Hard Rain Falling (19 page)

Within, Jack was amused and distant, but all he could think of to say was, “Fuck you.”

McHenry laughed, his gray eyes almost disappearing behind wrinkles of merriment. “I’m going to fine you for that, too. Matter of fact, I happen to know exactly how much money you got downstairs. Tomorrow, you just tell the deppity to transfer fifteen dollars from your account to mine. It ain’t legal, but he’ll do it. My name’s McHenry. You’ll get the rest of your fine tomorrow night. We got to hurry. Rest of the fine is fifty whacks. You want to know what a whack is? You want to know the rest of the rules, so’s you don’t go around busting the rules?”

“Fuck your mother,” Jack said.

McHenry shrugged, as if it was out of his hands now. “Beat shit out of him and put him back in his cell. Tomorrow night court con-venes again. Get the deppities in here for them guys been fightin.”

The Negro jumped down from the table, and while the men still held Jack, began hitting him in the chest and belly, hard short chops, his breath coming in grunts at each blow, until Jack went blind from the pain and heard himself distantly whimpering. After that he could remember nothing. He was told later that after he was put on his bunk unconscious all the other prisoners started yelling, and after a while the deputy out in the foyer came in, and then brought others up from downstairs, and they carried out the men Jack had wrecked. The one Jack had knocked out came back the next day, but the other two went to the county hospital and Jack never saw them again. If he had he would not have known them.

The next morning he was sitting by himself on one of the benches while the “outs”—men without money who had to do the work—cleaned up. He felt all right, he was still in pretty good condition, and if he ached all over it was not a new sensation. He noticed McHenry sitting at one of the tables with two other men, a big man, heavy, thick, as hard as teakwood. McHenry turned toward Jack and nodded to him, smiling, and then said something to the others and got up and came over. He sat down on the bench beside Jack and said, “A few aches and pains, Levitt?”

“A few,” Jack said.

“We got to have rules,” McHenry said.

“I know it. All you had to do was ask me.”

“Send you a subpoena, hey? Okay, I did it wrong.” He held out his hand. “Shake?”

It was impossible to refuse the hand.

“Breakfast on me this morning,” McHenry said. “While we eat I’ll tell you the rules of the tank. That is, if you want to learn them.”

They sat alone at one of the tables and had buckwheat cakes, bacon, scrambled eggs, and coffee, while McHenry told Jack the rules. They were really very simple and logical, and their function was to make the tank livable. Everyone in the tank is automatically a member of the sanitary court and is fined three whacks or three dollars; everyone must wash himself thoroughly in the weekly shower and keep as clean as possible the rest of the time, or is fined three whacks or three dollars; no one is allowed to make unnecessary noise after lights-out or is fined as the judge sees fit; no one is allowed to resist the judge or is fined as the judge sees fit; no fighting is allowed; no one is permitted to steal from his fellow inmates; no one is allowed to speak out against his fellow inmates, or is brought before the court and fined at least fifty whacks; no one is allowed to make a fuss in the open visitor’s room; anyone caught cheating at cards is banned from the game and fined all the money in his pocket automatically, etc. etc. They were, Jack realized, reasonable rules, and it was either have a sanitary court to administer them, however badly, or be at the mercy of the deputies. Jack already knew what that was like. This way, everybody had a sense of being at least partly responsible for his own welfare, and of course it made life a lot easier and more profitable for the deputies. It also made life easier for the inmates who had money, and it wasn’t even too bad for those who had to do all the work. Because by the end of every week they had six dollars clear and could get into a poker or crap game and run it up into a fortune and not have to work any more. This almost never happened, but then it
could
happen; at least there was hope.

After the delicious three-dollar outside breakfast, Jack was more than willing to listen to reason and to cooperate. He knew that if he didn’t his life would be made miserable. He would have to eat inmate food. The hell with that, he thought. There was also the matter of his being beaten half to death every night or so if he didn’t cooperate. He remembered what his rebellion had cost him at the reformatory in Oregon, the long endless time in the hole, and he thought, the excellent breakfast warming his belly, what a fool he had been.

