Cast the First Stone (38 page)

“You don’t have to worry any more,” I’d say, and he’d give me one of those scintillating smiles.

On Tuesdays and Fridays he was taken to the hospital for treatments and I asked him why. “I have sinus trouble,” he said.

“You don’t show any of the symptoms,” I said.

“But I have it very bad at times,” he said. “It’s all up here.” He tapped his forehead just above the bridge of the nose. “Sometimes it’s so bad it almost drives me crazy. My mother has it too.”

“I never thought it was very serious,” I said.

“It is, though,” he said. “It is very serious and I hope you never have it. Ninety per cent of all the people who have it go crazy, or maybe it’s ninety per cent of all the people who go crazy have it. Anyway, it’s—”

“Ninety per cent,” I said. “Like corn whiskey.”

“—very serious, James Buchanan Monroe, and it will drive you crazy, and I hope you never have it.”

“If it drives you crazy you’d better go over and have something done for it because you’re crazy enough as it is.”

“I’m much better now, aren’t I?” he asked.

“You’re splendid,” I said.

The next time he went to the hospital he signed up for an operation and about the middle of December they took him over to the hospital to operate on him. I got Captain Tom to take me over to see him and I brought him the soap and toilet articles he would need. The next day when they operated on him, I got Tom to take me back on sick call and I was there when they wheeled him out of the operating room. I walked beside the stretchers and touched his hand and told him to take it easy, but he didn’t need me then because the anesthetic was still with him. When the anesthetic left him was when he needed me, but I wasn’t there.

The long letters I sent over daily by the paper boy helped him a lot, he said in his replies. And those few lines he wrote to me helped me a great deal, too. It was dreadful in the dormitory with him away. I didn’t know it could get so dreadful in a dormitory filled with convicts.

Signifier elected himself to cheer me. “You look terrible,” he said. “You look heartbroken. Cheer up, he’ll be back in a month or two. You better get hold of yourself, you’ll come down with t.b.”

I paid the colored porter and the head nurse in A-ward a dollar a day each to look after him. But I didn’t tell him because I thought he wouldn’t have wanted me to.

They let him out the day before Christmas. It was just like going home when he came back. They wanted to keep him in a week longer, he said, but he told them he had to get out in time for Christmas.

“I told them it was a matter of life and death. I told them I just had to get out,” he said. “I just had to be with you this Christmas, Jimmy, there might never be another one.”

There was no answer to that.

I asked him how they had treated him and he said everyone had been swell. They all knew he was my friend and they were fine, he said.

“They’ve got a swell bunch of fellows over there anyway,” I said, and he said, “They are, really, but I had expected them to be sort of snotty.”

“They’ve just got a bad rep,” I said. The chiseling sons of bitches, I said under my breath. “But they’re all right,” I said.

His mother had sent him two dollars, his monthly allowance, in a letter, but during the Christmas excitement it had been overlooked by the mail censor, and he received the two one-dollar bills with the letter. He had bought a bottle of sodium-amytal capsules with it. They were given to the t.b. patients as opiates, but taken two or three at one time with coffee, they gave a wonderful jag. The capsules were blue so we called them blue boys. After we got jagged we figured no one would know what we were talking about when we said blue boys. But everybody called them blue boys.

About eight o’clock that night they brought me a box from my mother and he got one from his mother about an hour afterward. The boxes had been coming in all that day and they let the lights stay on until twelve o’clock to deliver them. We had a very fine jag from blue boys and were filled with good eats from home. We sang Christmas carols loudly while he played the accompaniment on his uke and at midnight we were so excited we couldn’t sleep and sat up and talked all night about all the Christmases we remembered.

Christmas morning we took some more blue boys with our breakfast coffee and were wonderfully jagged when we went over to the show. Everything was very funny and delightful and we laughed all during the show.

We took some more blue boys with our dinner coffee and that afternoon we played poker and lost and it was all so funny and nice. Everything was so funny and wonderful, just like a dream. We laughed at the prison and laughed at losing pots. We had completely forgotten the other convicts in the game until one of them exploded with pent-up laughter and then they were all laughing. We thought we would die from embarrassment. We had to quit and go away. But it was all like that. We didn’t know there was anyone else in the dormitory. Christmas seemed to belong to us alone.

