Cast the First Stone (42 page)

And he wasn’t. The team lost. When the pressure got on the game he was horrible to watch. He went to pieces right before my eyes. That was something I never wanted to see again.

Afterward I said, unreasonably angry, “It seems to me as if you’d have enough pride to keep from making a spectacle of yourself like that. It was disgusting. I’d be ashamed to let anyone see me break into pieces like that.”

“I haven’t got any pride,” he said. “And you should be the one to know it. If I did—” And that was all. There weren’t any more words; just a dull, hurting silence.

All that night I could hear his low muffled sobs. I wanted so badly to comfort him, to get up and say, Don’t cry, kid, I’m with you. I don’t give a damn what you do, I’ll always be with you. But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t, that was all.

When early morning came he leaned over the side of his bunk and said, “I didn’t mean what I said, Jimmy. The next time I’ll be very good and you’ll be proud of me.” I was so relieved I could have cried.

But some perverse impulse prompted me to say, “It isn’t that, that isn’t it, it’s just that—it’s how in the world can I ever feel sure about you when I’m not here if you’re going to be like that?”

“I’ll be different, I swear,” he said. The next time they played I stayed in the dormitory so I wouldn’t have to see it if he went to pieces. It was worse. They lost again and this time everyone was bitter about it.

“He was so damned sickening I had to take him out,” Candy said.

“Who?” I asked.

“You know who,” he said. I knew who, all right. He didn’t lie. I had only hoped that I was wrong.

“Boy, that kid’s solid nuts,” Signifier said. “He’d fall down every time he’d start for a ball and one time he just lost his head and picked up the ball and threw it over the wall. It looked like he did it on purpose. When Tom got after him he said he didn’t give a damn and wanted to fight Tom. You know that was wrong.”

“And the bases were loaded,” Candy added.

Mose came up and said, “Dammit, you got tuh do somp’n. Ah ain’ gonna pitch no mo’, long as dat fellow’s on the team.” His duck-bill lips were stuck out a country mile.

And I had to take it without a word.

Brothers joined the group. “Man, they killed us,” he said. “Fourteen to two. We ain’t never been beat that bad.” He started to say more but he looked at me and didn’t.

I saw Tom coming down the aisle, shaking his head. I knew what was coming. I tried to head it off.

“Well have to get someone else for center field,” I said, turning to Brothers. “What about Japcat?”

“That Dido!” Tom said, shaking his head. “What’s the matter with him?”

“He’s all right,” I said. “He’s a little excitable at times, but he’s all right.”

Tom kept on shaking his head as if he wanted to say something else, then Rifle Ed said, “When you going to be ready to play again, Jimmy?”

“I’m going to play the next time the team plays,” I said.

Tom’s eyebrows lifted.

“That’s next Thursday,” Brothers said.

“That’s when I’m going to play,” I said.

Tom didn’t know whether to look relieved or not.

“You better come on back,” Polack Paul said. “Ain’t nobody on the team any good without you there.”

Dido had stopped by the hospital. I went down to our bunks and waited for him. We had a board we’d placed across the bottom-bunk frames for a seat. After awhile he came in and looked at me without speaking and sat down.

His trousers were torn at the knees and both of his knees and his left elbow had been freshly bandaged. I noticed that he wasn’t wearing his knee braces but I was determined not to argue about it.

“Skinned yourself up a little, eh, kid?” I said.

I was standing over him, leaning with my good arm against the upper-bunk frame. He looked up at me and I noticed that his face was sweaty and his eyes were feverish.

“Go ahead and say it and get it over with,” he said, and abruptly I went blind. It wasn’t until I could see again that I knew I had hit him in the face. His lips were split and bleeding slightly.

I was instantly contrite. “Hit me,” I said. “Come on and hit me.” I wanted him to hit me.

He put a handkerchief to his lips. Above it his eyes were unreadable. “Why don’t you come on and hit me?” I said. “I hit you.”

He took the handkerchief away from his lips and they were slightly smiling. He licked the blood from them and said, “No.”

It wasn’t real. There wasn’t anything about it that was real. And very soon it would be gone. We tried to put everything into each moment. We were very frantic and scared and desperate. Happiness was like rain drops on the desert sands.

