Cast the First Stone (30 page)

We had three colored convicts on the team, Johnny Brothers at first, Baldy at short, and a boy called Snakehips in left field. Candy was at third and Chink and Jerry in the field and everybody at second, it seemed, because we never could find a good second-baseman. In short field we had a slim Okie cutie called Cotton Top. He was about the most perfect player I ever saw, although he wasn’t very well-liked. He was like a ballet dancer on the field. We had two pitchers, a little crippled kid called Beauty who was pretty wild, and a big, crabby black boy called Mose, who could really throw them in. He used to pitch them by so many batters that every team we played had the umpire go out and watch his delivery to see if it was legal. But he was so surly that you could never tell what he was going to do. Even Johnny Brothers couldn’t get along with him. “Evilest nigger God ever made,” Brothers used to say. I was the only one who could do anything with him at all, and I had to beg him and plead with him and damn near get down on my knees and pray to him to keep him pitching. But Captain Tom and I always had our chips down and were playing it for blood. We had to keep Mose pitching in order to win.

At first we were scheduled with other half-cripple companies. But they were pushovers for us. After that they gave tougher opponents. We got a great bang out of beating those teams that thought they were tough. But it was one hell of a job managing all those cranky convicts.

Tom would say, “Whew, these fellows have the damndest dispositions of any people I ever saw.”

And I’d say, “You haven’t seen them perform yet.”

We’d have to pay them and beg them, and every now and then blow up and curse them out. But Tom stuck right with them. He argued with them and begged them and bribed them and pleaded with them, and every now and then he’d get so mad he’d put one of them in the hole on a trumped-up charge, for making an error. That fellow, Tom, went softball crazy. Candy and I wanted to win, too; we had our dough up, too. But Tom would bet fifty or sixty dollars on each game and we had to win for him—we had to win for his peace of mind as well as his money. Between games he would take us out all day long to practice. The lieutenants reprimanded him for keeping us out so long and finally, they ordered him to stop taking us out at all. He didn’t stop but he wouldn’t keep us out so long. Instead, he had the tables moved in the dormitory and stacked down at one end in order to give his pitchers space to practice. He had Mose warming up so long one morning before a game that Mose’s arm got so tired when he got out on the diamond he couldn’t get the ball up to the plate. Tom swore that he had sold out to the other team and would have put him in the hole if it hadn’t been for Johnny Brothers and me.

The staff of the
Prison Times
drew up the schedules and sent scorers down to the games. At first the university students umpired. Tom would try to bribe them to make decisions in our favor but they never went for it. He’d go over to the print shop and find out who we were scheduled to play next and then he’d go over to the company and try to bribe the best players to throw the game. And, my God, don’t let one of our own players drop a ball, or strike out with the bases loaded. Tom would swear they were throwing the game. He had Jerry transferred down into the mills because he caught him talking to the coal-company guard the day we were to play the coal company.

But many of the other guards were just as bad as Captain Tom. All of them had spies in each other’s companies and they’d all try to bribe the players to throw off. None of them ever tried me because they all knew that I was Tom’s righthand man. But they tried Brothers and Candy and Mose. Mose would take their money and then go out and beat their team. He was certainly one evil colored man.

The rivalry between the teams was terrific. The officials condoned gambling on the games. It was nothing to see a company bring a half-dozen pillowcases full of tobacco and merchandise down to the diamond to bet on their team. They said the guard on 3-3 lost his home betting on his team. But none of them had it quite as bad as Tom.

You should have seen Tom walking up and down the firstbase line, with his big belly sweating in the sun and his white shirt sticking to his body, and his face red as paint, his cap cocked on the back of his head with a lock of hair down in his eyes; talking a mile a minute in a disjointed babble of sighs and prayers and curses and cheers. At the end of each game he would be utterly weary, with sagging shoulders, and his eyes registering the beginning of a heart attack. His unlighted cigar, which he had lighted a hundred times, would still be unsmoked but now chewed to a frazzle with slimy strings of tobacco hanging from his slack mouth. The first thing after we got back to the dormitory, even before we sainted players got our rubdowns, someone would get out a bucket of warm water for him to soak his feet, and someone else would have to apply hot towels to his arms and cold towels to his head and work on him until it was time for him to go off duty, so he would be able to get away on his own power. He played each game harder than all twenty players combined.

