Cases

Chapter One

It was the summer of ’53, he was twenty-one years old and thought himself gloriously drunk in the doorway of an empty boxcar clanking through the hot southern night. Sweat gleamed on his face and trickled down between his shoulder blades. He raised his voice in song:

In a far corner of the boxcar another voice also was raised, not in song. “Hey, shut the hell up.”

He drained the last of the half-pint and threw the empty out into the darkness. After what seemed a long time he heard it shatter somewhere behind them. It didn’t take much to get him high, he wasn’t really a boozer: first time he ever got drunk had been just two years ago, on a bottle of seventy-nine-cent dessert wine. There had been grape skins in it. For a month afterward he’d gotten sick every time he saw a billboard advertising liquor.

“I said knock it off!” Same voice, pissed now. “Goddamn brakeman hear you, it’s all our asses.”

The train was starting up a grade into some cracker town he didn’t know the name of, the engine straining, the click-click of the wheels slowing against the joins of the rail sections. The wind blew rich swampland into his face.

There were sudden scrabbling sounds from the corner of the boxcar, the thunder of charging feet. But he grabbed his duffel bag and was out the open doorway, floating, crunch! already running when his heavy hack boots hit the cinder right-of-way beside the tracks, still belting out his song:

He ran a dozen paces abreast of the moving train, slipping on the ties but keeping his feet. When he got himself stopped, still upright, he could see the pale retreating angry faces in the boxcar doorway. He cupped his hands to yell after them:

Chuckling, he trudged toward the thin cluster of lights half a mile ahead. Too bad he’d had to jump off the train, but running was better than fighting. This way he could get something to eat before trying to catch another rattler. Tonight, for sure, miles to go before he’d sleep. When he had covered half the distance into town, it started to rain.

A big man came from the still-open diner to pick his teeth by the light from the front windows. Yellow highlights gleamed on his black rain slicker as he moved down the street and around the corner and out of sight.

The dishwater-blond waitress, alone behind the counter, reached under it for a movie magazine she placed open between her elbows on the red linoleum top. She leaned swaybacked with her behind stuck out while she read. The counter’s wooden edging had been chipped and carved by generations of pocketknives. Most of the stools had rips in their imitation-leather seats.

When the man off the night freight came in and shook water from his army fatigue cap, she straightened quickly, blushing at being caught goofing off. His fatigue jacket was wet-darkened across the shoulders. The walk in the rain had sobered him up. He was not tall, but wide and blocky. He grinned at her.

“Good night for ducks.”

She had the sort of soft Georgia accent that made every sentence a question, almost every phrase a sort of invitation.

“Don’t figure you look as if it’d melt you none?”

“That’s for sure. You still serving?”

“Burgers an’ fries? Chili ’n’ beans with oyster crackers?”

“I’ll have it all. Uh... you got tea? Maybe with lots of cream and sugar for it?” He didn’t much like tea, but he liked coffee less.

She giggled. “Tea’s for little old ladies.”

“That’s about what I feel like, with the rain and all.” He jerked his head toward the three booths under the windows that fronted the street. “Over there?”

“You just pick your spot, Johnny Doughboy.”

Must be an army base somewhere around here; he was just as glad she hadn’t noticed all his clothes weren’t government-issue. In the end booth he opened his duffel bag and took out a dog-eared Gold Medal Original by John D. MacDonald, then sat with the paperback open in his hands, looking out through the window’s cheap wavy rain-streaked glass at the deserted length of side street. Two pale lights bounced above the wet-gleaming gravel like buttons on a string.

The main street, at right angles to this, would probably be called Center or Main or Broadway. Unless it was named after Robert E. Lee or Stonewall Jackson. Here in South Georgia, that war was still being fought. That’s why he’d chosen the booth: if the big man showed up again, he’d be out the back door. A week of riding the boxcars had made him wary and observant.

When the man didn’t appear again, he started to read The Damned, was instantly immersed in the lives of the people at a stalled river ferry in a sun-scorched little town south of the border down Mexico way. Be nice to see Mexico for himself.

As he read, two dark shapes dropped off another rattler when it slowed for the same grade outside town. Their heavy shoes also struck the embankment running, but because of the rain sank into the soft grade fill to send out showers of wet cinders. One of them missed his footing in the dark, rolled down the slope until the long wet grass beside the right-of-way stopped him. He sat up and sniffed the half-acrid smell of dirt newly wet down.

He laughed. “Hey, man, old brakeman never catch us now.”

A moving shadow trudged back, slid down the embankment on its heels, lit a cigarette, became a man.

“I’d of whupped that bastard flat, you hadn’t stopped me.”

The cupped match flame revealed a young, hard face with deep-welled blue eyes and a square, cleft chin. His hair was brown and curled tightly against his skull by the rain.

The Negro, taller, stood up to brush the red loam off his brown cord trousers. “We don’t need no more trouble.” Slanting rain popped on his leather jacket and slid off, glistening. A dirty plaid cap hid his kinky hair. He was light-skinned enough to be called high yaller. “Come on, let’s go into town and get us something to eat. I got two bits and two dimes and two pennies. You got any loot?”

“Half a pack of butts,” said the white man. “God, Larkie, could I use a drink. I’m wet and cold clean through.”

