Hard Rain Falling (21 page)

They had to help him back into the bus anyway, but even if he had been unchained he could not have made it alone. One of the guards gave the hard cases sandwiches and coffee after the bus got started again, and Jack felt the old wolfish hunger swelling up inside him, and made himself sit still, the sandwich in his lap, the paper cup of hot coffee in his hand, until the feeling subsided. Then he began to eat. It was a tuna salad sandwich, full of bits of celery, and it tasted very good, but the back of his neck hurt from having to bend down to eat. And the coffee was even harder. He had to suck it up from the paper container because he could not get the proper angle on it to tilt the coffee into his mouth. He got only a few hot sips before he gave up and asked the guard for a cigarette.

“Here you go, buddy,” the guard said. Jack left the cigarette in the corner of his mouth, blowing the smoke out his nose. He looked at the guard. A puffy, tired face. Even in his summer uniform the guard looked hot and tired. There were patches of sweat under his arms. Jack saw that his fingers on the riot gun were pressed white; so the man was tense. He had probably been tense all morning. In fact, Jack thought, the man was probably tense all the time he was at work. Probably every time he came to work a piece of whatever held him together disintegrated, vanished, and he would go home that much less than he had been. He would go home from work at night, the tension still stiff in his muscles, and have a drink of beer. Chino was hot; maybe the guard had a little patio out back of his house, where he had a canvas chair. He would take his can of beer out there, let himself down in the chair, and begin to drink, waiting. Maybe his wife would be out under the late sun, gardening. He would speak to her. She would straighten up, turn, smile. The glare would make it hard for him to see her smile, but he would know, and a little of it would slip away. It would take part of him with it, but it was worth it. Then he would remember that on the next day he had the run to San Quentin again. For a few seconds he would think about trading off. Or telephoning in sick. He would take another sip of beer, and then another. He would pull his hand away from the arm of the chair and light a cigarette. He would sigh, as if to clear his chest, but it wouldn’t work. His wife would sense that something was wrong, and she would suggest that they go to the drive-in movie that night with some friends. He would nod and notice that his teeth were pressed together, and he would put his hands on the muscles below his ears, rubbing them gently, trying to soften them. He would know that he ground his teeth in his sleep. His wife would have told him, and often when he took naps he would wake up with the sweet deathly taste of blood in his mouth. His face was puffy because he ate too much. Eating made him feel good. It was practically the only thing that did.

Jack daydreamed all this; the guard merely sat, his fingers on the riot gun, and sweated. Every once in a while he looked out the window at the hazy valley, as if to catch a glimpse of the view. The guard probably loathed his job, Jack thought, but didn’t have the guts or the ambition to do anything about it. But then, maybe he had no choice. He didn’t look like the kind of man who would find work easily.

“How long you been a guard?” Jack said.

The guard’s eyes wavered on Jack for a moment. “No talking,” he said.

Jack’s sympathy closed up. “But I have to take a piss,” he said.

“Me too, man,” the hard case behind Jack said. “How about we taken a piss?”

“Let’s all PISS!” Jack shouted. The words were hardly out of his mouth when he saw the gaping eye of the riot gun almost touching his nose. He giggled. “Shoot, fuckface.”

The guard across the aisle swung his gun onto Jack. “Don’t pay him no mind,” he told the first guard. “If he smarts off, crack him one.”

“Your mother sucks off niggers,” Jack informed the second guard.

“Hey, man,” came a faint protest from behind.

“Present company excepted,” Jack added.

“Well, I don’t know if I like
that
,” the Negro said.

“You guys shut up,” said the first guard.

“Never mind,” said the second guard. “I pity these poor guys.”

But the first guard still looked hurt. “You guys know the rules. No talking.”

“
And
,” added the man behind Jack, “no pissin.”

Jack got tired of the game. He lapsed into silence, and after a while the riot gun moved away from his face. He saw a smirk appear on the face of the second guard. He almost spoke. But it would have been useless; the second guard would think he had shut up out of fear, and nothing Jack said or did would change his mind, and anyway he was probably right. Jack decided the second guard was probably very happy in his work. That’s my revenge, he thought, to make him out a bastard. What about the driver? Bet he’s a bastard, too. The good guys are all chained up, and the bad guys have all the guns and salary. Hee hee.

