Cast the First Stone (43 page)

But when I told him about it he seemed extremely happy. He told me a thousand things he wanted me to do as if I was going home that very moment. He hugged me and wanted to kiss me. Signifier and Candy stopped by to find out about it and he told them I had made it. He was so excited and happy that he made all of us excited and happy, too.

“Let’s get some blue boys and celebrate,” he said.

“Fine,” I said. We got some blue boys and got jagged and went out and played some poker.

He got broke but when I offered him some of my chips he declined, saying he wanted to lie down for awhile. I was winning so I kept on playing. I said I would be down after awhile.

When I went back to our bunks I found him typing.

“What are you writing, your life’s history?” I kidded.

He was violently startled. He wheeled and looked at me and his face flooded crimson. “What the hell!” I said. He snatched the sheet from the typewriter and started to tear it up. “Don’t.” I stopped him. “Let me see it.”

He looked at me for a long time with his face all broken up in a thousand different expressions, then he said, “All right, Jimmy, I’ll do anything for you.”

I sat down on the bunk and began reading the typed pages, frowning slightly:

I am twenty-four and know life. I wouldn’t know life if I wasn’t twenty-four, and I wouldn’t be twenty-four if I didn’t know life. I learned life and life and life until I knew it so well that even when they said, No charge to you, baby, I love it, I didn’t feel romantic.

But love makes a difference. It comes like the Assyrian gleaming in neither purple nor gold but holding fast and hard to the path until its victim is won.

Is that the wisdom of twenty-four?

No, this is it. When the change is made there comes a most demanding need, greater than the need for plasma, for freedom, for life, greater than the need for heaven.

Don’t you understand?

I need a…without it…

My mind began skipping words. My eyes saw them but my mind would not record them. I wanted to stop reading but I couldn’t.

…drunk or sober…one way or another…

When I came to the end my eyes kept darting back and forth across the page, trying to find something, I didn’t know what. I was afraid to look up. When I looked up I would have to face it. I didn’t want ever to face it. I didn’t think I could face it.

“Jesus Christ,” I said finally.

I looked down at him and looked quickly away. He was sitting on the board between the bunks, looking up at me. His eyes were like those of a dog that fears punishment.

I took a deep breath and said, “Jesus Christ, I thought we’d gotten above that. Especially that.” I had to swallow. “You said once you put me in the stars. Remember? And now this puts us in the gutter. Right back where we started—before where we started. Listen, this takes away everything we ever thought we had.” I was silent for a moment. He didn’t speak. I asked, “Is this all you ever wanted from me?”

“What else would I ever want?” he said.

Everything went then. We were just two convicts who didn’t like each other any more, two convicts afraid of the other’s power to hurt. There was a beaten, unsmiling dullness in Dido’s face. The closeness we’d had for so long was now completely gone.

“Listen,” I said. “Listen. If it was like that—if it was always like that, then I’ve wasted a hell of a lot of feelings.”

He bowed his face between his hands. His shoulders sagged. His voice was muffled. “Tell me what you want, Jimmy? How would I know? I’ve never got anything for nothing in all my life.”

“Anyway,” I said. “Anyway—” I finally got it out. “Anyway, not you. I don’t want you. You’re no different from all the rest.”

He stood up, white-faced and remote, and began a dull, bitter plea. “Haven’t I tried to be what you wanted me to, Jimmy? Haven’t I gone around here and kissed these bastards’ behinds just because you wanted me to get along with them and treat them right, when I know they hate my guts? I’ve changed goddamn near everything about me, Jimmy, and just for you. I never did any of it for myself. I never cared a goddamn thing for myself or anyone except you.”

“It isn’t that, that isn’t it, what I want you to do I want you to do not because of me but because you want to yourself. I want you to want to do these things. That’s the only way you’ll ever live to make it and get out and become somebody in the world. I want you to be somebody in this world, just as much as I want to be somebody myself in the world. You could be so damn easily. You’ve got everything it takes but the right attitude. It’s all sex with you,” I said. “And no kind of sex was ever worth the value you put on it, much less your kind.”

