CHAPTER 2

 

I made parole and I’d been on the bricks seven months.

One minute I was on my way to work and the next minute I wasn’t.

Bang.

Just like that.

I did stuff like that all the time. I’d be talking to a guy, a friend even, and the idea would overtake me to sucker-punch him. For no reason. I just knew it would feel good. Or, I’d pull up to a 7-Eleven for cigarettes and get inside and all the way to the counter, money out and everything, nothing on my mind except get some smokes, and something would click, maybe the way the clerk kept reading his Playboy instead of waiting on me right away, and before I knew it, I had my piece out and the guy, the clerk, on the floor, and I’m hightailing it to the car with a bagful of cash. Bang. Just like that. Don’t ask me why these things happened like they did. I don’t have a clue. They just did.

“Bud,” I said, in the receiver, “I’m a block away, at the QuikStop and I’m leaving town. How about it? You tired of Fort Wayne pussy?”

Bud and I go way back, even before Pendleton, although that’s where we hooked up and became serious rappies. I was cellmates with his friend Dusty and then when we got into K-Dorm, Bud was already there and it became us three. The Three Musketeers, all for one and one for all. Bud protected me since he was the biggest and we both looked out for Dusty, who was too sweet looking for any judge to have ever sentenced.

Dusty had the worst rap sheet. He’d killed a gas station attendant when he was sixteen because the guy wouldn’t let him have any gas, said he was closing and the pumps were locked up. I heard the story a million times.

What started it was Dusty’d stole this car and was two blocks from home, some apartment where he was shacked up with a fourteen-year-old hooker, when the car ran out of gas.

“Pissed me off, he did,” Dusty said, in that voice of his that jumped registers practically every other word, so he waited until the guy got off and watched where he went. “He had this old pickup parked out back a’ the station, and this guy, he just went back there and sat on the driver’s side and began nipping at a bottle he had there. See?” Dusty said. The guy wouldn’t take ten minutes to sell me a buck’s worth of gas and it wasn’t like he had to be someplace. That’s when he really got pissed, Dusty said. Went and fetched the jack handle from his trunk and snuck around and clopped him through the window, busted the glass and his head, same time. He hit him a couple more licks, just to get the mad out.

After that, according to Dusty, he just walked on home. He had bad luck though. The cops followed his tracks in the snow right up to the apartment where he was and came in, no warrant, nothing—that was what Dusty said—and there he was, buck naked in bed with this fourteen-year-old, the gas station guy’s blood all over his shirt laying on the floor. His girlfriend was slurping the Big Gulp and just about bit it off when that door came flying open, he said. We all got a picture of that and snorted.

He did the first part of his stretch at the Indiana Boys’ School—account of his age—but he didn’t last there long, after he killed another boy, stabbed him with a straightened-out laundry pin, and they had no choice but to send him over to Pendleton which is where we met when they put him into my cell.

Young, sweet-looking thing, but a stone-cold killer. Like that mattered, where we were. Throw a rock any direction, hit about ten, eleven stone-cold killers on a lazy Tuesday morning. He was bad but not so bad for there. He was eighteen when I moved into his cell, and had twelve more years to go before they transferred him to Michigan City. That’s the way they did it then, back in the sixties and early seventies. Under thirty you went to Pendleton and over thirty to Michigan City. Young cons over here, old cons over there. It’s all changed now, boot camps, youth camps, shit like that all over the place. Candy-ass places for all the little suburban punks got caught trying to supplement their allowances selling dope to other punks. Pussy for real cons.

Anyway, that’s how I ran into Bud again, he was in the cell next to us and was from South Bend, same as me and we just hit it off. It was on the straight, too. Lots of folks think everybody in the joint is either a sissy or a daddy but there are lots of friendships that are neither, just guys who get along same as on the bricks and that’s the way it was for all three of us.

