Cast the First Stone (12 page)

Each of us had a bucket. The 2-11 company on the opposite side of the cell block from us, came around each morning after breakfast and emptied the buckets in a sewer down at the end of the first range. We put our buckets out on the range and they came and collected them and it was somewhat of a disgrace to be put in that company.

But they had a chance to make money and a lot of convicts asked to be put in the bucket company in preference to the soup company. They rented the newer, cleaner, better buckets and kept them disinfected for you. If you couldn’t afford to pay them you always got the oldest, most battered buckets, and they were never rinsed or disinfected. It didn’t help much if both of the convicts in a cell didn’t do it.

On summer days the odor hung in the cells like some vile miasma, thick and putrid, with no relief. There was always an argument and generally a fight when one of the cell mates had to take a physic.

At the end of the range was a long wooden washtrough, similar to those in the dormitories. The water was turned on for five minutes before each meal and half of the company came out at a time and washed. It was then I got my first look at the other fellows in the company. They were a seedy lot with that decayed familiarity of convicts who have lost their pride. There were six cells of colored convicts in the company.

“I thought the men in here were sick,” I said to Starlight.

“Hell, naw, ain’t nobody in here sick. This is where Gout puts the men he calls ‘agitators.’ Most of them are gunsels and fags. They got Mother Jones and Snookums in here.”

“Who?”

“Oh, they’re just a couple of nigger punks. Mother Jones is a tall, bald-headed nigger and Snookums is the little nigger with the straightened hair and red tie.”

“Yeah?” I’d seen them go by to wash up.

“They got Chump Charlie, Nick’s Indian kid, in here too; and Wop and Blackie.”

“Are all of them queer?”

“They’re notorious.”

“When did they transfer Chump Charlie? I was in the dormitory with him.”

“Oh, just last week.”

I knew I wouldn’t like that company. When we lined up for dinner I was placed between Chump and a bushy-headed Armenian convict, named Mac, who talked so fast his words had no meaning whatsoever. I didn’t talk to either of them.

Dinner consisted of soup and bread and coffee. Supper was the same soup, thinned out and warmed over, with tea instead of coffee. Breakfast was some sort of cereal with real milk and sugar—usually it was rice or oatmeal—and coffee. Everyone bellyached about the food, cursed Gout, the warden, and luck. They said they were going to see Jumpy Stone and get out of that company. No one ever did.

After dinner we returned to the cells. The range boy brought me two blankets, a sheet and a pillowcase. One of the blankets was so dusty, dust spilled from it at a touch.

“Why the hell didn’t you shake this out before you brought it up here?” I said.

“Not allowed to,” he said.

“This is Jimmy Monroe. You want to look out for him,” Starlight told the range boy. The range boy went off without replying.

I started to make my bunk. The mattress was old and flat and grimy with a big stain in the center. The other side had dark stains which looked like blood.

“I’ll get the range boy to get you a cover,” Starlight said.

“Oh, to hell with it!”

A hopelessness overwhelmed me. I felt as if I would never be able to make my twenty years.

There was a stool for the upper bunk and I stood on it and spread the sheet. The working companies came in shortly after we’d eaten. There were three setups in the dining room. The first was for the dining-room workers and ourselves. The second was for the idle companies. The third was called the main line. It was for the working companies. Shortly after they’d come in, the working companies lined up for dinner. There was a banging of steel doors, loud curses, shouts, laughter, and the guards knocking their sticks and calling out their company numbers: “Thoid Ten…Third ‘Leven…Fourth ‘Leven…Fifth Ten…” I wondered why they didn’t call them out in rotation.

After the working companies came back the guards had dinner. Then, after that, all of us left the cell block. The working convicts went back to work and the rest of us to the idle house.

The idle house was a big box of a room on the third floor of an old crumbling mill building. It was filled with hard wooden benches, spaced a foot apart, facing from the ends toward a wide center aisle. There was a guard-stand by the door and one in each corner and two on each side. At the far end of the center aisle was the latrine. As all the latrines in prison, it was unenclosed. And it stank.

