No Beast So Fierce (2 page)

The mental letter contained too much ugly truth for the humor I'd intended—not the whole truth, but that which was important for the world to judge me. I could not tell them the truth of myself; perhaps nobody can tell the world the truth. Maybe truth is something with dripping organs, gears, unfilled holes, a background of nothingness on a field of melting and shattered time. Maybe I could tell them my memories of being thrown into a pitch black cell, naked, without even a mattress, me and the concrete and darkness—when I was nine years old. Or of being handcuffed to a hot steam radiator in juvenile hall and having a grown man kick my ribs in—I was eleven years old. (But to give the man justice, I had spit on him.)

Whatever the truth, I wanted peace. Tomorrow would be a new beginning, the phoenix rising from the ashes.

It was dawn. The sparrows that nested in high corners of the cell house were unbelievably noisy. The convict keyman was turning the locks on each cell door; but the doors wouldn't open until the security bar on each tier was raised. As the keyman worked, the unbroken rhythm of steel striking steel—clack, clack, clack—rose and fell. It was loud when he was overhead or below, receding as he reached the end of each tier. I was dressed and shaved long before he reached my cell.

Once released, I passed through the mess hall without getting a tray and stepped into the main yard. It was jammed with men from other cell houses. In minutes the yard gate would open and the convicts would flow out to the rest of the prison. The asphalt-topped yard, formed into a rough rectangle, was a concrete canyon surrounded by the giant cell houses. Their faded paint and rusted bars blotted out the morning sun and added to the gothic bleakness. Riflemen patrolled on catwalks overhead, ready to break up fights with bullets.

I'd said goodbye to most of my friends during the preceding two days, while making the rounds to check out. Half a dozen of my closest comrades were waiting just beyond the mess hall door. Most of them I'd known since reform school, a couple had been crime partners. They wanted to shake hands and wish me luck. There was nothing else to say. I was going and they were staying.

Aaron Billings, the person I really wanted to see, failed to appear. He was black and would avoid a group of whites, just as I would avoid a group of blacks. The races had become totally polarized during recent years. Because of this I'd talked with Aaron less and less, but our friendship remained. He'd stopped me at the dentist's office yesterday (he worked there) and mentioned that he might be transferred to camp and wanted me to help him escape. There'd been no time to talk, and he was going to meet me this morning.

I excused myself from my friends, for whom life in prison would continue unchanged by my absence, and began searching through the crowd. I was more conscious of my surroundings than I had been in several years. Two thousand voices collected into a roar as powerful as wind from the sea. The roar moved up the cell house walls toward the sky, failed the ascent and echoed back into the pit. To someone seeing the yard for the first time it would remind them of a teeming anthill, each man identical with every other.

A voice cut through the uproar: “Clear the way! Dead man coming!”

In seconds there was a path ten feet wide. Moses couldn't have parted the Red Sea any more cleanly. First came a guard, whose voice was calling out. Six feet behind him came the condemned man, a tall young Negro. He was followed by a second guard. Overhead, a rifleman covered them.

It was early for a Death Row procession. This one seemed to be going toward the inside administration building. The doomed men always wore new denim and soft slippers without laces. The man's slippers were still new, indicating that he'd just arrived. He was probably going for fingerprinting and a mug photo. He was a dozen feet away and I studied his face, seeking (as everyone did) an answer to the great mystery: as if someone sentenced to die at a specific hour by cyanide gas knows more—or is more doomed. The black face gave no message. I didn't know who he was or why he'd been sentenced to die. Eighty men were waiting on the row. A handful had made headlines; the others were anonymous. Several I knew personally. Sometimes a condemned man had been on the prison main line and waved to friends when he was brought through. Not the black. His eyes remained ahead, except for an occasional glance at the sky. Another detail that told me he'd just arrived was that he was thin; after a few months everyone on Death Row got fat from the special menu. Each time I saw one of them with swollen belly I thought of hogs being fattened for the slaughter.

The procession disappeared. The crowd closed in its wake. The work whistle sliced the air. The gate slid open and in minutes the yard had only a scattering of convicts.

