On the Yard

ON THE YARD

As a general rule, people, even the wicked, are much more naïve and simple-hearted than we suppose.

—FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY

The Brothers Karamazov

Born in this jailhouse

Raised doing time

Yes born in this jailhouse

Near the end of the line

SOCIETY RED was the first man on the yard that morning. He sidled out of the south cellblock, turning up the collar of his faded denim jacket as he squinted resentfully at the cold gray sky. A sudden gust of wind caused him to hunch his shoulders and duck his head while he began to pound the heel of one Santa Rosa hightop against the other, three times; then he shifted to bang the second shoe against the first—tamp, tamp, tamp—and he continued this monotonous and joyless dance as he peered uneasily around the prison’s big yard, seeing it as he had seldom seen it: quiet, empty, an acre of bare blacktop enclosed within the high concrete walls of the cellblocks. A huge pen.

Society Red found the silent emptiness disturbing even though he knew that within the hour over five thousand inmates would stream from the mess hall, coiling into the yard, a restless spawn, an immense aggregate creature, the life of the big yard, that also was the big yard, as the residents are actually a town.

Other inmates were drifting out behind him now, but Red was still depressed. He thrust his hands into his hip pockets, palms flat to his lean backside, and continued punishing one Santa Rosa against its mate while he venomously cursed the cold. High on the north block wall he glimpsed a gun bull, symbolic as a scarecrow, and watched a seagull drifting down to hit the blacktop with an awkward waddle, where it scavenged a scrap of orange peel floating in the gutter.

Red was slightly over six feet, bone-thin, and awkwardly made. His face was so densely freckled it appeared rusty and gave his sharp features a raw, humorous aspect. His eyes were yellow as a goat’s, but the vivid orange hair that had prompted some forgotten humorist to call him Society Red had long since faded and thinned away to a clown’s half-bald ruff. He had been jailing for thirty of his forty-five years and was now a five-time loser. Still he didn’t consider himself a failure, simply because it had never occurred to him he could be confined in any such square john term.

The photo on the ID card he carried in his shirt pocket showed him the face of a man already harshly worn by age, dim, defeated, a caricature convict impossible to imagine except above his big number, drenched in the pitiless light of a mug shot. But even the first of his numerous mugs, taken at only sixteen, had shown him the face of a born wrongdoer, one the law had quickly recognized as its own, and his subsequent ID’s, taken at various times, on several occasions had even recorded changes Red was pleased to consider improvements. That original mug shot, now fixed to the first page of his cumulative case summary, still preserved the images of his formerly legendary ears, jutting from his head like the handles of a loving cup (he’d heard the wheeze a thousand times), and his huge front teeth had still pushed from his mouth like the tusks of a beaver. Between the bat ears and the buckteeth he had been a comic gargoyle whose first feverish pursuit of several half-grown neighbor girls had moved them only to fits of giggling.

Much later, it was his disfiguring ears that were altered first. One of the pioneer prison psychologists developed a theory that inmates who suffered such comic deformities formed compensatory mechanisms, of which their various felonies were merely symptoms, and their rehabilitation needn’t be sweated out in the stone quarry, making little ones out of big ones, when it could be found under the knife of a cosmetic surgeon.

Society Red was scheduled, with a dozen others, for plastic surgery, which it was hoped would leave him free to be as honest as anyone else. Surely too modest a goal to tax more than lightly the magical skills of a plastic surgeon, but then his time was donated, and he had apparently tried some technique he didn’t care to risk on a cash customer, because when the bandages were removed Red’s ears were greatly altered, but it was difficult to characterize the difference as an improvement. One ear pinched to his skull as if stapled there, and the other still flew at approximately half-mast, but he figured if they’d sliced his ears clean off it would still be a small price to pay to be rid of something so full of meanness and trickeration as that compensatory mechanism which had forced him to steal, not for wheels, women or money, but only as some sorry-assed symptom.

