The Best of Lucius Shepard (77 page)

“What
the hell’s that?

“The
queens who get you off down in Vacaville? The plumes put them away. You can’t
hardly tell the difference between them and a real woman.”

Anxious
to steer the conversation away from the sexual, I asked who I needed to watch
out for, and he said, “Guys down on the first three or four blocks … some of
them been known to go off. They’re transferred out or given punishment duty.
Mostly you need to watch out for yourself. Make sure you don’t screw up.”

“If
there’s no guards, people must just walk on out of here.”

Causey
gave me a penetrating look. “You crossed the river, didn’t you? You entered of
your own free will?”

“I
thought the guards were watching.”

“Might
have been somebody watching. I couldn’t tell you. All I know is, you and me and
everyone else, we chose to be here, so we’re not talking about a prison full of
hard-core escape artists. And Diamond Bar’s not so bad. Truth is, it’s the best
I’ve had it in a while. People say it’s going to be even better once they
finish the new wing. Escaping crossed my mind a time or two when I was first
here. But I had the feeling it wasn’t such a good idea.”

What Causey said made me no more certain of my estate, and after he
returned to his cell I remained awake, staring at the mysterious reach of the
old prison that lay beyond the ninth stair, the dim white lights and
anthracitic cell mouths. Everything I knew about Diamond Bar was cornerless and
unwieldy, of a shape that refused to fit the logic of prisons, and this gave me
cause to wonder how much more unwieldy and ill-fitting were the things I did
not know. I was accustomed to prison nights thronged with hoots, cries,
whispers, complaints, screams, an uneasy consensus song like the nocturnal
music of a rain forest, and the compressed silence of the place, broken
intermittently by coughs and snores, inhibited thought. At length I slept
fretfully, waking now and again from dreams of being chased, hunted, and
accused to find the silence grown deeper, alien and horrid in its thickness.
But toward dawn-one I sensed, not witnessed-I woke to an outcry that seemed to
issue from beneath the old prison, such a prolonged release of breath it could
only have been the product of awful torment or extreme exaltation … or else it
was the cry of something not quite human, expressing a primitive emotion whose
cause and color is not ours to know, a response to some new shape of fear or a
tidal influence or a memory from before birth, and following this I heard a
whispering, chittering noise that seemed to arise from every quarter, like the
agitated, subdued congress of a crowd gathered for an event of great and solemn
gravity. While that chorus lasted I was full of dread, but once it subsided,
almost stricken with relief, I fell into a black sleep and did not wake again
until the shadows, too, had waked and the first full day of my true
incarceration had begun.

·
· · · ·

During those early months at Diamond Bar I came to understand the gist of what
Ristelli, Causey, and the baldheaded man had tried to tell me. Eventually one
found what was suitable. Things came to you. Trust your instincts. These
statements proved to be not the vague, useless pronouncements I had assumed,
but cogent practicalities, the central verities of the prison. Initially I
behaved as I had during my early days at Vacaville. In the dining hall, an
appropriately cavernous room of cream-colored walls, with the image of a great
flying bird upon the ceiling, dark and unfigured, yet cleanly rendered like an
emblem on a flag … in the dining room, then, I guarded my tray with my free arm
and glanced fiercely about as I ate, warning off potential food thieves. When I
discovered that the commissary was, indeed, a free store, I took to hoarding
cigarettes, candy, and soap. It was several days before I recognized the
pointlessness of these behavioral twitches, several weeks before I grew
comfortable enough to forego them. Though I was not a heavy drug user, on those
occasions that I grew bored, prior to beginning my work, I had no difficulty in
obtaining drugs-you only had to mention your requirements to one of several men
and later that day the pills or the powder would appear in your cell. I have no
idea what might have occurred if I had developed a habit, but I doubt this was
a problem at the prison. It was clear that the men on my block were all either
above average in intelligence or skilled in some craft or both, and that most
had found a means of employing their gifts and skills that left no time for
recreational excess. As to the men housed in the cellblocks below the eighth
stairway and how they managed things-of them I knew little. The men of
different blocks rarely mingled. But I was told that they had a less innate
grasp of Diamond Bar’s nature than did we. Consequently their day-to-day
existence was more of a struggle to adapt. In time, if they were not
transferred, they-like us-would move into the old wings of the prison.

It
did not seem likely that anyone could have less firm a grasp on the subject of
Diamond Bar than I did, but I adapted quickly, learned my way around, and soon
became conversant with a theory espoused by the majority of the men on my block,
which held that the prison was the ultimate expression of the carceral system,
a mutation, an evolutionary leap forward both in terms of the system and the
culture that they believed was modeled upon it. They did not claim to
understand the specifics of how this mutation had been produced, but generally
believed that a mystical conjunction of event (likely a systemic glitch, an
alchemy of botched paperwork and inept bureaucracy), natural law, and cosmic
intent had permitted the establishment and maintenance of a prison independent
of the carceral system or-so said the true believers-one that acted through
subtle manipulation to control both the system and the greater society whose
backbone the system formed. Though this smacked of Ristelli’s cant, it was not
so easy to dismiss now that I saw Diamond Bar for myself. The absence of
guards, of any traditional authority; the peculiar demeanor of the inmates; the
comfortable beds, decent food and free commissary; the crossing of the river in
lieu of ordinary official process; the man dressed as a guard whom everyone had
seen and no one knew; the rapid fading of all tattoos; the disturbing dawn cry
and the subsequent mutterings, a phenomenon repeated each and every
morning-what could be responsible for all this if not some mystical agency? For
my part, I thought the theory a fantasy and preferred another, less popular
theory-that we were being subjected to an experimental form of mind control and
that our keepers were hidden among us. Whenever these theories were discussed,
and they were often discussed, Richard Causey, who had studied political
science at Duke University prior to turning to a career of violent crime and
was writing a history of the prison, would declare that though he had his own
ideas, the answer to this apparently unresolvable opposition resided with the
board, but that thus far their responses to his inquiries concerning the matter
had been inadequate.

