On the Yard (19 page)

Again he made the flying motion with his hand. “And that's
adiós
mother fuckers. They'll never figure how I made it.”

“That's keen. Real keen.”

“I worked it all out myself. When they sent me here I told myself there was something they hadn't thought of and I just laid back—”

Stick interrupted to ask, “How many will that balloon carry?”

“Just one.”

“You sure it won't carry two?”

“No, I had to make it small, otherwise I wouldn't have been able to get it to the gym.”

“That's too bad,” Stick said. “You got to leave your friend in the welding shop behind.”

“Oh, him. He don't care nothing about going.”

H
EY, BOY
!”

Lorin cringed and looked up from his notebook to see Sanitary Slim smiling at him from outside the bars. He knew the smile was meant to soothe him, but he found it more terrifying than Slim's normal expression of furious disgust.

“I got something for you, Lorin. Heh! You didn't think I knew your name, now did you? I looked you up, boy, that's how much I had you on my mind. And I got to wondering what I could do for you. And I thought, that boy might like these.”

Sanitary Slim pulled a pair of civilian shoes from behind his back, and held them up to the bars. He didn't notice that Lorin was trembling. He smoothed the bright toes with his fingers and asked softly, “Ain't they nice?” He turned the shoes back and forth so the light played on their brilliant shine.

“I don't want them,” Lorin said.

“Now, don't you say that, boy. These are boneroo free-world shoes. Now you take them and just give old Slim them old shoes of yours and he'll take them down and throw them in the trash. You not going to want them old shoes, when you got fine free-world shoes like these.”

Sanitary Slim cocked his head to the side, his eyes glittering with transparent craft.

Lorin began to pound on his notebook with both fists at the same time. “You get away from me. Please, get away from me!”

“Now, boy. Now, boy ...”

“I'm not going to give you my shoes for any reason. Understand that. It isn't going to do you any good to keep coming around here. Now, please leave me alone.”

His notebook had slipped to the cell floor and Lorin bent down to pick it up. He heard Sanitary Slim beginning to hiss above him.

“You're ungrateful, boy.”

“Just go away.”

“You telling me you don't want these shoes?”

“Please, just go away.”

“Punk! Someone's fucking you, boy, and old Slim's going to find out who. Then you won't talk so smart.”

Lorin turned to face the rear of his cell and he continued to sit like that until Slim finally gave up and left. Then Lorin wrote a letter to the psych department and put it on his bars where it would be picked up with the evening mail. That night, for the first time in several years, he cried before he fell asleep.

The next afternoon he was paged to the psych department. He was not surprised to be called so quickly. He knew his own psych jacket was coded red. Ordinarily, this was a source of amusement to Lorin, but now it had proved useful. He walked to the hospital, walking spread-legged to ease the rash that had developed at his crotch, and found Dr. Erlenmeyer waiting for him at the main desk.

“Come into my office, Lorin, and we'll talk this over.”

“Thank you, Doctor.”

They entered the small office and Erlenmeyer sat down behind the desk. On the wall above him a printed sign read:
You don't have to be crazy to work here, but it helps
. Erlenmeyer removed his tinted glasses and rubbed his eyes with his thumb and his forefinger. He held his head thrown back as if he were about to take nose drops.

“Are your eyes still bothering you?”

“Things get no better, Lorin.” Erlenmeyer replaced his glasses. “Now, what exactly is troubling you?”

Lorin told him about Sanitary Slim, leaving out only Slim's repeated inferences that he was someone's punk, and he was dismayed to see Erlenmeyer smile.

“A textbook specimen,” Erlenmeyer said. “An anal retentive, of course, and a useful type generally speaking. A lot of the world's more disagreeable work is done by people of this type. They're frightened of disorder, dissolution, they equate dirt with sin, and they're under a compulsion to keep things cleaned up.”

“Are you trying to tell me he doesn't want my shoes for some dirty reason?”

“No, I'm trying to tell you that isn't the way he sees it. In his strange fashion he's trying to do something for you.”

“I don't accept that. Whatever it is he wants it's for himself.”

“That doesn't make him much different than most people. How've you been otherwise, Lorin?”

