It did not seem that Czerny had spoken long enough to convey this much information. I suspected that the Latino man and his associates were running a hustle, pretending to interpret the maunderings of four senile old men and in the process guaranteeing a soft life for themselves.
Czerny muttered something more, and the Latino said, “Come visit me in my house whenever you wish.”
The old man assayed a faltering smile; the Latino steadied him as he turned and, with reverent tenderness, led him back to join the others. I framed a sarcastic comment but was stopped by Causey’s astonished expression. “What’s going on?” I asked.
“Man invited you to his house,” Causey said with an air of disbelief.
“Yeah… so?”
“That doesn’t happen too often.”
“I been here almost five years, and I don’t remember it ever happening,” Berbick said.
I glanced back and forth between them. “Wasn’t him invited me—it was his fucking handler.”
Berbick made a disdainful noise, shook his head as if he couldn’t fathom my stupidity, and Causey said, “Maybe when you go see him, you’ll…”
“Why the fuck would I go see him? So I can get groped by some old wheeze?”
“I guess you got better things to do,” Berbick said. He was acting pissed off again, and I said, “What crawled up your ass, man?”
He started to step to me, but Causey moved between us, poked me in the chest with two fingers and said, “You little hump! You walk straight up to eight from the door… You don’t seem to appreciate what that means. Frank Czerny invites you to his house and you ridicule the man. I been trying to help you…”
“I don’t want your help, faggot!”
I recognized Causey’s humorless smile as the same expression he had worn many years ago prior to ramming my head into a shower wall. I moved back a pace, but the smile faded and he said calmly, “Powers that be got something in mind for you, Penhaligon. That’s plain to everyone ’cept you. Seems like you forgot everything you learned about surviving in prison. You don’t come to new walls with an attitude. You pay attention to how things are and behave accordingly. Doesn’t matter you don’t like it. You do what you hafta. Pm telling you—you don’t get with the program, they gonna transfer your sorry ass.”
I pretended to shudder.
“Man thinks he’s a hardass,” said Berbick, who was gazing up at one of the guard turrets, an untenanted cupola atop a stone tower. “He doesn’t know what hard is.”
“Thing you oughta ask yourself,” Causey said to me, “is where you gonna get transferred to.”
He and Berbick started downslope, angling toward an unpopulated section of the east wall. Alone on the height, I was possessed by the paranoid suspicion that the groups of men huddled along the wall were all talking about me, but the only evidence that supported this was Colangelo, who was standing halfway down the slope to my right, some forty feet away, almost directly beneath the spot where the board was assembled. He was watching me intently, expectantly, as if anticipating that I might come at him. With his glowing scalp, his eyes pointed with gold, he had the look of a strange pink demon dressed in prison gray, and my usual disdain for him was supplanted by nervousness. As I descended from the ridge top, he took a parallel path, maintaining the distance between us, and though under ordinary circumstances I would have been tempted to challenge him, having alienated Causey and Berbick, knowing myself isolated, I picked up my pace and did not feel secure until I was back in my cell.
Over the next several days, I came to recognize that, as Causey had asserted, I had indeed forgotten the basics of survival, and that no matter how I felt about the board, about the nature of Diamond Bar, I would be well served to pay Czerny a visit. I put off doing so, however, for several days more. Though I would not have admitted it, I found the prospect of mounting the iron stair to the tier where Czerny lived intimidating—it appeared that in acknowledging the semblance of the old man’s authority, I had to a degree accepted its reality. Sitting in my cell, staring up at the dim white lights beyond the ninth stair, I began to order what I knew of the prison, to seek in that newly ordered knowledge a logical underpinning that would, if not explain everything I had seen, at least provide a middle ground between the poles of faith and sophism. I repaired my relationship with Causey, a matter of simple apology, and from him I learned that the prison had been constructed in the 1850s and originally used to house men whose crimes were related in one way or another to the boomtowns of the Gold Rush. The Board of Prisons had decided to phase out Diamond Bar in the 1900s, and at this time, Causey believed, something had happened to transform a horrific place that few survived into the more genial habitation it had since become. He had unearthed from the library copies of communications between the Board of Prisons and the warden, a man named McCandless Quires, that documented the rescinding of the phase-out order and conferred autonomy upon the prison, with the idea that it should become a penal colony devoted to rehabilitation rather than punishment. During that period, every level of society had been rife with reformers, and prison reform was much discussed—in light of this, such a change as Diamond Bar had undergone did not seem extraordinary; but the fact that it had been given to Quires to oversee the change; that smacked of the bizarre, for he had been frequently reprimanded by the Board for his abuses of prisoners. Indeed, it was the atrocities perpetrated during his stewardship that had induced the Board to consider the question of reform. It was reported that men had been impaled, flayed, torn apart by the prison dogs. Quires’s letters demonstrated that he had undergone a transformation. Prior to 1903, his tone in response to the Board’s inquiries was defiant and blasphemous, but thereafter his letters displayed a rational, even a repentant character, and he continued to serve as warden until his retirement in 1917. There was no record of a replacement having been appointed, and Causey theorized that the board as we knew it had then come to power, though it was possible, given Quires’s advanced age (eighty-eight), that they had been running things for many years previously. From 1917 on, communications between Diamond Bar and the Board of Prisons steadily diminished, and in 1945, not long before V-E Day, they apparently ceased altogether. It was as if the prison, for all intents and purposes, had become non-existent in the eyes of the state.
Once Causey showed me a yellowed photograph he had unearthed from the prison archives. It had been shot in the yard on a sunny day in May of 1917—the date was inscribed on the back of the photo in a crabbed script—and it depicted a group of a woman and five men, four convicts, one of them black, and the last, an elderly man with white, windblown hair and a craggy, seamed face, clad in a dark suit and tie. Causey identified the elderly man as McCandless Quires, the warden. “And these here,” he said, indicating the other four, “that’s the board.” He tapped each in turn. “Ashford, Czerny, LeGary, Holmes.”
Judging by their faces, the men were all in their twenties. There was a rough similarity of feature between them and the old men who met each day in the yard, but the idea that they were one and the same seemed absurd.
“That’s so, they’d all have to be more than a hundred,” I said. “They’re old, but not that old.”
“Look at the shape of their heads,” Causey said. “Their expressions. They all got that spacey smile. Look at Czerny’s hands. See how big they are? It’s them, all right.”
“You need to take a breath, man. This isn’t the fucking Magic Kingdom, this is prison we’re talking about.”
“This is Diamond Bar,” he said sullenly. “And we don’t know what the hell that is.”