Felony Tank Read online

  As soon as he got over the worst of his nervousness, Doug realized he was cold, and he was thinking about unrolling his blankets when he heard a quiet voice directly above him.

  “Hey—Agnes. We caught a fish.”

  Another voice answered sleepily from somewhere across the cell. “What?”

  “Someone just came in.”

  “In here?”

  Doug heard movement over his head and he lay perfectly still, feeling his heart against the mattress. The darkness of the bunk above him seemed to press against his face.

  “Damned if they didn’t. Hey, buddy….”

  Doug hoped they would think he was asleep. He wasn’t ready to talk or answer a lot of questions. But the voice persisted.

  “Hey, you!”

  He began to fake a loose snoring noise, and the quieter voice directly above him said, “Sounds like a wino.”

  “Damned if he don’t. How’d you like to be gassed like that?”

  “Yeah, but think how he’s going to feel when he wakes up in jail.”

  “Where do you think you’re going to wake up?”

  “Sure, but at least I know it.”

  “Now that’s a big help.”

  Both the voices seemed young and their speech was slurred with a western flavor that made them sound scoffing, but friendly. There was silence for a moment, and Doug was wondering if he could unfold his blankets without tipping them that he was awake, but then he heard:

  “Hey, Billy. Want to roll him?”

  There was a pause, and Doug forgot to snore. He hoped he’d be ready to fight if they tried to mess with him, but he couldn’t be sure. He got scared at the wrong times.

  The voice he’d identified as Billy said, “Maybe we better not. I didn’t get a good look at him. He might turn out to be nine foot tall.”

  “If he is, we’ll sic him on Carl. That’d be something to see.”

  One of them laughed softly.

  They went on talking in whispers, and when Doug was sure they were no longer interested in him, he stopped making the snoring noise. He lay quietly listening. In the other lower bunk across from him, he could make out a grayish face, the mouth a slowly moving dark blur.

  He was beginning to drift away into his own thoughts when the quality of whispering above him changed and took on the simmer of compressed emotion. He realized right away he had no business listening. But he listened anyway.

  They were talking about something they must have talked about hundreds of times because there were big holes of silent understanding. Still the import was clear: escape.

  How could they hope to? Doug had looked at the tank on the way in. Everything was barred and double-doored. But he could tell they were serious, because deep in their voices there was a note of constant anxiety.

  They were waiting for something they needed—blades, they called them, and Doug immediately thought of knives. They expected someone named Slim to bring them.

  That was all they really said, but they went on talking about whether he would bring them or whether he wouldn’t—talking just because it was important to them, and the more they talked about it the more possible it seemed.

  He was so cold he was beginning to shiver. Quietly he began to unfold his blankets. He was hungry for warmth and sleep, a chance to forget for awhile. He felt something slip in the blankets and grabbed for it, but he bumped it with the back of his hand. Whatever it was, it hit the floor with a sharp clatter. The silence was awful for him. It drew into the cell like a physical cold, making him feel empty and, somehow, wrong.

  “That sonofabitch was on the Erie!”

  “Maybe not—”

  “I tell you, the sonofabitch was listening. Laying down there and taking everything in. Hey! Asshole!”

  Doug couldn’t move his mouth. What could he say? He knew he hadn’t done anything but he felt guilty.

  “All right,” the voice went on grimly. “Play dead. We’ll see about it in the morning.”

  “Easy, Agnes.”

  “Easy, my ass!”

  A figure slipped out of the upper bunk. Doug rolled over against the wall. He didn’t know whether he could fight or not.

  A match flamed, and he saw a hard face staring at him. Two of them. Someone else was hanging over the top bunk. The man holding the match laughed. “A brat!”

  The match went out, and the voice went on in the darkness. “Listen, kid, you better forget our business. If you’ve got any idea of living to get out of jail, you better dummy on anything you hear in this cell. You know what I mean?”

  Doug felt his arm gripped in the darkness, gripped hard, and after a moment he realized that he was nodding his head when no one could see him. He managed to say, “Yes.”