And then the very first thing the next morning, as if he had lain awake all night and thought about it, he’d be out scouting some newcomer who had just entered the institution the day before, trying to find out if he could play softball. He’d slip over in the 10 block and up to the 5th range, where the newcomers were celled, and interview every one of them. If one just so much as said he had played softball at any time in his life Tom would tell him, talking through the side of his mouth in that ward-heeler’s whisper and acting as confidential as a race-track tout about to give you a tip on a horse that ain’t won a race since Count Fleet was a colt, “You act crippled now, and I’ll get you over in the cripple company. I’ll get you over there before they have a chance to ship you down into the mills.”

“Do what, sir?” the confused convict would ask.

“Hey!” Tim would whisper, his face up against the bars. “Pst, come closer,” talking even lower than a whisper. When the convict would get close enough for him to kiss he’d ask in his low stage whisper, “Got any smoking?”

“Why, er, no, sir—”

He’ll pull out a dime and give it to the convict. ‘Take this and buy some,” he’d whisper in a way that’d make you think he’d slipped a guy a thousand-dollar bill. “And don’t forget there’s plenty more where that came from. We have everything over in the cripple company. Best company in the joint.” He could make the cripple company sound better than freedom itself. And then he’d look up and down the range, knowing damn well that the company guard was over in another cell block with a hospital pickup list. “Now don’t forget now, just act crippled. Fall back in line. Act like you can’t keep up. Let the line get ‘way ahead and just keep on hobbling across the yard. Don’t let any of the lieutenants bluff you. Just tell them you’re crippled and can’t keep up. I’ll get you.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Get it?” he’d ask, stretching his eyes, interrogatingly.

“Yes, sir, fall back, act like I can’t keep up, don’t let the lieutenants bluff you, just tell them you’re crippled and I’ll let the line get ‘way ahead and then I’ll get you, er, I mean you’ll get him, er—” By then the convict would be so confused by all of Tom’s confidential jive he wouldn’t know what he was saying.

“Yeah, that’s—er, what did you say?” Tom would ask, his eyes stretching in earnest this time. “Er, say that again,” he’d shout, not so sure now if the convict had sense enough even to act crippled much less play softball, and getting a vague idea that he had lost another dime. “Er, never mind. What position did you say you played?”

“Second base.”

“Yeah, well here’s another dime, get yourself some more smoking. And be sure to act crippled, now.”

Then he would come back and tell us he had scouted Joe Blow for second base. “Hey, Jim, call Johnny Brothers, tell him to come down here a minute, tell him I got a kid coming in soon that can really play that second base.”

Tom wanted a second-baseman as bad as we wanted freedom. More than likely he’d get the kid into the company and the kid would get out on the diamond and couldn’t catch pennies in a wash tub if they were raining from heaven in a cloudburst, and would act as if he’d never seen second base before or a softball game either, for that matter. Tom would get so excited the director would have to come over and put him completely off the diamond, clear over behind the wire fence that enclosed the players’ field, and he’d walk up and down out there chewing his unlighted cigar to a frazzle and thinking up ways and means of getting the kid transferred to Siberia.

When we played 3-4, which was supposed to be a breather between the coal company and the band, they beat us and Tom fell out with a heart attack and had to be rushed to the hospital on stretchers. We were leading by a score of one-to-nothing, going into the seventh and last inning, when Mose blew up and walked the first two batters to face him. He steadied down and struck out the next two but I let one get through me and the two men on base advanced. The next batter swung blind at one of Mose’s high fast ones and hit it on the nose. It sailed far out in left-center field. Snakehips and Cotton Top started for it at the same time and when it became apparent that they were going to collide, you could hear Tom yelling a country mile, “Let it alone, you black son of a bitch! Keep away from it! Oh, you black African bastard!” When they bumped, Tom keeled over as if dead.

