Cast the First Stone (27 page)

But I caught the flu and a couple of nights later I ran a high temperature and my throat became sore. I supposed it was from getting my feet wet. The doctor had begun visiting us every morning and when he came through the next morning I went out in the aisle and tried to stop him. “My throat’s sore, doctor, and I’ve been running a temperature all night.” He hadn’t spoken to me or even looked in my direction since the powwow in his office and I thought if I got directly in his path he’d have to answer me.

But he brushed me aside and passed without replying. His stooge, the convict doctor, also passed me without speaking. I stopped Jake Ingalls and said, “What’s the matter with them?” nodding toward the doctor and his stooge.

“Anything wrong, kid?” Jake asked, pleasantly.

“I’ve got a sore throat and a hell of a head,” I said.

He looked at my throat and took my temperature. When the doctor turned and came back he looked at Jake, but Jake kept on examining me without noticing. “You’ve got a touch of the flu, kid,” he said, making out a prescription. “I’ll get this filled and send it down to you. Take a dose of salts and lie down and take it easy.” He called to one of the nurses, “Hey, Elmer, give Monroe a dose of salts and put him to bed.”

When I returned to the dormitory after five more weeks, things seemed duller and stranger than ever. I couldn’t work up even a passing interest in gambling any more. It seemed like a senseless pastime and I couldn’t see for the life of me how I had spent so much time and thought on it before. For a time I lay on my bunk and read novels and magazine stories, when I wasn’t studying. The only interesting things that happened any more were the things which happened in the stories I read. The life in them seemed to me the only real and true life which existed. The prison life came to be something of an unreality which surrounded me and in which I existed but did not live. It seemed as if it was all make-believe, like a scenario that had been written long years before, and we were only acting out our short parts on a stage, going through the actions which the script called for and uttering the written dialogue, and that in time the play would end for all of us and afterward, if we ever chanced to look back on it, it wouldn’t mean a thing.

And by then I was getting tired of it, not all at once but just a slow build-up of weariness, an unseen growth of distaste, a softly simmering exhaustion from doing time, an imperceptible accumulation of aversion for the prison and the prison life; for what it consisted of and existed for, and for the sight of it and the smells and the sounds and the repetitious, monotonous, theatrical voice of it; and for the deliberate, mocking, patently different, but everlastingly the same, continuity of actions which strung the years together like a haphazard sequence of situations written into a long, dull, rambling, dry, undramatic play. It came at first as a loss of interest in all the things that had formerly so intrigued me, as a sort of staleness that I thought was in the prison but which was really in me; in my mind and thoughts and reactions toward prison and prison life. The outside world was gradually building up in my thoughts. It was not the world in which I had lived for nineteen years, but one in which I had never lived and which had never existed anywhere but in my mind. My mind was building a world out of the stories I read and the thoughts I had in the silence of the night. It was an utterly fantastic and unreal and impossible-to-exist world. It was a Utopian creation which I was dreaming into existence.

Somewhere near the end of May I got a typewriter and began teaching myself touch typing from the instructions which had come with the typewriter. I was progressing rapidly when one day, while wrestling with little George, I sprained my back. It was the first time I had really hurt my back since I had been in prison and I was frightened.

At first I refused to be taken to the hospital. They weren’t going to get me over there and kill me, I told myself. I wore my back-brace every day and even slept in it, hoping that it would correct the ache, but instead it got worse. It got so bad I couldn’t keep up in line and had to leave the dormitory some time before the company in order to get to the dining room with them. I knew that, sooner of later, the deputy or director would notice it and they’d have me in the hospital, whether I liked it or not. Hobbling across the yard one day I passed the doctor and it seemed as if he got a look of gloating in his eyes.

My mother was with her people in South Carolina at the time. I wired her a hundred dollars to come and see me immediately. She arrived three days later. I told her all my troubles; about the cast and my back and my fear of being killed if I went back to the hospital. I knew that no matter how much in the wrong I had been, or how much I deserved it, she wouldn’t want me to be hurt. And no matter what I might have thought before about her, or might think about her afterwards, that was the truth. I knew I could depend on that.