“All right, except for that animal outside my cell.”

“Just ignore him,” Erlenmeyer suggested. “Or humor him a little if it doesn't bother you too much.”

Lorin shuddered, and Erlenmeyer noted this with a faint frown. “How are all your projects?” he asked.

“Progressing satisfactorily.”

“Are you still planning to herd all of us old folks into the gas chambers?”

“Don't mock me. I never suggested any such disposition. The matter will be settled by computer, since that is the only method by which we'll arrive at an impartial solution, but, offhand, I would think you will be pensioned off, and resettled in colonies in some temperate and lightly populated country such as Brazil. Until the last of you die out.”

“Like the dinosaurs?” Erlenmeyer asked with a faint smile.

“Again you mock. But the simile is an apt one.”

“Uh-huh. And how's Rita?”

Lorin blushed. Rita had reigned in his album before Diana, but she had betrayed him when she married one of her leading men. “Doctor,” he asked eagerly, “did you ever meet a girl named Diana Dolan?”

“Dolan? Does she make films?”

“Yes.”

“Lorin, people such as myself have very little opportunity to socialize with movie stars. They move in a world of their own and it would be good for you to keep this in mind.”

“I'll meet her,” Lorin said firmly.

“Well, I'm sure she's very nice.”

“She's wonderful.”

“Uh-huh ...”

Lorin looked up to catch a pitying look in Erlenmeyer's eyes, and for a moment his self-assurance faltered. “You think that's odd, don't you?” he asked with difficulty.

“I don't know. I only know it's nothing I ever did. When it comes down to it, isn't that how we decide what's odd and what isn't? You're in an odd place and you weren't very old when you came here.”

“When will I get out, Doctor? Why do they keep me? I've never heard of a first-termer serving three years for car theft. Eighteen months is the average.”

“I hope it won't be too much longer, Lorin, but you did refuse therapy.”

“Therapy! You want me to sit around an hour a week and talk about baseball with a bunch of imbeciles. Baseball and bullshit. Where's the therapy?”

“Some men discharge their tensions and concern through the apparently trivial. But didn't Dr. Smith offer you individual therapy?”

“Yes.”

“And you refused that too.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I didn't feel I needed it.”

“But surely it would have done no harm, and we could have told the parole board you were cooperating with the program. The token, Lorin, is sometimes very important to people. If they were somewhat naïvely concerned over your potential, at least they would have the satisfaction of knowing whatever could be done had been done before they authorized your release. You have left them in the dark.”

“I don't need therapy. I don't want it and I don't need it. It's a waste of time.”

“And you're so busy correcting fifth grade arithmetic papers?”

“I have my own work as well.”

“But you did ask me why you were still here, and I have tried to give you my understanding of it. I may be wrong.”

“It doesn't matter. In two more years my sentence runs out, and then you have no choice.”

“That's true. Although occasionally when a number of doctors agree that a subject is a dangerous psychopath, we can assign him what we call a P number and transfer him to the hospital for the criminally insane, where he can be held indefinitely.”

“Are you threatening me?”

“No, Lorin, I'm not threatening you. Perhaps you should return to your job assignment.”

Lorin stood up. At the door he turned back to ask, “And you're not going to do anything about that degenerate?”

“There isn't anything we can do. Perhaps you can arrange to have him transferred to the Brazilian colonies.”

“All right, Dr. Erlenmeyer. Thank you.”

Sanitary Slim sulked in front of Lorin's cell for an hour that evening. He pretended to be cleaning, but he was actually accusing Lorin, in a venomous whisper, of dreadful obscenities. Things Lorin could hardly imagine.

“Please, go away,” he continued to beg.

“You ain't being nice. You ain't being nice at all. What harm would it do you if I was to shine up your shoes? You tell me that, you being so smart and all. They's plenny a free people what pays old Slim to do up their shoes, and here old Slim's willing to pay you, and you turning him down. The Lord don't love ugly, boy, the Lord don't love ugly. Just let me shine them up one time, and I won't bother you no more. Just one time?”

“No.”

“Please, boy.”

