On the Yard (8 page)

As a last gesture, he hoisted the roof from the rain shed, a thousand square feet of galvanized iron, and wedged it into a rocky pass near the top of the Canadian Rockies.

He did not intend to be destructive, he thought, still drifting through the cool night; he only wanted to disrupt their air of grim seriousness and point out that they were all involved in the same cosmic joke.

The fun would come in the morning when his quixotic subtractions were discovered. He decided to wait. His revenge was Puck's revenge, a mockery, still he needed to see it, but he saw no reason to wait alone and he began to leaf through the slender album of his experience for a companion. He considered a slender violet-eyed girl named Janice Lee. He had never done more than kiss her and her untasted charms had thus proved more durable. He placed her sitting on the edge of his bunk, and had her turn slowly, her violet eyes opening like soft flowers, to discover him waiting for her.

—Why, Paul—how nice.

—Hello, Janice Lee. Are you still whacky for khaki?

—Oh, you remember that? I married a Navy man. Didn't I write you once and tell you?

—I think you did.

—I told you how unhappy I was.

—Yes, I remember.

He reached out to take her arm. He could recall the right qualities of softness and warmth as if he were actually feeling them. He began to concentrate in an effort to bring back every detail, not only of Janice Lee, but of all that was essentially female. He kissed her deeply and her breast formed beneath his hand.

—Why didn't you answer my letter? she asked.

Before he could catch himself he had answered, Because by that time I was married myself. And Anna Marie, his wife, entered his mind with the force of a scream, and the whole juvenile masturbation collapsed in an instant.

At 10 P.M. the light went out, controlled from a panel in the block office, and Juleson turned to the wall. He pressed his forehead against the painted cement for the coolness. His pillow seemed to grow hot as soon as he put his cheek against it, and he turned it repeatedly, shifting the cooler undersurface to the top. He would not sleep until he could forget how badly he wanted to be unconscious. He was aware of Manning shifting restlessly beneath him. Finally, the other man got up and used the toilet. His breath seemed labored in the silence of the cell. He was standing and he seemed to remain, half leaning against the wall for several minutes.

“Don't you feel well?” Juleson asked in a whisper.

Manning's voice shook. “I'm afraid I'm sick.”

T
HE PRISON
is never at rest. The incident rate slows at night, but it doesn't ever cease. It slows because with the exception of a few trusted to watch over the vitals of light and heat, the entire inmate body is confined in cells from 10 P.M. to 7 A.M. It doesn't cease, because they are locked two to a cell. They gamble, fight, build fires, practice various perversions, and sometimes kill one another.

At night the guard staff is reduced by two-thirds and the ratio then runs at approximately one guard to a hundred and seventy-five convicts. The night bulls would find themselves in a desperate minority if the cons ever broke loose, but they never have, and first watch is considered an easy turn reserved for young and inexperienced officers, or old screws pushing retirement, or the cowards afraid to beat the yard shoulder to shoulder with the enemy in the blue uniform.

These first-watch officers walk the gun rails, their flash-lights lingering over the barred gloom of the lightless cells, tier on tier, five tiers high, one hundred cells long. From the gun rail the block looks like a metal honeycomb, or perhaps more accurately like a huge multiple trap, sprung now on its unimaginable quarry while the will-o'-the-wisp of the trapper's flash moves from snare to snare in quiet approval. Other night bulls sit out in the towers above the floodlit walls and blocks. They sip black coffee, read girlie magazines, or watch the moonlight slowly shifting on the empty concrete seventy-five feet below them. The prison seems like a walled city, smothered under a rigid curfew, governed by an alien army.

The gun rail guards are required to wear crepe-soled shoes, and they try to move silently, not, as any con is quick to say, out of consideration for inmate sleep, but to cause those who might plot at night to think of the gun bull as drifting like a shadow—a phantom who in as many imaginations could silently keep all the thousand cells under simultaneous surveillance. In dull fact their approach is betrayed to those who have reason to listen by the creaking of the leather harness that supports the guns, both rifle and pistol, they are required to carry.