The
board consisted of four inmates ranging in age from sixtyish to over seventy.
Holmes, Ashford, Czerny, and LeGary. They met each day in the yard to, it was
said, decide the important questions relating to our lives and-if you bought
into the view that Diamond Bar was the purest expression of a carceral
universe, the irreducible distillate of the essential human condition-the lives
of everyone on the planet. To reach the yard it was necessary to pass through
the old wing of the prison visible beyond the eighth stairway, and though in
the beginning I did not enjoy the passage, made anxious by the gloomy
nineteenth century atmosphere of the wing’s antiquated cells with their key
locks and hand-forged bars, and the masses of rotting stone in which they were
set, I grew accustomed to the sight and came to view the old sections of the
prison as places of unguessable potential-it was there, after all, that I would
someday live if I stayed at Diamond Bar. As I’ve noted, the prison straddled a
ridge-the spine of the ridge ran straight down the middle of the yard. Most of
the population would gather close to the walls or sit on the slopes, which had
been worn barren by countless footsteps, but the members of the board met among
the grass and shrubs that flourished atop the ridge, this narrow strip of
vegetation giving the enclosed land the look of a giant’s scalp pushing up from
beneath the earth, one whose green hair had been trimmed into a ragged Mohawk.
Rising beyond the west wall, several iron girders were visible, evidence of the
new wing that was under construction. The new wing was frequently referenced in
conversation as being the panacea for whatever problems existed in our
relatively problem-free environment-it seemed an article of faith that prison
life would therein be perfected. Again, this struck me as fiction disseminated
by whoever was manipulating our fates.

Late
one afternoon some four months after my arrival, myself and Causey-toward whom
I had succeeded in developing a neutral attitude-and Terry Berbick, a short,
thickset bank robber with a gnomish look, his curly black hair and beard shot
through with gray, were sitting against the east wall in the yard, discussing
the newcomer on our block, Harry Colangelo: this happened to be the baldheaded
man whom I had confronted on the day I came to the prison. His furtive air and
incoherent verbal outbursts had made a poor impression, and Berbick was of the
opinion that Colangelo’s move onto the block had been premature.

“Something
confused the boy. Caught him at a crucial moment during his period of
adjustment, and he’s never gotten squared away.” Berbick glanced at me. “Might
be that dust-up with you did the trick.”

“It
wasn’t that big a deal.”

“I
don’t know. Way he stares at you, seems like you got under his skin. It might
be why he moved up to eight-so he can come back at you easier.”

“I’ve
seen it before,” Causey said. “Something happens early on to fuck up a man’s
instincts, and next you know he goes to acting all haywire. Gets his ass
transferred right on outa here.”

I
was not certain that being transferred out of Diamond Bar was the bleak
prospect that Causey and Berbick thought it, but saw no need to argue the
point.

“There
the fucker is.” Causey pointed to the slope on our left, where Colangelo was
moving crabwise down the ridge, his pink scalp agleam with the westering sun,
eyes fixed upon us. “I think Terry nailed it. The man’s all messed up behind
you.”

“Whatever.”
I turned my attention to the four old men who purportedly ruled the world.
Doddering on their height, the wind flying their sparse hair up into wild
frays. Behind them, the tops of the girders burned gold, like iron candles
touched with holy fire. Several younger men stood near the four. When I asked
who they were, Berbick said they spoke for the board.

“What?”
I said. “The masters of the universe can’t talk for themselves?”

Berbick
rolled up to his feet, smartly dusted the seat of his trousers, acting
pissed-off. “You want to find out about the board, let’s go see them.”

I
looked at him with amusement.

“You
act like you know something,” he said, “but you don’t know as much as we do.
And we don’t know dip.”

“Ain’t
no thing,” I said. “Forget it.”

“Nothing
bad’ll happen. We’ll go with you.” He glanced at Causey. “Right?”

Causey
shrugged. “Sure.”

Berbick
arched an eyebrow and said to me in a taunting voice, “It’s just four old guys,
Tommy. Come on!”

Colangelo,
who had been sitting upslope and to the left of us, scrambled up and hurried
out of our path as we climbed the ridge.

“Fucking
freak!” said Berbick as we drew abreast of him.

The
board members were standing in a semicircle just below the highest point of the
ridge, which was tufted with two roughly globular, almost identically puny
shrubs, so sparsely leaved that from a distance, seen against the backdrop of
the stone wall, they looked like the models of two small planets with dark gray
oceans and island continents of green. The steadfastness with which the board
was contemplating them gave rise to the impression that they were considering
emigration to one or the other. Drawing near, I saw that the oldest among them,
Czerny, appeared to be speaking, and the others, their eyes wandering, did not
appear to be listening. Holmes, a shrunken black man, bald except for puffs of
cottony hair above his ears and behind his neck, was shifting his feet
restlessly, and the other two, Ashford and LeGary, both grandfather-gray and
gaunt, were posed in vacant attitudes. One of the younger men who shadowed
them, a stocky Latino in his forties, blocked our path, politely asked what we
wanted, and Berbick jerked his thumb toward me and said, “Penhaligon here wants
to meet the board.”