Cast the First Stone (18 page)

In the morning, before breakfast, some of us slipped outside of the dormitory and went around to the other side—the side toward the walls—to examine the bullet holes.

“Hey, look, there’s the rope they used.”

We looked up and saw a knotted chain of sheets swinging from the bars of the ventilator intake, high up the side of the sheer stone wall of the front cell house. By that time guards were converging on us from every quarter and we beat it back inside of the dormitory. Some of the fellows got caught and taken to the hole.

Later that day we learned that Fred Veeders, the kid I’d spoken to in school the day before, and his brother, Harry, and a crippled convict named Tap Spence had escaped from their cell in 6-1 by digging through the reinforced concrete walls. They had walked down the catwalk between the 1&2 cells, to the end of the cell house where there was an iron ladder leading up to the outside window.

The narrow space between the cells was necessary to install and repair the plumbing and electrical installations. They had then sawed through two of the window bars and lowered the sheet to the catwalk atop the forty-foot section of outside wall connecting the 1&2 cell block with the main west wall, and separating the prison proper from the honor men’s dormitory. Although this section of prison wall was the same as the regular outside walls, beyond it was the enclosed dormitory and in order to escape one had to go down it to the west wall. There was a guard tower in the corner where the wall abutted and two power spotlights cast their beams at right angles down the two walls. Just inside, and below this wall, was the death house with its black slanting roof, and beside the death house was a heavy plate steel door opening into the back yard of the honor men’s dormitory.

In order to lower themselves from the ventilator intake of the cell house to the catwalk the men were exposed the full route in the blinding glare of the corner spotlight; which would have made them visible even to a casual window-gazer in a passing train a half mile down the railroad tracks which ran outside the walls. After reaching the catwalk they had to walk straight into the glare of light, behind which the wall guard should have been sitting with his machine gun trained on them. But the tower guard was asleep. It seemed impossible for these three convicts to have known he would be asleep on this particular night at this particular hour. They could not see him for all the blinding light which they had to pass through after coming from the black, dark passage between the cells. Nevertheless, he was asleep. They slipped up on him and took his rifle and submachine gun and riot gun and gas gun, and beat him unconscious and tossed him down on the cinders which covered that portion of the prison yard.

After that they evidently waited for the night yard guard to come around the dormitory on his nightly patrol, and then cut loose at him with the rifle and submachine gun. They didn’t hit the guard, however. He was the guard who had killed Red Swayzee back of the hospital that night and we were all sorry that he wasn’t killed.

But the guard ducked back around the corner of the dormitory and, from its protection, returned the convicts’ fire. He was joined by a number of other guards. The three convicts remained in the corner tower shooting at the guards during the whole half hour, without any guards going outside and attacking them from that side. Finally the convict named Tap Spence was shot in the thigh. The Veeders brothers jumped to the ground outside. When Tap made the jump his thigh, which had been shot, split open like a burst watermelon. The Veeders brothers had to leave him there to die while they made their escape. They left the submachine gun with him and two loaded clips. Tap wouldn’t let anybody get close to him and finally he was shot by a guard sergeant who mounted the wall by means of a ladder from the inside, and pumped a submachine gun full of bullets down into him from atop the wall. While I still remembered them the Veeders brothers were never caught.

And there were some who were killed by the due process of the law. They were first electrocuted and then the prison doctor ran a long thin needle through their hearts.

There had been quite a lot in the newspapers about Doctor Snodgrass ever since it had been discovered that he was the one who had killed the girl. The papers were full of it all during the trial and after the conviction and they got full of it again, shortly before the date of execution.

He was a well-known surgeon from Springfield, out of a socially prominent family. The girl, whom he had killed by knocking her in the head with a hammer, then severing some important arteries by sticking a knife blade up her ears and reaming them out, was a college student. He had given her Spanish fly during the period of their intimacy in order to teach her various manners of sex degeneracy, and they had smoked marijuana weed together and blown their tops during their sex-maddened tea jags; and he had finally, “in order to obtain complete satisfaction, utterly debased himself before her, receiving the exaltation of his sensation from the stimulation of his utter debasement—” That’s what the little pamphlets said, which sold for twenty-five cents, and which were very frank about the matter.

