On the Yard (24 page)

Juleson released Gasolino and struck him a hammering blow to the side of the head. Gasolino fell back, his hands held low and outstretched. He looked up along the east block rail where the gun bull was aiming down at them as he jacked another shell into the chamber.

“He can't shoot straight,” Juleson taunted, but his voice sounded breathless.

A third shot sounded and the slug tore the blacktop between them, cutting a ragged furrow, and in the same instant Gasolino cried out, whipping around as if he had been stung by a bee. He started running towards the edge of the crowd as an animal caught on the plain runs for the shelter of the surrounding trees. The crowd began to hoot.

“
Run, you sissy cocksucker
,” someone howled with delighted scorn.

“
Run, run
,” others joined in. “
Run, you yellow punk
.”

Juleson stood where he was. He realized he was panting. Two officers broke through the edge of the crowd and made an attempt to head Gasolino off, but he pivoted like a halfback reversing field, and managed to elude them. The crowd opened and closed around him, and Juleson saw someone throw a jacket over Gasolino's shoulders to hide the torn shirt. The gun bull on the north block was running along, blowing his whistle, trying to keep Gasolino in sight, but by the way his head was twisting from side to side it was apparent he had already lost him among the hundreds of nearly identical figures.

The two yard officers, abandoning Gasolino, closed on Juleson. They grabbed his arms, levering them behind his back.

“You don't have to do that,” Juleson told them.

“Move!” one of them said.

They marched him directly to the north block rotunda and rang for the elevator to the shelf. He was placed in a holding cell where he remained for two days. No one spoke to him, not even when his meals were served. On the morning of the third day he was taken out and prepared for disciplinary court. They let him wash up, and handed him a new comb, which, after he had used it, they took back and tossed in a wastepaper basket. Then they shook him down thoroughly, and sent him through the door into the committee room.

He was surprised to see the warden in the center seat. His presence measured the gravity of the hearing. Captain Blake sat on the warden's right and he was the only uniformed official present. His hat was on the table before him, but the ridge along the side of his straight black hair still held the square uncompromising line at which he wore it. At the warden's left sat the Reverend Mr. Nugent, the Protestant minister. A young correctional counselor, grade I, acted as recorder. Off to the side of the conference table, as if deliberately emphasizing the ambivalence of his position, sat Dr. A.R. Smith. His small feet were set side by side on the floor, and his two forefingers making “here is the steeple” seemed to support his chin. When his eyes met Juleson's he nodded slightly, and the forefingers communicated the motion to his clasped hands.

“That was a stupid thing to do, Juleson,” the warden said severely.

There was no adequate response to such a statement. He stood quietly aware that the captain was staring up at him with what appeared to be anger. The minister too was watching him, but his eyes seemed remote. Dr. Smith was looking out the barred window. The CC-I was writing.

“Sit down,” the warden ordered. He waited until Juleson had settled himself, then he asked, “Do you know an inmate named Memo Solozano?”

“No, sir.”

“He's known on the yard as Gasolino,” the captain added.

“I know him by reputation.”

“Do you know he's dying?”

“Dying?” Juleson repeated. His voice sounded fragile.

“Yes, he can't live more than a few days.”

“I don't understand. Was he shot?”

“Do you understand that if he had been shot you could have been held responsible under the laws of this state?” This was the captain.

“No, sir, I didn't know that.”

The warden continued, “Solozano is dying from the effects of carbon tetrachloride. Apparently he's been sniffing it for some time, but the afternoon of the day you two fought he drank the contents of one of the fire extinguishers located in the gym. This is a deadly and irreversible poison. There's a warning on each unit in English, but he was unable to read English—” The warden paused. There was nothing now of the father in his face. “Did you imagine something like this might happen?”

“How could I?”

“Your intelligence is superior. You have a history of violence.”

“I only wanted to force the issue so I had a chance of coming out of it alive.”

“And I offered you that chance. And you refused me. You lied to me.”

