Juleson smoked the pipe cut, after first picking out the twigs and gravel and straining it through a piece of window screen. Sometimes he even washed it in an effort to eliminate the ancient musty taste that was its indelible hallmark. After that it wasn’t too bad. But hard to roll. The smoke he was now finishing up bulged ominously in the middle. He frowned, studying his product—the paper was weakened with his saliva and if he tried to smooth out the hump he would probably tear the roll in two. He shrugged and lit up. He couldn’t get the damn things rolled right. He’d been fooling with them for three years, five months, and some days, and he still couldn’t roll a decent smoke.
Don’t ask me, he said to the silent companion in the back of his head, I don’t know why I don’t quit. The flame started to trace up the seam as it will on a loosely rolled cigarette, but by holding it carefully in two fingers he managed to smoke some of it before it fell apart scattering coals and tobacco over his pants. He brushed the fire onto the floor. He still wanted a smoke.
Why didn’t he find some comfortable way to earn a few packs a week? He thought, as he so often had, of the various methods available, but they were all such desperate shifts—little more than outright begging—selling your desserts, washing another man’s socks and underwear. If you wanted to take the risk you could stand point for one of the poker or dice games, or run for one of the big yard books. You could make home brew and sell it. And at the bottom of the pile—or the top, Juleson acknowledged, depending upon your point of view—you could hire out for beatings, knifings, and other collection or revenge work.
As he knew from many previous reviews, he didn’t want to do any of these things, or rather he didn’t want the cigarettes badly enough to lower himself a little deeper into the greasy sump he conceived of as the institution’s aggregate spirit —there were acids there which could dissolve the identity.
He had returned to his book before he remembered his birthday. He would be thirty next week. Not difficult to understand how he had forgotten it. Turning thirty in jail was many times more disturbing than turning twenty or twenty-five, just as the older prisoners always seemed more pathetic than the younger. It was the degree to which a significant part of an inmate’s life was committed to the prison, and this degree had nothing to do with the amount of time he had been imprisoned, but was determined by the time he had left in life in which he could hope to be free of it. In passing thirty Juleson felt he had left behind, necessarily forever, the possibility that he would be freed as a young man. And he could resent this and regret it at the same time as he harbored the conviction that he did not deserve to ever be released. But the birthday check ...
An aunt, who made her home in the state of Washington, always sent him a five-dollar money order for his birthday. Over the years the amount had never varied—he received the first the year he had turned ten and five dollars glittered like all possible fortune. And now twenty years later it would only buy two cartons of cigarettes, and yet that seemed no less a fortune. It wouldn’t be necessary for the check to come, he could borrow a carton tomorrow at 3 for 2, the standard rate of interest. Chilly Willy, the biggest of the lenders, had stuff stashed all over the institution. A carton to him was no more than a wet butt.
Juleson picked up his book, but he couldn’t get back into it. When he had first come to prison he had been able to loan himself to the most obvious fiction, timeworn devices held him enthralled simply because no matter how impoverished they were, or lacking in freshness, they were more interesting than the life around him. But over the years he was losing the capacity to respond. He sometimes spent his entire lunch hour prowling the shelves in the library without finding a single book he could read with pleasure. With many the tone and content of the first page was sufficient to cause him to return them to the shelf, and even with those books he checked out there were still a number he later discovered he couldn’t read. He sometimes withdrew as many as twenty-five books a week, and when he found one he could enjoy it was an event in his life. He had long since read the world’s classics, and current novels by first-rate writers were in great demand, and it was only rarely he was able to find one of them on the open shelves. Still he continued to read constantly. There was nothing else to do.
His new cell partner appeared to be asleep. He was fortunate to have drawn this apparently decent man. He wondered how Manning would fit into the prison zoo. Would he hop around and grunt and apologize continually because he wasn’t covered with fur, or would he adopt Juleson’s own strategy and hide out in a corner watching the animals from a distance and taking every precaution necessary to keep free of them in all essential ways?
It was too early to expect to fall asleep, but he undressed and got under the covers. He stared up at the mottled ceiling and automatically the defenses he had raised against his memories moved in to protect him. He refused to remember even after three and a half years, but his sense of loss still retained its power to punish him. In his unguarded moments he missed small things—the sound of high heels on a pavement, sweet smells, and the pleasure he had found riding home on the bus after a day’s work. He missed dogs and children.
He drifted into one of his favorite fantasies in which he had the power of teleportation and could move anything anywhere just by thinking it was where he wanted it. He flew out over the prison above the solid square heart of interlocking cellblocks, over the cream stucco and red tile of the education building, where in another incarnation he had once worked, he passed along the length of the old industrial building and around the walls that closed in the lower yard, noting the laundry, the foundry, the power plant, and pausing to float high above the sally port he caused its double gates to be deposited in the Sahara. Then he drifted over the athletic field and dispatched the metal goalposts to the Gobi. Turning back to the old industrial building he removed all the fire escapes that clung to it like blackened ivy and lodged them on a glacier north of Mount Doonerak. He stripped the gun rail from the north block and watched it vanish into the Brazilian rain forest. The all-clear light followed. The chair from the gas chamber, an apple green with sturdy straps, he deposited in the governor’s mansion, drawn up to the table ready for the governor’s breakfast.
