On the Yard (7 page)

“That's your shelf,” Juleson said, having followed Manning's brief inspection. “For your toilet gear and anything like letters you want to keep. Have you been here before?”

“No, this is my first time.”

“I thought it might be. These cells were originally designed for one man. It's a hardship, but you get used to it.”

“It was the same in the county jail. Always crowded. Men sleeping on the floor.”

Juleson smiled and his somber eyes flickered. “The jail business is picking up. When they built this place they had no idea how popular it was going to become.”

Manning walked to the rear of the cell and looked at the toilet. It had not been designed for comfort and below the waterline the bowl was deeply stained. “You hear about these places all your life,” he said quietly, “but you never quite realize they exist in the same world you live in.”

“I'm not sure they do. If there is an underworld, this is it. I've talked to men who have pulled time all over the country and they say it's the same everywhere. Here, I'll help you make up your bunk.”

The routine task was grotesquely complicated by the confines of the cell, but Juleson showed Manning the method by which countless convicts had assisted each other to make their beds over the years. When the bunk was square Juleson jumped back into the upper and picked up his book.

“This is my fix,” he said. “I lead other people's lives.”

Manning slipped into the lower, and lay face up staring at the metal webbing bellied down in the rough contours of Juleson's body. Every time Juleson shifted to turn a page the entire bunk swayed. The subtle feeling that he wasn't well began to come on Manning again, and, even as he thought about it, his lips seemed to be swelling, growing thick and hypersensitive. A stitch ran down his side.

“What would happen if you took sick while you were locked up like this?” he asked.

“We'd rattle the bars until someone came to see what was wrong.” Juleson's face appeared, upside down, over the edge of his bunk. “What's the matter? Don't you feel well?”

“I feel all right—I just wondered.”

“The medical attention isn't bad. Sometimes you might get a fast shuffle on the sick line, but you have to remember that every shuck in the prison's in that line trying to play on the doctors for a cell pass, or a few days in the hospital. But if they see you're really sick, you probably get better attention here than you would on the streets. A lot of high-class specialists donate their time over here.”

Manning wanted to continue the conversation, but he couldn't think of anything to say. He nodded to signify his thanks and Juleson went back to his book. Manning rolled over on his side, and his breath came with the tension of the awareness that he was breathing at all. His throat was thickening again.

“Shine em up!” someone said sharply outside the cell. Manning rose up to find himself staring into a pair of violently bitter eyes—green as he would imagine the deepest shades in the heart of an iceberg.

“Take off, Slim,” Juleson said from the upper bunk.

“Ain't talking to you. I'm asking this new fellow if he'd like to get his shoes shined.”

“I'm telling you to get out of here,” Juleson said with greater force. “Now move on, you unclassifiable degenerate.”

“Talk smart, don't you.”

“Get!”

The man slipped away, his eyes lingering over Manning's feet as he left.

“Who was that?” Manning asked.

“Sanitary Slim. He's some kind of machinery. He always comes around and hits on the fish to shine their shoes. It's an obsession with him—he's got it like cancer.”

Bells began to ring and minutes later the men from the yard were beginning to file in. More bells, and they stood up at the bars to be counted. Still another bell, and they were released, tier by tier, for dinner. Manning followed after Juleson and they entered what appeared to be an enormous cafeteria. They waited near the end of a long line that was passing in front of the steam table. Somehow Manning had expected silence, but the air was heavy with the shuffling blur of private conversation multiplied many times over and punctuated with the sharp clicking of metal on metal, speeded by repetition until it seemed like the whirring of a cloud of aluminum crickets, and added to this was the deeper racket caused by the beating of dippers against the trays as they were passed along the steam table. Manning closed his eyes.

“Hey,” Juleson said quietly.

“I'll be all right.”

“Believe me, you get used to all this—and maybe that's the worst thing that happens to you.”

The food was better than the food he had been eating in the county jail, but he had no appetite for it. He picked at the edge of his fish, and drank half a cup of black coffee.

“Aren't you going to eat?” Juleson asked tentatively.

“No, I'm not hungry.”