Once I said, “I don’t think I’ve been happy for one half an hour in all my life.”

“Don’t I give you something?” he asked.

“It isn’t that, that isn’t it—” I began. But there were no words for it.

And that was the way it was, desperate and unreal and magnified and intense and grotesque and frantic. But life went on in the prison the same as it always had.

The water was shut off again during those hot summer days. The
Prison Times
said the move was necessitated by our wasteful habits. But yet, on those waterless afternoons when our tongues were so dry they stuck to the roofs of our mouths, we could look out the window and watch the sprinklers running on the front lawn. Washing in the cells and dormitories was prohibited and the rule was rigidly enforced. But the prison commissary continued to take outside orders for underwear, socks, pajamas, and such articles of wearing apparel which could be washed in no other way.

The Fourth of July brought another boxing tournament and some special eats and too much heat.

One hot afternoon they brought in four desperadoes who had killed a sheriff. We watched the approach of the cortege from the windows. The first car was loaded with special deputies who seemed armed for war. The second car contained the prisoners. Then there were three more cars of armed deputies and two army vans of National Guardsmen with mounted machine guns.

“Goddamn, that looks like the Big Parade,” someone said.

“It’s the last parade, anyway.”

“That’s the way they do it when you’re tough,” I said.

“Tough!” Dido said. He was touched by it for some reason. “They’re not tough. They’re in the second car.” And that was being tough, I thought.

The warden tightened the vigil about the institution and put on extra guards about the walls. Cars were not allowed to park along the street. Every precaution was taken to keep the four prisoners from being rescued. They even went to the trouble to build a new bullet-proof tower on the stockade across from death row. And one Sunday afternoon, while it was under construction, three convicts walked across the yard with a ladder and put it up against the wall and told the guard in the tower they were going to install a spotlight.

“Come ahead,” the guard said, and they went up the ladder and slugged him and dropped over the wall. The first anyone heard about it was when a complete stranger came around to the front and tried to get to see somebody to inform. But the front guards stopped him at the sidewalk and wouldn’t let him enter. Among the precautions which had been taken to hold the four desperadoes were instructions to the front guards to keep out all strangers. So the man had to go away and find a telephone and call in to tell about the three convicts he had seen dropping over the walls. But by that time the convicts were gone. However, they were caught a few days later.

They had gone about fifteen miles down the railroad tracks and holed-up in a jungle. From some place they had secured quite a bit of money, and three rifles and two pistols and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, and a case of liquor. When the posse swooped down on them they grabbed the liquor and ran. They were taken back and put in the hole. But they were so drunk it didn’t matter. All night long they sang “Mother Machree” at the tops of their voices. The same old thing.

Time went on with its inexorable chain of events which we watched and discussed with detached interest. Nothing could make me so angry as when Dido let some part of it affect him.

“What burns me up with you,” I would say, “is that you let some cheap, lousy convict get you mixed up in some cheap lousy situation and you make a damn fool out of yourself; whereas neither the convict nor whatever in the hell you’re trying to do has the least importance. The thing is you let little, insignificant things get you so mixed up that you lose your sense of proportion. I’ve seen you get so worked up trying to beat Johnny Brothers playing cooncan that you didn’t give a damn about anything else in the world except just to beat him. When in the first place cooncan’s a nigger’s game and you never will be able to beat him, and in the second place where you lost fourteen dollars, you couldn’t have won but a dollar if you had beat him all night, and in the third place it wasn’t important and never will be important. I don’t mind what you do, but don’t let it get important. Don’t let it touch you. There’s nothing worth touching you.” I didn’t even realize the incongruity of me preaching that doctrine.

True to my word, when our team played again I wrapped my arm securely with adhesive tape and played shortstop. It had been five weeks since I had broken it and it didn’t trouble me at all. Once I fell forward on it fielding a slow roller, but no damage was done. Another time I made such a spectacular running catch that Tom swallowed his cigar and when they had beat him on the back and got him to breathing again he said, “That Jimmy’s a ball-playing son of a bitch. I sure hate to lose him.” Dido played center field and was excellent. He and I scored the winning runs. But they didn’t like him for it and he didn’t give a damn.