  “Okay. And don’t try anything sneaky. There isn’t anything you can say in any part of this jail I won’t hear about it before you can close your mouth. You hear?”

  “Yes.”

  “You better.”

  They left him alone after that. He got under his blankets but he couldn’t feel warm. He wanted to stand up to say you can trust me. I’d never snitch on anyone. But he knew how it’d be. They’d keep looking at him, wondering if he was going to tell. Making themselves angry thinking about it. And if anything went wrong they’d blame him, and probably try to kill him. He saw the hard face in the matchlight coming at him with a knife, and the flame of the match swelled up until he couldn’t see anything

  Sometime before he went to sleep, he remembered his wrist watch. He’d pushed it way up on his arm, and they hadn’t found it when they shook him down. Now he slipped the watch off and put it in his pocket. He went to sleep dreaming of knives.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Al came downstairs, back from locking up the fish. He racked the tank key beside the door and settled into his chair, sighing as if he’d done a day’s work. Slim smiled to himself, a bitter, healing smile. Well now, he thought, another dangerous mission successfully completed.

  Al looked vaguely worried, and Slim stared at him, waiting.

  “What’d you think of him?” Al asked.

  “He’s a real bastard.”

  “What?”

  “Huey. He’s a bastard.”

  “No. I meant that kid. The one I just locked up.”

  Slim smiled slightly. “He’s in serious trouble.”

  Al leaned forward. “He didn’t look eighteen. Sixteen, maybe. But I don’t see why he’d want to lie, do you?”

  “Don’t worry, he’ll live through it.”

  Al said, “Hell, it might do him good.”

  Slim nodded in satirical agreement. It was no skin off his ass.

  Al nodded back like a cartoon bear, round-eyed and simple, satisfied as long as someone seemed to agree with him. He sighed again and loosened his uniform belt.

  Al started talking about his weight, how nothing seemed to help—as if anything would, the way he stuffed his face—and Slim nodded and said something in the intervals when Al stopped for assurance, but Slim wasn’t really listening.

  He nodded and stared at the scarred linoleum, breathing the tired stale smell of the jail and wishing he was out of it. But he didn’t let himself go far thinking that way. He’d been in too many times, and he knew that the only way to stay sane was to think about the little bumps on each day—the tiny differences in routine that could grow to seem so important.

  That led him to Agnes. It was a fool’s setup and Slim wouldn’t have given it headroom if it hadn’t been for the cigarettes involved. Cigarettes were money and Slim always needed money. He played poker and lost.

  That was the only reason he listened to Agnes, because to Slim, Agnes wasn’t regular—he was a loudmouth hillbilly who wore his Levis too tight, and combed his hair like some punk movie star. Slim dismissed Agnes’s partner Billy as a pimpled moon drifting around an Okie sun.

  Agnes had scraped together a reputation for toughness, but he fought with his hands and Slim knew that no one was tough with a shiv in his belly. He’d seen a lot of the tough ones cut down and pounded into the pavement, while he—skinny and bitter—had endured.

  Also Agnes was unseasoned. Slim was an old con, a veteran of his own peculiar war and fiercely proud of his service, and he didn’t really trust anyone who hadn’t served big time. So when Agnes had called him over to the bars while they were feeding the tank, Slim had been automatically untrusting.

  But he listened, watching Agnes carefully out of his quiet gray eyes, and when he heard about the hacksaw blades he could hardly keep a straight face. What did this kid think he was going to do with hacksaw blades? Might as well try to cut down a tree with a pocket knife.

  Slim knew the felony tank. He’d been in it for six months fighting his own case, and if he’d ever seen a tight can it was the Penthouse. Remote-control locking devices, automatic alarms, case-hardened steel—the whole works. Hacksaw blades would be worse than useless, because even if they could get through the tank bars, which wasn’t likely, they still had the bars on the window to beat. No. It was impossible.

  But all he’d said was, I’ll see what I can do.

