No Beast So Fierce (13 page)

“These men have to go.”

“I don't care what they do. You wait.” He hurried through the gate. It clicked shut and the gate going out buzzed open. It was as if the gates of heaven opened.

Fury rose in me as we walked down the corridor. I was tempted to keep going, walk out and get in the car with Abe. But maybe it was what Rosenthal wanted. Once I jumped parole he'd have me dead to rights. It would mean three or four more years in prison—and another parole afterward.

“Goddam,” Abe said, “how do you put up with that bullshit?”

“It's better than staying in prison. Not much, but some.”

In the lobby, Abe asked what I was going to do.

“Wait to see this prick. What else can I do?”

“I'll wait with you if it's not too long.”

“That'd just aggravate him.”

“You're not in real trouble, are you?”

“I don't think so. I'll cool him out.”

Allen McArthur coughed to get our attention. “Excuse me. I've got a dinner engagement.”

“Okay, Allen. Get on that Monday and give me a call,” Abe said.

Allen MacArthur went through the glass doors into the beginning twilight.

Abe pulled a roll of money and peeled off twenty bucks. “That'll take care of cab fare. Are you coming by the club tonight?”

“Yeah, if I'm not busted.”

“I'll introduce you to some foxes.”

He patted me on the shoulder and went through the doors. A minute later I remembered that he'd forgotten to put the money on Stan's books. That, too, Rosenthal had caused.

When Rosenthal returned twenty minutes later, I was outside smoking a cigar and watching the grimy shapes of the industrial neighborhood become less harsh in the deepening twilight.

“Living high on the hog, aren't you?” he asked.

“How's that?”

“Big cigars.”

“It's a ten-center.” I started to ask him if smoking cigars violated the parole conditions—but the bitter indignation was submerged in a mixed salad of emotional exhaustion, loneliness, depression, and a longing for peace. I was tired of conflict and wondered why a Jew, who had thousands of years of experience with oppression, could not see what he was doing. He was my
bête noir
, but not through deliberate malevolence. No, it was fear of being conned that kept him from listening. In rigidity he found safety.

“What really brought you here?” he asked.

“Just what I told you,” I said quietly. “Look, Mr Rosenthal, try to get at least one foot off my neck. I'm not playing games on you, and I try to be sincere. One of those men owns a night club. Check on it. He's giving me a job. He might not be a booster in the Rotary Club, but he's got a job. I don't know the president of General Motors, and he wouldn't hire an ex-con anyway. Not many people will.”

The weary lament got through, and Rosenthal's adamant manner lessened. “Max, you know a parolee shouldn't be visiting jails. If you're going to be a decent citizen you've got to get away from the criminal atmosphere. Bondsmen and night clubs and jails are the same rut, the same pattern. They're no good for you.”

“I don't know where else to go, or anyone else to go to. I'm not going to someplace called the Sisters of Mercy Salvation House.”

“Who was the man they came to see?”

The question landed heavily. A whole life conditioned me to never give information, any information, but especially a name, to authority. It was a holy commandment. Rosenthal's question clogged my circuits. It took a lengthy hesitation before I decided that he could find out simply by asking the deputy in the booth, if he had not done so already. A refusal or a lie would be dangerous. I told him.

“Why'd you take so long? It shows you still think like a criminal.” Rosenthal didn't press for more details. He asked what kind of job Abe was giving me. When I told him what the job consisted of, he wanted to know what stopped me from pocketing the money.

“The guy trusts me.”

“So he must. But it creates a bad image for the parole department when parolees steal from their employers. Makes it hard for someone else to get a job.”

“He knows my record. If he trusts me what business is it of yours? You said I had to tell any employer I was on parole. That should be enough.”

“We won't make a final decision now. What about the other job, the one you phoned in about?”

When I started to answer, Rosenthal gestured toward the parking lot. We walked together while I talked. He told me that he'd drive me to the hotel; it was on his path. While we rode, I kept talking. Without showing agreement, he was listening without the puckered expression of having sucked a sour lemon. This was good, for if he became even slightly flexible, if he would take a “wait and see” view, my problems would decrease. I would show him.

