There was a jangle of keys and the khaki shoulder of a man at the window. The door opened and the queer man beckoned to Aaron, who rose warily, trying to decipher the mild expression on the pink face for a possible trick; and he continued to watch the man closely as he followed him down the hall.
He noticed how the man’s feet struck the hall floor in a short-stepped sliding manner, like a girl in sandals. He noticed the soft, khaki hip swells that hung over the belt, the bald spot, silver-dollar size, at the back of the skull, the round-shouldered slope; and stopped, apprehensively, when the man stopped at the last cell in the hall, across from the toilet, and waited by its open door for him to enter.
He forgot his apprehension when he saw a small elderly man in a brown suit, with a neat silver mustache and silvery hair, sitting behind a wide table, writing. The man looked like a portrait of an old-fashioned, kindly doctor Aaron had seen in prints and how he imagined his brother John would look some day, long after he had started his own medical practice.
The man raised his head, glanced at Aaron, gave no greeting, and concentrated once more upon his writing. But a yellowed eye chart with faded letters and a small scale with a height measurement attached to it convinced Aaron that he was going to be examined.
“Take off your nightgown,” the doctor said, without looking up; and Aaron grabbed the shirt but hesitated, remembering the man behind him, turned and saw only the empty space of the doorway, the cell across the hall, and wondered why he hadn’t heard the man leave nor why he hadn’t heard the doctor come up the stairs and pass his cell.
“Take it off!”
A strand of Aaron’s hair caught on the neck button of the nightgown. He pulled. The strand held. He pulled again. It held. He tried to unloosen it with his fingers but saw the impatient expression on the doctor’s face, so he gave the nightgown a jerk and it came free with two or three hairs still entwined about the button, and left a smarting sensation on his scalp.
“Put it on the table,” the doctor said, rising, taking a stethoscope out of his bag, stepping around the table, and placing the rim of cold metal against Aaron’s chest. He then listened, as Aaron breathed deeply, with bored indifference written on his face by the countless wrinkles and the tiny frozen trickles of blue and red veins which lay beneath the surface of his transparent skin, a skin smelling of shaving lotion and powder.
“How old are you?” he asked, his breath bitter with coffee, taking the black knobs out of his ears, reaching behind him for Aaron’s folder.
“Fifteen,” Aaron answered, bracing himself for the familiar insult.
“Why you’re just a peanut,” the doctor said and, checking the folder, asked again:
“Are you sure you’re fifteen?”
“Yes,” Aaron answered. “Yes, I’m fifteen!” he repeated, biting his lower lip with the front teeth as he said the number, trying to pronounce it as rudely as possible, making it ring like a curse, while his left nostril rose and quivered and pulled the left side of his upper lip into a peak of sarcasm.
“Boy,” the doctor said and looked pointedly at Aaron’s groin, “you don’t have the body of a fifteen-year-old. I’d say thirteen, at most.”
A hot blush darkened Aaron’s face, for a bald groin and a scrotum which was as shriveled as a walnut caused him unrelieved shame whenever he took showers in front of other boys his age. All his friends were more physically developed, not just taller, and their scrotums hung loose and grapelike between their legs, under beards of pubic hair.
The doctor was apparently satisfied with the score of their brief contest, and he weighed Aaron with indifferent movements, measured his height, said, “Four-feet-ten,” in a matter-of-fact tone, checked him out on the eye chart, made him cough twice while he hooked one finger under each of his testicles, tossed his nightgown to him, wrote the results of the examination down in the folder, said, “Your body structure is husky enough, but you don’t have an ounce of definition to your muscles,” and marched Aaron, in silence, back to his cell.
Aaron had kept his lips tight to keep from speaking and betraying the humiliation he felt, but when the doctor was closing the cell door and he knew he was going to be locked in once again, he asked, in a polite voice:
“How long will it be before I get put in a company? Don’t have to stay locked up in here anymore?”
The doctor held the door open for a moment as if he were surprised at the break in Aaron’s defense, but made no answer, shut the door, looked through the glass slot, shook his head in a noncommittal manner, his lips sealed by his silver mustache, and disappeared down the hall.
