Entrapment and Other Writings (11 page)

Hovering behind the soft-clothesmen, a newspaper man, in a tan topcoat, edged to the bars and gave Lester a cigarette. Smoking as he spoke, with both hands locked about the bars, Little Lester answered the topcoat between puffs.

“Naw, I don’t smoke much. I chew t’ree packs of gum a day but I don’t smoke much. Smokin’ is against the rules is why I do it is all. I don’t even eat much. Naw, I don’t play no ball. Movies I like better ’n anything. Movies ’n bubble gum. Me ’n my gum—we stick together.

“What I really like though is mechanics. I don’t like readin’ about crime-stuff, I like readin’ about takin’ t’ings apart ’n puttin’ ’em together, like airplanes. I used to go out to the airport just to watch.

“But what I
really
like is gym-a-nastics, that’s what I took up in the neighborhood. I crooked four days from school a week, I was workin’ on the parallella bars.

“
Say
—you know what burned my hump?”—nodding toward the bandaged eye—“It wasn’t when his girl-friend scratched me, like you said it in the paper. What burned me was after I shot him,
then
he says ‘Don’t shoot me.’ After I
done
it, he says something like
that
. He got his dirty eye shot out ’n he says ‘Don’t shoot me.’ I would of let him have it for real then, only the dirty chamber was empty.

“Naw, girls are poison. Once when I was twelve I was in love with a girl, she was ’leven, we was like a couple grownup goofs.

“My old man? His one big trouble is he’s always a pallbearer ’n never a corpse. How he’d look best is wit’ his head off five inches below the shoulders. You know what I told my old ma the time she called the cops on me for sellin’ the ice-box when she was downtown? I told her, ‘Mom, you been workin’ for me for nineteen years. Now go out ’n get a job for yourself.’ ”

Bonarue Katz looked at Frankie Machine and Frankie looked at Bonarue. “Let’s get the detail done, dealer,” Bonarue suggested, and another week passed before Frankie saw Little Lester the Money-Waster and Woman-Chaser again.

For two hours, on the following Saturday afternoon, Frankie sat at the same table as Lester, where an assigned group was permitted to write letters or play cards. Thus it was that Lester sat across from Frankie with a soiled deck in his hand, trying to do the tricks that Frankie had sometimes lived by.

“It took me five years to learn this one,” Frankie explained, “pick a card.”

“Show me one that don’t take that long,” Lester asked politely, declining to pick one.

He was forty-nine days from the chair, Frankie kept thinking—yet he sat here playing casino, would eat the same food this night as himself. Saw the same corridors and the same yellowish light wadded about the night-lights, all night long; slept and wakened to the same muffled sounds: down the tier evening was beginning.

“How does it feel to play cards with a man waiting for the chair?” Lester asked, as if reading Frankie’s thoughts.

“I hope you don’t make it, kid,” Frankie assured him.

“I’m gettin’ a little practice at it Monday,” Lester told him wryly: “I’m settin’ in the dentist’s chair. They’re fixin’ a loose
chopper so’s I won’t have to set in the chair downstairs with a toothache.”

Frankie’s eyes shifted to the floor, and he noticed that Lester was wearing tennis sneakers, with both bows neatly tied.

Frankie never forgot the neatly tied bows of the asphalt-colored tennis sneakers.

He saw them again on an afternoon when Lester was being taken into the yard for a twenty-minute workout. He was to be exercised, like a piece of stock out there, and the rumor of it had gone through the prison grapevine with hard laughter: “We’re all stock, in or out of County,” that laugh meant.

The yard was laid out like a rock garden, with a duckless duck pond, a chicken house, and a pale blue bird house. Above and behind the bird-house ran a two-story high legend:
PULASKI COAL MAKES WARM FRIENDS
. And across from it was a counter-appeal to the inmates:
BUY DELTA COAL
.

Along the rows where, in summer, vegetables would grow, four cons stood under the eyes of four guards. Without uniformity they touched their toes with their fingertips, bending awkwardly from the waist. Three of them had to stand spread-legged to do so. Lester, Frankie saw with an odd, defiant pride, could do so without bending his knees at all. He touched the tips of the tennis sneakers’ neat bow-knots with the condemned fingers of his condemned wrists.

“A guy got somethin’ like
that
on his mind ’n still he ties his laces like he was entered in a track meet,” Frankie complained to Bonarue Katz.

Bonarue missed the point. “He just does caliskonectics is all,” he told Frankie. “Let’s go. They ain’t gonna let him climb no bars. He might get too good at it.”

“If it was me I’d tell ’em to let me skip the rope,” Frankie offered; but Bonarue didn’t think the offering was funny at all.

“What good would that do? You’d still have to beat the chair.”

“Just tryin’ to make a joke,” Frankie apologized.

“Quit listenin’ to the radio, you won’t make so many,” Bonarue told him sourly.

And the greenish-gray light wavered, with Frankie’s unwavering wonder, along the whitewashed, silent halls.