For a moment he looked as if he was going to faint. Then his eyes became haunted and crazy and his face cracked like the white drum of a new banjo that’s been overheated. “You don’t think so,” he said, pushing the words out between paper-stiff lips. “You don’t think it’s worth that much. I’ll show you what it’s worth to me.” His head cocked to one side and his chin lifted and that sneer marred his lips again. “I’ll show you,” he said, looking down his nose at me. “I’ll kill myself.”

I believed him and I was suddenly afraid. There came to me a vague feeling that his destiny hung on my next words; that I had been endowed with the power of God. The power was mine and I could feel it. I wanted to say the right thing because I felt that on my words hung his life, but for the life of me I could only say what came to mind.

“That won’t prove anything. Anybody can kill himself.”

“Be seeing you, pal,” he said, and walked away.

I felt choked. It was a feeling of an opportunity gone to have done something a little noble. It was as if I’d kicked a cripple who had asked for a dime, or slugged a blind man who had bumped into me.

Just before bedtime he came back and knelt beside my bunk and burrowed his face in my blanket. “I didn’t have the nerve,” he said, his voice coming muffled from the blanket. “I’d like to do something very low, that’s all I am.

I reached down and lifted his face in my hand. His eyes were bruised and dirty as if someone had filled them full of sweepings. “Go to bed and sleep it off, kid,” I said. “You’ll feel differently in the morning.”

When the lights went off and the dormitory silenced I could hear him sobbing up above. One hell of a celebration, I thought.

After that he was despondent and very desperate, although he tried to be very gay and not show it. He never referred to that night and he seemed very happy about my going home. But I could see how desperate and despondent he was underneath. It showed in his eyes, in the way he talked, in the way he wanted to take any rape-fiend chance in an effort to please me. I was afraid even to say, “That schmo sure gets on my nerves,” because he might have asked me who and then gone out and cut his throat. At night, he began staying awake and talking to me until dawn. It was as if he was afraid that sleep might rob him of some precious moment with me.

Nothing was real.

28

A
FTER THAT IT
was like being washed away in a flood. Everything happened at once, it seemed. Things surged down on me in great waves and I was powerless before them. Everything was violent and chaotic and haywire. They happened suddenly and violently with no chance for defense against them nor preparation for them, and then they were gone. But their consequences remained. Their consequences were far-reaching and long-staying, and were like the treacherous backwash in which you drowned after fighting through the crest of the wave. The things swooped down on me and carried me away.

My feelings toward Dido couldn’t get back to where they had been before. There was a vague lack of confidence, and the understanding between us was lost so that we were never quite in tune with the other’s mood, never quite sympathetic with it. I felt a slight, dull revulsion; a vague dissatisfaction. Maybe it was just a letdown after all the high hopes and driving, tense excitement. And he could feel it. It put a tight-drawn recklessness in his actions, a strained desperation which seemed always about to explode.

There was an excitement, but it was different. It was strained and frantic and panicky. It was infirm and chaotic and stained with a dull monotone of hopelessness. And through it the incidents rushed in, surging pell-mell, sweeping us before them, and neither of us knew where they would take us. I tried to keep my head, but I felt a helplessness. It was as if I was beginning to go haywire myself.

We were still close, but only superficially. The separation was deep and dull and hidden. He didn’t give me anything any more, but he was my responsibility. August burnt through, like a fuse on a stick of dynamite, and each day tightened us more and more against the explosion that seemed so imminent.

His mother wrote me a letter which I received on the 20th, and that loosened us a little. It postponed the explosion but did not dispel the feeling of it.

Dear James:

I am so glad to hear that you are to be released next month. I do wish you all the success and good luck in life which I know you so truly deserve. I trust that it will not be long until I see you.

