Live by Night (10 page)

Joe's jaw clenched, but all he said was, “You make your luck, Dad.”

“Sometimes,” his father said. “But other times it makes you.”

They sat in silence for a bit. Joe's heart had never beat so hard. It punched at his chest, a frantic fist. He felt for it the way he'd feel for something outside himself, a stray dog on a wet night, perhaps.

His father looked at his watch, put it back in his vest. “Someone will probably threaten you your first week behind the walls. No later than the second. You'll see what he wants in his eyes, whether he says it or not.”

Joe's mouth felt very dry.

“Someone else—a real good egg of a fella—will stand up for you in the yard or in the mess hall. And after he backs the other man down, he'll offer you his protection for the length of your sentence. Joe? Listen to me. That's the man you hurt. You hurt him so he can't get strong enough again to hurt you. You take his elbow or his kneecap. Or both.”

Joe's heartbeat found an artery in his throat. “And then they'll leave me alone?”

His father gave him a tight smile and started to nod, but the smile went away and the nod went with it. “No, they won't.”

“So what will make them stop?”

His father looked away for a moment, his jaw working. When he looked back his eyes were dry. “Nothing.”

Chapter Seven

The Mouth of It

T
he distance from Suffolk County Jail to the Charlestown Penitentiary was a little more than a mile. They could have walked it in the time it took to load them into the bus and bolt their ankle manacles to the floor. Four of them went over that morning—a thin Negro and a fat Russian whose names Joe never learned, Norman, a soft and shaky white kid, and Joe. Norman and Joe had chatted a few times in jail because Norman's cell was across from Joe's. Norman had had the misfortune to fall under the spell of the daughter of the man whose livery stable he tended on Pinckney Street in the flat of Beacon Hill. The girl, fifteen, got pregnant, and Norman, seventeen and orphaned since he was twelve, got three years in a maximum security prison for rape.

He told Joe he'd been reading his Bible and was ready to atone for his transgressions. Told Joe the Lord would be with him and that there was good in every man, not the least of which could be found in the lowest of men, and that he suspected he might even find more good behind those walls than he'd found on this side of them.

Joe had never met a more terrified creature.

As the bus bounced along the Charles River Road, a guard rechecked their manacles and introduced himself as Mr. Hammond. He informed them that they would be housed in East Wing, except, of course, for the nigger, who would be housed in South Wing with his own kind.

“But the rules apply to all of you, no matter what your color or creed. Never look a guard in the eyes. Never question a guard's order. Never cross over the dirt track that runs along the wall. Never touch yourselves or one another in an unwholesome manner. Just do your time like good fish, without complaint or ill will, and we'll find harmonious accord along the pathway to your restitution.”

The prison was more than a hundred years old; its original dark granite buildings had been joined by redbrick structures of more recent vintage. Designed in cruciform style, the heart of it was comprised of four wings branching off a central tower. Atop the tower was a cupola, manned at all times by four guards with rifles, one for each direction a prisoner could run. It was surrounded by train tracks and factories, foundries, and mills that stretched from the North End down the river to Somerville. The factories made stoves and the mills made textiles and the foundries reeked of magnesium and copper and cast-iron gases. When the bus dropped down the hill and into the flats, the sky took cover behind a ceiling of smoke. An Eastern Freight train blew its whistle, and they had to wait for it to rattle past them before they could cross the tracks and travel the final three hundred yards onto the prison grounds.

The bus pulled to a stop and Mr. Hammond and another guard unlocked their manacles and Norman started to shiver and then he blubbered, the tears dripping off his jaw like sweat.

Joe said, “Norman.”

Norman looked across at him.

“Don't do that.”

But Norman couldn't stop.

H
is cell was on the top tier of East Wing. It baked in the sun all day long and held the heat through the night. There was no electricity in the cells themselves. They reserved that for the corridors, the mess hall, and the killing chair in the Death House. Cells were lit by candlelight. Indoor plumbing had yet to come to Charlestown Penitentiary, so cell mates pissed and shat in wooden buckets. His cell was built for a single prisoner, but they'd stacked four beds in it. His three cell mates were named Oliver, Eugene, and Tooms. Oliver and Eugene were garden-variety stickup guys from Revere and Quincy, respectively. They'd both done business with the Hickey Mob. They'd never had a chance to work with Joe or even hear about him, but after they all passed a few names back and forth, they knew he was legit enough not to turn him out just to make a point.

