The Glass Cell Read online

  All over the prison and even in the hospital ward, men sat around writing letters with the aid of law books, lawyers’ form letters, and dictionaries. They wrote about habeas corpus, coram nobis, and a thousand personal grievances. Carter was often asked to look over their letters for spelling and grammar. These mistakes he could correct, but not the pitiful organization of some of the letters, which at first so disturbed him, he had written some letters over for the men. Then finally, seeing not one result from their efforts, he had let the poorly organized letters stand. Some were disorganized as a cry from the depths might be disorganized. Other letters were from habitual whiners, and the disorganization came from stupidity. Some whiners were skillful and even literary, and these showed their letters to Carter not for corrections but because they wanted compliments. Their letters were a creative outlet, as well as an outlet for resentment and hatred. Especially in Max’s cell block men came with letters, because they saw Max and him writing. Max wrote many letters for illiterate men. The prison permitted each inmate to write two such “business letters” per month.

  David Sullivan wrote to Carter:

  Perhaps the situation doesn’t sound very promising to you now, but all we need is a little more proof. Statements from people who were involved with Gawill, i.e., recipients of some of the money he was spending so lavishly during the time the money was disappearing from Triumph. Gawill and Palmer were reasonably cautious, but the men who could talk exist, and I’ve talked to two of them personally. Hazel knows their names, too, but it is best not to write them. Unfortunately they are afraid of Gawill’s retaliation and would like to see him behind bars before they talk, but the law doesn’t operate this way. However, the threat of this is breaking Gawill down slowly. He is back in N.O. on his old grounds and as usual the men around him are the dregs. I intend to go down there, even if it has to be in disguise . . .

  Max and his Negro cellmate acquired a third man, who slept on a cot, and from then on the French lessons were less pleasant. He wanted to wash his hair at 3:30, or he needed the table to write a letter on, and even if Max and Carter sat on Max’s lower bunk with their feet up on it, he complained about their “mumbling,” which was much lower than the voices from the corridor at that time of the afternoon. The new man was called Squiff. He was under thirty, blond, thin, with a scar on one cheekbone that went up into his temple. He had been in prison several times before, Max told Carter, though Max did not know why he was in now. He was probably in for the third time at least, and had received a heavy sentence. At any rate, he hated the world, and he certainly hated Max. Max was polite to him, considerate about space, generous with his cigarettes, but Carter saw that this only added fuel to Squiff’s resentment. Carter said to Max in French that he ought to try acting a little tougher for his own good. Max only shrugged.

  “I have a feeling he’s going to start a fight with you.”

  “Oh, I’m bigger than he is,” Max said.

  “I mean a nasty fight,” Carter said, and he knew Max knew what he meant—a shiv wound, a blow on the head with a chair when Max’s back was turned.

  “Ronny will help me,” Max said.

  Ronny was the big Negro. Carter knew Ronny detested Squiff also, but very few Negroes—there were a few in the prison whose terrible hatred of whites showed—dared to touch a white man, no matter what happened. Negroes were usually bunked with Negroes, and if this wasn’t possible, the white man was a northerner of apparently easygoing nature, like Max. Carter said nothing more about how Max ought to behave with Squiff, but Squiff’s presence irritated him more and more. He dared not look at Squiff, lest Squiff see his dislike in his face and start something.

  “Are you wise guys talking about me?” Squiff said one day, whirling around from the basin, where he had been washing out a shirt, flinging drops of water on to Max and Carter and their papers.

  “No, we’re—” Max hesitated. “We make up things to talk about. What’s there ever to talk about in this clink?”

  Carter forced himself to look down at his French dictionary. He did not even wipe away a droplet that stood on the page.

  Slowly, Squiff turned back to the basin, wrung his shirt out, shook it and hung it so violently on a hook there was a sound of ripping. “It’s a pity you intellectuals can’t take yourselves to the library or something.”

