The Best of Lucius Shepard

by The Best of Lucius Shepard (v5. 5) (epub)

  The board consisted of four inmates ranging in age from sixtyish to over seventy. Holmes, Ashford, Czerny, and LeGary. They met each day in the yard to, it was said, decide the important questions relating to our lives and—if you bought into the view that Diamond Bar was the purest expression of a carceral universe, the irreducible distillate of the essential human condition—the lives of everyone on the planet. To reach the yard it was necessary to pass through the old wing of the prison visible beyond the eighth stairway, and though in the beginning I did not enjoy the passage, made anxious by the gloomy nineteenth-century atmosphere of the wing’s antiquated cells with their key locks and hand-forged bars, and the masses of rotting stone in which they were set, I grew accustomed to the sight and came to view the old sections of the prison as places of unguessable potential—it was there, after all, that I would someday live if I stayed at Diamond Bar. As I’ve noted, the prison straddled a ridge—the spine of the ridge ran straight down the middle of the yard. Most of the population would gather close to the walls or sit on the slopes, which had been worn barren by countless footsteps, but the members of the board met among the grass and shrubs that flourished atop the ridge, this narrow strip of vegetation giving the enclosed land the look of a giant’s scalp pushing up from beneath the earth, one whose green hair had been trimmed into a ragged Mohawk. Rising beyond the west wall, several iron girders were visible, evidence of the new wing that was under construction. The new wing was frequently referenced in conversation as being the panacea for whatever problems existed in our relatively problem-free environment—it seemed an article of faith that prison life would therein be perfected. Again, this struck me as fiction disseminated by whoever was manipulating our fates.

  Late one afternoon some four months after my arrival, myself and Causey—toward whom I had succeeded in developing a neutral attitude—and Terry Berbick, a short, thickset bank robber with a gnomish look, his curly black hair and beard shot through with gray, were sitting against the east wall in the yard, discussing the newcomer on our block, Harry Colangelo: this happened to be the baldheaded man whom I had confronted on the day I came to the prison. His furtive air and incoherent verbal outbursts had made a poor impression, and Berbick was of the opinion that Colangelo’s move onto the block had been premature.

  “Something confused the boy. Caught him at a crucial moment during his period of adjustment and he’s never gotten squared away.” Berbick glanced at me. “Might be that dust-up with you did the trick.”

  “It wasn’t that big a deal.”

  “I don’t know. Way he stares at you, seems like you got under his skin. It might be why he moved up to eight—so he can come back at you easier.”

  “I’ve seen it before,” Causey said. “Something happens early on to fuck up a man’s instincts, and next you know he goes to acting all haywire. Gets his ass transferred right on outa here.”

  I was not certain that being transferred out of Diamond Bar was the bleak prospect that Causey and Berbick thought it, but saw no need to argue the point.

  “There the fucker is.” Causey pointed to the slope on our left, where Colangelo was moving crabwise down the ridge, his pink scalp agleam with the westering sun, eyes fixed upon us. “I think Terry nailed it. The man’s all messed up behind you.”

  “Whatever.” I turned my attention to the four old men who purportedly ruled the world. Doddering on their height, the wind flying their sparse hair up into wild frays. Behind them, the tops of the girders burned gold, like iron candles touched with holy fire. Several younger men stood near the four. When I asked who they were, Berbick said they spoke for the board.

  “What?” I said. “The masters of the universe can’t talk for themselves?”

  Berbick rolled up to his feet, smartly dusted the seat of his trousers, acting pissed-off. “You want to find out about the board, let’s go see them.”

  I looked at him with amusement.

  “You act like you know something,” he said, “but you don’t know as much as we do. And we don’t know dip.”

  “Ain’t no thing,” I said. “Forget it.”

  “Nothing bad’ll happen. We’ll go with you.” He glanced at Causey. “Right?”

  Causey shrugged. “Sure.”

  Berbick arched an eyebrow and said to me in a taunting voice, “It’s just four old guys, Tommy. Come on!”

  Colangelo, who had been sitting upslope and to the left of us, scrambled up and hurried out of our path as we climbed the ridge.

  “Fucking freak!” said Berbick as we drew abreast of him.

