On the Yard (33 page)

“What's the shit?” Caterpillar asked.

“Nothing much. I want you to put a stud on the night gym list for me.”

“Okay. What's his name and number?”

“I'll let you know in a day or two. I just wanted to make sure the list was still cool.”

“We keep it cool.” Caterpillar smiled. “I hear you latched on to a broadski.”

“I got one stuck in my cell if that's what you mean.”

Caterpillar laughed. “You stick her, Chilly?”

“You know I don't play.”

“I know you say you don't. I thought maybe you were beginning to mellow a taste.”

“Mellow? You mean go soft in the head.”

“Ah, what the hell, Chilly,” Caterpillar said equitably, “what difference does it make? Hips, lips, or armpits—I don't turn nothing down.”

“They say, if you pitch, you'll catch. Any truth in that?”

“I ain't been tempted yet.” Caterpillar turned his head to the side. “But maybe if you give me a little kiss on the ear.”

“No, I hate to hurt your feelings, Cat, but I got better-looking stuff in the cell.”

“Chilly, you're supposed to have the best of everything.”

“I'll still pass. And I'll check you later.”

Chilly found both Nunn and Red in the boxing section watching the elimination bouts to determine who would fight on the next card. He made a few bets and won three boxes before it was time to close the gym. He passed the cigarettes to Caterpillar and walked back across the yard with Nunn and Red. The moon was vivid now, a few days from full.

“Did I catch good with Candy?” Red asked.

“Sure,” Chilly said. “You fascinated her.”

When he returned to his cell, the boy was in bed and apparently asleep. He found a note on his pillow. It was signed “Candy.” He scanned it, getting the gist that Candy “liked him a lot” and wanted “to give him a party.” Chilly tore the note up and tossed it in the toilet.

“Don't write me any more notes,” he said harshly.

S
TICK HAD
read every scrap of material Morris Price had collected on the art of ballooning, and he was able to check Morris's figures on the lifting power of balloons of various sizes. The vessel under construction—it shaped up now as a long thin tube—should raise between one hundred and seventy-five and two hundred and fifty pounds.

Morris, never quite satisfied, was trying a new stitch he had learned from a sailing manual, and Stick watched him complete a seam, paint it with latex glue and test it by determining that it would hold water.

“That's good enough,” Stick said.

“How do you know?” Morris had been turning testy, and now he stared resentfully at Stick.

“It won't leak.”

“It's got to be right.”

“It'll be keen. And if it works for you, maybe I'll try it.”

“It'd still be cool,” Morris agreed, some enthusiasm coming into his eyes. “They're never going to figure how I made it. I'll just be gone.” He snapped his fingers at the ceiling. “Just like that. Into thin air.”

“What're you going to do then?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, where you going to go?”

“I hadn't thought too much about it. Maybe Mexico. Canada, maybe, and maybe I'll catch a ship somewhere.”

“You gotta have a plan,” Stick warned severely, but apparently Morris could see no further than the rising balloon, and while he could, and frequently did, picture this vividly, he only had the vaguest impression of its coming down.

Stick watched the progress of the balloon with as much patience as he could generate, and meanwhile he had the job for Chilly Willy to think about. In the next few days he was able to determine that the Hit, for that was how he thought of Juleson, the Hit moved in a limited pattern that never seemed to vary. He went from the yard to the ed building and back again with an occasional side trip to the library. He couldn't be beaten in the ed building because there was always a guard on duty, and there wasn't any point along his daily route where an ambush was practical. This left the library. And it wasn't the safest place to attack a man, but it did have several attractive features—the long semi-tunnels formed by the bookshelves were often deserted, and there was only a civilian librarian in charge and he was frequently gone for long periods. Further, it was possible to predict that the Hit would be in the library at noon whenever he appeared on the yard in the morning with more than one book. It would have to be the library.

