‘The B. of I. give me the business. For seventy-two hours they kept me in the blue room and the things a bunch of tough coppers can think to do to a guy who won’t talk makes me shaky when I remember it yet. I could tell you things that’d make Uncle Sam’s whiskers turn black.
‘They jumped on my feet. They slapped my ears till I couldn’t hear. They put the glare in my eyes and held the lids open till I thought I was going blind and all the time somebody I couldn’t see kept hollering right into my ear at the top of his lungs. I got a pivot tooth now in place of one some ham-handed law cracked out, but I aced it out. Years later in stir I used to wake up thinking they were starting on me again, but I aced it. I aced it till one of my fluffs heard a radio broadcast ’n sent me a lawyer. That was when my real troubles begun.
‘You should of seen the jobs they hung on me! A finger for every jewel heist pulled in California since the earthquake. I found I was the Hollywood Taxi Bandit, and also some San Diego peterman who’d been out of range over a year. They put me up in front of some goof in pinch-nose glasses squealing I was the guy stuck him up in Pasadena and took his portable typewriter. Now would I fool around like that with all that ice in my kick?
‘Still I wouldn’t widen about the ice. I was framed was all I’d say. I went back and talked to the stir-simple kukes in the clink. They told me the only way to handle my case was to get some broad-lawyer whose daddy was a judge – she’d drag it into his court and get it whitewashed.
‘One old-timer warned me, “Don’t let no lawyer get you to shake another man’s jolt,” but I didn’t heed him. I give the broad-lawyer a large slice and for three months I lay in that lousy jail when I should have been partying in Chicago. Then she told me the best thing I could do was ask for probation. I had no record, it should go through sweet. I listened and pleaded guilty to two of them bum beefs, stuff somebody else had pulled they had to have a culprit for, and threw myself on the mercy of the court as a first-offender. Then up spoke my broad-lawyer right beside me, “Your Honor, this man has had his chance” – Wham! Daddy give me 4½ – 1 CC – two stretches, one for four and a half and the other for a year to be served concurrently.
‘There I was with my ice in Wilmington Harbor, clean of my own jobs but tagged for two other guys’ and on my way to San Q.
‘I was still laughing. But for some reason I kept gagging.
‘I don’t mind getting roughed up, everybody gets roughed up. Everybody, in jail or out, is shaking somebody else’s jolt. The thorn that sticks my side to this day is the one time in my life I was innocent was the one time that I got it. You through with them funnies, buddy? Let’s see ’em here. Maybe some of ’em’s in trouble ’n I’ll have to help ’em out.’
Country Kline claimed it was because of his good behavior but it must have been bad bookkeeping – he had been released from Leavenworth nine days before his last sentence had expired officially. When he’d learned of the error, he was in the South and had raced all over Louisiana and Mississippi trying to get some local official to lock him up for nine days in a county jail, give him a receipt and thus square him away with Federal law. He was uneasy about surrendering directly to Leavenworth lest he have to go to bat again against the same judge who’d already sentenced him once. ‘He might just get mad and give me a year for contempt or something,’ was what Country still feared.
He’d driven for days, asking gas station attendants whether they thought he was a fugitive, but no local official would lock him up. ‘You don’t owe us nothing down here, son,’ sheriffs and constables alike had told him. ‘You owe it to Broomface, not to us. Go on back to Kansas, son, we don’t want you. They got to take you.’
Now he waited for the feds with a mixture of hope and fear he could never clearly divide, his cap tilted cockily on the side of his head and a plug of Red Seal in his cheek. Dove studied that philosophical mug creased like a first-baseman’s mitt and concluded he couldn’t possibly have done better for a cell mate.
Whatever happened, it was Country’s consolation, he had Broomface where it pinched. He owed so much time here and there that even were he to serve it concurrently, he was sure to die owing at least fifty years. They’d never be able to collect.
He saw new ways and means of beating the law even in devices invented by madmen. One day Natural Bug came up with a brand new one. When told by a turnkey, ‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you,’ Bug replied quickly, ‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you,’ When the doctor poked his head into his cell to ask ‘How you feeling?’ Bug answered as fast, ‘How you feeling?’ Every attempt at conversation with him whether about the weather, death or parole withered on the vine.
‘One conversation with you is its own cure,’ his own cell mate abandoned him in disgust, and sure enough – ‘One conversation with you is its own cure,’ Natural Bug replied.
‘He’s no more bug than you or I,’ Country felt certain, ‘all he wants is privacy and I can’t blame him. I don’t even want to think of the trouble I could have saved myself if I’d thought of a thing as simple as that years ago.’
All of the inmates of Tank Ten were white. At night they heard laughter from the Negro tier one flight above, and most of the trusties were short-term Negroes. Murphy insisted it was his influence that kept the tank lily white, but Dove suspected privately that the authorities had something to do with it.
These were neither the great gray wolves of the snowplain wilderness nor fanged cats treed and spitting; but only those small toothless foxes of summer someone had chased and someone had chained, barking at changes in the weather.
The tricked, the maimed, the tortured and the sly, doers of small deeds from the nation of furnished rooms, they came off streets half as old as time to buy a little and sell a little and take their adventure in penny arcades. Their lives had been bounded by those windows SAYING ROOM FOR TRANSIENT. SLEEPING ROOM. LIGHT HKSP., where across a book of a thousand names the clerk who proffers the pen suggests, ‘Give me a phony, mister. We’re both safer off that way.’
Everybody is safer off that way.
They emerged from between those long green walls and those long spook-halls that are shadowed by fixtures of another day. That damp dull green the very hue of distrust; where every bed you rent makes you accessory to somebody else’s shady past.
They were the ones who’d rather play a pinball machine than put in a claim to a desk in an ad agency. Above gutters that run with a dark life all their own or down cat-and-ashcan alleys too narrow for a Chrysler, they hid out in that littered hinterland behind the billboards’ promises, evading the rat-race for fortune and fame. Their names were ‘Unemployed Talent Scout’ and ‘Part-Time Fry Cook,’ ‘Part-Time Beautician’ and ‘Self-Styled Heiress,’ ‘Water-Ski Instructor’ and ‘Dance-Instructress.’ And they strolled as matter-of-factly through their part-time nightmares into a self-styled daylight no less terrible than all their dreams. Their names were the names of certain night-blue notions and they seldom lay down to rest.
Their crimes were sickness, idleness, high spirits, boredom and hard luck. They were those who had failed to wire themselves to courts, state attorney’s office or police. Hardly a stone so small but was big enough to trip them up and when they fell they fell all the way.
Fell all the way and never got up. If life was a cinch by the inch, they did it by the yard. They always found someone named Doc to play cards with. They went out of their way to eat in a place called Mom’s. They slept only with women whose troubles were worse than their own. In jail or out, they were forever shaking somebody else’s jolt, copping somebody else’s plea, serving somebody else’s time. They were unwired to anything.