Just Like That Read online

  He was holding a magazine and pretending to read it. I knew why he had skipped supper. He didn’t like waiting until I went to sleep to masturbate. “Look,” I’d said, plenty of times, “go ahead and stroke the bald man. It’s none of my business. Just don’t get any ideas.” But, he was from a small town. I guess that’s the reason. Shy, you see?

  “What happened at the chow hall?”

  “What? Oh...I don’t know. Somebody got whacked.”

  “I heard. Franklin told me.” Franklin was the hack downstairs, put us in for the night. He would sit down at the desk all night and read those True Police Story magazines, pick his teeth with a folded-up gum wrapper. You could see him wince when the aluminum hit a filling. You’d think he’d learn, get a regular toothpick, discover floss string.

  “Franklin said it was a guy from K-Dorm. He said Susie did it.”

  He was right. It was Susie. I could see that, the part I happened to pay attention to.

  He went on, “Susie! That guy’s a mountain! One big sissy!”

  “Doesn’t matter how big you are you got a meat cleaver, you’re the biggest guy around, regardless your size.”

  “Yeah.” He laughed. “Franklin said the guy ran out the chow hall with the cleaver sticking out of his stomach. He said he was holding it in with his hands.”

  I didn’t say anything. What could I add to that?

  “He said he ran all the way across the grinder to the hospital. He said he got halfway up the steps before he died. He said he fell halfway up the steps and all his guts just popped out. God!”

  I had the idea I was supposed to say something, but what?

  “Is that what happened? Where were you?”

  I saw what he wanted. He wanted details. Franklin must not have seen it himself. Well, of course not. He was over here in J Block. One of the other hacks must have come by, filled him in. They’d kept us over at the chow hall a half hour longer, brought in some extra guards, blew the big steam whistle that makes all the guards shit ‘n git, all that stuff. They didn’t want trouble. A thing like that...

  “I guess that’s about right. I didn’t see that but it sounds about right.”

  “Didn’t you see it? Goddamn, Jake, you were right there! What happened?”

  I looked at him.

  “I don’t know. I guess that’s what happened. I wasn’t paying attention. It was just some grudge thing. I bit a rock.”

  “A rock?”

  “Yes. In the beans. I guess I’ll have to go to the dentist tomorrow. I’m not too thrilled about that.”

  He just shook his head and picked up his magazine. He turned over, his back to me and began turning the pages. I could tell he was disgusted that I hadn’t had any juicy details. He turned the pages faster and faster, making a lot of noise.

  My tooth was starting to really hurt now. I could feel pieces of filling or maybe the tooth itself. That rock had done a job, probably cracked the actual enamel. I got up and went over and tried to look inside my mouth in the mirror, but the mirror was metal, not glass, and it’s hard to see something like that in a metal finish. After a while, I gave it up and went back and climbed up on my bunk. I tried to think about other things, keep my mind off my tooth. It was throbbing at a pretty good clip now. I wondered if I yelled down to Franklin, would he get me an aspirin.

  In a little while, I began to doze off. Almost.

  “Jake.”

  I said, “Huh?”

  “You got three weeks, huh.”

  He was talking about my parole hearing.

  “That’s right.”

  “You’ll be back, Jake. I can guarantee it.”

  Everybody always says that. It’s jealousy, that’s all it is.

  “You remember Melrose, Jake?”

  Melrose was a little skinny black guy in the cell next to me, a long time ago, after getting out of quarantine, when I first came to the Pendleton Reformatory. He was slowwalking somebody for a carton of butts and the guy came by and threw acid in his face. He lay in his cell and screamed all night. The hack downstairs just kept on reading his magazine. It wasn’t Franklin; it was somebody else, but he read the same kinds of magazines, True Crime, stuff like that. Hacks all seemed to share the same literary tastes. In the morning, after we went out for chow they came and got Melrose who was down to a little occasional whimper by then. None of us heard anything we said, when they asked. When Melrose got out of the hospital, he had pink blotches all over his face, looked like bubble gum. Permanent blotches. Also, he lost an eye. That happened on my very first night in the population, before I learned to shut crap like that out, become invisible.