Everyone began talking about us, even Captain Tom and Captain Charlie. But we thought they were very stupid and funny people and we made little jokes about them and laughed behind their backs. Signifier and Candy came down the day after Christmas and helped us eat what was left of our boxes. We were very witty and hospitable hosts and pressed chicken and cake on them until they were stuffed. We teased them and made little quips about them which we thought, in our state of entrancement, they didn’t understand. Then we gave them some blue boys. Candy took all of his the first thing the next morning and went down in the colored convicts’ skin game and bamma-ed an eight spot through. When you play a blind card, after you have fallen and lost, they say you have bamma-ed it, because the boys from Alabama who think they are tough play that way. Sometimes another piker picks your card and plays it without knowing you are playing it too, and if you can shuffle your card into the dead at the end of the deal before it is noticed, all anybody can do is just grumble. But Candy wasn’t smart enough to get away with it and he got everybody’s money terribly mixed up. It took half of the convicts in the dormitory, including Dido and myself—especially Dido and myself—to get it straightened out and Candy wanted to fight all of us with the little home-made knife he carried, with the blade so short you could hardly see it. It took Tom and the hall guard and Polack Paul and a half-dozen other convicts to keep the colored convicts from biting off his ears. Tom called Dido and me aside and told us to get rid of that dope and not to give Candy any more of it. But we were so jagged we could hardly wait to get away before we were laughing again.

Later in the week Dido received a typewriter his mother had sent him for a Christmas present. I had never seen him so happy and excited. “Oh, isn’t she swell?” he gushed. “She’s perfect,” I said.

It wasn’t a very good typewriter but we never let on that it wasn’t the very best. That night he took it apart while I sat by and watched, with varying degrees of apprehension.

“Maybe you ought not to do it,” I said. “Maybe she wouldn’t like it.”

“She’ll love it,” he said. “You’d love her, Jimmy. She was so young when I was born, only fifteen, and she didn’t know how to raise me. I’m her love child. People used to think she was my older sister.” He worked while he talked. “When I was old enough so we could talk she taught me a swell way to live. Whatever we thought was right, honestly and sincerely, we took for right and acted on it and lived by it. And all my life I’ve felt that way.” He stopped and looked up at me. “Don’t you think that’s a swell way to live?”

“Yes,” I lied.

“It is, Jimmy,” he said earnestly, like a little child. “Everything would be wrong if you couldn’t feel that it was right. In the middle of the night when you’re awake and can’t sleep, when you think about it you have to feel it’s right.”

We took the last of our blue boys New Year’s morning. The whole week had been like a wonderful dream. The next day we had headaches and a nasty taste in our mouths. But we didn’t have any regrets.

“You don’t know how swell it is not to have any regrets,” he said.

Later on I discovered that I was one hundred and thirty-five dollars in debt. My typewriter was in pawn and his was all apart. We had jumped on a fellow and broken up his game and the only thing that had kept us out of the hole was Tom and Captain Charlie looking out for me. “You had a ball,” Signifier said enviously. “When did you take your blue boys?” I asked him. “I’m a chump,” he said. “I took mine that same night and didn’t do anything but sleep through breakfast.”

We laughed. When he left Dido said, dreamily, “It was like a sweet delirium.”

The second week in January I received a letter from my mother telling me to be brave and cheerful and not to become despondent because I hadn’t received a Christmas pardon. The legislature hadn’t adjourned until Christmas week, she wrote, and the governor had been so busy with the budget he hadn’t had time to consider my case. “Reverend Bentley talked to Mr. Allison again and he seems to think you will get some action this coming summer,” she wrote.

“Are you sorry?” Dido asked.

“Yes,” I said, “but I had forgotten it until now.”

“Then I’m sorry,” he said. “But I’m not sorry for our Christmas. I couldn’t be sorry for that.”

“I’m not, either,” I said.

When we wrote home that Sunday he said, “I told my mother about you last time, Jimmy. Do you want to say something to her?”

“Tell her that I think she is very swell people and that I think of her as my very own mother and that I love her very much.”

“I’ll tell her. She’ll like that.”

“I’m going to tell my mother about you,” I said.

He looked up, as startled as a deer. “I hope she doesn’t dislike me.”

“Oh, she’ll love you,” I said. I had my doubts.

He looked very queer when I said that but I didn’t think anything about it at the time.

“You never speak of your father,” I said.

“You don’t speak of yours, either.”

