Yet the words had left him with a secret and wishful envy of every man with a sentence hanging over his head like the very promise of salvation. Leaving him with no recourse save to swallow his own dark guilt, like a piece of spoiled meat in the throat, and turn out the charge-sheet lamp.
‘Come down off that cross yourself,’ he counseled himself sternly, like warning another.
But the captain couldn’t come down.
The captain was impaled.
PART TWO
Act of Contrition
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD In the real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.
Frankie lived by day beside the ceaseless, dumping shuffle of the three-legged elephant which was the laundry’s sheet-rolling machine. When he piled onto his narrow pad in the long dim-lit dorm at night and turned his face to the whitewashed wall, the three-legged elephant of the mangle roller followed, galumphing, through dreams wherein he dealt Record Head Bednar hand after hand while Louie Fomorowski watched from behind the captain’s chair. Night after night.
When the lights were down all voices were subdued. Down the long and low-roofed hall the good boys slept: the laundry and the bakery workers, the printshop typesetters and the boys who sat in classrooms and accepted their sentences with the dry, hard-bitten humor of old contented soldiers. These were the ones who had convinced the chaplain that they were really going straight this time. Frankie too had convinced the chaplain.
It had been harder to convince a certain ex-army major. ‘That vein been injured,’ he’d told Frankie in the infirmary on Frankie’s very first morning. ‘How long you been punchin’ holes in it?’
‘I been on the sleeve since I got out of the army, Doc,’ Frankie told him.
‘How big a habit you got, son?’
‘Not too big. I go for a quarter grain a day.’
‘Big enough. But I’ve seen them come in here hooked worse than that ’n still kick it. In here you got to kick it. When you get sick I’ll taper you off and if you behave yourself you’ll be out for Thanksgiving and have it kicked for keeps. Still, there’s boys in here who’ll tell you they can get you anything from heroin to gage for a price – forget it. Capone couldn’t afford the price. But if you get out of line any time you’re in here – remember that you’re on the books as a user. I’ll get you shipped to Lexington ’n that won’t be for a week end the way it used to be. That’ll be six months added. I tell you now for your own good and I won’t tell you again.’
Frankie gave him the grin. ‘I’ll tough it out, Doc.’
After that Frankie slipped into a life like the life of the barracks he had known for three years. Orders were given matter-of-factly without threats; and were obeyed complacently. Most of the men kept themselves as clean as if preparing for retreat each evening and most, out of sheer boredom, attended services in the pink-and-white chapel on Sunday morning. And each good soldier counted his two days off a month, for good behavior, like money in the bank and well earned.
All but Applejack Katz, with a long-term lease on the cot next to Frankie’s own: a man who daily risked his good-conduct time for the sake of a certain jar fermenting under the ventilator. He’d bought cider from one of the kitchen workers and, at every meal where boiled potatoes were served, stole the skins and made Frankie steal them too. He added the potato skins to the cider after lights out and was only waiting for a chance to snatch a few white-bread crusts. ‘When we get them crusts it’ll only take a week after that,’ he promised Frankie. He leaned across the cot to add a low warning word:
‘I seen you come out of the infirmary your first morning, Dealer. My advice to you is look out for the major. He’s a psycho. What he’ll do to you is to get you so square you’ll never have another day’s pleasure in your life.’
Katz glanced about the dormitory with a look so swift and furtive Frankie was reminded, with a troubling pang, of Sparrow Saltskin.
‘Listen. They sent me to a psycho eight years ago. I was forty-five then ’n if I’d worked two full weeks in my life I don’t remember where. If anyone had told me, eight years ago, I’d go to work for eight hours a day six days a week and stick at it over two years I would of give him hundred to one against it.’ N I would of lost.’ Cause that’s just how square I got.
‘For two years I was off the booze, off the women, off the horses, off the dice. I even got engaged to get married in a church. All I done that whole time was run a freight elevator up ’n down, up ’n down. It scares me when I think of it now: I come near losin’ everything.’
Applejack lay back in the very real relief of one snatched from the eternal fires, at the last possible moment, straight up into Salvation Everlasting. He gave a low laugh, mocking and wise.
‘Now they’re after me to go back to that same psycho. “He done me so much good that other time,” they try to tell me, “he almost cured my new-rosis.” Sure the fool almost cured my “new-rosis.” If I went back he might cure it altogether – and what would I have left? All the good times I ever had in my life was what my little old new-rosis made me have. Them whole two years on the square I didn’t have one good time. I like my little old new-rosis. It’s all I got ’n I’m holdin’ onto it hard. My advice to you is hold onto yours: lay off them psychos. Look out for the major. When guys like you ’n me get square we’re dead.’
Katz had a record that read like a Southern Pacific Railroad schedule. He’d made every stop between Jeff City and Fort Worth and had fashioned applejack out of white-bread crusts and potato skins in every one. Of his fifty-odd years fifteen had been spent between walls and he recounted each one in terms of applejack. Sometimes it had been hard to make and had turned out badly, in other places it had been easy and had turned out fine: his life was the definitive work on the science of making applejack under the eyes of prison guards.