  The board members were standing in a semicircle just below the highest point of the ridge, which was tufted with two roughly globular, almost identically puny shrubs, so sparsely leaved that from a distance, seen against the backdrop of the stone wall, they looked like the models of two small planets with dark gray oceans and island continents of green. The steadfastness with which the board was contemplating them gave rise to the impression that they were considering emigration to one or the other. Drawing near, I saw that the oldest among them, Czerny, appeared to be speaking, and the others, their eyes wandering, did not appear to be listening. Holmes, a shrunken black man, bald except for puffs of cottony hair above his ears and behind his neck, was shifting his feet restlessly, and the other two, Ashford and LeGary, both grandfather-gray and gaunt, were posed in vacant attitudes. One of the younger men who shadowed them, a stocky Latino in his forties, blocked our path, politely asked what we wanted, and Berbick jerked his thumb toward me and said, “Penhaligon here wants to meet the board.”

  “I don’t want to meet them,” I said, annoyed. “I was just wondering about them.”

  “They’re busy,” the Latino said. “But I’ll see.”

  “You trying to fuck me over?” I asked Berbick as the Latino man went to consult with the board.

  He looked pleased with himself. “What could happen? It’s only four old guys.”

  “Nothing to worry about,” Causey said. “He’s just giving you shit.”

  “I don’t need you interpreting for me, okay?” I said. “You can quit acting like my fucking big sister.”

  “Damn!” said Berbick with surprise. “He’s coming over.”

  With the Latino holding his elbow, Czerny was heading toward us, shuffling through the ankle-high grasses, wobbly and frail. His caved-in face was freckled with liver spots, and the tip of his tongue flicked out with lizardly insistence. He was small, no more than five feet five, but his hands were those of a much larger man, wide and thick-fingered, with prominent knuckles—they trembled now, but looked as if they had been used violently during his youth. His eyes were a watery grayish blue, the sclera laced with broken vessels, and the right one had a cloudy cast. When he reached us, he extended a hand and gave my forearm a tentative three-fingered pat, like the benediction of a senile pope who had forgotten the proper form. He mumbled something, barely a whisper. The Latino man gave ear, and when Czerny had finished, he said, “There’s important work for you here, Penhaligon. You should set about it quickly.”

  It did not seem that Czerny had spoken long enough to convey this much information. I suspected that the Latino man and his associates were running a hustle, pretending to interpret the maunderings of four senile old men and in the process guaranteeing a soft life for themselves.

  Czerny muttered something more, and the Latino said, “Come visit me in my house whenever you wish.”

  The old man assayed a faltering smile; the Latino steadied him as he turned and, with reverent tenderness, led him back to join the others. I framed a sarcastic comment but was stopped by Causey’s astonished expression. “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “Man invited you to his house,” Causey said with an air of disbelief.

  “Yeah…so?”

  “That doesn’t happen too often.”

  “I been here almost five years, and I don’t remember it ever happening,” Berbick said.

  I glanced back and forth betw
een them. “Wasn’t him invited me—it was his fucking handler.”

  Berbick made a disdainful noise, shook his head as if he couldn’t fathom my stupidity, and Causey said, “Maybe when you go see him, you’ll—”

  “Why the fuck would I go see him? So I can get groped by some old wheeze?”

  “I guess you got better things to do,” Berbick said. He was acting pissed-off again, and I said, “What crawled up your ass, man?”

  He started to step to me, but Causey moved between us, poked me in the chest with two fingers and said, “You little hump! You walk straight up to eight from the door…You don’t seem to appreciate what that means. Frank Czerny invites you to his house and you ridicule the man. I been trying to help you—”

  “I don’t want your help, faggot!”

  I recognized Causey’s humorless smile as the same expression he had worn many years ago prior to ramming my head into a shower wall. I moved back a pace, but the smile faded and he said calmly, “Powers that be got something in mind for you, Penhaligon. That’s plain to everyone ’cept you. Seems like you forgot everything you learned about surviving in prison. You don’t come to new walls with an attitude. You pay attention to how things are and behave accordingly. Doesn’t matter you don’t like it. You do what you hafta. I’m telling you—you don’t get with the program, they gonna transfer your sorry ass.”

  I pretended to shudder.

  “Man thinks he’s a hardass,” said Berbick, who was gazing up at one of the guard turrets, an untenanted cupola atop a stone tower. “He doesn’t know what hard is.”

  “Thing you oughta ask yourself,” Causey said to me, “is where you gonna get transferred to.”

