So attired he had taken a stroll, one wanton April evening, down Carondelet Street. Having, of course, taken the perfectly sensible precaution of severing his trousers at the knees and binding the bottoms to his calves with the rubber bands; lending an impression, to the casual passerby, that he was fully clothed. Here and there, passing some woman who appeared deserving, he would fling the raincoat wide for her amazement and delight, then modestly button himself and modestly hurry on.
Talent can spring up anywhere.
‘I’m not here for insulting a woman,’ he reproved society gently, ‘I’m here for not insulting one. I put on my innocent little show for her but instead of going on about her business she looks back over her shoulder as much as to invite me to follow her. She must have taken me for a moron, to think I’d do a thing like that. For Heaven’s sake, a man could catch a disease that way.
‘She started coming toward me – “Don’t be afraid,” I heard her say, “I’m not going to hurt you.” Oh, no, not much she wouldn’t. I know her kind. But I hadn’t expected one to turn on me. She was getting closer by the second, I was rooted to the spot, her hand reached for me – O God’ – Raincoat buried his face in his hands, the other criminals stood about. They had all been to the Sex Bureau and back, they knew what the man had been through. And waited politely till he had composed himself.
Raincoat dabbed at his eyes and went on – ‘Do you know what that thing had the brassbound gall to ask me? – “Would you like to sleep with a nice girl?” – that’s just what she asked and not more than three feet away! The woman was sex-crazy, that was plain. But you know what I answered her? “I’d rather go to bed with a wet shepherd dog!” – now that’s just what I said. How did a notion like that come into my head? Then I ran.
‘Before I could so much as say God with my mouth open there were half a dozen of them around me, I don’t know where they came from yet. Hauling me this way then that, tearing my clothes, screaming “sec fiend! sec fiend!” If I were a sec fiend I would of gone with the woman instead of trying to run, wouldn’t I?’
There were always half a dozen in for drinking or distilling corn likker, and it wasn’t surprising that those who bought too much and those who made too little should cell together. What wasn’t so easy to understand was how men who could no longer communicate with the outside world, but could only sit and mutter, automatically fell together. Citizens of the Republic of Natural Bugs, they felt themselves trapped together in an alien land.
Raincoat’s cell mate, for example, was a natural whose wife had had him locked up because he had made up his mind to have a baby by their fifteen-year-old daughter. Nobody could talk Natural Bug out of this. He couldn’t be roasted or frozen out of it. He knew he was right in this. But Raincoat was the only one to whom he communicated his defense.
‘He says the kid is a lot better-looking than his wife,’ Raincoat interpreted. ‘And not only that, but she’s much younger.’
And there was always, in one cell or another, the usual sexless, toothless queen of mezzanine, park bench and shrubbery. One of these was Wayback, who claimed to have been a saxophone player who had become addicted to something, he didn’t yet know what. He was too far back for that.
‘The doc wouldn’t tell me and I can’t read Latin,’ was his excuse, ‘but whatever the stuff was, someone kept raising the price of it on the doc so naturally he had to raise it on me.’
The price had gone up until he’d had to hock his upper plate. Then he’d had to hock his sax to redeem the plate because he couldn’t play without it. Then he was all set to go to work, but had no sax. Something had to be done. He was doing a year and a day.
‘You see,’ he’d begin as though he couldn’t get over it yet, ‘I couldn’t blow a sax without a plate.’
‘We’ve heard it all before,’ Out-Front would interrupt him. ‘You’re not way back, you’re yet farther back than that,’ and there would be no word for a while out of the sexless, toothless, saxless, dopeless, hopeless queen of mezzanine, park bench and shrubbery.
Out-Front was way out front about what he was on. He was a rugged old hand who’d taken morphine for migraine headaches contracted in the red zinc mines of Oklahoma. He’d been at the Federal Hospital at Lexington, Kentucky, for healing of his habit and remembered that institution with genuine gratitude.
