On the Yard Read Online Free Page A

boots.”
    â€œYeah, and there ain’t a cow in Texas.”
    Both men smiled at Manning, the Baby Raper, without a trace of friendliness.
    Will Manning sensed their mockery and distaste. Could he blame them? How might he have once felt, before he had made his incredible discovery? After more than half a lifetime, during which he had considered himself—what comfortable shorthand would he have used? Honest? Honorable? Decent? No, he would never have claimed so much. Halfway decent is precisely how he would have classed himself. And after better than half a lifetime of halfway decency he had suddenly discovered, in a few vivid moments, that he was a filthy degenerate. The phrase was not his own. His wife had supplied it.
    He took the display handkerchief from his breast pocket and wiped his forehead. The bullpen was too crowded. They shouldn’t herd men together like livestock. Too much body heat. The air was hot and stale, depressed somehow with a profound fatigue. A naked two-hundred-watt bulb burned through a haze of cigarette smoke.
    Manning folded his arms across his chest, trying to compress himself to avoid touching the men seated on either side of him, but the less room he managed to take, the more they took. They seemed to swell and flow around him as if their clothes were full of some warm, corrupt, half-fluid gelatin. The rhythm of their breathing seemed as intimate as his own.
    He stared down over his folded arms, past the points of his neat black shoes, and tried to think only of the stains on the metal floor. One, a ragged oval, seemed briefly like an island, a tobacco-colored island in a flat green sea. He moved his foot to cover it. Island population destroyed in senseless accident. Would senseless accident imply there could be a sensible accident? It would be better if he didn’t have to think.
    He took a comb from his inside coat pocket, awkwardly, trying not to jostle the men crowded against him, and began to comb his hair. Automatically he shaped the pushed-up wave he still affected over his narrow forehead. Year by year, since his last year in high school, this crest had grown steadily smaller, a visible record of the hidden shrinkages taking place somewhere within his spirit, and now, suddenly, he felt a strong wave of disgust. The tattered plume of an aging stud, who never had the occupation, only the ornament. He raked his comb straight back to destroy his modest crest and accidentally dug his elbow into the ribs of the man on his right.
    This individual, wrapped in a filthy tan overcoat many sizes too large, jerked around and fixed Manning with sick, accusing eyes. “Take it easy.”
    â€œI’m sorry,” Manning said automatically.
    â€œBuddy, sorry’s a word I’m tired of.”
    Manning turned sharply away to avoid the odor of decaying teeth, and, as if a signal had been given, everyone stirred. The prisoner on the other side of Manning, a heavy man in suntans, wearing a maroon sport shirt with six small black buttons at each cuff, lifted his head from his hands. His cheeks were mottled from the pressure of his fingers and his eyes were miserable.
    â€œWhat’re they doing out there?” he asked of no one in particular.
    From the opposite bench Nunn leaned over to inquire in a parody of polite interest, “You pressed for time?”
    The other prisoners laughed, and Henry Jackson joined in. “You jus’ hold yore cool,” he told the man in the maroon sport shirt. “They got an assload a time out in that cou’troom —alls you got to do is back up and get it.”
    â€œThat’s right,” Nunn agreed. “We’re all about to get screwed, and without the benefit of intercourse.”
    â€œNo Vaseline neither,” Henry Jackson added.
    The prisoners laughed again. “What’s funny?” asked the sick-eyed man Manning had jostled. “What’s supposed to be so damn funny?” he asked again