On the Yard Read online

  When he next made parole, he quickly discovered that his cosmetic ears cut no ice. The bitches, as he put it, still wouldn’t let him score on their drawers, but continued to deal way around him as if they sensed some violent far-out freakishness thrashing around in his hectic yellow eyes.

  He decided he couldn’t make it without wheels so he hotwired a new Buick convertible, and finally managed to pick up a girl in the Greyhound Bus depot. She’d just arrived nonstop from Macon, Georgia, with one change of clothes in a paper bag.

  “This your machine?” she asked, smoothing the Buick’s leather seat.

  “Sure. You like it?”

  “It’s most elegant.”

  She was so mortally homely Red figured she’d come near scaring a dog off a gut wagon, and she was built like a sack of flour, heavy, shapeless, and white, so he drove straight up into the hills, parked and reached for her. She was already slipping down the leather seat.

  “You got something in mind, California?”

  Red experienced a momentary uncertainty, staring down at the girl’s shadowed face. She was stretched flat now, her legs slewed off to the side and her scuffed black shoes rested on the floorboards.

  “Maybe,” he said.

  “Some of them old things back home would be halfway to Kingdom Come already.”

  He brushed up her cotton dress, and clambered awkwardly over her as she adjusted her underwear, and began to push uncertainly at her general softness until she shifted skillfully beneath him, and he plunged wildly, pounding his head against the car door.

  “Jesus, Savior ...” she murmured.

  In moments Red found himself wildly contorted on the car seat, the homely shapeless girl pinned beneath him, and he pulled back to look down at her face.

  “You’re some peehole pirate,” she said pleasantly.

  Red grinned. “What happened to your tits?”

  She shrugged, shifting her heavy shoulders. “They wouldn’t make a pair of doorbells.”

  Red drove back to his hotel and slipped the girl up to his room, where she immediately washed the clothes in the paper bag and hung them over the radiator to dry. Then she kicked out of her shoes, pulled her dress over her head and wandered around the room wearing only her drawers and a pair of red anklets. Her pale blue eyes were aimless.

  “First ho-tel I was ever in,” she said.

  “It’s a fleabag,” Red said from where he had sprawled on the bed.

  She inspected the tiny desk, the letterhead notepaper and a clotted straight pen propped in a dry inkwell. “Real hightone,” she said. Then she turned to Red. “I’m called Mavis.”

  “Mavis how many?”

  “Just Mavis. I bet they call you Red?”

  “Right! Give that lady the fur-lined pisspot.”

  Mavis laughed. “Ain’t you the one.”

  “You know you’re making me horny again parading around pract’ly bare-assed.”

  “Let’s turn the light out and get in your bed.”

  “Okay, if you want.”

  Red stripped, palmed the wall switch, and turned to the pale island of bed. With the light off, a scarlet glow outside the windows, reflected from a large neon sign, became apparent. The sheet was tinted; Mavis appeared to be blushing. It occurred to Red this would be the first time he’d ever had a girl in a real bed, one who would sleep beside him.

  In the morning, she said she’d turn a few tricks, and Red figured she might as well, since she looked better bending over anyway. They were busted a few days later by the hotel detail, who told Red the girl was fourteen and a runaway, and he had his issue of big-time trouble. For years he told the story, always ending, “Shit, I thought she was twenty.”

  That was the jolt when he blew his pickets. The cell lieutenant, exercising his gift for confusion, moved Society Red in with a weight lifter, called (always behind his back) Pithead. Pithead suffered from a smoldering case of acne, a festering and angry rash spreading over his cheeks, jawline, neck, and shoulders. He blamed his affliction on dirt, and he was a tireless clean freak who liked the cell spotless. But Red didn’t figure to bother himself with excessive cleaning, and he was never in any particular hurry to take a shower. He observed that water caused iron to rust, and frequent showering increased your chances of catching cold. His socks fermented.

