Oh, Ma, I didn’t mean to find him. Why didn’t you go in there so you could hate yourself?
Now, that was a good day, when we saw the Reds play the Pirates and he bought me a bag of peanuts and said he was proud of me. He was a real Marine.
The black part looks small in the mirror, small as a dot. But Pin’s smaller. Sharp as truth. My Winchester holds seven bullets. Magnificent seven I always liked Steve McQueen with that little sawed-off shotgun he died of cancer I think.
Pin, you’re so beautiful. I want to learn things. I want to know secrets. In the glare of the inner sun I will walk tall and proud like a Marine on the hot sands of Iwo Jima. Closer, Pin. Closer still. Almost there. Close against the black part, the unblinking black. Look in the mirror, don’t look at Pin. Don’t blink! Closer. Steady, steady. Don’t…
Dropped. Don’t go down the sink! Get Pin, get it! Don’t let it go…
There you are. Sweet Pin, sweet friend. My fingers are sweating. Wipe them off nice and neat on a towel. Holiday Inn. When did I stay at a Holiday Inn? When I went and visited Ma oh yes that’s right. Somebody else lived in the old house a man and woman I never knew their names and Ma she just sat in that place with the rocking chairs and talked about Dad. She said Leo came to see her and I said Leo is in California and she said you hate Leo don’t you? I don’t hate Leo. Leo takes good care of Ma, sends her money and keeps her in that place, but I miss the old house. Nothing’s how it used to be the whole world is turning faster and faster and sometimes I hold on to my bed because I’m scared the world is going to throw me off like an old shoe. So I hang on and my knuckles get white and pretty soon I can stand up and walk again. Baby steps.
Who blew that horn? Camaro, wasn’t it? Blond girl at the wheel? Seven bullets. I’ll make a lot of horns blow.
How straight and strong Pin is, like a little silver arrow. How were you made, and who made you? There are millions and millions of pins, but there is only one Pin. My friend, my key to light and truth. You shine and wink, and you say look into the inner sun and take your Winchester to the golden arches where Marines fear to tread.
I’m going to do it.
Yes. I am.
Closer. Closer.
Right up against the black. Shining silver, full of truth. Pin, my friend.
Look at the mirror. Don’t blink. Oh…sweating…sweating. Don’t blink!
Closer. Almost there. Silver, filling up the black. Almost. Almost.
You will not blink. No. You will not. Pin will take care of you. Pin will lead you. You. Will. Not. Blink.
Think about something else. Think about… Iwo Jima.
Closer. Almost.
One jab. Quick.
Quick.
There.
Ow.
OW. Don’t. Don’t. Don’t blink. Don’t, okay? Yes. Got it now. Ow. Hurts. Little bit. Pin, my friend. All silver. Hurts like truth. Yes it does. Another jab. Quick.
Oh, Jesus. Deeper. Little bit deeper. Oh, don’t blink please please don’t blink. Look right there, there yes in the mirror push it deeper I was wrong the black part isn’t dead.
Deeper.
Oh. Oh. Okay. Oh. Get it out! No. Deeper. Got to see the inner sun I’m sweating Joey Shatterly’s no coward no sir no sir. Deeper. Easy, easy. Oh. Streak of light that time. Blue light. Not a sunburst, a cold moon. Push it in. Oh. Oh. Hurting. Oh, it hurts. Blue light. Please don’t blink push it in oh oh Dad where’s my bike?
OH GOD GET IT OUT GET IT OUT OH IT HURTS GET IT…
No. Deeper.
My face. Twitching. Pain. Cold pain. Twitching. Seven bullets. Down to the golden arches and deeper still where is the inner s…
Oh…it…hurts…so…good…
Pin, sliding in. Slow. Cold steel. I love you, Dad. Pin, show me the truth show me show me show…
Deeper. Through the pulse. Center of the unblinking black. White’s turned red. Seven bullets, seven names. Deeper, to the center of the inner sun.
Oh! There! I saw it! See! Right there! I saw a flash of it push it deeper into the brain where the inner sun is right there! A flash of light! Pin, take me there. Pin…take me there…
Please.