Stick was still assigned to the laundry in the morning, but he made a point of spending his afternoons in the library, thumbing through a pictorial history of the Second World War, so he would be considered a familiar figure. He noted that the nonfiction stacks near the rear of the room were lightly used. He removed a heavy metal handle from a piece of laundry equipment and smuggled it into the library, where he hid it behind a set of religious books on one of the lower shelves. The books were coated with dust and hadn't been checked out for five years.

All through this period he continued to caution himself: “Be keen.” Involved in an actual plan of some complexity, he spent less time in the grip of fantasy. When he rehearsed what he would do, as he did many times each day, he saw himself working with his own hands, his own muscles, his own mind. True, there was an aura in these enactments, one of mastery, and his own figure was always followed by an individual spotlight, but he sometimes thought of things that might go wrong and considered how he would protect himself against them. He had stopped marking the Vampire design wherever he went.

Still he planned ahead. He spent a major part of his mornings in the laundry adding details to the uniform he would wear. The guards' uniforms were dry-cleaned in the same plant, occasionally the metal buttons were lost. Stick now had four of them. He needed to replace the leather band on his hat with metal, and he had managed to steal another inmate's watch for the expansion band. He needed two more bands. There was a clothing repair shop above the laundry and he had intimidated one of the inmates assigned to a sewing machine and forced him to remodel a denim work coat into an Eisenhower jacket. He had fashioned shoulder patches out of sheeting and rendered them with colored pencils he had stolen from the desk of the inmate clerk. He needed more leather. Leather was important. But more than anything he needed boots.

He allowed the Hit to use the library once while he drifted behind him. Keen, he was getting keener. He saw that the Hit had trouble finding anything he wanted to read. He searched the shelves from end to end, sometimes standing for minutes reading the beginning of a book only to replace it. The Hit never paid any attention to who was around him. People had to ask him to move so they could get by. He's unconscious, Stick decided, and he saw half a dozen opportunities to come down on him before he finally checked out two books and left.

Stick watched through the library window as the Hit walked towards the ed building. Enjoy them books, he thought.

That night in the cell, Morris began to put the last two sections together. He had fashioned a harness from strips of cloth braided into ropes. Two more of these ropes sewn to the middle of the balloon were to act as tethers.

“When it's full,” he told Stick, “I'll cut it loose, and—” Again his hand described the magic moment.

“You speak any Mexican?” Stick asked.

“Hell, no.”

“How you figure to make it down there with them Pancho Villas?”

“I don't know for sure I'll go there. Like I said, maybe I'll grab a ship.”

“Ship to where?”

“I don't know. I ain't got no definite plan. Hell, if I could go where I wanted, I'd go to Fresno. I had a woman in Fresno once.”

“You can't be fucking around with no woman,” Stick said severely.

“She's gone. I looked for her a half-a-dozen times. Pretty nice old girl. She was real artistic. She used to work in a bakery icing cakes, you know, putting all that fancy stuff on them?”

“You're not keen enough for that balloon,” Stick said.

Morris, who had often been told he was not enough of one thing or another, bowed his head over his work. “I was keen enough to think of it and keen enough to do it. I meet a lot of guys who talk about getting out of here—they're hard and sharp as crocodile teeth, they say. Well, they're still walking that big yard and they'll be walking it after I'm gone.”

“I didn't say you weren't keen on the balloon side, but you got to scheme ahead.”

Morris was tearing out the seam he had been working on, slashing at the stiff black thread with a razor blade.

“What're you doing?” Stick demanded.

“Pick, pick, pick,” Morris cried. “You'd think this was
your
balloon. But it ain't, it's mine and it's going to be right when I use it. I ain't building no parachute just in case. It's got to be right.”

“What was the matter with what you done?”

But Morris wouldn't answer him.

