Cast the First Stone (33 page)

And when I recognized it I just stood there and let it come up to me rather than trying to run from it, or running forward to meet it. I just let it come and take me. I couldn’t make it home, anyway, and so it was the next best thing. It was all right, too, because it wouldn’t even hurt anybody. It would be the best thing for everybody. My mother wouldn’t have to keep on worrying about whether I was a good boy or not and nobody else would even give a damn. And it would be the best thing for me. I would do it and then I would be through with it and I wouldn’t have to be afraid of meeting it on any other road. I wouldn’t have to worry any more about whether what I did was good or bad. I would do it and then I would be completely through with all the doubts and fears and all this misery.

But even after I’d made up my mind to kill myself I didn’t know how to do it. I stood at the end of the aisle, weakly bracing myself against the table. There was something wrong with my breathing and I felt myself gasping slightly. I felt a little nauseated, too. My mind quickly turned over a number of ways I could kill myself. I could borrow a knife and cut my throat, but the picture of the colored convict who had gotten his throat cut years ago in the 5-6 dormitory came to my mind and I discarded it. I couldn’t bear the thought of all that blood slavering from my mouth and nostrils. I thought of cutting my wrists with a safety-razor blade but I was afraid somebody would see me and try to save me before I died and I didn’t want anybody trying to stop me. That would be intolerable, I thought. Hanging would be the best, I thought. I could tie the rope to one of the overhead stanchions and jump over the wire enclosure and the fall would break my neck immediately. But I couldn’t think of where I could get enough rope unless I waited until the next day and I had to kill myself right then. There was no need of fooling around waiting any longer. I had waited too long as it was.

Finally I decided to climb up on the wire and jump off to the first floor. It was only about a ten-foot drop, but if I dove headfirst I could probably burst my skull, anyway. I decided to do that. I felt very confident that it would kill me because it was my time and any way I tried I knew would work. I pushed away from the table and started over toward the side of the dormitory. I was very weak and had to cling to the bunk frames for support. I got to the wire and began to climb up one of the supporting posts. I noticed a couple of convicts sitting near by on their bunks, watching me curiously, but I didn’t even care about them seeing me. They wouldn’t know what I was doing until it was too late to stop me.

The wire was about chest-high, but I was pretty weak and before I got to the top of it the lights flashed for bedtime. I thought, “Goddammit, that would happen. I can’t even kill myself because I’ve got to go to bed.” I stepped back off the wire and went back into the aisle. I didn’t have any difficulty at all getting back to my bunk. But I felt such a stifling hatred for the routine I could hardly breathe. A convict can’t even kill his damned self, I thought. Nothing about it struck me as being even vaguely funny or ridiculous. It seemed only natural to be stopped from doing something I wanted to do. I didn’t even think of defying the signal and going ahead and killing myself, anyway, as I might have a half-hour earlier. I felt only an intense frustration. I felt smothered by the routine. They’ll be sorry they flashed those goddamned lights, I thought.

I undressed automatically and climbed into my bunk. I was very tired and I went to sleep immediately. But I kept dreaming that I was falling. Each time, just before I landed, I woke up. But as soon as I got back to sleep I began dreaming again that I was falling. I’d wake up again and try to stay awake, but I’d doze off and begin falling over again. I don’t know how many times I fell before daylight.

The next day I remembered every detail of trying to kill myself. But I wasn’t shocked by it. I felt a vague sense of regret, of postponement. It was as if something had failed to happen that should have happened. I didn’t feel so much as if I’d gotten by it, as that it was just postponed. It had just gone on up the road a little way and after a time I’d come up on it again. I felt as if there were two of me and one of me was death. It didn’t make me rebellious or indifferent. But it made me desperate for freedom. I didn’t want to meet my death again inside the walls. I wanted to get outside to die. I didn’t even think to figure out the difference but I became very conscious of the outside world.

For the first few nights afterward I couldn’t sleep. I lay awake and tried to make up pictures of the outside world. I called to mind various undertaking establishments I had seen and then I would try to rid myself of the picture of my body lying in a casket in one of them. At times I thought of how old I was getting. I was twenty-four. I had never voted, I thought, once. It started me off to crying in my pillow, even though I knew had I been outside all the time I probably wouldn’t have voted, anyway. But it seemed as if something very vital had been taken away from me.