  “You cried at Melrose. I heard you. I was above you, top tier. You just got assigned to J Block. I knew who you were, new guy all the niggers wanted to fuck.”

  “I was new. It was a shock. I was probably scared. So what?”

  “You yelled at the guard. I told you to shut up, you’d get us all in trouble.”

  Damn, that tooth was acting up!

  “So what?”

  “So what is a guy gets whacked now and you don’t even care. You got a problem, Jake.”

  My tooth really began to throb now. I swung my feet over the edge, leaned over and grabbed the bars and brought my face up to them.

  “Hey! Franklin! I need an aspirin! Up here in twenty-two. Jake Mayes, four-nine-oh-two-eight.”

  “Your heart is hard, man. Ask me, you’re institutionalized,” Larry said, still on the same subject. Like I asked him or something.

  For some reason I thought of my dad. I wished there was some way he could’ve been a fly on the wall, seen how I handled this. He thought he was some kind of serious hard case. Maybe I’d write him a letter, kind of casually mention what had happened, act like I was more concerned with what we were having for dessert than seeing this guy get whacked. What the hell—I was getting out pretty soon. I’d bring it up, like something that had slipped my mind it was so unimportant in a conversation some time.

  An image of Susie burying the cleaver in that guy came up in my mind, and I couldn’t remember what the other guy looked like, who he was, even though I vaguely remembered seeing him around the yard. I could feel that tooth though. It was throbbing like nobody’s business. I couldn’t keep my tongue off it. You know how it is when you got a tooth hurting like that. You can’t keep your tongue away from it. You have to keep worrying it. That’s what I did. I kept worrying that tooth.

  CHAPTER 2

  I made parole and I’d been on the bricks seven months.

  One minute I was on my way to work and the next minute I wasn’t.

  Bang.

  Just like that.

  I did stuff like that all the time. I’d be talking to a guy, a friend even, and the idea would overtake me to sucker-punch him. For no reason. I just knew it would feel good. Or, I’d pull up to a 7-Eleven for cigarettes and get inside and all the way to the counter, money out and everything, nothing on my mind except get some smokes, and something would click, maybe the way the clerk kept reading his Playboy instead of waiting on me right away, and before I knew it, I had my piece out and the guy, the clerk, on the floor, and I’m hightailing it to the car with a bagful of cash. Bang. Just like that. Don’t ask me why these things happened like they did. I don’t have a clue. They just did.

  “Bud,” I said, in the receiver, “I’m a block away, at the QuikStop and I’m leaving town. How about it? You tired of Fort Wayne pussy?”

  Bud and I go way back, even before Pendleton, although that’s where we hooked up and became serious rappies. I was cellmates with his friend Dusty and then when we got into K-Dorm, Bud was already there and it became us three. The Three Musketeers, all for one and one for all. Bud protected me since he was the biggest and we both looked out for Dusty, who was too sweet looking for any judge to have ever sentenced.

  Dusty had the worst rap sheet. He’d killed a gas station attendant when he was sixteen because the guy wouldn’t let him have any gas, said he was c
losing and the pumps were locked up. I heard the story a million times.

  What started it was Dusty’d stole this car and was two blocks from home, some apartment where he was shacked up with a fourteen-year-old hooker, when the car ran out of gas.

  “Pissed me off, he did,” Dusty said, in that voice of his that jumped registers practically every other word, so he waited until the guy got off and watched where he went. “He had this old pickup parked out back a’ the station, and this guy, he just went back there and sat on the driver’s side and began nipping at a bottle he had there. See?” Dusty said. The guy wouldn’t take ten minutes to sell me a buck’s worth of gas and it wasn’t like he had to be someplace. That’s when he really got pissed, Dusty said. Went and fetched the jack handle from his trunk and snuck around and clopped him through the window, busted the glass and his head, same time. He hit him a couple more licks, just to get the mad out.

