On the Yard (11 page)

“Here, ol' fellow,” Angelo crooned softly.

Puchuco made a noise deep in his throat and his eyes disappeared for a moment to reappear a step lower.

“Come, ol' cat. You come eat.”

Angelo sat down on the bottom step and pulled the last of the meat from his pocket to spread it on the step above him.

“I ever hurt you?” he asked Puchuco.

As the cat began to eat, Angelo rubbed the knobs of torn flesh around his mutilated ears.

Angelo ended his round with the old industrial building, a huge boxlike, and half-empty structure that had been condemned for ten years. The gym was on the third floor, the second floor was used for storage and sometimes football chalktalks and play rehearsals. The ground floor still housed working shops, and Angelo paced slowly between the stands of bulky machinery, not always certain any more just what it was he was looking for.

At one-thirty-five an officer with a prisoner in chains was admitted through the front gate. Tom didn't recognize the officer.

“Higgins,” the officer said, offering his hand. “I'm from Camp Fourteen. Up in Del Norte?”

“You come a ways.”

“Yes, it's a piece,” Higgins admitted.

“How's the weather up there?”

“Winter's set in. We're already up to our ass in snow.” He took off his uniform cap and looked at the lining. Apparently satisfied with the way it was holding up, he put it back on his head.

“This here boy, now,” he said, nodding towards the prisoner standing quietly in handcuffs and restraining gear. “He took off on us. Gave us quite a chase until we got the dogs after him. They turned him up fast enough, shivering so hard it's a wonder he didn't shake his goddam teeth loose. Cold, weren't you, boy?” Higgins invited the prisoner to confirm it.

The prisoner shrugged, causing his chain to clink musically. “I was doing all right until you put dogs in the game. Them lousy bastards would starve before they'd track for food, but give them a chance to hunt a man and they can't start fast enough.”

“You might as well get that iron off him,” Tom told Higgins. “He ain't going to do no successful running from here.”

“Didn't do no successful running from camp neither,” Higgins said.

“What's his name? I'll phone control and get him a cell.”

“Sarich.”

Higgins removed the restraining gear with practiced efficiency. “You got smokes?” he asked.

“You know I ain't,” Sarich said.

“Here.” Higgins handed him a partial pack and Sarich sneered at them before he put them in his shirt pocket.

“I forgot you smoked them fruiter cigarettes.”

“They're better for you,” Higgins said mildly.

“Sure, they give you mentholated cancer.”

“Frank, why did you rabbit? I can't figure it out. Was someone in camp putting pressure on you?”

Sarich scowled. “There ain't a swingin dick in camp that could do me harm and you know it.”

“Well, what the hell did you run for then?”

“I felt like it.”

“But you only had a few weeks left.”

“I felt like it,” Sarich said harshly. “What's so hard to understand about that?”

Old Tom finished on the phone and swiveled around to face them. “Take him over to the south block,” he told Higgins. “They'll be waiting for him. Then you can be on your way back.”

Sarich jammed his hands into his pockets. For a moment his eyes looked raw and his sneer seemed almost painful.

In the south block rotunda he said so long to Higgins and went to wait by the office window. An inmate keyman loitered there, a nut Sarich remembered from before. They called him Jo-Jo and no one added “the dog-faced boy” because Jo-Jo was too big and his expression too strange. This night he wore the top to a suit of Navy surplus wool underwear, jeans held up by the heavy belt that also supported his pouch of large brass keys, and slippers knitted out of string. His head shaven, his eyes depthless, his hands enormous, he was slowly chewing a wad of paper he had torn earlier from a magazine cover.

“Where'd you come in from?” he asked.

“Camp.”

“Beefed in?”

“That's right. Where they going to cell me?”

“Up on the fifth.”

“You know who I'm going in with?”

Jo-Jo chewed slowly. If he was thinking, it wasn't possible to see any evidence of the process. Finally he said, “I don't pay no attention.”

The officer came and they took Sarich up on the fifth tier, and while Preston, the gun rail officer, stood by, they locked him in the dark cell. The other man was only a heavily breathing mound of shadowed blankets.