“May I have your fish? And the pie if you don't want it?”

“Certainly, help yourself.”

Juleson hesitated, then drew Manning's tray next to his own. “I'm always hungry,” he said in an apologetic tone.

Another bell sounded to send them filing from the mess hall, back to the cells. Again Juleson settled down with his book and Manning lay beneath him listening to the dry
flick, flick
as he turned the pages. Manning's mind began to move relentlessly towards the inventory he knew he had to take, and had been putting off ever since he heard the judge intoning “... as the law prescribes.” And with those words killed Manning right there in front of his bench, executed his past and all the meaningful continuity of his life, destroyed Willard Manning and left an unknown in his place, a man whose nature and future he was afraid to guess at.

He was forty-four and it was apparent. He was soft and his wind was going. He had an incipient hernia, and definite hemorrhoids and there was no way to guess what illness and disabilities might be waiting in the gradual deterioration of his health. His upper teeth were false, and one dentist had already advised him to have the lowers extracted as well.

He didn't know how old he would be when they handed him back the right to wage economic war. But he might well be fifty. How would he survive? Who was going to hire a middle-aged, unbonded accountant with no record of previous employment? Who was going to hire a morals offender even with his excellent employment record? Yes, they would reason, but who knows what ideas he may have picked up in prison, what friends he might have made, schemes entered into. Why risk it? He's fifty anyway. They say you can never cure a sex offender.

What would he do? It seemed hopeless—at best the rest of his years would shiver in the shadow of his former life. But it never occurred to Manning to give up.

As he was falling asleep, he tried to remember the date. It seemed important he know what day it was, but he wasn't surprised when this simple fact eluded him. It was only by going back to the day of his arrest, when all normal time had ceased, and working forward week by week, that he was finally able to tell himself that it was November the 16th.

P
AUL JULESON
read for an hour and forty-five minutes. Then he put his book aside, sat up tailor fashion, and started to roll a cigarette. He used the state-issue tobacco—it was free, but not exactly a bargain. There were two types available—a fine powdery rolling tobacco, called “dust”—and a pipe cut which wasn't quite inferior enough to warrant a derisive nickname. Originally the state tobacco was thought of as an important step forward in the advance of penal reforms because just previous to the first free issue two men had been killed for debt—between them they had owed four bags of Bull Durham. If the prison were to process tobacco and make it available to everyone, no one need die because he had borrowed a sack of Bull Durham he couldn't repay. But they had reckoned without the universal contempt for welfare of any kind, and the specifically convict resentment of anything provided by the state. The only inmates who smoked the tobacco were those who had absolutely nothing else and no way of getting anything and were still so lacking in pride they could acknowledge this publicly. It was widely held, though Juleson did not agree, that the state tobacco was deliberately spoiled, held to the lowest quality, so no one could possibly prefer it to the tailor-mades and pipe tobaccos sold on the inmate canteen at retail prices and, presumably, retail profits.

Juleson smoked the pipe cut, after first picking out the twigs and gravel and straining it through a piece of window screen. Sometimes he even washed it in an effort to eliminate the ancient musty taste that was its indelible hallmark. After that it wasn't too bad. But hard to roll. The smoke he was now finishing up bulged ominously in the middle. He frowned, studying his product—the paper was weakened with his saliva and if he tried to smooth out the hump he would probably tear the roll in two. He shrugged and lit up. He couldn't get the damn things rolled right. He'd been fooling with them for three years, five months, and some days, and he still couldn't roll a decent smoke.

Don't ask me, he said to the silent companion in the back of his head, I don't know why I don't quit. The flame started to trace up the seam as it will on a loosely rolled cigarette, but by holding it carefully in two fingers he managed to smoke some of it before it fell apart scattering coals and tobacco over his pants. He brushed the fire onto the floor. He still wanted a smoke.

Why didn't he find some comfortable way to earn a few packs a week? He thought, as he so often had, of the various methods available, but they were all such desperate shifts—little more than outright begging—selling your desserts, washing another man's socks and underwear. If you wanted to take the risk you could stand point for one of the poker or dice games, or run for one of the big yard books. You could make home brew and sell it. And at the bottom of the pile—or the top, Juleson acknowledged, depending upon your point of view—you could hire out for beatings, knifings, and other collection or revenge work.