“It don’t count on a bop binge, anyway,” one of the convicts in school argued.

“Hell, it was young stuff,” another confirmed. “She was only nineteen.”

We were in school that afternoon, baiting our teacher as usual, when one of the fellows looked out the window and said, “Here comes Doctor Snodgrass.”

“Where?”

We jumped up and rushed to the school windows.

“That him?”

“Sure.”

“I don’t believe it,” I said. “I don’t believe that’s him.”

“Sure that’s him, the lousy rotten bastard. I’d know him anywhere I see him, as much as I’ve seen his picture.”

“That’s him all right.”

I still didn’t believe it. A tallish, bald-headed man walked beside a stoutish woman clad in a black fur coat with a dark felt hat pulled low over her face, and a handkerchief held up to her eyes as if she was crying. The man had a seamed, ravaged face, as if he had worried a great deal, but at the time he was calmly smoking a cigar. The woman walked close to him on the other side. She was holding his arm. The man was bareheaded and dressed in a blue suit with a white shirt and dark tie. He did not wear an overcoat. They walked slowly. Behind them, about twenty feet, the deputy followed with a guard to whom he was talking. The man and the woman were also talking. There was no one else.

Blocker had come in from the other room and squeezed into the window beside me. “That’s him all right, kid.”

A convict called Candy yelled from the window, “Take that cigar out your mouth, you rape-fiend murdering bastard!” The convicts didn’t like the doctor. There was something about his act of killing the girl, just to keep it from being discovered that he was having an affair with her, that they couldn’t take.

The deputy looked up and saw us jammed in the windows and came over and made us go back to our seats. As soon as he turned away we rushed right back to the windows. The school guards didn’t object; they were trying to see too. Several other convicts yelled obscenities at the doctor. He didn’t give any sign that he heard them. The deputy waved us away from the windows again, but he didn’t come over. We didn’t move.

The doctor and his wife walked down the brick walk toward the death house and passed out of sight around the corner of our dormitory. The deputy and the guard followed. There was no other excitement on the yard. It was as if they were two visitors to the prison.

I felt vaguely dissatisfied and annoyed. “Damn, don’t they have any guards with them when they take them to the chair?”

“They do as a rule,” a convict said.

“They ought to have some with that bastard son of a bitch,” another convict said.

“It looks funny,” I said. It didn’t seem right.

“He’s a big shot,” someone said.

That evening after supper the convicts in the dormitory went straight to the windows that looked obliquely toward the death house. I tried to start a poker game but no one was interested. Blocker said finally, “Come on, kid, let’s catch the show.”

I got up reluctantly and followed him. The windows were jammed. We tricked a con out of his place by telling him someone was breaking into his lockbox. It was an old gag but he went for it; he didn’t think we were the kind of fellows who would kid him.

“That’s her,” Blocker said.

From where I stood I could see the death house, etched in the twilight glow. I had looked out those windows a hundred times and had it in my sight each time, but I had never seen it before. It was a square, squat house of dull red brick about the size of a two-car garage. It seemed superimposed against the gray stone of the west wall. The guard turret, where Tap Spence and the Veeders brothers staged their midnight shooting spree, was outlined against the darkening sky. There was the end of the brick walk which led from the prison yard, where it was chopped abruptly off by a waist-high iron railing, and looking at it and at the green door to the right, I wondered, fleetingly, how a man would feel after walking the bitter half mile from death row to come to it. Then the twilight suddenly paled and the glare of the prison lights became more obvious. A group of noisy, chattering, well-dressed men came excitedly down the walk and entered through the green door.

“Who’re they?” I asked.

“Reporters, mostly,” someone replied.

“Did you see the warden?” another convict asked.

“Yeah, I saw the pig,” was the reply.

“I saw the doctor,” I said.

“Old horse ass.”

“They’re the witnesses,” Blocker said.