‘The beauty part about Lex is that they take you off your habit by putting you on something new nobody ever heard of before because they don’t have a name for it yet. Then all you got to do is kick two habits instead of one. I loved the joint. A man would be a fool not to trade off one little flea-powder habit for a real burning-down one, wouldn’t he?’
Out-Front preferred to cell up with another user, but he could put up with a sex case if necessary – ‘You got a worse sickness than mine,’ he’d tell men like Wayback. What he really couldn’t bear was a lush. In those whose weakness was whiskey he saw a hostile tribe undeservedly favored by the powers that be. Why was it that one little white pill was enough to put a man with marks on his arm to hard labor for months, while another, weaving on the corner with a pint of uncorked gin sticking out of his pocket, got a free ride home, if he could still give the nabbers his address?
‘When you see a bum duck into the gutter for a butt,’ Out-Front challenged all corn-likker kukes, ‘you can be sure he’s a wino or a gin-head. No self-respecting junkie ever falls that low.’
Dundee claimed to have spent every weekend for thirteen years in the same cell. His wife had a brother on the force, and to keep Dundee from blowing his check on whiskey, brother picked him up on the job when the Saturday noon whistle blew and booked him for vag. Then he turned Dundee’s check over to sister – ‘to protect you from yourself.’ Monday morning brother handed Dundee his lunch bucket and let him out in time to get back on the job without getting docked.
‘One thing I’ve always insisted on,’ Dundee boasted wildly, ‘I never come along till I’ve finished my Saturday lunch.’
Dundee’s cell mate had also been strangely victimized. His name was Wren and he liked to buy Fords on Sunday, particularly in small towns. He’d pay a thousand dollars or so for one, by check, and show the dealer his bank balance for that amount. Then he’d drive it to the used-car agency across the street and sell it for six hundred. When the Ford dealer would have him picked up, to be held till the banks opened on Monday morning, Wren claimed he had always been sporting enough to warn the man, ‘You’re making a big mistake, friend.’
Morning would prove the check perfectly good, and Wren would sue for fifty thousand dollars for false arrest. The most he’d ever actually collected was thirty thousand.
‘I must have made a million,’ he computed. But a sinister change had come over Ford dealers on Sunday; particularly in small towns. They had begun to trust him. He had had to act increasingly furtive and fly-by-night. He had even gone to the length of pasting a stage moustache onto his upper lip that looked ready to fall off any moment; and still they wouldn’t arrest him. Wren had run into a solid wall of human faith. And every time he ran into it it cost him four hundred dollars. Finally he had such a vicious run of not getting arrested that he would have gone broke altogether but for a tiny drill, a length of wire and some colored crayon. Parish police had picked him up in a roadhouse for tampering with slot machines.
‘I drill an eighth-inch hole in the side of the machine – it’s only aluminum casting. When the three payoff bars come up I stop the works with the wire and she pays off. Then I plug the hole with crayon of matching color – usually blue, red or silver. When the chumps fill up the jackpot I come back again. Sometimes I got a buddy to cover for me while I drill, we concentrate on fraternal organizations. What can they do about it? Slot machines aint legal either.’
It was true that the authorities were uneasy about their right to hold him. Yet it seemed that somebody ought to.
Cell doors to Tank Ten were left unlocked. Only the big door to the block, operated by air brake, ba
rred the prisoners from the outside world. This permitted the area between the jail’s wall and the cells to be used for prisoner recreation. And since this was left to the prisoners’ own devising, all it came to in the morning was someone reporting casualties in the Animal Kingdom, or a spitting contest in the afternoon. But even the spitting contests lost interest, as the tobacco-chewers always won.
The men changed cells at will. When Wren wearied of Dundee’s grievance against his brother-in-law he moved, simply for change of grievance, into the cell of a barnyard cretin called Feathers.
Feathers had been snatched redhanded in the act of chicken-spanking.
‘I never heard tell of no such crime as that,’ Dove declined to accept chicken-spanking as a crime, ‘it must have been he tried to steal that hen.’
‘Feathers wasn’t trying to steal nobody’s hen,’ Make-Believe Murphy protested. ‘All Feathers done was set that leghorn on his lap and pat its bottom. Understand, I’m not saying the man was in his rights. After all, the bird hadn’t done nothing to be spanked for.’