Terrence Preston was embarrassed by these deadly tools. Two seemed excessive. He even wondered if he really needed a weapon at all since the most he usually saw of an inmate was an occasional blurred smudge of white tee shirt moving in a lightless cell. He had been warned—first by the training officer, then by his watch lieutenant—of the times when cell bars had been secretly sawed, and inmates had suddenly appeared, incredible aliens, in guard country. Guards
were
killed, his superiors had impressed on him. Still Preston couldn't imagine an inmate on the gun rail. He tried to picture one swinging over on an umbilical of knotted sheets, a handmade knife in his teeth, desperation in his heart ... Preston smiled. He couldn't see it.

He paused to push a scrap of orange peel from the rail and listen to the soft
pat
as it hit the concrete below him. Inmates were always throwing garbage onto the gun rail and Preston felt the practice represented an expression of hostility. It was a point worth making in his psych class tomorrow. The garbage would traditionally relate to feces. He smiled again. The infant inmate throwing feces at the father guard. But couldn't it as easily be a gift? An offering of something precious? Even a gift of love? He paused. There was a suspicious neatness, a jigsaw puzzle banality to the smooth interlocks of his speculation. He paced off another leg of his round and stopped to rest on the uncloseted toilet provided against an emergency. For a moment he had had an uneasy feeling, now he nodded firmly answering some invisible authority—it was a good point. Preston frequently made such points, based, he told his fellow students, on his observation of the inmates. Actually he had never spoken to an inmate. His “points” served to light his single distinction. He was working his way through college as a prison guard. He liked answering the questions he was always being asked. He had decided to take his degree in psychology and continue to work in the prison as psychologist. He believed he could help these men.

“Preston!”

He heard his name in a hissing whisper and looked down to discover the floor officer directly beneath him. The upturned face in the extreme foreshortening appeared to be sprouting shoes from immediately under the chin.

“Yo,” he whispered back.

“Come over to A-section and cover me. I've got a sick one.”

“Right.”

He followed along above the floor officer, watching the circle of his hat below, until they reached A-section, then he took up a position close to the center of the section and held his rifle at port. A door crashed, hurled by mechanical hands, and a sighing murmur ran through the block as if the men had collectively groaned and turned in their sleep.

“Radio,” some man called irritably.

“Radio yourself, punk,” someone else called.

Then Preston heard a sound he dreaded. In one of the cells just across from him an inmate hidden in the darkness was pushing his breath through his teeth to make a noise like air leaking from a punctured inner tube, bubbling through the spit. Preston knew what to expect.

“See the sweet little bull?” an anonymous voice asked in a tone that combined both amusement and obscenity.

Preston jerked his eyes away. He felt his face growing hot. Pay no attention to them, his watch lieutenant had told him; if they see they're getting to you they'll never let you up.

“Pussy on the gun rail,” another voice called.

“Hey, sucker, don't rank my action,” the first voice continued with mock seriousness. “I saw her first. Didn't I, baby? Slip over here on the tier and I'll give it to you through the bars.”

Preston lifted his hand suddenly, then didn't know why he had lifted it. In confusion he tugged at the brim of his hat and adjusted the temple bar of his heavy-rimmed glasses. He made himself stare sternly at the open cell. In a moment a half-dressed man appeared, his arms wrapped tightly around his chest, and even from the rail ten feet away his shivering was obvious.

“Go right down to the office,” Preston told him.

“Let me come down to the office,” his hidden tormentor began again. “I'll make it good to you.”

“Knock it off, men,” Preston ordered, unconsciously dropping his voice a half-octave below its normal pitch, and he heard his tone, hollow and absurdly faked like that of a boy of ten picked to play Daniel Webster in a school pageant. He cringed even before the delighted laughter started.

The sick one was shuffling down the tier and Preston quickly turned to shadow him. He pretended not to hear the chorus of whistles.