S
OMEONE
in the cells around Juleson was trying to learn the saxophone. Every night the first awkward and mournful notes began to sound immediately after the music bell rang at seven-thirty, and Juleson pictured the aspiring musician assembling his horn, adjusting his reed, and waiting with the instrument in his mouth so he wouldn't waste a second of the hour allowed to him for practice, correctly assuming he needed every moment of it.

At other times Juleson tried to picture the animal he would imagine if he didn't know these sounds were made by a man, and he saw a small—the big voice was obvious camouflage—sorrowing, cowardly creature the color of sunbaked mud, crouched in the far corner of its cage, its feet soiled with its own filth, but its eyes hopeful in spite of their manifest stupidity. Large, round, dull eyes, stained with hope, while its bell-shaped muzzle throbbed and quivered with a frustrated need to communicate.

For several evenings the saxophonist had been trying to learn “I Only Have Eyes for You.” He rushed anxiously through the first bars like a broad jumper gaining momentum for some final leap and invariably tripped over the accidental in the eighth measure, sprawled, fumbled around, and, undaunted, started over.

For Juleson this tune formed a key that held the power to unlock painful memories. The key didn't always insist upon its right to union with the lock, the memories were not always painful—their brighter hues and darker shadows had been scorched and faded by too many repetitions of his remorse. Even if he had felt it as an obligation he could not have maintained the vigor of his original suffering. For months at a time he did not remember at all, and at other times he seemed to be engaged in a ritual. He sensed that his entire inner show of concern was overstructured, that except for rare moments even his grief and shame lacked naturalness.

At seven-thirty he was reading the first of the two books he had checked out—
A Short History of Iceland
—when the bell rang and the horn sounded behind it, the small creature roused by the larger, and Manning said, from the bottom bunk, “There's your friend.”

“Where does he get the energy? The hopefulness?”

Manning, busy with his own work, didn't answer, and Juleson allowed himself to see another saxophonist of not much greater skill, standing in solo stance, his posture more practiced than his music, on the small stage at the end of the Italian-American Social Club where the friends and relations of the bride had gathered to acknowledge the union of Anna Marie Patello and Paul Juleson. A function of the tribe, he had thought, but he had been uncomfortable as a stranger. “Who is this boy Anna Marie's marrying?” Several times during the course of the evening he had been asked if he were Italian. His dark hair and deep tan prompted the question, and he would have been glad to answer yes.

The five-piece band, high school musicians, had been an economy. For days before the wedding various amateur groups had been phoning Anna's home to offer their services at the reception. The leader of a western group had been particularly persistent, blandly unable to comprehend that his recitation of the costumes and specialties offered by his group seemed as inappropriate to Mrs. Patello as a chorus of Bantu drummers.

“Get an accordion,” Mr. Patello hollered. “That's all you need—an accordion.”

“Papa, these kids don't want no accordion.”

“What'sa matter with an accordion?”

It was impossible to tell him. The leader of the high school group—“combo” was the word they used—turned up as the son of one of Mrs. Patello's friends. He and the other boys were willing to perform for five dollars apiece and all they could eat. They were not a bargain.

Anna Marie had requested “I Only Have Eyes for You,” and presented herself to him, moving through the gathering dancers, tiny, finally, on this night, confident, her luminous complexion, fine eyes, and off-center teeth all held up to him, all she had to give, as they danced.

“I had this played for you,” she said.

“I saw you talking to young Stan Kenton.”

“His name's Raymond Florio.”

“Your mother told me. I was just making a joke.”

Her arm tightened around his neck. “Do you know what Mother's Avon lady said? She said we danced beautifully together and if we passed through life as beautifully as we danced everything would always be wonderful for us.”

“Is the Avon lady here?”

“Everyone's here.”

It was true. For Anna Marie, everyone was there. Close to five hundred people, only a few of them known to Paul. An Army buddy had dropped in to haunt the bar like a stained shadow, and a former teacher, who now lived in San Francisco, had put in an appearance.

“You look tired, Paul,” she had observed.

“It's the excitement.”