“No whiskey, Dale. Won’t no one serve a white man and a colored man anyway.”

“If we weren’t tap city—”

“But we is.”

They waded through the sodden saw grass and smartweed that choked the ditch. A quail exploded from beneath their feet to squeak away into the darkness. Beyond the tracks was a shallow-rutted road of muddy sand. They turned toward the fitful yellow pocks that marked the town through the falling water. Far ahead, the freight train they’d left dropped its pressure with a sigh. Buckthorn and beaked hazel bushes flanked the road to their left, smelling fresh and sweet in the rain.

The dirt track became a badly maintained gravel street. The rain seemed to drift: through the wind-tossed streetlights’ dim glow, but it drummed the wooden sidewalk like running feet.

“Diner up ahead,” said Dale.

They hesitated in the windows’ pale yellow glow to peer in cautiously. There was a lone patron in a window booth, munching a hamburger, immersed in a paperback. He wore an army fatigue jacket and was maybe a couple of years younger than they were. Probably from some local army base, as much a stranger as they. No worries there. A homely waitress was behind the counter, washing fountain glasses in gray soapy water.

“What you think, Dale?”

“I think she’s got a kindly face. I think I got to get something into my gut.”

Normally Larkie would have waited outside, but it was raining hard now. The door’s hinges squeaked. They stopped just inside to drip water on the floor. The girl looked at them uncertainly, then at the man in the window booth, then back at them. She finally came down the counter drying her hands on the towel wrapped around her middle like an apron. Her hair was the color and texture of straw, nearly as straight. She was without makeup and with a slight squint.

“Yes?”

“Look, miss.” Larkie’s hands moved like instruments to measure her credulity. “We got us forty-seven cents. It’s cold and wet out and we just passing through. What that buy us?”

She bit her lip, looking at the man in the booth again. But after his first quick sharp glance, he had not looked up from his book.

“Well— I’ll let you have two bowls of chili and two coffees, if you promise to eat fast? It should be fifty cents but I’m about to close up? I’m not supposed to serve—”

She stopped abruptly. Perched at the end of the counter they slurped hot chili and drank steaming coffee as fast as their mouths could stand it, crunching down the whole heaped bowl of oyster crackers she brought.

“Any work around here?” asked Dale. Under the light he was too big-boned for his size; although his hands were thick and powerful, his wrists managed to make them seem small.

“No work in the state, I don’t think.” She looked around nervously, then leaned across the counter the way she had done to read her movie magazine. Her hair smelled of dime-store shampoo. “Listen, where are you boys from?”

“Up no’th,” said Larkie.

She nodded. “You’d better... Uh, they’re sort of funny about... coloreds and whites around here. You’d do better to either split up or else go back up north again. You don’t know how it is in this state.”

“We’re learning,” said Dale. “Me and Larkie have—”

“Much obliged for the food, ma’am,” said Larkie. He laid his forty-seven cents on the counter. “Wisht we had something extra for you.”

The girl blushed. “Oh, that’s okay. You take care.”

“We most surely will, ma’am.” He turned to Dale. “Come on, white boy. Let’s blow.”

The big man in the black slicker was standing on the boardwalk, absorbed by a dusty display of women’s hats in the millinery store two doors down from the diner. He looked like the sort of man who would find women’s hats singularly uninteresting. Without seeming to, he blocked their way.

Larkie said, “Uh-oh,” as Dale skipped sideways like a monkey, his hand whipping toward his trouser pocket. Larkie shot out a long arm to lock the white boy’s wrist with strong fingers. “Easy on,” he said.

The big man hadn’t moved except to put his right hand under the shiny slicker. His straight brown hair, touched with gray at the temples, was combed severely back from a high forehead. His broad face wore bleak eyes and a gunfighter’s mustache.

“You got a head, black boy. Just passing through?”

“You John Law?”

“Yep.”

“Just passing through.”

The big man shook his head slowly, almost sadly. A drop of rainwater fell from the end of his blunt nose.

“Looks to me like maybe you’re waiting around for little Sue Ellen to shut up the diner there. Then who knows? Maybe you plannin’ on followin’ her home—”

“We wouldn’t do nothing like that, Mr. Sheriff.”

“Or maybe you waitin’ to rob the place.” He swung around to point at the man reading inside. “Could be he’s your lookout.”

“The soldier boy?” said Dale disdainfully. “We never laid eyes on him before.”

“He’s no soldier boy, he’s out of uniform — wrong shoes, wrong pants.” Through the window he caught the eye of the man not quite in uniform, gestured for him to come out. “Brakeman off the train told me ’bout you two ’bos. Said to keep an eye on you, white boy. Said you think you’re handy with a knife.”

Dale stepped back, blinking his eyes against the water running down from his tight curls. His face was deeply tanned and he wore a blue navy watch sweater that smelled of wet wool.

“We ain’t done nothing in your town, mister.” His voice was low and sullen.

“And you ain’t about to,” said the sheriff as he gestured at the man inside again, this time impatiently.

“Shit,” said the almost-soldier boy under his breath.