The sick man was taken up to the massive double doors that opened to the prison hospital, and there he had to wait for fifteen minutes until an officer showed up with the key.

The clinic filled the front section of the hospital block. At night a Medical Technical Assistant, universally shortened to MTA, a free man, was on duty there, and he, in turn, was assisted by two inmate orderlies. This night the MTA was playing chess with one of the orderlies, the board set up on the treatment table in minor surgery, while they leaned over it propped on their elbows. The second orderly sat on the instrument stand watching without much interest, swirling two inches of lukewarm instant coffee in the bottom of a jam jar. The clinic had the lunar appearance of all large white rooms lit with fluorescent light and the faces over the chessmen were blue-tinged as putty.

When the key sounded in the lock, the MTA looked up to watch the ponderous door swing slowly out, exposing a widening section of the south block rotunda, its riffraff drabness in vivid contrast to the bright arctic order of the clinic. The sick man slipped in, still hugging himself, and a guard followed. The MTA blew his breath out through slack lips in a weariness colored with theater. He turned back to the game and with his index finger gently nudged his rook a single square right, opening a discovery check by a patient bishop that had stood waiting on the same square since the third move of the game.

“That's got you,” he said.

“Maybe,” the orderly mumbled, “and maybe not.”

The MTA snorted and started over towards the sick man, rubbing his densely furred arms and yawning. “What's your number?” he asked.

“I don't remember.”

“Come on.”

“I just came in today.”

“I see. Well, we wouldn't have a card on you anyway. What's the trouble?”

But before the sick man could begin to tell him, the MTA had his ears plugged with a stethoscope. He checked him over rapidly, told him flatly that the most serious thing wrong with him was a bad case of dandruff, gave him an ounce of diluted bromide, and ordered him back to his cell.

“They can't sleep,” he told the guard, “so they might as well come on down and see what's going on in the hospital. They figure the doctor might invite them to share a jug.”

He knew it was more than that. There came a night, the first night or the hundredth night, when they had to ask someone, anyone, to care about them. They had to prove that help and comfort could still be summoned, that they wouldn't be left alone to die in the dark.

The orderly was still studying the board.

“Come on, Ghost, concede, and we'll play another,” the MTA said.

“Concede shit,” Ghost said tightly. “There's an out somewhere.”

“You could tip the board over.”

“There's an out.”

“Well, while you're looking for it, Joey and I'll go up and shoot that cancer.”

Joey drank the last of his coffee and reached over to put the jar in the surgery sink. He slid loosely from the instrument table and opened his fly to resettle his shirt. Then he smoothed and straightened the creases in his hospital whites. His hair was carefully combed. His eyes were quick.

They stopped first at the hospital safe in the pharmacy where the MTA logged out an ampul of morphine. Joey was required to stand clear while the combination was being worked, but once the safe was open he joined the MTA and selected a syringe which he took to the sink to test for cloggage. The needle was clear and the water spurted in a thin sturdy thread. He passed the syringe to the MTA.

The cancer was in a single room on the third floor. He was terminal, his pain beyond control, but massive doses of morphine eased him and permitted him some sleep. He was awake when Joey and the MTA entered and his eyes turned to them in the slow devoted reflex of an old dog. He tried to smile, but pain tore the intention before it could form on his mouth—he grimaced instead.

The MTA loaded the syringe and handed it to Joey to administer.

Joey smiled, his eyes oblique. “We should mainline him. Give him some final kicks.”

The MTA frowned and shook his head. “Knock that off. This isn't funny.”

Joey shrugged and lifted the cancer's wasted arm. Under the watchful eye of the MTA he placed the needle against the loose flesh. The MTA saw the needle slide in but what he didn't see was that Joey had positioned it so low on the arm —and the cancer's arm was so thin—that when he pressed it home the needle went clear through the patient's slack muscle into the soft flesh at the base of Joey's own thumb. He pushed the plunger and felt immediate warmth etch the veins of his forearm. A moment later a sensation he always thought of as a big soft pumpkin hit the back of his head.