Cast the First Stone (8 page)

That afternoon I was transferred into the school company to teach school. The chaplain had charge of the school. He sent for me and told me he had heard I was a college student. I told him I’d attended the state university. He asked me how would I like to teach school. I said fine. He had me transferred.

5

T
HE 5-6 DORMITORY
, to which they transferred me, was the coal company dormitory over again, only it was long and narrow. It was housed in the north half of the wooden building which housed the 5-5 dormitory to which Mal had been transferred.

There were the same double-decked bunks and the same center aisle, with the wooden tables with attached benches, and at night there were three poker games instead of one. There was a blackjack game and a Georgia skin game which the colored convicts played. There were also colored convicts in this dormitory.

The outside door was at the end of the dormitory which was the middle of the building, adjoining the door to 5-5. The dormitories were separated by a thin wooden partition. At the back a hole had been cut in the partition through which notes and money and messages were passed from one dormitory to the other. Once or twice each evening Mal sent for me to come to the peephole so he could talk to me. The colored convicts bunked down at the end of the dormitory and the latrine was down there also.

I was assigned to a lower bunk on the center aisle next to the guardstand. “Right under the gun,” Mal said when I told him. “I’m glad—you won’t be able to get into any mischief.”

On awakening each morning I had my choice of looking at the convicts dress in their grayed and sweat-stained underwear and sweat-stiffened socks which they wore from week to week and their bagged stinking trousers which they wore from year to year, and their gaunt and patched coats which the officials seemed to think never wore out; or I could look underneath the sagging upper mattresses out of the west windows at the back of the hospital, weather-stained and still asleep, housing tuberculosis and syphilis and cuts and lacerations and contusions and infections and operations and skulls cracked by guards’ sticks, and death. With mattresses lying out beside the front entrance, almost every morning, which would be taken away and burned because the convict who had last slept on them would not need them any more; or need anything else any more except a six-foot plot in Potter’s Field and the soft, close embrace of mother earth. Or, displeased with that, I could look across the aisle and over the unmade bunks, out of the east windows, at the stretch of dark gray wall against the darker sky, cutting out the smell of burnt gasoline; and a home at night with a mother and a father, and the tinkle of ice in tall glasses, and the unforgettable perfume of a woman’s hair.

Or I could lie in bed and pretend I wasn’t going that morning, and watch the others spread their sheets and make their bunks and join the ragged soap-and-towel procession down to where the washtroughs were located, by the latrine. No matter how early you arose the colored convicts would have a skin game roaring down by the latrine, as if it had never stopped all night.

At night I could lie and watch the nightly latrine brigade with their open drawers and felt house shoes stolen from the hospital. Or I could read by the eternal droplight overhead; or listen to the steady, planted stride of the night guard making his rounds; or watch the furtive slitherings of those bent on degeneracy and maiming, and sometimes even murder—as was in the case of the colored convict called Sonny who slipped up on another colored convict called Badeye, while he was asleep, and cut his throat from ear to ear.

It was a sort of gurgle that I had heard, for it was late and quiet. When I got down there, peering over the shoulders of the convicts in front of me, I saw Badeye lying there with blood bubbling out of his mouth in large and small and very fine slavering bubbles, like the mouth of a dog gone mad; only the bubbles on Badeye’s mouth were bloody, and not quite so frothy, and the blood was running out of his nostrils and down his black greasy skin on the dirty gray sheet, and the blood had spurted out of his throat all over the dusty blanket and his dirty cotton underwear and even on the bottom of the mattress on the bunk above. His arms were half drawn-up and he was flopping very slightly but after awhile even the flopping stopped, and the blood seemed as if it had stopped, and he was lying there in such a pool of blood that you could hardly see him.

Or I could listen to the putrid, vulgar conversations of the convict who bunked above me and who was also a teacher; but I never learned exactly what he was to all those convicts who stopped to whisper every night when the lights were out and when the guard was at the other end.

