Cast the First Stone (37 page)

“Everyone would like you if you gave them half a chance,” I said. “You’re a rather likable person when you’re not putting on your act.”

“Is it necessary for people to like me?”

“Not particularly so. But there’s no sense in going around with a chip on your shoulder and antagonizing people needlessly.”

“I’ll be nice to everyone, Jimmy,” he said. “I’ll make everyone like me. Because you want me to, Jimmy.”

“That isn’t a good reason and I don’t particularly want you to. And then you might become so nice that everyone would want to take you away from me,” I grinned. “Then where would I be? No, you’d better keep on being your same old sneering self.”

“You’d always have the pardon to look forward to.”

“Sure.”

But the fun had gone out of the moment. He began picking out melodies in individual notes on his ukulele. He was an excellent musician with a true sense of rhythm but he had a love for melody. It was very pleasant and soothing and the melody was very clear. I began to realize how much I had missed music since I had been in there. He played “Summertime” and “Make Believe” and “Stardust” and other old tunes that I liked.

I had never owned a radio although there were dozens in the dormitory; I had always been afraid of getting too close to the outside world. But they had to keep them tuned down, and there was something in live music you couldn’t get over the air.

It wasn’t long before we had an audience. The other convicts had heard him playing and seeing me with him had gathered about.

The two colored convicts with the guitar and banjo came over and he invited them to join in. I started to get up but he said, “No, keep your seat, I like to have you where I can touch you.” We had a musical. Everyone liked it. Captain Charlie stopped by for awhile and listened. Music hour was between seven and eight but Captain Charlie let them keep on playing.

“Don’t play so loud though,” he cautioned.

It wasn’t until the lights winked that the gang began to break up.

“It’s better now?” he asked. I didn’t reply. “Don’t you think it’s better?” he insisted.

“Sure.”

“You don’t sound very enthusiastic, Jimmy. You do think it’s better, don’t you?”

“Of course I think it’s better,” I said.

“You’re not ashamed of me?”

“Of course not.”

“I was very nice to everyone, wasn’t I?”

“You were swell,” I said.

“I noticed you didn’t feel embarrassed. You won’t ever feel embarrassed or ashamed of me, Jimmy?”

“No.”

“Honestly?”

“Honestly.”

“I’m glad, I couldn’t bear it.”

“I’ve got to go down for count now,” I said.

“You’re coming back and tell me good night, aren’t you?”

I knew the convicts within hearing range were listening to us and I was a little self-conscious, but I said I would.

The next day was Thanksgiving. We had a nice dinner of roast turkey with oyster dressing and cranberry sauce, and that afternoon I began rewriting my great legal opinion. Dido came down and sat beside me, strumming an aimless note every now and then until I felt like screaming.

“Are you always so industrious, Jimmy?” he asked.

“No, I’m setting an example for you,” I said. It was true.

“I’m awfully lazy, aren’t I?”

“I don’t mean in that way.”

He was puzzled.

“I’m trying to show you how to relax,” I explained. “How to occupy yourself with something worthwhile.”

“You’re a darling to take so much trouble for me,” he said.

“But it would make me feel a whole lot better, too, if I knew you could occupy yourself with something worthwhile, or anything,” I said, somewhat lamely. “You seem at loose ends all the time. I don’t know just how to say it. You’re the same when you’re gambling. Haywire, that’s it. You’re so haywire, so radical.”

“And I was just going to ask you to let me gamble some,” he said, looking disappointed. “I’ve been a very good boy the last two days, haven’t I?”

“I haven’t got any money,” I lied. “I got broke the other night.”

“Oh well, it’s not important.”

I tried to concentrate on the piece I was writing but he made me nervous and distracted me, sitting there.

“Goddammit, quit picking that uke!” I shouted finally.

“Am I disturbing you?”

“No,” I lied. “Only when you pick the uke.” Then after a moment I said, “Haven’t you got anything to do? You want to read some magazines?”

“I’ll go away and let you work,” he said. He stood up, then he said, “Do you want to read something I wrote?”

“Oh, I don’t care,” I sighed.

“Go ahead and do your work,” he said. “I’m not going to disturb you any more.”

