On the Yard (9 page)

On the way back to the clinic the MTA said, “That stuff doesn't seem to help him much.”

“They get that far gone, nothing helps much.”

“How do you suppose he feels dying in a prison hospital?”

Joey shrugged and looked away. “It's like dying anywhere else, I guess.”

When they reached the clinic the phone was ringing, a call to condemned row, and they left again with Ghost still frozen in the bishop's ambush.

Condemned row, almost always called death row except in official documents, is buried deep in the center of the north block, guarded there by the mass around it like a fragile organ. The MTA and Joey had to pass three manned and locked doors, besides a remote-controlled and telescanned elevator, before they entered the bland white-tiled corridor, lined with cells which were painted in three alternating pastel shades: primrose, dusty pink, and nile green. It was drenched with light, the tile blazed and the eyes of the officer on duty were weary and red-rimmed. The death row sergeant, his feet crossed on a gray metal desk, sat at the head of the corridor.

The MTA asked, “Anything serious?”

“I doubt it,” the sergeant said. “It's Wagner. He's got a gut ache.”

He took a leather pouch of large keys from his desk and called to the officer on the door, “Back me up. They're going to take a look at Wagner.”

“Isn't he the kid that shot a cop in Oakland?” the MTA asked.

“That's him. Eighteen when he pulled the trigger. I doubt he sees nineteen.”

“No hope of commutation?”

“Not a ghost,” the sergeant told him, whispering now because they were outside Wagner's door.

Wagner's cell was painted primrose, a little larger than a mainline cell. A bunk, a stool, a metal table all were bolted to the floor, and his light bulb was barred away in a little cage of its own as if its offense were even greater than Wagner's.

The MTA knelt by the side of the bunk. “What's the trouble, kid?”

“My gut. I ate that greasy hamburger.”

“Better let me take a look,” the MTA said, pulling the gray blankets away from Wagner's chin. It disturbed him to discover Wagner was small, maybe a hundred and twenty pounds, no more than five-five. He probed the flat white abdomen for rigidity and finding none he dosed Wagner for indigestion.

He smiled. “Okay, kid, that'll take care of you.” He stood up and nodded at the sergeant.

“Doc,” Wagner said. “Look, Doc, how about a goofball?”

The MTA frowned. So that was it. And why not? Movie broads gobbled up yellow jackets like they were jelly beans, surely this dead kid ought to rate one.

He gave Wagner a Nembutal, drew him a cup of water, and waited until he had made sure the boy had swallowed it—a routine death row precaution like the plastic spoon Wagner was given to eat with and the locked razor he shaved with.

As they left, Joey said, “Take it slow, man.”

And Wagner sat up to answer, “I take it very slow.”

He remained sitting to watch the door close, folding into darkness, a darkness where the judas window hung like a square, gray, and stationary star, the only light now except for its own faint reflection from the white metal toilet top hanging in the corner, unconnected, like a ghostly zero.

It was his own fault he couldn't sleep. He took too many naps during the day. He warned himself against it, thinking of the slow night hours to wear away without any possible distraction except his own disabled thoughts. But the temptation to sleep, to forget, was too strong. Through the months he had spent on death row, that part of each day which he could hope to lose in sleep had grown shorter and shorter. He tried exercise, hundreds of push-ups, deep knee bends; he paced his cell. Nothing helped. It didn't occur to him that if to be unconscious was better than waking, then to be unconscious forever might be best of all.

Instead he dreamed of miracles. The miracles of the future: commutation to life imprisonment, abolishment of the death penalty, wild, impossible escapes, and the outbreak of the total atomic war. And the miracles of the past. In his mind he started out again and again the night of the robbery, but he left his gun unloaded. Or he dreamed he had shot to the side, the floor, the ceiling, anyplace but into the cop, whose death was going to cause his own.

He got up and, wrapping a blanket around his shoulders, sat on the toilet. Sometimes if he sat up awhile he would begin to feel sleepy. The hard toilet made the bunk seem comfortable. He rolled a cigarette and smoked it, flicking the ash between his legs.