  Max was talking about Keyhole, the little dog in the laundry. The dog had been in the laundry nearly a month now, carefully concealed, of course, as pets were not permitted. The laundry workers had got him from the driver of a delivery truck that came inside the prison walls. He was a small black and white mongrel with some fox terrier in him, and he was about a year old, Max thought. Seventy or seventy-five men who worked in the laundry knew about the dog, but no guard did and no other inmates. The laundry workers brought him bits of meat from their meals, and one man had braided a collar for him out of dental floss. If anybody saw a guard enter the laundry, the word was, “Who’s got the time?” yelled in a loud voice, then the inmates nearest Keyhole would whisk him into a clothes locker until the guard left. Keyhole slept in a large locker at night, where he had food and water and shredded paper as his bathroom. He seemed to be happy, and he had gained weight.

  “You guys planning a break?” Squiff asked in a contemptuous, amused tone.

  Max laughed. “No, are you? Let me in on it.”

  “Ain’t there no French word for keyholes?” Squiff chuckled. “Ought to be.”

  Max said, “It’s the name of a little town. In Arkansas.”

  “Oh,” Squiff said.

  Carter had written to his Aunt Edna, answering a letter she had written to him and that Hazel had forwarded to the prison. He had explained why he was in prison as best he could, and had not mentioned the injury to his thumbs. One shock at a time was enough. He wrote the letter on the typewriter, so Edna would not see the change in his handwriting. When he sent the letter off, he felt very depressed and lost at the thought that Edna, who had always read a lot of newspapers and now that she was in California probably subscribed to the New York Herald-Tribune, her favorite, had not heard anything about his being in prison. He felt even worse when he received her next letter. She wrote:

  I was floored by your news. It is a terrible thing for Hazel and the boy, but knowing your Hazel I think she will bear up well even through this. But have you thoroughly examined your conscience and your actions? No one is totally innocent. I cannot believe that American courts of justice would sentence a man who is absolutely without guilt. You have always been forgetful, Philip, absentminded when you should pay attention. If you realized how in some measure, however small, you behaved wrongly, it would take away some of your bitterness and help you to make your peace with God . . .

  Carter realized then that Edna was growing old. She was in her mid-seventies, not ancient for some people but evidently for Edna. He let weeks go by before he answered her, and then he wrote a shorter, more careful letter in which he explained more clearly the means Palmer had used to appropriate the funds assigned by the school board to Triumph. Edna never answered the letter. Her sister Martha with whom she lived wrote to Carter in July that Edna was bedridden with dropsy and a weak heart, and that her doctor was not very hopeful that she would pull through. And in August, Martha wrote that she had died. Carter was to inherit half her estate, which would amount to about $125,000. Carter knew where the other half had gone, to Martha, which he supposed was fitting, as Edna had lived with her for more than ten years now, and Martha had not much money of her own. But all his life, Carter had been told he would be the sole heir of his uncle’s and presumably of his aunt’s money when they died. Carter was neither resentful of the half nor happy about it. It simply did not seem to matter. He did not mention the money to Max. Carter wanted Hazel to enjoy it, to invest most of it, and to give up any idea she had of working. She now was thinking of taking a two-year course that wo
uld give her a master’s degree in psychology and sociology, without which she couldn’t take a job of any importance anywhere.

  He had seen Hazel in July, when she again flew down with Timmy and this time she had stayed at Sullivan’s house in Clayton, several miles from Fremont. Carter was now much more reconciled to Hazel seeing Sullivan. He did not think they were having an affair or had ever had one. And if they had not up until now, they would not, Carter felt. His love for Hazel had undergone a strange and profound change in the prison. It was now a sexless, fleshless love, as if that part of their love which had been so intense before had withdrawn in abeyance. Yet his love for her had grown. He felt that her loyalty to him was and would be the greatest thing he would ever experience. When she said to him in her summer visit, “After all, the time here’s half over even if we figure it’s going to be six years,” then Carter felt quite calm and strong. Two years before, such words would have made him bitter and angry.

