Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [71]
After his indictment for manslaughter (the other two charges were dropped) the man was returned to the tank and had to dress in dungarees. His bail had been set at fifty thousand dollars and no one had put it up for him. He was a pompous, florid man with silvery hair, and he looked absurd in dungarees, like a millionaire going to a costume party. There was a subdued excitement among the prisoners; to most of them this man represented their chief enemy, respectability, and cruelly they wanted to see him come up before the sanitary court and have his pants pulled down and his ass whacked, to watch him silently while he discovered that his dignity could be taken away from him so easily, and that for once he was at the mercy of the underdogs. Nobody spoke to him all day, and he sat in his cell, alternately holding his head in his hands and groaning, or jumping up to pace back and forth in his cell. All the prisoners knew this was a violation of tank rules, but they said nothing.
The executive, however, was not brought before the sanitary court at all. The next day, McHenry went into his cell and stood in front of him, and they talked for almost an hour, and McHenry came out and called the deputy at the desk over to the bars and whispered to him, and then the deputy went out and came back later with a tray of food for the executive.
When the executive was not visiting his lawyer, he stayed in his cell. He refused to speak to any of the inmates except Mac McHenry, and Mac let it be known that he, Mac, wanted the man left strictly alone. He winked at Jack. “This boy has power on the outside. We fiddle with him and the whole thing goes.”
The executive got out just before Jack, his lawyer finally arranging bail.
Somewhere along the line Jack began to be angry, in a deep, personal way that had nothing to do with the tank or the inmates. They could not be blamed for the way they acted, and if Jack began to hate the sanitary court and McHenry, it was not because he did not understand the need for the inmates to run things, or at least pretend they ran things. He understood that; but he hated it anyway. He did not even get to hate McHenry in person, because he was only the toughest and shrewdest of the lot, not the worst; and if he was gone the number two tough nut would take over the court, and that could have been Jack himself. He could feel it in himself, and he often thought of the sense of pleasure that could come from the power; and he hated himself for it. And he could not hate the deputies, because they hadn’t put him in jail, they were only there to see to it that he stayed in jail. They were just doing their job. Certainly, a few of them were getting rich off the inmates, but Jack could not think of any reason why they should not. If they didn’t, somebody else would. Everybody was just doing his job, making the machinery run smoothly. And so Jack could not hate anybody, or blame anybody, but himself. And in the end he could not even hate himself, because he had not willed himself into jail; he just tried to live his life his own way and that ran against the grain and he ended up, almost accidentally, in jail. And he could not hate accident. That was crazy. He had to admit that he had been proud of himself, and that he nourished the memory of his long stay in the hole years before; that he had assumed he would be able to do his time standing on his head because the hole had been so much worse; but now he was in doubt. He was getting older. The boredom of it all, the sameness, the constant noise and smell of the tank, were driving him crazy. The fact that he was in was driving him crazy. He lost all his contempt for the