Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [76]
Twelve
The Negro who had been sitting behind Jack on the bus wanted to go to prison even less than Jack. His name was Claymore. He was not a very hard case, even though he had held up a grocery store with a gun. But he kept trying to escape. When the police of Watts, California, came for him, he jumped out the back window of his apartment and they caught him in the alley with a twisted ankle. Then he tried to get out of the police car when it stopped at a red light. He did not offer the police any violent resistance, he just tried to get away. At the police station, handcuffed to one of the officers, he tried to sidle away from the desk, and when they jerked him back he said he wanted to go to the toilet. Claymore did not try to escape again until municipal court. He tried to walk out of the courtroom after being bound over for trial, and at the actual trial, three weeks later, he tried running. But that didn’t work, either. He tried to get out of the county jail three times, and once got as far as the elevator, but when the doors opened at the main floor they were waiting for him. There was nothing they could do but chain him up like an animal. They did so reluctantly, because he did not look at all dangerous.
They had showers after their chains were removed, and sat in a corner of the gigantic dining hall in San Quentin, eating supper. “I just continually want out,” Claymore said to Jack. “Hell, I got ten years to do.”
Jack was still in isolation when Claymore tried his first escape attempt from Quentin. He was missing for three days. He had been assigned to one of the factories and on his first day at work he vanished. Everyone was mystified. They found him near the end of the third day, stuffed up into a ventilating shaft. They put him in isolation for a while, and a couple of the counselors tried talking to him. They convinced him that it would just hurt his chances of early release if he kept trying to escape. He agreed with them and they sent him back to work. He worked for three weeks in the varnishing room of the furniture factory and then disappeared again and was not caught for well over a month. They got him in Colorado, in a stolen car. The authorities of two states and the Federal Government talked it over and the Federal Government said they could handle him, so they tried and convicted him of crossing a state line in a stolen car, and sentenced him to five years in Federal prison; after which he would be returned to California to serve the full ten years of his previous conviction. Because of his record, Claymore was sent finally to Alcatraz, and when the news of his capture and trial filtered back to San Quentin Claymore was already serving time only a few miles across the bay. Nobody ever escaped from The Rock.
“That Claymore boy has a lot of heart,” Jack’s cellmate said. “But I do wish I knew how the hell he got out of here. Don’t you?”
This cellmate was a Negro who refused to be classified as a Negro; his name was Billy Lancing, and he and Jack had known each other briefly several years before. When Jack got his job in the kitchen, Billy pulled some strings and they became cell partners. Billy looked different: his hair was paler red, his face sallower, and at one point in his career as a crossroader and pool hustler he had lost all his front teeth, which had been replaced with brilliantly white, obviously artificial teeth. To set them off, Billy had capped both his eyeteeth in gold, and all this gave his frequent grin a multicolored look. Otherwise he was much the same as Jack remembered him, small, narrow, giving the appearance of being in the last stages of tuberculosis.
Jack did not know how to take him. Billy talked a lot, and Jack wanted to be let alone. There was something wrong with San Quentin, and he wanted time to think about it.
“Can you figure it, man,” Billy continued. “He gets