As a last gesture, he hoisted the roof from the rain shed, a thousand square feet of galvanized iron, and wedged it into a rocky pass near the top of the Canadian Rockies.
He did not intend to be destructive, he thought, still drifting through the cool night; he only wanted to disrupt their air of grim seriousness and point out that they were all involved in the same cosmic joke.
The fun would come in the morning when his quixotic subtractions were discovered. He decided to wait. His revenge was Puck’s revenge, a mockery, still he needed to see it, but he saw no reason to wait alone and he began to leaf through the slender album of his experience for a companion. He considered a slender violet-eyed girl named Janice Lee. He had never done more than kiss her and her untasted charms had thus proved more durable. He placed her sitting on the edge of his bunk, and had her turn slowly, her violet eyes opening like soft flowers, to discover him waiting for her.
—Why, Paul—how nice.
—Hello, Janice Lee. Are you still whacky for khaki?
—Oh, you remember that? I married a Navy man. Didn’t I write you once and tell you?
—I think you did.
—I told you how unhappy I was.
—Yes, I remember.
He reached out to take her arm. He could recall the right qualities of softness and warmth as if he were actually feeling them. He began to concentrate in an effort to bring back every detail, not only of Janice Lee, but of all that was essentially female. He kissed her deeply and her breast formed beneath his hand.
—Why didn’t you answer my letter? she asked.
Before he could catch himself he had answered, Because by that time I was married myself. And Anna Marie, his wife, entered his mind with the force of a scream, and the whole juvenile masturbation collapse
d in an instant.
At 10 P.M. the light went out, controlled from a panel in the block office, and Juleson turned to the wall. He pressed his forehead against the painted cement for the coolness. His pillow seemed to grow hot as soon as he put his cheek against it, and he turned it repeatedly, shifting the cooler undersurface to the top. He would not sleep until he could forget how badly he wanted to be unconscious. He was aware of Manning shifting restlessly beneath him. Finally, the other man got up and used the toilet. His breath seemed labored in the silence of the cell. He was standing and he seemed to remain, half leaning against the wall for several minutes.
“Don’t you feel well?” Juleson asked in a whisper.
Manning’s voice shook. “I’m afraid I’m sick.”
4
THE PRISON is never at rest. The incident rate slows at night, but it doesn’t ever cease. It slows because with the exception of a few trusted to watch over the vitals of light and heat, the entire inmate body is confined in cells from 10 P.M. to 7 A.M. It doesn’t cease, because they are locked two to a cell. They gamble, fight, build fires, practice various perversions, and sometimes kill one another.
At night the guard staff is reduced by two-thirds and the ratio then runs at approximately one guard to a hundred and seventy-five convicts. The night bulls would find themselves in a desperate minority if the cons ever broke loose, but they never have, and first watch is considered an easy turn reserved for young and inexperienced officers, or old screws pushing retirement, or the cowards afraid to beat the yard shoulder to shoulder with the enemy in the blue uniform.
These first-watch officers walk the gun rails, their flash-lights lingering over the barred gloom of the lightless cells, tier on tier, five tiers high, one hundred cells long. From the gun rail the block looks like a metal honeycomb, or perhaps more accurately like a huge multiple trap, sprung now on its unimaginable quarry while the will-o’-the-wisp of the trapper’s flash moves from snare to snare in quiet approval. Other night bulls sit out in the towers above the floodlit walls and blocks. They sip black coffee, read girlie magazines, or watch the moonlight slowly shifting on the empty concrete seventy-five feet below them. The prison seems like a walled city, smothered under a rigid curfew, governed by an alien army.
The gun rail guards are required to wear crepe-soled shoes, and they try to move silently, not, as any con is quick to say, out of consideration for inmate sleep, but to cause those who might plot at night to think of the gun bull as drifting like a shadow—a phantom who in as many imaginations could silently keep all the thousand cells under simultaneous surveillance. In dull fact their approach is betrayed to those who have reason to listen by the creaking of the leather harness that supports the guns, both rifle and pistol, they are required to carry.
Terrence Preston was embarrassed by these deadly tools. Two seemed excessive. He even wondered if he really needed a weapon at all since the most he usually saw of an inmate was an occasional blurred smudge of white tee shirt moving in a lightless cell. He had been warned—first by the training officer, then by his watch lieutenant—of the times when cell bars had been secretly sawed, and inmates had suddenly appeared, incredible aliens, in guard country. Guards were killed, his superiors had impressed on him. Still Preston couldn’t imagine an inmate on the gun rail. He tried to picture one swinging over on an umbilical of knotted sheets, a handmade knife in his teeth, desperation in his heart ... Preston smiled. He couldn’t see it.