“Do you really think it's that simple?” Juleson asked angrily. “Do you really think you have everything—
everything
—written down here in front of you?”

“Lower your voice,” the captain said.

Juleson turned to look at Dr. Smith. He hadn't moved, though his gaze was no longer directed at the window. His face was passive, eyes veiled. The CC-I, pen poised, was watching with interest. His lips were sucked in against one another as if he were tasting salt on them.

“I felt I had to solve my own problem,” Juleson continued.

“So again you did something violent,” Mr. Nugent said. His voice was fortified with stately intonation as deliberately as breakfast cereal is fortified with vitamin C. “Again you took a life.”

“That's not true.”

“A man is dying,” the warden said. “If you had allowed me to help you the fight on the yard could have been avoided.”

“I know that would have seemed best to you,” Juleson said, anger again adding an edge to his voice. “Don't make waves. But I will tell you I have been ordered to commit far greater violences for reasons that were much less clear to me, and then if I had
not
obeyed I would have had to face a similar court and they would have been equally sure they were right.”

“That's enough of that!” the warden ordered. After a moment of heavy silence, he continued, “There may be something in what you say, but you have lost, at least temporarily, the right to make such distinctions. Fighting is against the regulations of this prison. There is no ambiguity as to that. And we find you guilty of the charge.”

“It was Oberholster you owed, wasn't it?” the captain asked.

“No, it was Gasolino—Solozano—as you called him.”

Again no one spoke. He felt their eyes on him. Then the warden said with a trace of weariness, “Wait outside.”

He waited in the corridor, under the eyes of a young officer. “Pretty rough on you?” the officer asked companionably. They were both small fry under the same distant authority.

“Not too bad.”

“It's lucky neither of you guys was killed out there. The Mexican lost the tip of his little finger. Did you know that?”

“No.”

“It must have been a fragment, or a nearly spent bullet. Sliced it off neat as a knife. Just the very end.” The officer glanced at the committee room door, then continued in a lower tone. “But you won't have any more trouble with that punk. His guts are falling out his ass.”

“They told me.”

“They should have given you a medal instead of a beef.”

A buzzer sounded and a light above the committee room door went on. “They want you back in there,” the officer said.

This time the warden didn't invite him to sit down. He stood to receive sentence.

“It's the decision of this committee that you be awarded ten days isolation, and sixty days loss of privileges. Further judgment will be in the hands of the parole board. The report submitted by this committee will acknowledge the extenuating circumstances. That will be all.”

Isolation's only hardship was monotony. As is customary in all detention units, a Bible was furnished as part of the cell equipment. Someone had mutilated the title page, and printed “bullshit” in the margins through most of Genesis before his zeal faltered. There was a smoky quality to the word, more suggestive of bitter disappointment than simple condemnation, and Juleson wondered if this same man would have found it necessary to deface the Koran or the Bhagavad Gita had these equally sacred books been provided for his example.

Someone else had made a large drawing of a vampire on the wall above the toilet. It was crudely rendered, but unlike most comic book and B-picture vampires this one looked as if it might actually drink blood. There was a curious and inhuman strength in the expression of the eyes, not entirely offset by the rude fangs and a pimp's hairline mustache.

His cell was otherwise featureless, and he passed the time pacing back and forth from the door to the toilet, and reading parts of the Bible. It never occurred to him that he might find help or hope of sufferance in this book he had never taken seriously, and it was just at random that he came to I Corinthians 10:13 and found himself intimately addressed:
There has no temptation taken you, but such as is common to man
... Still billions of others had resisted their common temptations. He had not.

He began to pace again. There was more he might remember, and he puzzled trying to recall what it was the Biblical verse suggested. Something similar. Pacing, eyes level with the vampire's eyes, he drew a second forgiving quotation from his memory ... There is nothing human which is alien to me. Recalling now that these were the words of Marcus Aurelius, the last of the Five Good Emperors. It went something like ... because in my youth I knew all things, there is nothing human which is now alien to me. That was the substance.