He remembered certain jugs as if remembering certain people: the El Paso County Jug, recalled with joy and a certain tenderness, that he had kept filled, through a kitchen connection, night and day for six blissful months. The Grant’s Pass Jug, recalled with bitterness and doubt, that had been spirited out of his cell in the night and never seen again.
But applejack wasn’t Katz’s only interest. He had half a dozen minor projects going, involving the bartering of nutmeg for Bull Durham, of Bull Durham for nutmeg and of emory for the manufacture of something he called a ‘glin wheel,’ a sort of homemade cigarette lighter. It was also his daily concern, while working beside Frankie on the mangle roller, to steal the paraffin wax off the rollers for the making of candles, which he sold clandestinely to the harder cons upstairs.
The cons up there were either in bug cells or deadlock. They were the privates who went for stronger brew than applejack. These no longer cared: these were the truly unsaved. Over the hump for redemption and the hour for turning back lost forever: too late, forever too late. So they hurried forward all the faster into the darkness.
They talked in terms of police administrations and remembered in terms of police cars. ‘That was the year the aces had black Cadillacs with a bell on the side – or was that the year they had them speedy orange Fords?’
One night some pale castoff, a twenty-year-old so far gone in narcoticism that nothing but the one big bitter fix of death could cure him, was placed among the good soldiers either by error or just to see how long he could stand it there.
It didn’t take long for the panic to start. One look at the stolid faces about him, he knew he was in the wrong tier and the horrors shook him like an icy wind.
‘Bond me out! Don’t touch me!’
The junkie wants a bondsman though he doesn’t own a dime. His life is down to a tight pin point and the pupils of his eyes drawn even tighter: nothing is reflected in them except a capsule of light the size of a single quarter grain of morphine. He has mounted the walls of all his troubles with no other help than that offered by the snow-white caps in the brown drugstore bottle. A self-made man.
r /> But all the drugstores are closed tonight.
‘Bond me out! Bond me out!’
And the flood of shameless tears. By the time the major shuffled in, yawning, with the hypo, the junkie was throwing a regular circus for the boys, tossing himself about on the floor. It took four men to hold him down to give him his charge at last.
‘I think he ate somethin’ didn’t agree with him,’ Applejack observed after the youth was carried out. Such exhibitions seemingly required this flat, cold sort of mirth. The only laughter that broke the monotony here was that same hard-bitten glee: ‘The service is gettin’ pretty bad when a man has to knock his skull on the floor to get a charge of M. I remember a time when all you had to do was hold your breath for half an hour.’
Yet such pale youths felt as devout about their addiction as others might of some crotchety religious conviction or other. ‘I’m just the type got to have it, that’s all. It’s how I’m built. Don’t ask me why – how do I know? It’s just something, cousin. It’s there.’
Frankie Machine understood too well. Standing at the sheet roller on his eleventh morning, it hit him so hard and so fast he went down beside the machine while the sheets, unguided, twisted and tore themselves to shreds at the very moment that his own entrails were tearing at his throat and his very bones were twisting. He heard his own voice crying as shrill as a wounded tomcat’s down the icy corridors of his anguish.
He lay eight hours in a 104 fever before the major pulled him out of it with dolaphine.
‘If you get sick on me like that again you won’t even get paregoric off me,’ were the first words he could distinguish, and blinked the sweat out of his eyes to see the major studying him. ‘Next time I’m lettin’ you sweat it out, soldier.’
Back at the sheet roller two mornings later, Frankie felt he’d already sweated it out. All that remained of his sickness was a couple days of the chuck horrors, of which Nifty Louie once had told. ‘It feels like I got a tape snake or somethin’,’ he complained to Applejack Katz, ‘every two hours the bottom falls out of my gut ’n I feel like I could eat myself through a cow on the hoof.’
Katz traded off his ‘glin wheel’ to a kitchen connection for a pound of lump sugar and gave it to Frankie. Frankie consumed it in a single day.
‘Wait till the applejack is ready,’ Applejack immediately promised him, ‘that’ll kill the chucks every time.’
‘Ain’t it ready yet?’ Frankie pleaded a little, he still felt so weak.
‘Give it just one more day,’ Applejack promised.
Katz could give anything he owned to anyone but the warden. Except that applejack. He was no more able to give that away than to give away his blood.
When the horrors had passed at last Frankie felt himself beginning to want Molly-O again. He hadn’t had one visitor, not so much as a letter or a card, in all those hard first two weeks.
But he’d gotten to know some of the boys who were neither trying to be good soldiers, like himself, nor bad ones like those upstairs.
These were the ones who just wouldn’t work. Yardbirds who couldn’t quite be trusted in a bakery or a laundry. They never disobeyed an order directly nor made trouble nor talked back. But time off for good conduct means little to men with no place to go and nothing in particular to do when they get there. They were men and youths who had never picked up any sort of craft – though most of them could learn anything requiring a mechanical turn with ease. It wasn’t so much lack of aptitude as it was simply the feeling that no work had any point to it. They lived in prison much as they had lived out of it, vaguely contented most of the time, neither hoping nor despairing, wanting nothing but a place to sleep and a tin pie plate with some sort of slop or other on it a couple times a day. They neither worried about the future, regretted the past nor felt concern for the present.