  He was pretty sure he could get the blades, and Agnes had offered him three cartons of cigarettes, which was a fair price, but you didn’t let a hoosier off with a fair price. Slim decided to hold off and see how much they would pay, and in making this decision he was conscious of a sense of power. They were locked up. Helpless. They couldn’t make a move without him, and what they didn’t know was that they couldn’t make a move with him—not even with a boxcar full of hacksaw blades.

  But he didn’t intend to tell them that.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Morning hit Doug all at once. The lights came on, the cell doors rolled and banged, toilets flushed, and a medley of voices grum
bled and wisecracked.

  “Come on, you sad bastards—”

  “Dummy up!”

  “Breakfast is served.”

  “Oh, dee-lightful!”

  “Chow!”

  Doug sat up. The cell door was open. Through two more sets of bars he saw a gray morning beginning to form outside the windows. A man passed, buttoning his pants. He was yawning and shaking his head.

  Doug heard someone clearing his throat and turned to see a fat man sitting up in the lower bunk across from him. He was fully clothed except for his shoes. An older man, his face swollen with sleep.

  “You come in last night?”

  Doug nodded, uncomfortable because the man was staring at him, harder and longer than he should have, rubbing his mouth with a thick red hand. He was thick and heavy all over.

  “You better get your breakfast. They don’t serve it in bed.”

  The man started out of the cell, but paused in the doorway. “My name’s Carl. You talk any?”

  “Sure, I talk.” Doug was going to say when I feel like it, but he didn’t. He thought of a lot of things he couldn’t quite say.

  “I just wondered,” Carl said, and left.

  Doug stood up. His head was higher than the top bunks, and he couldn’t help staring anxiously at the two men sleeping in them. He recognized the man he’d seen in the matchlight—the one called Agnes. His face was to the side on the pillow of his arm, and his mouth moved a little with his even breathing. He seemed younger than he had the night before. Doug thought he looked like the younger brother of the good guy in a western movie; the one who was wild, but you knew he wasn’t really bad. Even in his sleep Agnes seemed alert, as if he were waiting and hoping something would go wrong, because he knew he could handle it.

  “He meant it.”

  Doug turned quickly into the aisle, taking a step back towards the door. The other one was sitting up, watching him. This one would be Billy. In a glance he knew Billy didn’t scare him. Billy was skinny and pigeon-breasted, with a rotten complexion. Billy’s eyes were pale gray, red-rimmed and crusted with sleep.

  “I know he meant it,” Doug said, “what’s that s’posed to mean?”

  “Just that you better watch yourself.” Billy looked at Agnes as he said it, but Agnes didn’t show any signs of waking up.

  “You guys made your point. There’s no sense in going on about it.”

  Billy looked a little uncertain. “I just wanted to make sure you understand.”

  Doug was satisfied with the way he had spoken up to Billy. He crossed his arms and looked at him deliberately. “Well, I understand all right.”

  Billy slid out of his bunk. He was wearing an old pair of striped shorts with one leg ripped nearly to the waist band. He had an angry scattering of pimples over his shoulders and back. Doug saw them as Billy bent to pick something up.

  “If you’re all right, you don’t have to worry. Here’s your cup. That must be what you dropped last night.”

  Doug accepted the metal cup, and after a momentary hesitation, he followed Billy out into the tank.

  In the daylight it didn’t seem big. About ten feet wide, maybe forty feet long. Doug looked around, made more curious by what he’d heard last night, and again he didn’t see what they could do. The secret of the tank was simplicity. Three sides were bars, stretching from the floor to the ceiling; the forth side was closed off by the solid bulk of the cell block, a row of identical cages. Three feet beyond the bars there was a concrete wall, broken by narrow barred windows. In the corridor formed by the bars and the wall, two trustys in blue denim were pushing food through a long horizontal slot. A jailer in a green uniform stood a little apart, watching.

