Cast the First Stone (14 page)

Before the head guard, who was fat and lazy, sitting on the stand by the door, could get to his feet someone threw a tin cuspidor of sawdust and tobacco spittle in his face. Then a bunch of other convicts grabbed him by the legs and yanked him out of the stand, underneath the railing, down on the floor where they began kicking out his guts. They kept on kicking him until blood started coming out his mouth.

There were three other guards and five hundred convicts. Big Irish stood up and pleaded with the men. A convict snatched the chair out from behind him and hit him across the head. The other two guards tried to run. The last I saw of them they were smothered by convicts. The band guard stuck his head out of the bandroom, took one look and snatched it back. He shut the door and locked it.

Cuspidors were thrown. Windows were smashed. The noise, which began as a confused babble of voices, rose into a shrill, loud, continuous wail, earsplitting and nerve-shattering. Benches were splintered. It seemed as if Demotte and the head guard were being killed. I started to get up and beat it for the door.

Chump Charlie grabbed me by the arm. “Keep your seat. That’s the only way to keep out of it.”

I heard someone yell, “Let’s make a break!”

“Goddammit, let’s go!”

“Let’s crush through the front gates!”

“Let’s go get the pig!”

“Kill the goddamn pig!”

Suddenly I saw that two of them had guns. They must have taken them from the guards. They rushed toward the door. Five hundred wild-eyed, disheveled, freedom-crazed, howling convicts with two guns.

“Let’s break down the stockade gates!”

“Down with the stockade gates!”

“Bastard son of a bitch!”

“Shoot the son of a bitch in the guts!”

“Aw, cut his goddamned throat. We want to save the bullets.”

At the door they stopped as if they had run into an invisible wall. They backed up, step by step. The two convicts with the guns kept backing into the others until suddenly the others broke for their seats. The hands holding the guns began to tremble. The guns dropped to the floor as if the strength had gone out of the hands that held them.

I don’t know what I expected to see. But what I saw shocked me deeply, violently, as I have never been shocked before or since.

One man came through the door. Just one man—Cody.

He wore a dark blue uniform cap, with the gold legend of a sergeant, low over his eyes, and a black slicker buttoned about his throat and wet with rain. He did not rush or hesitate but came steadily through the doorway, his empty hands hanging at his sides, his lips tight and bloodless, his face a burnt-red—raw-edged and hard as baked clay—his eyes a half-hidden tricky gleam beneath the brim of his cap. He came straight ahead across the floor, never hesitating once, and up to the two convicts who had had the guns. He slapped one of them on the side of his head so hard it laid him his full length on the floor. The other one broke to run but he grabbed him by the collar, and holding him at a distance, slapped him until his face was raw and swelling, red and turning blue. Then he said, “Stand over by the door.” His thin bloodless lips did not seem to move but his voice came out loud, harsh, uncompromising.

The two convicts scrambled over to the door. Cody picked up the guns, then stood there for a moment looking us over. A convict went crazy from the strain. He jumped up, his arms outstretched to the ceiling as if hollering hallelujah, his fingers stiffened and extended out like prongs, and his hair rising on his skull. He screamed, “Oh, you goddamned dog!”

Before his feet touched the floor Cody shot him five times with one of the guns, so that when he fell he must have already been dead. He fell across the convict in front of him. The convict jumped aside. He fell on the back of the bench, slid slowly off, crumpled to the floor between the benches.

In the silence following the echo of the gun shots I could hear the three buttons of his uniform coat scrape across the back of the bench as he slid to the floor. I could hear, distinctly, the stifled breathing of the convicts and the hard, fast thumping of my own heart. I could hear the moans of the injured guards and, from below, the deliberate, monotonous, mocking, eternal clank of the looms of the woolen mill, beating out their blunt-toned melody. Then from somewhere down below in the yard came the stentorian bellow, “CompaneeeeEEEEEEEE…! MARCH!”

“Oh, please! Oh, please! Oh, please!” I never knew whether I said it in my mind or aloud.

10

A
T THE BEGINNING
of summer we shed our coats. We left our collars unbuttoned when the guard wasn’t watching. But nothing helped that idle house, sitting up there on a level with the sun, hotter than a Virginia coke oven. “Hot? As a pussy with the pox!” they’d say. On those sultry summer days there was a squad of convicts whose only duty was to revive the men who fell out from the heat.

