T. Boyle - The Inner Circle

I probably stammered. Or, no, I certainly stammered. “I, well, nobody’s really, I mean, Prok hasn’t said—”

She’d eased down on the arm of the chair so that the overlay of her hip was parallel with my face, then leaned in to bring her eyes closer to mine, and I could smell her, perfume, soap, yes, but something else too, something raw and primitive that can’t be feigned and will never come in a bottle. “What’s the matter,” she said, “don’t you like me?”

If you haven’t guessed, I’d been filmed already — I was one of the one thousand males recorded masturbating on the sheet in Aspinall’s studio, as were Corcoran and Rutledge. Prok saved twelve dollars there, and why not? If I’d felt self-conscious about it at first, there were the other 999 men to buck me up, and the thought of that, as much as anything, stimulated me to the point of response: I performed, wiped up and moved off like any of them.

Vivian Aubrey’s hair hung loose, the tug of gravity easing it from her shoulders in a thick shimmering panel. I glanced across the room at Betty — she was watching me, something almost mocking in her expression. Or maybe it was hunger, maybe that was it. I turned back to Vivian Aubrey, the light of her eyes, the single flaming slash of color fixed on the ridge of her tooth, and whispered, “Oh, yes, I do. I like you a lot.”

She straightened up then, and let a hand drift to my shoulder for balance. One more puff from the cigarette. A short, trilling laugh. “Anything for science, huh?” she said, and I wondered where I’d heard that before.

I don’t know if I’ve got the dates right here, or even the year (the volume of Prok’s travels during the five-year period between publication of the male edition in ’48 and the female in ’53 would have dwarfed any statesman’s), but to the best of my recollection it was sometime early in the following year that Prok, Mac, Corcoran and I entrained for the Pacific Coast, that is, for San Quentin and Berkeley both. Mac spent most of her travel time knitting and staring out the window, silently watching the countryside scroll past, but she came to life for meals in the dining car and the occasional late-night game of pinochle, and it was a real pleasure to have her there, just for companionship, just for that. As for Corcoran and me, Prok put us to work, of course, interviewing travelers, computing data, meeting daily with him in the club car to talk over our strategy for history-taking at San Quentin and the volume on sex offenders he was even then projecting as a successor to Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. The prospect was exciting, but we were all a little anxious about taking histories in the prison — this wasn’t the Indiana State Penal Farm, but a maximum-security lockup replete with a gas chamber and its own Death Row to feed it, and to be confined in a cell one-on-one with a rapist or murderer was daunting, to say the least.

We took a car across the Golden Gate Bridge, the fog seething below us as if the ocean were heated to a rolling boil, none of us saying much, not even Prok. I remember the look of the prison still, humped and low against a battery of treeless hills, a clustered stone beehive of a place with slits for windows and a medieval funk hanging over it, as if it had been there before Columbus, before laws and juries and judges. It was a place of confinement. Of penitence. And if any of the inmates went from penitence to resentment to rage and violence, we would be on our own. As the guard searched our car at the gate and my palms sweated and my throat went dry, I couldn’t help wishing I’d chosen another profession. Or at the very least begged off just this once to stay home with Iris and the baby.

As it turned out, the warden was as concerned for our safety as we were (as I was, that is: once we got there, once we were actually inside the walls, Prok seemed unfazed, one subject no different from another as far as he was concerned), and he’d arranged for us to interview the elite prisoners first. These were the heads of the various gangs and cabals, the foremost Mexican, the leading Negro, the champion boxer, and so on. If we could establish our legitimacy with the inmate leaders, then we would find it relatively easy going with the others — that was the thinking. Of course, we needed absolute privacy, and to conduct interviews in the warden’s office or even the chaplain’s, where intimacies might be overheard, was out of the question. Prok finally decided on a series of disused cells dating back to the last century, deep in the prison’s subchambers. The walls were of stone, two feet thick, the doors each fashioned from a single slab of steel and with nothing but a peephole to break their lines; even so, Prok wound up draping blankets over them to be sure of muffling even the slightest sound.

My first subject was a Negro who was entirely innocent of the crime for which he’d been convicted, viz., lying in wait in the alley behind a bar after an altercation with two of the establishment’s patrons, after which he was falsely accused of battering the two men to death with the use only of his hands and a brick wall that presented itself as a convenient, if immobile, weapon. Or so he claimed. Nearly all the prisoners we interviewed, particularly the sex offenders, harped continually on the subject of their innocence. At any rate, he was led into the cell by a guard with a disapproving face (universally, the guards thought our locking ourselves in with their charges was a bad idea, even suggesting that we wear whistles round our necks in the event we needed to summon aid), and I offered him a chair, cigarettes and a Coca-Cola out of the eight-ounce bottle, a real luxury in prison, since, for reasons that should be obvious, glass was strictly verboten.

The Negro was thirty-one years old, short but powerfully built, with a cast in one eye and a habit of ducking his head and mumbling his responses so that I often had to stop the interview and ask him to repeat himself. As for his sex history, it was surprisingly unremarkable, very little consensual activity with the opposite sex and a burgeoning list of activities of the H-variety, owing to his long incarceration. He talked freely, seemed even to enjoy himself, the novelty of the situation appealing to him, I think, as well as the special consideration with which I treated him, the Cokes (he consumed three) and the largesse of the cigarettes (he smoked half a pack, then pocketed two others). At the very end of the interview, he leaned across the table and said, “You know, I don’t know if I should be telling you this, but I want to be straight with you, because you been straight with me, know what I mean?”

“Yes,” I said, holding fast to my clipboard. “We try to be — that is, we pride ourselves on our, how do you say it? — our hep. Or hepness, that is.”

“Well, listen: I’m not really as innocent as I might have made out.” A pause, a tap at the fresh cigarette he’d stuck for safekeeping behind the lobe of one ear. “The two of them outside in that back alley? That night?”

I nodded.

“Well, I did croak them. My hands — know what I mean? — my hands were like when you get a piece of meat out of the butcher before he wraps it up, just like that. That was their brains, Jack, squeezing through my fingers.”

I had no response to this. This wasn’t what we’d come to hear — this was a different kind of science altogether. My eyes were fastened on his, on the one that wasn’t rolling. There was no sound but the dry wheeze of our internal furnaces, of our lungs pumping in and out. We were in a tomb, deep down, buried deep. Was I frightened? Yes. Absolutely. I mastered myself long enough to say, “Yes? Go on.”

He took his time, the undisciplined eye rolling like a porthole in a storm, and then he reached across the table and took hold of my wrist. “That fat fuck,” he spat.