Back in the rotunda Jo-Jo settled down on the wide metal steps and pulled the magazine from his hip pocket. He couldn't read and he had already looked at the photographs many times so he was able to turn directly to his favorites. One was a young fair-haired girl, nude and showing herself except for the just sufficiently cocked leg that obscured her final mystery in shadow. Her eyes were lowered but the delicate pink nipples of her small breasts stared triumphantly at the lens.

His other favorite picture was very different. The people, a man and a woman, were dressed: the man in a dinner jacket, the woman in a cocktail dress. They sat at a small table and held glasses half full of some red liquid, and the people seated at the surrounding tables were watching them with polite admiration. The girl was beautiful, but when Jo-Jo imagined himself to be the man in the dinner jacket seated across from her, he never went on with the dream and imagined himself taking this girl home. He just sat and looked at her and sipped the red liquid and didn't have any trouble finding something to say that wouldn't sound like he was dumb or crazy. That was all, but he found it even more satisfying, in a different way, than the things he imagined with the girl whose breasts were bolder than her eyes.

He studied these pictures off and on through the night. Then at 4 A.M. he went up and unlocked the cells on the mess hall and kitchen bars, and at four-forty the officer pulled the bars releasing the white-uniformed cooks, waiters, and kitchen utility men to straggle down, bitching monotonously and without real bitterness, to prepare a breakfast certain to please only the head steward who wouldn't, of course, eat it.

At five Jo-Jo started unlocking the entire block. He walked rapidly along the tiers, his steps exactly metered so it was three steps, key in, turn and out, three steps, key in, turn and out. He never broke stride, never missed the keyhole or bound the key turning it, and the men waking up in the cells would hear a metronomic series of clicks, gradually rising or falling in pitch, depending upon whether Jo-Jo was moving towards or away from them, and after listening awhile to see if the rhythm would falter, they thought when it didn't, “That nut Jo-Jo's on the key.”

Terrence Preston followed Jo-Jo's progress from the gun rail, watching with fascination as he had every morning since he had been assigned the post, still waiting for Jo-Jo to miss while hoping he wouldn't.

Only a moron, Preston had concluded, could be capable of such single-minded concentration. Anyone with even the most rudimentary spark of intelligence would think something—that would at times throw him off his rhythm, but Jo-Jo moved on, robotic and inexorable and, Preston imagined, mindless as the broom enchanted by the Sorcerer's Apprentice.

Actually, in a small crystal globe deep in his slow brain, Jo-Jo was still smoothing the satin lapels of his dinner jacket and telling the girl something nice about her hair, and the hypnotic click of the key entering lock after lock was as remote as the street noises outside the imaginary restaurant.

T
HINK OF
all them fools out there bustin their asses so them bitches can sit under those hair dryers,” Chilly Willy said idly.

It was six-thirty by his watch. He knew the sun was probably shining already out there in the free world, but it hadn't yet crested the high walls of the big yard. Chilly was cold but he was trying not to show it. He had read somewhere that if you relaxed when you were cold, rather than hunching and shivering, it was easier to bear. It seemed to be true. He wasn't comfortable, but neither was he giving anyone the satisfaction of appearing uncomfortable.

“Sure,” Society Red was saying, “but look at all the bedtime action those fools are getting.” Red jumped up, spun around and shouted “Hot cock!” like a street vendor.

“That's a trick's notion,” Chilly Willy said, amused scorn playing in his eyes. “I don't know, Red, I'm trying to educate the fool out of you, but sometimes I wonder if it isn't buried too deep.”

“I ain't real swift,” Red acknowledged slyly. “If I was I wouldn't be beating this yard morning after morning.”

Chilly smiled at the shaft. Red was the type of stud that just when you were sure he was a fool and a clown came up with something half sharp.

The two men were watching the other inmates straggling from the mess hall. It was a hungry morning. There were three such mornings and today's was French toast, an offering so distorted in mass production that it was often referred to as fried linoleum. Another hungry morning featured a stack of thick and sodden hot cakes cooked hours before. The third and most dreaded was a notorious concoction known as the square egg, prepared from powdered eggs and fatback, baked into rubbery sheets, which were cut into square servings. The square egg was universally regarded as inedible.