“You son of a …” Aaron said, but not loud enough to be heard beyond the walls of the cell, angry with himself for comparing the doctor to John, trying, as he climbed on the cot again, to justify his dislike for the doctor, telling himself, as he searched for the shadow of the building, that the doctor had exaggerated, that lots of guys his age were small and didn’t have hairs, and that size and hairs didn’t stop him from being considered manly by the rest of the guys or from getting girls either, from having more girls than most guys.
He lay down on the cot and touched his hairless groin through the nightgown and fingered his soft penis, fingered it idly and without any interest or thrill. For he had only masturbated two or three times in his life and had failed to come to a climax: once while crouched with a bunch of boys in a boxcar, having a contest, unable to have come anyway, because of his laughter.
He pressed the soft, ridged sack of his scrotum and then removed his hand. It wasn’t not having a long one to screw girls with. It wasn’t that, for none of his buddies screwed girls yet. They only talked about it. It was sitting on the edge of a wicker seat on a slow-moving bell-clanging streetcar, approaching the end of the line deep in West Oakland at two o’clock in the morning, and staring out the window to hide his embarrassment because his toes wouldn’t touch the floor if he sat back and because Judith was afraid to be with him so far down in West Oakland so late at night.
It was the anguish the forced giggles that shivered up from her double chin caused him, frightened giggles that blanched the color out of the faint freckles scattered over her nose, that faded the blue in her eyes, that bleached the sunny warmth out of her dark blond hair, guilty giggles, too, over the lie she had told her mother so she could stay out late, giggles whose fear was not concealed by the chuckles of Barneyway and his girl, whom they were taking home, giggles that were tight with assumed nonchalance, that rippled above the whine of the streetcar, above the white caps of the sailors, the frowzy hair styles of sailor-bait girls, the pomaded heads of stray pachucos, the nifty-brimmed hats of colored zoot-suiters, and the safety helmets of night-shift shipyard workers, men and women, white and colored, young and very old.
It was the sight of stars glittering far beyond the dirty window, a window bleared by city scum, clouded by the smoky breaths of people, streaked by fingerprints and rivulets of damp bay dew, but stars so far, far beyond the window that they seemed to both magnify and make meaningless his embarrassed anguish over the length of his legs and her guilty, scared, and too loud giggles.
That was it! That was having no hairs! That was only being four-foot-ten!
The hoarse blare of the whistle blew his thoughts away, and he sat up, relieved but confused, for he was sure it couldn’t be the dinner whistle. He stood on the cot and looked for the line of shadow. It stretched away from the building in a forty-five degree angle and was some twenty feet beyond the clump of manzanita. He checked the shadow again, trying to figure out how time had passed so quickly, when he heard footsteps on the stairs again, and he jumped to the floor and ran to the slotted window just as the colored boy and the man stepped out of the stairwell into the hall.
The door opened without the sound of keys and almost hit him he was so unprepared for it. The colored boy jammed the tray into his chest while he was still confused, and he didn’t realize the boy had winked until the door had closed and he had a tray f
ull of macaroni and cheese in his hands, which he had to eat (although he had food stashed under the mattress and less appetite than he had at noon) or get in trouble.
He picked a spoonful and let the melting lump lie on his tongue for a moment, savoring the tang, trying to get some pleasure out of it before he swallowed it, without biting it. Then he tried to see if he could suck the cheese taste out of each lump until it melted and, in that way, get every minute particle of pleasure from each mouthful, while using the pleasure of each mouthful to revive the memories and pleasures of past meals, also make each mouthful last longer than the previous one. But when the cheese taste weakened and the macaroni tasted too doughy, he swallowed the pulpy lump.
He continued this game long after he felt any enjoyment in it, and he stopped only when it occurred to him that he was eating to keep the queer man from punishing him. He then tried to clean the cheese off each individual macaroni with his spoon and put the nibbles of cheese he had gathered on his tongue. But this was too much work; he slid the tray under the cot and sat in motionless boredom until he realized that he was watching the dark window slot for the queer man’s pink face, fearful of a forced feeding.