Aaron was near the east cell house wall; he was alone, as usual. His brown head, shaved and oiled, glistened in a vagrant sliver of sunlight. Tucked under his arm were three thick books, all on higher mathematics. His faint smile on seeing me was the equal of a gush of affection from most persons. His ambition was to face life with precise, scientific detachment, with as little emotion as possible. The only decoration in his cell was a charcoal sketch of Albert Einstein.

We shook hands. In prison, the gesture was more than empty ritual. It was the clasp of friendship.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

“Up tight.”

“Are you ready?”

“I'm jack-ready for some freedom. How ready I am for a parole officer is another question.”

“After eight years you're ready as you'll ever be.”

“Yeah, if I'm not ready now I'll never be ready. I know I hope I'm ready.”

“Let's walk a few minutes. I told the doc I'd be late for work.”

We began to pace the now-empty yard. Though we were the same height—six feet—he outweighed me by thirty pounds, all of it in shoulder, chest, and arm. Years ago, before the racial climate brought too many ugly stares from both black and white, we used to pace the length of the yard for an hour or two at least once a week. The walking habit had developed because if we remained in one place our friends would walk up and intrude in the conversation. The occasional serious conversations we shared—about books and their content—had had a salutary effect on me. Prison conversations usually concern murder, mayhem, homosexuality, gambling, narcotics, stool pigeons, cops, and escape. The all-purpose word is “motherfucker”, serving as noun, verb, adverb, and adjective—it's meaning depending on context and intonation. Remove this word from the convict vocabulary and prisons will fall silent. Neither the vulgarity nor the topics offended me; they were too close to my own existence. But an unrelieved diet of them left me hungry for something different. Aaron's intelligence stimulated me. In his eleven years of imprisonment he'd learned to speak Spanish, French, and Portuguese, had mastered computer programming and electronics, was a dental technician. His reading habits were less eclectic than mine, but he had a unique precision of mind.

This was our first walk in six months. I'd backed away from him. He knew the reason and had said nothing. We'd never have become friends if the foundation hadn't been placed before racial hate began erupting into wars. The atmosphere had changed in the last two years. The rifles kept things from erupting into wholesale massacre, but there were murderous skirmishes. If a black was stabbed by a white, whatever the reason, there would be retaliation: several blacks would suddenly rush down a tier and stab any white available. Whites would wait and reciprocate. Aaron viewed both sides as ignorant. This was not because he disclaimed his heritage or lacked pride—but he refused to make it a condition of shame or a rallying point of hatred. Quite simply, he found racists on either side to have unsustainable attitudes, lacking scientific foundation. And it was not white convicts who were the problem, assuming the blacks could change the world with violence. The blacks disliked him, too, because he disdained their ignorance. If they tried to force their opinions on him, he could make them back up, for his calm was not fear or passivity. He could be dangerous. He met every person as an individual, and no amount of ignorance could dissuade him. This view created an unusual situation. Many militant white racists treated him as a person first, his negritude being secondary. In other words they reacted to him as he reacted to himself.

When I came to prison I had few prejudices, despite having been through racial gang fights in reform schools.

Now I hate most blacks—because of their paranoia. Suspicion on their part may be justified, but paranoia is a disease. If they hate my whiteness, I hate their blackness. They hate whitey; they want revenge, not equality. They consider themselves unbound by white laws and moral codes. They pose a direct and immediate threat to me, and to meet it a loathing and hatred has grown—so when I look into their amber eyes glowing with hate, my blue eyes glow with a mirrored hate.

I was ashamed of this attitude where Aaron was concerned, but the prison's racial situation was something we seldom talked about, having agreed that there were no universally acceptable answers. But the situation had driven us apart—not our friendship—and so we talked infrequently. And this would be the last time.

“I've only got a couple minutes,” I said. “You want me to help you escape from camp—if you go to camp.”

