Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [68]
After the delicious three-dollar outside breakfast, Jack was more than willing to listen to reason and to cooperate. He knew that if he didn’t his life would be made miserable. He would have to eat inmate food. The hell with that, he thought. There was also the matter of his being beaten half to death every night or so if he didn’t cooperate. He remembered what his rebellion had cost him at the reformatory in Oregon, the long endless time in the hole, and he thought, the excellent breakfast warming his belly, what a fool he had been.
As they smoked their after-breakfast cigarettes, McHenry asked, “Well, how about it? You coming along?”
“What about tonight?” Jack bargained. “I guess you want to give me those fifty whacks.”
“I never did tell you what a whack is, did I? Well, it’s one whack across the bare ass with this-here belt.” McHenry was wearing a thick leather belt, and, Jack saw later, was the only man in the tank who had a belt at all. More cooperation from the deputies, he thought. Oh, how everybody cooperates. But this was tangible, just plain old naked force. You don’t cooperate with naked force, you just sit there and take it. Which made Jack wonder why McHenry was asking for his cooperation, instead of just enforcing, since he obviously had the power to do so.
“I’ll tell you about them fifty whacks,” McHenry said. “I’ll drop that if you’re willin to go along, and if you just transfer about twenty-five dollars into my account downstairs. Above the fifteen. Hell, you got lots of money.”
“Okay,” Jack said. “That’s fine.” He understood now. McHenry was afraid of him, afraid that Jack might just want his job as judge, and might be strong enough and determined enough to take it away from him. “I’d be happy to cooperate,” Jack said, and they shook hands again. There appeared to be an expression of guarded relief in McHenry’s eyes. Jack remembered what the tall prisoner in Idaho had said, and he hoped the man had been wrong; but he could see, now, that even in here and with these rules of self-government there would be no such thing as fairness; that the big and the strong and the rich would naturally be better off. That was why he was being offered a way out.
“I wouldn’t touch your racket,” he said to McHenry. “You know what you are? You’re just another screw. You’re in here, but you’re just like the deputies. Don’t worry; I wouldn’t want to be you and have to worry about guys like me.”
“Now, you got a point there, Levitt,” McHenry said, not bothered at all. “I was worried about you. But man, if I don’t run the tank, somebody’s got to. These guys don’t know what’s good for them, they’d live just any ole way if there wasn’t any rules. And the deppities can’t control from out there; you know that. If there wasn’t a sanitary court guys’d be rattin on each other inside ten minutes, just to get special treatment. Now, that’s shitty and you know it.”
“Sure,” said Jack, “so you run things for everybody’s benefit. And I’ll help you, too, because I dig that special treatment myself.”
“Doesn’t everbody?” McHenry grinned.
They understood each other perfectly now, and for a few weeks Jack was permitted, with a nod and a thank you to his strength and his ability to use it, to remain on the edges of the simplified social structure of the tank. For a while this suited him, because,