On the Yard (16 page)

He replaced his notebook on the shelf and paced for a while beside his bed. The paint had worn away to the bare concrete under his feet just as night after night he had worn the edge from his nerves. The paint did not replace itself. Once he stopped and studied himself in the mirror.

Lorin was sentenced for Grand Theft Auto. He had stolen the car because his own had broken down and it was imperative that he have a car not only to live in, but to drive from the park where he spent the nights to the library where he spent the days. When he had tried to explain the importance of his work to the arresting officers they had grown thoughtful and noncommittal. During the entire arrest and court procedures no one had listened to him without evident sympathy, still he had had the impression he was caught in the works of a mindless machine which could find no way within its programming to release him. Now he missed the nights in the park, sleeping with his knees drawn up on the front seat of his car, the early mornings playing chess with vagrant perverts before it was time to drive to the library, and there his orderly numbers formationing on the clean white paper, neat and intricate as ants.

Sentenced to prison for his first offense, he had promptly committed another when he scored too high on the battery of tests they administered to every new arrival. Much too high. His IQ pulsed ominously in the minds of the parole board. They condemned him with a cliché as worn as “criminal genius,” and Lorin, whose sense of humor sometimes supported him, saw reflected in their attitude the burning eyes of Dr. Fu Manchu.

He stopped pacing and began to look through a stack of coverless, grimy, and fragmenting movie magazines he had acquired in trade for a week's desserts. His eyes brightened with anticipation, and in a moment his breath caught. Diana! She was photographed at a typical Hollywood party and the camera had arrested her in the act of turning towards her date, her face vivid with animation. Lorin took the blade from his razor and cut Diana free of her escort. Now he could imagine her smile was for him.

He took his notebook from the shelf and, looking at the photo, started another poem:

“Lovely, lovely, lovely, white and lovely,” Lorin reread softly.

He took his photo album from its hiding place beneath his mattress and began to look for the proper position in which to place the new picture. Lorin was arranging the pictures in groups he thought of as fugal. Diana in a hundred poses invited, provoked, and challenged. She was a starlet who had entered Hollywood as Miss Dairy Products of Wisconsin, and Lorin was in love with her. He had idealized her into a nymph of delicacy and a Héloïse of faithfulness and wisdom. He saw them holding hands as they listened to Purcell, Monteverdi, and Mozart, or discussed symbolic logic and group theory.

He placed the photo and copied the new poem beneath it. Some day he would give Diana this book. He dreamed how that would be. How her eyes would shine with instant comprehension of his every nuance. How she would give him her hand to hold and how he would tell her about his Theory of Identity, his discovery which was going to revolutionize thought and speed man forward so swiftly he would look back on his former self as he now looked back on a Neanderthal. How he had invented seventy-two new mathematical symbols and filled over three hundred pages with equations ...

Sometimes he had her interrupt at this point to say, That's not necessary, Lorin. And he would explain that he only wanted her to be proud of him.

—But I am. You've reworked my heart in your own image. I feel cleaner, purer.

—Did you ever ... he sometimes tried to ask.

—Ever what?

—You know. With boys?

—Well, Hollywood. My career was terribly important to me before I met you ...

—You don't have to talk about it. Just promise me it's over.

—Of course, Lorin, unless you ...

—I'll never soil you by thought, word, or deed. This is the promise Lorin imagines he will make to her. And then they seem to dissolve in a warm and scented silver mist until they no longer have bodies, but are released as pure spirits to the sweet cohabitations of the mind.

“Lovely, lovely, lovely, white and lovely,” he whispered again.

As he put away his photo album and got out the notebooks dealing with his Theory of Identity, he noticed Sanitary Slim sweeping outside his cell.

Sanitary Slim paused in his work, leaned on the handle of his broom, and stared into Lorin's cell with an eye as bright as a snake's. The boy was a punk. Old Sanitary knew, he could always tell. Never came down to take a shower, crapped after the lights went out, wouldn't look a man in the eye.