Grimy windows let in the light of gray March days. Now put a rickety wooden outside staircase, very steep and wobbly, ascending from the brick walk below, and fill the place to overflowing with cold, stale, smelly convicts jammed side-by-side on the benches and not allowed to read, or talk, or smoke; and only to go to the latrine with a guard’s permission.

No convict but a fool would sit there on those hard benches all day and go crazy doing nothing. They read papers, books, magazines; played cards, checkers, and other games, on the benches out of sight of the guards; shot dice on the floor, using a felt-lined cigar box in which to shake the dice; smoked cigarettes, fanning the smoke out of sight to the floor; and mush-faked. Mush-faking was the major industry within the prison. It was the manufacture of gadgets such as cigarette holders and lighters and jewel boxes and rings and pins and similar items from old bones, toothbrush handles, copper coins and gold crowns.

Our company sat on three benches at the north end. There was a small room partitioned off behind us where the prison band practiced. The colored convicts from all of the companies sat together at the other end of the idle house. All day long the band played. It was a very loud and brassy band. It played marches and marches and more marches until you could close your eyes and see the gray convicts marching through the gray days. When the band guard had to leave, for some reason or other, the convicts immediately stopped playing and began a crap game. The convicts from the idle house would crawl down between the benches and slip into the band room to join them.

As soon as we were settled the fellows began getting acquainted with me. “Weren’t you the fellow old man Warren caught writing that note?”

“He didn’t get it off of me. He got it off of Hunky.”

“I saw old Hunky right after that. He said the note fell into his inside coat pocket and he couldn’t find it. Old Fuss Face found it even before he knew where it was himself.

“Yeah? He didn’t tell me.”

“They sapped up on Book-me, didn’t they?”

“Yeah. I hated to see that.”

“Say, was that your mother I saw visiting you the other day?” someone called from the end of the bench.

“Yeah.” I had to answer them. They didn’t have anything else to do.

“Too bad about Big John.”

“Damn right,” I said. “Put him in the hole over a dried slice of bread.”

“I mean about him dying.”

“Dying?” I gave a start. “When did he die?”

“He died in the hole. Didn’t you hear about it? Caught pneumonia. He told Kish and the guard he was sick but they wouldn’t take him to the hospital.”

“Damn!” I said. “Damn!”

They asked me about my charge and my sentence and whether I had graduated from college, sure enough, and how old I was and did I expect to get a pardon?

“Hell, you have to be a big shot to get a pardon,” somebody said.

“Maybe he’s a big shot,” another convict answered.

Blackie asked me if I wanted to read his paper. He had moved over to sit next to me. I told him I got a paper.

“You know, it seems to me I’ve seen you in Toledo.”

That was the old approach. I’d gotten used to it by then. “You might have,” I said. I’d never been to Toledo but he was a likable-looking little fellow. He was about five feet, three inches tall and weighed about a hundred and twenty. He had long, curly black hair and features that were chiseled so finely they looked fragile. His skin was dead white. When his hair became mussed he looked very girlish.

“When we go in, stop by my cell, I’ve got something I want to show you,” he said. “It’s cell No. 13.”

“Okay.” I didn’t stop by his cell. I knew that the best way to keep out of trouble was to keep in your place. But I let him down lightly. I stopped and whispered through the bars as I passed, ‘The hack’s watching me.”

That night I asked Starlight about him. “What the hell did a kid like him do to get in here?”

“Who, Blackie? Man, he’s every bit of thirty-five years old. He was a machine gunner for the Lucky Lou mob.

Doing double life for machine-gunning two guys in Black-stone Park.”

