On the Yard (20 page)

And they had talked about who was stuff and who wasn't. Stuff was anything of value and faggots and sissies were of great value to many, and it was a treasure hunt of sorts to search for the signs, the revealing and half-unconscious gestures, that sped the word of fresh stuff on the yard. And they talked about others they thought might be stuff, but who for one reason or another were pretending not to be, and no one was entirely free from these speculations, which even penetrated the circle of their closest buddies.

Chilly had said, “I don't play that game, but if I ever start I'm going to have to try old Red here.”

And Society Red had answered, “Tough enough, if you got eyes to swap out. A little tit for tat and you promise to let me go first.”

And Nunn, “You're so anxious to go first, Red, makes me wonder if you haven't been cheated before.”

“Yeah, your old mother cheated me. You know I don't play that stuff. I've been known to pitch, but I'm no catcher.”

“No one cops to playing it, but there's sure a whole lot of suckers going around talking it.”

And Chilly Willy had said, “It's something to talk about.”

They had talked about everything else and now they were just standing around half hoping something would happen so they could talk about that.

Chilly knew the rain in the big yard was different from that which fell in the free world. Once in a while you might have to run a half a block in the rain, maybe get your topcoat wet, and you might have to stand a few minutes waiting for a bus, or a taxi, but you never had to walk miles in it, or stand for hours watching it come down, imagining every few minutes that it was letting up a little when it was only getting ready to rain harder. Rain served to turn a day which might have just been dull into one that was actively miserable.

The rain shed could have housed a dozen locomotives, but so acute was the overcrowding that even packed in nearly solid only about two-thirds of the inmate population were able to find shelter under the shed. The rest were left to tough out the rain the best way they could. A few walked the yard ignoring the rain. A small cluster sheltered in each of the block doorways. And one isolated man stood on the wooden bench that lined the far side of the yard. He stood hunched, unmoving, letting the rain run down the sides of his face. No one paid any attention because he was a known psych case who most days carried a large bundle of ragged newspapers and had his shirt pocket stuffed to straining with the stubs of lead pencils, all sharpened to needle points. He hadn't dared to risk his precious papers in the rain, but his freshly sharpened pencils saved him from the day's worst terrors. If he stood quite still, dared nothing, avoided any notice, he might be able to survive until lockup and the safety of his cell.

Those who had been quick enough had found seats in one of the chapels and sat there listlessly, listening to one of the inmate organists practicing the selections he would play during the Christmas services. Some in an agony of boredom might even read the Christian literature put out for them.

Others waited out the rain in the library sitting at the reading table leafing through the back issues of the
National Geographic
looking for the occasional photographs of native women posed with uncovered breasts.

Chilly Willy, though he could ease many of the discomforts of the prison, couldn't do anything about the rain. He and his friends bore it with the rest. Except they wore yellow oilcloth raincoats and rainhats, like those the old fisherman wears in the tuna ad, and this rain gear was boneroo, which meant the average mainline inmate could be in water up to his ass seven days a week, and still stand no chance whatsoever of being issued a raincoat. The control of raincoats verged on high politics, and like, say, the baton of the French Academy they were the symbol—more symbol than actual protection against the weather—of power, position, influence, even honor in their society. The yellow raincoats were worn by their proud owners on days when there was even the barest chance of rain, and frequently they blazed to full sunlight standing out against the faded denim of the mainline inmate with the relentless authority of ermine.

Nunn and Society Red owed their raincoats to Chilly Willy. Red had attempted to block his rainhat into a style currently in vogue with pimps and hustlers called the Apple, but the heavy oilcloth, stubborn and style-blind, was reasserting its former shape. One of the woolen earflaps, intended to button under the chin but folded by Red into the crown, had slipped loose to dangle unnoticed. Nunn pulled at it, extracting its full length, fusty as long-handled underwear.

“That's very sharp,” Nunn mocked approval. “Makes you look real clean.”