That’s why I called Bud. When I got out, even though I was from South Bend, I took the bus to Fort Wayne where Bud had gone himself instead of back to South Bend. You know, escape the “influences.” Bud, he had got me a job through PACE, the do-good outfit, businessmen who want to help ex-convicts and the job was in Fort Wayne with Bud, cut loose seven months before me. In fact, the job was at the same barber shop as he worked at. Most of the other guys were ex-cons too. The owner was himself an ex-con. Good guy but a boozer. We used to have to go in and roust him off the stool when he had a customer. Sat in there hitting one of his hidden bottles. Vodka, so the customers couldn’t smell anything. That’s what he thought anyway. Most of his customers were drunker than he was usually, pals of his from down at the North Star Bar and Tap. Once in a while, some mother, didn’t know him, came in with her kid. We’d bet, usually fives, how long it’d be before he’d clip the tyke’s ear way he shook. See, a little boy’s skin is soft, you can even cut it with the clippers when they’re set on triple-ought. You got to have them bend way over when you cut the back. Stretches the skin so you don’t cut it. There’s also this little hollow in the middle of the neck little boys have until they get older and you have to bend the head over to flatten it out so you can cut the hair there. The boss, Wayne Ferguson, he’d forget to bend the kid’s head over. Get to talkin’ with his buds and nail the kid. One thing he liked to do was talk. Guy like that, in the joint, we call him a Jeff Chandler ‘cause he’s always jaffin’. Selling you bullshit, a wolf ticket, is what he was always doing.

He used to tell the mother that the kid only cried because she was there and somehow he’d convince her to leave while he finished. You could see the tears start to well up in her eyes as she went out into the other room leaving her crying baby behind. Soon’s she’d leave, he’d grab the kid’s ear on that little hangy-downy part with his thumb and finger and squeeze hard. He’d get down real low, to the kid’s level, and he’d say, Now, you little sumbitch. You let out a peep, I’m gonna rip your ear off.

It was a wonder ol’ Wayne never got arrested. Either the kid’s mother didn’t believe him when she got home or else she figured what’s the use. One thing, he didn’t have much repeat business in kids.

That was another thing. Me, Bud and Dusty all got into the prison barber school. Coming out into the population from quarantine, I’d started out in I.D., Identification, where we take your mug shot and print up your rap sheet. It was a good lick but I could see the handwriting on the wall, this was a job that was so good you had to keep paying somebody the whole time or color your ass gone and gone meant you had to go over to the laundry or the mess hall to work. Unh-uh. Be one of three honkies in the middle of fifty brothers got tear drops tattooed on their cheeks?

“Barber school,” Dusty said. “I got a hack likes me, Mr. Jones. He got me in, he can do it for you, too. I’ll set it up. You got to act like I say when you talk to him.”

So I applied for barber training and sure enough, I’m in there, cutting flattops on the white guys and “lines” on the brothers, me, that never in a million years woulda figured I’d end up in that line of work. Lot of the white guys they hated cutting lines on the bros, but me, I kinda enjoyed it. Only time I could hold a razor on a nigger and they couldn’t do a thing about it. I used to talk to ‘em, whisper shit in their ears. It’s a wonder any of them came back only they had no choice. The inmate played receptionist told them whose chair to sit in. I got a rep that way. Brothers would whisper that’s a crazy honky there, meaning me, and how they was going to get me sometime. They never did though. They knew if they tried and fucked up sooner or later they’d have to sit in my chair and I had that razor.

At first I worried some about what my dad would think. He was what you’d think of as a real “man’s man” and I was already in barber school three months before I said anything in my letters. I guess I thought he’d call what I was doing a “sissy” job, having my fingers in other people’s hair but I thought it over real good and ended up telling him. It wasn’t like I was a beautician, and even if I was so what? That’s what I told him in my letter and what I also said was that I couldn’t get into the body shop where they fixed the cars of the hacks and various instructors. That was a lie of course. I hadn’t even considered the body shop. He never wrote back, which was normal, he never wrote anyway so I don’t know if he approved, but fuck it, who cares anyway? It’s my life is the way I figured it and if he didn’t like it, fuck ‘m. I’d like to see how he’d handle it in here himself, Mr. Tough Ass like he always thought he was. I tried not to think about what Dad thought but it wasn’t always that easy. Besides I was twenty-three. Who gives a rat’s ass what his “daddy” thinks anyway!

