Glass Cell Page 8

  Sullivan gave a laugh. “Don’t be silly. As far as Hazel goes, I think I’d have the same chance with her whether you were in or out. The point is, I have no chance.”

  What kind of sense did that make, Carter thought, when Sullivan had just said he wouldn’t have said anything to Hazel, if he hadn’t been off the scene—in prison?

  “You might say,” Sullivan went on, “if I really care about Hazel, I’ll help her to get what she wants and that’s you.”

  Carter spread his elbows on the table and smiled. A couple of colorful prison expressions for that kind of talk came to his mind. “I don’t believe in the age of chivalry. Anymore,” he added.

  “Oh. I’m sure you do. From what Hazel tells me here and there. Don’t let prison make you callous, Phil.”

  Carter said nothing.

  “Do you think I’m dragging my feet on this Gawill investigation?” Sullivan asked, leaning forward. “I’m inquiring about his behavior on his former jobs, too, from New Orleans to . . . to Pittsburgh. Back to here. Gawill knows it. Even if he’s innocent—I mean in the Triumph affair—he hasn’t a clean past and the word is spreading and Gawill’s squirming. Drexel knows about it. Drexel might fire him, just on the suspicions I’ve raised about him. Drexel ought to fire him, but it’d look too much as if Drexel weren’t very bright about his own staff when your trial was on.”

  Sullivan looked at him expectantly, then in a baffled, angry way as Carter said nothing: “If I go too far—if I’m a little too successful, Gawill, I’m sure, wouldn’t mind putting me out of commission.”

  “How could he?”

  “I mean killing me. Having me killed, of course.”

  “Do you really mean that?”

  “He was with a very tough company in New Orleans, and there was a mysterious killing there. Gawill kept clear of it, of course, so did the whole company he was with. But a fellow named Beauchamp who was in the State Legislature and very noisy about upholding parish laws, was found strangled in a bayou. Then the company Gawill was with pushed their building plans through. Oh, it’s a detail from your point of view, maybe, but my point is, Gawill is that kind of man. He’ll have somebody eliminated who’s—”

  A guard touched Carter’s shoulder, and Carter rose. “Sorry,” Carter said.

  Sullivan stood up, and his frown of intensity left his face. He was once more upright and calm. “I’ll see you soon again, Phil. Keep your chin up.” Then he turned and walked quickly away.

  8

  From time to time, Carter took medicines and pills to inmates in the various cell blocks. There were six cell blocks, and C was the worst, as Dr. Cassini had said. The gray stone walls of C-block looked dirtier, it was darker (due to several electric lights not functioning), and the men seemed older and quieter, yet the atmosphere was more sullenly hostile than in the other blocks. The memory of Cherniver’s murder was still fresh in Carter’s mind and perhaps in the minds of all the others. The inmates could pass over a man like a flood. For a few seconds, a score, any score of them could get their whacks in, and then the flood could move on, innocent of face, calm in manner, the guilty ones nameless, unidentifiable, because they were all equally guilty. And if he had been in good health with a strong pair of hands, Carter thought, and if he had been walking close enough to Cherniver that day? Yes, he might have got his whack in, too, even without the added inspiration of having been bullied by Cherniver personally.

  The cell blocks of the State Penitentiary were connected, all six of them, though only four, A to D, were of the original structure. These did not connect at right angles and did not form a square. Blocks E and F were simply hitched to each other, E-block to one end of D-block. From a distance, and Carter remembered it from his approach by car in November, the prison looked like an ancient wreck of a six-carriage train in which the carriages had piled up due to a sudden stopping of the first. Double doors with a guard at each door divided blocks A to D, and individual men with passes were let through in the same manner in which guards let men through the cage at the front of A-block. The mess hall and workshops and laundry were below some of the blocks, and men marched in double file to these places. The pairing off and marching began as each batch from its own block entered a new block. The L that E- and F-blocks made had been turned into an enclosure by a high fence of heavy wire topped by barbed wire. This was the recreation yard, where, between 4 and 5 o’clock, shifts of men pranced and trotted under the eyes of a dozen guards who stood around the edges armed with machine guns. The prison was now so overcrowded that not all the inmates could eat at once, and there were two shifts for meals.