Snakehips was sore for days after that and I had to go around and placate him. I had to tell him that Tom didn’t mean any harm, that he was so excited he didn’t know what he was saying. When that didn’t soothe him I had to take him down to Tom and have Tom apologize.

“Aw, Snakehips, old boy, you know how a man says things when he gets excited,” Tom said. “Don’t take it to heart, old boy. Here, take this dime and go down and win yourself something.” After Snakehips had gone he turned to me and said, “It’s a hell of a racket, ain’t it, kid? You have to kiss the black bastard’s behind and then pay for the privilege.” But Tom was crazy about Johnny Brothers. Brothers was the best first-baseman in the joint. He could get anything Tom had—up to a dime, that is.

Candy and I bet heavily on our games but we had to split our winnings with the rest of the players for fear they might throw a game. Tom had told us not to use anyone who wouldn’t bet on himself, but if we had done that we wouldn’t have had any team. Most of the guys thought it was smart to bet against themselves, then when they lost we’d have to give them part of ours. Tom wouldn’t give them anything himself. He’d let them have their way in the dormitory, however. He was really strong with that. All you had to do was play softball for him and you could do whatever you wanted to in that dormitory with impunity.

When we really got to going, like the time we knocked over the colored convicts in the coal company, who were supposed to be so hot, we took over. On rainy days we’d not only move the tables so we could practice inside but we’d move the bunks, too. The rest of the convicts got to resenting Tom so that practically everyone who wasn’t on the team had written out to the warden, ratting on him. One day the warden called him out and showed him the notes, a whole stack of them. He told Tom if he couldn’t do better he’d find himself up on 6-11 with a mill company. Tom had us lie low for awhile and then he pinned hell on those rats. He shut down all the games, enforced the silence rules and even stopped the colored convicts from having church services during the day.

Toward the middle of the season Tom was so filled up with softball the other guards began avoiding him. And later, when the guards began umpiring the games, all of them went nuts. It was all the deputy and director could do to keep peace between the guards. If Tom couldn’t bribe the guard who was umpiring he wouldn’t let us play unless the director was on the field. The time we played 1-4 the guard who was umpiring kept sending word back to us to wait out the pitcher. 1-4 had a hell of a fine pitcher and he wasn’t throwing anything but strikes. He was striking out so many of us that the umpire called time, and came over to our bench to get a drink of water. While he held the cup to his lips he turned his back to the players on the field and whispered to those of us who could hear him, “Listen, you fellows, quit striking at those balls. I’ve got forty dollars bet on you.”

“What balls?” Brothers asked. “That chump ain’t pitching nothing but strikes.”

“They’ll be balls when I get through calling them,” he said.

The dining-room and hospital teams played on Sunday afternoons. Each week the best team from one of the other groups was selected to go out and play one or the other of them. The hospital and dining room would play and then the winner would play the team chosen for that week. The men in the company were permitted to go along with the team and it gave them all a Sunday afternoon outside, while everyone else in the whole joint was locked in. It was a very special occasion and there was great rivalry among the teams to be selected. The dining room was supposed to be the best team in the prison and besides beating the hospital regularly they beat all the other teams sent out to play them.

Tom wanted us to play them. He would rather have had us play them than have had strawberry shortcake for dinner the rest of his life. And Tom truly loved strawberry shortcake. Just a little strawberry shortcake was enough to give him gas pains and slow up his ticker, but he’d eat it until his stomach bulged. He’d eat three or four helpings, knowing that it was a gamble whether he’d be alive the next day. But he would have given up his shortcake for an entire week if he could have gotten us a game with the dining room.

He kept after the warden to let us play the dining room until he almost got fired. They told a story around the prison about the last time Tom asked the warden to let us play the dining room. The warden was attending a big political banquet in a downtown hotel. The governor and the welfare director and a United States senator and a lot of other big shots were present. Tom happened to stop by the bar and learned that the banquet was in progress and the warden was present. He called a bellhop and sent word to the warden that he’d like to see him for a minute. The warden sent word back that he couldn’t leave right then, but for Tom to stop by his office the next day.