On the Yard by Malcolm Braly Page B

have been anywhere from five to twenty cats rubbing joyously around Angelo’s legs depending upon how long it had been since custody had last sacked up the excess and tossed them into the bay. This routine reduction of the cat population was clearly necessary, otherwise the institution would have been quickly overrun by them, but few inmates accepted this ecological justification and it was understood by the majority that bulls were natural bastards and if nothing else to kill was handy, they’d kill cats.
    Two cats had risen above this law, because for cats the law could still spare by regal whim, and both hero and fool, those mythic twins, had claimed their traditional immunity.
    The fool was called Puchuco. He was tailless, cross-eyed, castrated, and all of one ear and half of the other had been chewed off. His head was flattened and lopsided like a rain-softened ball, and his right hind leg was drawn up until the paw rested an inch above the ground. When he howled at night it was painful to hear.
    Sometimes the evening classes in the ed building looked down into the moonlit well of the industrial alley to see Puchuco playing there. Dancing a grotesque and halting ballet with a crumpled newspaper or a wad of cotton waste, he stalked this phantom prey with a parody of feral urgency like an overgrown and mutilated kitten. Those watching usually laughed, but a few grew angry and said, “Someone ought to pity that poor fucking cat enough to kill it.”
    The hero was a giant black tom with yellow eyes, a witch’s cat, seamed with honorable scars, whose expression was so steady and still it seemed a look of utter certainty. The other toms were terrified of him and wouldn’t come within a dozen yards when he was eating or courting. The inmates hailed him as Joe the Grinder, giving him the same wry name they gave to the man who made it into their wife’s bed while they were locked, hopeless and despairing, in jail. Joe the Grinder wore their suits, wrecked their car, dug up their stash, played with their old lady’s tits as she wrote: “Dear John, I miss you so much ...” And, sooner or later, knocked the bitch up, at which point he split. The tom operated with equal ease. He was Joe the Grinder in his heart, as who might not wish to be, and the cons spun his nightly exploits into sagas of envy.
    For a few moments each night here at the head of the industrial alley Angelo was the God of cats. Then the meat he had scavenged for them from the abandoned trays in the mess hall had been divided among them, and Angelo moved on into the shadows of the alley until his torch caught the unmatched and zany luminescence of Puchuco’s eyes peering down from one of the metal steps of the fire escape that climbed the side of the industrial building like a rusty Z.
    â€œHere, ol’ fellow,” Angelo crooned softly.
    Puchuco made a noise deep in his throat and his eyes disappeared for a moment to reappear a step lower.
    â€œCome, ol’ cat. You come eat.”
    Angelo sat down on the bottom step and pulled the last of the meat from his pocket to spread it on the step above him.
    â€œI ever hurt you?” he asked Puchuco.
    As the cat began to eat, Angelo rubbed the knobs of torn flesh around his mutilated ears.
    Angelo ended his round with the old industrial building, a huge boxlike, and half-empty structure that had been condemned for ten years. The gym was on the third floor, the second floor was used for storage and sometimes football chalktalks and play rehearsals. The ground floor still housed working shops, and Angelo paced slowly between the stands of bulky machinery, not always certain any more just what it was he was looking for.
    At one-thirty-five an officer with a prisoner in chains was admitted through the front gate. Tom didn’t recognize the officer.
    â€œHiggins,” the officer said, offering his hand. “I’m from Camp Fourteen. Up in Del