Again Juleson met the eyes of the vampire and he smiled, wondering if Aurelius might not concede that here was something alien, and, yet, perhaps no more alien than he must have found his own son, Commodus.

He continued pacing, aware of his persistent conviction of his own ... evil, he could put no lesser word to his feelings, “evil” was precise, though he knew he didn't believe in the existence of evil, just as he was aware that his conviction he was evil betrayed some inverted and ravenous vanity. Perhaps it was as great a presumption to think oneself evil as it would be to consider that one was good. Weren't both extremes equally attractive when they were needed to escape the conclusion that one was, after all, ordinary? An ordinary man who beat his wife for all the ordinary crummy little reasons.

On the sixth day, Dr. Smith stopped by to see him, telling the shelf officer, “Just lock me in, please ... I'll call when I'm ready to leave.”

“Any way you say, Doc,” the guard agreed, turning the key.

Dr. Smith appeared as colorless as always, except for his soft russet eyes, slightly magnified in the lenses of his glasses, searching Juleson's face with warm concern.

“You look none the worse,” Smith said.

“After a while, any change, even isolation, is stimulating.”

Juleson automatically sat on the toilet, leaving the bunk for Smith, who settled himself somewhat deliberately, lifting his pants from his knees to show his black socks and small black shoes. He glanced around the cell.

“These are Spartan enough,” he said.

“That's the whole punishment.”

“Are you taking it as punishment?”

“No, but I miss my books.” Juleson smiled. “All I have is the Good Book. I've been learning to detect leprosy. Whoever shall develop a sore on his head which does not heal, shall be declared unclean, for the sore is in his mind and the Priest shall come and declare him to be utterly unclean—”

“In his mind?” Dr. Smith asked blandly.

Juleson grinned: “For he is utterly unclean.”

Dr. Smith laughed softly, smoothing his hands on his pants. Then he turned soberly to Juleson to ask, “How do you feel about your hearing before the disciplinary committee?”

Juleson shrugged. “It was pointed out to me I had broken a rule.”

“Is that how you see it?”

“I see it several different ways, but it comes to this—I did what I thought I had to do. I believe they did the same.”

“Yes, perhaps, perhaps,” Smith murmured as he crossed his leg and rubbed his knee. “But I find it disturbing. I'm not going to tell you the choice you had to make was easy. To consult your rule book as the warden suggested. But, as your friend, I'd have much rather seen you accept protective custody.”

“You'd want me to hide? Like a child?”

“Why not like a child? Children are eminently sensible in many of the ways they deal with an environment still strange to them and over which they exercise little or no control. So the simile is apt. And I find myself wondering why your healthy instincts didn't demand that you hide from danger, rather than prompting you to measure yourself against some alien code of honor at the risk of your life.”

“The code isn't alien,” Juleson said. “Any schoolboy would know it. There're boys out on that yard who have refused to grow up. They look forty, but they're still twelve. One of them ordered me off the yard. He said he was going to cure himself of having to look at me. It was like I'd been told not to come out on the school grounds during recess. I wouldn't submit to a bully. No more, no less.”

“But, Paul, they're boys, you're a man.”

Juleson slapped his leg lightly and turned away though there was nothing in the cell he could pretend an interest in. “I hope I am,” he murmured without conviction.

In the silence he heard the slamming of a distant door, then a tuneless humming closer by. Then Smith was saying, “You have a sinister guest there.” And Juleson turned to see Smith frowning at the vampire drawing just above his own head.

“He hasn't tapped me,” Juleson said lightly. “Apparently the moon isn't full.”

“I've had several talks with the boy who drew it, a very strange boy, and curiously passive now. That figure is his ... totem, his real identity, and he gets something of his own expression into the eyes ...” Dr. Smith paused, his gaze still fixed on the drawing as if there were something about it he failed to understand. Then he sighed, and added, “But the boy will shortly be Dr. Erlenmeyer's responsibility, not mine—Paul, I've decided to resign.”