“Hey, boy,” Slim called. “When you going to let me shine them shoes.”

Lorin made several careful and deliberate marks before he turned to say. “No, thank you.”

A punk! Sanitary Slim could always spot them. He stared hotly at Lorin for a moment, then made a disagreeable noise with his lips, and continued on down the tier, sweeping with great care. A tall dried old man with a nose as sharp and red as a beak, whose lips were locked in a vice of chronic disgust. His shirt collar and sleeves were buttoned tight, winter and summer, and he wore a faded denim cap, pulled straight down over his eyebrows, and in the shadow of the bill his eyes blazed with a hectic and feverish vitality.

He considered turning Lorin in. Sanitary Slim was violently revolted by every form of erotic expression and he considered it his duty to tell the captain of the guards the names of all the punks his instincts uncovered, as well as those who didn't keep their eyes to themselves in the shower, or hung around the urinals, or walked and whispered together as couples. He was equal death on dirt and disorder and he made no firm distinction between the two forms of contagion. Sparkling toilets and a rigid anus were equally wholesome. Touching, rubbing, stroking, sucking were all the same as filth—shades of the same horror.

He was a marvelous janitor. Even the most obscure corners were dust-free; floors gleamed, windows sparkled. His specialty was shoes. He made them glitter. What few staff members even suspected, though a number of inmates had guessed, was that Sanitary Slim had been left a single exception through which the steaming drive of his own sex escaped. He got his shining shoes. Each stroke of the brush increased his excitement until he rocked and moaned on his stool crooning to the shoes like a lover. And some shoes, like women, were better than others and Sanitary Slim yearned after Lorin's with a smoldering passion.

Punk! he snarled again. Ain't tooken a shower in weeks.

That night Sanitary Slim dreamed he was an enormous white slug rolling in the warmth and pleasure of his own slime. He woke to nausea and a violent headache. It was the middle of the night, but he rose and scrubbed out his sink and toilet for the second time in twenty-four hours. Then he went back to sleep and had the same dream again.

Lorin rarely dreamed and he woke the next morning from a smooth darkness with a question already formed in his mind: Why not let him shine your shoes? Whatever his obsession is, how can he involve you if he only wants to shine your shoes? But he knew he couldn't allow it. The unconscious resistance he felt in his own mind warned him that the compromise would be a costly one even if the exact price remained obscure to him.

He got up and tried to take a sponge bath in the few ounces of hot water allowed him for shaving. There was enough to wash his armpits. He was sure he was beginning to stink. Yesterday in the lunch line someone had deliberately moved away from him. He shaved in cold water and though his beard was slight the razor pulled.

He spent the day at his desk in the education building. He finished early with the papers he was required to correct and returned them to the teacher. He wanted to talk to his friend Juleson, but Juleson seemed disturbed over a letter he had been expecting and had so far failed to receive. Lorin reminded him of how their mail was frequently delayed for several days in the censor's office, and Juleson agreed absently, and of course it had already occurred to him. None of them were quite sane on the subject of mail.

He added a number of new words to his list—rodomontade, callipygian, corybantic—and lost himself in the cool delight of Roget's categories. The work of identification had always been pursued by the few, the elite. Above him on the wall Albert Einstein appeared friendly and a little dull.

When he returned to his cell that night he had his mind made up that he was going to take a shower. His crotch was beginning to chafe, and his feet and ankles were black. But when the shower bell rang and he stepped out on the tier, naked except for a towel knotted about his waist and his shoes, he found Sanitary Slim leaning on his broom watching him. Lorin wouldn't have been more frightened if Slim had been a crocodile that had somehow learned to walk erect and use a broom. A strange wild animal, urged by unknown hungers. Lorin retreated into his cell. He went to bed and turned his face to the wall.

He listened to the sound of the showers until the water was ringing on the empty concrete as the fortunate few, the block workers, took their showers alone. Then silence.