She went to the warden and told him the story. At first the warden scoffed at the suggestion that my life would be endangered in the hospital. He refused to intercede. But my mother begged and pleaded for me. Finally he promised her that no harm would come to me while I was in the hospital. He sent one of his clerks inside to take me over to the hospital. When the doctor saw me coming in, with the warden’s clerk, he wouldn’t speak to me. But Jake Ingalls saw that I was taken care of. I stayed flat on my back for two weeks. Then, as suddenly as it had come, the ache left. My back felt as well as it had ever felt. I returned to my company.

My mother had remained in the city during the time I was in the hospital. I wanted her to stay there near to me for a longer time, so I gave her the power of attorney to draw my compensation. It would not be enough for her to live on, I knew, but it would help. The papers were drawn up for one year and I signed them. I felt much safer with her living in the city.

18

D
URING THE LAST
week in July we were transferred back to 2-2. I was put into a cell with Chump Charlie, Big Loony, and a tall, skinny, dried-up Mississippi red neck called Pappy Calhoun. It wasn’t as tough in the cells as it had been before because in some miraculous manner, during our stay in 2-6, we had changed from “agitators” into legitimate cripples. How this had come about, since we were the same convicts with the same afflictions and attitudes, I didn’t know. But it was so, like the world when God got through making it.

There were also cripple companies on 1-2 and 1- and 2-1, part of whom were also from the dormitory. During the afternoons, when the weather permitted, we were taken out behind the wooden dormitory in the area facing down from the death house along the outside wall. It was a recreation period for all four cripple companies. We pitched horseshoes and played softball, visited with each other or just strolled about in the bright sunshine. Later we were given permission to use the old baseball diamond as our playground. It had not been in use since the year before the fire. Weeds had overgrown the diamond and the wooden grandstand had rotted. But it was still good enough to hold those who wished to sit idly in the sun, and we pulled up a few weeds so we could see the base lines and played softball on the old diamond, with our raggedy balls made out of rocks wrapped in cotton socks and wrapped with hospital tape. Someone got hold of a set of rings and pitching quoits became popular also. It was very pleasant to get outside in the sun each day.

In the mornings when we remained indoors the cells were unlocked and we had range privilege. We could visit from cell to cell and Blocker and I ran our poker game the same as we always had. After supper we were locked up again but the four of us in our cell used to play seven-up or gin rummy or canasta until bedtime. Chump always insisted on being my partner. It was very hot in the cells. Each evening after supper Nick would bring Chump a bucket of warm water so he could take his “bird bath.” Chump had a safety razor and all kinds of lotions and powders. He shaved every day and twice a week he shaved the hairs from his legs and underneath his arms. After he bathed he rubbed his skin with lotions, and powdered himself all over, and dabbled perfume underneath his arms and between his legs and back of his ears until the cell smelled like a whore house. It was impossible for the guards not to have noticed it because the convicts in the cells on either side, and above and below and even halfway down the range, could smell him when a breeze was blowing through.

“I hear you, Chump,” someone would yell at him.

“Do you hear me?”

“We hear you over this way too, Chump?”

“How do I sound?” he would ask, winking at me and looking very pleased with himself.

“Sound like a mel-o-dee. Sweet-lee and loving-lee…”

He’d get a great kick out of them. Later on while we were playing cards, he’d wear nylon undershirts and silk pajama trousers. His smooth, powdered and lotioned arms would be exposed, his freshly shaved and powdered face sticky with complacency, and his hair parted and falling down on each side like a careless bob; and smelling as bitchy as a doll on the make. If you could blame Nick for going for him you could do more than I could do, sitting there with my nostrils clogged with perfume and my eyes filled with the sight of his smooth, round hairless arms; or lying on my upper bunk across from his while he winked at me and made kissing sounds with his lips, his eyes as raw and open as those of a depraved woman watching a stallion in heat.

“Come on over when they go to sleep, daddy, I’ll be nice to you,” he’d say, forming the words soundlessly with his lips.

And there I was, choking on the perfume, looking into his heated eyes, watching his begging lips as he lay there in the semi-gloom of his upper bunk with the aisle light just missing him as it shone into our darkened cell, making his arms and legs—accentuated by the pink satin loincloth—look like an old oil painting. Myself as cocked as a hair-trigger forty-five, thinking of all the whores I should have had to carry me through all those years. Thinking, I’m a convict doing time and what in the hell have I got to lose? Thinking, after all, as simple as it is, what am I going through all this thinking for? And then, at the last moment, reneging, losing all desire and wanting to hit him in the mouth; cursing him, calling him everything but a child of God, while he lay there shivering with each curse as if I was whipping him with a switch and ecstatic currents of pain were passing through his body, going finally into a convulsion; while I lay there all night with an excruciating ache, until finally, just before dawn, I went to sleep.