Tooms was older and quieter. He had stringy hair and stringy limbs, and something foul lived behind his eyes that you didn't want to look at. As the sun set on their first night, he sat on his top bunk, legs dangling over the edge, and every now and then Joe found Tooms's blank stare turned in his direction, and it was all he could do to meet it and then casually move off it.

Joe slept on one of the low bunks, across from Oliver. He had the worst mattress and the bunk sagged, and his sheet was coarse and moth-eaten and smelled like wet fur. He dozed fitfully but he never slept.

In the morning, Norman approached him in the yard. Both of his eyes were black and his nose looked to be broken and Joe was about to ask him about it when Norman scowled, bit down on his lower lip, and punched Joe in the neck. Joe two-stepped to his right and ignored the sting and thought of asking why, but he didn't have enough time. Norman came for him, both arms awkwardly raised. If Norman avoided his head and started punching his body, Joe was done. His ribs weren't healed; sitting up in the morning still hurt so much he saw stars. He shuffled, his heels scrabbling the dirt. High above them, the guards in their watchtowers watched the river to the west or the ocean to the east. Norman drilled a punch into the other side of his neck and Joe raised his foot and brought it down on Norman's kneecap.

Norman fell onto his back, his right leg at an awkward angle. He rolled in the dirt, then used his elbow to try to stand. When Joe stomped the knee a second time, half the yard heard Norman's leg break. The sound that left his mouth wasn't quite a scream. It was something softer and deeper, a huffing noise, something a dog would make after it crawled under a house to die.

Norman lay in the dirt and his arms fell to his sides, and the tears leaked from his eyes into his ears. Joe knew he could help Norman up, now that he was no danger, but that would be seen as weakness. He walked away. He walked across the yard, already sweltering at 9
A.M
., and felt the eyes on him, more than he could count, everyone looking, deciding what the next test would be, how long they'd toy with the mouse before they took a real swipe with their claws.

Norman was nothing. Norman was a warm-up. And if anyone here got a sense of how badly Joe's ribs were damaged—it hurt to fucking breathe at the moment; it hurt to walk—there'd be nothing but bones left by morning.

Joe had seen Oliver and Eugene over by the west wall, but now he watched their backs melt into a crowd. They wanted no part of him until they saw how this played out. So now he was walking toward a group of men he didn't know. If he stopped suddenly and looked around, he'd look foolish. And foolish in here was the same thing as weak.

He reached the group of men and the far side of the yard, by the wall, but they walked away too.

It went that way all day—no one would talk to him. Whatever he had, no one wanted to catch it.

He returned that night to an empty cell. His mattress—the lumpy one—lay on the floor. The other mattresses were gone. The bunks had been removed. Everything had been removed except the mattress, the scratchy sheet, and the shit bucket. Joe looked back at Mr. Hammond as he locked the door behind him.

“Where'd everyone else go?”

“They went,” Mr. Hammond said and walked down the tier.

For the second night in a row, Joe lay in the hot room and barely slept. It wasn't just his ribs and it wasn't simply fear—the reek of the prison was matched only by the reek of the factories outside. There was a small window at the top of the cell, ten feet up. Maybe the thought behind placing it there had been to give the prisoner a merciful taste of the outside world. But now it was just a conduit for the factory smoke, for the stench of textiles and burning coal. In the heat of the cell, as vermin scuttled along the walls and men groaned in the night, Joe could not fathom how he could survive five days here, never mind five years. He'd lost Emma, he'd lost his freedom, and now he could feel his soul beginning to flicker and wane. What they were taking from him was all he had.

The next day, more of the same. And the day after that. Anyone he approached walked away from him. Anyone he made eye contact with looked away. But he could feel them watching as soon as his gaze moved on. It was all they did, every man in the prison—they watched him.

Waiting.

“For what?” he said at lights-out as Mr. Hammond turned the key in the cell door. “What are they waiting for?”

Mr. Hammond stared through the bars at him with his lightless eyes.

“The thing is,” Joe said, “I'm happy to straighten things out with whoever I offended. If I did, in fact, offend somebody. Because if I did, I didn't do so knowingly. So I'm willing to—”

“You're in the mouth of it,” Mr. Hammond said. He looked up at the tiers arrayed above and behind him. “It decides to roll you around on its tongue. Or it bites down real hardlike, grind its teeth into you. Or it lets you climb over them teeth and jump out. But it decides. Not you.” Mr. Hammond swung his enormous ring of keys in a circle before hooking them to his belt. “You wait.”