Red tucked the earflap back out of sight. “I'm known to be clean, lean and clean, like your old mom.”

“That's right,” Nunn agreed. “Mom was clean.”

“Clean out of her skull. Otherwise she'd have done you up as soon as she dropped you.”

Chilly stared out at the space beyond the rain shed where he could see the water striking against the glistening blacktop. The only sign that he had been listening at all was that he began to tap one highly polished and expensive shoe against its mate. He watched the men walking in the rain—nuts, exercise freaks, claustrophobes—they dug their chins into their upturned collars, and plunged their hands into their pockets. The wind whipped the bottoms of their pants around their ankles. Chilly noted scornfully that a good third of these aggressive outdoorsmen wore sunglasses.

Then he saw Juleson, also walking in the rain, with his library books, wrapped in plastic, dangling from a belt as kids dangled their readers. The books looked thick and dense.

Who's he trying to shuck, Chilly wondered.

Chilly did a lot of reading on his own, but he would have been quicker to parade the yard in lace trick pants than to make a show of himself carrying books. Big thinker, he told himself contemptuously. And deadbeat, he added.

Chilly chose his reading material from the select books that never saw light on the mainline shelves, but were hidden in the back room as a rental library operated by the head inmate librarian, who charged from a pack to five packs a week depending upon the demand for a specific book. Most of these books were L and L's, derived from Lewd and Lascivious Conduct, hotdog books heavy with sex, and they were always in demand. But unless they were brand-new, most of the L and L books in the institution had suffered a specific mutilation. An unwary reader would pursue a slow and artfully constructed fictional seduction, feeling the real and tightening clutch of his own excitement, turn the page and fall into an impossible aberration of context. He would discover several pages missing, sliced out of the book so neatly it was difficult to detect even when the pages numbers clearly indicated they were gone, and almost impossible to detect before actually reading the book.

Most of the big yard thought it was probably some rapist turned hank freak who was cutting the sex scenes from the L and L books, that somewhere in one of the blocks there was a hidden scrapbook filled with the erotic passages removed from the hundreds of novels found mutilated, and nightly the hank freak would read of one coupling after another while he masturbated.

It was a natural theory to evolve since many of them had done the same thing—reading late at night, with their cell partners already asleep, they might come on a vivid cartoon of perfect sexual encounter, no fumblings, no failures, no fizzles, and their hips would unconsciously begin to work in sympathetic rhythm until they seemed to join the glorious phantoms rolling like colored shadows cast on the page below, and labored far above them until they spilled their own strength across the page like a solitary god who, unable to form the conception, might still know loneliness, and even in the rush of final white light sense his purpose pushing unconnected against the emptiness around him.

But Chilly didn't support the hank freak theory—on one count of evidence—the work was too neatly done, it was surgical, and he couldn't picture the hank freak taking the pains. No, Chilly thought, here was the hand of a puritan, a censor, working with the antiseptic precision of righteousness.

Chilly was still watching Juleson, and his restless displeasure had found a focus. Most of the things Chilly hated were safe from his anger, but here was this superior fool walking the yard like he was no part of it. Chilly walked over to the edge of the rain shed, and when Juleson went by again he called him. Then he worked his way back to the bakery door, aware that Juleson was about twenty feet behind him. He turned around to catch Juleson's expression of uneasiness, and he felt, without seeing them, that Nunn and Society Red had automatically moved to back him up.

“I've been meaning to see you, Oberholster—” Juleson began.

“You got my stuff?” Chilly asked, automatically falling into the tone and vocabulary he used for these exchanges.

“Well, no, as a matter of fact I haven't. That's what I wanted to see you about.”

“How would it do you any good to see me if you ain't got my stuff? If you can't come up, I'm the last guy you want to see. You didn't draw?”

“No. I'm sorry. I was expecting some money for my birthday, but it ... it hasn't come yet.”

“You know how many times I hear that?”

“This is the first time you've heard it from me.”

“All right, when do I get my stuff?”