  In E-block, there was a bull of a man about fifty years old with a sore behind his left ear. Dr. Cassini had seen him up in the ward and dismissed him with instructions to use a certain ointment. Now Carter was delivering a second tin of it. The man was alone in his cell. Carter asked him where his cellmate was.

  “Lucky bastard went home. Mother died.”

  “Home?”

  “Yeah, he’ll be gone for two nights. Chicago. See his wife.” The bullethead lifted and looked at Carter with a sly wink.

  The man rambled on. A couple of furlough screws went with Sweepey, and he’d had to go handcuffed, even on the train up, but he’d get to spend two nights with his wife. Carter was lost in a kind of incredulity, as if the man had told him a fantastic story of physical disappearance, metamorphosis, of slipping through keyholes.

  Carter shook his head suddenly, shocked by the intensity of his own thoughts. “Lucky guy,” he said automatically.

  The bullethead scowled at him, angry at the interruption. Then, to Carter’s complete surprise, he stood up and drew his right fist back.

  Carter stepped back, over the raised threshold of the cell and into the corridor.

  The man yelled a two-word curse and threw the little tin of ointment as hard as he could. It hit the wall of the cell beside the door, came open and the lid spun, sounding like a silly giggle, before it came to rest on the floor.

  Four days later, Carter faked a request, got a pass from Clark, and went back to cell twenty-seven in E-block just to see Sweepey. He carried another tin of the ointment. It was just after 4, when the inmates of E-block were in their cells awaiting the bell for late supper. This time the bullethead was not in the cell, but Sweepey was, sitting with the earphones on, whistling and jigging in his chair and snapping his fingers.

  “Hello, pill-pusher, and what can I do for you?” He seemed so elated, he might have been drunk.

  “I brought some more stuff for your chum.”

  “Okay, okay, I’ll tell him.”

  Carter’s eyes moved from the man’s dark hair down his body to his prison shoes and up again. “Heard you just went home.”

  “Yeah, not much fun, but still it was home. My mother died.” He was still in the mood of the music, obviously wanting to put the earphones on again.

  “Well—at least you saw your wife,” Carter said with a blunt naïveté. He was ready to leave, he had not even entered the cell, only tossed the ointment onto the lower bunk, but he could not tear himself away. He stared at Sweepey, trying to see some magical sign of it all.

  “Yeah, it’s gotta last me a long time.” Sweepey guffawed. “My old man’s dead, nobody left except my sister and she’s the pitcher of health!” He put on the earphones and turned back to the little table. “Thanks for Jeff,” he said.

  Carter went away.

  It was two or three months after that, around Thanksgiving, that Carter met Max Sampson. Max was in B-block, where Carter was delivering some cough medicine. The delivery was not to Max’s cell. Carter noticed him because he was reading a French book—paperbound with the title Le Promis in red—sitting at the little table in his cell. He was alone. Carter paused by the half-open cell door.

  “Pardon me,” Carter said.

 
; The man looked up.

  “You’re French?”

  The man smiled. His face was friendly, calm, and very pale. His large, strong forehead looked almost white below his black and slightly wavy hair. “Naw. I just read it sometimes.”

  “Can you speak it?”

  “I used to. Yeah, I can speak it. Why?” Again he smiled.

  The smile by itself was a pleasure for Carter, a smile being such a rare thing in the prison. Sneers, yes, and guffaws, but not simply a natural, happy-looking smile. “I only asked because I’m studying it—on my own. Vouz pouvez parler—vraiment?”

  “Oui.” Now the wider smile showed strong white teeth, whiter than his face.

  Carter talked with him for ten minutes, until the bell rang for lunch and Max had to leave. They talked both in French and in English, and Carter became strangely excited and happy. When Carter hesitated for a word, Max supplied it, if he could guess it. Max had about twenty books lined up in a row at the back of his cell, and half of them were French books. Very generously he pressed two of them on Carter, one a book of eighteenth-century French poetry, the other selections from Pascal’s Pensées. They were a loan, of course, but Max said he did not care when he got them back. Carter returned to the ward feeling completely changed. Max was the first person he had met in the prison whom he felt glad to know, with whom he felt a friendship could grow. It was a wonderful thing. In that ten minutes, he had learned that Max was from Wisconsin; his father had been an American but his mother was French; and from the age of five to eleven he had lived in France with his mother and gone to school there. He had been in prison five years, he had said airily in answer to Carter’s question. He had not said why he was in prison, and Carter was really not interested in knowing.