“What’er you grinnin about?” the second guard asked him.

“Nothing. I was just plotting my escape.”

“Take us with you,” the man behind him said, and there was an odd urgency in his voice. Then he giggled. “Oh, please, man, take us with you.”

The second guard smiled. “Okay,” he said with a paternal gentleness.

Throughout the whole day, the man next to Jack had been muttering and cursing.

“Will you shut the fuck up?” Jack said to him finally. The man turned his eyes to Jack, and for a moment Jack was frightened by what he saw, an empty coldness in the eyes that seemed to go nowhere. Not dead eyes, but terribly alive and so out of place in that meek clerkly face. Jack turned away and watched the valley darken in the twilight. They were on the freeway now, among the afternoon traffic. He watched the cars surge around the old bus, almost all of them with only the driver and no passengers; hot, tired-looking men. Thousands of cars, thousands of men, free to drive home on the freeway in empty cars, and Jack envied them terribly.

The Negro who had been sitting behind Jack on the bus wanted to go to prison even less than Jack. His name was Claymore. He was not a very hard case, even though he had held up a grocery store with a gun. But he kept trying to escape. When the police of Watts, California, came for him, he jumped out the back window of his apartment and they caught him in the alley with a twisted ankle. Then he tried to get out of the police car when it stopped at a red light. He did not offer the police any violent resistance, he just tried to get away. At the police station, handcuffed to one of the officers, he tried to sidle away from the desk, and when they jerked him back he said he wanted to go to the toilet. Claymore did not try to escape again until municipal court. He tried to walk out of the courtroom after being bound over for trial, and at the actual trial, three weeks later, he tried running. But that didn’t work, either. He tried to get out of the county jail three times, and once got as far as the elevator, but when the doors opened at the main floor they were waiting for him. There was nothing they could do but chain him up like an animal. They did so reluctantly, because he did not look at all dangerous.

They had showers after their chains were removed, and sat in a corner of the gigantic dining hall in San Quentin, eating supper. “I just continually want out,” Claymore said to Jack. “Hell, I got ten years to do.”

Jack was still in isolation when Claymore tried his first escape attempt from Quentin. He was missing for three days. He had been assigned to one of the factories and on his first day at work he vanished. Everyone was mystified. They found him near the end of the third day, stuffed up into a ventilating shaft. They put him in isolation for a while, and a couple of the counselors tried talking to him. They convinced him that it would just hurt his chances of early release if he kept trying to escape. He agreed with them and they sent him back to work. He worked for three weeks in the varnishing room of the furniture factory and then disappeared again and was not caught for well over a month. They got him in Colorado, in a stolen car. The authorities of two states and the Federal Government talked it over and the Federal Government said they could handle him, so they tried and convicted him of crossing a state line in a stolen car, and sentenced him to five years in Federal prison; after which he would be returned to California to serve the full ten years of his previous conviction. Because of his record, Claymore was sent finally to Alcatraz, and when the news of his capture and trial filtered back to San Quentin Claymore was already serving time only a few miles across the bay. Nobody ever escaped from The Rock.

“That Claymore boy has a lot of heart,” Jack’s cellmate said. “But I do wish I knew how the hell he got out of here. Don’t you?”

This cellmate was a Negro who refused to be classified as a Negro; his name was Billy Lancing, and he and Jack had known each other briefly several years before. When Jack got his job in the kitchen, Billy pulled some strings and they became cell partners. Billy looked different: his hair was paler red, his face sallower, and at one point in his career as a crossroader and pool hustler he had lost all his front teeth, which had been replaced with brilliantly white, obviously artificial teeth. To set them off, Billy had capped both his eyeteeth in gold, and all this gave his frequent grin a multicolored look. Otherwise he was much the same as Jack remembered him, small, narrow, giving the appearance of being in the last stages of tuberculosis.

