Beyond the ninth stairway lay a deeply shadowed cellblock that had the musty, claustrophobic atmosphere of a catacomb. Walls of undressed stone set close together and mounted by iron stairs; the cells showing like cave mouths; dim white ceiling lights that had the radiant force of distant stars tucked into folds of black cloud. Fatigued and on edge, I was not up to exploring it. A cell stood open and untenanted just below the stairway, and deciding that my safest course would be to allow whoever was in charge to come to me, I entered it and sat down on the bunk. I was struck immediately by the quality of the mattress. Though it appeared to be the usual thin lumpy item, it was softer and more resilient than any prison mattress I had ever rested on. I stretched out on the bunk and found that the pillow was remarkably soft and firm. Closing my eyes, I let the quiet soothe me.
I must have been drowsing for several minutes when I heard a baritone voice say, “Penhaligon? That you, man?”
The voice had a familiar ring, and there was something familiar, too, about the lean, broad-shouldered man standing at the entrance to my cell. Framed by a heavy mass of greased-back hair, his face was narrow and long-jawed, with hollow cheeks, a bladed nose, and a full-lipped mouth. He might have been the love child of Elvis and the Wicked Witch of the West. I could not place him, but felt I should be wary.
He grunted out a laugh. “I can’t look that different. Just shaved off the beard’s all.”
I recognized him then and sat up, alarmed.
“Don’t get worked up. I’m not gonna fuck with you.” He perched on the end of the bunk, angling his eyes about the cell. “You want to put up a picture or two ‘fore your wall comes in, they got pretty much any kind you want in the commissary.”
There were questions I might have asked concerning both the essence and the rather housewifely character of this last statement, but during my first month in minimum security, Richard Causey, then doing an eight-spot for manslaughter, had put me in the hospital for the better part of a month with injuries resulting from a beating and attempted rape; thus his comments on interior decoration sailed right past me.
“I ’spect it’s been a while since anybody took the walk you did,” Causey said with a trace of admiration. “Straight up from the door all the way to eight? I never saw anyone do it, that’s for sure.” He clasped his hands on his stomach and settled back against the wall. “Took me a year to move up here from six.”
All my muscles were tensed, but he merely sat there, amiable and at ease.
“‘Most everybody stops somewhere along the first few blocks,” Causey went on. “They don’t feel comfortable proceeding on ’til they nail down a crib.”
“Is that right?”
“Yeah, they feel kinda how you felt when you got to nine. Like you best stop and give things a chance to sort themselves out. It’s the same with everybody, ’cept you got a lot farther than most.”
Though I may have made a neutral noise in response, I was intent upon Causey’s hands, the muscles in his shoulders.
“Look here,” he said. “I understand what you’re feeling, but I’m not the man I used to be. You want me to leave, that’s cool. I just figured you’d want to talk. I know when I came here, that’s all I wanted was somebody to talk to.”
“I’m not the man I was, either,” I said, injecting menace into my voice.
“Well, that’s good. Takes a different man than both of us were to do time in Diamond Bar.”
I was beginning to think that, truly, Causey might have changed. No longer did he give off the hostile radiation that once he had, and his speech, formerly characterized by bursts of profanity commingled with butchered elisions, was now measured and considered by contrast. His manner was composed and the tattoo of a red spider that had centered his brow was missing. “Just wore away, I guess,” he said when I asked about it. He told me what he could about Diamond Bar but cautioned that the prison was not easily explained.
“This’ll piss you off…’ least it did me,” he said. “But can’t anybody tell you how to work this place. Things come to you as you need ’em. There’s a dining hall and a commissary, like everywhere else. But the food’s a helluva lot better and you don’t need money at the commissary. The board handles everything. Supplies, discipline, recreation. We don’t have any guards. I don’t…”
“I saw a guard when I was walking up.”
“Everybody sees that guy, but I never heard about him whupping his stick onto anybody. Could be he does his thing so’s to give people something familiar to look at.”
“You saying he’s an inmate?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. There’s a lot I haven’t figured out about, but it’s coming.” He tapped his temple and grinned. “Best thing about the place is the plumes. You gonna love them.”
“What the hell’s that?
“The queens who get you off down in Vacaville? The plumes put them away. You can’t hardly tell the difference between them and a real woman.”
Anxious to steer the conversation away from the sexual, I asked who I needed to watch out for, and he said, “Guys down on the first three or four blocks… some of them been known to go off. They’re transferred out or given punishment duty. Mostly you need to watch out for yourself. Make sure you don’t screw up.”
“If there’s no guards, people must just walk on out of here.”
Causey gave me a penetrating look. “You crossed the river, didn’t you? You entered of your own free will?”
“I thought the guards were watching.”
“Might have been somebody watching. I couldn’t tell you. All I know is, you and me and everyone else, we chose to be here, so we’re not talking about a prison full of hard-core escape artists. And Diamond Bar’s not so bad. Truth is, it’s the best I’ve had it in a while. People say it’s going to be even better once they finish the new wing. Escaping crossed my mind a time or two when I was first here. But I had the feeling it wasn’t such a good idea.”
What Causey said made me no more certain of my estate, and after he returned to his cell I remained awake, staring at the mysterious reach of the old prison that lay beyond the ninth stair, the dim white lights and anthracitic cell mouths. Everything I knew about Diamond Bar was cornerless and unwieldy, of a shape that refused to fit the logic of prisons, and this gave me cause to wonder how much more unwieldy and ill-fitting were the things I did not know. I was accustomed to prison nights thronged with hoots, cries, whispers, complaints, screams, an uneasy consensus song like the nocturnal music of a rain forest, and the compressed silence of the place, broken intermittently by coughs and snores, inhibited thought. At length I slept fretfully, waking now and again from dreams of being chased, hunted, and accused to find the silence grown deeper, alien and horrid in its thickness. But toward dawn—one I sensed, not witnessed—I woke to an outcry that seemed to issue from beneath the old prison, such a prolonged release of breath it could only have been the product of awful torment or extreme exaltation… or else it was the cry of something not quite human, expressing a primitive emotion whose cause and color is not ours to know, a response to some new shape of fear or a tidal influence or a memory from before birth, and following this I heard a whispering, chittering noise that seemed to arise from every quarter, like the agitated, subdued congress of a crowd gathered for an event of great and solemn gravity. While that chorus lasted I was full of dread, but once it subsided, almost stricken with relief, I fell into a black sleep and did not wake again until the shadows, too, had waked and the first full day of my true incarceration had begun.