9009/Chapter 3
The next morning, 9009 was awakened by a rude hand and taken to the yard captain’s office to be booked. A keen-eyed, iron-gray man met him there and, after stripping him, scanned his bare body inch by inch for scars.
He examined first the face of 9009, passing his eyes slowly and mercilessly over each feature, exploring every fold and pit of skin; then, with the same passionless, peering scrutiny, like that of an old woman examining a piece of meat at the market, he searched the arms, the hands, the naked torso, and finally the feet. At times he stopped and marked down the result of his observation into a little note-book. When he was through, he had not spoken a word; he had not seen the man.
Having slipped on his garments again, 9009 stood a moment awkwardly in the, centre of the room, not knowing what was expected of him, and unconsciously watching the clerk book his commitment: “John Collins, Union County, July 19, 1897; Burglary and Assault to Commit Murder; five years and three years.”
The clerk was young and slender, clad in blue; his boyish lips curved in a vague smile. The book was thick, heavy, its large page ruled off by vertical lines of red and blue. The pen scratched and sputtered. The clerk stopped and replaced it with another, then went on writing, smiling vaguely into the book.
“Five years and three years.”
9009 dropped his eyes to the floor; it was concrete, hard, like stone. He raised his eyes to the window; it was steel-barred. Through the squares he saw a stretch of wall; on the top, cutting the sky in silhouette, a guard paced slowly, carrying his rifle in his hand, loosely, like a hunter.
“Five years and three years. Eight years,” thought 9009.
A sudden report, sharp and loud as a pistol-shot, made him jump. The clerk had slammed the book shut.
The rat-eyed trusty was standing in the doorway, beckoning. 9009 followed him across the yard into the cell-house, up two flights of iron stairs, along a narrow steel platform, past a long row of steel-barred doors, back to his cell. Following the prison regulations he must pass his first day in his cell.
The night before, he had thrown his bedding upon the narrow bunk and, stretching upon it, had immediately sunk into a brutish sleep. Now he looked about him.
The place was steel-walled, steel-ceilinged, steel-floored. Against the bottom wall was the bunk upon which his bedding was heaped. As he sat upon the iron rod forming the edge of this bunk, he had to bend forward so as not to hit with his head the second bunk, above. The upper bunk was without tenant that day. The cell was wide as the length of the bunks—about seven feet—and of less depth. That is, between the bunk and the door, there was just enough room to allow a man to pace the two or three steps allowed by the width; two men could not do it. The door was a steel-barred gate through which the eyes of guards and trusties, watchful or merely hostilely curious, could always peer. In one corner was a three-legged stool; above it, on a triangular shelf, a Bible covered with dust; a placard shone yellow on the wall to the left. That was all.
He sat on the edge of the bunk, his survey made, holding his chin in his two hands, tormented by a strange sensation. It was an odor; a taint was in the air; something elusive, but which would not go. Curiously enough, in his mind, it called up visions of circus menageries, seen in childhood. After a while he worked out the connection. The smell of a menagerie, it came from caged animals. Here also, there were things in cages. These were not animals; they were men. The taint in the air, it came from men, many men, caged.
The idea made him a little sick. But now, something else was troubling him, something still more vague, more elusive, more irritating than that which he had just caught—something that he must solve.
He felt a vast sense of stoppage—stoppage, that was it. A sense one has on a steamer when suddenly the clanging engines cease with a sigh; that which comes when one is alone in a room with the ticking of a clock, and this ticking stops; the feeling that comes when one passes without warning from the tumult of a storm into a great calm.
There had come a distinct halt in his life; a period, a gigantic punctuation.
9009 was a bad man. He had come to this cell not through a miscarriage of justice. He had been bad; he had been lawless.
He had been lawless from childhood, from the time when, a mere boy, cutting away from a squalid home, he had forced his way to the leadership of a “gang” whose serious occupations were pilfering from the grocer, robbing boats and box-cars, and whose amusements were fierce fights with rival “gangs,” stonings of Chinamen, torturings of cats, and experiments in men-vices.
Always he had been at war. He had been at war with men, with society. And now, in this abrupt cessation of the whirl of his life, there had come to him a feeling, vague, indefinite, of futility—a discouragement. All of his fighting, all of his defiance, his cunning had after all led him only to this—to a cell. For the last six years he should have been expecting this. But really, he had not expected it. It had come to him as a distinct shock. And now came this feeling of uselessness, of futility.
He had fought society and had been worsted. And he felt that always he would be worsted. He felt that he could not go on in this way. It didn’t pay, that was it. Always, he would get the worst of it. It didn’t pay. He couldn’t fight the world. He couldn’t fight that. His life—it had been a failure. That was it: his life had been a failure.
It had been a failure. And in him, now, obscure but strong, there was a longing for something else, for some elusive thing that he could not name, that he could not picture, and yet which was indispensable to him.
Strangely enough, it was allied in some way with the impression that he had carried away from his visit to Tom Ryan.
A few weeks before his arrest, Ryan, meeting him on the street, had taken him to his home for dinner. Ryan was one of the companions of his boyhood, and he had not seen him for years.
Ryan had become, he found, a common plodding workingman—of the class at which he sneered. He was a hod-carrier. He lived in a wretched cottage on the outskirts of the city. He arrived there every evening, his brogans red with brick dust, his shoulders white with plaster, to squat at a table roughly laden by his wife, and shovel food into his harassed body. That evening Collins had eaten with him.