As they smoked their after-breakfast cigarettes, McHenry asked, “Well, how about it? You coming along?”

“What about tonight?” Jack bargained. “I guess you want to give me those fifty whacks.”

“I never did tell you what a whack is, did I? Well, it’s one whack across the bare ass with this-here belt.” McHenry was wearing a thick leather belt, and, Jack saw later, was the only man in the tank who had a belt at all. More cooperation from the deputies, he thought. Oh, how everybody cooperates. But this was tangible, just plain old naked force. You don’t cooperate with naked force, you just sit there and take it. Which made Jack wonder why McHenry was asking for his cooperation, instead of just
enforcing
, since he obviously had the power to do so.

“I’ll tell you about them fifty whacks,” McHenry said. “I’ll drop that if you’re willin to go along, and if you just transfer about twenty-five dollars into my account downstairs. Above the fifteen. Hell, you got lots of money.”

“Okay,” Jack said. “That’s fine.” He understood now. McHenry was afraid of him, afraid that Jack might just want his job as judge, and might be strong enough and determined enough to take it away from him. “I’d be happy to cooperate,” Jack said, and they shook hands again. There appeared to be an expression of guarded relief in McHenry’s eyes. Jack remembered what the tall prisoner in Idaho had said, and he hoped the man had been wrong; but he could see, now, that even in here and with these rules of self-government there would be no such thing as fairness; that the big and the strong and the rich would naturally be better off. That was why he was being offered a way out.

“I wouldn’t touch your racket,” he said to McHenry. “You know what you are? You’re just another
screw
. You’re in here, but you’re just like the deputies. Don’t worry; I wouldn’t want to be you and have to worry about guys like me.”

“Now, you got a point there, Levitt,” McHenry said, not bothered at all. “I
was
worried about you. But man, if I don’t run the tank, somebody’s got to. These guys don’t know what’s good for them, they’d live just any ole way if there wasn’t any rules. And the deppities can’t control from out there; you know that. If there wasn’t a sanitary court guys’d be rattin on each other inside ten minutes, just to get special treatment. Now, that’s shitty and you know it.”

“Sure,” said Jack, “so you run things for everybody’s benefit. And I’ll help you, too, because I dig that special treatment myself.”

“Doesn’t everbody?” McHenry grinned.

They understood each other perfectly now, and for a few weeks Jack was permitted, with a nod and a thank you to his strength and his ability to use it, to remain on the edges of the simplified social structure of the tank. For a while this suited him, because, as he reflected ironically, he had been wanting some time to think. Except for the more or less constant noise, the county jail was a fine place to think. Of course there were distractions. New prisoners were brought in and old ones released, and it was always interesting to find out who the new people were, and how they reacted to the tank. Most of them had been in jail before and would be again, and considered jail only a transitory phase; some were citizens, upset, angry, baffled, frustrated, frightened, terrified that they would stay in jail the rest of their lives. But most of the citizen trade went to the drunk tank downstairs. One night an old man was brought in for assault with a deadly weapon. They got the story from the deputies: The old man lived with his son’s family, and his granddaughter had been gotten pregnant by a boy, and there had been a conference of the two families in an attempt to fix the responsibility and decide what to do. At first it was decided that it was the boy’s fault for making the girl go all the way; then they blamed the girl for allowing the boy to take these liberties with her (they were only juniors in high school), and then both sets of parents decided to blame themselves for not raising their children properly, and finally, after much self-recrimination, it was decided that modern society itself made it impossible to raise children properly, what with the movies and television and violence, too much sex in the magazines, and the way girls dressed these days; and the old man, who had been sitting in the background listening in disgust, finally went upstairs to his room and came back down with his double-barreled 12-gauge shotgun and terrified everybody by pointing the deadly weapon at the boy and telling him by God he would do the right thing by the girl or the grandfather would come looking for him and would find him no matter how far he ran and when he found him he would blow a hole through him, by God. The boy let out a scream and jumped through the picture window, and cut himself pretty badly, and the boy’s parents called the police right after they called the ambulance. It did not occur to them to blame the grandfather’s actions on society.