He splayed his paperback open on the tabletop, raised his eyebrows in exaggerated query as his left hand pointed at his chest in apparent surprise. Why hadn’t he got out when he’d had the chance? Because he’d gotten lost in The Damned, that’s why.

Instead of bumming around the country in boxcars, maybe he should have stayed home in Minnesota, worked at the lumberyard another summer, or behind a desk in his dad’s accounting office, gone home at night to his mom’s good cooking off nice china.

But that wasn’t what you did if you wanted to be a writer.

Meanwhile, his right hand was already digging in his pants pocket. There were a wallet and two twenties and a five in there, along with some silver. Two fingertips drew his Social Security card and driver’s license out of the thin worn leather, sandwiched them in the fold of the twenties. Outside, the big man in the slicker gestured again, as if vexed by the delay.

The youth slid partway out of the booth; he had noticed a rip in the seat just wide enough to slip his twenties and identification into and out of sight. With only pocket change, he was a vagrant; but the twenties would be taken anyway, then used to suggest he had pulled a robbery somewhere back up the line. His Uncle Russ, who’d ridden the rods during the Great Depression, had warned him about that.

He carried his duffel bag over the waitress, said, “Could you put this behind the counter and hold it for me until I pick it up?” When she nodded, puzzled, he made her wide-eyed by tossing the folded five down in front of her. “That’s for holding the bag, miss. And for me and the other two boys. You keep all of that for yourself. Don’t tell your boss about it.”

Outside, he joined the three waiting men, putting on his fatigue hat against the rain.

“What’s your name, ’bo?” said the sheriff.

As a throwaway line in “The Joint Is Jumpin’,” Fats Waller had sung, “Don’t give your right name, no, no, no.”

“Peter Collinson,” he said.

“Army man?”

“Not anymore.” Not ever, but why tell the sheriff that?

“What I thought. You’re about halfway in uniform but you could have bought your clothes at an army-surplus store. I was just telling your friends here that maybe you three ’bos was planning a little larceny in my town.”

“You know I never saw these men before, Sheriff,” said Collinson evenly. “You saw me come into town alone.”

“Know what I know. Saw what I saw. Riding the rattlers. Bumming meals in white restaurants where nigras ain’t allowed. No visible means of support... Know what all that means, ’bos?”

Nobody answered him. Nobody had to.

“Vag, that’s what it means. Lots of road going through here, the state’s poor and it needs cheap labor.” He took Larkie’s arm in one big paw, said to Dale, “Walk in front of us, ’bo, and keep your hand out of that pocket.” He added, almost as an afterthought, “Jail’s right comfortable, my wife does the cooking. Won’t be but overnight anyway.”

They turned the corner and started down the main street. Confederate Boulevard, noted Collinson. That figured.

Larkie pulled his plaid cap down against the rain, said politely, “Nice little town you got here, Sheriff.”

“It grows on you, ’bo. It grows on you.”

Chapter Two

At 8:27 in the morning, last night’s rain was just a fond memory; the big thermometer outside the red brick courthouse showed eighty-nine hot degrees. Six tall windows down the left side, open to catch any morning breeze, still left the crackerbox courtroom sweltering. A languid fan turned below the high ceiling without appreciable result. In the blossom-fragrant magnolia outside, a pair of purple grackles argued their day’s agenda.

The courtroom’s hardwood floor was worn bare of wax and varnish by decades of miscreants and their captors. There were eight rows of wooden benches for spectators, those on the right deserted except for an unshaven slat-thin almost seven-foot drunk who smelled of whiskey and urine. He was talking to himself in low reasonable tones. Across the aisle, glancing over at him like disapproving relatives at a shotgun wedding, sat the sheriff with his three captives. The boys were now all in handcuffs.

Dale was still arguing.

“Sheriff, why’re we here? We didn’t do anything. We—”

“ ’Bos, let me give you a piece of advice. Judge Carberry was planning to be out after bluegills and crappies this morning, but he had to convene court just for you three. He ain’t in the mood for much lip.”

Beyond the handrail were the deserted prosecution and defense tables. The massive hardwood bench, from which the judge would dispense the town’s particular brand of justice, was flanked by American and Confederate flags. Most of the wall behind it was covered with a gold-fringed Georgia state flag.

A uniformed bailiff wandered in from a side door, scratching his crotch with the innocent delight of a hound dog with fleas and saying all in one sentence without pause, “All rise for the Honorable Judge Hiram Carberry court is now in session God guide these proceedings.”

Judge Carberry came from chambers to take his place behind the bench, wearing his black robe of office despite the heat. He was in his late fifties and his hair was white-blue like shadows on snow, his face aristocratic, his China-blue eyes just slightly too close-set on either side of a narrow aquiline nose.

Despite there being little in the way of description — “proud-looking” was the only adjective Twain had used — the judge reminded Collinson of Colonel Sherburn in Huck Finn, saying disdainfully to the mob that had come to get him, “The idea of you thinking you had pluck enough to lynch a man.”

“Morning, Sheriff Swinton,” said Judge Carberry.

“Your honor,” said Swinton.

Everyone had sat down again. The judge was looking at the drunk. “Gideon. You stand on up now.”

Gideon stopped talking to himself and stood up to gaze at the judge with watery eyes. “Yessir, y’r honor.”

