Hard Rain Falling (20 page)

Jack envied him; he had his work, which he loved, and he had a good life and a good attitude toward life. He and Jack were the same age, too.

The other citizen was different. This man was in his fifties, an executive for a hardware company, and his case made all the newspapers. He, too, had been driving home drunk, but instead of pulling over to go to sleep he fell asleep behind the wheel while going sixty or seventy, and his car plowed into a parked car full of necking teenagers. Three of them were killed at once, both girls and one of the boys, and the other boy was in the hospital with a bad concussion and a broken collarbone. The executive got out of his car, saw what had happened, and ran off. Two policemen found him hiding in a backyard, and he offered the policemen fifty dollars each if they would let him go. It was stupid; his car was back there, wrecked, but the executive seemed a little out of his mind. When the police refused the money, he hit one of them and tried to get away. So he was booked for manslaughter, attempted bribery, and assault on a police officer. When they brought him into the felony tank early in the morning the first thing the prisoners heard him say was, “You can’t do this to me!” So everybody knew he was a citizen. They all said that.

After his indictment for manslaughter (the other two charges were dropped) the man was returned to the tank and had to dress in dungarees. His bail had been set at fifty thousand dollars and no one had put it up for him. He was a pompous, florid man with silvery hair, and he looked absurd in dungarees, like a millionaire going to a costume party. There was a subdued excitement among the prisoners; to most of them this man represented their chief enemy, respectability, and cruelly they wanted to see him come up before the sanitary court and have his pants pulled down and his ass whacked, to watch him silently while he discovered that his dignity could be taken away from him so easily, and that for once he was at the mercy of the underdogs. Nobody spoke to him all day, and he sat in his cell, alternately holding his head in his hands and groaning, or jumping up to pace back and forth in his cell. All the prisoners knew this was a violation of tank rules, but they said nothing.

The executive, however, was not brought before the sanitary court at all. The next day, McHenry went into his cell and stood in front of him, and they talked for almost an hour, and McHenry came out and called the deputy at the desk over to the bars and whispered to him, and then the deputy went out and came back later with a tray of food for the executive.

When the executive was not visiting his lawyer, he stayed in his cell. He refused to speak to any of the inmates except Mac McHenry, and Mac let it be known that he, Mac, wanted the man left strictly alone. He winked at Jack. “This boy has power on the outside. We fiddle with him and the whole thing goes.”

The executive got out just before Jack, his lawyer finally arranging bail.

Somewhere along the line Jack began to be angry, in a deep, personal way that had nothing to do with the tank or the inmates. They could not be blamed for the way they acted, and if Jack began to hate the sanitary court and McHenry, it was not because he did not understand the need for the inmates to run things, or at least pretend they ran things. He understood that; but he hated it anyway. He did not even get to hate McHenry in person, because he was only the toughest and shrewdest of the lot, not the worst; and if he was gone the number two tough nut would take over the court, and that could have been Jack himself. He could feel it in himself, and he often thought of the sense of pleasure that could come from the power; and he hated himself for it. And he could not hate the deputies, because they hadn’t put him in jail, they were only there to see to it that he
stayed
in jail. They were just doing their job. Certainly, a few of them were getting rich off the inmates, but Jack could not think of any reason why they should not. If they didn’t, somebody else would. Everybody was just doing his job, making the machinery run smoothly. And so Jack could not hate anybody, or blame anybody, but himself. And in the end he could not even hate himself, because he had not willed himself into jail; he just tried to live his life his own way and that ran against the grain and he ended up, almost accidentally, in jail. And he could not hate
accident
. That was crazy. He had to admit that he had been proud of himself, and that he nourished the memory of his long stay in the hole years before; that he had assumed he would be able to do his time standing on his head because the hole had been so much worse; but now he was in doubt. He was getting older. The boredom of it all, the sameness, the constant noise and smell of the tank, were driving him crazy. The fact that he was in was driving him crazy. He lost all his contempt for the executive; the executive was right, they can’t do this to me. They have no right to do this to me, or to anybody else. He hated them all. But it was crazy to hate them. So he decided he was going crazy.