  Pithead sullenly tormented his pimples while Red explained why it was senseless for him to degenerate into a neat freak behind his acne, since it couldn’t be caused by dirt, because, as Red admitted in a nice display of candor, he was considerably dirtier than Pithead, and he didn’t have one pimple. Probably Pithead had bad blood.

  Pithead ground his teeth, his eyes blinking with furious revulsion. He knew what caused his acne. It was sin, and dirt was sin made visible. He sent by mail order for various medicated soaps and took nightly sponge baths, which caused Red to chuckle with amused tolerance. “Pithead’s queer for soap,” he told his buddies on the yard. “He sleeps with a bar under his pillow and sniffs it while he lopes his mule.”

  But then one day when Red made afternoon lockup, he crawled into his bunk already half asleep, and accidentally stepped on Pithead’s pillow, depositing a crescent of dust and grease. When Pithead came in later, the first thing he saw was Red’s footprint. He stared down as astounded as if it were the hoofprint of the Fiend, and it did appear to smolder with sin.

  “Hey, man,” he told Red. “You stepped on my pillow.”

  Red yawned hugely. “No shit, did I?”

  Pithead changed his pillowcase and stretched out in his bunk, his arms folded behind his head. He stared steadily up at the outline of Red’s body pressed into the webbing of his springs. Finally, he said, “That was cold, man.” Red was asleep.

  The next morning, when Red stumbled groggily from his bunk, seconds before unlock, he had to brush by Pithead to get to the toilet. But nothing warned him, as Pithead pivoted sideways and, winding up like Whitey Ford, copped a Sunday, smashing Red flush on the mouth. Red sprawled against the wall, his mouth filling with blood. “What the fuck?” he demanded. But just then the unlock bell sounded, the bar freed, and Pithead was out of the cell. He paused on the tier to yell back, “Step on my pillow, will you, you filthy son of a bitch!”

  When Red tried to wash his face he discovered one of his front teeth was barely hanging, and the other was loose. He passed on breakfast and caught the head of the dental line. The dentist smiled but didn’t ask questions. He told Red he could probably save the tooth, but he hesitated to blow the life back into anything so singularly unlovely. He suggested they pull both front teeth and fit Red with a partial. But of course if Red wanted to keep his own teeth—

  “Yank the bastards, Doc,” he said. “Those snags have whipped me for a lot of action.”

  The yard was growing crowded. Hundreds of men were now walking steadily from one end to the other, pounding the blacktop, and a great many more were gathered under the rain shed in small groups, exchanging the idle topics of a thousand mornings. All wore blue denims, but the condition of their uniforms varied greatly, the tidy, the slovenly, and the politicians in their pressed pants—starched overalls, Red thought mockingly—their polished free-world shoes, and expensive wristwatches.

  Red was waiting for his hustling partner, but he rapped to anyone who passed by. He liked to bullshit, play the dozens, and when some clown stopped to call him “old tops and bottoms” he quickly said, “Your mammy gives up tops and bottoms.”

  “I heard yours was freakish for billy goats.”

  “She used to sport a light mule habit,” Red returned, his yellow eyes beginning to light with pleasure. “But she wrote and told me she was trying to quit.”

  The clown smiled. “Red, you think you’ll ever amount to anything?”

  “Next time out I figure to file my pimp hand.”

  “Next time? You’ve already beat this yard long enough to wear out two murder beefs and a bag of robberies.”

  Red shrugged. “Off and on, I’ve been a
round awhile.”

  “The big yard’s a cold place to fuck off your life.”

  Red’s eyes began to grow vague as he lost interest in the conversation. Cons busted into jail, then spent half their time crying. And all the sniveling didn’t make anyone’s time any easier to do, any more than it shortened the length of a year. You did it the easiest way you could and hard-assed the difference. The big yard was an undercover world if you knew how to check the action, and something was always coming down. You could make a life on this yard, and you could die on it.

  “What’s to it, Society?” someone else asked.