At the hotel, he cut the ignition, indicating a wish to talk more. I had to urinate and my feet were throbbing. I told him and invited him up. He agreed—and he was seriously concerned about the blisters. If they worsened he'd arrange an appointment at the General Hospital. Bad as the blisters were, I wished that he'd show less concern for them and more for my other problems. They were more urgent than my feet.

“Pretty dreary,” was his comment on the room.

“Better than a cell. Even if it's not, I can walk outside.”

I sat on the bed and took off my shoes and socks.

In the same way that my yesterdays trained me to peer from windows for possible escape routes, Rosenthal was conditioned to certain behavior. He examined rooms, especially parolee's, for signs of wrongdoing. He looked from the habit of looking.

“What's this?” he demanded, turning from the dresser. Pinched between thumb and forefinger, held before his eyes, were three burnt matches. They were fastened together where they'd been torn from the matchbook, and their burned tops were fused. Rosenthal had picked them from the ashtray where they'd been torn from the matchbook, and their burned tops were fused. Rosenthal had picked them from the ashtray where Augie left them. It was the way matches were used to cook heroin—and Rosenthal knew it.

The dipping sickness churned in my stomach.

“What's what?” I asked lamely; what else could I say?

“Already shooting junk,” he said.

“Where'd you get that idea?” What a weak defense, playing lame—but any defense was weak in this predicament.

Rosenthal, still beside the dresser, rubbed a forefinger over a spot on the enamel and turned back, holding the forefinger up like a prosecutor presenting evidence. He displayed a smudge of black. “The bottom of a burned spoon left this,” he said.

What he'd found was far more damning evidence of misdeed than my being at the jail. He knew someone had fixed in the room. To prove it wasn't me would force me to confess other misdeeds. I searched for words—yet I was unafraid. As I'd been starkly aware of the bars at the jail, I was now aware that we were alone. No deputy sheriffs could come to his aid if he decided to arrest me—and he could never do it by himself.

“You're crazy! I haven't shot any dope.”

“I wasn't born yesterday. I know what this means.” He waved the matches.

“You're accusing me on three burned matches in an ashtray. That's insane.”

His eyes narrowed. He was considering whether or not he had enough evidence to send me back to prison. He needed very little to justify it, but three burned matches in an ashtray would appear silly in a written report. Even his superiors might think so. And he knew it. He demanded to see my arms. I showed them to him. Any glee I might have felt at this frustration was dampened by the knowledge that all hope of rapport was now forever destroyed. In his mind I was guilty, and if he couldn't prove it his hostility would be exacerbated.

He scrutinized my arms and the backs of my hands. His manner was arrogant, as if he were in a jail with help all around rather than a fat little pig alone. I submitted—but felt like laughing. Maybe he had delusions of grandeur, or maybe he'd handled too many passive parolees.

Next he searched my pockets; then the room, checking the hollow under the sink basin and the small ledges at the rear of the dresser behind the drawers. Both were routine places of concealment for addicts.

When he finished, sweating and breathing heavily, he wiped his hands and turned to me. I sat on the bed, and I'd anticipated his next move.

“Get your shoes on. I'm taking you down for a nalline test.”

I'd been waiting for that, and decided that if he punctuated the order by reaching for his handcuffs I was going to put my fist down his throat—or whatever was necessary to get away. Handcuffs would show a decision to put me in jail. Without them it was more likely that he intended to wait for the test's result. Going with him at all was risking imprisonment, but if I assaulted him and got away, when I was caught it was certain imprisonment. I had to choose between lesser evils. I put on the shoes.

9

T
HE
concrete building that housed the parole department's nalline testing center could have been designed by the same architect who devised the jail. It had the same neo-Orwellian blankness. And it stood in a rundown neighborhood.

