The Best of Lucius Shepard (78 page)

“I
don’t want to meet them,” I said, annoyed. “I was just wondering about them.”

“They’re
busy,” the Latino said. “But I’ll see.”

“You
trying to fuck me over?” I asked Berbick as the Latino man went to consult with
the board.

He
looked pleased with himself. “What could happen? It’s only four old guys.”

“Nothing
to worry about,” Causey said. “He’s just giving you shit.”

“I
don’t need you interpreting for me, okay?” I said. “You can quit acting like my
fucking big sister.”

“Damn!”
said Berbick with surprise. “He’s coming over.”

With
the Latino holding his elbow, Czerny was heading toward us, shuffling through
the ankle-high grasses, wobbly and frail. His caved-in face was freckled with
liver spots, and the tip of his tongue flicked out with lizardly insistence. He
was small, no more than five feet five, but his hands were those of a much
larger man, wide and thick-fingered, with prominent knuckles-they trembled now,
but looked as if they had been used violently during his youth. His eyes were a
watery grayish blue, the sclera laced with broken vessels, and the right one had
a cloudy cast. When he reached us, he extended a hand and gave my forearm a
tentative three-fingered pat, like the benediction of a senile pope who had
forgotten the proper form. He mumbled something, barely a whisper. The Latino
man gave ear, and when Czerny had finished, he said, “There’s important work
for you here, Penhaligon. You should set about it quickly.”

It
did not seem that Czerny had spoken long enough to convey this much
information. I suspected that the Latino man and his associates were running a
hustle, pretending to interpret the maunderings of four senile old men and in
the process guaranteeing a soft life for themselves.

Czerny
muttered something more, and the Latino said, “Come visit me in my house
whenever you wish.”

The
old man assayed a faltering smile; the Latino steadied him as he turned and,
with reverent tenderness, led him back to join the others. I framed a sarcastic
comment but was stopped by Causey’s astonished expression. “What’s going on?” I
asked.

“Man
invited you to his house,” Causey said with an air of disbelief.

“Yeah
… so?”

“That
doesn’t happen too often.”

“I
been here almost five years, and I don’t remember it ever happening,” Berbick
said.

I
glanced back and forth between them. “Wasn’t him invited me-it was his fucking
handler.”

Berbick
made a disdainful noise, shook his head as if he couldn’t fathom my stupidity,
and Causey said, “Maybe when you go see him, you’ll …”

“Why
the fuck would I go see him? So I can get groped by some old wheeze?”

“I
guess you got better things to do,” Berbick said. He was acting pissed-off
again, and I said, “What crawled up your ass, man?”

He
started to step to me, but Causey moved between us, poked me in the chest with
two fingers and said, “You little hump! You walk straight up to eight from the
door … You don’t seem to appreciate what that means. Frank Czerny invites you
to his house and you ridicule the man. I been trying to help you …”

“I
don’t want your help, faggot!”

I
recognized Causey’s humorless smile as the same expression he had worn many
years ago prior to ramming my head into a shower wall. I moved back a pace, but
the smile faded and he said calmly, “Powers that be got something in mind for
you, Penhaligon. That’s plain to everyone ‘cept you. Seems like you forgot
everything you learned about surviving in prison. You don’t come to new walls
with an attitude. You pay attention to how things are and behave accordingly.
Doesn’t matter you don’t like it. You do what you hafta. I’m telling you-you
don’t get with the program, they gonna transfer your sorry ass.”

I
pretended to shudder.

“Man
thinks he’s a hardass,” said Berbick, who was gazing up at one of the guard
turrets, an untenanted cupola atop a stone tower. “He doesn’t know what hard
is.”

“Thing
you oughta ask yourself,” Causey said to me, “is where you gonna get
transferred to.”

He and Berbick started downslope, angling toward an unpopulated section
of the east wall. Alone on the height, I was possessed by the paranoid
suspicion that the groups of men huddled along the wall were all talking about
me, but the only evidence that supported this was Colangelo, who was standing
halfway down the slope to my right, some forty feet away, almost directly
beneath the spot where the board was assembled. He was watching me intently,
expectantly, as if anticipating that I might come at him. With his glowing
scalp, his eyes pointed with gold, he had the look of a strange pink demon
dressed in prison gray, and my usual disdain for him was supplanted by
nervousness. As I descended from the ridge top, he took a parallel path,
maintaining the distance between us, and though under ordinary circumstances I
would have been tempted to challenge him, having alienated Causey and Berbick,
knowing myself isolated, I picked up my pace and did not feel secure until I
was back in my cell.