“Here's the situation, precisely. I've got eleven years served and I've been eligible for parole for four. I go to the board again next month. Yesterday I saw my counselor, and if the board denies me again he's going to recommend to the classification committee that I go to camp. You already have my mother's address and I hope you'll keep in touch with her. I'll write you there and tell you what to do. All I really want is to have you give me a ride.”

“
If
you get denied at the board,
if
you go to camp,
if
you send for me, I'll come for you. But I want you to know something, you're putting weight on friendship. I wouldn't give a shit if I was going out to do wrong, but I plan to straighten up. Even before I get there I'm being put in a cross between friendship and breaking the law. I'll be a dirty motherfucker if it isn't a drag to promise to commit a felony before I even get out.”

Aaron grinned and squeezed my shoulder. “I thought it over a long time before I asked. If it was anything less than freedom I wouldn't ask. And it's no risk. You know that. Drive up to the Sierras, pick me up, and drive back.”

“I hope you get parole. You goddam sure got one coming.”

“What one has coming and what one gets is often quite different.”

“You're a cinch next year.”

“I could say ‘next year' to doomsday. I'm no mule chasing a carrot.”

I understood his view—and agreed with it. We walked another lap in silence. I wanted to go. The sooner I reached the front gate the sooner I would be outside the walls. My mind had left him. He understood what was happening. When we reached the end of the yard he stopped and stuck out a brown paw. “Later on, brother. Good luck.”

“All right.” I grinned. “I'll be seeing you.”

It was time to report to Receiving and Release.

2

I
RODE
off the prison property with sixty-five dollars, a cheap suit (ten years out of style), a set of khakis and change of underwear in a brown parcel, and a bus ticket to Los Angeles. A uniformed guard drove me to the depot and waited until I was on board.

I hurried onto the bus, glad to escape the eyes of the citizens in the depot, eyes attracted to me by the guard. Through the tinted window I watched him depart. An almost electric awareness went through me. I was free. Free!

Other passengers filtered aboard, heaved bundles onto overhead racks. The idling motor made the vehicle tremble. A sense of unreality, so intense as to make me dizzy, swelled up. Everything was weird. The tinkling resonance of women's voices, which I hadn't heard in eight years, was as alien as Chinese to my ears. The variety and color of clothes—the reds and yellows of summer print—crashed against my sensibilities with blinding force. I sat in a trance.

The driver came down the aisle, a stocky man. His belly rolled over his belt buckle; his hat was off and his hair was damp with perspiration. He joked with each passenger as he checked tickets. On reaching me, his smile disappeared. He grunted, wouldn't meet my eyes. Shame and anger made me want to retch—but then I wondered if it was just my imagination. Yet the driver resumed his banter at the next passenger. “Fuck it,” I muttered. In a few hours I'd blend into the swarm and nobody would know.

Brakes whooshed, the diesel motor churned. My freedom journey began. All other feelings were eclipsed in the excitement of seeing the world beyond the walls. While we inched through the town's back streets, I soaked up every sight. Commercial garages, body and fender shops, beer joints, and ramshackle grocery stores were pitifully ugly in the unrelenting sunlight—but to me they were beautiful beyond description.

Soon the bus was in the country. The black asphalt sliced through mile after mile of alfalfa, the emerald growth polished by water from revolving sprinklers. I watched the fields with the fascination of a child at his first kaleidoscope.

Wheels and hours turned. The bus passed through rolling scrubland—it was beautiful—and small towns where gas stations bustled, farm workers in Stetsons loitered, and children played in the streets. There were more fields, rippling voluptuously beneath fingers of a breeze. I felt as if I could ride the bus through eternity and be happy.

Two teen-age girls got off in a small town near an airbase. I watched them walk away. They wore stretch pants that clearly outlined thigh and butt. I stared at them hungrily, fantasy rising with swift intensity. Years without a woman sharpens a prisoner's ability for imagery—one has to have imagination to use a stubble-bearded, plucked-eyebrow fairy. Close your eyes and imagine someone else—perhaps the exotic movie star you saw at the weekend movie. Imagination is necessary where a hand slippery with pomade serves for a woman. Pomade, closed eyes, and imagination. When the two girls disappeared I was worked up with imagining.