But the macaroni was too cold to eat now, and he considered smashing it with the spoon and hiding it under the white bread. But this didn’t seem practical. And he began to worry about getting put on bread and water for not eating. Or maybe kept in isolation longer? Or made to see the doctor again? Or maybe …?
The door began to open slowly, and his first impulse was to kick the tray farther under the cot with his heel, but the colored boy appeared, with his finger held to his lips, and his voice, when he spoke, was as soft as his pale-brown eyes.
“Buckshot’s my name, dad. Yours?”
He stood in the doorway, left foot in the cell, right foot in the hall, leaned his chubby shoulder against the door frame, and held his pink palm out before him.
“Some skin, man.”
“Aaron, man. Glad to meet yuh.” Aaron slapped the palm with his fingers. “You don’t have a key? Do you?”
“No, man. This door’s been open since you seen the doctor. Doc always does that. He’s a good guy. He forgets to lock it.”
“The doctor?”
“No, man. Doc is the tall man who came on duty after breakfast. You know, the guy with the crooked teeth.”
“He’s a good guy?”
“Yeah,” Buckshot said, his pale eyes questioning the question. Then he smiled and the bulge of his big upper lip leveled with his teeth. “Don’t worry about him, man. He watched yuh take a leak, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“Listen, man. Doc won’t bother yuh. And if yuh want a favor, he’ll do it for yuh. He’s one of the best men here. He won’t touch yuh. Just stare. And he only does that to new guys, anyway. It’d be great if that was all yuh had to worry about.”
“What a ya mean?” Aaron asked, suddenly worried about Barneyway, afraid to ask Buckshot now if he knew him.
Buckshot leaned back and looked down the hall, pulled on his bottom lip with his pink finger tips, cleared his throat, dragged the rubber edge of his shoe sole against the hardwood floor until it squeaked, and stalled so long that Aaron lost his fear of the warning. His own lips then spread slightly and hinted at his loss of respect for Buckshot, his belief that Buckshot was falling into the common jail habit of storytelling: the very habit that made him doubt the rumor about Barneyway, a habit in which each guy was the big hero of his own big dream, and the dream so big it was unbelievable.
“It ain’t no lie. There’s things here to worry about,” Buckshot said and added, quickly, as if trying to recover his lost face:
“You might even get put in the dairy. And in the dairy, the big, bad guys give it to the little guys.”
He stopped, apparently trying to see if his words had any effect on Aaron and to give them, by stopping, more mystery.
“You mean they stomp ’um, man?” Aaron asked, but this was no big mystery, for getting stomped was an accepted part of just being around bad guys and jailbirds, everybody stomped.
“That’s not news,” he said, but without scorn, for it was a real danger, and he could imagine big muscular guys, eighteen-year-old guys with men’s bodies, powerful biceps and shoulders, hairy chests, guys who might have stomped Barneyway.
“No, man. I don’t mean stomp,” Buckshot said, his tan face seeming to swell with superiority.
“What do you mean?” Aaron asked, more suspicious of a lie than scared.
Buckshot lowered his head and its mass of auburn-colored, wiry curls; he was obviously stalling for dramatic effect, and he lifted his full, round face to Aaron before he said, “They beat ’em up, first, and, then … gang-bang ’um … man!”
“Gang-bang ’em?” Aaron blurted out, and the tip of his tongue glided slowly out between dry lips, moved up the chapped slope of the top lip, and eased back into his mouth on the lower, like a receding wave tucking its edge into its own backward roll along the sand.
“Gang-bang ’um, dad. Make queens out of ’em forever.”
“Queens?” Aaron said and licked his lips again.
“Do you know what a queen is?” Buckshot asked, his voice sharpened by confidence.
“Yeah,” Aaron said. “Yeah, I know what a queen is.”
He spoke loudly, embarrassed by the cool way Buckshot was studying him, as if he, Aaron, didn’t really know what a queen was, as if he might be one himself!