Juleson shrugged, meeting Chilly's level gaze with difficulty. “To be honest with you, I don't know.”

“You be honest. That's a keen virtue. But I can't smoke it, and I can't pay the people I owe with it. How much you figure you'll owe me next month?”

“Why fifteen packs, a box at three-for-two. That's right, isn't it?”

“No, that isn't right,” Chilly repeated with satirical patience. “You had
one
month to get up fifteen packs. Now it's twenty-two packs. Another month and it's three cartons. Are you following me?”

Juleson took a half-step back, his face flushing. “Nothing was said—” He paused and then continued in a more reasonable tone, “You're defeating your own purpose. I can probably scrape together fifteen packs.”

“What do you know about my purpose?” Chilly asked. “You pick up mind reading out of one of them books of yours?”

“I assume you want your cigarettes back.”

“I'm going to get my cigarettes back. If it were a gambling debt, some bet you lost, I might lighten up. I write off a lot of bad paper. But I handed you a box cash, three-for-two, and you're no fish, you know three-for-two figures every month, or did you think you were dealing with the Bank of America? Now I want my stuff, or I'm going to get in your ass.”

Juleson started to walk away. He turned after a few steps. “I'll pay you the fifteen packs I agreed to pay you as soon as I can.”

“You'll pay what
I
think you owe, not what
you
think you owe, and I'm telling you like it is. You got any weird ideas you can handle me, forget it, I don't bother with collecting. That's Gasolino's speciality.”

Juleson was clearly growing angry. “Why do you have to pull this sort of thing?” he asked. “You're not one of these brainless assholes. You surely don't need the cigarettes. What do you get out of it?”

Chilly turned to Nunn. “You notice how this joint is beginning to crawl with amateur psychs?”

Nunn smiled tightly. “As one of the brainless assholes I hope you don't expect an intelligent comment from me.”

Society Red started laughing, like water collapsing deep in a drain.

Juleson stared at them white-faced. “Sure, I know. Big joke. Catch some guy short and scare him blue just to be getting a little of your own back. But sometime you're going to pick the wrong man, and you'll be the one who ends up with the shank in him. Then I'll do the laughing, me and everyone else who tries to do his own time and get along without turning this place into a jungle.”

Chilly had listened to this, his face quiet and still, but now he stepped forward and began to tap the air an inch from Juleson's chest. “Now, you listen. You're digging a hole with your own fat jaw. You want to pay fifteen packs? All right, you got one week to come up with fifteen packs. That's it. Otherwise I turn the debt over to Gasolino. Now, get in the wind.”

They watched Juleson walk away. “There goes a mad sucker,” Nunn said.

“What's he going to do?” Chilly wanted to know. “Write a letter to the warden?”

“You really going to put Gasolino on him?”

“I didn't creep up and slip that box in his back pocket. He came and asked for it.”

“Yeah, but a lousy box?”

“It's principle.” Chilly smiled thinly. “That's something he'd understand.”

They finally booked a bet. A man whose hair and jacket looked like animal pelt, so solidly were they matted with the white cotton lint from the textile mill, stopped to bet a single pack on the outcome of the Cotton Bowl game. Then feeling around in his jacket pocket he came out with a cigarette holder that appeared to have been made from a toothbrush handle and some scraps of abalone.

“Three packs and it's yours,” he said.

“I'd give three packs to get rid of it,” Nunn said.

Society Red took the cigarette holder and waved it with his notion of elegance. “Pretty smooth pimp stick for only three packs.”

“Red,” Chilly said, “you'd go for fried ice cream.” He took the holder from Red and returned it. “We make book. We don't collect handicraft.”

The man studied the cigarette holder for a minute, then looked up doubtfully. “Think she's worth three packs? I give two.”

“Old buddy,” Nunn said, “they saw you coming.”

“Yeah, I'm beginning to think so.”

The man moved on.

“Where do fools like that come from?” Chilly asked in a tone that didn't suppose an answer.