They were the ones who had never learned to want. For they were secretly afraid of being alive and the less they desired the closer they came to death. They had never been given one good reason for applying their strength. So now they disavowed their strength by all sorts of self-deceptions.
They gave nothing because nothing had been given them. If they lost their privileges they shrugged it off, they had lost certain privileges before; one way or another they had had always to forfeit any small advantage gained by luck, chance or stealth.
Some slept at the race-track barns all summer and crashed County in the winter, year after year. Getting back to the barns a week sooner or later didn’t mean much, it would probably be raining that week anyhow. So why get all steamed up in a laundry all winter for nothing? Where was the payoff?
They didn’t even read comic books. They had been bored to death by all that the day before they were born. The whole business between birth and death was a sort of inverted comic strip, too dull to read even if set right. So what was the difference whether a man slept on wood or hay?
‘Rubber heels ’n fisheyes again’ was the word on the meatloaf and tapioca, ‘but wait till we get that mountain goat’ – warless soldiers as indifferent to Sunday mutton as the walls were indifferent to themselves; yet feigning to look forward to a Sunday dinner as tasteless in the mouth as life was in their hearts.
Sometimes something wakened and flared feebly in one of these: he talked back and got to think it over in deadlock.
Deadlock was any cell with a red metal tag locked onto the bars to indicate the man was either a junkie or just out of line. As long as the tag stayed there it meant no yard privileges, no cigarettes, no newspapers and no mail; no candy, no card playing and the next time maybe you’ll keep that big trap buttoned.
Deadlock meant a monotony more deadly even than the regular abnormal monotony of jailhouse days and nights. For no one can sleep all the time and deadlock brought hours when memory caught up with a man at last. Hours in which to sit and remember that willing long-ago lovely who’d married some square after all; or a family that cared less than ever. Or how suddenly the rain had come one blue-and-gold Easter Sunday a dozen blue-gold Easters ago.
Thinking of release only slowed the hours down to the deadliest crawl of all – yet of what else was there to think? And what could freedom mean except a chance to get out of the state with one clean shirt on your back and jump back on the con the day it got dirty? You had to get across the state line to promote some decent clothes and enough change in the poke to take a woman to a movie or a bar.
So the deadlockers walked up and down till they grew weak at the knees, slept and rose to walk again till night and day and the weariness in the knees and the weariness of the mind all rolled together into one big cell-sized, life-sized weariness.
‘The day after I come out of deadlock the first time,’ Applejack Katz told Frankie, ‘I seen how they got all the clocks stopped at twelve o’clock ’n I realized I was in deadlock whether I was in a cell with a red tag on it or not.’
Till night and day were one and the heart itself felt like a clock stopped cold on a dead-cold hour.
The very hour that life was to begin; and would not tick again.
Yet even a stopped clock can be right for a while. If time moves slowly enough. And Frankie lived in a deadlock only somewhat darker and narrower than that deadlock in which all his days had been spent.
Just one bit lighter than the deadlock of the cells with the red metal tag.
To the tune of some old frayed song, offered over and over again by Applejack Katz in his horrible fifty-four-year-old squawk.
‘I’m a ding-dong daddy from Duma
’N you oughta see me do my stuff.’
Till all the other cots would howl him down.
‘That stuff ought to be about ready,’ Frankie hinted.
Applejack felt it wasn’t yet sufficiently fermented.
Though Frankie would hear him rise in the night, fumble about under the ventilator, hear the secret gulping in the dark and the sound of the cork being carefully replaced; and once, long after lights out, that querulous, quavering sq
uawk.
‘I’d feel bad if you’d kissed too many
But I’d feel worse if you hadn’t kissed any.’
All the next day, working beside Frankie at the mangle roller, Katz murmured songs as frayed as his voice. There was a certain sly merriment about old Applejack. One felt that, secretly, he was convinced he’d already beaten the state on so many charges that there was no chance at all of the state getting it back in terms of timeserving. He could be in the rest of his life, he knew, and still end up far ahead of the game.
Down in the G-H blocks the punks from eighteen to twenty lived in shifts more sullen than that which Frankie shared with Katz. G was for the black punks and H for the whites. The whites went to school in the mornings and blacks in the afternoons. The sign in the mess-hall library said:
THINK
Read a good book
Which didn’t at all mean that a black punk should be caught reading a good book at the same time as a white punk; and didn’t say just what book. Each went to think separately, for the thinking of separate thoughts. For the black con’s brain, it appeared, was darker than the white con’s and therefore required the afternoon sunlight to assist the thinking of certain scheduled thoughts.
Yet, strangely enough, the chair in the basement accepted any color at all. Indeed, it was painted black just to show how little race feeling there was down there in the basement where the afternoon sunlight didn’t shine at all.
Nor did the big black sheriff’s wagon that pulled up for the haul to Stateville, St Charles, Dixon and Menard draw any particular color line.
The punks piled in it, leaping over each other as if going on a picnic, filled with a sudden brainless, coltish joy to be out of the cells and riding in the open air for the hour that took them down Route 66. One hour. The years to follow were forgotten in the brightness of the immediate sun.