I thought of all the chances I’d thrown away and of all the people I’d hurt and disappointed. I thought of Margie, whom I’d got pregnant, stepping from my car and being run down and killed. I had kept that one buried for a long time. My head would grow so tight with my thoughts that my stomach would get a hollow, sick feeling and Yd find myself gagging slightly, as if I wanted to vomit. I’d feel I couldn’t bear my thoughts another single minute without dying. But they stayed with me for hours, days on end.

I wrote to my mother and asked her to go see the governor herself and plead for my release. “Just sit in his office until he talks to you,” I wrote. “Tell him how badly you need me. Tell him you are old and can’t support yourself. Play on his sympathy. He must have some kind of feelings. Get Reverend Bentley and all the other influential people you know to write him in my behalf. Please, Mother. I can’t stand this any more.”

Then I sat down and wrote the governor a long letter myself. I had to get the warden’s permission first. He let me have the letter form because I’d been in five years. I told the governor about my studying law and short-story writing and touch-typing, in an effort to improve myself. I told him I had become converted to religion.

At all times I may not have appeared the model prisoner, but I swear, Honorable Sir, that at all times my intentions were the best and the discrepancies in my record are the result of honest misunderstandings. I have never tried to hide my wrongdoings from the officials, for the simple reason that I have at no time realized they were wrongdoings until it was too late to amend them, for they all grew out of intentions that were right. I will admit, Honorable Sir, that I have never become oriented to the life of prison, and many of the measures which are necessary for the preservation of discipline I have never truly understood.

As perhaps you know, Honorable Sir, a perfect record is not always indicative of good purposes: nor does it always prove that a convict is ready for freedom; but oft-times it is merely the manifestation of what we term “stir wisdom,” or in other words, the result of knowing how to serve time, and that, I must confess, I do not know and perhaps never shall. But I contend that I do know how to be a good citizen, and that is my highest ambition.

Then followed the weeks of waiting, of suspense and anxiety and half-scared hopes. And all the time I was tight inside and sick and going crazy. I kept to my bunk mostly, reading, studying a little, sullen and uncommunicative and tense. I practiced typing and now and then I played a game of cards, but my heart was never in it. I was too empty, I thought, too drained of all emotion. I was like a spring gone dry. There were days I felt light enough to fly.

22

W
RINKLEHEAD
. Dutch Henry, Signifier and I were playing Canasta, with Dew Baby kibitzing, that Saturday morning when Nick, the deputy’s runner, brought in a new convict. We stopped playing to stare at him. A banjo ukulele, swung from plaited shoestrings was looped about his neck and he carried a small grimy pillowcase of belongings. At each step his knees buckled and knocked together as if the strength had suddenly gone out of them, and his feet flew out at grotesque angles. He seemed to catch himself at the brink of collapse at each step, so as to make mere walking seem extremely hazardous. It reminded me of the wobbly motions of a splay-legged colt learning how to walk. I felt a strong impulse to laugh.

“Who’s the kid?” Signifier asked Nick when he came back up the aisle.

“Duke Dido.”

“Not the brother of the Princess?” I said, recalling my year of Virgil.

“What’s the matter with him?” Dutch asked. “Walks like a hobbled horse.”

“Don’t no one seem to know,” Nick said. “The doctor thinks he stiffing to dodge work.”

“Does he throw his knee out of joint himself?” Dew Baby asked.

Nick grinned. “He’s got it bad, ain’t he?”

“He’s about to fall out with it,” Signifier said.

“He’d be a bitch of a panhandler,” Dew Baby said.

Wrinklehead began dealing again.

“Don’t forget what I told you,” Dutch said to Nick.

“About that—”

“Yeah, about that little business,” Dutch cut him off.

We all laughed. I pushed my cards away. “Want to play my hand, Dew?”

“I don’t care,” Dew Baby said, blinking his lids. “You’re going to quit?”

Nick walked away and Wrinklehead asked, “What’s the matter, Jimmy?”

“Oh, I’m just tired of Signifier trying to cheat all the time,” I said.

“I’m glad you’re quitting,” Signifier said, getting up himself.

“What you going to do, you going to quit too?” Dew Baby asked him.

“I’m going down and get some water,” Signifier smirked.