The few times he was able to think about the night he had killed the policeman with the hard precision of true recall, he realized that there had been no intention on his part which he might have deflected or reversed. Again he would see the cop flash in front of him, and instantly he felt his hand jump as if pulled by the gun. As if the gun had been set to make its own murder.

There was nothing he could have turned back—except not to have robbed the store, not to have had the gun, not to have been in reform school where he had learned to want the gun, and, ultimately, not to have been himself.

Gratefully he felt the first sweet drift of smoke as the Nembutal began to work in his bloodstream.

In the condemned cell next to Wagner's, Oscar Raymond Johnson, convicted of the rape-murders of two women, both in their sixties, caressed his crotch as he thought: They goin fry my ass like a egg, but, man, man, man, them grannies was good.

Directly behind Wagner's cell, across a narrow utility tunnel clogged with the thick black bowels of the sewage system, was another cell, a twin, a Siamese twin since they were wired from the same outlet and a single valve released water to both toilets. But while they were identical physically, spiritually it was as if one twin had been assured he would die within the month, while the second had found no reason to doubt he would continue to live forever.

Stick was confined in the second cell—a holding cell in the isolation unit known as the shelf. The goon squad had hustled him into the cell and he had been ignored since, except for his evening meal served from a portable steam table. He had flushed the food down the toilet.

He had been drawn up tight. For a long time he had walked up and down and occasionally he slapped the side of his face smartly as if a gnat had just landed on his cheek. His eyelids had seemed to be twitching and his armpits were cold. Every few minutes he had pressed against the door trying to see through the hairline crack at its edge, but he could make out only a formless green blur which he knew to be the far wall of the corridor. Then he moved to the back of the cell and jabbed the round button above the sink to watch the water pour into the basin. In time he realized he was thirsty and he bent to gulp at the stream as if he were biting it. The excess water spilled down the side of his chin and wet the collar of the blue denim coverall they had given him to replace the one he had worn from Delano.

When fatigue had worn the harshest edge from his tension, he began to look around for something to draw with and discovered a pencil stub hidden under the mattress. The lead was worn down smooth with the wood, but he managed to sharpen it with his teeth, biting the wood away until enough graphite was exposed to mark the wall. He drew the Vampire.

Then he lay down to stare up at the bare ceiling. After a while his immediate awareness began to blur and he felt better. He sensed he was growing stronger and stronger and the indication of his increasing strength was the poised glow of well-being in the pit of his stomach. He didn't need his arms to read the message of his power, he felt it in his gut at its source.

He stood up and, moving with a polished coolness suggestive of the floating grace of an athlete caught on slow-motion film, he broke the metal door from its frame, crumbling it as if it were cardboard, and stepped into the corridor. A bull came running towards him, clearly running from pure reflex. The stunned amazement in his eyes was delicious. Deftly Stick swooped and seizing the officer by the ankle he spun around in a half-circle and pitched him the length of the corridor. His scream printed itself in Stick's mind as EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE—the first E an enormous yellow capital which funneled off, smaller and smaller, until the final E vanished in a tiny star at the point of impact. A second officer sat at a metal desk. He was swooning with terror.

Stick tore open the door to the elevator, but discovered the car was at the bottom of the shaft. Rather than wait for it to rise, he slid down the cables, and plunged through the side of the shaft to land lightly in the north block rotunda. They were waiting as he had known they would be—ranks of uniformed men with square white teeth and tiny black eyes. Their heads were covered with scarlet bristle. They closed on him behind the jagged flare of small arms fire. He arched his chest and the bullets glanced off harmlessly, bouncing back to kill his attackers. He grew steadily stronger. He looked up to see the convicts watching him, tiers of them pressed against the bars of their cells.

—Free us, Vampire, they called. Free us and we're your men.

They shook the metal doors in their frames until the block thundered. With great clarity he saw his Generals, both in the same cell. They stood at attention as he had taught them, pounding their chests in the Roman salute, their faces firm with pride.