“For how long?” Joe asked.

“Till it says so.” Mr. Hammond walked up the tier.

T
he boy who came for him next was just that, a boy. Trembling and jump-eyed and no less dangerous for it. Joe was walking to the Saturday shower when the kid dislodged himself from the line about ten men up and walked down toward Joe.

Joe knew from the moment the kid left the line that he was coming for him, but there was nothing he could do to stop it. The kid wore his striped prison pants and coat and carried his towel and soap bar like the rest of them, but he also had a potato peeler in his right hand, its edges sharpened by a whetstone.

Joe stepped to meet the kid and the kid acted like he was moving on, but then he dropped his towel and soap, planted his foot, and swung his arm at Joe's head. Joe feinted to his right and the kid must have anticipated that because he went to his left and sank the potato peeler into Joe's inner thigh. Joe didn't have time to register the pain before he heard the kid pull it back out. It was the sound that enraged him. It sounded like fish parts sucked into a drain. His flesh, his blood, his meat hung off the edges of the weapon.

On his next pass, the kid lunged for Joe's abdomen or groin: Joe couldn't tell in all the ragged breathing and left-right, right-left scrabbling. He stepped inside the kid's arms and gripped the back of his head and pulled it to his chest. The kid stabbed him again, this time in the hip, but it was a feeble stab with no momentum behind it. Still hurt worse than a dog bite. When the kid pulled his arm back to get a better thrust, Joe ran him backward until he cracked the kid's head against the granite wall.

The kid sighed and dropped the potato peeler, and Joe banged his head off the wall twice more to be sure. The kid slid to the floor.

Joe had never seen him before.

I
n the infirmary, a doctor cleaned his wounds, sutured the one in his thigh, and wrapped it tightly in gauze. The doctor, who smelled of something chemical, told him to keep off the leg and the hip for a while.

“How do I do that?” Joe asked.

The doctor went on as if Joe had never spoken. “And keep the wounds clean. Change the dressing twice a day.”

“Do you have more dressing for me?”

“No,” the doctor said, as if embittered by the stupidity of the question.

“So . . . ”

“Good as new,” the doctor said and stepped back.

He waited for the guards to come and mete out their punishment for the fight. He waited to hear if the boy who'd attacked him was alive or dead. But no one said anything to him. It was as if he'd imagined the whole incident.

At lights-out, he asked Mr. Hammond if he'd heard about the fight on the way to the showers.

“No.”

“No, you didn't hear?” Joe asked. “Or, no, it didn't happen?”

“No,” Mr. Hammond said and walked away.

A few days after the stabbing, an inmate spoke to him. There was little special about the man's voice—it was lightly accented (Italian, he guessed) and a bit gravelly—but after a week of almost total silence it sounded so beautiful that Joe's throat closed up and his chest filled.

He was an old man with thick glasses too big for his face. He approached Joe in the yard as Joe limped across it. He'd been in the line to the showers on Saturday. Joe remembered him because he'd looked so frail one could only imagine the horrors this place had foisted upon him over the years.

“Do you think they'll run out of men to fight you soon?”

He was about Joe's height. He was bald up top, a shade of silver on the sides that matched his pencil-thin mustache. Long legs and a short, pudgy torso. Tiny hands. Something delicate about the way he moved, almost tiptoeing, like a cat burglar, but eyes as innocent and hopeful as a child's on his first day of school.

“I don't think they can run out,” Joe said. “Lot of candidates.”

“Won't you get tired?”

“Sure,” Joe said. “But I'll go as long as I can, I guess.”

“You're very fast.”

“I'm fast, I'm not
very
fast.”

“You are, though.” The old man opened a small canvas pouch and removed two cigarettes. He handed one to Joe. “I've seen both your fights. You're so fast most of these men haven't noticed you're protecting your ribs.”

Joe stopped as the man lit their cigarettes with a match he struck off his thumbnail. “I'm not protecting anything.”

The old man smiled. “A long time ago, in another life, before this”—he gestured past the walls and the wire—“I promoted a few boxers. A few wrestlers too. I never made much money, but I met a lot of pretty women. Boxers attract pretty women. And pretty women travel with other pretty women.” He shrugged as they began walking again. “So I know when a man is protecting his ribs. Are they broken?”

Joe said, “There's nothing wrong with them.”

“I promise,” the old man said, “if they send me to fight you, I'll limit myself to grasping your ankles and holding on tight.”