When he next made parole, he quickly discovered that his cosmetic ears cut no ice. The bitches, as he put it, still wouldn’t let him score on their drawers, but continued to deal way around him as if they sensed some violent far-out freakishness thrashing around in his hectic yellow eyes.

He decided he couldn’t make it without wheels so he hotwired a new Buick convertible, and finally managed to pick up a girl in the Greyhound Bus depot. She’d just arrived nonstop from Macon, Georgia, with one change of clothes in a paper bag.

This your machine? she asked, smoothing the Buick’s leather seat.

Sure. You like it?

It’s most elegant.

She was so mortally homely Red figured she’d come near scaring a dog off a gut wagon, and she was built like a sack of flour, heavy, shapeless, and white, so he drove straight up into the hills, parked and reached for her. She was already slipping down the leather seat.

You got something in mind, California?

Red experienced a momentary uncertainty, staring down at the girl’s shadowed face. She was stretched flat now, her legs slewed off to the side and her scuffed black shoes rested on the floorboards.

Maybe, he said.

Some of them old things back home would be halfway to Kingdom Come already.

He brushed up her cotton dress, and clambered awkwardly over her as she adjusted her underwear, and began to push uncertainly at her general softness until she shifted skillfully beneath him, and he plunged wildly, pounding his head against the car door.

Jesus, Savior ... she murmured.

In moments Red found himself wildly contorted on the car seat, the homely shapeless girl pinned beneath him, and he pulled back to look down at her face.

You’re some peehole pirate, she said pleasantly.

Red grinned. What happened to your tits?

She shrugged, shifting her heavy shoulders. They wouldn’t make a pair of doorbells.

Red drove back to his hotel and slipped the girl up to his room, where she immediately washed the clothes in the paper bag and hung them over the radiator to dry. Then she kicked out of her shoes, pulled her dress over her head and wandered around the room wearing only her drawers and a pair of red anklets. Her pale blue eyes were aimless.

First ho-tel I was ever in, she said.

It’s a fleabag, Red said from where he had sprawled on the bed.

She inspected the tiny desk, the letterhead notepaper and a clotted straight pen propped in a dry inkwell. Real hightone, she said. Then she turned to Red. I’m called Mavis.

Mavis how many?

Just Mavis. I bet they call you Red?

"Right! Give that lady the fur-lined pisspot."

Mavis laughed. Ain’t you the one.

You know you’re making me horny again parading around pract’ly bare-assed.

Let’s turn the light out and get in your bed.

Okay, if you want.

Red stripped, palmed the wall switch, and turned to the pale island of bed. With the light off, a scarlet glow outside the windows, reflected from a large neon sign, became apparent. The sheet was tinted; Mavis appeared to be blushing. It occurred to Red this would be the first time he’d ever had a girl in a real bed, one who would sleep beside him.

In the morning, she said she’d turn a few tricks, and Red figured she might as well, since she looked better bending over anyway. They were busted a few days later by the hotel detail, who told Red the girl was fourteen and a runaway, and he had his issue of big-time trouble. For years he told the story, always ending, Shit, I thought she was twenty.

That was the jolt when he blew his pickets. The cell lieutenant, exercising his gift for confusion, moved Society Red in with a weight lifter, called (always behind his back) Pithead. Pithead suffered from a smoldering case of acne, a festering and angry rash spreading over his cheeks, jawline, neck, and shoulders. He blamed his affliction on dirt, and he was a tireless clean freak who liked the cell spotless. But Red didn’t figure to bother himself with excessive cleaning, and he was never in any particular hurry to take a shower. He observed that water caused iron to rust, and frequent showering increased your chances of catching cold. His socks fermented.

Pithead sullenly tormented his pimples while Red explained why it was senseless for him to degenerate into a neat freak behind his acne, since it couldn’t be caused by dirt, because, as Red admitted in a nice display of candor, he was considerably dirtier than Pithead, and he didn’t have one pimple. Probably Pithead had bad blood.

