Hard Rain Falling (16 page)

The next morning in Municipal Court he found out what the charges were. By this time he was really sick; hung over, his arms and legs hollow, his belly a hard knot, his face burning with fever. The assistant district attorney, a large man in a brown suit, with reddish hair and a peaked, sunburned face, read out the charges in a droning yet somehow angry voice, standing at his table, holding the sheet of lined onionskin paper up before his eyes, telling Jack and the rest of the court that Jack was charged with statutory rape, resisting arrest, drunk and disorderly, and theft. In the same bored angry monotone he said, “We have a foreign warrant on him, too, your Honor.”

“Well, let’s hear it, let’s hear it.”

“This just came in this morning, your Honor; it’s a warrant for kidnap, Balboa County. If it hadn’t come in on time I was going to ask you to hold him on the local charges or bind him over to Superior Court.”

Jack and the judge looked at each other for a moment, and then the judge shook his head slowly. “Hold for Balboa County,” he said, writing on his disposition sheet. Jack had never been in Balboa County in his life; but he did not think it was unusual. The way he felt, nothing was mysterious. Everything seemed rational. If they had taken him out and hanged him in public he would not have been surprised, and if they had just let him go, he still would not have been surprised. They took him back to his cell and he went back to sleep. He woke up several times during the day with attacks of diarrhea, and although he was nauseated he could not manage to vomit. He felt lucky to be able to sleep.

Late that afternoon two detectives came and got him and drove him up to Balboa County. The two detectives sat in the front of the big black-and-white station wagon and Jack sat in the back. They had welded steel eyelets to the floor in back, and Jack wore leg chains that were fastened to the eyelets. Back of his head there was a grill of steel mesh, and each of his hands was outstretched and handcuffed to this grill. The two detectives were very nice to Jack, spoke to him, and let him smoke. The one who was not driving had to hold Jack’s cigarette for him, turned halfway around in the seat, but he said he didn’t mind. Both detectives said they were sorry about having to truss him up like that but it was regulations. “Some of your felonies,” the one who was not driving said, “we just use the cuffs; but on your capital crimes we got to use the leg chains, too.”

“You know, though,” the driver said, “it cuts both ways. I mean, you’re pretty safe all locked up like that. A couple of our guys were haulin a prisoner just like you are, I think the guy cut up his wife and killed her or somethin, and the guy drivin was goin like a bat out of hell and this dumb fuckin farmer comes puttin out of a side road, blind, and whacks right into the side of the vehicle and knocked it ass-endways, it goes off the highway, turns over a couple of times and ends up on its top. The guy drivin held on to the steerin wheel and he was okay but the guy sittin next to him got throwed out and spilled his brains all over the street; caved in his head like a punkin; but the prisoner, why, he was just sittin there as pretty as you please, upside down, all chained in, protected, not a scratch on him, yellin his head off to get him out of there before the fuggin thing blew up. You never saw anything like it.”

The other one grinned back at Jack. “So we got these safety belts now”—he held up the end of a seat belt and waggled it at Jack—”but piss on em.”

“I got mine on,” the driver said. “You never know.”

The other one said, “How the hell can I administer to the prisoner’s needs if I’m strapped in? I’d have to strap in and then unstrap every ten minutes.”

“It’s your ass,” the driver said. “You’re the one in the ninety-percent seat.”

“Seventy-percent seat,” the other corrected.

At the county jail, someone noticed Jack’s fever and called a doctor, and Jack was taken to the county hospital. They had no prison ward at the hospital, so he was placed in a private room with wire mesh over the windows. The door was locked and a policeman was stationed outside the room. Jack was sick for almost two weeks, in a near-delirium, but he did not speak once during that entire time, not even to the doctors. His case was diagnosed as a bad attack of influenza.