“I know what a queen is,” he said and sat up and looked squarely into Buckshot’s eyes so as to stop any wrong ideas that Buckshot might get about him.
“Well, that’s the way it is in the dairy,” Buckshot said, and squeaked his sole against the floor again, cleared his throat again, and leaned back and looked down the hall again. His full neck was a smooth expanse of tanned skin. He then leaned back in the cell and although he appeared relieved that Aaron had stopped staring at him, neither he nor Aaron attempted to carry on the conversation.
“I’d better go. The man might come,” Buckshot said and pulled the tray out from beneath the cot. He then stepped into the hall and started to close the door, but just before it had eased shut, when only the width of his fingers prevented its closing, he glanced sympathetically at Aaron, and flicked his fingers in a salute.
“See yuh,” he said softly and left.
The sound of his receding footsteps accentuated the silence in the cell, Aaron’s lonely isolation, the danger in the warning, and Aaron’s fear that the dirty stories were almost bound to be true. And if they were true, the rumor then … about Barneyway … was …? But he couldn’t allow himself to admit this possibility. He couldn’t allow it to be true. He’d have to hear it from his buddy’s lips first, before he’d accept one word of it, and he jumped to his feet and doubled his fists and shook them in front of his face. He studied them and gingerly touched the torn skin of his knuckles, swearing that it couldn’t be true, that it would never happen, and that even if it were possible.…?
Gray walls surrounded him. His fists were trembling with tension. He dropped into a boxing stance, weaved to his side, and threw a steaming right hand at the guy who might have slugged Barneyway. He set his jaw and then shuffled forward as if he were stalking the guy, fists clenched, ready to counter-punch at the guy’s first move, which would be his last mistake, all of his fear ready to explode in thrilling anger. He was determined to drop the guy right away, make the guy pay for punching his best buddy, his crime partner, make somebody pay for the misery he felt; and he punched, dropped the guy, but had gained so much momentum with the quick, angry flurry of punches that he had to block his fall against the door with his arms. He shuffled back toward the barred window, feeling mean, the nightgown swaying, fists up, set, ready to punch again, determined, full of guts and confidence, but the cell lights came on and his eyes fell on the heart.
He took another shuffling step forward, then stopped and studied the heart until he could make out the letters spelli
ng RICKY DE LA CRUZ, the plus below, and EVA wedged into the heart’s point. Then he dropped his fists and ran his finger over the cross and the three rays above it. Then he took a deep breath, let it out in a long sigh, and saw darkness through the screen. Then he climbed on the cot, leaned a foot on the radiator, and looked out the window.
The whole hill was the shade of dusk. The bleat of crickets rose like a hum from the darkened grass. The manzanita was a clump of blue shade, and the sky was a patch of violet, darkening to a cloudy purple in the east. His feet began to get cold. He grabbed the bars and tried to shake them. He felt chilled inside, too, but he told himself he didn’t care. No isolation cell.… Dairy or no dairy.… Not a single rumor … mattered.…
He shoved his face against the bars so that the edges of two made indentations in his cheeks and his nose touched the screen beyond. He pressed harder and then harder, trying to see how much pain he could take. His eyebrows and cheekbones took the brunt of the punishment, and he imagined that his brother Stanley was watching him, and soon he was straining with all the strength he could muster in his off-balance position, the stretch of his body across the open space between the cot and the window, making himself take the pain for long seconds, long, long seconds, until it began to hurt too badly and he quit.
The bars left tight creases on his cheekbones for a moment and his eyebrows burned, but warm blood quickly flooded the creases and the brows and brought him an intense satisfaction. He grabbed the bars again and leaned his face against them in exactly the same position again, so that their touch was harsh to his tender skin, and he tensed himself and got ready to test himself again. But his grip relaxed, and he leaned his forehead against them instead.
A long intake of breath then whistled against the roof of his mouth, held for a moment in his chest, was expelled in a broken cough, and his shoulders jerked as if a chill had passed over him, and he began to cry with low, muted, but quivering sobs.
Tattoo the Wicked Cross Page 3
