CHAPTER 1

 

We were having beans this meal. That’s not news—when we don’t have beans, that’s news. My main concern was not biting down on a rock. There are rocks all the time in the beans. If I looked around, I would see everyone else eating the way I was. Carefully, so as not to bite down on a rock. As if I cared.

There are long rows of inmates, just shy of five hundred of us at a sitting when we eat. Twenty to a table, ten on each side. Five rows of tables, five tables to a row. There are no tablecloths on the tables, just the metal painted gray, gloss finish. They feed us in shifts. We do almost everything in shifts. They don’t want us all together. That could lead to trouble.

Rows of blue denim. Guys in blue denim eating at gray tables. Civil War motif in 1968. Boy, wasn’t that the truth!

Not every table is full. Here and there is an empty seat. Individuals who didn’t feel like beans tonight or stayed in their cell for another reason. I see a few spots where there are two vacant seats right next to each other and I can guess why they skipped supper. There are more absent than usual but that’s because it’s payday—when the state issues you your monthly chit—and everybody has been to the commissary buying bags of cookies and Pall Malls because of their length—more for the money. If I hadn’t owed all my money out, I’d be back in the cell myself, eating Oreos and not worrying if I was going to bust a tooth.

The man across from me said, “Hey, look at that.” He kicked me under the table.

I looked where he was looking and saw one of the inmate cooks walking fast and he had a meat cleaver in his hand, held down, blade up. He was walking like a man with a mission, in a straight line. He walked with even, precise steps, each stride the same length as the previous and the same speed. Not slow, not fast, just the same. He walked in a line that could have been marked off with a carpenter’s plumb line chalked on the concrete, up to the head table, and his last three steps were like this: The hand with the cleaver went back on one like a pendulum; swung forward in an underhand arc on two and sank into this inmate’s blue denim belly on three. It was as smooth a thing as I had ever seen. The man whose belly had received the cleaver had cooperated as if they had practiced their little dance together for hours. He stiffened in awareness on the first of those last three steps, began to rise on the second and was fully risen on the third, in perfect position.

There was a general hubbub of noise like what you’d expect. I forgot to check the spoonful of beans I just put in my mouth and bit down hard on a pebble. I was almost done with the meal and I did that. Stupido!

***

They were locking us down. I went in first, when we were all in front of our cells. What was the point in staying out on the tier walk for just a few extra seconds? We were going to be in all night anyway.

My cellmate was awake, a guy named Larry something, I kept forgetting his last name. The last month before your parole hearing they put you in a cell, keep you from some of the trouble in the dorms. Larry was all right but he wasn’t Dusty. Bud had already been cut loose back in November. I missed my friends from K-Dorm.

He was holding a magazine and pretending to read it. I knew why he had skipped supper. He didn’t like waiting until I went to sleep to masturbate. “Look,” I’d said, plenty of times, “go ahead and stroke the bald man. It’s none of my business. Just don’t get any ideas.” But, he was from a small town. I guess that’s the reason. Shy, you see?

“What happened at the chow hall?”

“What? Oh...I don’t know. Somebody got whacked.”

“I heard. Franklin told me.” Franklin was the hack downstairs, put us in for the night. He would sit down at the desk all night and read those True Police Story magazines, pick his teeth with a folded-up gum wrapper. You could see him wince when the aluminum hit a filling. You’d think he’d learn, get a regular toothpick, discover floss string.

“Franklin said it was a guy from K-Dorm. He said Susie did it.”

He was right. It was Susie. I could see that, the part I happened to pay attention to.

He went on, “Susie! That guy’s a mountain! One big sissy!”

“Doesn’t matter how big you are you got a meat cleaver, you’re the biggest guy around, regardless your size.”

“Yeah.” He laughed. “Franklin said the guy ran out the chow hall with the cleaver sticking out of his stomach. He said he was holding it in with his hands.”

I didn’t say anything. What could I add to that?

“He said he ran all the way across the grinder to the hospital. He said he got halfway up the steps before he died. He said he fell halfway up the steps and all his guts just popped out. God!”

I had the idea I was supposed to say something, but what?

“Is that what happened? Where were you?”