Pithead ground his teeth, his eyes blinking with furious revulsion. He knew what caused his acne. It was sin, and dirt was sin made visible. He sent by mail order for various medicated soaps and took nightly sponge baths, which caused Red to chuckle with amused tolerance. Pithead’s queer for soap, he told his buddies on the yard. He sleeps with a bar under his pillow and sniffs it while he lopes his mule.

But then one day when Red made afternoon lockup, he crawled into his bunk already half asleep, and accidentally stepped on Pithead’s pillow, depositing a crescent of dust and grease. When Pithead came in later, the first thing he saw was Red’s footprint. He stared down as astounded as if it were the hoofprint of the Fiend, and it did appear to smolder with sin.

Hey, man, he told Red. You stepped on my pillow.

Red yawned hugely. No shit, did I?

Pithead changed his pillowcase and stretched out in his bunk, his arms folded behind his head. He stared steadily up at the outline of Red’s body pressed into the webbing of his springs. Finally, he said, That was cold, man. Red was asleep.

The next morning, when Red stumbled groggily from his bunk, seconds before unlock, he had to brush by Pithead to get to the toilet. But nothing warned him, as Pithead pivoted sideways and, winding up like Whitey Ford, copped a Sunday, smashing Red flush on the mouth. Red sprawled against the wall, his mouth filling with blood. What the fuck? he demanded. But just then the unlock bell sounded, the bar freed, and Pithead was out of the cell. He paused on the tier to yell back, Step on my pillow, will you, you filthy son of a bitch!

When Red tried to wash his face he discovered one of his front teeth was barely hanging, and the other was loose. He passed on breakfast and caught the head of the dental line. The dentist smiled but didn’t ask questions. He told Red he could probably save the tooth, but he hesitated to blow the life back into anything so singularly unlovely. He suggested they pull both front teeth and fit Red with a partial. But of course if Red wanted to keep his own teeth—

Yank the bastards, Doc, he said. Those snags have whipped me for a lot of action.

The yard was growing crowded. Hundreds of men were now walking steadily from one end to the other, pounding the blacktop, and a great many more were gathered under the rain shed in small groups, exchanging the idle topics of a thousand mornings. All wore blue denims, but the condition of their uniforms varied greatly, the tidy, the slovenly, and the politicians in their pressed pants—starched overalls, Red thought mockingly—their polished free-world shoes, and expensive wristwatches.

Red was waiting for his hustling partner, but he rapped to anyone who passed by. He liked to bullshit, play the dozens, and when some clown stopped to call him old tops and bottoms he quickly said, Your mammy gives up tops and bottoms.

I heard yours was freakish for billy goats.

She used to sport a light mule habit, Red returned, his yellow eyes beginning to light with pleasure. But she wrote and told me she was trying to quit.

The clown smiled. Red, you think you’ll ever amount to anything?

Next time out I figure to file my pimp hand.

Next time? You’ve already beat this yard long enough to wear out two murder beefs and a bag of robberies.

Red shrugged. Off and on, I’ve been around awhile.

The big yard’s a cold place to fuck off your life.

Red’s eyes began to grow vague as he lost interest in the conversation. Cons busted into jail, then spent half their time crying. And all the sniveling didn’t make anyone’s time any easier to do, any more than it shortened the length of a year. You did it the easiest way you could and hard-assed the difference. The big yard was an undercover world if you knew how to check the action, and something was always coming down. You could make a life on this yard, and you could die on it.

What’s to it, Society? someone else asked.

Not much. You want to grease armpits and wrestle?

A man walked by carrying a cardboard box and sporting parole shoes. Red knew he had made his date and was heading out. By ten he’d be free, on his way to the city, and before the day was over some fish would be coming in to replace him. This happened every day. The gradual turnover was constant. Only lifers and a few other longtimers stood outside this process.

