Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [82]
It was at about this time, three weeks after Jack started working in the kitchen, that Claymore disappeared from San Quentin. Everyone was delighted, and began making book on his capture. With not too much else to do that had the spice of life to it, gambling was very important to some of the convicts, and they would bet on almost anything. Of course the biggest bets were on the men in death row, and of them, the most action was on Caryl Chessman, who had been there over four years already and whose arrogant, intelligent face inspired nearly everybody. To them, to some of them, he was one little man, using his larceny and his brains against the entire machinery of the State. If he finally won, there was an unconscious yearning in many of them that the State, the machinery, all, would just fizzle away and the gates open and they could go home. The odds on Chessman at this time were there to four against. Jack saw him once, crossing the big yard under escort; he was surprised at how small Chessman was.
The odds on Claymore were a little more sentimental; after all, he was an expert in a sense, and so the betting was a flat even-money proposition.
The night they heard about it Billy was excited and nervous in the cell. “Man,” he said to Jack, “me and that Claymore are connected. I can feel it.”
“What do you mean? Because he’s a Negro?”
Billy rubbed his mouth. He did not look either happy or unhappy, but disturbed. “I don’t know. When he first come in here and headed up that pipe I could feel it, you know. Connected. That’s all.”
From Billy’s mood, Jack decided not to ask any more questions, and spent the time until lights-out reading in his history book. Afterward, in the semidarkness, he heard Billy say from above, “That man’s got to stay free.”
Now, this was something Jack could not understand. He knew, of course, that free meant outside the prison, and that he himself wanted that, especially when he awakened in the mornings to the cell, or stood by the door while the guard at the end of the long walkway pulled down the heavy bar that locked the cells; at such moments there was a heavy tension in him to just run, run down the gallery past a thousand cells or throw himself off the side and into the court; a pain starting at the edges of his eyes as he sat still for the count or put on his shoes—that he could understand, but not Billy’s passionate need for Claymore to stay free. Personal freedom, yes, of course; but why freedom for somebody else? It did not make sense.
“If you want to escape,” he said to Billy, “why don’t you try?”
Billy laughed. He did not even bother to answer. When they heard Claymore was caught and on Alcatraz, Billy brooded for days.
Fourteen
Eventually, with so much time ahead of him, Jack got used to San Quentin. The yellow walls, the tall barred windows, the girders in the dining hall, became as familiar as home to him; even the smokestacks, through one of which the cyanide gas and a man’s life had too often risen, wrinkling the sky for a few minutes above the north block at around ten in the morning. He even learned how to play dominoes, out at the picnic tables in the big yard. He had to—the enemy here was even more intangible than in reform