Harlan Ellison - Web of the City

Rusty looked up. “What’s that?”

“They get you in here and they let you have butts, but no matches; so we got to keep one butt goin’ all night or nobody smoke. You know?”

Rusty grunted understanding.

“I ’member one night they’s about six of us in here and all with butts, none with matches. One guy was lit-up when he got in, an’ we hadda roll them butts back an’ forth all night, till we was near shook, man, we got so nervous.”

Silence for a while. Then, “They take your shoelaces and belt, jack?”

Rusty leaned his head against the wall. “Not my laces. Took my belt an’ tie, though. Yours?”

“Mmm. Took mine.” The Negro laughed deeply, it rumbled. “But then, I’m a veteran. I’m tank bait, man.”

“Why they take that stuff?”

“You know, like some cat gets the lows. Tries to cool hisself with his belt. Ties it up to that screen ’round the light thing in the ceilin’, and hangs hisself with it. That makes a bad smell for the coppers, somebody goes out the hangin’ way overnight. So they takes the stuff. They must not of booked you if you still got your laces an’ matches.”

Rusty grunted agreement. “No, they didn’t.”

The Negro went on. “That explains it. They can’t take ya stuff they just holdin’ ya, in procoo or like that.”

“What’s procoo?”

“Man, you sure ’nuff new to this, ain’tcha?”

“I been in the cooler a couple times. With some other guys. I been around.”

The Negro chuckled wryly. The calf trying to be the bull. “Yeah, sure, jack. Didn’t mean no harm. Sure you been around, you say so, it’s so.”

“What’s procoo?”

“Protective cust’idy, man. Like they’s holdin’ you for your own good. A crock. You know, so they know where you are overnight.”

Rusty stood up. He leaned his head against the thin, cool metal of the bars. “What you in for?”

The Negro laughed cheerily. “Sheet, man. Nothin’ much. They makin’ a big thing outta nothin’.”

“Oh? What?”

“Sheet, man. I just cut someone, thass all.”

“Who’d you cut?”

The prisoner hesitated, and Rusty heard a deep drag on the cigarette. The Negro’s voice came in a deeper, more strained, more worried tone, belying his words. “Oh, no one much. I just cut my old lady a little. She peed me off and I took the blade to her, is all.”

Rusty slid back along the wall, staring up at the ceiling, staring at nothing. He didn’t want to talk to the guy; that was nowhere. He had to think. He had to give it a long, long think.

Was Pancoast going to come down tomorrow and bail him loose? Was he going to sit in the can till his tail turned blue? He thought of Moms and he thought of Dolo and the last thought worried him.

Where was she? She had been at the dance, he was certain of that, but she had gone and not come back. For some reason he worried the thought about and found it singularly unpleasant. He wanted to get out, fast—to check home with Moms.

That had been a rough time and anything could have happened. Rusty realized he was foolish to be worrying about Dolores when he was so deep in trouble himself, but he could not help himself. The darkness of the cell did nothing to reassure him.

He took his handkerchief out and moved in the cell till his thighs hit the trough-bunk. He struck a light and swabbed out the troughload of puke as best he could. It wasn’t much to sleep on, but he had to try.

He loosed a flood of cursing at the sight; but did the best he could with it. He prepared to lie down, finally. A deep tone sounded from the cell across the way.

“What you in for, man?”

Rusty turned, and tried to make out the face of the man in the cell opposite. For some strange reason, he wanted to see his face, to engrave it with bitterness in his mind. He never wanted to come back here again.

“Nothing, mac. Just—nothing at all,” the boy answered.

He lay down in the shallow trough and the hard, unyielding metal seemed right, somehow. He knew it was foolish, the same as Moms’ religion kick every now and then, but he wanted the bunk to be hard; he had done wrong tonight, very wrong. He had let himself slip back a little, thinking release from everything he had been and done was so easy to come by. He knew better now. It was a constant thing, a steady thing. He had to work at it and keep himself clean and away from it. It was like pot or liquor. It got to you and sucked you down every time, if you weren’t careful.

He closed his eyes. But sleep would not come.

Finally, the lights behind his eyes dimmed away to a darkness deeper than that of the tank and he slipped away to weird, disquieting, running dreams.

Just before the curtain slid down completely, he thought he heard the fuzzy, indistinct, deep voice from nowhere saying, “You got to be good, man, or they set you in the jailhouse. An’ that’s so bad, man, so bad…”

It registered. Rusty slept.

The morning dawned muggy and gray. Rusty slipped out of the trough, and his back was a mass of aches. His neck was stiff and he had a chill that ran through his bones. It wasn’t the most pleasant awakening of his life, but somehow things seemed all clear now, all clean, all fresh and ready for a start.

The turnkey came to open the cell doors at nine o’clock, and as the bars slid into the wall with a thump, Rusty turned away from the sink, his face wet, his eyes feeling strange and gritty in their sockets, even with the cold water doused in them.

He stood there and watched the other man come out of the cell across the way.

Rusty knew he would remember what the big Negro looked like. Not the color of his skin or the range of his arms or the skew of his nose, but the lines of the face, the meaning in the eyes, the whole composite thing. The whole, damned-forever thing. And it wasn’t nice, but he knew he would keep it close and any time he might need it there would be no trouble getting it out where he could look at it tightly.

The man did not speak and Rusty did not come out of the cell. But when the big man went down to the far end of the tank to rattle the bars and scream for breakfast Rusty knelt down on the sandpapery floor and shut his eyes.

“Hail Mary, full of grace, blessed—”

Later, the turnkey came to get him. The officer walked Rusty back down the corridor and into the squad room. The beefy sergeant from the night before was gone. In his place was a sallow-faced officer with a Madison Avenue haircut and large ears. Rusty had seen this man around the neighborhood from time to time. His name was Bedzyk. It seemed right, for this morning.

No matter what happened, Rusty felt very, very clean.

The desk officer looked up as he came in and his eyes frosted over quickly. No emotion before these street punks. Bedzyk hated the gangs. A group of hoods one afternoon had followed his bride of eight months, calling filthy suggestions after her as she walked down the street to her apartment. But there was nothing he could do to rough it on them this time. He examined the notation.

“You Santoro, Russell?”

Rusty nodded.

“Answer when I speak to you!” Bedzyk’s voice was hard and deadly. Rusty felt himself averting the man’s snake-like gaze.

“Yessir.”

Bedzyk grudgingly acknowledged the boy’s thumbing-under. “I got a release order here for you, left by Sergeant Dohrmann. Says some man named Pancoast okayed your release. You’re supposed to report to his place this evening. You know where to go to see him?”

Rusty answered sharply, “Yessir.”

“Okay. Then remember this, kid. I ever see you in here again, I’m going to personally see that the book’s tossed at you. Understand me, comprende?”