I just wrote my son and know he will be very glad to get my letter and the good lot of news that I wrote him. I will tell you as I do my other son, be of good courage and be good boys and the time will soon pass, then we will all be able to see each other face to face, and what a day that will be. You seem so much like my own son since having heard so much of you through Pepi. He surely thinks that the sun rises and sets in you, so to speak, and him thinking that way about you I know that you must be nice and I am going to adopt you as my second son. He sent me a snapshot of you which I was pleased to have. I wonder sometimes why he does not send me one of himself, maybe they don’t allow him to have any made. I pray for you both, and I want you to pray for me. Be as good as you can, and be of good cheer.

With prayers for your success,

Mother Davis.

When I read that letter I felt like crying, I felt so sorry for her. “You have a wonderful mother, kid,” I said to him. He didn’t answer. He wasn’t talking much those days.

But her letter helped us a lot. It brought us closer together again. It took some of the desperation out of him and I was pleased. I felt encouraged. He might make it after all, I thought.

Then the whispering campaign started. It must have been going on all along, but we were just beginning to feel it. Tom called me down and told me about it. “Listen, Jim,” he said, not looking at me, “I’m not trying to run your business, but you and Dido have got to watch yourselves.”

I got on my muscle. “Why? Why have we got to watch ourselves?”

“Listen, Jim, there’s no need of all that,” he said, spreading his hands, palms upward. “Three lieutenants have asked me about you two and a week ago the deputy called me into his office and showed me a whole drawerful of notes which fellows up here in the dormitory had written over there, about you and Dido. They said you did whatever you wanted to and I let you do it.”

That shocked me. I should have known that they would be ratting on us, but I had never given it a thought. We had been so wrapped up in each other that we hadn’t thought about the other convicts in the dormitory.

“I told the deputy that there wasn’t anything between you two,” Tom went on. “I explained how Dido had helped you a little when your arm was in splints, but that was just because I had asked him to. They discharged you from the hospital with the splints still on and somebody had to help you get your clothes on, I told him. What have they got against Dido, anyway?” he asked.

“I don’t know, Tom,” I said. “It could be about him losing those two ball games but I doubt if they’d carry it this far. It’s just that they don’t like him, really. He doesn’t associate with them and doesn’t have to ask them for anything. His mother sends him everything he wants and they don’t like that. The truth is, Tom, we’ve just been getting along too good for them.”

“That’s what I told the deputy,” he said. “You’ve always got a little money and he gets what he wants from home. Just because you guys are getting along nobody likes it. I told the deputy you were just getting along too good for these envious bastards up here. You know, Jim, I can’t understand what makes people like that. I’ve seen a lot of people outside like that. They did me the same way when I was commissioner. They couldn’t stand to see me make a little dough. They started crying for an investigation, people I’d been supporting, feeding. You’d be surprised if I told you who some of the fellows were who wrote notes about you and Dido.”

“You’d better not tell me, Tom,” I said.

“What I wanted to tell you,” Tom went on, “is that Gout sent a transfer up here for Dido this morning. He was going to transfer him to 5-4.” That was the girl-boy company.

I sucked air. I was so scared I was weak. My stomach went hollow and my knees knocked together. My mouth came open but I couldn’t get the words out.

“I sent the transfer back and then went out to see the warden,” Tom said. “I’ve done him a lot of favors and I asked him to do me a favor. I told him to let you and Dido stay in here and I’d be responsible. I told him that I would see to it that no more complaints reached him. He had almost as many notes about you as the deputy had.”

“What did he say?” I gasped.

“He said he’d let you stay on one condition, that he didn’t receive another complaint. But listen, Jim, you’d better cut it out. Or make it less obvious, anyway.”

“There isn’t anything to cut out, Tom,” I said. “We’re just good friends.” His eyebrows went up. “I’m not trying to string you, Tom,” I said. “Listen, can’t a man have a friend in this joint? Is there any crime in having a friend?”

He spread his hands. “I don’t write the rules, Jim. You know how it is, you’re not a fool.”

“What do they want me to do, quit talking to him?” I said. “I guess they don’t even want me to look at him. I guess they want to tell me who I can talk to, I guess that’s what they want to do.” The more I talked the less afraid and the more angry I became. “I guess they want a guy to do like they want him to or else they’re going to rat on him.”