Hungry mornings meant little to Chilly Willy. He seldom ate mainline chow. At the moment he was looking for someone who owed him, who could be pressured into standing in the canteen line for rolls and coffee, sometimes an hour's wait, and a job so humble he wouldn't even ask Red to do it unless it were important.

“And here he comes,” Red said, “just like he never left.”

Chilly turned to watch Nunn walking towards them through the clusters of shivering cons sheltered under the rain shed. He moved as if he were seriously ill and there was nothing in his drained and leaden face to contradict this impression except the brittle light of his flat gray eyes.

“You come back to die?” Chilly asked.

“No, to build myself up. Those streets tear up your health.”

The two men shook hands.

“Well, what'd you bring this time?” Chilly asked.

“Nothing much. A one to five for Receiving.”

“Receiving?” Chilly was incredulous.

“They set me up, Chilly. They flat set me up. In court they claimed I'd turned out Jimmy Brown—you remember him?”

“The freak they used to call Frosty?”

“That's the one. They claimed I put him to boosting for his fixes.”

“Did you?”

“More or less.”

“That's you then, isn't it?”

“One stinking suit. That's what they nailed me on.”

“It was good enough, wasn't it?”

“I guess it was. We're not holding this conversation in the lobby of the St. Francis.”

“And how many times have you stood right here and said no one but a fool would steal anything but money?”

“Okay, Chilly.”

“I hope you looked real clean in that hot suit.”

“It didn't fit.”

Red started laughing and Nunn turned to ask, “You still putting out them withered backs of yours?”

“I ain't puttin out nothing 'cept'n old people's eyeballs.”

“Well.” Chilly ignored the byplay. “You had your vacation. How long? Seven months?”

“Closer to six.”

“That's no record, but you're whipping around pretty fast. Well, it's only a nickel, even if they stick it all to you, you can still see the end of it.”

“Chilly, you going to score?” Red wanted to know.

“Just hang tough until I find a horse to put in the line.”

Nunn slapped his hollow stomach. “Good. Long as I've been looking at that slop, I still can't eat it. You'd think I'd get used to it.”

“It's not really food,” Chilly said in the solemn mocking tone he thought of as his educational voice. “It's more like fuel. Like Presto logs. It'll keep you moving around if you don't want to move too fast, and they're not keen to have you move too fast anyway.”

“This time I'd like to make some of those variety shows they put on for the free people. They scoff them good steaks.”

“What're you going to do on the variety show,” Red wanted to know. “Perform on the meat whistle?”

“Hit it, punk,” Nunn said. “I wouldn't move in on your specialty.”

“Your mammy's specialty,” Red countered.

But Nunn had turned back to Chilly. “How about it, Chilly, couldn't you get us on the show as stagehands, or some other lightweight shuck. We could lay up and eyeball them fine broads, then fix on free-world food.”

“Maybe,” Chilly said.

“You want to get in some righteous eyeballing?” Red asked, beginning to clamor for attention. “Make it to church. Some of them Christer broads are all right.”

“All right for your mammy,” Nunn said. “Adenoidal, pinch-breasted, dry-crotched, nowhere bunch of hymn-singing pigs.”

“Your mammy's a pig.”

Chilly Willy sighed. “Sometimes I wonder why I stand out here year after year listening to you two swapping mammies.”

“Because you got nothing better to do and nowhere else to do it,” Nunn said in a much different tone from the one he used for banter with Red.

Chilly smiled an acknowledgment, but made no answer. He had continued to monitor the men who were still filtering from the mess hall, and now he stepped forward to call, “
Larson!
” Then he hooked his thumbs in his back pockets while he waited for Larson to come to him. Chilly Willy wasn't corny. He created an impression of taut, finely drawn, but elastic strength, and with it there was a contrary suggestion of denseness as if he would be difficult to move from any spot where he had chosen to stand. His eyes were habitually mocking, elaborately insincere, but they also conveyed a sense of still, cold bottoms.