On the Yard by Malcolm Braly Page A

like going through all the red tape involved in reporting a beef, but neither could Old Tom be taken for granted. About one night a month he was prodded into wakefulness by an intense and smoldering irritation and on such nights he would literally beef you because he didn’t like your looks. This peculiar and curiously regular trait was popularly attributed to menstrual snappishness, an attribution as mean as it was unlikely, for Old Tom, whether male or female, was thirty years free of the moon, and his appearance was so gross as to make Dog Breath, an awesomely homely Negro fruiter, appear a vision of feminine loveliness.
    Charlie, still playing it bold, walked by four-box with no more than an airy wave for Old Tom, who appeared half asleep, sprawled so deep in his swivel chair his hooded eyes were just visible behind the khaki mountain of his belly. Charlie made another twenty feet.
    â€œHey, Wong,” Tom said, ominously out of his chair, standing in the four-box door motioning him back. “What would I find if I was to shake you down?”
    Charlie stopped five feet away and grinned delightedly. “Plenny, you find plenny. Much mari-ha-ha, maybe a little yen pox—and a flied egg sandwich. You keep sandwich, okay, boss?”
    Old Tom smiled sourly and waved him on with a hand that looked like a softball mitt left out all winter and chewed by anything hungry enough to waste time on it.
    â€œThat Chinaman’s a goddam nut,” he said to Angelo. Angelo didn’t answer and Tom hadn’t expected him to.
    Angelo, between his rounds as night fire watchman, sat behind Old Tom on an apple box, padded by the simple device of nailing a pillow across it. Angelo was seventy-nine and serving his fifty-sixth consecutive year in prison. He was twenty-three the last time he had kissed a woman, and that woman was his wife the week before he cut off her head. Legend had it that he took the severed head, hidden in a paper bag, to the bar where he did his drinking. He ordered whiskey, and when the drink was placed before him he pulled the head from the bag, sat it up on the bar and told it, “Now nag, you sonabitch.”
    This is just a story, and Angelo had been in so long, longer than any other prisoner, because he refused to leave and return to a world he remembered only as something he might have dreamed. When, on his rounds, he passed one of those points in the institution from which the lights of San Francisco are visible the sight had no real meaning to him. Once in a while he stopped to stare at the glistening and mysterious hills across the bay with the same sense of awe and apprehension with which early men viewed the stars.
    His rounds were made hourly throughout the night. First he checked the education building, shuffling down the main aisle, shifting the watered beam of his old flash along the upper walls because he felt himself severely regarded by the painted eyes of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Alva Edison, Theodore Roosevelt, Justice Holmes, and the other heroes of the republic hung here for the beneficial aura of their moral charisma. His light respectfully touched each portrait, surprising the watching face in the shadow of its frame, and to Angelo this was a ritual as solemn as the Stations of the Cross because he believed these men to be former wardens, dead now, arranged in regal succession, and he thought he remembered Emerson as that sonabitch Pennypacker, who built a brick kiln with public funds and made a fortune selling labor-free brick, watered with convict sweat and baked with convict hate. Angelo had worked the kiln in the first years of his imprisonment when he still had a chest like a barrel, curved mustaches as bold as scimitars and a man’s capacity for hating.
    After the ed building, he checked the chapels, the dental department and the hobby shop. Then he turned down the steep and lightless hill that led to the industrial alley. Here the cats met him.
    There might