“Mine’s in Terre Haute,” I said.

“Mine’s in San Francisco.”

We looked at each other.

During the weeks following we became very literary and read O. Henry together. Once I said, “You’re a sweet child.”

His reaction was abrupt. “Oh, how lovely!” he exclaimed, his eyes turning smoky with wistfulness. “Call me that always.”

And then we ran across the name “Puggy Wuggy” and he said, “What a darling name and it just fits you.”

“Me!” I said. “What the hell?”

“You have a Puggy-Wuggy nose that quirks when you’re about to laugh—” he said, his husky voice teasing and his eyes alight with mischief.

“That’s no compliment.” I said.

“—and I love it and I’m going to call you Pussy Wuggy—”

“The hell you are!”

“—and you’re going to call me Sweet Child. Won’t that be nice?”

“No,” I said.

We loved O. Henry. “He knew a lot about people,” I said.

“Prison was his school,” he said. “He did his bit in Ohio, working in the hospital—”

“Selling blue boys no doubt, if they have ‘em over there.”

We laughed.

When my mother came over that month she asked me about Dido and I told her he was the most intelligent convict I had met in prison. He’s about my age and his mother lives in California and he’s a swell friend, I said. It was all about Dido. But she wasn’t sold.

But his mother was entirely sold on me. Her next letter was addressed to her “two sons,” and she said as soon as she got the money she was coming to visit us both; she wanted to see us very much.

“If you get out this summer I want you to go and live with her,” he said.

“Is she as nice as you?” I asked.

“Oh, she’s much nicer.”

“Maybe I’ll fall in love with her,” I said. “She seems very young and I go for the Dido family.”

He was very enthusiastic. “You will, Jimmy. I’ll write her and tell her you’re coming. You will love her—” he broke off. His face settled so abruptly it was ugly in the change. “You said you’d fall in love with her. What did you mean?” he asked. His voice was flat as mud.

I could have told him that I didn’t mean a thing because I didn’t. But some perverse impulse made me say, “After all, I’m a man. I’ve been in here five years. What else could I mean?”

“She’s not like that,” he said. “She’s just as good as your mother. She’s better than anyone’s mother. She’s deeply religious.”

“But she’s a woman just the same,” I said, impelled by some imp of cruelty. “And she’s beautiful.”

He stood up, dull-eyed, dopey-faced, remote. His shoulders sagged, his head drooped forward, his hands hung lifeless at his sides. I noticed that they were large hands.

“There were some swell moments, Jimmy,” he said. “I’ll remember those.” There was a grinding nonchalance to his voice that jarred me. His lips twitched as if he was trying to smile, and then they stopped as if he had given up and his eyes filled with hurt. He was very ugly. He turned away as the hurt came into his eyes, and walked down the aisle with his knees buckling again.

For a moment I stood there, watching him. Then I thought, well, that’s Dido. I sat on the bench and leaned back against the table and lit a cigarette. And then it hit me, a wave of hurt. My stomach became hollow and sick and I filled with a cold, draining fear. I realized suddenly that I was trying to get up and go after him. But the thousand emotions which were rushing through me had assumed weight and the weight anchored me to my seat. I was stunned. After a time I began trembling violently. I had to get up and walk about to stop it. I passed him in the aisle but he looked away without speaking. I winced.

In twenty minutes everybody in the dormitory knew that we had fallen out. I went over to my bunk and stretched out, fully dressed. Signifier came over and asked me what was the trouble. I shook my head. I couldn’t talk. Then Candy and Dew Baby and Wrinklehead came over. “No beef,” I said. “We just cut out, that’s all.” They started planning how they would gang up on him and run him out of the dormitory. But I shook my head again. “Let him alone,” I said.

Later that night he got into trouble in the poker game. A fight started between him and Starrett and Starrett went after a knife. Dutch gave Dido a knife. Signifier came over and told me that Dido was about to get into a knife fight. It made me sick enough to vomit. It was like hearing of your sister in a knife fight. I pulled myself up and went out and tried to talk to Dido. He was standing in the aisle waiting for Starrett. His face was a dead dopey white, his lips a bluish bruise, his eyes lidded. There was that drugged remoteness in his face. He had the knife in his hand and when I saw the naked blade a drawing coldness moved from the front of my body through to my back, contracting my lungs and heart. Goose flesh rippled down the back of my legs.