He looked so hurt that I said, “But I do want to see it.”

He hurried off down the aisle, and when he returned with it he said, “It’s not very much. I’m writing a song, too. I love music.”

I picked up the single-typed sheet with a forced resignation, thinking, maybe after this he’ll find something to do. But after the first line I was caught, startled:

Shadows, they are all about me. In the stench-laden corners of my dungeon they are black sentinels at the black gates of death, forbidding me sanctuary. On the slime-encrusted floor they lie motionless, writhing in the eyes of my fear. They hover alive in the space about me, vampires of thought, drinking the life of my soul. Shadows, flung into space by sharp corners, breaking off at unknown angles, falling on concrete floors, climbing black walls. Shadows, receding before light, racing rapidly off to hide behind bars, making blackness. Shadows of bars swinging out into space to fall with soul-bruising heaviness on shadows of men. Shadows of shadows, no longer men, victims of the night eternal, victims of the shadows…

“Did you write this?” I asked.

He nodded. “Do you like it?”

“I think it is exceptional,” I said. It gave me a funny feeling, though. A creepy sort of feeling. I was sick with being afraid for him.

“It came to me one night in the cell,” he said.

I could picture him lying on his bunk in his darkened cell, haunted with terrible fears. “Come on, I’m going to get you some money and let you play some poker,” I said.

He started to take the piece but I said, “No, leave it there, I want to read it over.”

“I’m going to win today,” he said. “All for you.”

I read his piece over. I always thought of it as “Shadows” after that. For some strange reason it provided a compelling incentive for what I was trying to do. My memory became sharp, my thoughts began assembling into a logical pattern. Everything within me seemed to struggle for a sanity. The cold, pure clarity of legal reasoning had never been so welcome. I wrote on my opinion rapidly and with assurance. The right terminology came without search. When I had finished it I felt confident of its merit. I was jubilant.

When I was closing up my typewriter Signifier came up and told me that Dido was winning. I felt excited and glad. I went down and stood behind him with my foot on the bench. He looked up and smiled and then divided his chips.

“Want to play, Jimmy?”

I shook my head. “Too crowded.”

There were already ten in the game and a dozen more waiting for a seat. Everyone wanted a chance to horse at Dido. He had a large stack of chips and was bulldozing the game. He was getting an immense kick out of it. After a time he said, “You can play my hand, Jimmy, if you want to.”

I noticed several of the players about to protest but I grinned and said, “No, you keep on, you’re doing fine.” They were all relieved; they figured they might catch him in a pot and get even and they knew I wouldn’t give them a chance to get their money back. But after awhile he lost interest and quit, anyway.

“I want to be with you,” he said.

He was so happy and excited over winning that his eyes shone and he could hardly talk. “I waited until I got a pair before I’d call and they thought I didn’t have anything and bet into me and I—”

“You turned them wrong-side out,” I supplied.

“When I got a big stack of chips I ran them with nothing. I just took their money.”

“I finished the thing I was working on, too,” I said.

“Oh, let me read it,” he said.

I got it and let him read it.

“This is genius,” he said. “I didn’t know it could be that much better. You are a genius, Jimmy. Are you as happy and excited as I am?”

“Yes,” I said.

24

D
IDO AND I WERE
talking one day—what about I could never afterwards recall—but in the course of the conversation he said, “Sure, but a convict is human, too,” and that started us off on something new that I never forgot.

“We know it, but who else can you sell it to?” I said.

“It is enough to sell it to yourself,” he said, surprising me.

“You’re full of little philosophies,” I said.

“That’s what prison does to you,” he said. “You come in as a neophyte and go out as a sage.”

“Of course I can’t blame people much for not thinking of us as being human, too,” I said. “People have just so much sympathy inside of them and they don’t care to spend it on convicts.”

“I can’t blame anybody for anything,” he said. “What deacon may have rung a bell with larceny in his heart, or what angel carried heaven’s tidings to hell?”

“That sounds like Omar,” I said. “Where do you get so much fatalism?”

“It’s not mine,” he said. “It’s life’s. The other person in everybody’s bed is death.”

“What big teeth you have,” I said, sarcastically.

But he was serious. “I’m twenty-four,” he said.

