Cast the First Stone (13 page)

“But if you give the commissary clerk a handout he’ll furnish you with tailor-made shirts. You pay for everything,” he said. “Maybe you don’t know it but they charge you for your clothes, your food and all the medicine you get from the hospital. That’s why nobody ever has any earnings when they turn ‘em loose. You know we’re supposed to be getting eighteen cents a day for working in here but some of these poor bastards work for twenty years in here and when they go home all they get is the lousy ten-dollar bill the state gives them.”

“Hell, you can get that if you don’t do a lick of work,” I said.

“Sure. You get more for not working than you do for working. That’s why I don’t do any work. You don’t get nothing but a pain in the ass from working.”

“You get the t.b. if you work in the mills,” I said. I’d heard that.

“Work in those mills and get the t.b. and die and then they won’t even give you nothing but a plain wood box to be buried in.” We were just shooting the bull to pass off the time; neither of us really gave a damn about it.

“The only thing you get in here worth a damn for your earnings is some teeth,” he said. “They’ll give you some gold teeth.”

“Yeah? I didn’t know that.”

“Sure, they’ll give you gold teeth. But they ain’t worth a damn. They’re about ninety-per cent brass and canker in your mouth. They turn green in a week and give you cancer of the stomach. A son of a bitch’s got the toothache, so he figures he’ll get some gold teeth. Next goddamn thing he’s got the cancer and is dead as hell. It don’t pay. If you ever have any dentist work done you better pay for it out your pocket.”

“Can you do that?”

“Sure. You can buy anything in this joint you want. Whisky, dope. You can pay these guards to take letters out for you. They’ll bring in stuff for you, too. I got a buddy in the construction company who it costs a hundred dollars a month, at the very least, just to live in here. Hell, I used to buy three meals a day myself. I used to have a big radio set but it cost me so much to keep it up I had to sell it.”

I was getting tired of his crap by then. “Damn right,” I said, ending it. “Everything in here’s a racket.”

“That’s the setup,” he said. “The only thing you can get plenty of in here, without paying for it in some way or another, is hell.”

“And that’s free,” I said. And that wasn’t a lie, I found out. That was the solid truth.

9

T
HERE WERE MANY
things that happened during that time but all of them that I remember happening, happened to me. They happened to me in sight and in feeling and in smelling and in hearing; emotionally and spiritually. The seasons happened to me. Spring was as heady as a drink of rare old wine, and white clouds in a high blue summer sky happened to me like a choking up of tears. The routine happened to me and the discipline; and being locked up with Starlight to smell his unique stink which he said came from being poisoned by Jap wine in the war; and the sight of the convicts happened to me. Nights happened to me and made me want to see the sky and the stars and smell it out at night.

But nothing lingered, neither the shocks, nor the scares, nor the laughs, nor the hurts. Nothing had a past or a future and when the feeling or the emotion happened, stirring up its definite sensation, that was all. I could not bring it back to conjure up that laugh again, nor could it come back of its own accord to bring those tears.

Each moment was absolute, like a still-life photograph; each happening lived its span and died, unrelated to the ones that came before and afterward. A day was not the seventh part of a week, but in itself infinity.

I thought through seeing and smelling and feeling, and many times I was deeply touched, angered, sickened, amused, frustrated, shocked, but none of these outlived the sensation which spawned them—the simple sound, the simple smell. Everything was an odor, a sound, a picture; hot or cold, blunt or sharp, amusing or irritating.

That was present tense. It was timeless, governed neither by the seasons nor the years, neither by the past nor the future, but in itself complete. It was not automatic because there was thought in it; nor was it meditative because that almost always is retrospective and it was not retrospective. What it was, in fact, as any old-timer could have told me, I was simply doing time.

But although there was thought in it, it was not necessary to think in order to survive. Everything necessary to survival was in a pattern, an old and musty pattern that some poor convict had used before you got there, and which some poor convict would use after you were gone, and which, like the gray stone walls, was eternal. There was no need for retrospection, nor introspection, nor even experience. If you had never lived before, anywhere at all, you still would have no need to know how it was done, as it was all down in the pattern.

