The Animal Factory (3 page)

“So how do I handle it?”

“Start out by not being friendly and don’t accept favors. The game is to get you obligated. Don’t shave too much and wear ragged clothes. Talk out of the corner of your mouth with a lot of
motherfuckers
thrown in … and give off vibes that you’ll ice the first bastard who fucks with you. It’ll make ’em think about it.
Nobody
wants to get
killed
. And some people do get through with
murder-mouth
and nothing behind it. But they don’t look like you. ’Course you could put a shiv in one and that’d keep ’em off you …
leastways
them that ain’t serious. But if he’s got friends … and it’d keep you from getting out.”

“Thanks for the advice,” Ron said. He thought of asking what the prison authorities would do if he asked for help. Certainly others were in the same situation and the men who ran the prison had responsibility. Asking for protection was distasteful, but getting buggered or killing someone was beyond distaste. He wouldn’t be able to live with himself after submitting to
that
, and killing, even without penalties, would be hard. He couldn’t imagine himself taking someone’s life. He didn’t ask, sensing that appealing to the
authorities
for help was taboo. Maybe he could hire bodyguards. He asked if that was possible.

“Maybe, but what’d probably happen is that they’ll take your money, extort more, and then turn on you. Then again, you might find someone. Shit, I’ve seen twenty cartons of cigarettes buy a
stabbing
… right in the fuckin’ lung.”

The questions had been partly rhetorical, but later Ron lay on his bunk and thought about the price of twenty cartons of
cigarettes
for a stabbing. It was cheap enough—if he could afford it. One week before the bust he’d had fifty-three thousand dollars in cold cash, another twenty-five thousand dollars or more in
pre-Columbian
artifacts from Mexican ruins (stolen and smuggled by the same persons in Culiacán who sold him narcotics), a Porsche, a Cammaro, and a partnership in a downtown parking lot. Thirty grand was lost when the narcotics were seized. The police had seized twelve grand, and turned eight over to Internal Revenue, which claimed he still owed sixty thousand. Some policemen had kept the missing four thousand. Five thousand in the bank had gone to the bail bondsman to get Pamela out. But before she made bail, some jackal among their acquaintances had broken into the apartment, stolen the artifacts, the stereo, the color television, and his clothes. The Porsche had been sold to pay Horvath, who also got the pittance from the forced sale of the parking lot. Pamela had the Cammaro, all that remained of his empire. It had been stripped like autumn leaves in a gale.

Maybe I can’t afford twenty cartons, he thought, and grunted in disgust.

Ron knew that this would be the last visit. Tomorrow or the next day he would ride a sheriff’s bus to prison. When his name was called at 10:00 a.m., eight men were in the four-man cell. Every night the jail filled with drunks and traffic violators who hadn’t paid their tickets. The floor was always littered with bodies, many without mattresses but too full of booze to care. In the late
afternoon
they were moved to the county farm to make room for a new batch. All but one were awake. The old con was reading the
newspaper
by light coming through the bars. The recessed cell light had been burned out when Ron arrived and never replaced. Three
middle-aged
blacks and a rotund Indian were playing nickel-and-dime tonk on a bunk, while two others watched. The sleeper was on the floor in front of the toilet, which Ron had to use. The wino was snoring lustily, spittle drooling from his toothless mouth. In jail vernacular he was a “grape.” After a momentary hesitation, Ron stood as close as possible and pissed over the sleeper’s head. Most of the stream went into the toilet, but as it expired and he shook himself, some fell on the man’s face without breaking the rhythm of his snores. Ron rinsed his hands and turned around. The gate would open any moment and he had to be ready. If he hesitated, the gate would close and he’d miss the visit.

The old con had lowered the newspaper and his expression was of a privately enjoyed joke.

“What’s on your mind?” Ron asked.

“See … it’s already got you.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“Time in the cage, how it corrupts. Six months ago you wouldn’t have dreamed of doing that—” he glanced toward the wino on the floor—“pissing on somebody, you couldn’t have done it.”

“He’s just an old grape.”

“Ah, that’s what you think
now
. It wasn’t what you thought
then
.”