Deeper. Past pain. Cold. Inner sun burning. Makes you smile. Almost there.
Push it in. Using all of Pin up. A mighty pain.
White light. Flashbulb. Hi, Ma! Oh…there…right there…
Pin, sing to me.
Deeper.
I love you, Dad… Ma, I’m so sorry I had to find him I didn’t mean to I didn’t…
One more push. A little one. Pin is almost gone. My eye is heavy, freighted with sight…
Pin, sing to me.
Dee.
Yellachile’s Cage
I KANT WRITE TOO good, but I wanted to get this down. On paper, where it seems more real than it does in your head. A pincil and erasore can be messy things, cant they? Well, I am gone start learnin me how to use that machine up in the liberry. Mister Wheeler say he gone teach me them keys and how to put that ribbon in and all, and he’s a truthful man.
Well, now that Im started I dont know where to go. Reckon you should always start at the first, huh? So thats a good place.
I did the crime they said I did, and I never said I didn’t. Mans gone cut you, you got to cut him first. I seen the blade grin when he jerked it out of his coat, and thank the Lord I’ve got a fast hand or Id be sitting in the clouds right now. My momma now, she’d be saying Id be sitting on a hot rock where the sun dont shine. I gave her a lot of trouble, I reckon. Gave everybody a lot of trouble. Well, you don’t get in prison for singing too loud in church, thats for damn sure.
I always heard things about the Brickyard. Bricknell Prison’s its real name, but nobody inside and few outside call it that. Its the kind of place you hear about when your a kid and you start sassin and crossing the line real early. You know what I mean. Lord, if I had ten cents for every time somebody in Masonville said, “Boy, you gone wind up in the Brickyard yet!” I sure as hell wouldn’t have got here in the first place. Masonvilles where I was born and raised, but it aint my home. I never felt much like I had a home. My old man run off when I was a kid. Mama say I look just like him and I got his bad blood too and I say you better quit that talking or Im gone tear this house up. And I would, too. Pretend I was crazy mean just to get her to stop that talking about how bad I was and how bad my old man was and all that such jive. To this day she say I got such a temper I could blow the Brickyard’s walls down, but I just pretended to get mad so I could get me some elbow room. Somebody thinks your crazy mean, they aint gone be hanging on your ass ragging you all the time.
Aint much to say about the Brickyard. Its gray, even when the bright sun comes in the winders. Long halls, lots of cages. Always smells like sweat, or piss, or that sick-smelling crap they use to wash down the walls and floors. Toilet backed up in the cell next to mine few days ago, you shoulda seen ol’ Duke and Kingman doin the highstep in there and hollerin their heads off. This is an old prison, and at night it moans.
I turned twenty-one a week before they brought me here. Closed the gates behind me on March 24, at sixteen minutes after ten in the mornin. The clocks at the Brickyard work real good, and you remember things like that. Its been seventeen months, twelve days, and four hours since them gates closed and locked, and its been five days since Whitey passed on. I dont say die, cause Im startin to think theres no such thing. These last five days, well, theyve been real strange. I thought and thought of the right word to discribe them but I dont know words so good yet. When I walked in here I couldnt hardly read or write, and now look at me here with a pincil cuttin a buck.
Ive spent time in juve centers and workhomes and crap like that, but you say “Prison” and your talking a different animal. You walk in a prison like the Brickyard and you be twenty-one years old and you better keep a tight ass and your head tucked down real low to the ground or somebody he gone knock it off cause thats his kick. My first day I didnt answer when a plowboy said som
ethin to me and I got a fist upside my head and a size-ten boot in my jewlls. Im not such a big teller and I learned real quick that playin crazy mean don’t go too far in here. Theres plenty who are crazy mean for sure, and they love to do the fandango on your backbone. Anyways, I didnt pay a feller no respect and I was in the hospital bout three hours after the Cap’n dropped me down the chute.
I woke up to somebody pokin the bandage on my head, and I liked to jump out of that bed cause I thought oh Lord they gone bounce me again.
