Люциус Шепард - Eternity and Other Stories

Some of the men resumed their quiet occupations, while others continued to watch, but no one answered, and the unanimity of their unresponsiveness, the peculiar density of the atmosphere their silence bred, played along my nerves. I thought I must have come to an asylum and not a prison, one abandoned by its keepers. I wanted to curse them further, but felt I would be slinging stones at a church steeple, so aloof and immune to judgment they seemed. Like old ladies lost in their knitting and their memory books, though not a man within sight looked any older than I. With a disrespectful, all-inclusive wave, I set out walking again, but someone behind me shouted, “Bitch!” and I turned back. The baldheaded man had emerged from his cell and was glaring at me with his dime-sized eyes. He lifted his fist and struck down at the air, a spastic gesture of frustration. “Bitch!” he repeated. “Bitch… you bitch!” He took another babyish swipe at the air and hiccupped. He was, I saw, close to tears, his chin gone quivery. He stumbled forward a step, then performed a rigid half-turn and grasped the bars of his cell, pushing his face between—it appeared that he had forgotten that his gate was open. Many of the inmates had left their cells and were standing along the tiers, intent upon him—he covered his head with his hands, as if defending himself against the pressure of their gaze, and slumped to his knees. A broken keening escaped his lips. Trembling now, he sank onto his haunches. Shame and rage contended in his face, two tides rushing together, and the instant before he collapsed onto his side, he caught the face of one and said feebly and for a last time, “Bitch!”

Beyond the ninth stairway lay a deeply shadowed cellblock that had the musty, claustrophobic atmosphere of a catacomb. Walls of undressed stone set close together and mounted by iron stairs; the cells showing like cave mouths; dim white ceiling lights that had the radiant force of distant stars tucked into folds of black cloud. Fatigued and on edge, I was not up to exploring it. A cell stood open and untenanted just below the stairway, and deciding that my safest course would be to allow whoever was in charge to come to me, I entered it and sat down on the bunk. I was struck immediately by the quality of the mattress. Though it appeared to be the usual thin lumpy item, it was softer and more resilient than any prison mattress I had ever rested on. I stretched out on the bunk and found that the pillow was remarkably soft and firm. Closing my eyes, I let the quiet soothe me.

I must have been drowsing for several minutes when I heard a baritone voice say, “Penhaligon? That you, man?”

The voice had a familiar ring, and there was something familiar, too, about the lean, broad-shouldered man standing at the entrance to my cell. Framed by a heavy mass of greased-back hair, his face was narrow and long-jawed, with hollow cheeks, a bladed nose, and a full-lipped mouth. He might have been the love child of Elvis and the Wicked Witch of the West. I could not place him, but felt I should be wary.

He grunted out a laugh. “I can’t look that different. Just shaved off the beard’s all.”

I recognized him then and sat up, alarmed.

“Don’t get worked up. I’m not gonna fuck with you.” He perched on the end of the bunk, angling his eyes about the cell. “You want to put up a picture or two ’fore your wall comes in, they got pretty much any kind you want in the commissary.”

There were questions I might have asked concerning both the essence and the rather housewifely character of this last statement, but during my first month in minimum security, Richard Causey, then doing an eight-spot for manslaughter, had put me in the hospital for the better part of a month with injuries resulting from a beating and attempted rape; thus his comments on interior decoration sailed right past me.

“I ’spect it’s been a while since anybody took the walk you did,” Causey said with a trace of admiration. “Straight up from the door all the way to eight? I never saw anyone do it, that’s for sure.” He clasped his hands on his stomach and settled back against the wall. “Took me a year to move up here from six.”

All my muscles were tensed, but he merely sat there, amiable and at ease.

“’Most everybody stops somewhere along the first few blocks,” Causey went on. “They don’t feel comfortable proceeding on ’til they nail down a crib.”

“Is that right?”

“Yeah, they feel kinda how you felt when you got to nine. Like you best stop and give things a chance to sort themselves out. It’s the same with everybody, ’cept you got a lot farther than most.”

Though I may have made a neutral noise in response, I was intent upon Causey’s hands, the muscles in his shoulders.

“Look here,” he said. “I understand what you’re feeling, but I’m not the man I used to be. You want me to leave, that’s cool. I just figured you’d want to talk. I know when I came here, all I wanted was somebody to talk to.”

“I’m not the man I was, either,” I said, injecting menace into my voice.

“Well, that’s good. Takes a different man than both of us were to do time in Diamond Bar.”

I was beginning to think that, truly, Causey might have changed. No longer did he give off the hostile radiation that once he had, and his speech, formerly characterized by bursts of profanity commingled with butchered elisions, was now measured and considered by contrast. His manner was composed and the tattoo of a red spider that had centered his brow was missing. “Just wore away, I guess,” he said when I asked about it. He told me what he could about Diamond Bar but cautioned that the prison was not easily explained.

“This’ll piss you off… ’least it did me,” he said. “But can’t anybody tell you how to work this place. Things come to you as you need ’em. There’s a dining hall and a commissary, like everywhere else. But the food’s a helluva lot better and you don’t need money at the commissary. The board handles everything. Supplies, discipline, recreation. We don’t have any guards. I don’t…”

“I saw a guard when I was walking up.”

“Everybody sees that guy, but I never heard about him whupping his stick onto anybody. Could be he does his thing so’s to give people something familiar to look at.”

“You saying he’s an inmate?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. There’s a lot I haven’t figured out about, but it’s coming.” He tapped his temple and grinned. “Best thing about the place is the plumes. You gonna love them.”

“What the hell’s that?”

“The queens who get you off down in Vacaville? The plumes put them away. You can’t hardly tell the difference between them and a real woman.”

Anxious to steer the conversation away from the sexual, I asked who I needed to watch out for and he said, “Guys down on the first three or four blocks… some of them been known to go off. They’re transferred out or given punishment duty. Mostly you need to watch out for yourself. Make sure you don’t screw up.”

“If there’s no guards, people must just walk on out of here.”

Causey gave me a penetrating look. “You crossed the river, didn’t you? You entered of your own free will?”

“I thought the guards were watching.”

“Might have been somebody watching. I couldn’t tell you. All I know is, you and me and everyone else, we chose to be here, so we’re not talking about a prison full of hard-core escape artists. And Diamond Bar’s not so bad. Truth is, it’s the best I’ve had it in a while. People say it’s going to be even better once they finish the new wing. Escaping crossed my mind a time or two when I was first here. But I had the feeling it wasn’t such a good idea.”