“I thought the last time you were before me, I ordered you to stay out of the Johnny Reb.”

“Well, y’r honor, my dog ran in under them swingin’ doors an’ I went in to—”

“You damn fool, you don’t have a dog.”

“Oh.” Gideon thought about it. “My cat?”

“Don’t have a cat, either. But you do have a wife. She’ll be worried. You go on home, and you thank God that good woman’ll put up with a piece of worthless white trash like you.”

Gideon’s face screwed up into a pathetic squinch. “She beats on me when she’s mad, y’r honor.”

“Go on home with you now, you old reprobate.”

Seeing only flint in the judge’s gaze, Gideon shuffled sadly out of the courtroom like a lanky crane.

“Stand up, ’bos,” whispered the sheriff.

The three young men stood up as Judge Carberry turned his gaze on them. The bailiff was sitting in a straight-back chair below the bench, cleaning his fingernails with a pocketknife.

“What do we have here, Sheriff Swinton?”

“Well, your honor, these three men were hanging around town last night in the rain. When I spoke to them, they gave me evasive answers. None of them has any identification, none of them has any money, none of them has any visible means of support. No local ties that I could uncover, your honor.”

“You are telling me that they are vagrants.”

To Collinson, the two men were like actors in a play so well rehearsed that they knew each other’s lines.

“It appears that way, your honor.”

“Are they all three together, Sheriff Swinton?”

Swinton indicated Collinson. “He came into town alone, ahead of the other two, but they’re of an age.”

“I see.” The judge turned a seemingly benevolent eye on the three men. He said pleasantly, “Do you gentlemen have anything to say on your own behalf?”

Dale, deluded by the soft tones and kindly look, said, “Your honor, we were just passing through town lookin’ for work. We weren’t bothering nobody...”

“Sheriff?”

“These two, your honor, they went into the diner together.”

Carberry leaned forward on the bench like a stooping hawk. “A nigra and a white boy in Imelda Joad’s diner together?”

“Yes, your honor.”

“And they were served?”

“Chili and coffee. It was Sue Ellen, your honor.”

“And the other fellow was already in there and didn’t do or say anything to defend the young lady’s honor?”

“That’s how she stacks up, your honor.”

The judge leaned back, shook his head in gentle exasperation. “You get Sue Ellen on up here to my chambers this afternoon, Sheriff. I want to have a talk with that young lady. She’s just too softhearted for her own good.” He looked down at Collinson. “What about you, son? Any statement you want to make about all of this?”

“None, your honor.”

The judge nodded. “Three drifters off the trains.” He leaned forward on his elbows, chin on his interlaced hands. “We can’t have it, gentlemen. We won’t have it. Not in my town.”

“And a lot of new road going through,” said Larkie almost under his breath.

“What was that, boy?” demanded the judge sharply.

“Calling on the Lord, your honor. I’m a good Baptist.”

Judge Carberry nodded, picked up his gavel, pointed it at Dale. He had not asked, nor had he been given, any of their names. “You. Six months hard on the road crew.” He slammed the gavel down, bang! Pointed it at Larkie. “You. Six months hard on the road crew.” Bang! Pointed it at Collinson. “You. One month hard on the road crew.” Bang!

“All rise court is dismissed,” intoned the bailiff.

The judge disappeared back inside his chambers. Swinton checked his watch, a big old turnip on a fob that he took from his pants pocket. “Two minutes and fifty-eight seconds for you three. Judge Carberry just set hisself a new record.”

“Bluegills must be bitin’ real good,” said Larkie.

“Happens after a good rain,” said Collinson with a careless grin. But he could hardly breathe he was so scared.

“Truck’s waiting, ’bos,” said the sheriff.

The compound was four miles off the road behind barbed wire, in the last county in Georgia where road-gang prisoners still wore ankle chains. Their pay was two bits a day and found — beans and rice and a sliver of fatback at a dime a day per man. The convicts lived in a single one-story clapboard building much like an army barracks except it was feces-brown instead of urine-yellow. The unglassed, screened windows had wooden covers that could be hinged upward and held open by brace sticks.

It was set on a low ridge above the floodplain. Behind it, crowded into the dense shagbark hickory and swamp chestnut, was the outhouse; lime was dumped into its two holes once a week for sanitary purposes. There were two showers made by water pipes run up outside the back wall of the barracks and then bent over at an angle. The showerheads were tin cans with holes punched in them.

Inside the barracks, a row of twelve bunks ran down each side, set head to the wall. In the center of the room was a potbellied iron woodstove. Wire stays held its black sooty stovepipe in place. Now, in the summer heat, the stove was cold.

Captain Hent had a two-room cabin all to himself, could cook and shower, had a bed with a mattress and springs and a headboard. Since there was a convict-dug septic tank, he and the four guards in their dormitory had running water and flush toilets. There was a cook-shack and a commissary with a huge shiny padlock and heavy-mesh screens across the windows.

That first night, as they got their prison issue of clothing and the leg irons fitted around their ankles, Dale’s blue eyes showed white all around like those of a spooked horse.

“I don’t know if I can take this,” he said urgently.

“You gotta take it,” said Larkie. “Ain’t no way out short of six months or dyin’.”