The consensus in the tank was that the old man had done right, and what young people needed was to be shown who was boss. It was remarked by Mac McHenry that the most difficult and noisy prisoners were invariably young. The old man, his eyes bright and interested, told the others, “Boys, that old bird gun of mine has come handy more than once. When that little girl, the same girl, mind you, was about four years old, we lived in Santa Rosa—that was just after I retired, I was a plumbing contractor for thirty-two years, boys—the people next door had this Doberman pinscher, meanest-looking dog I ever saw in my life; I told the owners of the dog, I said, `If that dog gets loose and comes around here you’d better look around for some place to bury him,’ that’s what I told em, but that man was just so proud of his big dog, and the dog stayed out there in their backyard on a long rope, and roamed around crapping on the lawn and digging up the flowers and looking mean. Hell, that was no dog to have in town. If I had my way all those big dogs, especially the Dobermans, would be taken out and done away with. Well, anyhow, boys, little Darcy (aint that a hell of a name for a child, boys?), she went on over into their yard one afternoon to have a close look at that dog, and naturally, the dog, being a brute with no more brains than a nitwit anyway, just bit that child right on the arm, and Darcy came running home to me crying and bleeding like hell, and I fixed up her arm and called the hospital and went upstairs and got my bird gun and went over and blew that there dog right into dog heaven. Then I got in my car and drove Darcy to the hospital and left her there and went on down to where this man worked—he was in the life-insurance business—and went in and told him, `Sir, I shot and killed your dog. Here’s seventy-five dollars; that’s what you paid for the beast, take it.’ He stared at me, his lips working, and wanted to know what happened, and I told him, and he looked at that money in my hand—I always carry plenty of cash, you never know—and started cursing me under his breath, but by God he took the money and he even counted it, and I went home. His wife never spoke to me again.”

“You killed a
dog?
” said one of the prisoners. “That was tied up and couldn’t get away?”

“I did just that, sonny. Damn brute.”

“You had no right to do that.”

“Horse-frocky, sonny,” said the old man. “Now, if you boys will excuse me, I got to get some sleep.”

The old man got out on bail the next day, and Jack heard later that he had been convicted and given a one-to-five sentence, suspended, and two years on probation. Jack thought the old man had done right in both cases, but most of the men in the tank were upset and angry about shooting the dog.

Citizens like the old man usually got out on bail, or if convicted of a misdemeanor were sent right out to the trusty farm, but there were a couple of exceptions.

The first of these was a man in his middle twenties who lived in Sausalito, in the adjoining Marin County. He had, according to the wry tale he told, been driving home from a party in Redding, horribly drunk from the last few hasty nightcaps, and not long after he crossed the Balboa County line he decided he was just too drunk to go on, too sleepy, and so he pulled his car over and went to sleep. He was awakened by a flashlight in his face. The police made him get out of his car, turn around, lean against the side of the car and be searched. Then they made him walk a line, and they smelled his breath. They searched the car, too. He was taken in and thrown into the drunk tank, and in the morning, with the rest of the night’s crop of drunks, he came before the municipal court. He was charged with being drunk on a public highway. He explained to the judge that he was not driving, but sleeping. The judge asked him if he had gotten to where he was arrested by driving in a drunken condition, and he said yes, but that he had stopped driving because he realized he was drunk. The judge said that didn’t matter. He fined the man $250 and the man lost his temper and yelled at the judge, and was given ten days in the county jail for contempt of court.

“So I’m in here for not drunk driving,” he explained. “Ain’t that enough to frost your balls?”

Jack corrected him. “No, you got sent here for yelling at the judge. You got
fined
for not drunk driving.”

This particular citizen was very popular while he was in the tank. He played shrewd poker and won a lot of money, marveling that the men got to play cards all day and saying he wouldn’t mind coming here every so often just to get in the game. He appeared before the sanitary court, took his few token whacks and fines with good humor, obeyed the rules of the tank, was friendly to everybody and did not act superior, and at the end of his ten days went downstairs to the cafeteria and left money and orders for packs of cigarettes to be delivered in his name to “the boys on the top floor.” He was a chemist by profession and everybody admired him for his education, breeding, and good manners.