as he reflected ironically, he had been wanting some time to think. Except for the more or less constant noise, the county jail was a fine place to think. Of course there were distractions. New prisoners were brought in and old ones released, and it was always interesting to find out who the new people were, and how they reacted to the tank. Most of them had been in jail before and would be again, and considered jail only a transitory phase; some were citizens, upset, angry, baffled, frustrated, frightened, terrified that they would stay in jail the rest of their lives. But most of the citizen trade went to the drunk tank downstairs. One night an old man was brought in for assault with a deadly weapon. They got the story from the deputies: The old man lived with his son’s family, and his granddaughter had been gotten pregnant by a boy, and there had been a conference of the two families in an attempt to fix the responsibility and decide what to do. At first it was decided that it was the boy’s fault for making the girl go all the way; then they blamed the girl for allowing the boy to take these liberties with her (they were only juniors in high school), and then both sets of parents decided to blame themselves for not raising their children properly, and finally, after much self-recrimination, it was decided that modern society itself made it impossible to raise children properly, what with the movies and television and violence, too much sex in the magazines, and the way girls dressed these days; and the old man, who had been sitting in the background listening in disgust, finally went upstairs to his room and came back down with his double-barreled 12-gauge shotgun and terrified everybody by pointing the deadly weapon at the boy and telling him by God he would do the right thing by the girl or the grandfather would come looking for him and would find him no matter how far he ran and when he found him he would blow a hole through him, by God. The boy let out a scream and jumped through the picture window, and cut himself pretty badly, and the boy’s parents called the police right after they called the ambulance. It did not occur to them to blame the grandfather’s actions on society.
The consensus in the tank was that the old man had done right, and what young people needed was to be shown who was boss. It was remarked by Mac McHenry that the most difficult and noisy prisoners were invariably young. The old man, his eyes bright and interested, told the others, “Boys, that old bird gun of mine has come handy more than once. When that little girl, the same girl, mind you, was about four years old, we lived in Santa Rosa—that was just after I retired, I was a plumbing contractor for thirty-two years, boys—the people next door had this Doberman pinscher, meanest-looking dog I ever saw in my life; I told the owners of the dog, I said, `If that dog gets loose and comes around here you’d better look around for some place to bury him,’ that’s what I told em, but that man was just so proud of his big dog, and the dog stayed out there in their backyard on a long rope, and roamed around crapping on the lawn and digging up the flowers and looking mean. Hell, that was no dog to have in town. If I had my way all those big dogs, especially the Dobermans, would be taken out and done away with. Well, anyhow, boys, little Darcy (aint that a hell of a name for a child, boys?), she went on over into their yard one afternoon to have a close look at that dog, and naturally, the dog, being a brute with no more brains than a nitwit anyway, just bit that child right on the arm, and Darcy came running home to me crying and bleeding like hell, and I fixed up her arm and called the hospital and went upstairs and got my bird gun and went over and blew that there dog right into dog heaven. Then I got in my car and drove Darcy to the hospital and left her there and went on down to where this man worked—he was in the life-insurance business—and went in and told him, `Sir, I shot and killed your dog. Here’s seventy-five dollars; that’s what you paid for