  Max had said that he was competing with another inmate in B-block to achieve the whitest prison pallor by Christmas Eve. The bet was six cans of instant coffee, and Max thought he was going to win, even though his competitor was a blond. Because of the bet, Max shielded his face carefully in the twice-a-week airings in the recreation yard. A panel of six inmate judges had already been chosen to pick the winner. “I’ve always been pale,” Max had said in his slow, distinct French, with a smile. “Very early it was plain I was marked for a life in prison.”

  They had an appointment to meet again at 3:35 in Max’s cell the following day.

  In the golden light of his new acquaintance, Hazel’s last letter sounded melancholic, even lugubrious. She had written:

  Darling, do you think that fate (or God) put this awful trial in our path to test us? Please forgive me if I sound mystical. That’s the way I feel tonight—and many nights. One way of looking at this—our awful lives now, each awful in its own way—is that it is a test given to very few people. We have come through it so well up to now, I mean as far as fortitude goes. So let us continue and see it through. My thoughts are no doubt influenced by the talk I had (over the phone) with Mr. Magran this afternoon . . .

  Magran had told her that they couldn’t appeal again until mid-January to the State Supreme Court, owing to the holidays. That seemed now no blow at all to Carter. He wrote:

  You are always asking me why I haven’t met anybody decent in this place, and I’m always saying there isn’t anybody decent, but as of today I take that back. By accident I met a nice fellow who knows French (reads and speaks it) so now I have someone to practice with. His name is Max Sampson, he is about my age, tall, dark-haired, and very pale. More about the pallor when I see you. He is in B-block, but I think I can visit him when I like.

  Then Carter realized he had nothing more to say about Max, because he didn’t know anything more, except the bit about his French mother.

  In the next days, Carter still did not learn much more about Max, but their twenty- or twenty-five minute meetings in Max’s cell were the highspots of Carter’s day. Max’s cellmate was a large, good-natured Negro, who couldn’t understand more than “oui” of their French, but he kept out of their way in the upper bunk while Carter was with Max, and read his old worn-out comic books or listened to the earphones. Carter’s letters were now full of Max, and he talked about Max to Hazel when he saw her on Sundays. To Carter’s surprise, Hazel seemed almost resentful of his new friend.

  “I thought you wanted me to find someone I liked in this hellhole,” Carter said.

  “Do you realize that out of nearly twenty minutes you’ve spent more than ten talking about him?” Hazel smiled, but her annoyance was plain.

  “I’m sorry. It’s a dull life I lead here, darling. Had you rather I talked about—oh, say, the couple of dimwits in the ward now who nearly blinded themselves drinking alcohol from the typewriter repair shop?” Carter laughed. He laughed more easily since meeting Max. “I’d like you to meet Max. He’s— Well, I think from a woman’s point of view, he’s not even bad-looking.”

  But Hazel was never to meet Max. She might have met him by asking to see him one Sunday, by stating that she was a friend, and Carter thought of this, but Max declined it. “Oh, I think it’s better if I don’t. Bad luck,” he said in English, so Carter never proposed it again. He had not proposed it to Hazel either, sensing that she would say no also. Hazel could never see Max even in the visiting room, because Max never had any visitors. He had no family, he said, and the only person who had ever visited him was his former landlord, a man who had rented a room in his house to him just before Max went to prison. He had come twice to the prison, but that had been in Max’s first year. Still, Carter thought it spoke well for Max that his last landlord had visited him twice. But Carter asked no questions about Max’s past. Max had asked none about his, but he had noticed Carter’s thumbs, knew what had caused their deformity, and had said only, “This is a cruel place,” in a tone of resignation, in French.

  Max and Carter went to the movie together on Saturday and Sunday nights. It was good to have someone beside him who thought the films just as mediocre as he did. Their friendship was noticed, of course, by some of the guards as well as many inmates. Some of the inmates assumed they were homosexual, and made comments to Carter’s face and behind his back, within his hearing. Carter was not bothered by the comments, but he was a little concerned about what they might lead to. Some inmates took a pleasure in beating up men who engaged in homosexual practices. Carter was careful to look behind him as he walked to Max’s cell block in the afternoons, lest anybody jump on him. The door of Max’s cell was always open when he was there—not that one could not have seen through its bars, anyway—and the Negro was there, too. Carter realized he had never even touched Max, even to shake hands.