  After that, according to Dusty, he just walked on home. He had bad luck though. The cops followed his tracks in the snow right up to the apartment where he was and came in, no warrant, nothing—that was what Dusty said—and there he was, buck naked in bed with this fourteen-year-old, the gas station guy’s blood all over his shirt laying on the floor. His girlfriend was slurping the Big Gulp and just about bit it off when that door came flying open, he said. We all got a picture of that and snorted.

  He did the first part of his stretch at the Indiana Boys’ School—account of his age—but he didn’t last there long, after he killed another boy, stabbed him with a straightened-out laundry pin, and they had no choice but to send him over to Pendleton which is where we met when they put him into my cell.

  Young, sweet-looking thing, but a stone-cold killer. Like that mattered, where we were. Throw a rock any direction, hit about ten, eleven stone-cold killers on a lazy Tuesday morning. He was bad but not so bad for there. He was eighteen when I moved into his cell, and had twelve more years to go before they transferred him to Michigan City. That’s the way they did it then, back in the sixties and early seventies. Under thirty you went to Pendleton and over thirty to Michigan City. Young cons over here, old cons over there. It’s all changed now, boot camps, youth camps, shit like that all over the place. Candy-ass places for all the little suburban punks got caught trying to supplement their allowances selling dope to other punks. Pussy for real cons.

  Anyway, that’s how I ran into Bud again, he was in the cell next to us and was from South Bend, same as me and we just hit it off. It was on the straight, too. Lots of folks think everybody in the joint is either a sissy or a daddy but there are lots of friendships that are neither, just guys who get along same as on the bricks and that’s the way it was for all three of us.

  That’s why I called Bud. When I got out, even though I was from South Bend, I took the bus to Fort Wayne where Bud had gone himself instead of back to South Bend. You know, escape the “influences.” Bud, he had got me a job through PACE, the do-good outfit, businessmen who want to help ex-convicts and the job was in Fort Wayne with Bud, cut loose seven months before me. In fact, the job was at the same barber shop as he worked at. Most of the other guys were ex-cons too. The owner was himself an ex-con. Good guy but a boozer. We used to have to go in and roust him off the stool when he had a customer. Sat in there hitting one of his hidden bottles. Vodka, so the customers couldn’t smell anything. That’s what he thought anyway. Most of his customers were drunker than he was usually, pals of his from down at the North Star Bar and Tap. Once in a while, some mother, didn’t know him, came in with her kid. We’d bet, usually fives, how long it’d be before he’d clip the tyke’s ear way he shook. See, a little boy’s skin is soft, you can even cut it with the clippers when they’re set on triple-ought. You got to have them bend way over when you cut the back. Stretches the skin so you don’t cut it. There’s also this little hollow in the middle of the neck little boys have until they get older and you have to bend the head over to flatten it out so you can cut the hair there. The boss, Wayne Ferguson, he’d forget to bend the kid’s head over. Get to talkin’ with his buds and nail the kid. One thing he liked to do was talk. Guy like that, in the joint, we call him a Jeff Chandler ‘cause he’s always jaffin’. Selling you bullshit, a wolf ticket, is what he was always doing.

  He used to tell the mother that the kid only cried because she was there and somehow he’d convince her to leave while he finished. You could see the tears start to well up in her eyes as she went out into the other room leaving her crying baby behind. Soon’s she’d leave, he’d grab the kid’s ear on that little hangy-downy part with his thumb and finger and squeeze hard. He’d get down real low, to the kid’s level, and he’d say, Now, you little sumbitch. You let out a peep, I’m gonna rip your ear off.

  It was a wonder ol’ Wayne never got arrested. Either the kid’s mother didn’t believe him when she got home or else she figured what’s the use. One thing, he didn’t have much repeat business in kids.

  That was another thing. Me, Bud and Dusty all got into the prison barber school. Coming out into the population from quarantine, I’d started out in I.D., Identification, where we take your mug shot and print up your rap sheet. It was a good lick but I could see the handwriting on the wall, this was a job that was so good you had to keep paying somebody the whole time or color your ass gone and gone meant you had to go over to the laundry or the mess hall to work. Unh-uh. Be one of three honkies in the middle of fifty brothers got tear drops tattooed on their cheeks?