Dale indicated Collinson. “Only one month for him.”

“He kep’ his big mouth shut fronta the judge,” said Larkie, “and he wasn’t running with no nigger.” He said to Collinson, “Me ’n’ Dale jungled up together ’cause we both figured wasn’t neither of us able to whup the other one. Figure the same ’bout you. We all gotta look out for one another, you see that?”

“I see that,” said Collinson, thanking God. When the hinged iron had gone around his ankle he’d almost lashed out blindly, like a claustrophobic in a closet.

After two free hours following their evening meal of fatback and wormy beans, the twenty-four convicts were fastened to their beds like dogs in a kennel. The chain, threaded through the staples on their leg irons and passed down each row of cots and padlocked to plates in the walls, saved roll calls and night patrols.

There was supposedly no talking after the kerosene pressure lantern was extinguished, but with three bunks in a row the three of them could whisper together. Collinson wasn’t sure he could have handled that first night otherwise. It had all happened so fast. Like going down Plummer’s hill in his coaster wagon when he was a kid: once you started moving, you couldn’t stop.

Uncle Russ had been smart enough to do his hoboing west by north, not east by south, so he’d had no words of wisdom Collinson could apply to this situation.

But he got used to it. The work was hard, but just that — hard work. He already had a strong back and callused hands from six years at the lumberyard after school and summers, unloading boxcars of lumber, coal, shingles, cement, plaster, and bricks to stay in shape for football and to get money for college.

The road was being cut north through a mixed pine forest of shortleaf, longleaf, loblolly, and slash. Two crews cleared brush and cut trees, a third came along behind them to lay the roadbed.

Simultaneously the road was being pushed south across a corner of the Okefenokee, so the last road crew had to build a levee out into the swamp. This was the toughest work because it meant hauling a lot of red Georgia clay. A ’dozer and trucks could have done it in a month; but since the local pols’ graft was safe no matter what, the county would just use an endless rotating supply of men with picks and shovels and wheelbarrows for as many years as it would take.

The three of them ended up on the swamp crew, with Collinson wondering aloud about Pogo, Albert the Alligator, and Faithful Old Dog Tray. Nobody else had any idea of what the hell he was talking about.

There had been no rain since the night of their arrest, seventeen days before, so they had to stamp on their shovels to make them bite at the earth even though it had been pickaxed first. Reddish dust drifted from each shovelful of clods that went into the wheelbarrows. It reminded Collinson of emptying gondola cars of coal at Kruse Lumber back in Rochester: he and another college guy had been able to shovel fifty tons a day. He’d had to ride home on the front fender of his dad’s car because he was too filthy to ride inside.

Two men always picked, two more shoveled; the other two, unchained, wheeled the barrows. Each midday they rotated jobs. The backs of their necks were red and sore from the sun, their palms cracked from sweat-slick tool handles.

To pass the time and keep his fear at bay, Collinson told stories about Uncle Russ during his hoboing days. The other convicts would stop and listen as if they were learning something Collinson didn’t know was in the story.

Uncle Russ in Wyoming, wanting to be a cowboy. When the ranch foreman asked him if he was good with horses, Russ bragged, “Born on ’em,” though he’d never been on a horse in his life. So they cinched a stallion too tight and put him on it. Of course it started to buck.

“When Uncle Russ got bucked off, and was high in the air,” said Collinson, “he thought, ‘God, how I wish I was down on the ground.’ When he lit on the ground and broke his collarbone, he thought, ‘God, how I wish I was back up in the air again.’ ”

Then there was that argument in the San Francisco saloon.

“Uncle Russ remembered the old saying about having a chip on your shoulder, so he put a wood chip on his shoulder from the sawdust on the floor, and told the other guy, ‘Knock that off.’ ”

“Did he?” demanded Anderson, a lanky whipcord Texan with flat black hair and pale challenging eyes who was doing five hard years for rape.

“Knocked the chip off his shoulder and broke Uncle Russ’s jaw in the bargain,” said Collinson.

Anderson laughed really hard at that story.

The ones they liked best were Uncle Russ’s Alaskan years in the Army Corps of Engineers during World War II. Two of the three older men were veterans themselves — mostly of PX rip-offs and black-market cigarettes and stockade time. But Uncle Russ had helped build the Alcan Highway against a possible military thrust through Siberia and the Aleutians into Alaska. The kind of stuff men not going anywhere liked to hear about.

“They got so far out across that muskeg that they ran out of fill. But they had to get the highway built. So they just started running trucks, cars, semis full of supplies, drums of oil, anything, into that swamp and letting it all sink, until they had a foundation for the highway.”

“They ought to do that here,” said Dalton, a short, once-chubby man who suffered the heat more than the others. He’d embezzled from a bank, had stupidly hit a cop with a baseball bat while on the run. “We got no trucks, but they could use our barracks for fill.”

Collinson also told them about the Alaskan mosquitoes.

“Those muskeg mosquitoes were so big that six of them could carry a man off screaming.”

Huge bulking Blackman Brown stopped his wheelbarrow in rapt wonder. He was a gentle Negro who’d caught his wife in bed with another man, backhanded her across the mouth, and broke her neck. A long knife scar ran diagonally across his face.

