Cast the First Stone Read Online Free PDF

chaplain was away he took charge of the Sunday services.
    I wasn’t allowed to keep the money but it would be put to my credit in the front office. Deacon had no sooner left than everybody in the dormitory knew I had a hundred bucks to my credit. All of a sudden I had more friends than I knew what to do with. They wanted to walk around with me or give me some Bull Durham. Mostly they wanted to tell me what I could order the next day, which was ordering day.
    With all that money I’d seen outside around gambling clubs during the past year, a hundred bucks didn’t seem like a lot of money to me. But those convicts in that dormitory were broke and they figured they had a sucker.
    Everybody began calling me Jim. All of a sudden they knew all about me; all about my sentence, and my going to the state university and graduating, and being a doctor, one of them said, and another had it a lawyer, and one asked, “Weren’t you a fighter pilot?” They had a lot of things to sell me and a lot of things to give me. All I wanted was to gamble. I could have gotten credit in any of the poker games. But I didn’t know it.
    When Mal came out and asked me to come back to his bunk I went because I didn’t have anything else to do. He looked very neat. He had washed and cleaned up after supper, so he must have had some private water because the washtrough was cut off. As he walked ahead of me I noticed that he was taller than I. He must have been about five feet, ten-and-a-half, or eleven. His hips were as wide as his shoulders. That looks odd in a man, especially if the man isn’t stout.
    He was very pleasant and very friendly. He kept smiling all the time he talked as if he was pleased with something. When he smiled the hardness which his face had in repose was gone and he looked quite boyish.
    I liked his bunk. There was an openness about it. Although it was over by the wall there was a light over it that gave it a certain cheerfulness. He didn’t have it curtained off as Jeep had his bunk, and there was none of that gloom and secrecy and suggestiveness like the bunks down in the corner where Jeep and Mike were: I liked it because it was open. I didn’t have any secrets.
    Mal sat down beside me, crossing his legs and leaning his head back against the bunk frame so as to face me. I was sitting with my back to the aisle and my feet on his box, with my arms propped on the bunk.
    “Do you draw disability compensation?” he asked. He was just fishing, he knew I hadn’t been in the army.
    “Naw, state compensation from the industrial commission,” I said.
    “You mean for an injury?”
    “Yeah, I broke my back about three years ago—before I went to college.”
    “Broke your back! Damn!” he exclaimed. “How do you get about?”
    “Oh, it’s all healed up now. Just about, that is.”
    “Damn! Nobody’d ever know it.”
    “Nobody’d ever know you were in death row, either. Not just by looking at you.”
    “Naw, guess you’re right. How’d you do it?”
    “I was working in a steel mill in Gary. I’d just finished high school. I was riding an overhead crane and fell on a stack of plates.”
    “Jesus Christ! Wonder it didn’t kill you.”
    “It damn near did. I broke my arm, my jaw, and three vertebrae. I was in the hospital four months.” I showed him the scar where the bone had come through my arm.
    “Jesus Christ!” he said. “Does it ever hurt?”
    “Not often. Mostly when I get cold. Of course I make out like it does to keep drawing compensation.”
    “How much do you get?”
    “Twenty-seven bucks a week. That’s for total disability. I can get it for five hundred weeks if I keep stiffing.” After a pause I said, “I haven’t told anybody but you. I don’t know what they might do when they find out I’m in prison. They might cut it off.”
    “If you’d told the deputy warden you could of got an easy job,” he said. “You could of got in the cripple company.”
    “I don’t mind it here,” I said.