·
· · · ·

Over the next several days, I came to recognize that, as Causey had asserted, I
had indeed forgotten the basics of survival, and that no matter how I felt
about the board, about the nature of Diamond Bar, I would be well served to pay
Czerny a visit. I put off doing so, however, for several days more. Though I
would not have admitted it, I found the prospect of mounting the iron stair to
the tier where Czerny lived intimidating-it appeared that in acknowledging the
semblance of the old man’s authority, I had to a degree accepted its reality.
Sitting in my cell, staring up at the dim white lights beyond the ninth stair,
I began to order what I knew of the prison, to seek in that newly ordered
knowledge a logical underpinning that would, if not explain everything I had
seen, at least provide a middle ground between the poles of faith and sophism.
I repaired my relationship with Causey, a matter of simple apology, and from
him I learned that the prison had been constructed in the 1850s and originally
used to house men whose crimes were related in one way or another to the
boomtowns of the Gold Rush. The Board of Prisons had decided to phase out
Diamond Bar in the 1900s, and at this time, Causey believed, something had
happened to transform a horrific place that few survived into the more genial
habitation it had since become. He had unearthed from the library copies of
communications between the Board of Prisons and the warden, a man named
McCandless Quires, that documented the rescinding of the phase-out order and
conferred autonomy upon the prison, with the idea that it should become a penal
colony devoted to rehabilitation rather than punishment. During that period,
every level of society had been rife with reformers, and prison reform was much
discussed-in light of this, such a change as Diamond Bar had undergone did not
seem extraordinary; but the fact that it had been given to Quires to oversee
the change, that smacked of the bizarre, for he had been frequently reprimanded
by the Board for his abuses of prisoners. Indeed, it was the atrocities
perpetrated during his stewardship that had induced the Board to consider the
question of reform. It was reported that men had been impaled, flayed, torn
apart by the prison dogs. Quires’ letters demonstrated that he had undergone a
transformation. Prior to 1903, his tone in response to the Board’s inquiries
was defiant and blasphemous, but thereafter his letters displayed a rational,
even a repentant character, and he continued to serve as warden until his
retirement in 1917. There was no record of a replacement having been appointed,
and Causey theorized that the board as we knew it had then come to power,
though it was possible, given Quires’ advanced age (88), that they had been
running things for many years previously. From 1917 on, communications between
Diamond Bar and the Board of Prisons steadily diminished, and in 1944, not long
before VE Day, they apparently ceased altogether. It was as if the prison, for
all intents and purposes, had become non-existent in the eyes of the state.

Once
Causey showed me a yellowed photograph he had unearthed from the prison
archives. It had been shot in the yard on a sunny day in May of 1917-the date
was inscribed on the back of the photo in a crabbed script-and it depicted a
group of a woman and five men, four convicts, one of them black, and the last,
an elderly man with white, windblown hair and a craggy, seamed face, clad in a
dark suit and tie. Causey identified the elderly man as McCandless Quires, the
warden. “And these here,” he said, indicating the other four, “that’s the
board.” He tapped each in turn. “Ashford, Czerny, LeGary, Holmes.”

Judging
by their faces, the men were all in their twenties. There was a rough
similarity of feature between them and the old men who met each day in the
yard, but the idea that they were one and the same seemed absurd.

“That’s
so, they’d all have to be more than a hundred,” I said. “They’re old, but not
that old.”

“Look
at the shape of their heads,” Causey said. “Their expressions. They all got
that spacey smile. Look at Czerny’s hands. See how big they are? It’s them, all
right.”

“You
need to take a breath, man. This isn’t the fucking Magic Kingdom, this is
prison we’re talking about.”

“This
is Diamond Bar,” he said sullenly. “And we don’t know what the hell that is.”

I
studied the photograph more closely, concentrating on the woman. She was
lovely, delicate of feature, with flowing blonde hair. Noticing my
attentiveness, Causey said, “I believe that there’s a plume. Quires didn’t have
no daughter, no wife, and she got the look of a plume.”

“What
look is that?”

“Too
perfect. Like she ain’t a man or a woman, but something else entirely.”

The
photograph aside, what Causey told me lent a plausible historical context to
the implausible reality of Diamond Bar, but the key ingredient of the spell
that had worked an enchantment upon the prison was missing, and when at last I
went to visit Czerny, I had retrenched somewhat and was content to lean upon my
assumption that we knew nothing of our circumstance and that everything we
thought we knew might well have been put forward to distract us from the truth.
Climbing the stairs, passing meter after meter of stone, ash-black and broken
like the walls of a mineshaft, I felt on edge. Up on the third tier, the
ceiling lights shed a glow that had the quality of strong moonlight; the bars
and railings were flaked with rust. Four prisoners were lounging against the
railing outside Czerny’s cell-the Latino who had spoken for him was not among
them-and one, a long-limbed black man with processed hair, his sideburns and
thin mustache giving his lean face a piratical look, separated from the rest
and came toward me, frowning.

“You
supposed to come a week ago and you just coming now?” he said. “That ain’t how
it goes, Penhaligon.”

“He
told me to come whenever I wanted.”

“I
don’t care what he said. It’s disrespectful.”

“That
kind of old school, isn’t it?”

He
looked perplexed.

“It’s
the kind of attitude you’d expect to find at Vacaville and San Q,” I said. “Not
at a forward-thinking joint like Diamond Bar.”

The
black man was about to speak, but turned back to the cell as Czerny shuffled
onto the tier. I had no inclination to mock the old man. Surrounded by young
men attentive as tigers, he seemed the source of their strength and not their
ward. Though I did not truly credit this notion, when he beckoned, the
slightest of gestures, I went to his side without hesitation. His eyes grazed
mine, then wandered toward the dim vault beyond the railing. After a second, he
shuffled back into the cell, indicating by another almost imperceptible gesture
that I should follow.

A
television set mounted on the wall was tuned to a dead channel, its speakers
hissing, its screen filled with a patternless sleet of black, silver, and
green. Czerny sat on his bunk, its sheets cream-colored and shiny like silk,
and-since he did not invite me to sit-I took a position at the rear of the
cell, resting a hand upon the wall. The surface of the wall was unusually smooth,
and upon examining it I realized it was not granite but black marble worked
with white veins that altogether formed a design of surpassing complexity.