“They ever find any of them men again?”

“Just bones with skin draped around them, thin as parchment paper,” said an utterly solemn Collinson. “The mosquitoes had sucked every bit of blood and meat right out of them.”

“I would of liked to of seen that.”

“Goddammit! Get to work! What we paying you for?”

That was Captain Hent, who had left his paperwork back at the compound to ramrod their crew personally. The long-timers had gone very still when he’d shown up, as if it meant more than was apparent. Hent was medium-sized, heavy-bodied, mid-forties, thick without fat, with cold blue eyes and a strong-jawed face always in need of a shave. Low on his right hip rode a .44-caliber revolver in a stained and shiny leather holster; low on his left, a razor-sharp bowie knife in a fringed leather sheath.

Collinson noticed how the long-timers reacted to Hent taking over their crew, but he just kept his silent count. Thirteen more days and a get-up to go. He kept telling himself he could do the time standing on his head, hugging the release day like a child hugging a giant teddy bear.

Then it would be just another adventure to recount.

His own this time, not Uncle Russ’s.

Chapter Three

Things went sour on the eighteenth day. Larkie started clowning around while he shoveled, as he had done with the guard in charge before Hent.

“Cap’n,” he said.

“What is it, niggerboy?”

Captain Hent was standing beside his chair under the shade of a lone bald cypress with its trunk rising up out of the water like an upside-down trumpet; its flared base was five feet bigger around than the upper trunk. Hent’s thick arms were crossed on his chest, his hips were slung forward in a comfortable slouch. His shirt was black with sweat. By his right foot was the water jug, its sides beaded with moisture.

“How about a drink of that there water, Cap’n?”

“You know better than that, niggerboy. Only ten minutes to lunch break.”

His voice was like the baying of an old hound gone mean from too many beatings. The only other sounds were the grunts of the men, the rattle of earth in the barrows, the liquid chirping of passing redwings. Each time a man bent to shovel or pick, beads of hot sweat rained from his face onto his hands and wrists. Their bodies were caked and streaked with red clay dust.

“Cap’n.”

Hot breeze moved shadow across Hent’s face from the Spanish moss festooning the cypress. “What you want, niggerboy?”

“How ’bout giving me my time? I figure on quittin’.”

Anderson, the Texas rapist, snickered. The captain’s face reddened and his eyes got hot and hungry. He stepped closer to Larkie, unfolding his arms.

“You making fun of me, niggerboy?” he asked softly.

Larkie’s eyes widened in surprise. They became almost too wide for real surprise.

“No, Cap’n, I mos’ surely ain’t. We out here expiatin’ for our sins, sure ain’t any of us gonna draw no time.”

A spiny softshell turtle was half buried in the mud beside the levee, its pointed tubular snout just breaking the surface of the shallow brown water. Captain Hent grabbed Larkie’s shovel, made two giant steps down the side of the four-foot embankment, drove the sharpened, pointed blade down to cut the turtle almost in two. Its frantic scrabbling clouded the water with blood.

Hent chuckled and gave Larkie back his shovel. “You want lunch today, niggerboy, you eat that there turtle.”

Dale straightened up, a hand to the small of his back.

“Captain, all you got’s a gun makes you feel like God almighty. I ever get you alone without one...”

Captain Hent brought his whisker-stubbled face inches from Dale’s. “Boy, maybe tonight at the compound we’ll have us a little shot at that there. No gun. Tonight on your own time.”

In the evenings they were unchained inside the barbwire enclosure, could shower, take a dump, shave, sew, or wash their clothing. They could even, if so inclined, sit on the weathered front steps and listen to the birdlike whistle of the tree frogs, wit-wit-wit repeated a score of times without pause.

“Makin’ up stories in your head?” asked Larkie as he sat down beside Collinson.

“Listening to the tree frogs. They sort of sound like somebody calling his dog.”

“Yeah.” Larkie hunkered down, his hands clasped between his knees, and lapsed into uncharacteristic silence. Finally he said, “Wisht I hadn’t of got funnin’ at that old cap’n this afternoon. Dale thinks he faced the man down, but...” He turned to look at Collinson. “What you think gonna happen?”

A barred owl sailed wide-winged into the top of a dead tree high above them. He gave his two distinctive hoots, then fell silent, alert for any swamp rabbit or tiny golden mouse spooked by his cry.

“Maybe he’ll lose some privileges,” said Collinson.

Two guards were striding toward them across the flattened grass of the compound. They paused at the foot of the steps, fleshy men in their late twenties, vets come home seven years earlier to a world perhaps safe for democracy but with no assurance of steady jobs for ex-servicemen.

“Where’s your buddy, black boy?”

“Inside. But there ain’t no need for you to...”

They were already clumping up the steps. They came back out with Dale between them. He looked pale and frightened, but determined. With a burst of maniacal laughter, the owl spread its wings to sail off into the gathering dusk.

Captain Hent’s door opened to silhouette him against the light. Slapping the nightstick in his right hand against his left palm, he stepped back so they could go past him into the cabin. Two minutes later the guards came back out, one carrying Captain Hent’s holstered .44. The door slammed behind them.

“Oh sweet Jesus,” Larkie had moaned at the sight of the gun.