Bud came over later when he saw how good a lick the school was, and then we all put in for K-Dorm and that’s how I spent most of my three years in the joint, barber school and K-Dorm, Bud, Dusty and yours truly. Our chairs were even side by side at the barber school, Bud in the middle, Dusty on the left and me on the right.

We played a lot of cards in K, mostly double-hand pinochle for cigarettes, candy bars, blow jobs. “You lose this hand, you got to bend over.” Shit like that. Me, Bud and Dusty, we never got into them kind of stakes, but there were plenty who did. We played mostly for Oreos, Camels, green when we had it. Green is jailhouse slang for real money, bills. Bills were contraband but there was plenty floating around.

Barbering was a pretty good lick and for something never crossed my mind I’d ever do I found out I was pretty good at it. There’s something about a sharp-as-your-ass Andis clipper blade biting into the back of somebody’s neck hair, you starting to make a creation with just a few simple tools and your fingers, that’s—satisfying.

***

“Let me call my old lady,” Bud said, not even asking where I was—which was the QuickStop or where I was going—which I didn’t know, or why, or none of the kind of questions a straight john would have. Just, “Let me call Kimmie. She’s working down at Parkview Hospital in housekeeping. Give me an hour to pack.”

To kill the time, I invested in a call to my brother. “Thirty-five cents,” the operator said, “for three minutes.”

“Hello,” I said. “Is Raymond there?” It was my sister-in-law, Ruthy Ann. I figured it was a Tuesday, Ray might’ve had a hangover and skipped work. I had his work number if I needed it, but it turned out I’d called the right number first.

“—fuck you calling this early for?” he said. “I’m still in bed.”

“Yes,” I said.

A woman with a little blond boy, about four maybe, pushed by me to get to the cooler where the pop was and I had to hug the wall to let them by. He was crying he wanted a Coke-Cola and she was saying it was too early for pop; he should have a fruit juice, how about orange or maybe cranberry? The cranberry was on sale, she was explaining to this little brat; I could get two, one for you and one for me, honey. I waited till they were past to resume my own conversation.

“Jake? You still there? You calling from jail?”

Raymond calmed down when it became clear I wasn’t after bail money, was offering him something instead.

“I got a bunch of clothes, two nice leather jackets, both full-length, and other stuff, records. There’s about an eighth in a bag in one of the pockets of the brown one.”

“And I can have it all?” he said, waiting for the catch. “You owe rent or something, dontcha? Will the landlord let me in? You still in that place in Ft. Wayne off Lake?”

I laughed. “Yeah, and I’m paid up for two more weeks, Ray. I’ll call him, tell him to let you in. I’ll even see if he’ll give you the two weeks I already paid. I doubt it though. There’s some deposit money too, but I think he’s gonna want that to fix the door.”

“Well, say, it’s worth a try,” he said. “Maybe I’ll just use it for two weeks. Have some poker parties.” I could see his mind working, figuring out how to capitalize on his sudden good fortune only I figured it wasn’t poker he had in mind. I wondered if Ruthy Ann was standing there listening and did he think she was that dumb. He was going to drive all the way down from South Bend to Fort Wayne for poker parties? Sure. “Where you going, Jake? You told Mom? What’d she say?”

“No,” I said to the second question, and “I don’t know, Ray. I can’t say for sure,” to the first.

“Hey, Jake.”

“What?”

“How come you weren’t at Dad’s funeral?”

“I was.”

“Fuck you were. I didn’t see you. You wearing your Captain Midnight invisible shield?”

“Maybe. Fuck you, Ray. I was there. Don’t worry about it. I just didn’t go in the church is all. I paid my respects in private.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

When I hung up, the kid’s mother had gone to the front by the cigarettes and Slim Jims and the kid was opening and slamming shut the cooler door. I guess she’d given up on him. Me, I’da left him. Climbed in my car when he wasn’t looking and went out and took in a movie.