“No. Absolutely not.”

“You stink, boy,” Slim said spitefully. “You stink worse'n a he-goat.”

Lorin woke up the next morning to find his depression had deepened. He scratched his crotch tenderly, avoiding the places where it was chafed raw. He caught his own smell like decay. He was going to have to find some way to take a bath. He couldn't bear it any longer.

He avoided everyone throughout the day, even Juleson, and didn't even try to work on his Theory of Identity. He finished the class papers as quickly as he could, and went down into the basement where he sat in a darkened room which they used for audiovisual aids. During the third period a class filed in and Lorin sat through a film describing the operation of a turret lathe, and then another on the conservation of watersheds. The films were seldom germane to regular classwork. When a class was scheduled for audiovisual aids they were shown whatever was available. Lorin had already seen most of the films several times.

The night when the shower bell rang he had himself nerved up to ignore Sanitary Slim as if he didn't exist, and it was a shock to discover the tier empty when he stepped out of his cell. He looked both ways, but Slim was gone. Then Lorin expected he would encounter him in front of the showers, but he wasn't there either. With an overwhelming sense of relief, he stepped out of his shoes, and unknotted the towel from around his waist. He turned to the crowded showers with less than his usual revulsion.

The shouting, the steam, the soapy bodies crowded four and five to a shower head, the obscene jokes and more obscene laughter, all seemed wholesome when compared with Sanitary Slim. Lorin moved forward to stand with the men who were waiting for a chance to squeeze under the water. Lorin had long ago developed a tactic which called for him to wait until just a few minutes before his sense of timing warned him a fresh tier was about to be released, and at that point the press was at its lightest. He stood waiting, imagining the simple pleasure he would find in being clean again, and then some instinct caused him to look around just as Sanitary Slim was bending down to pick up his shoes. He shouted and Slim took off down the side of the cellblock, the shoes hugged to his chest. Lorin looked after him, and began to shudder violently.

When Sanitary Slim returned the shoes, gleaming with polish, later that night, Lorin didn't even complain. He had the feeling he had been raped, and it was several weeks before he could bring himself to open Diana's album, and when he did he found himself staring at an empty-faced girl—a stranger.

O
NE MORE
morning—a few days before Christmas—and as always Chilly Willy stood in the big yard with Nunn and Society Red. The rain was bad, coming down in gray sheets whipped by the wind, and they were under the rain shed at a particular spot they thought of as Chilly's Other Office. Experienced cons avoided this spot on a rainy day and should a fish blunder into it he was invited to move on. It was a small alcove that held the back door to the bakery, but it offered enough shelter to make book.

The three friends were silent. Action was slow, and Chilly was in a grim mood. They had already talked bad about the weather and discussed the opinion, an article of faith to many, that the big yard was probably the only place on earth where the wind blew from all four directions at once. Except naturally in the summer when the asphalt topping was about to boil, and old cons were falling out from the heat, then the wind would come straight and cool from the bay only to pass about twenty feet above their heads. The wind, they decided, confirmed the conspiracy that all nature joined—to screw them around whenever possible. And while Chilly Willy was willing to agree that the big yard was probably the most miserable stretch of real estate in the western hemisphere, he privately couldn't lay it all to the weather.

They had tried to remember what was for chow and then had been sorry they were able to because it was one-eyed hash, a scoop of hash which looked at if it might have already been digested, at least once, half hidden under a chill and rubbery fried egg.

The goon squad had gone by, buttoned to their chins in green foul weather gear, on one of their mysterious errands, and they had told each other what a dog sonofabitch the guard they called the Indian was, and how the Farmer was all right if you didn't try to shuck him, but if you did shuck him and he caught you, you might as well try to climb the wall. And the Spook—no one could hope to understand the Spook, they could only hope to avoid him. Chilly thought of some half-wild thing driven mad by the daily burden of its own pain, but he also considered that the Spook might be playing a part, as all the goon squad might, to make their jobs easier. He tried to picture them at the end of the day sitting in some bar, drinking beer and laughing over how they put the convicts on. Nice guys really, family men—Chilly smiled. The picture wouldn't quite come clear.