  The promise of the $125,000 after the will was probated did not change Hazel’s plans about the sociology degree, and she was going to start at Adelphi College in Long Island in September.

  August was a vaguely troubling month for Carter. The heat seemed worse than in other summers. Sullivan was again in New York, in the Knowltons’ apartment. Thus the years rolled on. In the last week in August, Keyhole was discovered. An inmate, rushing to hide him when a guard came in, had stepped on his foot and the dog had yelped. The guard—he had had to draw his gun to make himself obeyed, and then had failed—demanded that the animal be produced. By this time, Keyhole was in the locker, and nobody moved to get him out. Max said the laundry had been perfectly silent, all the machines turned off, and in the unusual stillness, Keyhole had barked. The guard had discovered the locker and pulled the dog out.

  “The screw looked mad enough to have shot the dog,” Max said, “but I swear if he had, the guys down there would have torn him to pieces.” Max spoke in French. Squiff was as usual present that day.

  The dog had been taken to the pound in Bowman, a nearby town. Max said some of the men were going to write a letter to the Bowman Eagle and try to find a home for him. The inmates were also sending the three dollars that were needed to get a license at the pound. The letter to the newspaper was to be signed by all the men in the laundry, so the prison authorities would not be able to pick on any one inmate or a few as the ones to blame.

  By the next morning, the whole prison seemed to know about Keyhole. It was strange that for three months the dog’s presence had been kept such a secret, and that within twenty-four hours of the dog’s removal, six thousand men seemed to know about it. They were resentful. Max said there had been whispering in the mess hall at supper the day the dog was found, and the screws had to blast out a warning over the loudspeaker that any man caught talking would lose his movie privileges over the weekend.

  “So you knew about Keyhole, but you wouldn’t let me in on it,” Squiff said to Max. He was sitting on the straight chair, scraping his nails with what looked like a toothpick. “You work in the laundry, don’t you?”

  Max said easily, “Oh, come on, Squiff, if we’d told everybody, that dog wouldn’t have been there two days. Some bastard would have told a screw.”

  “But you told your friend here.” He nodded at Carter. “He don’t work in the laundry, he’s a pill-pusher. Why’d you tell him?”

  Two days later, Max said the letter signed by all the fellows in the laundry had been stopped. The censor had evidently shown the letter to the warden, because the warden had piped up now, and every man in the laundry was getting two months’ extra time on his sentence and movie privileges taken away for the next month.

  Carter had left Max and was standing at the end of A-block, waiting for the elevator, when he heard the first roar of voices. It was from the direction of B-block. At first it sounded like cheering—but who ever cheered? The elevator door slid open, the operator heard it, and a stiff, surprised expression came on his face. All the inmates in the corridor of A-block stood silent, facing the growing sound. Others came out of their cells to listen.

  “It’s on!” somebody shrieked in a voice that cracked.

  “Come on in,” the elevator operator said quickly to Carter, but just then an inmate jumped on the operator, pinned his arms to his sides, and they both fell to the elevator floor.

  Suddenly everybody was running. Carter was knocked aside by three or four men who rushed into the elevator, yelping and laughing. A shot was fired within the cell block, but it sounded faint in the roar of voices. The elevator door shut. Carter turned and saw that the door into B-block was wide open and that men from A-block were pouring through it. He didn’t know where to go, had an impulse to duck into one of the cells nearby for safety, but he had hardly started toward the cells when he collided violently with a big man who was running. Carter gasped painfully, geting back the breath that had been knocked out of him. He was suddenly furious. He headed for B-block. The crush of bodies at the bottleneck of the door was terrifying. Carter was aware of a man’s body under his shoes. A few men punched at the heads of the men in front of them. Then Carter was through the door. Men were streaming down from the tiers of B-block, all yelling. Water cascaded from one of the tiers, and the men under it, who were getting wet, shouted and pushed at the human sea around them. Max’s cell was perhaps two hundred yards away, but it might as well have been two hundred miles. He gave up the idea of reaching him, and aimed for the cells on his left. An old man was trailing behind him, clinging to Carter’s shirt like a drowning man, and saying, “I want to get to my cell! My cell!”