  “Barber school,” Dusty said. “I got a hack likes me, Mr. Jones. He got me in, he can do it for you, too. I’ll set it up. You got to act like I say when you talk to him.”

  So I applied for barber training and sure enough, I’m in there, cutting flattops on the white guys and “lines” on the brothers, me, that never in a million years woulda figured I’d end up in that line of work. Lot of the white guys they hated cutting lines on the bros, but me, I kinda enjoyed it. Only time I could hold a razor on a nigger and they couldn’t do a thing about it. I used to talk to ‘em, whisper shit in their ears. It’s a wonder any of them came back only they had no choice. The inmate played receptionist told them whose chair to sit in. I got a rep that way. Brothers would whisper that’s a crazy honky there, meaning me, and how they was going to get me sometime. They never did though. They knew if they tried and fucked up sooner or later they’d have to sit in my chair and I had that razor.

  At first I worried some about what my dad would think. He was what you’d think of as a real “man’s man” and I was already in barber school three months before I said anything in my letters. I guess I thought he’d call what I was doing a “sissy” job, having my fingers in other people’s hair but I thought it over real good and ended up telling him. It wasn’t like I was a beautician, and even if I was so what? That’s what I told him in my letter and what I also said was that I couldn’t get into the body shop where they fixed the cars of the hacks and various instructors. That was a lie of course. I hadn’t even considered the body shop. He never wrote back, which was normal, he never wrote anyway so I don’t know if he approved, but fuck it, who cares anyway? It’s my life is the way I figured it and if he didn’t like it, fuck ‘m. I’d like to see how he’d handle it in here himself, Mr. Tough Ass like he always thought he was. I tried not to think about what Dad thought but it wasn’t always that easy. Besides I was twenty-three. Who gives a rat’s ass what his “daddy” thinks anyway!

  Bud came over later when he saw how good a lick the school was, and then we all put in for K-Dorm and that’s how I spent most of my three years in the joint, barber school and K-Dorm, Bud, Dusty and yours truly. Our chairs were even side by side at the barber school, Bud in the middle, Dusty on the left and me on the right.

  We played a lot of cards in K, mostly double-hand pinochle for cigarettes, candy bars, blow jobs. “You lose this hand, you got to bend over.” Shit like that. Me, Bud and Dusty, we never got into them kind of stakes, but there were plenty who did. We played
mostly for Oreos, Camels, green when we had it. Green is jailhouse slang for real money, bills. Bills were contraband but there was plenty floating around.

  Barbering was a pretty good lick and for something never crossed my mind I’d ever do I found out I was pretty good at it. There’s something about a sharp-as-your-ass Andis clipper blade biting into the back of somebody’s neck hair, you starting to make a creation with just a few simple tools and your fingers, that’s—satisfying.

  ***

  “Let me call my old lady,” Bud said, not even asking where I was—which was the QuickStop or where I was going—which I didn’t know, or why, or none of the kind of questions a straight john would have. Just, “Let me call Kimmie. She’s working down at Parkview Hospital in housekeeping. Give me an hour to pack.”

  To kill the time, I invested in a call to my brother. “Thirty-five cents,” the operator said, “for three minutes.”

  “Hello,” I said. “Is Raymond there?” It was my sister-in-law, Ruthy Ann. I figured it was a Tuesday, Ray might’ve had a hangover and skipped work. I had his work number if I needed it, but it turned out I’d called the right number first.

  “—fuck you calling this early for?” he said. “I’m still in bed.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  A woman with a little blond boy, about four maybe, pushed by me to get to the cooler where the pop was and I had to hug the wall to let them by. He was crying he wanted a Coke-Cola and she was saying it was too early for pop; he should have a fruit juice, how about orange or maybe cranberry? The cranberry was on sale, she was explaining to this little brat; I could get two, one for you and one for me, honey. I waited till they were past to resume my own conversation.

  “Jake? You still there? You calling from jail?”

  Raymond calmed down when it became clear I wasn’t after bail money, was offering him something instead.