He paused to push a scrap of orange peel from the rail and listen to the soft pat as it hit the concrete below him. Inmates were always throwing garbage onto the gun rail and Preston felt the practice represented an expression of hostility. It was a point worth making in his psych class tomorrow. The garbage would traditionally relate to feces. He smiled again. The infant inmate throwing feces at the father guard. But couldn’t it as easily be a gift? An offering of something precious? Even a gift of love? He paused. There was a suspicious neatness, a jigsaw puzzle banality to the smooth interlocks of his speculation. He paced off another leg of his round and stopped to rest on the uncloseted toilet provided against an emergency. For a moment he had had an uneasy feeling, now he nodded firmly answering some invisible authority—it was a good point. Preston frequently made such points, based, he told his fellow students, on his observation of the inmates. Actually he had never spoken to an inmate. His “points” served to light his single distinction. He was working his way through college as a prison guard. He liked answering the questions he was always being asked. He had decided to take his degree in psychology and continue to work in the prison as psychologist. He believed he could help these men.
“Preston!”
He heard his name in a hissing whisper and looked down to discover the floor officer directly beneath him. The upturned face in the extreme foreshortening appeared to be sprouting shoes from immediately under the chin.
“Yo,” he whispered back.
“Come over to A-section and cover me. I’ve got a sick one.”
“Right.”
He followed along above the floor officer, watching the circle of his hat below, until they reached A-section, then he took up a position close to the center of the section and held his rifle at port. A door crashed, hurled by mechanical hands, and a sighing murmur ran through the block as if the men had collectively groaned and turned in their sleep.
“Radio,” some man called irritably.
“Radio yourself, punk,” someone else called.
Then Preston heard a sound he dreaded. In one of the cells just across from him an inmate hidden in the darkness was pushing his breath through his teeth to make a noise like air leaking from a punctured inner tube, bubbling through the spit. Preston knew what to expect.
“See the sweet little bull?” an anonymous voice asked in a tone that combined both amusement and obscenity.
Preston jerked his eyes away. He felt his face growing hot. Pay no attention to them, his watch lieutenant had told him; if they see they’re getting to you they’ll never let you up.
“Pussy on the gun rail,” another voice called.
“Hey, sucker, don’t rank my action,” the first voice continued with mock seriousness. “I saw her first. Didn’t I, baby? Slip over here on the tier and I’ll give it to you through the bars.”
Preston lifted his hand suddenly, then didn’t know why he had lifted it. In confusion he tugged at the brim of his hat and adjusted the temple bar of his heavy-rimmed glasses. He made himself stare sternly at the open cell. In a moment a half-dressed man appeared, his arms wrapped tightly around his chest, and even from the rail ten feet away his shivering was obvious.
“Go right down to the office,” Preston told him.
“Let me come down to the office,” his hidden tormentor began again. “I’ll make it good to you.”
“Knock it off, men,” Preston ordered, unconsciously dropping his voice a half-octave below its normal pitch, and he heard his tone, hollow and absurdly faked like that of a boy of ten picked to play Daniel Webster in a school pageant. He cringed even before the delighted laughter started.
The sick one was shuffling down the tier and Preston quickly turned to shadow him. He pretended not to hear the chorus of whistles.
The sick man was taken up to the massive double doors that opened to the prison hospital, and there he had to wait for fifteen minutes until an officer showed up with the key.
The clinic filled the front section of the hospital block. At night a Medical Technical Assistant, universally shortened to MTA, a free man, was on duty there, and he, in turn, was assisted by two inmate orderlies. This night the MTA was playing chess with one of the orderlies, the board set up on the treatment table in minor surgery, while they leaned over it propped on their elbows. The second orderly sat on the instrument stand watching without much interest, swirling two inches of lukewarm instant coffee in the bottom of a jam jar. The clinic had the lunar appearance of all large white rooms lit with fluorescent light and the fac
es over the chessmen were blue-tinged as putty.
When the key sounded in the lock, the MTA looked up to watch the ponderous door swing slowly out, exposing a widening section of the south block rotunda, its riffraff drabness in vivid contrast to the bright arctic order of the clinic. The sick man slipped in, still hugging himself, and a guard followed. The MTA blew his breath out through slack lips in a weariness colored with theater. He turned back to the game and with his index finger gently nudged his rook a single square right, opening a discovery check by a patient bishop that had stood waiting on the same square since the third move of the game.
“That’s got you,” he said.
“Maybe,” the orderly mumbled, “and maybe not.”
The MTA snorted and started over towards the sick man, rubbing his densely furred arms and yawning. “What’s your number?” he asked.
“I don’t remember.”
“Come on.”
“I just came in today.”
“I see. Well, we wouldn’t have a card on you anyway. What’s the trouble?”
But before the sick man could begin to tell him, the MTA had his ears plugged with a stethoscope. He checked him over rapidly, told him flatly that the most serious thing wrong with him was a bad case of dandruff, gave him an ounce of diluted bromide, and ordered him back to his cell.
“They can’t sleep,” he told the guard, “so they might as well come on down and see what’s going on in the hospital. They figure the doctor might invite them to share a jug.”
He knew it was more than that. There came a night, the first night or the hundredth night, when they had to ask someone, anyone, to care about them. They had to prove that help and comfort could still be summoned, that they wouldn’t be left alone to die in the dark.
On the Yard Page 6