Or I could talk to the guard whom we all called Captain Charlie. He was a short, sort of cherubic-looking old man. He had taken a liking to me. We talked in whispers about crime and punishment, virtues and vices, history and ambitions. He said it was such a pity that a boy of my age should have to come to prison. We did not talk of politics or of the warden. Although he was very nice he was also very old and couldn’t have gotten another job easily. Nor did we talk of convicts. I was determined not to get the reputation of being a rat, or being one. But I enjoyed talking to him. We talked of many other things which were of mutual, but not malicious, interest. Pretty soon he was bringing me candy which his wife, who had once run a candy shop, made especially for me. It was exceedingly good candy except for those pieces they fooled me with which were balls of cotton dipped in chocolate.

If I so desired, in the evenings after supper I could lie on my bunk and watch the evening promenade; up the aisle on one side, down on the other, up and down, up and down, mile after mile, which—put together—would have been a good way out into freedom, but which ended up each night at the bunks where it started. Or I could watch the amateur prize fighters who worked out in the aisle beside my bunk in front of the guardstand. I could smell them, too, the pungent unwashed bodies.

I could lie on my bunk and close my eyes and say I was back in Lake City at the Lotus Gardens again, or at the Far East restaurant listening to Roy Bugle’s
Serenaders
or out to the Hawaiian Gardens, or at Shady Beach, or at the Palace D’Or, or at Hudson Park, or at the baseball park with a double-header playing underneath the hot July sky. Or I could say I was on the road at night doing a cool seventy, with the motor roar spilling out behind me and catching up with me only when I passed through some small town with the heavy-leafed tree limbs hanging low over the road, and the white vine-clustered houses reflecting the sound. I could say I was in White City the night I drove Johnny down to catch the boat; or that I was back at State again boning for my finals; or back at high school playing quarterback on the varsity team. I could say I was in Chicago, too, and had sold that ring and had kept on down to Santa Anita for the winter races, with a pocket full of money. But I couldn’t make myself play that game, no matter how hard I tried, or how tightly I closed my eyes or how much I cursed God or Fate or Luck, or whatever you care to call it. Sooner or later, anyway, all my thoughts would come back to Chicago from wherever they had gone, no matter how far, how many miles or how many years, and I’d feel again that sickening, unbearable chagrin as intensely as when the judge had said, “
I sentence you to be taken to the penitentiary where you shall remain incarcerated at hard labor for a period of not less than twenty years and not more than twenty-five years
.” And I would wish to God that I had gone to sleep when I had had the chance.

Just by trying hard enough I could keep from thinking about my mother and father and that wild, reckless year I’d lived after their divorce. I could keep from thinking about the guys who hung around the gambling joints and were my friends that year. Although it didn’t hurt to think about them because most of that gang were just lucky they weren’t in there with me. Only thinking about them made me think about Chicago, and thinking about Chicago made me want to vomit. It made me want them never to know what an utter fool I’d been, what a simple-minded schmo, a square, as to try to pawn that ring in that shop, of all places.

There were many things about that dormitory, things that happened there and things that happened elsewhere while I was bunking there, which afterward I could remember without remembering the dormitory at all. By that I do not mean the dimensional or visual aspect of the dormitory, its breadth and length and height, its bunks and tables and such. That was like a color one will remember long after sight has left the scene. I mean the living, pulsing, vulgar, vicious, treacherous, humorous, piteous, tawdry heart of it; the living men, the living actions, the living speech, the constant sense of power just above, the ever-present breath of sudden death, that kept those two hundred and fifty-three convicts, with their total sentences numbering more years than the history of Christianity, within the confines of that eggshell wood; or, for that matter, kept them within those high stone walls to live on, day after day, under the prescribed routine and harsh discipline and grinding monotony which comes to all after a time.

And there were convicts, too, whom I could remember without remembering the dormitory, as if, telescoping back into retrospect, I could pick them out; where they stood, what they said, how they looked at some given moment—without seeing beyond the circumference of the vision of the telescope, like sighting a buck at three hundred yards.

There was Mal at the peephole, telling everyone who came near enough to hear his voice to tell his cousin, Jimmy Monroe, that he wanted to speak to him; until everyone within both dormitories had heard it said that I was his blood cousin and had remarked that we did look something alike, sure enough.

“Hello, cousin,” he would say.

All I could see would be his eye and I would begin to laugh. “All I can see is your eye. It looks funny.”

“I can see all of you.”