  “Studying forgery?” the guard in Max’s cell block asked one afternoon as he let Carter by.

  “Forgery?”

  “I seen you writing sometimes in there.” He nodded toward Max’s cell. “He’s a good forger, Max. One of the best.” The guard smiled.

  Carter waved a hand, tried to smile, and went on. He thought of Max’s slow, clear writing which Carter had seen in his notebooks. Max kept a diary sporadically, and occasionally he wrote a poem in French. His handwriting had a curiously innocent look. Forgery. It was an unpleasant shock to Carter, as if someone had snatched off Max’s clothes and Carter saw him in the nude. Well, Carter thought, at least he wasn’t in for murder.

  It had occurred to Carter that, because of knowing Max, a second rejection from the Supreme Court, if it came, would be easier to bear. Thus Carter tried to prepare himself in advance for the worst. The second rejection came in the 5:30 p.m. post one day in April. This time, it shocked him more than the first rejection. His impulse was to run at once to Max’s cell, but it was not possible to see Max at that hour. Carter went into the toilet and lost the supper he had eaten an hour before. He did not want to see anyone or talk to anyone, but he could not achieve that condition either. In the prison, there was no privacy.

  That night he slept ve
ry little, and finally out of sheer boredom with his own thoughts, took a Nembutal. The next morning he did his work with a stony face and mind, ate no lunch, and at 3 o’clock fixed himself a cup of coffee on the burner in the washroom. The coffee was from one of the three cans of Nescafé that Max had given him for Christmas. Max had won the bet for prison pallor, and had shared the spoils with Carter.

  When he got to Max’s cell, he sat down on the lower bunk with his hands over his face. He wept shamelessly, not caring that the Negro was standing there beside Max, bewildered, that a screw, an inmate, whoever looked in and saw an inmate sobbing, would stop and stare for a moment.

  “I know,” Max said. “It’s the Supreme Court thing, isn’t it?” he asked in French.

  Carter nodded.

  The Negro heard “Supreme” and understood. “Holy, holy Jesus,” he said mournfully, then lumbered out of the cell so they could be alone.

  Max lighted one of his cigarettes and gave it to Carter.

  Carter told Max about his job with Triumph, about Wallace Palmer, about the trial, about being sent to prison over last September and how unbelievable it had been to him. He told Max about Gawill and about Sullivan, and about Sullivan and his wife.

  “I’ve got to make Hazel go away now, back to New York,” Carter said, banging his fist down on his thigh, heedless of his thumb.

  “Don’t decide anything today,” Max said in a calm, deep voice, like the voice of God himself.

  Carter sat in silence for a while.

  Max began to speak in French, about going to France when he was five, and of his childhood there. When his father died and the alimony stopped, his mother brought him back to Wisconsin, where he had been born. They had a few relatives there on his father’s side. His mother had remarried, but his new stepfather had no intention of putting him through college, so after high school, Max had got a job in a printer’s shop and learned the trade. He had met Annette when he was twenty-one and she nineteen, and they had wanted to marry, but her father had made them wait two years because he did not want his daughter to marry before she was twenty-one. “I waited, but still I was happy because I was in love,” Max said. Then Annette, when they had been married not quite a year, had died. Max’s mother had been visiting them, and Annette had driven a car over a cliff with his mother in the car also. Annette had swerved the car to avoid a deer that suddenly ran across the road, according to a man in another car who had seen the accident. Annette had been pregnant. Then Max had started drinking and had lost his job. He had come south and in Nashville had met a lot of “bad characters,” including ex-jailbirds and forgers. Max had learned how to forge, and the robbers and pickpockets of the gang used to bring him their traveler’s checks and anything else that needed a signature. “Certainly I knew I was a crook,” Max said, “but I was alone in the world, nobody cared, and I didn’t care.” It was a profitable business for all concerned, and he had thought he was in a particularly safe position in the outfit, but their headquarters were raided one night by two plainclothesmen. Max killed one of them in a fight, so he was in for both forgery and manslaughter and had been sentenced to seventeen years.