When he had been drunk, everything had seemed rational; now nothing did. He did not know why he had been arrested. He could not understand why he had been charged with kidnaping and brought to this place. He could not understand why he was sick. At one point he was certain he was going to die. His body temperature kept dropping, and got as low as 97, and he felt cold inside, as if the life was deserting his cells and soon there would be nothing left of him but meat. In his delirium he thought that if he died they would prop his corpse up at the table in the courtroom and still go through the motions of the trial, calling witnesses Jack had never seen in his life to testify to things he had never done, and in the end the jury would bring in a verdict of guilty and his corpse would be taken to the gas chamber and gassed, and then it would be taken out and buried; and through all this he would be floating above it, watching, listening, trying to understand what was happening to his meat and bones, to the body he used to inhabit; and the corpse would just sit there, dead, in its chair, rotting, beginning to stink, everyone else in the courtroom pretending that the corpse did not stink, and he even saw his eyes shrivel, and finally drop out of their dead sockets and roll down onto the floor, and saw an attendant come over and pick them up and put them into his pocket, and the eyeless corpse just sat there, getting smaller and yellower as the trial droned on, and finally, when they carted it off to the gas chamber, it was so small and so light that one man carried it under his arm like a doll, and how tiny it looked in that big chair, eyeless, toothless, the nose half eaten away with decay, as the tiny octagonal room filled with the mists of cyanide gas and the corpse got soggy with it and began to fall to pieces so that several men had to pull it away from the chair in fragments and dump the fragments into a bag, and it all kept coming apart in their fingers, but they did not mind, they were even telling jokes to each other and laughing as the bits of soggy flesh and rotting bone stuck to their fingers and they had to wipe their hands off continually, stuffing the bag full and joking about the odor; while he, Jack, his spirit, hovered over them and watched and refused to speak. It was obscene, he knew this, but it did not move him.

He even dreamed that Denny accused him and he was being tried for his betrayal of Denny, and Denny was saying to him, yes, you betrayed me, you are my friend and you refused it, but Jack said, no, you don’t have any right to move into my body and take part of me as yours, but Denny said, yes, of course, I have every right to do that, you are my friend, I have a right to your body and your mind, to all of you, because I love you and need you, and everyone has this right, to take love away from each other and inhabit one another’s souls, but Jack said, no, no, I am my own body and soul and you are not part of me, you have no right, but Denny said, you don’t understand, we all have this right to each other, and no man is entitled to privacy because your privacy is my murder, don’t you see that yet, don’t you understand that just by being alive you are open to me, and I to you? Don’t you understand now? And Jack said no, he kept saying no, not to Denny because Denny was gone by this time, taken off to the hospital himself, and Jack was alone, not suffering, free of Denny; convicted but free. He knew that he could not afford to hate Denny, because that would be the same, that would be giving himself up to him. But he was gone, and with an incredible sense of sadness, Jack realized he would never see Denny again, and he felt something shred away and dissipate, something important; not Denny, something important, some part of himself, vanishing.

But eventually he got better, and they took him back to the county jail, and the day after that he was brought in for a conference with the District Attorney.

His name was Forbes and he was a very fat man, large, big-boned, without any of the weaknesses of self-indulgent fat, but with the strength of pure bigness, a powerful barrel of a man, whose heavy florid face was pleasant rather than jolly, his mouth sensual but not cruel, and his eyes hard and alive and humorous. When Jack sat down across the desk from Forbes he knew right away that there was going to be no phony stuff; in other circumstances, Jack probably would have liked him.

Forbes had a Manila folder in front of him, and he flipped it open and read silently for a moment. “I don’t believe a word of this,” he said to Jack. “But don’t think I won’t try you on it. If I have to, I will. Are you going to cooperate?”

“No,” Jack said. He wanted a look at the papers in the folder, but he refused the idea of asking.

“I didn’t think you would. You look like a tough boy. I don’t have to tell you not to get tough around here. We have your record from Oregon, so we know you know how things go. You’re no cherry. Will you make a statement?”

“No,” Jack said, but the big man had already heaved himself up out of his chair and gone over to the door behind Jack, opened it, and called out, “Myra, would you come in here, please?” When he got back to his desk and settled, he said to Jack, “Talk loud, she’s kind of deef.” The woman, about fifty, with brightly dyed red hair and a petrified face, came into the room and sat in a chair by the window. She had a notebook and a pencil ready, and she twitched a smile at Jack and said loudly, “All right, dearie.”