The things that happened in the pattern are not the things which stand out most clearly in recollection, but are the things which are completely gone. Only the pattern is remembered, such as dinner, which is not remembered as the midday meal on a Tuesday, February 21st, but as two thousand six hundred and forty-five midday meals strung out like an endless chain of plates of beans and potatoes and cabbage. The things which stand out clearly are those which were done in contradiction or discord with the pattern. So it was with the things that happened to me during my time in the soup company.

The first day of spring happened, but it happened only on the calendar. The day itself was cold and dreary with the bleakness that comes alone to prison—gray, gray top, gray bottom, gray men, gray walls, dull-toned and unrelieved, with the sky so low you could feel the weight of it on your shoulders. At first there was slush underfoot, soggy and soot-blackened, and then the rains came. I learned then what they meant by it never rains in prison. We marched through the rain with our caps pulled low and our collars turned high.

“Take those hands out your pocket! You had ‘em out all winter, now you don’t want to get them wet.”

It was not raining. Fog was the only thing that kept us in our cells.

The warden had us new men over to talk to us. He was the remnants of a large man gone to seed, dressed in an expensive suit made for that man and much too large in the shoulders for the remnant of the man, and too small in the waistline for where he had all gone to. His head was practically bald and his face, seamed and sagging, looked as if it had melted through the years and had run down into his jowls which, in turn, had dripped like flaccid tallow onto his belly. His shoulders had sagged down onto his belly too, so that now his whole skinny frame seemed built to keep his belly off the ground. He had sickly white, vein-laced hands which made one nauseated to look at them. He wore a huge diamond on his second finger.

What he said, boiled down, was simply that he was tough. That any man so completely decayed could wield the power to make himself tough to four thousand human beings so much stronger was a sickening realization.

That night Nig and the night guard had it. Nig was yelling up to some convict on 3-10 and the guard, walking down the second range, heard him. The guard stopped, took the cigar from his mouth, spat on the range, and called below, “Pipe down, down there! What the hell you think this is, a levee camp?” He was standing in front of our cell.

“Come down and make me,” Nig called up.

The guard reddened. He was a young, medium-built, dark-haired man with a bluish growth of whiskers. Instead of the regulation uniform he wore a pin-striped, double-breasted blue suit. He kept his coat unbuttoned so we could see the bright butt of the thirty-eight special he wore in the shoulder holster, and after seeing the gun we could smell narcissus perfume, whisky and cheap cigars. That always made me think of whores—the lousy kind. “I’ll come down and break your skull, you black nigger bastard!” he snarled.

“Come on.”

Someone laughed. He rushed down the range, tugging at his gun. I was excited.

“Come on down, punk,” Nig said.

“What’ll he do to him?” I asked Starlight.

“Who? You mean what’ll Short Britches do to Nig?”

I nodded.

“Nothing. He’s not even going down there. Nig’s one bad nigger. He’s got some old white canvas gloves he puts on and he fights these roaches as fast as they can gang up. Man, he can knock a man down without even drawing back. I’ve seen him fighting so many of them they hit each other’s sticks hitting at him, and every time he hit one of them he’d knock ‘im down.”

“Yeah?” I didn’t believe it. He wasn’t my hero. “Why don’t they shoot him?”

“Aw, Jumpy Stone thinks he’s crazy. He won’t let them shoot him.”

“Yeah.” But he was wrong about the guard not going down there.

Pretty soon I heard the guard down below. “What’s the matter with you, Nig?”

“Aw, take it easy, punk. Gimme one of those good smellin’ cigars you’re smoking.”

“You know it’s against the rules to talk out of your cell.”

“Aw, forget about it, punk. Gimme a cigar.”

After a time, after the guard had gone and we couldn’t even hear his footsteps, I saw the bluish cigar smoke coming up over the range and smelt the smoking cigar. It looked to me as if Nig was the tough one in that prison.

But the next night I changed my mind in favor of the guard. He took two convicts out of their cells, sapped them with his blackjack, and locked them back again. “Now let that be a lesson.”

The block was silent. Then someone yelled from down at the far end, on top somewhere, “Lay down, you bastard.”

“I’ll come up there and sap you, too.”

“You’ll come up here and get this.” But the convict knew that the guard couldn’t locate him.