For a moment Red thought about the men waiting somewhere in some county jail, still unaware they’d be hitting the big yard before the day was out. Then he saw the bookmaker he worked for, and walked over to take his station beside him.

1

TWO HUNDRED miles to the south in the Delano County jail, Jim Nunn was the first prisoner on the court chain down from the felony tank. He was keeping his cool. He’d been through it all before, several times in different counties, and nothing in the routine of jail, trial, conviction, or sentence could any longer surprise him. Today’s chain was running for sentencing, and when the deputy unlocked his cuffs, Nunn gestured into the bullpen at the hidden courtroom beyond and asked, This where they give out the free board and room?

The deputy smiled mechanically. This is it, he said and began to uncuff the next man. Nunn stepped into the bullpen. They’re all the same, he thought bitterly. They all look the same, smell the same. He sat down on one of the two benches that faced each other in this narrow, featureless room.

Henry Jackson, a tall, very dark Negro, stepped in. He smiled at Nunn and said softly, Well, sport, here we is.

Nunn smiled back. You come to get your rent paid too?

Jackson winced humorously. Mos’ likely that be what happen.

They told me if I couldn’t do the time, I shouldn’t mess with crime.

That’s the troof. Jackson shrugged and sat down beside Nunn. Well, they won’t be gettin them no cherry. He looked up as another prisoner, released from the chain, entered, and asked Nunn, How many of these dudes you think we take with us?

Enough, Nunn said. They keep that prison full.

They do that.

Nunn watched the other prisoners enter the bullpen. He thought of them in terms of their crime. Two Checks, a Manslaughter, a Burglary, the Baby Raper, and three kids, one a stone nut, with a four-dollar robbery to divide between them. Nunn rubbed the back of his neck and tried to remember his last good fix. The memory brought no ease. He started as the metal door leading back to the county jail slammed shut; he heard the solid thrust of the bolt. In an hour or so, whenever the judge got ready, they would be led out for sentencing. Nunn felt but slight suspense. He knew he was going back to prison. He would be sentenced and delivered by midafternoon.

He turned to ask Henry Jackson, What’s for chow on the main line tonight?

Friday? Tha’s fish, ain’t it?

That’s right, fish.

And cornbread. Apple pie.

Yes, and all the water you can drink.

Tha’s right, go heavy as you like on water.

Nunn shook his head in mock sorrow. Jackson, I think we have fucked up.

You bes’ tell it like it is.

The judge’ll tell it.

"Well, he the man today."

That’s right, and tonight he won’t even remember what we looked like.

Was that what bothered him? Nunn wondered. Did he wish he’d had the brains and the balls for some spectacular offense, some legendary crime, rather than be, as he knew he was, just one more small gray malcontent? Yes, he wished he was someone else. His eyes searched the faces in the bullpen and in the saddest, the weariest, he saw some furtive hope. Even the Baby Raper appeared to believe he could be forgiven. Baby raping didn’t necessarily make him a bad fellow. He just forgot to ask for ID. It could happen to anyone.

Hey, Manning, Nunn called.

The Baby Raper looked up. Yes, he said.

What’re you looking for out there?

In court?

Yes, what do you expect?

I don’t know.

You think you’ll get the joint?

I don’t know.

Henry Jackson leaned over to whisper to Nunn, Iffen he don’t get the joint the ducks in Mississippi wear rubber boots.

Yeah, 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.

I’m sorry, Manning said automatically.

Buddy, 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.

What’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.

That’s right, Nunn agreed. We’re all about to get screwed, and without the benefit of intercourse.

No 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 with forceless bitterness.

It’ll come to you, Nunn said.

That it do, Henry Jackson added.

Like, when rape’s inevitable, Nunn continued slyly, relax and enjoy it.