On Saturday afternoons we had baseball games. Outside teams came in to play our prison grays. We would go and sit out on the grandstand, down beside the walls, getting a tan watching the fellows park home runs over the corner stockade guard tower. It was plenty of fun. Most of the convicts rooted for the visiting team.

There was cash and tobacco and merchandise bet on the games. Afterward there was the necessary fighting to collect the bets. My mother had sent me some undershirts and shorts and I had sold them for cash, and won about forty dollars in the dice game up in the bandroom. When the ball games began I’d stake one of the fellows to a fin and then bet him on the hits. That made it peppier.

Outside visitors always came in with the teams. Sometimes there would be more than a hundred, both men and women. If there were any pretty girls among them we’d always find some excuse to pass their section of the grandstand so we could get our gapper’s bit. They’d soon catch on after the parade had started. Some of them would give us a show.

On Decoration Day we had the privilege of the yard. All of the companies except Death Row and the 1-11 company, where the redshirt desperadoes were kept in solitary, were turned out in the yard for a couple of hours before dinner. Immediately dozens of crap games came to life. Several guys got cut, several got caught. Mal looked me up as soon as the rout order was given.

“Give me something, Jimmy,” he greeted. “I heard about you breaking everybody.”

“Hell, I just gave you four dollars last week. You must be keeping up some kid.”

“I don’t like that.”

“Well maybe you’re keeping up some man, then. I heard that the hack up there in the tin shop was sweet on you.”

“Aw, go to hell.”

“Come on, let’s get in this game. I’ll stake you.”

“I don’t want to gamble. Let’s talk. Gunner Garson and Red Cork are going to win it all, anyway, and I’ll get a chance at them in the dormitory tonight.”

“I staked Cocky,” I said.

“He argues too much.”

“He wins too, sometimes.”

“Come on, let’s walk.” We went down by the dining room, past the powerhouse, toward the ball diamond. There were thirty or forty convicts down there playing ball, with twelve or sixteen men on each team. We went over to the grandstand and sat down.

“There’s a game this afternoon, I hear,” I said.

“We’re playing the Pott’s Brewers. They’re gonna beat hell out of us.”

“Oh, I don’t know. We almost beat them before.”

“How do you know? You weren’t watching the game. Every time I saw you you were passing the visitors’ stand.”

“Did you see me?”

“Sure I saw you. You thought you were cute with your cap off. I could see you grinning from ‘way over where I was.”

I laughed. “I was looking at the little blonde in the green dress. Did you see her?”

“Sure, I passed by there myself. I wanted to see what she had to keep you walking all afternoon.”

“I sure would like to get that. She didn’t have a damn thing on underneath her dress. Every time I passed she’d open up her legs and let me see it.”

“She was just teasing you. She just let you see it because you couldn’t get it.”

“I bet I could if I was out.”

“You always want something you can’t get.”

We were silent after that. Then I said, “I was over to court, Monday.”

“I heard. What for?”

“You know that note you wrote on the back of my first cashier’s receipt? Something about ‘dear cousin, I hope you will always hold me in the high esteem which I hold you—’ you know all that slush you wrote.”

“That wasn’t slush.”

“The hell it wasn’t.”

“I meant it.”

“Sure, but it was slush just the same. Anyway, old man Warren was standing by the chapel doorway Sunday and when I went by he pulled me out of line and shook me down. He found the receipt in my pocket and wrote me up.”

“What did he pull you out for?”

“Oh, nothing. He’s been trying to get something on me ever since I got out of the coal company.”

“What did Jumpy say?”

“He asked me were you my cousin.”

“What’d you say?”

“I said sure, our mothers were sisters.”

“Did he believe it?”

“Hell, naw. He doesn’t believe any damn thing. He said that if we were cousins it was a legitimate relationship and one that could not be helped.”

“But the other?” he grinned.

“He just implied that,” I grinned back.

Some fellows passed and one of them called, “What say, Mal? Is that your cousin?”

“Hello, Joe. Yeah, this is Jimmy.”