Jack did not know how to take him. Billy talked a lot, and Jack wanted to be let alone. There was something wrong with San Quentin, and he wanted time to think about it.

“Can you figure it, man,” Billy continued. “He gets out of here and then gets caught in a stolen car.
Surrounded
by
evidence!
Man, if I ever get shut of this place I won’t spit on the
street!
” Billy laughed. His voice was high and soft, but his accenting was comical, almost a parody of how a Negro was supposed to talk. Of course, when he had been shucking the authorities about his racial background, he had been entirely white in his accenting and posture. The only things negroid about him, really, were his lips and nose, and he argued vehemently that this was surely not enough to make him eat and sleep with, as he phrased it, “a bunch of boogies.” When the authorities finally gave in, Billy collected twenty-eight packs of cigarettes from other inmates who had bet him at two-to-one odds he wouldn’t make it. He had no cell partner until Jack came.

Jack’s placement in the kitchen instead of one of the factories came about in this way: When he first came in he was placed in isolation, “on the shelf,” until he was brought before a counselor. The counselor had not been wary with him, and did not pretend that he knew more about Jack than Jack did, which was an unusual experience right there, and made Jack begin to feel uneasy. And yet, the counselor was not a con-lover. Jack knew these: men and women—an enormous number of women—who were simply fascinated by institutional types. They were always showing up at the orphanage or the reform school, ostensibly to observe or even to help out, but actually, as far as Jack was concerned, to satisfy their urges, to look through the bars at the wild animals. They had a certain glassy look to their eyes which Jack recognized, and the trick was to spot these people and make them give you money or candy, or, at the reform school, get the men among them aside somehow and ask them if they had a bottle in the car and would they sneak it in. On visitor’s day at the reform school some of the boys would be given the job of handling the parking lot, and these would rifle the glove get the bottle, it would probably already be stolen. Jack imagined compartments, and when the sucker sneaked out to his car to these con-lovers liked the idea of being stolen from.

But the counselor wasn’t one of these. He was a short round man with a pink face and delicate fingers, who looked as if he had a hangover. He looked through Jack’s institutional records, blinking wearily, and then smiled at Jack.

“Well, how about it? What do you want to do here?”

The question stunned Jack. Nobody had ever asked him before. He sat there and didn’t say anything. He felt very uneasy. The counselor talked on, about other matters of adjustment, and then came back. “Well, you’re here, and you’ll be here a while. Why waste the time? What do you want to accomplish?”

Again, the question frightened Jack and he did not answer. They took him back to the shelf, which was merely a section of single cells away from the main population. He knew now that San Quentin no longer had a hole. This frightened him, too. He was prepared for the hole; he was not prepared for anything else. He was afraid if he opened his mouth he would begin yelling for help. It was absurd, but that was the way he felt.

When they brought him back a couple of weeks later, the counselor smiled affably. He did not seem to have the hangover this morning, and he was quite brisk. “Well. Back again. Sorry about the long wait; the case load around here’s terrible. Now, let’s get this done, shall we? I’m going to assign you to the furniture factory for the time being. I don’t have to tell you it helps to be sort of busy around here; and there’s plenty to do. None of it’s make-work. I hope. And I’ve noticed on these records that you’re just a few semesters short of high school graduation. Would you like to finish up here? We have some pretty good instructors. You can get a certificate from the GED and the Great State of California making you a bona fide high school graduate, if you want. Then you can go to college and become a brain surgeon. Work in the plant mornings, and go to school in the afternoons. Study in the evening. Want to try it?”

There was only one way for Jack to react: he had to push.

“I won’t do it,” Jack said. “Fuck your factory.”

“Don’t you like that kind of work?”

“Drives me batty. I’ve done it before.”

A look of sympathy passed over the counselor’s face. “I know what you mean.” He did not seem bothered by the virtual “fuck you” Jack had flung at him. “Well, what
would
you like to do? I can’t find out unless you tell me.”

The softest job in the prison was kitchen work. “How about the kitchen?” Jack said. “I’ll work there.”