Manning felt the blood burning in his face as he stared at the metal wall above the heads of the prisoners seated on the opposite bench. He wouldn’t look at them for fear they were all smiling at him. Instead he found himself studying a crude drawing of a man and a woman making love. The genitals were grossly exaggerated, and in the balloon above the woman’s head she was saying: Moan! Oh, do it to me, Big Daddy! While Big Daddy had been made to say: Shake that thing, Bitch!

Manning shuddered. The obscenity was as intolerable as the feel of slime. He closed his eyes, but the grotesque caricature immediately came to life in his mind, and the figures began to move in a slow grind of animal pleasure. The image seemed to tip as somehow his viewpoint altered and he became involved and once again saw Debbie’s soft young face turned aside on her pillow, her profile in places almost indistinguishable from the white cloth and in others chalked vividly against the black tangle of her long hair. He saw her eye-lids flutter and once again felt the first subtle shift of her hips beneath his own, and again, as he had that night, he gasped. After years of dullness a wave of fierce and masculine energy had trapped him like a rabbit in a snare and exposed him as an object of disgust and derision. He opened his eyes. No one was paying him any attention. Nunn was rolling a cigarette, his motions precise to the point of fussiness, and Henry Jackson was watching as if he were trying to memorize how it was done. Manning looked away and found himself staring at a tall, very thin boy who was drawing still another picture on the wall.

Sheldon Wilson, sometimes called Stick because he was over six-foot-three and under one hundred and sixty pounds, was drawing the Vampire. The Vampire had the Devil’s hairline and nostrils round and dark as pennies. The fangs, drinking teeth soon to be set to the world’s soft throat, were blunt and functional as soda straws.

Stick’s two followers, both with the title of General, watched their leader work. One was seventeen, the other eighteen. The younger had the round dull eyes and slack mouth of a borderline defective, while the older seemed only slightly brighter. Stick, in sharp contrast to his Generals, had an air of sullen keenness. A dark, mean look. His narrow face was shaped like a trowel, and his eyes, small and set close together, were the rivets that fixed the blade to the handle. He was nineteen, and before he was sixteen he had been expelled from several high schools. Twice for hitting teachers, both women, and a third time for breaking into the school at night to paint Fascist slogans in the hallways. He had also invaded the girls’ lavatory, broken open the sanitary pad dispenser, and scattered the pads. Following this incident a school psychologist characterized him as seriously disturbed and recommended treatment in an institutional setting, which Stick knew in plain words meant he should be stashed in some nut house, and, in his own phrase, he cooled it. He became quiet, withdrawn, and normal enough if one ignored the large swastikas on the cover of his binder. And he wasn’t the first boy to have found a kind of negative magic in this discredited symbol; in a way its banality was almost reassuring. Then the swastikas were replaced by the Vampire.

The three of them, the Generals and Stick, comprised the total membership of the Vampires, an organization dedicated to world domination. They stood convicted of robbery, an attempt to levy tax for their treasury, which at the time of their arrest totaled three dollars and ten cents. The money was first held for evidence, then returned to the man they had robbed. They had spent ninety cents on cigarettes, candy bars, and a bottle of Royal Crown Cola.

A key sounded, and Stick looked up from his drawing to watch a mild-looking deputy standing in the open courtroom door. The hands holding a clipboard were slender and well kept. Stick’s eyes narrowed scornfully. He stared at the black gloss of the deputy’s boots.

Henry Jackson? the deputy called from a typewritten list.

Yessir, tha’s me.

You’re first at bat, Henry. Take off your cap and come along.

Jackson snatched off his paint-stained golfer’s cap and stuck it in his back pocket. Yessir, he said again, this time with a hint of derisive broadness. He winked a yellowish eye and grinned over his shoulder at the men behind him. Here we goes, he said.

Play it Tom, Nunn advised.

Oh, yes, I plays it Tom.

When the door closed behind the deputy and Henry Jackson, Stick turned back to his drawing and began to trace a hairline mustache on the Vampire like the one he wore himself, although his own was as much burnt match as it was whisker.

