Hard Rain Falling (New York Review Books Classics)

by Don Carpenter

Whatever made him run away from Oakland to the Wild West seemed to have been taken care of, one way or another. Maybe what he wanted was freedom. Maybe he looked around and saw that everybody was imprisoned by Oakland, by their own small neighborhoods; everybody was breathing the same air, inheriting the same seats in school, taking the same stale jobs as their fathers and living in the same shabby stucco homes. Maybe it all looked to him like a prison or a trap, the way everybody expected him to do certain things because they had always been done a certain way, and they expected him to be good at doing these strange, meaningless, lonely things, and maybe he was afraid—of the buildings, the smoke, the stink of the bay, the gray look everybody had. Maybe he was afraid that he too would become one of these grown people whose faces were blank and lonely, and he too would have to satisfy himself with a house in the neighborhood and one of the girls from high school and a job at one or another factory and just sit there and die of it. So he ran for the only frontier he ever heard about and became a cowboy. But of course he brought it all with him when he ran, and it kept at him, jabbing, destroying, murdering, until he himself was all gone and nothing was left but a man’s body doing work. And finally that died too.

There were six punishment cells, and communication of a sort could be made by yelling, but most of the time it required too much effort, or Jack’s senses were gone and he could not hear. But sometimes he did. He could hear other boys being brought in, yelling, cursing, some of them crying, and he himself suppressed all feelings of pity for the others; they did not pity him. They probably thought he was some kind of hero. Well, fuck them, too. Maybe in the cells they would learn the truth as he had, and know that nothing existed but a single spark of energy, and that spark could die for no reason, and existed for no reason. Then they would understand that it does no good to cry out, because a spark of energy has no ears; the ears are a lie, a joke, a dream, to keep the spark going, and there is no reason to keep the spark going. And more than there is a reason for letting it go out. Maybe they would learn not to hate the guards, either, because the guards and everybody else on earth were prisoners in dark cells like themselves and just did not know it, and in fact they were in a worse prison than Jack was, because they were imprisoned by their own limits, and he was only imprisoned by them. He had found their limits—they would not, could not, just take him out and shoot him, and they could not let him run around loose, because he would not take any of their shit, and so they had to lock him up and feed him and dump his piss and shit for him, all because they had these limit...

they knew that nobody, not the ministers, not the ladies who visited, and least of all the authorities themselves, believed it, any of it, because they did not act as if they believed it. They acted as if they believed only one thing: that force and force alone governed. And this the children believed too, in their hearts, and most of them dreamed of the time when the power of force would be in their hands.

He looked at the guard. A puffy, tired face. Even in his summer uniform the guard looked hot and tired. There were patches of sweat under his arms. Jack saw that his fingers on the riot gun were pressed white; so the man was tense. He had probably been tense all morning. In fact, Jack thought, the man was probably tense all the time he was at work. Probably every time he came to work a piece of whatever held him together disintegrated, vanished, and he would go home that much less than he had been. He would go home from work at night, the tension still stiff in his muscles, and have a drink of beer. Chino was hot; maybe the guard had a little patio out back of his house, where he had a canvas chair. He would take his can of beer out there, let himself down in the chair, and begin to drink, waiting. Maybe his wife would be out under the late sun, gardening. He would speak to her. She would straighten up, turn, smile. The glare would make it hard for him to see her smile, but he would know, and a little of it would slip away. It would take part of him with it, but it was worth it. Then he would remember that on the next day he had the run to San Quentin again. For a few seconds he would think about trading off. Or telephoning in sick. He would take another sip of beer, and then another. He would pull his hand away from the arm of the chair and light a cigarette. He would sigh, as if to clear his chest, but it wouldn’t work. His wife would sense that something was wrong, and ...

The same for me on a pool table. I can feel it. So it’s there. I sight the shot, bend down, and there’s somethin goin on between me and the cue ball and the object ball and the pocket, and I feel it build up, shoot, and that’s it. You waited for that all your life. The connection is made. The thing is complete. It’s inside you now. “But, if you miss the shot, the ball hangs up in the pocket or you miscue or somethin, that connection is broken and some of you dies. I’ve felt that, too. I know it’s the truth. Somethin busted and gone, not a run of a hundred balls is gonna bring it back. When you lose you lose forever, an when you win it only lasts a second or two. That’s life. I aint lyin.

She stamped out into the kitchen, but came back in a few minutes still holding the letter. “The ACLU will tear these bastards apart,” she said. “The idea of prison is to reform people, they haven’t any right...“ “Now, where did you get that idea? The idea of prison is punishment, an any reforming done is strictly incidental. Society don’t give a fuck what happens to you, and you know it. Society is an animal, just like the rest of us.”

Gradually, through his books, his records, his long walks alone, the mere passage of time, he would begin to come to terms with his life as it was. He became an observer. He began to taste his food and to smell the air. He saw things and felt them. The earth became real, and at times he was capable of sensing the pleasure of existence. Other times were not so good.