Before Ron could comment, the door slid open and the deputy at the control panel called his name. He stepped out, tucking in the wrinkled denim shirt as he walked by the faces of the cells to the front and picked up the visiting-room pass.

The corridor with waxed concrete floors and prisoners moving along right-hand walls, watched by deputies, was so quiet that soft music from recessed speakers could be heard plainly. But as he neared the visiting-room door, Ron was washed by a tide of sound, an accretion of two hundred separate conversations. A trusty took his pass, said, “E five,” and put the pass in a
pneumatic
tube. Row E, window five, Ron thought, going to where he’d been directed. “E” Row visitors would come in a bunch when the prisoner windows were full. All phones would go on
simultaneously
, and go off automatically in twenty minutes. Ron sat on the stool and stared through the dirty Plexiglas, freedom inches away, wondering what kind of acid would simply melt the barrier and let him walk away. The thought was academic. Desperate moves were not his style. Next, he looked at the visitors at the windows across from him. Most were women visiting sons, lovers, and husbands, bearing the historical female burden to endure. The single impression of the throng was poverty. Prisoners came from the poor. Even the hallowed right to bail favored the wealthy. As always, he looked for pretty women. Mere sight had now become a semiprecious experience. A Mexican girl, perhaps still in her teens, with lustrous black hair to her waist, velvet skin, and
fawn-like
eyes, was visiting a man with the dark granite features of an Indian. Ron watched the girl’s ass and thighs pressing against her jeans as she shifted around.

A fresh cluster of visitors filled the air, their faces flashing into his as they looked for the right prisoner. Pamela came quickly,
plopping
down with a smile. Since he’d gone, she’d returned to jeans and bra-less T-shirts, blond hair hanging straight down. She was the complete hippie chick, and without makeup she looked young. The “skinny blond with big knockers,” she called herself.

Ron immediately saw the pinpointed pupils; he’d seen them several times lately, but now he didn’t want to argue so he would ignore them. She carried a pencil and tablet, ready in case
something
needed to be written down. Each held a dead phone at the ready, smiling and feeling stupid.

Somewhere the switch was thrown on and twenty conversations commenced along the row.

“Hi, honey, why so glum?” Pamela asked, turning her mouth down to mock the mask of tragedy.

“Not glum. I’m probably going tomorrow. Two buses are
scheduled
.”

“You’ll be glad to get out of here, won’t you? This is shitty—except I can visit twice a week.”

“Horvath says the judge won’t let us get married. I don’t really know if he asked him. Fuckin’ mouthpieces are lyin’ bastards. They take your money and fuck you over quick.”

“What about just putting down that you’re married?”

“I’ll try it.” He needed married status to get conjugal visits. “You know you need to get fucked good to keep you in line.”

She winked in exaggerated lewdness.

“Get I.D. in my name,” he said. “You won’t have an arrest record under that name so there’ll be no trouble. They can’t very well take your fingerprints. At least I’ll be able to touch you when you visit there.”

“I won’t be able to come as often.”

“I know.”

“I’ll call tomorrow to see if you’re still here.”

“I’ll be glad to get it started. All these months in jail don’t count.”

“
What?
”

“The time doesn’t start counting until I get there.”

The information triggered sudden tears, which momentarily startled Ron, for although she was volatile, given to all kinds of emotional outbreaks, these tears were out of proportion.

“It’s okay,” he said.

“Things are just … so shitty.” She managed a smile. “I’m going to start hustling again.”

“Don’t tell me about it.”

“That’s where you found me,” she snapped, anger replacing anguish. “I mean, what the hell …”

“Do what you have to do, but you don’t have to tell me. I’ve got enough trouble as it is.”

“I’m sorry. I’m uptight. I never thought I’d miss a man so much.”

After a pause, he changed the subject. “Oh yeah, I talked to the bondsman. He’s giving back some money. Send me enough to buy canteen and keep the rest for yourself.”

