costigan was very bitter about it, but Forbes said he knew a way out of the dilemma. Jack could plead guilty to having had intercourse with the girl right in the car, still inside Balboa County, and they would drop the part about the gun and the force to make it statutory. He asked the judge about it and the judge said he would go along with that and give Jack a very light penalty, perhaps one-to-five.
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