  A knot of half-dressed men was crowded around the feeding slot, but they were standing quietly, waiting. One by one they headed away, carrying a bowl and a cup. They all seemed strange. One wore a little hat folded out of newspapers. Another had on what looked like a good suit, but he was shirtless, and the gray hair on his chest grew up around his neck like a sweater. A tiny bald man wore longjohns, and the trap had flopped half open, exposing his shriveled butt. Next was a young man in a gas-station outfit, complete except for the black leather tie. He even had a trade mark above his pocket, and that would have seemed silly to Doug except the man looked so scared.

  Doug saw Billy talking to one of the trustys, and he recognized the trusty as the one who had been standing in the booking room the night before. A thin grayish man with a sharp eastern slant on his face. He was whispering to Billy, hardly moving his lips, and Billy looked worried. Doug was curious, but he looked away. He didn’t want to know any more than he did already.

  Doug was the last one served. One trusty dipped mush, three slices of bread on it, and shoved it at the slot. Doug took it and held his cup up to the bars for coffee.

  He sat down on his own bunk and ate some bread. The oatmeal was in a metal bowl. Everything in the jail seemed to be metal. Even the toilet was metal and it stuck right out of the wall in plain sight.

  “You say you come in last night?”

  Doug met Carl’s eyes and he didn’t like them. They were too blue, too pressed with energy, and they looked strange in his tired red face. He needed a shave and his beard was like rust. A long time ago he must have been redheaded.

  Doug answered because he didn’t want everyone in the cell mad at him. “It was pretty late.”

  Carl said, “Must have been. I didn’t hear a thing. You got a name?”

  “Doug.”

  “Doug, huh?” Carl drank from his bowl like it was a cup. He didn’t seem to pay any attention to what was in it. He shifted the bowl and held out his hand. “All right, Doug—”

  Doug tried to make his shake firm, but Carl’s hand was warm and moist, and he didn’t let go right away.

  Carl smiled, still squeezing. “You’re just a youngster. What’re you doing in here?”

  “I’m old enough,” Doug replied tightly, pulling his hand loose. He couldn’t resist wiping his palm on his blanket.

  Carl didn’t miss the gesture. His smile turned into a grin, showing small yellow teeth. “Old enough for what?”

  “Old enough to take care of myself.”

  “Kid, no one’s that old.”

  Carl’s shirt was the kind Doug thought of as a gambler’s shirt. Green gabardine edged with solid white piping and the pockets were fastened down with little buttons like pills. In contrast, his jeans were faded and sun-bleached, rolled away from his bare feet. The toenails were broken and yellow and the skin seemed puffy around his ankles.

  Doug drank some of the mush. It was barely sweetened, but milk had been mixed with it, enough to make it pour.

  “Why don’t we get spoons?” he asked Carl.

  “Because they’re afraid we’ll cut each other’s throats.”

  “With a spoon?”

  “A spoon can be sharpened on the floor—” Carl slid his bare foot back and forth on the concrete—“until it goes in as easy as an ice pick. Sure as hell makes you just as dead.” He grinned, then said, “They give us spoons at lunch and supper, but they count them and make sure they get them all back. If they don’t, they turn off the TV. You think that don’t produce spoons in a hurry?”

  Doug finished his oatmeal and wiped the bowl with his bread. He was still hungry, but he was used to that. He tried the coffee. It was black, bitter without being strong. The cup was some kind of grayish soft metal, hotter than the coffee inside it.

  He drank the coffee and listened to the noise of the tank: the wordless simmer of conversations, and running water. Somewhere someone was singing softly in Spanish, and someone else was swearing with a countrified exuberance. The air seemed dense, heavy with a complex of smells, all unpleasant: disinfectant, sweat, souring clothes and urine.

  Well, you asked for it, didn’t you? He wanted to feel equal to anything that could happen, but he knew in blunt truth he wasn’t. The tank was too barren, emptier even than the gas station, bus depots and other featureless public places he had eaten and washed in since leaving home.

  “Smoke?”

  Carl was offering him a cigarette. He shook his head, “No, thanks.”