  He and Berbick started downslope, angling toward an unpopulated section of the east wall. Alone on the height, I was possessed by the paranoid suspicion that the groups of men huddled along the wall were all talking about me, but the only evidence that supported this was Colangelo, who was standing halfway down the slope to my right, some forty feet away, almost directly beneath the spot where the board was assembled. He was watching me intently, expectantly, as if anticipating that I might come at him. With his glowing scalp, his eyes pointed with gold, he had the look of a strange pink demon dressed in prison gray, and my usual disdain for him was supplanted by nervousness. As I descended from the ridge top, he took a parallel path, maintaining the distance between us, and though under ordinary circumstances I would have been tempted to challenge him, having alienated Causey and Berbick, knowing myself isolated, I picked up my pace and did not feel secure until I was back in my cell.

  Over the next several days, I came to recognize that, as Causey had asserted, I had indeed forgotten the basics of survival, and that no matter how I felt about the board, about the nature of Diamond Bar, I would be well served to pay Czerny a visit. I put off doing so, however, for several days more. Though I would not have admitted it, I found the prospect of mounting the iron stair to the tier where Czerny lived intimidating—it appeared that in acknowledging the semblance of the old man’s authority, I had to a degree accepted its reality. Sitting in my cell, staring up at the dim white lights beyond the ninth stair, I began to order what I knew of the prison, to seek in that newly ordered knowledge a logical underpinning that would, if not explain everything I had seen, at least provide a middle ground between the poles of faith and sophism. I repaired my relationship with Causey, a matter of simple apology, and from him I learned that the prison had been constructed in the 1850s and originally used to house men whose crimes were related in one way or another to the boomtowns of the Gold Rush. The Board of Prisons had decided to phase out Diamond Bar in the 1900s, and at this time, Causey believed, something had happened to transform a horrific place that few survived into the more genial habitation it had since become. He had unearthed from the library copies of communications between the Board of Prisons and the warden, a man named McCandless Quires, that documented the rescinding of the phase-out order and conferred autonomy upon the prison, with the idea that it should become a penal colony devoted to rehabilitation rather than punishment. During that period, every level of society had been rife with reformers, and prison reform was much discussed—in light of this, such a change as Diamond Bar had undergone did not seem extraordinary; but the fact that it had been given to Quires to oversee the change: that smacked of the bizarre, for he had been frequently reprimanded by the Board for his abuses of prisoners. Indeed, it was the atrocities perpetrated during his stewardship that had induced the Board to consider the question of reform. It was reported that men had been impaled, flayed, torn apart by the prison dogs. Quires’ letters demonstrated that he had undergone a transformation. Prior to 1903, his tone in response to the Board’s inquiries was defiant and blasphemous, but thereafter his letters displayed a rational, even a repentant character, and he continued to serve as warden until his retirement in 1917. There was no record of a replacement having been appointed, and Causey theorized that the board as we knew it had then come to power, though it was possible, given Quires’ advanced age (88), that they had been running things for many years previously. From 1917 on, communications between Diamond Bar and the Board of Prisons steadily diminished, and in 1945, not long before VE Day, they apparently ceased altogether. It was as if the prison, for all intents and purposes, had become non-existent in the eyes of the state.

  Once Causey showed me a yellowed photograph he had unearthed from the prison archives. It had been shot in the yard on a sunny day in May of 1917—the date was inscribed on the back of the photo in a crabbed script—and it depicted a group of a woman and five men, four convicts, one of them black, and the last, an elderly man with white, windblown hair and a craggy, seamed face, clad in a dark suit and tie. Causey identified the elderly man as McCandless Quires, the warden. “And these here,” he said, indicating the other four, “that’s the board.” He tapped each in turn. “Ashford, Czerny, LeGary, Holmes.”

  Judging by their faces, the men were all in their twenties. There was a rough similarity of feature between them and the old men who met each day in the yard, but the idea that they were one and the same seemed absurd.

  “That’s so, they’d all have to be more than a hundred,” I said. “They’re old, but not that old.”

  “Look at the shape of their heads,” Causey said. “Their expressions. They all got that spacey smile. Look at Czerny’s hands. See how big they are? It’s them, all right.”

  “You need to take a breath, man. This isn’t the fucking Magic Kingdom, this is prison we’re talking about.”

