On the Yard Read Online Free PDF

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.”
    â€œHis woman holdin out on him,” Henry Jackson said. “No cock can sure make a man red-eyed.”
    â€œThat’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 child.”
    The judge had removed his glasses and folded his hands. Manning, finally able to meet his eyes, saw they were narrowed in distaste.
    â€œProbation denied. In the opinion of this court the law doesn’t provide an adequate punishment for one who violates his own home and fouls his young like an animal. You should be altered by surgery.”
    Manning bowed his head, scalded with shame. The judge was rapidly repeating the legal formula sentencing him to prison. His lawyer was patting him on the shoulder, saying, “Sorry, Will, I thought we might squeak by.”
    â€œHow long? How long is that?”
    â€œI’d have to check, but I think it’s one to fifty years.”
    â€œFifty years!”
    â€œDon’t let the fifty scare you. You could be out in a year.”
    He turned to see the back of Pat’s tan coat as she passed through the swinging doors. Then the bailiff was motioning him back towards the bullpen. As he left the courtroom he found himself wondering if he would have to cancel his insurance.

2
    T RANSPORTING convicted prisoners, now literally convicts, to the state prison is the responsibility of the sheriff, and the county had converted an old school bus into a prison van. Welded bars over the windows enclosed the driver in a separate cab, and the original orange-and-black had been repainted gray. Manning had occasionally noticed this van. It had seemed to move in a cloud, not of disgrace, or danger, but enveloped by a separate atmosphere. A stout gray bird of passage coming from one alien land, bound for another.
    Prisoners were transported in white coveralls, but it wasn’t until Manning stepped into the embarkation cage in the basement of the county jail and saw the stacks of coveralls that he remembered the men visible through the bus windows, all in