The guards blew the bed-check whistle. The convicts not already inside began gathering. Larkie stood there, irresolute.

“There isn’t anything you can do,” said Collinson.

That’s when the thud of nightstick on flesh started. As the other convicts got into their bunks, not meeting the two boys’ eyes, defiant cries joined the blows. The guards strung the chains through the staples on the ankle cuffs.

“What about Dale?” asked Larkie.

A guard answered with a muttered curse. He released the pressure of the kerosene lamp, there was a low hiss as the mantles began to fade. Collinson lay stiff and silent on his bunk, listening to the voracious whine of mosquitoes, the whistle of the tree frogs. No more blows; just a voice now, pleading.

Then a new sound started, carried on the clear night air. Regular, steady, gradually increasing in speed and urgency. Collinson could almost feel Larkie’s rigidity in the next bunk.

Captain Hent’s bedsprings, squealing...

Collinson woke sometime in the night. There was no moon, he could see little. Could hear only night sounds; then the bedsprings started again. When he woke just before dawn, Dale was back on the bunk in a fetal position, silently crying.

For noon they ate balls of cooked rice and rested on the sloping side of the levee for half an hour, away from the others. Collinson had no stories that day.

“He said he was gonna do me again tonight,” Dale said suddenly. His voice was almost unrecognizable. He sat between Larkie and Collinson, looking straight ahead across the swamp. “We gotta—”

“Ain’t no gottas here, man,” said Larkie. “ ’Cept we gotta see us plenty of country once we’s outta this bind. Ain’t gonna last forever, even if... even if...”

He stopped, not able to go on. Dale turned to Collinson.

“When I was a kid we lived in a big white house with a white fence around it and a red pump out in back higher than I was. I’d stick my head under there, hot days, and my daddy would pump cold water on me. I remember things like that, I know I can’t take any more of what Hent did to me. You’re smart, you been to school. You gotta think of something.”

“Okay, I’ll try,” said Collinson. Maybe try to get to the judge... Maybe do himself some good, too. “But you’ve got to promise me you won’t do anything dumb before then. Okay?”

Captain Hent’s whistle ended the noon break. The convicts started painfully to their feet, working tightened muscles.

“Okay,” said Dale, “I promise.”

Captain Hent sat like a bullfrog in his puddle of shade, drinking water, a half-smile on his face, watching the muscles strain under Dale’s blue shirt. At the water break, the men laid down their tools to start for the jug. Hent stopped Dale.

“Bet you wanna kill me, don’t you, boy?”

Dale shut his eyes for a moment, his face taut, fighting for control. Finally he opened his eyes and raised his arm to wipe the sweat from his face with the sleeve of his shirt.

Captain Hent’s hand swept the big .44 from the holster on his hip with a fluid movement that denoted long hours of practice before a mirror, an elated, transported expression on his face.

He fired from a crouch with his body turned in the approved Police Manual method. The heavy slug took Dale just under his right eye; the back of his head split outward like a melon. He fell on his face. His nose broke against the pink earth.

“Sweet Christ in Heaven!” cried Larkie.

He dropped to his knees beside his dead buddy, breathing like a man just kicked in the groin. Collinson was frozen in place, afraid of being sick; he had never seen anyone die except his granddad, and that had been in the odor of sanctity, doctor in attendance, family around him, wife to hold his hand so he wouldn’t be scared as he went gentle into that good night.

“He said he was going to kill me.” Captain Hent looked around at the eyes he was sure had not seen, the lips he was sure would not speak. “You all heard that. Then he raised his hand to me. When the investigators come around, you’ll tell them what he said and how he raised his hand to me.”

Larkie cried, “All he did was go to wipe his face. Just a man gonna wipe his face—”

“He wasn’t no man, niggerboy — just a backwards pussy for me to fuck.” Captain Hent gave a harsh bark of laughter and turned away. “Okay, all of you. Back to work.”

Larkie bent to whisper something against Dale’s strong dead throat. Blood from the exit wound in the back of the skull glistened on the callused pink palms of his brown hands, impregnated the denim of his trousers. Captain Hent spoke again.

“You too, niggerboy.”

Larkie slid the body off his lap. Dale’s left hand struck the dirt as softly as a girl’s breath stirring a curtain.

“Here I comes, Cap’n,” said Larkie with a desperate gaiety.

By the time Hent let them trundle Dale back to the compound in a wheelbarrow, the dead man’s head was covered with big, fat, shiny green flies buzzing loudly like a radio warming up. Black vultures circled overhead in silent frustration.

That night Collinson and Larkie dug the grave; on Saturday morning they put Dale in the ground. Larkie said a few Bible words, then handled that day’s barrow work alone, working with maniacal energy. Captain Hent was in high spirits, cracking jokes and giving out extra rations of water. He even let the crew’s five remaining men share out Dale’s ration of food.

But they were still a sullen and slow-moving lot, quick to take offense with each other. Collinson and Anderson, chained together, kept getting in each other’s way. Finally Collinson gave the rapist a shove.

“Why don’t you watch how you use that goddamned shovel, you Texas asshole? You almost took off my toes!”

“How about I take off your fucking head?”