As he knew from many previous reviews, he didn't want to do any of these things, or rather he didn't want the cigarettes badly enough to lower himself a little deeper into the greasy sump he conceived of as the institution's aggregate spirit —there were acids there which could dissolve the identity.

He had returned to his book before he remembered his birthday. He would be thirty next week. Not difficult to understand how he had forgotten it. Turning thirty in jail was many times more disturbing than turning twenty or twenty-five, just as the older prisoners always seemed more pathetic than the younger. It was the degree to which a significant part of an inmate's life was committed to the prison, and this degree had nothing to do with the amount of time he had been imprisoned, but was determined by the time he had left in life in which he could hope to be free of it. In passing thirty Juleson felt he had left behind, necessarily forever, the possibility that he would be freed as a young man. And he could resent this and regret it at the same time as he harbored the conviction that he did not deserve to ever be released. But the birthday check ...

An aunt, who made her home in the state of Washington, always sent him a five-dollar money order for his birthday. Over the years the amount had never varied—he received the first the year he had turned ten and five dollars glittered like all possible fortune. And now twenty years later it would only buy two cartons of cigarettes, and yet that seemed no less a fortune. It wouldn't be necessary for the check to come, he could borrow a carton tomorrow at 3 for 2, the standard rate of interest. Chilly Willy, the biggest of the lenders, had stuff stashed all over the institution. A carton to him was no more than a wet butt.

Juleson picked up his book, but he couldn't get back into it. When he had first come to prison he had been able to loan himself to the most obvious fiction, timeworn devices held him enthralled simply because no matter how impoverished they were, or lacking in freshness, they were more interesting than the life around him. But over the years he was losing the capacity to respond. He sometimes spent his entire lunch hour prowling the shelves in the library without finding a single book he could read with pleasure. With many the tone and content of the first page was sufficient to cause him to return them to the shelf, and even with those books he checked out there were still a number he later discovered he couldn't read. He sometimes withdrew as many as twenty-five books a week, and when he found one he could enjoy it was an event in his life. He had long since read the world's classics, and current novels by first-rate writers were in great demand, and it was only rarely he was able to find one of them on the open shelves. Still he continued to read constantly. There was nothing else to do.

His new cell partner appeared to be asleep. He was fortunate to have drawn this apparently decent man. He wondered how Manning would fit into the prison zoo. Would he hop around and grunt and apologize continually because he wasn't covered with fur, or would he adopt Juleson's own strategy and hide out in a corner watching the animals from a distance and taking every precaution necessary to keep free of them in all essential ways?

It was too early to expect to fall asleep, but he undressed and got under the covers. He stared up at the mottled ceiling and automatically the defenses he had raised against his memories moved in to protect him. He refused to remember even after three and a half years, but his sense of loss still retained its power to punish him. In his unguarded moments he missed small things—the sound of high heels on a pavement, sweet smells, and the pleasure he had found riding home on the bus after a day's work. He missed dogs and children.

He drifted into one of his favorite fantasies in which he had the power of teleportation and could move anything anywhere just by thinking it was where he wanted it. He flew out over the prison above the solid square heart of interlocking cellblocks, over the cream stucco and red tile of the education building, where in another incarnation he had once worked, he passed along the length of the old industrial building and around the walls that closed in the lower yard, noting the laundry, the foundry, the power plant, and pausing to float high above the sally port he caused its double gates to be deposited in the Sahara. Then he drifted over the athletic field and dispatched the metal goalposts to the Gobi. Turning back to the old industrial building he removed all the fire escapes that clung to it like blackened ivy and lodged them on a glacier north of Mount Doonerak. He stripped the gun rail from the north block and watched it vanish into the Brazilian rain forest. The all-clear light followed. The chair from the gas chamber, an apple green with sturdy straps, he deposited in the governor's mansion, drawn up to the table ready for the governor's breakfast.