“You’re going down to talk to the kid?” Dew Baby asked.

“I’m thirsty,” Signifier said.

“What you going to do, you going to sound him out?” Dew Baby persisted, blinking his lids and getting excited.

“I’m going to sound out the drinking fountain if that’s what you mean.”

“I’m coming with you. You’re not going to get away from me,” Dew Baby said, taking hold of his arm.

Signifier shook him off. “Naw, he’ll think we’re trying to gang up on him if you go down there blinking your eyes. He’ll think you’re a psychopathic killer and get scared.”

“Aw, Signore,” Dew Baby said, falling all over Signifier. “Aw, Siggy.”

“You fellows rush a kid too fast,” Dutch said. “You don’t do nothing but queer everything. You make a kid freeze up.”

Signifier started away. “You’re too slow,” he called back to Dutch. “You can have him when I get through with him.”

“Aw, let me go with you, Siggy, you know two are better than one,” Dew Baby said.

“Let him go on and rank it,” Dutch said. “He ain’t going to do nothing but signify, anyway.”

I got up and went over to my bunk. I felt disgusted. Once I would have been up with that pitch, I thought. I don’t know, I thought; a man grows up. My bunk was an upper on the aisle and I climbed up on it and opened a magazine. But instead of reading I watched Signifier approach Dido, out of the corners of my eyes. Signifier stopped at the foot of Dido’s bunk and said something. I saw Dido stop and turn around and look at him and make some kind of answer. There was belligerence in his every gesture. After a moment Signifier turned away and came up the aisle. He looked so chagrined I laughed out loud.

Still wearing the uke strung about his neck, Dido had followed him, wobbling along in his grotesque walk. He must have thought I was laughing at him. He jerked his head around and the strike of his eyes caught me in the middle of the laugh, chopping it off as with an ax. His chin lifted, tilting his head to the side as if steering it, and the most contemptuous sneer I had ever seen grew across his wide, mobile lips. He looked as if he wanted to spit on me. Then he raked a slashing discord across his ukulele, dismissing me, and wobbled on, chin high, head tilted, lips sneering, not looking at any of us.

Dew Baby, Dutch and Wrinklehead sat at the table and silently watched him pass. All of the fun was taken out of all of us. He doesn’t mind letting us know what he thinks of us, I thought. I knew that it took either a lot of nerve or a real and genuine indifference for a new convict in a dormitory to make enemies as recklessly as that. It reminded me a little of myself when I first entered the old coal-company dormitory.

I watched him go down the aisle. Strangely, I felt a lot of admiration for him. His shoulders were rather wide but stooped, and in walking his body slouched and all of his movements were awkward and jerky and grotesque. Every step seemed a precarious action, bordering on actual disaster. Long black hair was a tangled mass above his head, growing thick down the back of his neck and over his ears as if it had neither been combed nor cut in months, and his clothes, all of which were state-issue, were in a sad state. His brogues were battered and run-over and half-laced, and his trousers were so bagged they looked like elbows in a chimney pipe. Every now and then when he raised his arms to strike a careless chord on the uke, his elbows stuck through holes in both shirt and coat sleeves. He did not wear a vest and the top two buttons of his shirt were open. His neck was slender and collumnar, and his throat was as lovely as a woman’s. Halfway down the aisle he stopped to watch a poker game and I noticed that he had an attractive profile with a longish jaw and fullish lips.

“What did he tell you, Johnson?” I called to Signifier.

He and Dew Baby came over to my bunk. “He didn’t say anything. He just said he didn’t need any help.”

“Help? What kind of help?”

“Siggy asked him if he could help him make his bunk.”

I could picture that. I grinned. “Wonder if he gambles,” I said, thinking ahead.

“Sure that punk gambles,” Signifier said. “Ever see a punk who didn’t gamble?”

“Why don’t you try him out, Jimmy?” Dew Baby leered. “Give him a couple of bucks and put him on the track. All the kids fall for that.”

“Hell, I don’t know anything about him,” I said. “He might be straight for all I know.”

“Aw, he’s a fag if ever I saw one,” Signifier said. “I can look at ‘em and tell. He’ll go. If somebody don’t turn him out before this week is over I’ll walk up and hit old Tom Craig in the mouth.”