I saw what he wanted. He wanted details. Franklin must not have seen it himself. Well, of course not. He was over here in J Block. One of the other hacks must have come by, filled him in. They’d kept us over at the chow hall a half hour longer, brought in some extra guards, blew the big steam whistle that makes all the guards shit ‘n git, all that stuff. They didn’t want trouble. A thing like that...

“I guess that’s about right. I didn’t see that but it sounds about right.”

“Didn’t you see it? Goddamn, Jake, you were right there! What happened?”

I looked at him.

“I don’t know. I guess that’s what happened. I wasn’t paying attention. It was just some grudge thing. I bit a rock.”

“A rock?”

“Yes. In the beans. I guess I’ll have to go to the dentist tomorrow. I’m not too thrilled about that.”

He just shook his head and picked up his magazine. He turned over, his back to me and began turning the pages. I could tell he was disgusted that I hadn’t had any juicy details. He turned the pages faster and faster, making a lot of noise.

My tooth was starting to really hurt now. I could feel pieces of filling or maybe the tooth itself. That rock had done a job, probably cracked the actual enamel. I got up and went over and tried to look inside my mouth in the mirror, but the mirror was metal, not glass, and it’s hard to see something like that in a metal finish. After a while, I gave it up and went back and climbed up on my bunk. I tried to think about other things, keep my mind off my tooth. It was throbbing at a pretty good clip now. I wondered if I yelled down to Franklin, would he get me an aspirin.

In a little while, I began to doze off. Almost.

“Jake.”

I said, “Huh?”

“You got three weeks, huh.”

He was talking about my parole hearing.

“That’s right.”

“You’ll be back, Jake. I can guarantee it.”

Everybody always says that. It’s jealousy, that’s all it is.

“You remember Melrose, Jake?”

Melrose was a little skinny black guy in the cell next to me, a long time ago, after getting out of quarantine, when I first came to the Pendleton Reformatory. He was slowwalking somebody for a carton of butts and the guy came by and threw acid in his face. He lay in his cell and screamed all night. The hack downstairs just kept on reading his magazine. It wasn’t Franklin; it was somebody else, but he read the same kinds of magazines, True Crime, stuff like that. Hacks all seemed to share the same literary tastes. In the morning, after we went out for chow they came and got Melrose who was down to a little occasional whimper by then. None of us heard anything we said, when they asked. When Melrose got out of the hospital, he had pink blotches all over his face, looked like bubble gum. Permanent blotches. Also, he lost an eye. That happened on my very first night in the population, before I learned to shut crap like that out, become invisible.

“You cried at Melrose. I heard you. I was above you, top tier. You just got assigned to J Block. I knew who you were, new guy all the niggers wanted to fuck.”

“I was new. It was a shock. I was probably scared. So what?”

“You yelled at the guard. I told you to shut up, you’d get us all in trouble.”

Damn, that tooth was acting up!

“So what?”

“So what is a guy gets whacked now and you don’t even care. You got a problem, Jake.”

My tooth really began to throb now. I swung my feet over the edge, leaned over and grabbed the bars and brought my face up to them.

“Hey! Franklin! I need an aspirin! Up here in twenty-two. Jake Mayes, four-nine-oh-two-eight.”

“Your heart is hard, man. Ask me, you’re institutionalized,” Larry said, still on the same subject. Like I asked him or something.

For some reason I thought of my dad. I wished there was some way he could’ve been a fly on the wall, seen how I handled this. He thought he was some kind of serious hard case. Maybe I’d write him a letter, kind of casually mention what had happened, act like I was more concerned with what we were having for dessert than seeing this guy get whacked. What the hell—I was getting out pretty soon. I’d bring it up, like something that had slipped my mind it was so unimportant in a conversation some time.

An image of Susie burying the cleaver in that guy came up in my mind, and I couldn’t remember what the other guy looked like, who he was, even though I vaguely remembered seeing him around the yard. I could feel that tooth though. It was throbbing like nobody’s business. I couldn’t keep my tongue off it. You know how it is when you got a tooth hurting like that. You can’t keep your tongue away from it. You have to keep worrying it. That’s what I did. I kept worrying that tooth.