Later the purr of a motor sounded. I saw the black sheen of the hearse as it idled across the rough areaway outside the window. It turned, backed up to the green death-house door, and came to a stop. We had become very quiet in the dormitory. After a short time I heard a sullen whine, very faint, come from within the death house.

“Thar she blows!” someone said.

Into the silence I heard someone say, “Murder seems such a little thing when you’re doing it.” I looked around and recognized the moralist as Metz. I looked back at the death house.

The green door opened and a hand beckoned. Two men got down from the hearse and went around and opened the back and took out a wicker basket. They took the basket inside and after a moment they brought it out and shoved it back into the hearse. They got in and started the hearse and drove away. That was all there was to it. I could feel a vein throbbing quickly, steadily at my temple. I went back to the poker game and began dealing. “Come on, good gamblers,” I called.

Down at the lower end where the colored convicts bunked a voice was singing loudly: “Uncle Bud…Uncle Bud…Uncle Bud got ‘backer ain’ never been chewed; Uncle Bud got women ain’ never been screwed…Uncle Bud, Uncle Bud…”

13

I
T WAS IN
Lippy Mike’s poker game that I first noticed Metz. Three of the players had stayed for the last card but when the player, Frenchy Frank, bet two dollars and forty cents the third player turned down. Mike said, “I call it,” and Frenchy said, “Put it in the pot,” and Mike said, “Goddammit, I’m the dealer, I call it,” and Frenchy turned over his cards and threw them into the discard. Mike reached for the pot and Frenchy said, “Let’s see what you got,” and Mike said, “You don’t need to see it, you said I won it.” Frenchy said, “The hell I ain’t supposed to see it.” Mike shuffled in his hand and raked in the pot and said, “I’m taking it and if you don’t like it, bastard, you can pat your foot.”

Frenchy got up and walked away from the table and Metz said in an angry, intense voice, “Boy, you’re lucky, you’re lucky, man! You’re lucky…lucky!” shaking his head quickly, violently. “Lucky to be living…lucky someone hasn’t killed you…Boy, you’re lucky…lucky!”

It was then that I looked at him. He had a narrow, rather handsome, very reckless face with curly black hair cut GI fashion, and the arteries stood out in his large-fingered hands, jerking nervously on the table. There was a ragged scar down the middle of his forehead to the bridge of his nose and now, in his hot red face, it was livid like a jagged line of clotted blood; and as I watched it seemed to twitch as if it was a separate living entity from his face. I had never seen a man who seemed so completely ready either to kill or die.

Mike was looking at him too. “You’ve said it all,” Mike said. He seemed more cautious than afraid.

“What do you mean?” Metz challenged, in his clogged intense voice.

“I mean you’ve said it all.”

Metz looked at him, weighing the words, then passed it. He threw away his chips in the next pot, betting on nothing, then backed away from the table, looking at Mike, undecided, then turned away and went down to his bunk which was at the head of the aisle. Standing, he was tall and flat with the slight stoop that tall men seem to have, but none of the recklessness that was in his face and hands was in his body. There was an indication of rigid control in his body motions, as if his life had been repressed or severely disciplined.

The incident left me with a vague sense of letdown. I had hoped that he would try Mike. He seemed like a man who would be towering in his rages. After a time I quit also and cashed out and went over to see how Blocker was making out in our game. Mike hadn’t been open long and most of the play had gone to his game for the time being, making our game slow, so I left Blocker to hold it down and sauntered up to Metz’s bunk. He had an upper and he was sitting with his back against the frame, with his feet up on a newspaper spread over the blanket, reading a book.

“Say, your name’s Metz, isn’t it?” I asked.

He turned his head, then swung around to face me, dropping his feet over the edge of his bunk. “Hello, Monroe,” he said. “Yes, it is,” he added. “Why?” In repose his skin was whiter and he looked older, perhaps thirty-five.

“I just heard you talking to that starker, Mike,” I said. “You certainly told him right. He’s a lucky man to be living, as overbearing as he is.”

“You know,” he said, grinning apologetically, “when I see that fellow run over someone like that I get so angry I can’t see. I’d like to just take something and whip him to death.”