Rosenthal parked in a lot beside the building. As we got out, I noticed the neighborhood's empty silence. The streets of the city's poor usually teem with motion and noise. This was deserted, as if the malignity in its midst was alien to life. Dusk's light had ceased to peer over the roof tops and now sneaked between the buildings and lighted the shapes into unreality.

The dozen automobiles in this lot were new or nearly so. Most were compacts—economical luxury, bucket seats, white sidewalls, gleaming chrome. This was for “personnel only”.

We walked to the sidewalk and turned toward the front door. Another parking lot was on the other side of the building. It was much larger, but unpaved, a vacant lot. Automobiles were scattered at random, sagging from rutted earth and their own arthritic suspensions. They were a spectrum of yesteryear's models—each one looked as if Willy Darin belonged behind the wheel. But women occupied most of them, and some of the women held babies, or watched them skitter about in search of games, as if this was a park. Each woman was waiting for her man to run the gauntlet, and each was necessarily in fear that her man would disappear into the maw—to be next heard from back in prison. I knew the women had worn faces, for they had to reflect the lives of their men.

The front door was frosted, opaque glass. As Rosenthal ushered me inside, a black face appeared above a suit collar. The room was very dim; the purpose was to get eyes adjusted to the gloom preparatory to the nalline test.

“What've we got here, Bill?” the Negro asked.

“One of mine. I think he's been using.”

The Negro looked at me. “Naughty boy.”

The levity grated my nerves. I was not a child—nor were these my parent surrogates—nor was the situation funny.

The Negro was huge enough to be a wrestler, and size was probably a factor of his assignment, whatever his other civil service qualifications. Most addicts shrug and ask what's for chow when it's time to go to jail, yet someone might rebel and the Negro's presence was to restore order. He was a good house nigger.

The Negro gave me a log to sign—name and prison number. I wondered if they'd engrave the number on my headstone. Rosenthal had me stand aside with him while my eyes adjusted to the gloom. The room had three rows of wooden benches. About fifteen figures sat quietly waiting in the shadows. I studied the faces of the waiting men. Most were Mexican, some blacks, a small number of whites.

Rosenthal beckoned me. I followed him, mind shivering on unreality's brink, and found myself in another room, seated in a chair before a doctor—a tall man with an ophthalmoscope casting a searing light. He chanted questions—medical history—and held up a strange instrument to measure the size of my pupils. A moment later a needle stabbed into my arm.

The nalline added cramps to my nausea. I waited in another dark room. Figures sat around me, were called one by one. My name was called. The doctor measured again. The pupils had gone down, grown smaller, and this meant I was clean. He shook his head and told Rosenthal I'd passed.

Rosenthal was unsatisfied and wanted a urinalysis; it would show up things other than opiates. “He's been shooting something,” Rosenthal said.

Bottle in hand, he escorted me down a hallway. It had red signs indicating this was the exit for those who had passed the test. At the hallway's end was an electrically controlled grill gate. It was opened for those who passed, but not for those who failed. To the left of the gate was a short corridor into a cell. Those who failed had no choice but to enter the cell. It was also where urine specimens were taken.

A young Mexican was lying on a bench, head propped against a wall, hands folded on his chest. He opened his eyes when Rosenthal led me in, but otherwise remained motionless.

Recessed fluorescent light gave a sheen to the enameled concrete walls. Suddenly, words of fury boiled from me, frenzied and somewhat incoherent, an attempt to make Rosenthal understand that he shouldn't worry about me using heroin—that he should worry about driving me to much worse things. The confusion of my outburst kept him from understanding exactly what I said. It was just as well that he didn't understand.

Before the tirade finished, the burly Negro charged into the room, summoned by the noise. He was as ready as a trained dog to control any rebelliousness. His arrival checked me, for I verged on saying things that could bury me if quoted on paper. The hammering pulse in my head continued even though I was silent.

Rosenthal handed me the bottle. I pissed in it, fastened the white cardboard lid, and handed it back.

They walked out—and locked the door. Only those who have been caged can understand the horror of a key closing in a lock. Rosenthal had done it unconcernedly, without a word of explanation. And he'd been cunning, had completely tricked me.