The next morning Chump said, “Hello, Jimmy,” in a tenor lilt as if we had really had a session the night before. But the session had been all his.

“Good morning, Big Loony,” I said.

“What do you say this fine morning, Pappy?”

I turned to Chump and said coldly, “‘Lo.” But Chump didn’t let it bother him; he was as smug as if he had had it all his way.

Chump kept after me, getting something, it seemed, from my abuse. It was the fact he thought he was going to win me that made me begin to hate him because I was afraid that he was going to do it. He thought he was so very clever and smart and wise, on top of being pretty, that sooner or later he would make me fall for him. And I was afraid that this was true.

On candy-ordering day I would buy two boxes of candy and give them away and then help him eat his box and the extra one Nick would bring him. On nights when Nick sent him hot sandwiches from the kitchen, when he could get the night guard to bring them up, I’d always eat the choicest sandwich and let Chump eat the one I left. And when my underclothes and socks got dirty I’d have Chump wash them in the cell although he always sent his own out by Nick, to have them laundered. When we went out on the yard I made a point of obviously avoiding him and if he so much as spoke to me directly I’d turn him off with the most brusque reply I could think of. And still I couldn’t stop him.

Once he said, “God, Jimmy, you treat me so rough when I love you so much. You’re asking me to take a hell of a lot, Jimmy, a hell of a lot.”

“You can always quit, honey, when you get tired,” I said.

I derived the greatest pleasure, however, when I could hurt him enough to make him cry. Then I would say, “I can stand you when you’re hot and bothered because that’s the way you are, and I can put up with the things you say because a bitch like you might say anything, but you’re just contemptible when you try to impose your tears on me because you know I don’t want to feel sorry for you and I’m not going to.”

“What do you want with me, anyway, Jimmy?” he asked. “Don’t you even love me a little?”

“To tell you the truth, I never think of you in quite that way,” I said. “When I think of you at all, I think of you loving me and not ever as me loving you.”

“I’d kill you for that if I didn’t love you so much,” he said.

“You’ve got a hell of a lot better reasons than that if you were going to,” I said.

His eyes got hot and feverish. “You certainly do ask me to take a lot,” he said.

“So it’s like that now, is it?” I said, feeling all the contempt for him that it was necessary for me to feel to keep from despising myself. But I despised myself, anyway. I couldn’t keep from despising myself.

I was getting very tired of the prison and disgusted with myself. Everything was like stale, flat beer sitting warm and pallid in the sun; like a flaccid, bloated corpse just before it begins to rot. Tired of the prison and disgusted with myself. But the prison was indifferent. The days did not give a damn and the nights were no less long. Sunsets came and sunsets went and the walls were rooted just as deeply into the everlasting earth. Stone and steel, and time coming and going but never staying, and ever the eternal same. And I was getting tired of it. Tired of hearing and seeing and feeling and learning of the perfidy and degradation of convicts and of myself. Tired of murder and rape and jobs and punks and hacks and monstrosities.

And then a simple-minded convict had to write another simple-minded bastard to tell him to keep his mouth shut and Tommy Tucker, to whom he had given the kite to be delivered, had to take it to the director and the director had to have the convicts over and get the truth out of them with a three-hour clubbing; and the two damn fools had to break down and confess that they were the ones who had set the prison afire and burned up two hundred and seventy-seven other convicts. And I had thought, my God, what the hell did they do that for? they’ll only burn them now and that will make two hundred and seventy-nine. What the hell did any of them do any of it for? What did Tommy have to rat for? And why couldn’t the officials, for once, have let it pass and no one but themselves would ever have been the wiser nor have thought about it nor have given a damn, one way or the other, how the prison fire had started? Since it had and since the two hundred and seventy-seven bastards had died and since, now that they were dead, there wasn’t anything anyone could do to bring them back to life; neither clubbing two incidental convicts into unconsciousness nor burning them to death in the electric chair nor giving Tommy Tucker an honor job, which was the customary reward for such services beyond the call of duty; which by then you knew so well you could close your eyes and see, and be tired of—be so completely tired of.