On the Yard (42 page)

Red, watching the byplay, scowled.

“Take it easy,” Chilly told him. “We can coast for months on what we have left.”

“Just let it happen?”

“Why not?”

“I don't know. That fucking fire. I still see it every time I close my eyes, and I can't stop trying to count what we lost in it.”

“A few hundred boxes of cigarettes?”

“And the cotton.”

“That's being replaced. You ever gone without cotton when you wanted it?”

Red ignored the question. “And Nunn?”

“He bothers you?”

“Sometimes.”

“If I'd had to guess, I'd have said you didn't dig Nunn.”

“Maybe I didn't. But I keep seeing him sitting there with his jaw jacked open and nothing to say and he always had too much to say.”

“Maybe he found what he was looking for.”

“Chilly, don't go funny-style on me.”

Chilly smiled. He was surprised to be feeling so well, both on and off the cotton, his mind working so neatly, but without urgency. He touched Red on the chest and found his educational voice. “There comes a time when a sucker knows he's beaten, whipped to the bone, and after that he's just waiting for the first good chance to die.”

“Bullshit.”

“Nunn knew it was all over when he came back last time.”

“His third fall?” Red asked. “I'm working on my fifth fall and I'm not thinking about giving up.”

“But you like jailing, Red. Nunn didn't. He didn't like it here, he didn't like it on the streets, he didn't like it anywhere. There wasn't anything happening for him and he couldn't get it off his mind. Others—” Chilly smiled faintly at Red. “It don't bother them too much.”

Candy had tired of her watch and now sought to enter the conversation. “Life's a ball,” she contributed.

“A ball of shit,” Red said.

“Baby,” Chilly told Candy, “now that you've come to, why don't you jump in the canteen line and get us some scarf?”

“What do you want?” Candy asked.

“A Sidewalk Sundae. How about you, Red?”

“Get me one of them Whale bars, or if they ain't got that, get an ice cream sandwich.”

“And shoot your best shot,” Chilly added.

Both men turned to watch Candy walk away towards the canteen line. The element of caricature in her walk had increased, but Chilly no longer saw it, and Red never had.

“You're getting righteously hooked on that broad, aren't you, Chilly?”

Chilly turned to study Red with mild humor. “I didn't mean to take over your program.”

“Not my program. I love to freak off, but get strung out? That's something else.”

“Maybe I'm turning into a come freak.”

“Turning? You ain't put a foot outside your cell for the last three weekends. Laying up with that sissy and a tube of cotton.”

“I've been doing a lot of reading.”

Red snorted. “If you've been reading that bitch has got something printed in her ass and you got an eye in the head of your dick.”

Chilly started laughing. “Would you feel better if I switched cells with you some night and let you do some reading?”

“They got cows in Texas?”

“You'd like that?”

“Yeah, but you don't mean it.”

“I might mean it. Next month, I might mean it.”

“Shit, by next month you'll have that bitch driving to the canteen in a red convertible, if that's what she asks for.”

“She don't ask for nothing, except what I'm looking to give her anyway.”

“You mean it? About switching cells?” Red asked.

“I don't think she'd go for it.”

“She'd go for it if you told her that was the way it was going to be.”

“No, I don't think she'd go for it.”

“You mean you don't want her to go for it.”

“Something like that.”

“Huckily-buck.”

Candy came back with the ice cream. Half-a-dozen prisoners turned to stare after her. She had three Sidewalk Sundaes. “They were out of both Whale bars and ice cream sandwiches,” she told Red.

“Whatever I want, that's always what they're out of.”

“Sure,” Chilly said, “the warden arranges it personally.”

“I believe it.”

They stood eating the Sidewalk Sundaes. The yard was clearing as the assigned men headed back to work after lunch. “What're you going to do this afternoon?” Chilly asked Candy.

“I don't know.”

“Maybe you better lock up.”

“Is that what you want me to do?”