The youngest General leaned over to whisper, What you think they’re gunna do to us? He looked at the door. Out there?

I told you not to worry about that.

Yeah, I know, but I keep wondering—

Stick regarded his Generals calmly. Does it matter? he asked softly, his ear appreciatively tuned to the coolness of his voice. Does it matter what they do?

No, but I can’t help—

That’s right, Stick broke in. It doesn’t matter. They get their licks in now. We get ours later. He nodded with confident emphasis, and hooked his thumb at the door leading to the courtroom. And these crud, and all the crud like them, will get scraped up in the street and shoved into the sewers.

The Generals nodded in hopeful agreement. For a moment they appeared as pleased as children who have been promised a favorite treat.

Again the door opened. Henry Jackson stepped through, still smiling, though now his smile seemed numb.

What’d you get? Nunn asked.

Well, I got enough, Henry Jackson said, pulling a crushed and broken cigarette butt from his shirt pocket. He looked at the butt, saw it couldn’t be lit, and dropped it to the floor. But not so much I cain’t hack it, he continued. Iffen the man figures he’s got it coming I guess I can do it.

"I guess you will do it," Nunn said.

Ain’t no guessin to that, is there, pops? When the man sticks time to your ass you better be able to do it.

You can hack it. You’ve worn out beefs before.

That’s the troof.

Again the key sounded, and this time Stick heard the deputy calling their names. He stood up briskly and motioned the Generals into line behind him. They marched into the courtroom, but the martial and menacing effect Stick had planned failed when the youngest General was unable to keep in step. They lined up beneath the bench at attention, largely ignoring their parents seated in the first row beyond the rail. The lawyer hired by their parents made a brief speech, but Stick didn’t listen. He concentrated on the judge’s eyes. He wanted this judge to remember him as he intended to remember the judge. He knew his own eyes were charged with power, a cold power, and he drilled his icy strength into the judge’s brain until he could send his thoughts like commands ...

—Let the Vampire go, he willed the judge to say.

Then he heard the judge sentencing them to the state prison. His head jerked back as if the judge had hit him, and the youngest General was crying openly. Stick heard his mother calling his name in that same tearful whine he hated so much, and he ignored her now as he had so often before.

Then the deputy was leading them back towards the bullpen and they followed him like stunned children, but when the door closed behind them, Stick pulled himself up tight, and told his troops to snap to. Stop sniveling, he told the youngest General. So they send us up there—does that mean we have to stay?

And in Stick’s mind at this moment was born a curious hybrid, bred in part from his simplified re-creation of Napoleon’s triumphant return from St. Helena, mated with his recollections of the late-late show where Humphrey Bogart crouched in the shadows of a prison wall while the search-lights lashed around him like the tentacles of an enraged squid.

Manning watched the other prisoners take their turn in the courtroom. A few won probation or short terms in the county jail, but most returned sentenced to state prison. He heard Nunn whistle softly and say, That judge is savage. He’s killing people left and right.

His woman holdin out on him, Henry Jackson said. No cock can sure make a man red-eyed.

That’s right, Nunn said. He figures if he can’t get none, ain’t nobody going to get any.

Manning’s turn came, and he walked out into the bright sterile atmosphere of the courtroom with the sense of a diver returning to the surface after many hours in the dark and murderous bottoms of the ocean. He scanned the seats and immediately saw his wife in the back row. He had neither seen her nor heard from her since the morning of the day she had reported him to the police. No visits or letters, nothing to indicate that she had realized her act had been as destructive as his own. Then he was close enough to see the set of her face. She had come for revenge.

Manning’s lawyer joined him before the bench and began an unemotional plea for probation. Manning heard himself described as a good citizen with an impressive service record. Look at the judge, Manning told himself, but his gaze drifted away. His lawyer was continuing: "... crime of passion in the truest sense ... not his natural