It was a relief for him to go berserk at last; it was an act of pure rationality that had nothing to do with McHenry or the poor fool Mac was taking over the bumps. It was an expression of sanity, a howl of rage at a world that put men in county jails. Everything finally got to be too much and he let go of his passion.

The man was a farmworker, probably a
bracero
, and he could just barely understand English. He had picked fruit for a couple of weeks, on his knees under the straight lines of prune trees, and one night he got drunk in a poolhall and pulled a knife on a man. He got a year for pulling the knife, and he was not sent to the trusty farm because he had a record of disobedience from his last stay in jail. On the night of his sanitary court trial he stood in front of McHenry stupidly, not comprehending what Mac was telling him. As usual, Jack stood well back, his arms folded, watching the whole procedure. Mac was in an odd mood; he kept asking the
bracero
if he was willing to pay his fines, and when the man did not speak he gave him more fines to pay or more whacks to suffer.

It disgusted Jack to see Mac, in his pleasant drawl, making fun of the man simply because the man was weak and stupid and Mac had the power. The
bracero
probably thought Mac was a legal official, and he hesitated and stammered, and finally made everybody laugh by saying, “Wock? Wass a Wock?”

Mac was tickled. “I’ll show you what a wock is. Take his pants down.”

It tore away in Jack, and he came up. He was really out of control, but he seemed calm and possessed. Inside he felt passionate.

“McHenry,” he said, his voice trembling only a little, “you’re about the most chickenshit Southern cracker I ever saw in my life. I bet you got a hard-on right this minute. I bet this is how you get your kicks, you fuckin hillbilly. Aint you ever heard of women?”

McHenry understood instantly and fell back in his chair, wildly signaling, but he was too late. Jack dived at him across the table, and they rolled on the cement floor, punching and grunting, before anybody could stop it.

The fight only lasted a few minutes, and was broken up when they saw Jack beating McHenry’s head against the concrete, his fingers dug into McHenry’s shoulders. Mac’s eyes were bugging out, and blood was coming from his mouth and spattering on the floor, and when they pulled Jack loose Mac slumped down unconscious, his eyes still open. He came back the next morning with a bandage on his head. There was no concussion or anything more serious than a few stitches. Mac must have talked to the deputies before he came back, because they came in before morning and locked Jack into his cell. He stayed locked in until he left Balboa County.

Even the smoothest-running county political machines have their flaws. In this case, the particular judge who was supposed to hear Jack’s case upset the smooth operation of the machine. Costigan, the lawyer, told Jack all about it, his voice dry and bitter. The judge said he would not accept such a drastic reduction of the charge, from kidnaping to a misdemeanor charge of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. It was none of the judge’s business, but he made it his business. All in private, of course, the judge told District Attorney Forbes and Costigan that he thought Levitt ought to do some time, and not county jail time. He hinted that if the District Attorney brought the man Levitt up on a contributing charge, the judge would give him the year in the county jail, and then make it a point to get in touch with San Francisco and have them prosecute on the rape charge. So that the man Levitt would get out of his year and go right back in. Costigan was very bitter about it, but Forbes said he knew a way out of the dilemma. Jack could plead guilty to having had intercourse with the girl right in the car, still inside Balboa County, and they would drop the part about the gun and the force to make it statutory. He asked the judge about it and the judge said he would go along with that and give Jack a very light penalty, perhaps one-to-five.

“That’s the best we can do,” Costigan said. “I’m awfully goddam sorry.”

“I don’t give a shit,” Jack said. He was empty. He had been empty since the assault against McHenry. For once, everything ran smoothly. He was tried before the judge, waived the waiting period, and was sentenced at the same time. The next day he left by station wagon for Chino, chained up in the back, leaving Balboa County the same way he had entered it, only with two uniformed deputies instead of two detectives. Both of the deputies were taking courses in criminology at San Jose State, and had requested the assignment because they wanted to see the center at Chino. They were going to write a paper about it.