“Now isn’t that a lot of living?” I said. “You’d better tie your long whiskers off the floor.”

And deeply serious, brooding, remote, he said, “It might not be so much but it was plenty for me until I met you.”

I jerked around and looked at him. He meant it. “That’s a funny thing to say.”

“Everybody needs a purpose,” he said. It didn’t sound right.

“You have a mother,” I argued.

“I’m such a disappointment to her,” he confessed.

“Sure, I’m a disappointment to my mother, too,” I said. “She had her heart set on me. But if I needed a feeling to pull me through the twenty years I started with, I could have gotten it from her.”

“You don’t know my story,” he said. “I’ve gotten all of that already. You see, I was in the reformatory and my mother sent me three-hundred dollars to come home on.”

“And you got broke and got into trouble and came back to prison,” I supplied. “I understand. But mothers are funny things, little boy. They wouldn’t sell you out for that, no matter how much of that stuff called mother love you destroy and abuse. They still have just as much left. It’s like a spring that never runs dry. Your mother wouldn’t ever fail you, little boy.”

“She wouldn’t,” he said. “It’s me. I was out twelve days. I didn’t even get out of the state. You were so right when you called me haywire—” He broke off and asked, “Have you ever been scared?”

I was slow in replying. “Of life? Of what it can do to you? Of the nights? Of being alone? Scared of thoughts and feelings and memories?” I took a deep breath. “Sure, I’ve been scared,” I confessed. I had never confessed that before to anyone. “I’ve been scared a lot of times. I’m still scared a lot of times.”

“You’re so much like me, and yet so different.” He was silent for a moment and I said, “But I don’t think about it. If you don’t think about it, it can’t hurt you.” But he didn’t hear me. “That’s some of it, but not all,” he said slowly. “Have you ever been afraid of people not understanding you, and grown up feeling that no one ever understood you, not even your mother; and when you had given everyone a chance to understand you, and no one ever had, telling yourself that you didn’t give a damn if they never did—that you simply did not care? And then being wild and reckless and uncaring and saying, Take me or leave me and to hell with everybody, and not really meaning it? All the time so scared and lonely and away from everybody in a shadowed world and wanting so badly for someone to tell you that you are right; or if not that, for someone to tell you that you are all right, anyway?” When he stopped he was crying.

I wanted to hold him in my arms as I would have a little baby and comfort and reassure him; I felt so tender toward him. “You’re all right,” I said. “You’re all right, kid.”

A spark of worship flickered in his eyes. “Sometimes you’re wonderful,” he choked.

“It’s only that you brood too much,” I said. “It’s only in your mind that no one understands you.”

Suddenly he was laughing. “But of course you don’t understand; how could you? You don’t have to be afraid of yourself. You don’t have to be afraid ever—” and now he was deeply bitter, “of doing something so sickening that you want to hang yourself a moment afterward, and still not being able to help it.”

“I don’t know, I’ve done a lot of things that I’m not proud of,” I said.

“But they’d still stand telling,” he said. “Let’s don’t talk about it,” I said. For the instant I hated him for everything he had implied; all the moments and all the men.

Now it was his turn to reassure me. “You’re wrong, Jimmy,” he said. “It never came to that.”

I felt better. “The trouble with you is that you have a fatalism, but it isn’t a true fatalism,” I said. “You don’t actually believe it or it wouldn’t desert you when you need it most.”

“Now you’re getting fleas in your beard,” he said. We laughed.

Sometimes in the evenings we’d stand beside his bunk with a magazine opened on the blanket and real aloud to each other just because we liked to hear each other’s voices. At other times we’d stand in the window and watch the sun setting beyond the bathhouse. “God, I wonder what’s beyond that horizon,” I’d say, and he’d say, “You can take it from me, Jimmy, it’s not what you think.”

“I’d be willing to chance it, anyway.”

“I hope you will and I’ll pray to God that you’ll never be as disappointed as I was.”

“You sound like you’ve been a lot of places.”

“I have, but that horizon was always there, between me and the other side.” And looking at me, he’d say, “And then I met you and something is happening to me. I don’t know myself just what it is, only that the horizon doesn’t matter any more because the other side is all inside of me now.”