  “Not much. You want to grease armpits and wrestle?”

  A man walked by carrying a cardboard box and sporting parole shoes. Red knew he had made his date and was heading out. By ten he’d be free, on his way to the city, and before the day was over some fish would be coming in to replace him. This happened every day. The gradual turnover was constant. Only lifers and a few other longtimers stood outside this process.

  For a moment Red thought about the men waiting somewhere in some county jail, still unaware they’d be hitting the big yard before the day was out. Then he saw the bookmaker he worked for, and walked over to take his station beside him.

  1

  TWO HUNDRED miles to the south in the Delano County jail, Jim Nunn was the first prisoner on the court chain down from the felony tank. He was keeping his cool. He’d been through it all before, several times in different counties, and nothing in the routine of jail, trial, conviction, or sentence could any longer surprise him. Today’s chain was running for sentencing, and when the deputy unlocked his cuffs, Nunn gestured into the bullpen at the hidden courtroom beyond and asked, “This where they give out the free board and room?”

  The deputy smiled mechanically. “This is it,” he said and began to uncuff the next man. Nunn stepped into the bullpen. They’re all the same, he thought bitterly. They all look the same, smell the same. He sat down on one of the two benches that faced each other in this narrow, featureless room.

  Henry Jackson, a tall, very dark Negro, stepped in. He smiled at Nunn and said softly, “Well, sport, here we is.”

  Nunn smiled back. “You come to get your rent paid too?”

  Jackson winced humorously. “Mos’ likely that be what happen.”

  “They told me if I couldn’t do the time, I shouldn’t mess with crime.”

  “That’s the troof.” Jackson shrugged and sat down beside Nunn. “Well, they won’t be gettin them no cherry.” He looked up as another prisoner, released from the chain, entered, and asked Nunn, “How many of these dudes you think we take with us?”

  “Enough,” Nunn said. “They keep that prison full.”

  “They do that.”

  Nunn watched the other prisoners enter the bullpen. He thought of them in terms of their crime. Two Checks, a Manslaughter, a Burglary, the Baby Raper, and three kids, one a stone nut, with a four-dollar robbery to divide between them. Nunn rubbed the back of his neck and tried to remember his last good fix. The memory brought no ease. He started as the metal door leading back to the county jail slammed shut; he heard the solid thrust of the bolt. In an hour or so, whenever the judge got ready, they would be led out for sentencing. Nunn felt but slight suspense. He knew he was going back to prison. He would be sentenced and delivered by midafternoon.

  He turned to ask Henry Jackson, “What’s for chow on the main line tonight?”

  “Friday? Tha’s fish, ain’t it?”

  “That’s right, fish.”

  “And cornbread. Apple pie.”

  “Yes, and all the water you can drink.”

  “Tha’s right, go heavy as you like on water.”

  Nunn shook his head in mock sorrow. “Jackson, I think we have fucked up.”

  “You bes’ tell it like it is.”

  “The judge’ll tell it.”

  “Well, he the man today.”

  “That’s right, and tonight he won’t even remember what we looked like.”

  Was that what bothered him? Nunn wondered. Did he wish he’d had the brains and the balls for some spectacular offense, some legendary crime, rather than be, as he knew he was, just one more small gray malcontent? Yes, he wished he was someone else. His eyes searched the faces in the bullpen and in the saddest, the weariest, he saw some furtive hope. Even the Baby Raper appeared to believe he could be forgiven. Baby raping didn’t necessarily make him a bad fellow. He just forgot to ask for ID. It could happen to anyone.

  “Hey, Manning,” Nunn called.

  The Baby Raper looked up. “Yes,” he said.

  “What’re you looking for out there?”

  “In court?”

  “Yes, what do you expect?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You think you’ll get the joint?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Henry Jackson leaned over to whisper to Nunn, “Iffen he don’t get the joint the ducks in Mississippi wear rubber boots.”

  “Yeah, and there ain’t a cow in Texas.”