The heavy leather belt tight around his waist buckled in the back. The chain of his handcuffs passed through two steel-reinforced holes in the front of the belt, and he could not move either hand more than a few inches. When he wanted to smoke a cigarette he had to bend his head down to his hands to take a puff, and of course one of the guards had to give him the cigarette and light it. Passed through the handcuff chains was another chain leading down to his leg-irons, which were clamped onto his ankles in such a way that he could move his feet only enough to shuffle; and the connecting chain was too short to allow him to stand erect. He and the other two hard cases had to be helped onto the bus, along with the others who were making the trip from the center at Chino to their final destination at San Quentin.

The three hard cases sat right in front, under the eyes of two riot guns. The window next to the driver was open, and the hot wind blew into Jack’s face; but it was better than no air at all. He sucked it into his lungs as if it was to be the last air he would breathe; he had never forgotten the feeling of suffocation that would overcome him sometimes in the hole, and he could see nothing in the future but an endless repetition of the hole. He had the answer to all his questions now. He knew what he loved. He loved freedom, and this long bus ride was going to be his last chance to sense it, to use his eyes and ears and lungs on the world, the real world, before he was locked again in endless darkness. He did not feel sorry for himself. He was too busy trying to draw the world into himself, trying to
be there
.

The hard case sitting next to Jack muttered and cursed throughout the hot valley morning, his chin on his chest, his eyes shut. He was completely crazy. He was about forty years old and had been a Certified Public Accountant and a Notary Public. One night about three months before, he had come home from his office and gone into the kitchen and gotten a butcher knife, gone in to where his invalid wife was sleeping, and stabbed her more than three hundred times. Then he dragged the body out the side door and stuffed it into the trunk of the car and drove off. Several neighbors saw him and had called the police even before he left the neighborhood. He drove around with the body for hours before they finally got him. He had appeared rational at the trial, and did not break down until later. Everyone at the Chino center was afraid of him, even though he behaved rationally in front of the authorities until time to leave for San Quentin, and then he broke down again. The other hard case sat behind Jack in a seat by himself. He was a Negro, like most of the other passengers. He had the tab on his file because he had resisted arrest and tried to break out of the country jail. He was going up for ten years for armed robbery. These three were the ones the guards watched.

When the bus stopped at a small roadside diner, the sun blistering overhead, the prisoners were taken in shifts to eat and go to the toilet, and while this was going on the three hard cases were made to get out of the bus and lie face down in the ditch beside the highway, with the guards taking turns standing over them holding a riot gun. Jack lay face down in the ditch for over an hour, the sun burning his skull, the gravel hard against his cheek, thoughtless again, his mind and senses cleared of all obstructions; the nerves alive and waiting for the guards, the State, the authorities, to make one tiny mistake, open one tiny crack through which he could burst; not escape, that was impossible and unimportant; no,
burst
, destroy, kill, show them he had no limits and they would have either to break him or kill him, and the only way they could break him would be to kill him and he knew they, it, did not have the courage to do that, and he did. Waiting, then, for a tiny slipup, perhaps a softness in one of the guards, a momentary weakness or a careless mistake, the riot gun slipped a little too close while the guard lights a cigarette. They were all one to Jack. He knew the rules now. They wouldn’t kill him unless he killed them. Then they would kill him. And he would not have to go back in the hole.

Jack was very much afraid now of going to prison. He remembered the long endless moments of the approach of insanity in the hole; not the coming of relief in the form of delusion, but of cold wet terrifying madness, when nothing made sense and all illusions made him tremble with fear: all sounds made his body jerk, all dreams were awakened from in cold sweat and deadening dread of the unknown—madness, an eternity of fear. He could smell the gravel and feel it cutting into his cheek. The back of his head felt as if it was going to explode from the heat. He knew he had to move his head, turn over the other way. The smell of the gravel made him want to throw up, but he was frightened; if he threw up perhaps his intestines would come loose and hang out of his mouth. He was afraid that if he turned his head the guard would misunderstand and blow his head off; yet if he did not turn his head, raise it up, let the gravel sticking into him fall loose, he would go mad. Sweat trickled down and burned into his eyes. He was afraid to blink; they would see that and the butt of the riot gun would come down on the back of his head and spill his hot brains out over his hair and down into his eyes and he would surely go mad in that instant before death and die screaming; and remain screaming for eternity.