—Free us, Lord.

He wrenched the door from their cell and they fell in behind him as he moved down the tier tearing off each door as he came to it. His army formed behind him. His army formed behind him and began to sing, and their voices combined into a single voice ...

Someone shouted and the singer fell silent. It was a moment before Stick realized he had shouted. He turned over and pressed his face against the hard pillow. He tried to guess the time. If he knew what time it was he would know how many hours he had been alone. No one even bothered to open the small metal window to look in on him. Were they that confident there was nothing he could do?

He stripped the top blanket from his bed and stuffed it into the toilet. He began to press the button. The toilet was a Standard Instanto and without a reservoir to refill it flushed constantly. Soon water was flowing across the floor and beginning to drain through the crack at the base of the door.

The water was around Stick's ankles before the door flew open and it was free to rush into the corridor. The officer looked at his wet shoes, then looked at Stick.

“You miserable punk,” he said.

Still they didn't beat him. They stripped off his coveralls and locked him in a different cell, and he found himself naked in an absolutely bare room. The monotony of cement was broken only by a three-inch hole in the middle of the floor, and directly above the hole, higher than he could reach, a light burned behind a frosted pane. When he stretched out to put his ear to the hole, he heard running water. He caught the faint scent of urine and sat up quickly, his mouth working with revulsion. This is the end of the line, a voice in his head said quietly. You made it in record time. The cement was cold against his bare skin, and he stood up to begin pacing. He began to slap his cheek. He paused and ran his thumbnail down the concrete wall. The surface was hard and smooth and his nail turned under. He couldn't even draw the Vampire. You've got to play it keen, he whispered to himself. Keen. He crooned the word, seeking comfort in the thought of its power.

The MTA returned to find that Ghost had conceded the game in his absence, but had managed to sour the concession with his usual soreheadedness. Ghost had simply cleared the board, boxed the men, and retreated into the clinic can to practice on his guitar. He was trying to learn “Your Cheatin' Heart.” This was the song he intended to sing to his wife when he became a big-time country and western singer. She was a dirty, cheating, loose-legged slut, and he intended to make it plain for the whole world to see. He didn't picture it too clearly but usually he seemed to be wearing a white hat and a white leather jacket with fringe and he was sitting up on the back seat of a white convertible, big as a goddam iceberg, his eyes real cool and careless, and he'd be loving up some cute little ol' gal sitting beside him—some way he'd make that bitch regret the day she started shacking with that fool and cut off his smoke money.

The MTA heard Ghost's guitar, muffled by two doors, but he didn't go in to ask about the game because he knew from experience that Ghost would claim he had found a way to avoid the mate, but had just got tired of waiting around, and it was only an old game anyway.

The MTA was busy again in twenty minutes. A Mexican boy called Baby de Flats had slashed up the face of another Mexican boy known as Conejo with a ragged sliver of glass from a broken Pico Pico Hot Sauce bottle. Baby had heard indirectly that Conejo, his cellmate for six months, had been a narcotics snitch on the streets.

The MTA worried about the effect of hot sauce in open wounds, got the O.D. out of bed to come in and take a look. The inmate photographer, immediately summoned from his cell, arrived to take a series of photographs, front, left profile, right profile, of Conejo's face recording the cuts in the event Baby was tried for assault. As he was kneeling for the full-face, Conejo's eyes cleared for a moment. He looked at the blood on his hands.

“I ain't no snitch,” he said.

The watch lieutenant preserved the sliver of Pico Pico Hot Sauce bottle in a manila envelope, which he locked in the hot room. He called the hospital to learn that the O.D. had Conejo half mended and that complications were not anticipated. Then he phoned the warden's residence to report the incident.

Charlie Wong, the warden's inmate houseboy, answered the phone.

“Let me talk to the old man, will you, Charlie.”

“Ver' solly, Loot, Missy Sheeley he no here.”

“Well, where is he?”

“He say, he go eat with some klind animal.”

“What?”

“Animal. Some klind animal. Missy Sheeley he say—”