The Animal Factory (6 page)

“He’s just a fool who wants to be a killer. It isn’t worth a killing and the risk because he’s a fool. What the fuck …”

Earl fell silent, knowing that although he and Paul had as much influence as anyone over the two young men, it wasn’t enough. Conditioned by a lifetime of violence, he was willing to use a knife if he felt threatened, or if it was a question of saving face, but he didn’t believe in revenge unless it was necessary to avoid ridicule. He was capable of violence while disliking it; T.J. and Bad Eye both thought of violence as the first answer to any problem. T.J. was less quick but more relentless; Bad Eye was more explosive but could be reasoned with after the first blaze of temper. Earl didn’t care about Ernie, a loud-mouthed braggart whose ambition was to be a big shot in prison’s violent world, but Earl did care about his friends.

“It might come out okay,” he said. “Kittredge is Seeman’s protégé and he likes us okay. It depends on whether Hodges gets our names. If he does, we better pack our shit for ‘B’ Section.”

“What can the guy tell ’em? He can’t tell ’em we tried to rip him for some dope—he doesn’t think it was me anyway and he doesn’t know any other names, I don’t think. If he says we were pressuring him, what the fuck,
he
stays in the hole and gets transferred. We might get ten days, but here they gotta cage the prey because there are too many predators.”

Earl snorted, nodded, seeing the irony. Gibbs would be in
protective
custody for months until he was transferred to a softer prison. The officials couldn’t make transfer too easy or they’d be overrun with men asking for protection just to get out of San Quentin. During those months of isolation, Gibbs’s food would be spat in, his face spat on, and he would be despised as a coward—for being a victim.

The public-address speakers blared: “Copen, A-forty-two
forty-three
, report to the yard office immediately!”

Earl squeezed Paul playfully on the shoulder cap. “Well, I’m gonna find out what the score is.”

“I’ll be waiting right here.”

Sergeant William Kittredge was waiting on the road beyond the yard gate, leaning against the wall of the education building, a sly grin on his face. He was bouncing a red ball the size of a jawbreaker up and down in his hand, and Earl knew it was a balloon containing two grams of heroin. The powder was packed down, the balloon knotted and the end snipped off.

“You guys lost something, didn’t you?”

Earl shrugged. “Not that I know of.”

“What about this here?” Kittredge held the balloon up between his thumb and forefinger.

“I never saw it before,” Earl said, careful to keep his voice
modulated
. Kittredge might take too vehement a denial as an insult to his intelligence, while something coy would be an indirect
admission
.

“That’s not what I heard.”

Earl didn’t reply. It was better to wait till he knew Gibbs’s story.

“Let it hang. I’m not telling Hodges what I saw, but when your boss comes on duty, I’ll see what he wants to do. Meanwhile, come on down to the office so you can type a memo.”

“Where’s Fitz?”

“On a visit. Anyway, I want
you
to type this one.” Earl walked beside Kittredge to the yard office, where Rand was doodling on a yellow legal pad. The lieutenant was not in the rear office. The memo had been roughed out. Earl polished the grammar and spelling as he typed:

Now Earl knew Gibbs’s story—and that Kittredge believed it. Refuting it was impossible without confessing the truth, and that was out of the question. He handed the report to Kittredge, who signed it and put it in an envelope.

“There are better ways,” Kittredge said. “I could bust the whole fuckin’ mob of you.”

Earl saw Rand behind Kittredge, and the big guard was holding a finger to his lips. The admonition was unnecessary.

“You run things around here,” Earl said. “You can lock
everybody
up every day of the year.”

“Okay, Earl, okay,” Kittredge said. “What I’m trying to tell you is to get your friends to lighten up. That fucking gang is getting too far out of line. Every day the captain gets a dozen snitch letters about those maniacs. There must be a hundred letters that Bad Eye killed that colored guy in the lower yard last year.”

“What about that white boy they killed in the East block? And the four that got stabbed in the school building? And the bull that they killed in the hospital?”

Without saying it in so many words, Earl was subtly reminding Kittredge that since the beginning of the racial wars a dozen years ago, and especially since black convicts had begun killing white guards, there was an unspoken alliance between some of the guards and the white convict militants. Before the guards began falling, most of them had been even-handed; now many looked the other way at what white convicts did.

“So okay … he’s not locked up, is he? But the associate warden doesn’t need much evidence to get him … and the others.”

When the big yard was crowded with lunch lines, Bad Eye came up to Earl and Paul. Seconds later, Ernie appeared out of the throng. When Bad Eye heard the story, he expressed fury at the “stinkin’, lyin’, stool-pigeon punk,” and vowed to make sure something happened to Gibbs wherever he was sent. Earl kept silent, planning to talk sense to his friend when he was calmer. Bad Eye had come to San Quentin eight years earlier, when he was eighteen, for a ninety-dollar gas-station robbery, but instead of becoming mature, he was wilder, like a bull enraged by pain. “Fuck,” Bad Eye said. “Another bust and I’ll never get a parole. I wish I could escape. Earl, help me bust outta here.”

“You’re gonna get a parole next year. This is going to be okay. Just hold your temper and be patient.”

“I didn’t blow it,” Bad Eye said, pointedly looking down rather than at Ernie. He hadn’t greeted Ernie when the latter joined the group.

Ernie’s earlier toughness was now diluted by fear of the possible lockup. He nagged with questions about Kittredge, whom he didn’t know. Earl reassured him that he was safe, and hid his contempt. He detested falseness, and Ernie was a pussycat trying to be a leopard, though he would probably murder someone from behind if he had ten-to-one odds. To get rid of the man, Earl advised him to go to his cell so he wouldn’t be seen with them.