  “Get away, bud!” a mad-faced inmate said when Carter finally reached a cell. There were four others in there with him, and they were holding the door shut.

  Carter pushed toward the next cell, going in the direction of Max. The whole mob was pushing toward C-block, and Carter supposed the doors were open. The next two cells had their doors open, but they were being raided, bedding torn up, mattresses flung on the floor. A toilet had been pulled out and water flowed. It crossed Carter’s mind that a lot of toilets pulled out could flood the downstairs and drown them all. In another cell, a man was screaming in pain: six or eight men were in the cell, beating and kicking at the screaming man, who was not visible. Carter gave up the cell idea. What chance had he if hundreds had the same idea? He saw a single man desperately trying to hold a barred door shut on himself, and failing. A toilet was flung in a heavy arc over Carter’s head, and at least two men dropped beneath it.

  “Here we go! Pass him on!” someone sang out, and a man was passed feet first and horizontal, laughing and out of his mind, over the heads of all, touched by many, hit in resentment and fear, helped on by other laughing men, and soon he was far on the way to the door of C-block and out of sight.

  “Hang the warden! Hang the warden!” The chant grew.

  Carter looked for Max. He saw Hanky, grinning and yelling, waving a homemade knife in triumph. Water slammed down on Carter and the men around him, and in the press to escape it, Carter was swept out into the center of the corridor. But there the stream moved faster, and within seconds he was abreast of Max’s cell, and he fought his way toward it.

  Max’s cell was occupied by about eight men, wide-eyed with fear, all standing rigid, holding the door shut.

  “Where’s Max?” Carter yelled at them.

  “Who?”

  “Max! That’s his cell!”

  The men looked blank. Maybe they hadn’t heard him. He was shouting across a dozen men. Carter did not know any of the men in Max’s cell.

  The crowd was suddenly much thinner around Carter. They were finally pushing through into C-block.

  “Shove on, buddy,” one of the men in Max’s cell said to Carter.

  “I’m not trying to get in. Don’t any of you know where Max is?”

  A few cell doors were opening now.
Some men came out yelping and screaming with laughter. They had taken refuge only during the worst, and they were ready to join in again.

  “Let’s get out of here,” said one of the men in Max’s cell.

  Suddenly the cell door opened and they all slipped out in a fast stream, eight, perhaps ten men.

  Max lay on the floor at the back of the cell.

  When he turned Max over and saw his face, he knew he was dead. Max’s face was full of blood and absolutely smashed. Carter gasped, took a few short, crazy breaths, then charged out the door. He ran toward C-block, after the ten men. One of them had done it, or more than one, fighting for Max’s cell. A large man half jokingly reached out and stopped Carter with a thick arm. Carter raised a foot and shoved it into the man’s stomach. The man reeled back and hit the wall. He went down. Carter jumped on him. He jumped on his face, his body, he kicked him. Loud voices nearby cheered him on. Carter seized the man’s shirt collar in both hands and banged his head against the stone floor.

  Then a Negro inmate pulled Carter by his shirtfront, grinned into his face and said, “Hey, man, you goin’ crazy!”

  Carter threw his fist at the Negro and missed.

  The Negro hit back, and Carter was knocked unconscious.

  When he came to, the cell block was silent, except for two voices at the far end. Two inmates stood there with guns in their hands. A third man stood by himself, also with a gun, at the other end of the block, much nearer to Carter.

  “Thought you were daid, Joe,” said the nearest man with the gun, a Negro. He danced slowly from foot to foot.

  Carter tried to push himself up, and his arm gave way, bending strangely, and he realized it was broken. He got up with the aid of his other arm and staggered toward the support of an open cell door. The cell was empty. He collapsed on the lower bunk, on the bare springs, because the bedding was all over the floor.