Old man standin next to my bed. Wearing the gray pajamas they give you when your sick or laid up. He say, “Boy, you look like you been killed, buried, and dug up.” His voice made me think of my momma’s knuckles scrubbin wet clothes on a washboard. He laughed, but I didn’t think it was too funny. He say, “Whats your name?” and I told him but he say, “The hell it is! You a Wanda, boy! A fresh-meat, dumb-ass Wanda is what you are!”
Wanda is what they called the new boys at the Brickyard. At least right then. The name changed every few weeks, always some girl’s name.
“You a big, bad Wanda, aint you?” he asked, just standing there and grinnin like a black ole fool. He was blacker than me, that African black that’s so black you can see blue through the skin. And his eyes were pale amber behind a little pair of wire glasses and he had a tight cap of white hair done in cornrows. His face looked like the bottom of a dried-up mud pond, and I swear there wasnt enough room for another wrinkle. I mean, he was old! Maybe like sixty-five or something, I figured. But he was skinny like me, just walkin bones, and those hospital duds hung on him like a tent.
“Go way and leave me alone,” I remember sayin to him. My head was aching fit to bust, I couldnt see straight, and all I wanted to do was sleep.
“Wanda says go way. Think we ought to?” Talkin to somebody else, only there wasnt nobody in the beds around.
“Crazy as hell,” I say, and he smile and say, “Yellachile, look at a prime cut of fool.”
Well, he holds up somethin out of them gray tent folds and I saw what it was: a little yella bird. A canary, I guessed it was. My Aunt Mondy had a canary in a cage that she called Sweet Thang and a cat thought it was sweet too cause it gulped it down and didnt leave a feather. He holds it in one hand and its wings are flappin like its fixin to fly and I figured bird shit on my head was about all I needed. I say, “Get that thing outta here!” and he say, “Yes’m, Wanda. Just for you.” He put his other hand over it to keep it from flyin off, and back it went into the folds.
And then he leans over real close, and I saw his teeth were as yella as that bird, and he say soft like, “Wanda, you gone be in here for a long time. Cut a brother’s throat, didnt you?”
“He tried to cut me first,” I said. Didnt bother me that he knew. Aint no privacy in a prison.
“They all sing the same tune. Goes like this: tweet, tweet I didnt do it tweet tweet no sir not me tweet tweet…”
“Didnt say I didnt do it,” I told him. “Just say I didnt pull the knife first.”
“Yeah, and you stuck it in first too. Well, reckon the Brickyard’s better than the boneyard, aint it?” He laughed; it was a little chuckle, but it brought a cough out of him and that made another cough come up and another one and then his eyes were full of hurt and he was hackin his lungs out.
“Your sick,” I say when he stop that coughin.
“If I was well I wouldnt be in here with the likes of you, would I?” He wheezed a few times, and then whatever it was passed but he had a deep sickness in him. I could tell that right off. The whites of his eyes looked like cups of pus. “Come on, Yellachile,” he said to the canary, “let’s get on away from Wanda and let her get that beauty sleep she’s gone need.”
He didnt go too far, just to a bed across the aisle. He laid down on coarse linen like the King of Africa on a gold throne, and the sun was shining in through the bars hot and proper and somebody else was moppin the floor. I sits up and I saw that canary flying round and round over the African’s bed, and all of a suddens he reached up and caught that bird and he pulls it to his cheek. Started whistlin to it, makin love sounds to a bird. I knows he’s a number-one fool now! But after a while I got to enjoyin the sounds, and it seemed to me that him and the bird were talking back and forth in a language that was older than anythin Id ever heard. I laid my head back on a pillow and slept, and I dreamed of Aunt Mondy’s canary flyin in its cage and a catface lookin in.
Well, time passes even in here. You get a routine, and thats how you live. They put me on the garbage detail, which is bout the lowest you can get and not be belly-crawlin, cause a prison’s garbage sure aint perfumy. Lot of fellers wanted to fight me cause they heard I figured myself to be bad and suchlike, and plenty of times I got struck out but I hit me a few home runs too and that was all right. You dont fight back in prison, you might as well be sewing a gravesuit. The trick is not to hurt nobody too bad and cause a grudge. Grudges get you killed real quick. Anyway, I got me some friends and a new name. “Wanda” turned into “Wand,” cause I’m so skinny, and by that time we were callin new meat “Lucys.”