“Kid,” I said, crooking my finger at him and bending over. “Kid, you get the cranberry juice like your mama told you. I got a gun in here and if you don’t I’m going to shoot you in the leg.” He stood there a minute and I was half out the door when he came screaming up to his mom. I looked back in the car and seen her and she had the little shit up in her arms glaring at me. So were some other people. Fuck’m, is what I thought. I was in a mood.

I started to pull out then changed my mind. One of those things that were always happening, don’t ask me why. I went back in.

“Line up by the coolers,” I said, waving my hog. “Fill it,” I said to the clerk, this kid who was a poster for the pimple cure industry, shoving one of the plastic bags on the counter at him.

While the clerk was putting the money in the bag, I told the little kid’s mother, “Honey, you go back and get you a can of that cranberry juice.” The smart thing would have been to get the hell out of there, but I wasn’t done.

“Drink it,” I told the kid. He only started bawling. “Drink it or I’m gonna blow out your kneecap, you little shithead.” His mama seen I was serious, slapped the living shit out of her kid, held the can for him while he tried to choke some down, both of them boohooing. It mostly got all over the front of his shirt way he was moving around, looked like blood.

“You mind your mama, son,” I said, going out the door. “‘Less you want to end up like me.”

I headed over to Bud’s place. On the way I dumped out the bag on the seat and tried to count it. No more than fifty-sixty bucks it looked like, mostly ones and a few fives. One lousy ten.

***

Me and Bud go back a long way. Back to my first day in the joint. Even farther back than that. On the street when I was robbing and pillaging the straights I’d run into him sometimes. Once, about three in the morning, at the Kozy Korner Koffee Shop, the outlaw hangout in South Bend, a couple of my rap partners and me were hanging out in a back booth cracking on a couple of prosties in the booth next to us, and I saw Bud talking to some babe at the counter, only I didn’t know who he was then. I’d seen him around but didn’t know who he was.

All of a sudden she cracks him with a closed fist, a big ol’ strawberry popping up where she hit him on the cheek. Well, Bud doesn’t say a word, only grabs her arm and hauls her out the back door, her cussing and trying to kick him. Naturally, we all pile out of the joint to see what he’d do. All he did was smack her once, open hand, and then she goes into her purse, quick, like these greasers will do, and comes out with this little pocket knife which she sticks into his neck clear down to the handle. It’s stuck there like some dart lost its way during a bar game and he reaches up and plucks it out like it’s a mosquito just stung him. And laughs. Blood’s running down his neck tie-dying his white t-shirt and he just laughs.

The way he laughs freeze-dries her—you could just see that—just nails her to the spot, her face turned as white as first-date panties—even in the dark we could all see that—and she just turns and runs while he stands there grinning. Chilly.

Tough mother.

After that I made his acquaintance, talked to him once in a while. We got to be friends.

He had this old Studebaker Lark he fixed up so he could remove the steering wheel and steer with a control stick between his knees. His brothers helped him engineer the car in the body shop they were partners with their dad in.

We’d get some unsuspecting dude in the car on the pretext of cruising and slamming down some cans of Drewrys, and after we’d killed a six-pack or two, head out west on Lincolnway out toward the airport where the houses thin out and the cornfields start. When we reached the country, right before the airport, Bud would get the Lark up to about eighty-five which was top end. They shoulda named that car the Cocker Spaniel it was such a pooch. Hell, the real lark, the bird, could outfly it with one wing broke. We always let the new guy sit in the front with Bud and I’d sit in the back. We’d roll down all the windows for effect, have the wind screaming in and Bud would start weaving back and forth crisscrossing the center line. He’d say he was dizzy, felt like passing out. All of a sudden, he’d pluck the wheel loose and hand it to the guy saying, “Oh, man, I’m going out. It’s all black. Here—you drive.” He’d punch the gas pedal down all the way as he slumped forward.

***

I parked the car about a block from Bud’s apartment and smoked four or five cigarettes. Different people strolled by giving me the once-over so I decided to go ahead and pick him up, ready or not. Turns out he’d been waiting for me.