‘I like chickies,’ Feathers clucked from his cell.
‘I’ll represent him even if I don’t care for the case,’ Murphy assured Dove. He seemed to have appointed himself a sort of Kangaroo Public Defender. Who was defending Murphy Dove didn’t ask.
Gonzales vs. Gonzales was more to Murphy’s taste than Feathers vs. Louisiana. Gonzales, a laborer six days a week, was resting on the seventh when Mrs G. suggested idly that they go on a second honeymoon. This had upset Vicente, as they had never had a first. He had gone through the house methodically with a Number Five shovel, smashing holy images, pictures, glassware, chairs, pottery and a Victor gramophone and every time he’d brought the shovel down had cried out, ‘Call this a honeymoon!’
He had been prying the bathtub off the floor by its stubborn enamel claws when he’d heard Consuela run into the bedroom, snatch something and run out of the house again. He’d apprehended her trying to save their wedding photograph and pointed to the stove. She had always been an obedient wife, and she did what he ordered now: she threw the picture in.
Then they had stood, holding hands by side, until the flames had caught.
‘Mister Gonzales,’ Consuela told him then, ‘that just did it.’ And had phoned the police, had him booked and now promised, every time she came visiting loaded with dainties, that she was going to get him ninety days for malicious mischief if it was the very last thing she did.
‘Why you do that, Vicente?’ Dove inquired with some concern.
‘When I feel like going, I go,’ Vicente explained to his own satisfaction if nobody else’s.
‘You were in your rights,’ Murphy told him confidently, ‘you were remodeling your home. No court in the country can convict you.’
‘I’m just sorry he seen fit to remodel that photograph,’ Dove felt, ‘if you ask me that was pure meanness.’
‘I’m glad you brought that angle up,’ Murphy said, ‘I got that one whipped too. It was my client’s intent to burn only his half of the picture.’
‘It didn’t do her half much good,’ Dove felt obliged to point out.
‘I see,’ Murphy regarded him coldly, ‘you’re the type would actually deprive a man of his freedom for the sake of an old photograph. What kind of man are you anyhow?’
‘I’ll tell you just what kind,’ Dove informed him, ‘I’m the kind that’d injunct that Mexican’s shovel, if I were his wife, before I let him in my house again. That’s what kind.’
‘Shovel no matter,’ Gonzales promised everyone cheerfully, ‘when I feel like going, I go.’
‘A little on the headstrong side,’ Make-Believe Murphy had to concede, squatting beside Dove. He was a lanky stray from nowhere who’d been lost in the shuffle along the way. A year or two older than Dove. Older prisoners tolerated his make-believe practice, knowing that was as close to practising law as Murphy was going to get.
‘Great Hand of God,’ he marveled now, ‘for what it cost this country to keep us criminals in here, we could send a navy to Mexico.’
‘What for?’ Dove wondered. ‘We don’t have no war with Mexico.’
‘Well, by God,’ the boy resolved. ‘By God, if we don’t we’ll send down ’n get us one.’
The only true criminal in the whole tankful of fools, the only one who had soldiered honestly against law and order, was an old-timer named Cross-Country Kline, with a battered and seamed old round brown ball of a face that looked as if it had been lined into the grandstand and lined right back. They were having a hard time getting Country out.
‘Blow wise to this, friend,’ he advised Dove, ‘it’s always easier to convict a man of something he didn’t do than it is to prove that what he actually was doing was a crime. That’s why the nabbers are so much tougher on the man without a record than they are on the finished criminal product. They’ve got the finished product solved, they can nab him any time, so they can afford to be friendly. It’s the bird who pops up on some corner they never seen him around there before, he claims he never been arrested, he got no needle marks, he don’t act like a thief and they can’t find a set of prints on him that worries them. They figure he must be some too-wise ghee. They got to find a crime to fit him. And if he’s innocent that takes persuasion.