The guard shift changed at six. After supper, when they had locked the men in their cells and taken the count, they relaxed and prepared to leave. For the most part they congregated in the stair well, down at the end of the cell blocks known as the hall, and shot the bull. During that time the convicts did all their extra-cell business. They shouted from cell to cell, from range to range, passed notes, passed objects down the range, someone in each cell moving it along. It was a time of great activity. The range boys who celled in the first cells of each range were still out. They were busy as cats covering up crap, hustling their change—doing whatever anyone wanted done for a price. The convicts passed objects from one range to another by tying them to strings, throwing them over the range and lowering away. When the object reached the desired range another convict would reach out of his cell and draw in the object with a wire hook. Then the sender would shout down directions, and it would be passed on to the next cell to be passed on down to its destination. Every convict had some sort of mirror, if only a broken fragment, and whenever a convict started a note or a package down the range he’d angle his mirror in the bars so he could watch its progress. We could also watch the guards in this way. Although it was against the rules to have such implements, and if caught with them it meant time in the hole, every cell had a hook, a string, a mirror, and many of the convicts had knives, clubs, sections of pipe, homemade blackjacks, and other instruments of aggression and defense.

The cell lights were turned on after supper, to remain on until bedtime. I began to read my morning paper which had been stuck into my cell by the paper boy in my absence. But Starlight wanted to talk. He told me about the time he was a member of The Syndicate, and about the automobiles he had owned and the thousands of dollars he had won in dice games in the army. Every convict had owned at least two Cadillacs and had at least fifty thousand dollars in civilian life.

He was a short, fat, redheaded guy who thought he looked like a prize fighter. Actually he looked like a chubby, good-natured little runt. He was. He told me that they called him the Boston Red Squirrel and that he was in for driving the getaway car during a bank robbery. He said he drew eighty dollars a month disability pension and that he had been General MacArthur’s orderly.

The routine of the soup company was: Get up at six, wash, breakfast, idle house, cells and wash, dinner, cells, idle house, cells and wash, supper, cells, bedtime. Saturday afternoons we remained in the cells. Sunday mornings we went to church. We took our buckets to the dining room Sundays at dinnertime and brought back a half-bucket of soup and two slices of bread for our supper. Those of us who had money bought sandwiches and slices of pie from fellows on the other ranges.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays we went to the barbershop and on Fridays to bathe. The bathhouse was across from the idle house. There was a waiting room inside where we stood in line until our numbers were called. Then we stepped to the counter and received our change of clothing from the commissary clerk. Afterward we marched into the showers. In the center, benches surrounded a platform. We sat on the benches, undressed, piled our clothes on the platform. When we were all undressed we stood beneath the showers, often three and four men to each shower. The guard signaled the attendant who turned on the water. Always the water was too cold or too hot. It stayed on for three minutes. We dried and dressed and filed out the doorway, dropping our soiled socks into a basket, under the watchful eyes of the guard. We had to hold up our shirts and underwear, extended so that the guard could see that they had not been cut or torn. This was to keep us from tearing our clothes to get new ones, or holding out so we could get extras. We turned in our towels and got clean ones. That was our weekly bath.

Each morning we were required to sweep our cells. We were not furnished with brooms. We used old newspapers. Afterward the range boy came along and swept the range. If the guard wasn’t watching he’d just sweep it off below, where it blew back into the cells and on the ranges beneath. Once a week he would bring around a pail of water and a mop. The water was strong with lysol. Each of us mopped our own cells. He never changed the water. We mopped the twenty-seven cells with the same bucket of water.

“Jim, you ought to give the range boy something,” Starlight told me once. “He can do you favors.”

“Give him what?”

“Oh, a couple of twists a week will do. Just let him keep your state-issue tobacco. You never use it, anyway, and they’re the pettiest chiselers in the joint.”

“What the hell do I want to give him my tobacco for?”

“Oh, he can do you a lot of favors. He can carry messages and pass papers and packages. He can connect with the yard runners and get stuff from all over the joint.”

“That’s right, too,” I agreed. I’d been using the paper boys but I had to give them something each time.

“You have to give everybody a handout,” Starlight said. “Everybody in here’s got a racket. You have to pay the waiters in order to get something to eat. You have to pay the nurses and the doctors in order to get into the hospital. You have to pay the bucket boy before he’ll clean out your bucket.”

“Damn right, you have to pay to get your clothes washed if you own any of your own, like handkerchiefs and pajamas and underwear and stuff. If you put them in the laundry you’ll never get them back.”