He couldn’t get over Little Lester’s composure. Like any punk, with less luck than most. A kid who had seen double-headers at Comiskey Park and shot six-no-count pool and watched a striptease act on North Clark and played nickel-and-dime poker in the back of a neighborhood bar and had crapped out on a twelve-dollar pass and had carried a pass to Sportsman’s Park in his wallet; one who’d worn bright new trunks to show off in front of the girls on the North Avenue Beach on a summer morning when summer was going to last forever.

“What if them tennis-shoe laces break,” Frankie worried to himself late that night—“Would that punk just tie them up and forget it or would he send for a new pair, just as though he was going to be around to wear them out? Did Lester really
believe
he was going to die? Actually die? A break in the shoe laces, Frankie realized tensely, would put Lester to the test: if the punk ordered a new pair it would show he didn’t believe in his own death. If he didn’t, it would show he didn’t have the nerve to pretend any longer. But what if they broke—and he ordered a new pair just to show off? Or if he said, “Don’t bother with a new pair, Warden. I’m kicking off on the 15th of next month, I’ll make these last until then.”

Frankie harassed himself into an uneasy sleep.

At night, they said, Little Lester had not been sleeping well. He would waken and ask to play casino with the night screw through the bars. The night screw had taught him the game, Lester had grown to like it as the shadows behind him grew longer.

One night, somebody told Bonarue, somebody who’d had it right from the night screw, Lester had had a long laugh at a misplay the
screw had made. He had been happy because of beating the guard at the guard’s own game.

And that, somehow, hit Frankie worse than if they’d said he was lying on his bunk in a dead-cold nightmare, sweating out the chair. Instead he was sitting there killing the time with casino and “sigerettes.” Just as Frankie himself had, so often at home, sitting by the sink, while a clock ticked off the hours and his own shadows had lengthened.

Here there were no clocks. Yet each man knew the hour. All clocks were set forever here at midnight. If you wanted to know the time you asked the screw and were told, inevitably, “What you want to know for? You’re not going nowheres.”

And always it seemed to Frankie that it was wrong of Little Lester to tie his shoelaces neatly as it was for him to be reading his favorite book, something called
How to Write Better Business Letters
. As wrong as it had been for him to crow over beating the night-screw or sending for the barber to have his sideburns trimmed. The punk would be asking to have the collar starched on that last white shirt he’d ever wear, Frankie felt. And waited.

Everyone waited, with something like resentment, for Lester to break. Everyone sensed he had only been acting to keep up his nerve.

“He’ll forget his act when they take him downstairs,” Bonarue assured Frankie on the execution night. “Wait till they trim off them side-burns and make him try on them long black tights for size.”

It was rumored that Lester had already boasted of what his last meal should be: “A t-bone wit’ enough sheenie-bread so’s I can sop up the gravy.” A copy of
Esquire
and a package of gum was the rest of it.

“He won’t even be on his legs when he goes through the little white door,” Bonarue decided. “They’ll have to lift him into the seat ’n shove his nose through the helmet. Wait till he feels that sponge pressin’ his ankle and his leg gettin’ bound to the voltage clamp. He’ll konk out. I know that brave-guy type.”

And as Bonarue spoke so, in the bunk above his own, the figure of Little Lester became, to Frankie Machine, more and more that of his own; till the finger of the accusing past seemed to touch his forehead and he wanted to sweat and couldn’t; till he wanted to be sick, and couldn’t. All he could do was heave.

If only Lester would break down. It would be so good for Frankie’s soul. If the punk would only start bawling like a baby, beg for mercy like a girl, scream for his dead mother—if he didn’t, Frankie felt, Frankie Machine might start screaming himself: there was a small panic in his throat that he had to keep swallowing down; and had to keep assuring himself that there was nothing on the books against him more serious than the theft of an electric iron.

A single senseless cry, from some con fighting the same pressure which Lester’s pretense had been putting upon them all, rang through the walls. Immediately a hundred sleepers wakened, calling passionately to each other, none knowing why he called or what it was that all feared so wildly. The night-guards came off their stools shouting, it was one of those reasonless tides of panic which seize men and women in jails and asylums, which cannot be subdued by blows but dies instead, as abruptly as it has begun, of its own accord; and just as reasonlessly.

They said, between the bakery and the laundry, between print-shop and mess, they said he’d come out of the cell wearing the long black tights and the white shirt buttoned over one shoulder like a fencer’s shirt, looking proud as he could be of his fancy outfit. They said it had taken hardly a minute to adjust the chair. They said, they said. They said there had been one contact for the nape of the neck and one for the pale right ankle. They said that after the unseen switch had been pulled the left knee had kicked up just once, as if tapped by a sharp ruler. Just once was all, they said. Toward the chin already hanging loose.

They said the single shoulder button had been stripped off in taking the shirt down, to expose the poor seared heart. Six doctors then, in alphabetical order, had pronounced the heart as dead as any Westside punk’s heart can get: a charred lump of spoiled meat sagging where once the living heart had burned.

There had been one hundred and twenty men and two women on the benches, one of the trustees said, in the front row reserved for newspaper men.