The night after that two colored convicts down below got to arguing after the lights had gone out. The guard went down to quiet them in the rough.

“Oh! Oh! Please doan hit me no mo’, cap’n. Please doan hit me no mo’, cap’n. Ah wasn’t doin’ nuttin’.”

“Short Britches got him another one,” Starlight said.

“What the hell’s the matter with you black bastards? Every damn night you get into an argument.”

“Cap’n, Ah wasn’t doin’ nuttin. It’s him. He walks all night an’ keeps me wake.”

“What’s the matter with you, nigger?”

There was no answer. I had a feeling that the whole cell block was awake and listening.

“Smart nigger, eh? Come on out of there!” I heard the slight suction of the gun being pulled from the oiled holster, the snap of the safety, or perhaps the cocking of the trigger. It was very quiet. “Come out or I’ll blow you out.”

“Aw, let that poor bastard alone, he’s crazy,” someone up on our range said.

“Come out, goddammit!”

The Negro came out. His coat was half on, his cap was on backwards. He was coal black and African-looking.

Starlight was standing on the stool so he could get a better view below. “That’s Marcus,” he whispered. “He’s really crazy.”

The guard kicked Marcus. After they’d come out on the range I could see them from my upper bunk. Marcus started to run, then stopped suddenly, looking back over his shoulder at the guard, grinning, his eyes white slits in his blank stupid face. He looked crazy as hell. It gave me the creeps. Then he ran out of sight and the guard went out of sight after him. I heard the outer door open and bang shut. I slid back beneath the covers.

“Short Britches is just trying to be like Two-gun Tracy,” Starlight said. “We had a young guard in here named Tracy. About my size. He was a real sport…”

I wasn’t listening. About fifteen minutes later I heard distant gunshots; one, then two more, then one, then a whole fusillade. Then silence.

“That was inside,” Starlight said.

“Say, you hear shooting?” a voice called from above.

“Yeah, sounded like it was inside,” came a reply.

“Wonder who it could be?”

“Damned if I know. Did they take that colored fellow out?”

“I don’t know.”

“Hey, down there! Hey, down there on 1-10. Did they take that fellow out?”

No reply. The colored convicts weren’t talking.

“Hey, they just killed Marcus,” someone called from the first cell, either on our range or down below on 1-10.

“Where…?”

“Who killed him…?”

“Was he the colored fellow…?”

“The dirty sons of bitches! Who did it…?”

“Short Britches shot him first—”

“He says Short Britches shot him first—”

“Shut up, goddammit, I can hear him!”

“Kish and Short Britches and the night captain were beating him with a piece of pipe, out in front of the hole, and he broke and ran—”

“They wanted him to run.”

“Sure, that’s why they didn’t take him inside where he couldn’t run.”

“Short Britches shot at him first, then the night captain. He ran around behind the hospital down by the coal company. The wall guard saw them shooting at him and cut loose with his machine gun—”

“Why, the dirty son…Why, the dirty…” Whoever he was he couldn’t find a suitable word.

“A damn dirty shame,” Starlight said. “That guy was really nuts.”

Well, that wouldn’t bring him back, I thought. “How the hell do those guys down there in the first cells know so much about it?”

“Aw, some guard told them. These guards can’t keep nothing to themselves.”

There was plenty talk, lasting up into the night.

And then Blackie and Wop got into a fight up in the idle house one day. A big good-natured guard, called Big Irish, went down and parted them. It was during the dull hours of the afternoon and Big Irish wanted to get in the remainder of his nap, so he didn’t take them to the hole.

Demotte, another guard, gray-haired and squat with a blunt mean face, wasn’t satisfied. He went in between the benches to get Blackie to take him to the hole. When Blackie passed Wop, who seemed to be getting off, he hit him on the nose without warning. Blood spurted from Wop’s nose and as he staggered up Blackie hit him again. Then Demotte hit Blackie across the back of the head with his stick, and Blackie went down like a sack of cement.

Four convicts jumped up and hit at Demotte at the same time. He ducked one, but the other three hit him. He tried to protect himself but they were on top of him. Someone jerked his stick from his hand and beat him across the head until blood matted in his hair. He fell down between the benches, and the convict with the stick bent over and kept hitting at him.