On the Yard (2 page)

Malcolm Braly's life was sad, triumphant, and sad again. He lived mostly inside for twenty years, until his writing, together with the will and generosity of Gold Medal Books editor Knox Burger, provided a rescue. He died in a car accident at fifty-four, leaving behind a wife and infant daughter—Knox Burger has said he was “fat and happy.” His peak as a writer came in the two complementary books, the novel and the memoir, and in the memoir he says about the novel, “I was writing over my head.” A reader needn't explore the earlier books to confirm this, for Braly is working over his head in
On the Yard
in the sense that any novelist is when he has moved beyond his tools, or through them, to experience a kind of transubstantiation with his characters. At those moments a writer always knows more than he ever could have expected to, and he can only regard the results with a kind of honest awe. The book is no longer his own, but a vehicle by which anyone can see himself both exculpated and accused, can find himself alternately imprisoned and freed. Braly's novel is something like Stick's borrowed balloon, in the end, a beautiful, unlikely oddment rising from the yard of San Quentin, motley with the scars of its making and no less perfect for showing those “hesitation marks.” It rises above the prison walls in a brief, glorious flight, before gravity makes its ordinary claim.

—J
ONATHAN
L
ETHEM

Born in this jailhouse

Raised doing time

Yes born in this jailhouse

Near the end of the line

S
OCIETY RED
was the first man on the yard that morning. He sidled out of the south cellblock, turning up the collar of his faded denim jacket as he squinted resentfully at the cold gray sky. A sudden gust of wind caused him to hunch his shoulders and duck his head while he began to pound the heel of one Santa Rosa hightop against the other, three times; then he shifted to bang the second shoe against the first—tamp, tamp, tamp—and he continued this monotonous and joyless dance as he peered uneasily around the prison's big yard, seeing it as he had seldom seen it: quiet, empty, an acre of bare blacktop enclosed within the high concrete walls of the cellblocks. A huge pen.

Society Red found the silent emptiness disturbing even though he knew that within the hour over five thousand inmates would stream from the mess hall, coiling into the yard, a restless spawn, an immense aggregate creature, the life of the big yard, that also
was
the big yard, as the residents are actually a town.

Other inmates were drifting out behind him now, but Red was still depressed. He thrust his hands into his hip pockets, palms flat to his lean backside, and continued punishing one Santa Rosa against its mate while he venomously cursed the cold. High on the north block wall he glimpsed a gun bull, symbolic as a scarecrow, and watched a seagull drifting down to hit the blacktop with an awkward waddle, where it scavenged a scrap of orange peel floating in the gutter.

Red was slightly over six feet, bone-thin, and awkwardly made. His face was so densely freckled it appeared rusty and gave his sharp features a raw, humorous aspect. His eyes were yellow as a goat's, but the vivid orange hair that had prompted some forgotten humorist to call him Society Red had long since faded and thinned away to a clown's half-bald ruff. He had been jailing for thirty of his forty-five years and was now a five-time loser. Still he didn't consider himself a failure, simply because it had never occurred to him he could be confined in any such square john term.

The photo on the ID card he carried in his shirt pocket showed him the face of a man already harshly worn by age, dim, defeated, a caricature convict impossible to imagine except above his big number, drenched in the pitiless light of a mug shot. But even the first of his numerous mugs, taken at only sixteen, had shown him the face of a born wrongdoer, one the law had quickly recognized as its own, and his subsequent ID's, taken at various times, on several occasions had even recorded changes Red was pleased to consider improvements. That original mug shot, now fixed to the first page of his cumulative case summary, still preserved the images of his formerly legendary ears, jutting from his head like the handles of a loving cup (he'd heard the wheeze a thousand times), and his huge front teeth had still pushed from his mouth like the tusks of a beaver. Between the bat ears and the buckteeth he had been a comic gargoyle whose first feverish pursuit of several half-grown neighbor girls had moved them only to fits of giggling.

Much later, it was his disfiguring ears that were altered first. One of the pioneer prison psychologists developed a theory that inmates who suffered such comic deformities formed compensatory mechanisms, of which their various felonies were merely symptoms, and their rehabilitation needn't be sweated out in the stone quarry, making little ones out of big ones, when it could be found under the knife of a cosmetic surgeon.

Society Red was scheduled, with a dozen others, for plastic surgery, which it was hoped would leave him free to be as honest as anyone else. Surely too modest a goal to tax more than lightly the magical skills of a plastic surgeon, but then his time was donated, and he had apparently tried some technique he didn't care to risk on a cash customer, because when the bandages were removed Red's ears were greatly altered, but it was difficult to characterize the difference as an improvement. One ear pinched to his skull as if stapled there, and the other still flew at approximately half-mast, but he figured if they'd sliced his ears clean off it would still be a small price to pay to be rid of something so full of meanness and trickeration as that compensatory mechanism which had forced him to steal, not for wheels, women or money, but only as some sorry-assed symptom.

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.”