Bad Eye went to tell T.J. what was happening, so Earl and Paul found themselves pacing the length of the yard alone. Walking in this fashion was a habit of years. Friends would gather if they stood in one place, but if they kept moving, they were left alone. Earl’s and Paul’s friendship had begun eighteen years ago in the county jail when Earl was going to prison for the first time and Paul for the second. Now Paul was on his fifth term, and where he had once been slim and dark-haired, he was now fat and gray. They knew each other’s faults, but this didn’t mar their friendship; sometimes they argued heatedly, but without lasting rancor.

“Well, brother,” Earl said dolefully, “we’re having another wonderful day in jail.”

“Yeah … no work and no taxes and plenty of excitement. If we didn’t have some
wrong
to do now and then we’d lose all our
initiative
. This one got fucked up good.”

“It looks like we skated. You’d better start cooling it; you could get a play from the parole board next appearance.”

“I was thinking that when I saw Kittredge looking at us. A nickel should be enough for car theft.”

“Hold it! You weren’t just joyriding. They found a ski mask and there ain’t no snow in L.A., plus some gloves … and a pistol. You should get a parole, but don’t rationalize so close to home. I know you.”

Paul laughed. “It’s still just a car theft.”

“Yeah, I figure I’ve got two or three left, depending on how
politics
are. Nine years is a long time, even if you say it fast. The trouble with being a criminal is that you get two bad breaks—mistake, luck, whatever—and you’ve blown a couple of decades. I’ll be nearly forty when I get out and what else can I do to catch up except put a hacksaw blade to a shotgun and run off into a bank or something?”

They walked a lap in silence. Usually Earl contracted his world to what was within the walls. Excessive fretting about the outside drove men insane. He cut himself off from everyone he knew outside because they could do nothing for him except make his time worse than it was. If he counted on them, he would be disillusioned, for after a few years in prison, you were as forgotten as a man in a coffin under the earth. During his first term, after matricu lating from reform school, he’d taken all the school courses available, graduating from high school and even getting a semester of college credits. He’d completed the vocational printing course, too. None of that had gotten him a job, nor had it made him feel comfortable except among the kinds of people he’d known all his life. He recognized that he was, indeed, a habitual criminal, with a metabolism that demanded he gamble his freedom, even his life, for real freedom—freedom from a life of quiet desperation. He would get one more chance, and he would take it. He’d gone too far and lost too much to quit the game now.

“When is that dope bag due?” Paul asked.

“Maybe this week. We’ll know when the mule gets a visit tomorrow.”

“Dennis must be doing okay out there.”

“He always makes money and he usually lasts a few years. He’s been out less than three months and he’s sent back about five grand worth of dope. A couple bags to Folsom, too. I sent word if he wanted some money and he said he’d freeze if I tried to pay him.”

“We can use it when it gets here. I owe Vito’s clique twenty papers.”

Earl laughed. “You’ve been sneakin’ around on me again.”

Paul answered with lips pursed into a cone and opened his very blue eyes in a parody of innocence. Responsibility of any kind was beyond him, but he was a good friend nonetheless. The one quality that mattered to Earl was loyalty. It outweighed a thousand other flaws. He gave it and he wanted it, and his close friends gave it to him and to each other.

As they approached the North cellhouse, they heard a brief roar of voices from within.

“That fuckin’ game,” Earl said. “All of ’em play the ticket, so I’d better see what’s happening with the scores—and make sure sleazy ass Preacher doesn’t run in a couple of bogus tickets with winners.”

“I’ll see you at the flick if I don’t see you after count.”

“Bring those books.”

Earl went in and took his seat. Preacher had a checklist of games on the ticket and scores, some partial, some final. Although Earl hadn’t checked each ticket, he had a good idea of how they ran. From the scores he could see that he was in no danger of being bombed out. He sat down to watch the game, knowing that nearly every ticket had picked Navy because they were a
seventeen
-point favorite and he’d listed it on the ticket at thirteen. Ten years of running a ticket told him that traditional rivalries often ended much closer than handicap form indicated. Navy was ahead by fourteen and he forgot Kittredge, Gibbs, and Seeman. Two minutes before the end Army scored, the convicts groaned, and there it ended. When Earl stood up in the front row, he faced the crowd, yelled “Hurrah,” and clenched his hands over his head. Most of them had lost a couple of packs, but not enough to bother them, so many laughed. Earl liked being known and respected, but moments later as he trudged up the steel stairs toward his cell, the thrill of winning disappeared. He’d won—a lot of tobacco.

At 4:20, when nearly all the convicts lined up in the yard and then returned to their cells for count, Earl went to the yard office. At count time it became a hangout for sergeants and lieutenants coming on and going off duty. Sometimes closed-door
conferences
were held in the back room, and Earl eavesdropped by going into the washroom, locking the door, and putting an ear to the wall. Today Hodges and a couple of sergeants were in the back room, but the conversation Earl wanted to hear was taking place fifty yards away, beside the plaza fish pond outside the chapel. Kittredge was talking and Lieutenant Bernard Seeman listened stolidly, nodding occasionally. Seeman was a
heavy-shouldered
man in his midfifties, starting to get a belly, and he wore his billed cap tilted to the side like a Navy man; he’d been a submarine bos’n for twenty years. Earl crossed his legs on the typewriter stand, seemingly uninterested while he watched through the window.

When the count cleared, a bell clanged from atop the building with the main gate. Before the tones died, convicts and guards spilled from the custody office across the plaza, the former heading toward the road to the mess halls, the latter making a beeline for the sallyport. The yard office disgorged all but one guard, and other guards hurried by in a stream, carrying coats and lunchboxes. Those with seniority counted the nearest cellhouses so they could get away a couple of minutes earlier.