It was information he’d given before. Nearly everything had been said before, and there was nothing really new to say. The glass was more than a barrier to freedom; it was a line between lives. Two persons together, the condition of an entity, atrophied when they were divided. Yet he felt more longing than he ever had outside. Then she had been merely a convenience, a portion of his interests. Now she was the focus of his hope and dreams because everything else was gone. He wanted to tell her, though he’d done so in letters already, but before he could speak the phone went dead. Time was up. Men began to stand up along the row, making final, pantomined communication before a deputy began ordering them to move out. Pamela quickly wrote on the tablet and held it up to the glass. “I love you,” it said, with a sketched sunflower behind it. She held up three one-dollar bills, the amount a prisoner could receive. Not needing it, he shook his head.

As Ron was heading back to the tank, face twisted with his thoughts, Pamela was crossing the parking lot to the Cammaro where a slender, light-skinned black in bell-bottom jeans and multiple strings of beads was waiting behind the wheel.

Long before daylight Ron and thirty others were stripped naked, skin-searched, given white jumpsuits, and then put in waist chains, handcuffs, and leg irons. They hobbled through the cold darkness to the bus while men with shotguns and mackinaws stood on the sidelines, mist coming from their noses and mouths. The prisoners shivered in their seats until the bus had been under way for ten minutes, its headlights finally probing the ramp to the freeway. Ron was one of the few who had a seat to himself, and he felt lucky. Pleasure comes from trivial things in jail.

For the first hour they sliced through the city on the nearly empty freeway. Ron gazed out at the dark silhouettes of the Hollywood skyline, remembering other days, wondering how long it would be until he saw freedom again. He sat near the rear, a shotgun guard in a cage behind him. Beside the guard was the open toilet, and Ron would regret having taken a seat close to it long before the day was over.

As the sun came up, the bus catapulted through the mountains. The driver turned on a radio. A speaker was nearby and Ron’s mind drifted with the music and shifted from gnawing anxiety to longing. He was going to face a long, bitter experience before he “danced beneath a diamond sky … silhouetted by the sea …”

The bus ran along the coast highway, stopping at San Luis Obispo to unload some prisoners and gather others. Ron’s name wasn’t called and the queasiness in his stomach increased.

By late afternoon the bus had made another stop at Soledad amid central California farms, and again Ron wasn’t called.

In the town of Salinas the bus took on fuel. As the driver climbed back on, he faced his passengers through the wire.

“Well, boys, next stop is San Quentin … the Bastille by the Bay. Our estimated time of arrival is seven-thirty tonight … God willing and the river don’t rise!”

“Well, get the motherfucker rollin’ an’ quit bullshittin’,” one rough wag said. “We wanna see if it’s bad as its publicity.”

“You’ll see,” the driver said, swinging into his chair and starting the motor.

Earl Copen was serving his third term in San Quentin, having come the first time when he was nineteen, and he sometimes felt as if he’d been born there. If he’d ever conceived eighteen years ago that he’d be in the same place at thirty-seven, he would have killed himself—or so he thought sometimes. He was as comfortable as it was possible to be, and still he hated it.

Weekdays, Earl Copen slept late, a luxury afforded by his job as clerk for the 4:00-p.m.-to-midnight lieutenant, a job he’d had for twelve years, except for two periods of freedom, one lasting nine months, the other twenty-one months. The earlier years had been spent walking the yard or in segregation. On Saturdays during
football
season he got up early and went to the yard to pick up
football
parlay tickets from his runners. It was profitable and passed the autumn and early winter.

He came out of the North cellhouse in the breakfast line, following the denimed convict in front of him along the twin white lines under the high corrugated weather shed. Outside of it, crowded together on the pitted wet asphalt, were legions of sea gulls and pigeons. When the convicts filled the rectangle of the big yard, the sea gulls would circle overhead or perch on the edges of the giant cellhouses. Or fly over en masse and shit on everyone.

The two mess halls were inadequate to feed the four thousand convicts from the four cellhouses at the same time, so the North and West honor units ate first. They could return to the cellhouses where the gates were kept open while the other cellhouses ate, or they could stay on the yard, waiting for the gate to the rest of the vast prison to open at 8:00 a.m.