“Lock up if you feel like it, otherwise stick close to Red.”

“I'll probably lock up.”

“Suit yourself. I'm going to make it back to work.”

Chilly and Lieutenant Olson no longer had too much to say to each other outside of business. Olson was cordial, Chilly continued to do an efficient job, though he was beginning to question the value of the entire long-range program which had prompted him to take a job in the first place, particularly now since he and Olson had both apparently withdrawn to some more fundamental level of their personalities where it was necessary to see each other as enemies. Chilly didn't care. He had never made that much of Olson's pretense at friendship, but he still occasionally got the intimation that Olson, behind the congestion of his hypertensive eyes, was enjoying some secret relish. The sharpest point Chilly could put to it was that Olson knew what Candy was, but that didn't make much sense since he had done nothing about it unless, buried deep in his fat, Olson was some kind of machinery himself.

Chilly came into the office, took his jacket off, and hung it over the back of his chair. “What's to it, Loot?” he said.

Olson looked up from a memo and nodded. Another point: he had stopped calling him “hotshot.” Just about the time of the fire.

“How much tooth powder did you send the north block on their last regular requisition?” Olson asked.

“A drum—fifty pounds.”

“They say they're out. I wonder if someone over there's dealing that stuff?”

“State tooth powder? You couldn't give it away. Someone probably spilled water in it and threw it out to cover his goof.”

“You hear something?”

Chilly smiled. “That's just one hypothesis. Someone might be bagging it up in balloons and selling it on the yard for dope.”

“I don't doubt it. You probably handle it.”

“No, I use chalk dust from the ed building—it's got a better texture. I can probably get the south block to send them some over.”

“What's that?”

“Tooth powder for the north block.”

“Okay. Do that then.” Olson stood up. “I'll be out at the snack bar.”

Chilly waited until Olson left the office before he said, “Where else?” Then he called the head cell tender in the south block and arranged to have some tooth powder taken to the north block. The cell tender wanted to know was his clean underwear being delivered to his cell every night, and Chilly said he had no complaint. He hung up and went to heat a pot of water. He made a glass of instant coffee and sat smoking while he sipped it. There was nothing else to do.

He had persisted on this job because it was the only way to earn an assignment somewhere outside the walls, but he was beginning to doubt it would work at all. The classification committee wasn't foolish. They trusted no one. But there was a growing breed of career convict, largely alcoholic check writers, whom they distrusted less than most. They trusted them to be harmless, and these were the men, regardless of time served, who were being assigned to minimum security jobs. Sometimes they ran off, but their escapes seldom amounted to more than drunken sprees where they ran wild for a few weeks with someone's checkbook or credit cards before they were caught and returned like runaway boys. A new inmate was emerging, the waste product of a new society.

Chilly recognized that his chances of being assigned outside the walls were growing more remote rather than improving, and now he had to doubt he could gain such an assignment in less than ten served, and by then the balance would have tipped well past halfway and it would no longer be intelligent to risk his investment by escaping into a world where the odds against success were daily tightened by the growing sophistication of police methods. Yes, the slobs knew their business. It would still make sense to run this year, or next year, but he didn't ache for the chance as he had previously. This was as much as he would admit.

He rolled a piece of inmate stationery into his typewriter and tried to think of something to write to his mother. It was slow going and it always was. His mother had lately taken the position that he was being crucified by the authorities. Somehow she had formed the conviction he was innocent, that he had always been innocent, and Chilly didn't understand how she could support such a notion—if she were sane enough to earn a living, she must be sane enough to suspect her own delusion, but the theme was beginning to dominate her letters to him. She had announced sometime back that she was going to see the governor, and apparently she was still waiting for an appointment. Lately she had met some man who claimed to have connections within the legislature, and Chilly had pictured an aging player driving on his dippy old mother through this most obvious soft spot. Nothing he could find to write her seemed to have any effect on her growing conviction and he had given up with the thought that if it made her any happier what difference did it make?