“He’s better-looking than you are.”

I found myself blushing. After they’d passed, Mal said, “Bobby Guy is coming to the soup company tomorrow.”

“Who’s Bobby Guy?”

“Oh, he’s just a boy. Doing ten to twenty-five.”

“What did you tell me about him for?”

“I just don’t want you to fall in love with him.”

“No danger.”

Nick and Chump Charlie strolled by. “What say, Mal? I see you and Jimmy are catching a little sun,” Nick said, smirking.

“Hello, Nick,” Mal greeted.

“Hello, Jimmy,” Charlie said, smiling around Nick’s shoulder. “Are you trying to get a tan?”

“What say, Charlie? What say, Nick?”

Nick hesitated a moment as if he wanted to say something else, then he said, “Take it easy,” and went on.

“Don’t you know Chump?” I asked Mal.

“We don’t speak. I don’t like the little bitch.”

“Oh!”

“I hear you like him well enough,” he said. “You like him well enough for both of us.”

“I haven’t got anything against him. I don’t like him, though.”

He looked at me solemnly. “You’ve changed a lot, Jimmy. When you first came in you wouldn’t even talk to anyone you thought was like that.”

I became serious for a moment too. “Hell, everybody in the soup company’s some kind of freak or other,” I said, defensively. “I’ve got to talk to somebody.”

“You don’t have to associate with ‘em. There are a lot of good fellows in here.”

I laughed. “Sure, I know. Just like Sunday School.”

“Oh, I don’t mean that. I mean who aren’t wolves and punks, and aren’t always running around trying to find somebody new.”

“Where are they? Hidden? Damned if I’ve seen any of them.”

“I know you haven’t. They’re the last persons you get to know. The fellows who tend to their own business are the ones you never see. There are fellows in here who’re taking correspondence courses, and others who write stories and things like that. I’ll bet half of the fellows in here don’t participate in that degeneracy stuff.”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ll bet it’s more than that.”

“Maybe you’re right.”

“You know Burns. He’s editor of the
Prison Times
.” We had a weekly prison sheet, edited and printed by the convicts in the print shop and distributed throughout the prison every Saturday afternoon.

“Yeah. He came up in the idle house one day and asked me if I wanted to draw some illustrations for the
Times
. He’d heard somewhere that I could draw.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I asked him was there anything in it for me.”

“What did he say about that?”

“He said he was sorry but all services to the
Times
were gratis, so I said to hell with it.”

“They don’t get any more than the rest of us. Nobody gets any more than anybody else.”

“That’s what I’m finding out.”

“It would have given you a chance to cell with some fellows who are at least decent. I don’t believe you want to know anybody decent.”

“To hell with them! The bitches are more interesting.”

“Burns has sold thirty-seven stories to magazines.”

“Screw Bums.” I was tired of it.

“You and Chump.”

“That’s a lie! He’s been after me to, but I haven’t got to the place where I can do that yet. But give me time. It’s so common around this joint it sounds almost natural. It doesn’t even shock me any more to find out someone I like is like that.”

“You’ve been using his radio,” he accused.

“Who, Chump’s? That’s another lie. He had a line run down to my cell and sent down some earphones. I was going to send them back but Starlight kept them. I don’t want that bastard to do me any favors. You’re just jealous I talk to him and you don’t like him.”

“You’re a damn fool,” he said.

The bell rang for us to line up and return to our cells.

“You’re another damn fool,” I said, standing up.

We started back toward the main yard. “You’re going to eat on the main line today. Maybe that’ll make you feel better.”

“I feel all right. The soup’s all right with me. I’m getting along fine on it. I’m gaining weight.”

“I don’t suppose you’re going to give me anything.”

For a moment I was tempted to refuse. Then I pulled two dollar bills from my pocket. “Here.”

“You shouldn’t keep that money loose in your pocket,” he said. “Some guard’ll shake you down and take it.”

“Let ‘em take it!” I said.

When we parted in front of the dining room he said again, “You’ve changed, Jimmy.”

My company was lining up in front of the chapel. The band stood about the alligator pool, playing. I could see the four slimy, stinking alligators panting in the shallow pool. Everybody’s a whore, I was thinking.