Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [78]
There was only one way for Jack to react: he had to push.
“I won’t do it,” Jack said. “Fuck your factory.”
“Don’t you like that kind of work?”
“Drives me batty. I’ve done it before.”
A look of sympathy passed over the counselor’s face. “I know what you mean.” He did not seem bothered by the virtual “fuck you” Jack had flung at him. “Well, what would you like to do? I can’t find out unless you tell me.”
The softest job in the prison was kitchen work. “How about the kitchen?” Jack said. “I’ll work there.”
“You will, hey?”
“Sure. And, go to school, too. I mean, if you can work it.”
The counselor fussed with his papers. “We’ll see,” he said. Jack went back to isolation, expecting to feel justified and triumphant, but all he really felt was disgusted with himself. He was acting like a child. He was in isolation for another week, and then transferred to Billy Lancing’s cell and told that his schedule would be work in the kitchen from 4:30 A.M. to noon, with yard break, and then school in the afternoon. He could not understand it. Billy’s schedule was the same, except that he spent his afternoons teaching elementary arithmetic. “Ah’m a fuckin mathmatical genius, baby,” he told Jack with a delighted grin.
Thirteen
Jack spent his mornings mopping the dining hall, feeding one of the gigantic steam clippers, scouring pots and pans, all the KP duties of a newcomer to any kitchen, and in the morning break on the yard stood by himself in the sun. He ate early chow with the kitchen workers and then went on pass to the classroom and spent the afternoon in the oddly nostalgic atmosphere of learning. It was, in fact, the slowest part of the day. Their teacher was a convict, sent up for the usual white-collar crime of bad checks, a thin, egocentric man whose instruction moved painfully slowly, as slowly as if not more slowly than the dim comprehension of the dullest student, most of whom were much older than Jack. The young ones were nearly all fuckoffs from the factories and not even vaguely interested in grammar or English literature or California history. Jack was always glad when the day ended and he could go back to his cell. He brought his books with him and it was much easier just reading the books than studying them. And Billy was there, too, with another installment of his autobiography. Not that Billy wasn’t interested in Jack’s past or that he wanted to monopolize the conversation; just that Jack was not really talking yet. He was still trying to absorb the sights and sounds of the prison; it was his new home, and he expected it to be, almost wanted it to be, his home for the rest of his life. Because to think any other way was to hope, and he hoped he had given up hope.
Evenings were the best part of the day. After the bustle, the noise, the omnipresent danger and the constant sense of enforcement, being at home in a two-man cell was almost restful, even though there was always a threshold of noise that never lessened throughout the night, and even though there was another man sharing the semi-privacy. It was Jack’s luck that the other man was someone he could like and someone he could listen to with interest.
It was clear, of course, that Billy wasn’t talking just to hear himself, or to tell Jack about his adventures. By recapitulating the past Billy was in a sense getting out of the present, getting back into the world outside, as if by the magic of speech and memory he could for a few hours free himself from the cell, and as far as Jack was concerned, it worked. It not only drew Billy out, it took Jack with him, by the very simple fact that Jack could not think about Billy and think about himself at the same time. So, for a few hours each evening, the two of them wandered around the northern parts of the United States, living, reliving, the life of a small-time gambler. Those things Jack thought he would miss most, the colors and tastes of life on the outside, came back to him as he tried to picture the things Billy talked about, and often afterward he would lie on his bunk and wonder with