The Best of Lucius Shepard (76 page)

At
Vacaville I had been handcuffed but not shackled, not the normal procedure, and
left alone now I had the urge to run; but I was certain that invisible weapons
were trained on me and thought this must be a test or the initial stage in a
psychological harrowing designed to reduce me to a Ristelli-like condition.
Cautiously, I stepped onto a flat stone just out from the bank, the first of
about forty such stones that together formed a perilous footbridge, and began
the crossing. Several times, besieged by a surge of water, a damp gust of wind,
I slipped and nearly fell-to this day I do not know if anyone would have come
to my rescue. Teetering and wobbling, fighting for balance, to a casual
observer I would have presented the image of a convict making a desperate break
for freedom. Eventually, my legs trembling from the effort, I reached the shore
and walked up the shingle toward the annex. The building terminated, as I’ve
said, in an arch of pitted stone, its curve as simple as that of a sewer
tunnel, and chiseled upon it was not, as might have been expected, Abandon Hope
All Ye Who Enter Here or some equally dispiriting legend, but a single word
that seemed in context even more threatening: WELCOME. The iron doors were
dappled with orange patches of corrosion, the separate plates stitched by rows
of large rivets whose heads had the shape of nine-pointed stars. There was no
sign of a knocker, a bell, or any alarm I might engage in order to announce
myself. Once again I gave thought to running, but before I could act on the
impulse, the doors swung silently inward, and moved less by will than by the
gravity of the dimness beyond, I stepped inside.

My
first impression of Diamond Bar was of a quiet so deep and impacted, I imagined
that a shout, such as I was tempted to vent, would have the value of a whisper.
The light had a dull golden cast and a grainy quality, as if mixed in with
particles of gloom, and the smell, while it plainly was that of a cleaning
agent, did not have the astringency of an industrial cleaner. The most curious
thing, however, was that there were no administrative personnel, no guards, no
term of processing and orientation. Rather than being kept in isolation until
it was determined to which block or unit I would be assigned, on passing
through the annex door I entered the population of the prison like a pilgrim
into a temple hall. The corridor ran straight, broken every fifty yards or so
by a short stairway, and was lined with tiers of cells, old-fashioned cribs
with sliding gates and steel bars, most of them unoccupied, and in those that were
occupied, men sat reading, wall-gazing, watching television. None of them
displayed other than a casual interest in me, this a far cry from the gauntlet
of stares and taunts I had run when I entered the population at Vacaville.
Absent the customary rites of passage, undirected, I kept going forward,
thinking that I would sooner or later encounter an official who would inscribe
my name or open a computer file or in some other fashion notate my arrival. As
I ascended the fourth stairway, I glimpsed a man wearing what looked to be a
guard’s cap and uniform standing at parade rest on the tier above. I stopped,
expecting him to hail me, but his eyes passed over me, and without saying a
word, he ambled away.

By
the time I reached the sixth stairway, I estimated that I had walked
approximately two-thirds the length of the annex, climbed two-thirds the height
of the hill atop which the walls of the prison rested; and though I held out
hope that there I might find some semblance of authority, I decided to ask for
assistance and approached a lanky, pot-bellied man with a pinkish dome of a
scalp that caused his head to resemble a lightly worn pencil eraser, an
illusion assisted by his tiny eyes and otherwise negligible features. He was
sitting in a cell to the right of the stairs, wearing-as was everyone within
view-gray trousers and a shirt to match. He glanced up as I came near, scowled
at me, and set down the notebook in which he had been writing. The gate to his
cell was halfway open, and I took a stand well back from it, anticipating that
his mood might escalate.

“Hey,
brother,” I said. “What’s up with this place? Nobody signs you in and shit?”

The
man studied me a moment, screwed the cap onto his pen.. On the backs of his
fingers were faint inky tracings, the ghosts of old tattoos. The precision of
his movements conveyed a degree of snippishness, but when he spoke his voice
was calm, free of attitude. “‘Fraid I can’t help you,” he said.

I
would have been on familiar ground if he had responded with a curse, a warning,
or the fawning, fraudulent enthusiasm that would signal his perception of me as
a mark, but this politely formal response met none of my expectations. “I’m not
asking you to get involved, man. I just need to know where to go. I don’t want
to get my nuts busted for making a wrong turn.”

The
man’s eyes fitted themselves to the wall of the cell; he seemed to be composing
himself, as if I were an irritant whose presence he felt challenged to
overcome. “Go wherever you want,” he said. “Eventually you’ll find something
that suits you.”

“Asshole!”
I clanged my handcuffs against the bars. “Fuck you think you’re talking to? I’m
not some fucking fish!”

His
face tightened, but he kept on staring at the wall. The interior of the cell
had been painted a yellowish cream, and the wall was marred by discolorations
and spots from which the paint had flaked away that altogether bore a slight
resemblance to a line of trees rising from a pale ground. After a few seconds
he appeared to become lost in contemplation of it. Some of the men in other
cells on the ground tier had turned our way, yet none ventured to their doors,
and I sensed no general animosity. I was accustomed to prisons filled with men
on the lookout for breaks in the routine, any kind of action to color the
monotony, and the abnormal silence and passivity of these men both intimidated
and infuriated me. I took a circular stroll about the corridor, addressing the
occupants of the cells with a sweeping stare, hating their mild, incurious
faces, and said in a voice loud enough for all to hear, “What’re you, a bunch
of pussies? Where the hell I’m supposed to go!”

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 race 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, that’s 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.”