He had trouble writing half a page, double-spaced, and finally called upon the fire to fill the page down to where it seemed decent to type “Love” and sign it “Billy.” He addressed an envelope and walked out on the yard to mail the letter. One of the domino games attracted him, he knew the players to be expert, and he stopped to watch. He tried to determine the bones each player held by his style of play. O'Brien, who had been standing on the other side of the table, came around next to Chilly.

“Hendricks and Rooster,” he named two of the players, “are my horses.”

“You got good horses,” Chilly said.

“They got a lock here.”

Chilly, watching the pattern form, rock by rock, nodded in agreement.

“I hear you're easing out of everything,” O'Brien said. Chilly turned to look up at the other man. O'Brien's face was large and red, his eyes as gray as rain water. He chain-smoked cigars; there were always five or six stuffed in his shirt pocket, along with several leather-bound notebooks, which Chilly guessed to be full of blank pages, and a good pen.

“Where do you hear that?” Chilly asked in a form of idle contradiction.

“Here and there. Is it true?”

“I might lighten up for a while.”

“You taking to other interests?”

Chilly looked at O'Brien again. There was something in the too full lines of his face that suggested a taint of foolishness, and for a moment the cigar in his mouth seemed to be made of candy, a boy's token of vice.

“What do you want, O'Brien?”

“Your connection.”

“And what connection is that?”

“Your cotton connection.”

“Someone's putting you on. I've never had any part of the cotton.”

“Don't come on like that, Chilly. You're not talking to some fish now. Everyone knows you're behind the cotton.”

“Then everyone's full of shit.”

O'Brien nodded thoughtfully like a man deciding to play his ace. “Then I'll have to hit on Caterpillar.”

Chilly smiled. “That's a good idea.” Over O'Brien's shoulder he saw that the canteen line was down to just a few men. “You do that,” he continued and walked away towards the canteen. At the window he bought two bags of cookies, one applesauce, one oatmeal, and a package of rolls, and he had these in his arms when he appeared in front of the cell at lockup. Candy rolled over in her bunk, still half asleep, to see Chilly standing there like a husband coming home from work carrying groceries and to her it didn't seem at all a pathetic farce. “Hello, daddy,” she whispered.

She was up brushing her teeth when the bar was thrown and Chilly entered the cell. She turned around and moved to squeeze him intimately. He felt an immediate throb of warmth.

“Don't start that unless you're going to do something about it.”

“Now?” she asked, smiling, the word hollowed and blurred through the toothpaste.

“That's what I mean.”

They skipped the dinner line, eating the rolls with hot instant chocolate. Chilly spent the evening reading—first the paper, which he handed up to Candy, then a novel. Candy shaved every night and spent a long time inspecting her face in the mirror, looking along the edge of her jaw for blackheads. They had a snack at eight; cookies, this time with coffee. Candy wanted to talk about one of the places where she had hung out in San Francisco, and Chilly listened for a while before he returned to his book.

When the lights went off after the ten o'clock count, Candy immediately slipped from the top bunk. For a moment, feeling some vague disinclination, he almost waved her away. Then the monotony, the essential emptiness of the day, seemed to compel him to some expression of life and he opened the blankets for her, moving far to the side of the narrow bunk so she could get in. If this is it, he thought, then this is it, and then she had him turned on so he didn't have to think about anything.

He was mounted over her in the somewhat awkward posture they had both found they liked best when the first flashbulb went off outside the cell. Instinctively Chilly turned to look towards the bars, while he heard Candy murmur, “Daddy?” with a presentiment of dread.

A familiar voice said, “Hold it right there, Oberholster,” and the flash went off again like a blow aimed directly into his eyes.

A second voice said, “That'll do it.”

Chilly heard the bar thrown and then the Spook was inside the cell. “All right, kids. Out of the sack. I hate to break in on this tender moment, but I only obey orders.”