But after that everything was swell between us and we were sitting on top of the world again, down there in our private corner. The dormitory was still there and the walls were still there and the convicts were still there, but we were unaware of them. On those hot summer days we’d lie side-by-side on my bunk and look out the window at the clouds in the sky, rolling by in great dirty flocks beneath the sun, and he would call them sheep. They did look something like sheep. Once we got a pair of smoked glasses and looked at them and everything was purple-tinted and fantastically beautiful. It was swell to be young and alive and have such a wonderful friendship, even if we were in prison. I had my mother send him a tenor guitar and the next time she visited me she asked about him. It made me feel swell.

His mother sent him some pajamas and underwear and a very lovely scrapbook. It was wonderful of her and it made us feel a great deal better. When two people have things of their own, without being dependent on the other, it always makes things better. It put him on a more equal footing and he didn’t have to feel badly about accepting things from me. The pajamas were fine and I took one pair that I liked extremely well. He wanted me to take both pairs but I didn’t like the other pair so well.

After that he carried himself erectly and there was a new confidence in his bearing and he looked very handsome. We didn’t have anything in particular to put in the scrapbook, so he pasted in some old pictures of me my mother had sent me.

Once he came back from a poker game and told me that if Signifier was a friend of mine I’d better talk to him, because Signifier had just called him a curly-headed punk and he wouldn’t take that from anybody. I got up and went out to the game and asked Signifier about it. He said he wasn’t talking about Dido, he was just cursing his luck and had said something about a curly-headed punk, but he wasn’t talking about anyone.

“It’s like this, Signifier,” I said. “Dido’s my friend and I’m going to try like hell to keep him out of trouble, but if he ever gets into any trouble I’m on his side. Anybody who hurts Dido hurts me.” I looked at everybody when I said it.

“If that’s the way you feel, Jimmy, I don’t blame you,” Signifier said. “But you tell that kid I wasn’t talking about him. I wouldn’t say anything like that about him. He’s all right with me.”

But I knew that he was lying about Dido being all right with him because Dido wasn’t all right with anyone in that dormitory any more. They were all down on him. It was just because they liked me that they treated him decently at all. I knew that and I tried to keep things smooth.

“You don’t really need to gamble,” I told Dido when I returned to my bunk. “You’ve got everything you need. Let’s rest up for awhile.”

“Whatever you say,” he said.

One night we were talking in low, muted whispers when all of a sudden we became aware of the moon shining through the window. It seemed enormous and pale and distant and beautiful.

“Can you see the face in the moon?” I asked.

“Who, the man eating green cheese?”

And then I said, “When the moon shines through your window think of me, maybe I’ll be looking at it, too.”

When his voice came it was choked. “Don’t say that, please don’t say that.”

“I didn’t mean to hurt you, boy,” I said. “Don’t take it like that. We can’t do anything about it. It was inevitable from the very start.”

“I know,” he said. “I know. I’m sorry.” And then from a long way off his voice came, low and muffled, “Don’t ever lean your whole weight on happiness, Jimmy, you fall too hard when it gives away.”

“You have a saying for everything, haven’t you?” I said.

“Just the words,” he said. “Not the music.”

We were silent and I was thoughtful. “Whenever I see a full moon after this I’ll think of you,” I said. “And I’ll think of this dormitory. I’ll see this goddamn dormitory and I’ll see you in it, and that isn’t the way it ought to be.”

He was subdued and quiet after that and when I asked him why, he said, “You don’t need me at all any more, do you?”

“Even if I didn’t, you’d always be my friend, kid,” I said.

The first of August I was called over to the classification bureau for an interview. “We have a request from the governor’s office to have a little talk with you,” the sociologist said. I knew that this was it. I realized then that all along I had been afraid that it wasn’t so. But I wasn’t afraid any longer. I knew then, beyond all doubt, that I was going home. I thought of all the things I would do and of how glad my mother would be. And then I thought, Dido will certainly miss me. I felt very scared for him. I couldn’t imagine him making it without me.