Every cellblock has a different schedool for time in the excercize yard. I was in Block D, and we went out at two-thirty. One day we were out there rappin and shooting some baskets and when we were resting we start talkin bout our first day in. Well, I told em about that old man and the canary, and Brightboy Stubbins say, “Lord, Wand! You done met Whitey and Yellachile!”
“Yellachile’s that bird’s name, I guess,” I said, “but that old man sure aint a whitey!”
“Shush up, boy!” Stretch say. “You dont wanna be disrespectful to Whitey, no sir!”
“Aint being disrespectful,” I say. “Aint being nothin. How come the hallboys let that old man keep a bird?” I remembered the Cap’n readin the rules in a roar that quaked my bones. “Aint supposed to be such a thing in here.”
“Whitey’s special,” McCook say. “The hallboys leave him alone.”
“Yeah, and you know why.” Brightboy leans his head down, like hes talkin to his shadow. “Whitey’s a voodoo man, thass why. Lord, yes! He speaks the conjure tongue!”
I laughed. “Hell, the conjure tongue didnt keep him out of this place, did it?”
They all looked at me like I was a roach on two legs. Stretch put his hand on my shoulder, and Stretch has got a mighty big hand. “You listen up,” he says, and the way his eyes were glintin I didnt think we were gonna be friends anymore. “Whitey Latrope is a mighty important feller around here. Dont matter if you dont believe in the power of the conjure tongue. He dont care. But dont you never show disrespect to Whitey, or you gone have to deal with ol’ Stretch. Okay?”
I said okay real quick. Wouldnt want to knock heads with Stretch, no sir!
“Whitey Latrope’s a voodoo man,” Stretch said in that low quiet voice hes got, “and Yellachile aint just a bird. Yellachile knows things, and speaks em to Whitey.”
“What things?” I was brave enough to ask.
“Yellachile flies out of his cage at night,” Brightboy said, and it was funny to hear such a big man whisper. He looked past me, the sun slamming down on his moon-pie face. I saw he was staring at the tall fence topped with barbed wire, and the fence beyond that, and the gray stone wall that eight men had died tryin to get over, and the brown dusty hills and limp-limbed woods that surrounded the Brickyard for too many miles. “Yellachile flies,” he say. His shadow lay across the tight fence mesh. “Out of his cage, through a winder, out of Block A, and gone.”
“Gone?” I say. “Gone where?”
“Over the fence. Over the wall. To freedom and back again to his cage before the sun comes up and the whistle blows. And Yellachile tells Whitey where he’s flown, and what he’s seen out there. Tells him about the towns and the houses all full of light, and the people laughin’ in the jukejoints and the music rollin out in the street like silver coins.” Brightboy smiled just thinkin about such things, and I saw them in my head and I kind of smiled too. “O
h, that Yellachile goes to some wondrous towns,” he said. “Places you never knowed about, but, you always dreamed were there.”
It was a nice spell, but it didnt hold me too long. “How do you know?” I asked him. “If Whitey’s in Block A, how do you know?” There wasnt any mixing between the men in different blocks, see.
“Everybody knows,” Stretch answered, and the way he said it let me know I was the big fool. “Besides, they rotate you around here every six months. That’s to break up the doodle-dangers and the gangs. I was in Block E with him two years ago. Three cells down from mine.”
“Well, I was right crost from him in ’81,” McCook say. “Block B. Yessir, I could look over there and see that bird flyin round like a little piece of sun every day!”
“Just hold on.” Somethin peculiar had come to me, and I ought to say it. “How long’s Whitey been in here?”
Stretch said goin on forty years. McCook said thirty-five. Brightboy believed it was between those numbers.
I say, “How long does a bird live? Cant no canary live forty years!”
“Yellachile’s always been there,” Stretch told me. “Always. Cant die. Whitey’s a voodoo man, and Yellachile’s his spirit.”
That shut me up, but I sure was talkin in myself while we. went back to basketball.