Anderson swung the gleaming pointed blade. Collinson ducked under it, pumped fists into Anderson’s gut. They went down in a flail of arms and legs.

“Knock it off!” yelled Hent. He reached down to grab Collinson by the collar and jerk him to his feet.

Hulking Blackman Brown’s shovel-strengthened fingers scrunched Hent’s right hand so the hand could reach neither collar nor holstered .44. Collinson jerked Hent’s left arm wide so his scattergun hit the dirt. Anderson’s unshackled leg whipped, Hent went down, sprawling on his belly in the dust.

He opened his mouth to shout, though the nearest guard was half a mile away at the quarry, but mild little accountant Dalton shoved a torn shirtsleeve, foul with brine, between his teeth. Clods dug his belly and chest. Dalton’s hands ripped the keys from his belt, Larkie’s the huge bowie knife from its sheath.

It went just as planned, hard, sharp, quick, physical — almost like a football game, except you couldn’t limp off this field, helmet in hand, in the middle of the game.

“Turn him over,” said Larkie to Blackman Brown; to Collinson, “hold his arms"; to Anderson, “his feet.”

Larkie jerked down the squirming captain’s pants to expose his thick white flanks. He grabbed the handful of sex between Hent’s thighs and looked into the captain’s wildly rolling eyes.

“Gotta borrow these here, Cap’n,” he said with diffidence.

The bowie knife flashed. Hent convulsed, whipping his head from side to side, trying to buck Collinson off, trying to scream. Collinson hung grimly on, sick, frightened, confused, but unable to release his frozen grip on Hent’s arms. Larkie straightened up, holding his bloody prize above his head; then he threw it far out into the swamp.

“For the turtles,” he said.

He stooped, drove the blade into Hent’s lower abdomen and ripped it upward to the sternum. Hent thrashed and tried to kick, tried to scream, and tried to tear his arms loose. But most of all he tried to die, which took way too long.

Collinson, eyes shut, kept repeating his silent litany: It’s an adventure. It’s all just another adventure. It’s an adventure. It’s all just...

The corpse, draped in their leg irons, was sunk in the swamp, the bloodstained earth spread over the embankment and covered. Brown took the shotgun, Anderson the .44, Dalton the money, Larkie the big bowie knife. Collinson took the water jug.

They got off the levee, spread out through the woods, each man going his own way to confuse the dogs that would be brought at dawn. They all knew that if they stayed together, any man caught would give up the others to avoid the noose.

Collinson moved silently through cover; he had hunted with his dad since he was a kid. Near nightfall, he waded a half mile through water to throw off the dogs, pine resin heavy in his nostrils, mosquitoes, ticks, and leaches feasting on his sweat-soaked body. But finally he worked his way into the center of a dense briar patch on the edge of town and settled down to wait.

Please don’t throw me in that briar patch, Br’er Fox.

He prayed all through the sleepless night, something he hadn’t done much of since being sent to the chain gang: Glory be to the Father, to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.

It being Sunday, he felt an intense desire for Mass, but not for confession because he couldn’t repent. He hadn’t committed murder, but he’d helped, and would again: he’d do almost anything not to be next on those squealing bedsprings...

Almost anything. Would he ever be able to do what Larkie had done? He hadn’t been able to release Hent’s arms — why not? Was there a part of him able to mutilate and murder? Maybe part of being on the road was finding out things like that about yourself...

At dawn he lifted a bottle of milk from among others on a back stoop, stole a shirt and trousers from a lineful of early wash flapping in the hot breeze. The gooseberry lay, his Uncle Russ had called it.

He wore only one day’s stubble on his face; after shoving his convict clothes down into a trash barrel behind the general store, he slicked his hair back with water from the town square’s drinking fountain. What if Sue Ellen was working the morning shift at the diner? What if Sheriff Swinton was having before-church breakfast? What if the end booth was in use and he had to wait, naked and exposed, until he could get to it?

No on all counts. He sat looking out the window as the fingers of his right hand delved into the rip in the red imitation leather, groped desperately... Yes!

In vast relief, “Ham and eggs and grits and toast and coffee, ma’am, thank you very much.” They’d remember tea.

He ate fast, his Social Security card and driver’s license under his real name once more in his pocket. As he paid at the cash register with one of his precious twenties, he saw his duffel bag still under the counter. He just reached down and scooped it up, nodded his thanks to the iron-haired cold-eyed woman behind the register. Imelda Joad, without a doubt.

“Ma’am, I’d purely ’predate you thankin’ Sue Ellen fer keepin’ this here fer me,” he twanged in a bogus cracker accent.

She stared hard-eyed after him as he left, but he was counting on her being all too aware of Sue Ellen’s kind heart. In the paperback rack at the bus station he found a new copy of The Damned, caught the first Greyhound out. Didn’t matter which way it went: out of town, out of Georgia, over a state line before the bloodhounds came baying down his back trail.

He had his duffel bag back, no one could trace him through that. They hadn’t even taken his fingerprints. Peter Collinson meant “son of nobody.” He could go back to his own name. The shackle scars on his ankle would heal; in time, the nightmares would stop.

Somehow he knew he would never be telling any tales about that chain gang.

He quit telling Uncle Russ stories, too.