‘Do you know that half the men serving time are serving it for somebody else? Shaking somebody else’s jolt for copping somebody else’s plea, playing culprit for a lesser crime than the one they actually done?
‘What a young fellow like you got to think about, if you’re going into crime serious, is what any young business man got to consider before he invests in anything – How can he wire himself so that, if he takes a fall, he falls the least distance instead of the longest? He got to wire himself to the courts, the state’s attorney’s office, the police department. He can’t trust just any old lawyer, you don’t learn the law by going to law school. He got to have someone who can operate behind the bench as well as in front of it, behind the public prosecutor as well as in front of him. Then if he takes a fall he got a choice – Should it be one-to-life for armed robbery or one-to-three for simple robbery?
‘But blow wise to this, buddy, blow wise to this: Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom’s. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own. Never let nobody talk you into shaking another man’s jolt. And never you cop another man’s plea. I’ve tried ’em all and I know. They don’t work.
‘Life is hard by the yard, son. But you don’t have to do it by the yard. By the inch it’s a cinch. And money can’t buy everything. For example: poverty.
‘Take my own experience with money, for example. I was suppose to be a writer on the coast but all I ever wrote was phone numbers. I’d slip into a party like I was invited, spot some fluff who looked like she’d left her jewel case home, talk her out of her address and phone it to a couple fellas who were just setting around some hotel room talking religion. When she got home the jewel case would be empty. How should I know they were that kind fellas?
‘We made so much I didn’t have time to spend it. Still I felt them fellas were giving me a shellacking. I got out and went on my own. I lined up a most trim little number – you understand I passed for sharp myself them years. Husband had gold. Had her own car. One day she give me the key to it on a ring with her other keys, to drive around while she shopped. I wheeled eighty an hour out to her place, cleaned out every bit of her jewelry and the husband’s too, and was waiting for her when she got through shopping.
‘I was scoring like that every week, stuffing a suitcase for a trip to Chicago. There was a fence I trusted there. What tripped me was I figured it was my turn to give a party.
‘The country had just gone dry. I was living in Catalina and went across to L.A., bought a second-hand suitcase and stuffed it with Canadian rye. I got off the boat with it and carried it up hill to my cottage. I had to go past the nab station. I knew all the nabs. I set the suitcas
e down and cut up jackpots with them a spell. One of them asked, “What’s in the keister, Kline?”
‘“Just what you’re thinkin’ is in it, MacElheny my boy,” I told him, “booze.” We all had a laugh. I laughed too.
‘I just got into the cottage when somebody knocked. Four nabs I’d never seen in my life before. “What’s in the keister, Kline?” Only this one meant it.
‘“Liquor,” I told him right out, “Want a shot?”
‘“We’ll have to take you to the station, we have a tip you’re bootlegging.”
‘I went along. What else? Some clown of a justice of the peace clapped a hundred-fifty-dollar fine on me. I didn’t have that much on me, so they kept me in the clink. I played cards with the jailer and went to bed. I was still laughing but not so loud.
‘About three in the morning a deputy sheriff came in and shook me awake, took me into the jail office and pointed.
‘It was all spread out on a table. $120,000 in hot ice. They must have tore that cottage apart to find it.
‘My head was spinning like a top the rest of that night, trying to figure how to get rid of the stuff. I’d never been fingered for burglary, if they didn’t have the ice I was clean. In the morning the chief turned me over to a deputy, to take me on the boat to L.A.
‘The deputy was skirt-crazy. As soon as the band started playing he made it to the dance floor, lugging the jewelry in a cardboard shoebox under his arm. Once he threw it to the drummer to keep while he dragged a broad around the floor.
‘I wasn’t handcuffed. Where could I go? Nowhere but overboard and I can’t swim enough to bother. So I sat around gnawing my fingernails twenty-eight miles worth, waiting for a break. When we were almost in it came.
‘The deputy got the shoebox back, and we went up on deck to watch the boat make the pier. I said I was getting seasick and made for the rail. We were in the channel, almost to Wilmington Harbor. The deputy came along with me – to hold my head I guess – and when we reached the rail I started one from the ankle and he took it big.