  Both men smiled at Manning, the Baby Raper, without a trace of friendliness.

  Will Manning sensed their mockery and distaste. Could he blame them? How might he have once felt, before he had made his incredible discovery? After more than half a lifetime, during which he had considered himself—what comfortable shorthand would he have used? Honest? Honorable? Decent? No, he would never have claimed so much. Halfway decent is precisely how he would have classed himself. And after better than half a lifetime of halfway decency he had suddenly discovered, in a few vivid moments, that he was a filthy degenerate. The phrase was not his own. His wife had supplied it.

  He took the display handkerchief from his breast pocket and wiped his forehead. The bullpen was too crowded. They shouldn’t herd men together like livestock. Too much body heat. The air was hot and stale, depressed somehow with a profound fatigue. A naked two-hundred-watt bulb burned through a haze of cigarette smoke.

  Manning folded his arms across his chest, trying to compress himself to avoid touching the men seated on either side of him, but the less room he managed to take, the more they took. They seemed to swell and flow around him as if their clothes were full of some warm, corrupt, half-fluid gelatin. The rhythm of their breathing seemed as intimate as his own.

  He stared down over his folded arms, past the points of his neat black shoes, and tried to think only of the stains on the metal floor. One, a ragged oval, seemed briefly like an island, a tobacco-colored island in a flat green sea. He moved his foot to cover it. Island population destroyed in senseless accident. Would senseless accident imply there could be a sensible accident? It would be better if he didn’t have to think.

  He took a comb from his inside coat pocket, awkwardly, trying not to jostle the men crowded against him, and began to comb his hair. Automatically he shaped the pushed-up wave he still affected over his narrow forehead. Year by year, since his last year in high school, this crest had grown steadily smaller, a visible record of the hidden shrinkages taking place somewhere within his spirit, and now, suddenly, he felt a strong wave of disgust. The tattered plume of an aging stud, who never had the occupation, only the ornament. He raked his comb straight back to destroy his modest crest and accidentally dug his elbow into the ribs of the man on his right.

  This individual, wrapped in a filthy tan overcoat many sizes too large, jerked around and fixed Manning with sick, accusing eyes. “Take it easy.”

  “I’m sorry,” Manning said automatically.

  “Buddy, sorry’s a word I’m tired of.”

  Manning turned sharply away to avoid the odor of decaying teeth, and, as if a signal had been given, everyone stirred. The prisoner on the other side of Manning, a heavy man in suntans, wearing a maroon sport shirt with six small black buttons at each cuff, lifted his head from his hands. His cheeks were mottled from the pressure of his fingers and his eyes were miserable.

  “What’re they doing out there?” he asked of n
o one in particular.

  From the opposite bench Nunn leaned over to inquire in a parody of polite interest, “You pressed for time?”

  The other prisoners laughed, and Henry Jackson joined in. “You jus’ hold yore cool,” he told the man in the maroon sport shirt. “They got an assload a time out in that cou’troom —alls you got to do is back up and get it.”

  “That’s right,” Nunn agreed. “We’re all about to get screwed, and without the benefit of intercourse.”

  “No Vaseline neither,” Henry Jackson added.

  The prisoners laughed again. “What’s funny?” asked the sick-eyed man Manning had jostled. “What’s supposed to be so damn funny?” he asked again with forceless bitterness.

  “It’ll come to you,” Nunn said.

  “That it do,” Henry Jackson added.

  “Like, when rape’s inevitable,” Nunn continued slyly, “relax and enjoy it.”

  Manning felt the blood burning in his face as he stared at the metal wall above the heads of the prisoners seated on the opposite bench. He wouldn’t look at them for fear they were all smiling at him. Instead he found himself studying a crude drawing of a man and a woman making love. The genitals were grossly exaggerated, and in the balloon above the woman’s head she was saying: Moan! Oh, do it to me, Big Daddy! While Big Daddy had been made to say: Shake that thing, Bitch!