  “This is Diamond Bar,” he said sullenly. “And we don’t know what the hell that is.”

  I studied the photograph more closely, concentrating on the woman. She was lovely, delicate of feature, with flowing blonde hair. Noticing my attentiveness, Causey said, “I believe that there’s a plume. Quires didn’t have no daughter, no wife, and she got the look of plume.”

  “What look is that?”

  “Too perfect. Like she ain’t a man or a woman, but something else entirely.”

  The photograph aside, what Causey told me lent a plausible historical context to the implausible reality of Diamond Bar, but the key ingredient of the spell that had worked an enchantment upon the prison was missing, and when at last I went to visit Czerny, I had retrenched somewhat and was content to lean upon my assumption that we knew nothing of our circumstance and that everything we thought we knew might well have been put forward to distract us from the truth. Climbing the stairs, passing meter after meter of stone, ash-black and broken like the walls of a mineshaft, I felt on edge. Up on the third tier, the ceiling lights shed a glow that had the quality of strong moonlight; the bars and railings were flaked with rust. Four prisoners were lounging against the railing outside Czerny’s cell—the Latino who had spoken for him was not among them—and one, a long-limbed black man with processed hair, his sideburns and thin mustache giving his lean face a piratical look, separated from the rest and came toward me,
frowning.

  “You supposed to come a week ago and you just coming now?” he said. “That ain’t how it goes, Penhaligon.”

  “He told me to come whenever I wanted.”

  “I don’t care what he said. It’s disrespectful.”

  “That kind of old school, isn’t it?”

  He looked perplexed.

  “It’s the kind of attitude you’d expect to find at Vacaville and San Q,” I said. “Not at a forward-thinking joint like Diamond Bar.”

  The black man was about to speak, but turned back to the cell as Czerny shuffled onto the tier. I had no inclination to mock the old man. Surrounded by young men attentive as tigers, he seemed the source of their strength and not their ward. Though I did not truly credit this notion, when he beckoned, the slightest of gestures, I went to his side without hesitation. His eyes grazed mine, then wandered toward the dim vault beyond the railing. After a second, he shuffled back into the cell, indicating by another almost imperceptible gesture that I should follow.

  A television set mounted on the wall was tuned to a dead channel, its speakers hissing, its screen filled with a patternless sleet of black, silver, and green. Czerny sat on his bunk, its sheets cream-colored and shiny like silk, and—since he did not invite me to sit—I took a position at the rear of the cell, resting a hand upon the wall. The surface of the wall was unusually smooth, and upon examining it I realized it was not granite but black marble worked with white veins that altogether formed a design of surpassing complexity.

  During my first conversation with Causey, he had suggested I purchase some pictures from the commissary to decorate my cell “until your wall comes in.” Though struck by this phrase, at the time my attention had been dominated by other concerns; but I had since discovered that once a cell was occupied, discolorations manifested on the wall facing the bunk, and these discolorations gradually produced intricate patterns reminiscent of the rock the Chinese call “picture stone,” natural mineral abstractions in which an imaginative viewer could discern all manner of landscapes. The wall in my cell had begun to develop discolorations, their patterns as yet sparse and poorly defined; but Causey’s wall, Berbick’s, and others were fully realized. It was said these idiosyncratic designs were illustrative of the occupant’s inner nature and, when reflected upon, acted to instruct the observer as to his flaws, his potentials, the character of his soul. None of them—at least none I had seen—compared to the elaborate grandeur of the one on Czerny’s wall. Gazing at it, I traveled the labyrinthine streets of a fantastic city lined by buildings with spindly, spiny turrets and octagonal doorways; I explored the pathways of a white forest whose creatures were crowned with antlers that themselves formed other, even more intricate landscapes; I coursed along a black river whose banks were sublime constructions of crystal and ice, peopled by nymphs and angels with wings that dwarfed their snowy bodies like the wings of arctic butterflies. I cannot say how long I stared—quite a while, I believe, because my mouth was dry when I looked away—but from the experience I derived an impression of a convoluted, intensely spiritual intellect that warred with Czerny’s drab, dysfunctional appearance. He was smiling daftly, eyes fixed on his hands, which were fidgeting in his lap, and I wondered if the audience was over, if I should leave. Then he spoke, muttering as he had out in the yard. This time I understood him perfectly, yet I am certain no intelligible word passed his lips.