District Attorney Forbes began asking questions, and the woman began writing; after each question, both of them would pause and wait for Jack to answer, and when he did not, the District Attorney would say, “Refuses to answer,” and go on to the next question. They were ridiculous; they had nothing to do with Jack. From the import of the questions, Jack understood that he was supposed to have been in Balboa County about six weeks before, in a car, to have picked up Mona and Sue in front of the Ritz Theater at gunpoint—forced them into the car with a threat of bodily harm if they did not comply—driven the pair of them to San Francisco, and installed them in the hotel. He was supposed to have threatened them by saying he would have them arrested as prostitutes if they did not stay, and he was supposed to have forced them to perform acts of a sexual nature, and to have lived with Mona in a state of unlawful carnal cohabitation. Further, a wallet was found in his possession, belonging to someone named Dennis Mellon; and Jack was asked to explain this, and to explain the fact that Mr. Mellon was at present in the University of California hospital in San Francisco, suffering from multiple fractures of the jaw. Jack was also asked to explain why he assaulted two police officers who had come to his room to question him. He answered no questions, and explained nothing. He also refused to sign a statement denying everything. The woman went out of the room, and District Attorney Forbes sighed.

“I talked to San Francisco a couple of times,” he said. “What probably happened is these two girls got braced by the vice squad, and the boys had nothing better to do, so they made up a story for the girls to cop out to. They probably told the girls they’d have to waste away in the juvenile home for the next four or five years if they didn’t lay the blame on somebody else. Hell, there was a missing persons report on both the girls laying around the SF police station for about a month. Trick is, to find out how much of Mona’s statement is bullshit, how much true. Did you pick em up at the theater?”

Jack said nothing. He wanted to ask several questions, but he did not.

Forbes went on: “I’ll give it to you straight. This girl’s father swings some weight around here; he’s been in this office four times already, fartin fire and telling me he’s going to have my ass if you aren’t sent to the gas chamber on the Little Lindbergh Law. I know the girl. She stinks. Just another two-bit chick, stupid enough to go tough. I know both the girls. Sue Franconi is all right, but don’t think she won’t get up on the witness stand with Mona and lie you right into San Quentin or worse. She’d do it to save her ass, and to tell the truth, I don’t blame either of them. You shouldn’t, either. You’ve been in juvenile, you know what it’s like.

“Now, these other charges are still open in San Francisco. I told them I wanted to try the kidnap charge here, and if you get convicted of anything at all, they’ll probably drop. I’m going to ask the grand jury to indict you for kidnaping, and that’ll get Mona’s old man off my neck; and by the time trial rolls around, he’ll be up to his ears in some other wild-ass scrape of hers, and we can accept a lesser plea of contributing or something from you, hear it before a judge, and you’ll be doing your little bit in county jail before he knows what happened. Anyway, by that time I’ll be renominated and he can’t touch me for another four years.”

He looked at Jack intently. “I’ll lay the whole thing out for you. If you don’t cop the plea, if you want to fight it out, you’ll probably win your case. I can get you a damned good lawyer, and he’ll beat it. You can probably find somebody who saw the girls leave town, maybe the bus driver. You can get the clerks from that fleabag hotel down in the city, and they’ll probably testify in your behalf. You’d have no trouble beating it, and you know it. It’s as phony a charge as I ever saw. It’s got vice squad bull written all over it. I’m just telling you so there’ll be no mistake. I ain’t trying to trap you. You can beat it, and I’ll have a big defeat on my record in an election year, and Mona’s daddy will raise all sorts of hell, and I’ll look stupid. But I’ll tell you what I’ll do if you try that: I’ll drop the case and take my medicine, and you’ll go back to San Francisco and face the statutory rape charge. That one you can’t beat, and you know it. I won’t lift a finger to get that charge dropped if I have to drop mine. It’s out of my hands anyway. You’ll do time on that one, plenty of time. Do you see what I’m getting at? I’m telling you I can fix the rape charge and the rest of it, if you’ll cooperate with me. If you won’t, tough tiddy.”

Jack saw. If he pled guilty to the charge he was innocent on, he would not be tried on the charge he was guilty on. It was even kind of funny. As to the rape charge, he realized now that he had always known the girls were underage, but had never given it a second thought. If he hadn’t known, or suspected, it would not make any difference anyway. It was still a felony. It was a joke. Nobody ever went to jail for screwing. Except that they did, all the time. But none of that made any difference. You didn’t go to jail for what you did; you went because they caught hold of you and didn’t know what else to do, and so they put you in jail. They. Yes, they. The filing cabinets in the orphanage. The city hall. The parking meter. The hotel-room door. Batman. Never anybody real sending you to jail. The cops didn’t do it. The District Attorney didn’t do it. His
chair
is doing it. Sending my meat and bones to jail, and I got to go along. That’s all. Nothing personal.