“Hey, boy. You, boy! You let me shine up your shoes, I'll give you five packs of smokes. Spit polish and all.”

Lorin rolled over to stare up at Sanitary Slim's face—bisected by one of the bars, a raw green eye stared from either half. The split mouth was riven with tension.

“You're psychotic,” Lorin said.

“What's that you said?”

“You're crazy.”

“Don't you go talking like that. That ain't no way to talk to a friend. You talk nice to old Slim and he'll do up your shoes till they sparkle like new money.”

“No, not now. Not ever. Now you leave me alone.”

“You ain't being nice,” Sanitary Slim accused.

Lorin was silent.

“How come you don't never take a shower?” Slim asked.

“I shower at work.”

“Ain't no shower in the ed building,” Slim said triumphantly. “Now what you want to lie for?” Slim's face grew severe. “Maybe you showering somewhere with your jocker? What you letting him do to you, boy?”

“I fail to see where my personal habits, whatever they might be, are any of your concern.”

“Punk!” Slim hissed. “Smart-talking little punk. You take keer, boy, you hear me? You just take keer.”

That night Sanitary Slim dreamed he was being cut up by huge knives that hissed all around him. The light flashed from the blades as they beat like the wings of metal birds. His blood boiled out. Corrupt and warm it rose around him until he awoke choking on his own saliva. Lying there in the dark he conceived the first of his plans to get Lorin's shoes.

M
ANNING
spent his first days in prison submitting himself to various measurements. He had deliberately constructed a mood of passivity with which he endured this. In a room still titled Bertillon they had recorded his height, weight, body build, coloring, distinguishing scars or tattoos (he had none) and taken six sets of fingerprints. The next day he was given a thorough physical examination, pronounced fit, and certified for “light to medium heavy work.” The following day he was given a battery of tests—AGCT, Kuder Preference, MMPI, and many others. Finally he was interviewed by a psychologist.

The psychologist kept Manning waiting for an hour and fifteen minutes. He sat on a narrow white bench in the hospital corridor watching the doctor through the glass windows of his office. He appeared to be deeply involved in another interview. From where he was sitting Manning could see only the inmate's back, but he saw the doctor clearly enough to make out the thin black hair sketched on his white skull, as even as ruled lines, and the foreshortened ellipses of his glasses. The name on the door was A.R. Smith.

A few feet further down the corridor an old man was lying in an oxygen tent. The gently pulsing mask covered the lower part of his face, and his eyes were closed. One bone-thin arm hung over the edge of the bed, the hand stirred slowly. A very tall blond nurse came to take his pulse. When she looked up her eyes were cool, inward, and her face seemed as small as a child's. She left and in a moment was back with two orderlies who wheeled the old man away. As they passed Manning, the patient's eyes opened, but his expression didn't change in any way.

The coming interview made Manning nervous. He counseled himself against hope, but Juleson had told him the psychiatric department's recommendation would weigh heavily in his case and he was shading his acceptance of imprisonment by hoping it might still somehow be dissolved. More than he was caught in concrete and steel, he was caught in words and paper, and someone might nullify these legal charms, someone who could look into him and recognize his essential guiltlessness. Perhaps A.R. Smith. Manning combed his hair, and wiped his hands on a handkerchief. Once he looked up to find the psychologist's eyes on him.

When the inmate already being interviewed rose to leave the office, Manning was surprised to discover it was the boy called Stick. He hadn't seen Stick at all since they had led him from Receiving and Release. Now he was smiling at the doctor, talking with considerable animation. But a moment later when he passed Manning on his way out of the hospital, Stick's face had gone dead. He walked swiftly, affecting a sort of glide Manning had noted in some of the younger inmates, and as he continued down the corridor he flipped up his shirt collar. If he had noticed Manning at all he had decided to ignore him.

When he was finally called himself, Manning found his hand so sweaty he had difficulty turning the doorknob. He entered the office wiping his palms on his pants.

“Willard Manning?”

“Yes, sir.”