Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [64]
As a final gesture, Costigan asked for bail for Jack, but the judge refused because it was a capital case and Jack was not local. When they took him back upstairs he was permitted to change his smelly civilian clothes for a set of dungarees, and they offered him a pair of workshoes, but he asked if he could keep his loafers. The deputy thought it over, bit his thumb, and finally said okay.
Jack was not really concerned about his guilt or innocence; or even about the giant abstractions of Guilt and Innocence. In his life he had already committed enough crimes to be jailed for a thousand years. Armed robbery, battery, statutory rape, and for that matter even kidnaping as it was defined in the State of California. He and two others had robbed a store and then forced the owner to come in the car with them at gunpoint and then drove him out into the country so he couldn’t call the heat down on them until they were far away. That was kidnaping. Shortly after he had quit working in eastern Oregon, he had gone all over with a partner pulling a short-change racket that involved the changing of a twenty-dollar bill for a package of cigarettes; he imagined he had done this enough times to deserve at least a hundred years in prison if he got a year on each count, so he was not feeling particularly innocent, at least in the eyes of the law. As for the true crimes of his life, the crime of being born without parents, the crime of being physically strong and quick, the crime of not having a puritan conscience, the crime of existing in a society in which he and everybody else permitted crime without rising up in outrage: well, he was purely and perfectly guilty here, too, as was everybody else. So that didn’t matter, either. The trick was to keep from being “punished” for his “crimes.” He decided that to fight the authorities, to balk, would in a sense be admitting that they were right and he was wrong. But of course there wasn’t any right or wrong. So it was better to cooperate, to do anything that would lessen his punishment.
Except that in his heart he felt deep personal rage at himself for cooperating. It made him grind his teeth together to keep from shouting out his self-hatred, from beating himself against the concrete wall of his cell; the thought kept ballooning up in his mind that they had no right to treat him like an animal, no matter what he had done or not done. All night long, in his cell, he burned with hatred. It did not matter what he thought, it was how he felt; and alone in the darkness of his cell, with the muttering noises of the tank around him, he felt like murdering the universe.
Ten
In a way, the Balboa County jail was run on democratic principles, which was not true of a jail in Peckham County, Idaho, where Jack had spent nearly three months a few years before. He had been given three months in Peckham County for rolling a drunk, and as soon as he got put in he knew that this was going to be a hard three months. The Peckham County jail was run very tightly by the deputies, with no inmate control at all. There had been no corruption and no graft. Jack had been told that a few years before the jail had been one of the worst in the nation and that a reform administration had cleaned it up. The prisoner who told him this, a tall lean man in for failure to provide child support, first greeted Jack by grinning and saying, “Welcome, Comrade, to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Don’t spit on the sidewalk.”
It wasn’t long before Jack saw what he meant. The reform administration saw to it that there was no outside food or anything else for the prisoners with money. The tank was very well lit all the time, and the inmates were under constant supervision, to see that there would be no gambling, arguing, fighting, or unnatural sex practices. Each man had to do his share of the work, and long-term prisoners spent most of each day in a gravel quarry out in back of the jail. During the day the prisoners who were