They sat at the table, Ryan with both elbows upon it, gulping the food which Collins hardly touched. Mrs. Ryan, a squarely built, red-faced woman, stood between the stove and the table, keeping the latter plenished. At intervals she leaned over and directed a wandering spoon into the gaping mouth of Myrtle, the little tow-headed elder daughter, or leaned over a crib in the corner of the kitchen, lifting a blanket to quiet an acid wail.
After eating, Ryan had lit his pipe, had puffed a while, and then had gone to sleep, there in his chair.
This, to Collins, used to an alert, vigilant existence; to the excitement of long-plotted and carefully executed thefts and of their resultant pursuits; to intervals of Tenderloin luxury, was just the sort of life to be most despised. To him, his lawlessness and cheap luxuries were what elegance is to the rich, beauty to the artist. Like the rich man, like the artist, he naturally revolted at the commonplace of such an existence as Ryan’s.
And yet, that night, he had carried with him a vague and inexplicable desire which was still with him now, which in some way was allied with the feeling that had come to him this morning, here, in his cell; which had to do with the discouragement, the sense of failure, the disgust, almost, that tormented him as he looked back along the days that he had lived.
And as he sat here, his fists against his temples, the two things suddenly leaped together, coalesced.
What he desired was that which Ryan had.
What he, 9009, longed for, what his life had failed to give him, what his life must now give him, it was what Ryan had.
It was Security.
“He felt safe,” he said to himself with heavy finality.
Then: “Didn’t have to look out for no ‘bulls.’”
“Didn’t have to look out for stool-pigeons.”
“Didn’t carry no gun.”
“He felt safe.”
He knew now what he wanted, wanted more than wine, money, women, cigars, more than the joy of fight, the iron tang of revolt; he wanted peace, he wanted security, he wanted what Ryan had.
“No more of this,” he muttered; “no more. I’ll turn square.”
“Square”—not out of any ethical renovation, but “square,” very simply, because thus only could he get what now he wanted, which was peace.
By a freak of his mind there came now to him the scratching pen of the clerk booking him. The big book leaped before him; he saw the pen travelling. “Five years and three years.”
Eight years! Eight years before he could even begin his new life.
And yet—eight years; after all, it was not so. long, eight years! He gave a swift look behind. The last eight years—they had not been so long! In eight years he would be thirty-seven. A man had some years left at thirty-seven!
He had risen to his feet in his excitement and was pacing to and fro along the narrow space between bunk and door. At one of his turns his eyes fell upon the placard stuck to the wall. He stopped, his eyes glued themselves upon the cardboard, a flush came to his heavy cheeks.
“My copper!”—it was almost a shout—“My copper”—he slapped his thigh—“By God, I was almost forgetting my copper!”
Before him, yellow on the blue-black wall, the placard shone; its little black characters danced. He read them carefully.
GOOD TIME
Under the Goodwin Act you have already earned time which has been deducted from your sentence. This time had been deducted as follows:
For the first year, two months; second year, two months; third year, four months; fourth year, four months; fifth year, and every year thereafter, five months.
This time had already been earned by you. The law has given it to you, and it belongs to you. Only bad behaviour on your part will forfeit this time. It is for you to determine whether or no you will keep this time to your credit; and for you alone.
About the margin of the printed rule he saw pencilled figures, many of them, where former occupants had made calculations over and over again. He fell to figuring.
“Thirty-two months—two years and eight months—that was his copper. He tried it again; a third time; the result was the same. He could gain two years and eight months.
He subtracted now. Keeping his copper, there would be left for him to serve only five years and four months.
Five years and four months! That would not be so long! He looked back along his life to get a measure. Five years ago, he was turning his first yegg trick. It wasn’t so long, five years. In five years he would be only thirty-four.
He sat down to calm himself. “In five years—I wonder where Nell will be,” he said. But the thought did not remain with him long. Almost immediately he returned to the more palpitant subject. He remained silent, bent over, thinking, a long time. And then, solemnly, almost with affection, “My copper,” he said softly.
He would work for it, he would treasure it, his “good time,” his “copper.” There were rules in this place; he would keep them. There was work; he would work. He remembered the words of the garotter and of the sheriff; he would keep to himself, he would obey, he would do anything they told him.
“Oh, I’ll be good,” he said aloud, whimsically; “I’ll be good, all right.”
A step sounded outside in the narrow corridor, the door opened with a rasp, and Jennings, the sallow-faced guard, walked in. He laid his hand roughly upon the shoulder of 9009 and fixed his white-gray eyes upon him in a stony, passionless stare. 9009 returned the gaze, defiantly, as had been always his habit, in a struggle of man and man. The guard scanned him long, silently, with no expression in his stony face, but a sort of invisible and heavy threat rising like a dull blush into his cheeks. The look chilled; 9009 met it. For a full minute neither pair of eyes shifted, neither flickered. Then the guard loosed his grip and pushed the shoulder away from him.
“By God,” he said evenly. “You are a bad one.”
He turned; the steel door shut; a bar fell heavily into a socket outside. 9009 remained seated on the edge of his bunk, holding his chin in his two hands. The exultation of his discovery, of his resolve, had left him; instead, a vague sense of danger was enwrapping him; he shivered slightly. And to his nostrils again, an obsession, there came the taint; the taint that came from men, caged, like wild beasts.