“I saw an ad in the paper,” I would say. “Hammon’s has a shoe sale on. Florsheims for $15.75. Two pairs for $30. Do you want a pair?”

“You’re not kidding, Jimmy?”

“Naw, I’m going to get a pair for myself.”

“I need a pair, but I don’t know. You won’t be straining yourself?”

“Fifteen dollars? What the hell!”

“Fifteen seventy-five.”

“Fifteen, if I get two pairs. I’ll get you a pair. I don’t care what you say.”

“I’ll make it up to you, Jimmy,” he would promise.

And I would say, “Aw, hell.”

“I hear you’re a big shot now. I hear you’re running a poker game,” he would say.

“Old Nick the Greek himself, that’s me.”

By that time we’d have to get away and let some other cousins talk. He’d send for me again when they got through, or maybe he’d wait an hour or so until the lights went out. If I was busy dealing and couldn’t get down for that or some other reason he’d send for me the next day to come over to the window where the furnace was located. I’d stand at the window and talk outside to him while he stood inside of the furnace room, or in the doorway of the sand room where the sand was kept for the molds. That way he was hidden from the tin-shop guard who liked to stand in the window of his second-story office and spy out on the yard, so he could know every time some convict carried a kid to some hiding place so that afterward he could get the kid and have him for himself. He was that kind of a guard. It was also against the rules to talk through the windows of the dormitory.

And there was Lippy Mike the head porter, a big wide-shouldered, athletic-looking, black Irishman, who held his shoulders high and square and walked with a swagger. Everybody seemed to be afraid of him because he had a reputation with a knife, and a scar up over his deep-set insane-looking eyes to prove it. And he also had a knife with a blade six inches long.

He assumed more authority in the dormitory than the guards, one of whom was Captain Bull, big and beer-bloated and slovenly, with tobacco ashes down his vest and a stubble of gray beard, and the heart disease which finally killed him. The other guard was Captain Clem who had a narrow, nasty, greasy face and a sloppy mouth and narrow shoulders and a pot belly and skinny legs, looking young in the face and old in the body, with prematurely gray hair.

Lippy Mike was the most overbearing, arrogant convict I’ve ever seen, “After this when you’re transferred, Monroe, bring your sheet and pillowcase,” he had said to me the very first thing with his damned insufferable arrogance. “Thursday’s laundry day. Be sure to have your sheet and pillowcase on top of your bunk. And take everything off the floor in the mornings.” He had assigned me to my bunk. The guards left the dormitory to him; he ran it.

“Anything else, captain?” I asked.

He had pinned those fanatical blue eyes on me with his shoulders high and square and the butt of the knife sticking out of his left breast pocket. “I’m not your goddamned captain, punk. I’m Mike.” And then after a full moment in which he just stared at me he had lifted his gaze to call, “Papa Henry, give this boy a sheet and pillowcase.” And with that he had walked down the aisle, high-shouldered and swaggering and when I had said, Go to hell, he had been too far away to hear it.

I never liked that boy.

And there was Hunky Hank who had been in the Lincoln County jail with me when I’d been arrested for forgery. He had helped me run the dice game in the county jail and had helped me fight the time I tried to take on all the colored prisoners on the floor. Here, he and another fellow called Book-me had been running a peewee poker game. He had started me off to gambling in prison because he knew I could. I would spell him on the deal and sell chips the rest of the time. It gave me something to do besides he on my bunk and brood, which I did a lot of, too. Also I could talk to him, which I couldn’t to most of the men.

Hunky was a porter in school at first. Then he got a porter’s job in the woolen mill because he thought he could make some money out of it. One of the woolen-mill companies bunked in the dormitory with us across the aisle, and he was just transferred from one side of the dormitory to the other. Then one day he took my Sunday shirt over to the woolen mill to wash and iron it. The guard caught him washing the shirt. It was against the rules. My number was on the shirt tail so they caught me, too. The courtroom guard came around that morning before breakfast and added the two of us to the long line of convicts going to court. We were all sullen because we’d miss our breakfast, even if the deputy found us innocent, and scared because most of us were guilty and were going in the hole. The deputy transferred Hunky to the coal company. He gave me a lecture and sent me back to school. That was how I took over Hunky’s half of the poker game to run for him.