Forty Lashes Less One

3

When Frank Shelby entered the mess hall he stepped in line ahead of Junior. In front of him, Soonzy and Joe Dean looked around.

“You take care of it?” Junior asked him.

“He needs some time in the snake den,” Shelby said.

Soonzy was looking back down the line. “Where’s he at?”

“Last one coming in.”

“I’ll handle him,” Junior said.

Shelby shook his head. “I want somebody else to start it. You and Soonzy break it up and get in some licks.”

“No problem,” Junior said. “The spook’s already got leg-irons on.”

They picked up tin plates and cups and passed in front of the serving tables for their beans, salt-dried beef, bread, and coffee. Soonzy and Joe Dean waited, letting Shelby go ahead of them. He paused a moment, holding his food, looking out over the long twelve-man tables and benches that were not yet half filled. Joe Dean moved up next to him. “I see plenty of people that owe us money.”

“No, I see the one I want. The Indin,” Shelby said, and started for his table.

Raymond San Carlos was pushing his spoon into the beans that were pretty good but would be a lot better with some ketchup. He looked up as Frank Shelby and Junior put their plates down across from him. He hurried and took the spoonful of beans, then took another one more slowly. He knew they had picked him for something. He was sure of it when Soonzy sat down on one side of him and Joe Dean stepped in on the other. Joe Dean acted surprised at seeing him. “Well, Raymond San Carlos,” he said, “how are you today?”

“I’m pretty good, I guess.”

Junior said, “What’re you pretty good at, Raymond?”

“I don’t know—some things, I guess.”

“You fight pretty good?”

It’s coming, Raymond said to himself, and told himself to be very calm and not look away from this little boy son-of-a-bitch friend of Frank Shelby’s. He said, “I fight sometimes. Why, you want to fight me?”

“Jesus,” Junior said. “Listen to him.”

Raymond smiled. “I thought that’s what you meant.” He picked up his coffee and took a sip.

“Don’t drink it,” Shelby said.

Raymond looked directly at him for the first time. “My coffee?”

“You see that colored boy? He’s picking up his plate.” As Raymond looked over Shelby said, “After he sits down I want you to go over and dump your coffee right on his woolly head.”

He was at the serving table now, big shoulders and narrow hips. Some of the others from the latrine had come in behind him. He was not the biggest man in the line, but he was the tallest and seemed to have the longest arms.

“You want me to fight him?”

“I said I want you to pour your coffee on his head,” Shelby answered. “That’s all I said to do. You understand that, or you want me to tell you in sign language?”

Harold Jackson took a place at the end of a table. There were two men at the other end. Shifting his gaze past them as he took a bite of bread, he could see Frank Shelby and the mouthy kid and, opposite them, the big one you would have to hit with a pipe or a pick handle to knock down, and the skinny one, Joe Dean, with the beard that looked like ass fur off a sick dog. The dark-skinned man with them, who was getting up now, he hadn’t seen before.

There were five guards in the room. No windows. One door. A stairway—at the end of the room behind the serving tables—where the turnkey and the little man from the train were coming down the stairs now: little man who said he was going to be in charge, looking all around—my, what a fine big mess hall—looking and following the turnkey, who never changed his face, looking at the grub now, nodding, smiling—yes, that would sure stick to their ribs—taking a cup of coffee the turnkey offered him and tasting it. Two of the guards walked over and now the little man was shaking hands with them.

That was when Harold felt somebody behind him brush him, and the hot coffee hitting his head was like a shock, coming into his eyes and feeling as if it was all over him.

Behind him, Raymond said, “What’d you hit my arm for?”

Harold wiped a hand down over his face, twisting around and looking up to see the dark-skinned man who had been with Shelby, an Indian-looking man standing, waiting for him. He knew Shelby was watching, Shelby and anybody else who had seen it happen.

“What’s the matter with you?” Harold said.

Raymond didn’t move. “I want to know why you hit my arm.”

“I’ll hit your mouth, boy, you want. But I ain’t going to do it here.”

Raymond let him have the tin plate, backhanding the edge of it across his eyes, and Harold was off the bench, grabbing Raymond’s wrist as Raymond hit him in the face with the coffee cup. Harold didn’t get to swing. A fist cracked against his cheekbone from the blind side. He was hit again on the other side of the face, kicked in the small of the back, and grabbed by both arms and around his neck and arched backward until he was looking at the ceiling. There were faces looking at him, the dark-skinned boy looking at him calmly, people pressing in close, then a guard’s hat and another, and the turnkey’s face with the mustache and the expression that didn’t change.

“Like he went crazy,” Junior said. “Just reared up and hit this boy.”

“I was going past,” Raymond said.

Junior was nodding. “That’s right. Frank seen it first, we look over and this spook has got Raymond by the neck. Frank says help him, and me and Soonzy grabbed the spook quick as we could.”

The turnkey reached out, but Harold didn’t feel his hand. He was looking past him.

“Let him up,” Fisher said.

Somebody kicked him again as they jerked him to his feet and let go of his arms. Harold felt his nose throbbing and felt something wet in his eyes. When he wiped at his eyes he saw the red blood on his fingers and could feel it running down his face now. The turnkey’s face was raised; he was looking off somewhere.

Fisher said, “You saw it, Frank?”

Shelby was still sitting at his table. He nodded slowly. “Same as Junior told you. That colored boy started it. Raymond hit him to get free, but he wouldn’t let go till Junior and Soonzy got over there and pinned him.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all,” Shelby said.

“Anybody else see it start?” Fisher looked around. The convicts met his gaze as it passed over them. They waited as Fisher took his time, letting the silence in the room lengthen. When he looked at Harold Jackson again there was a moment when he seemed about to say something to him. The moment passed. He turned away and walked back to the food tables where Mr. Manly was waiting, his hands folded in front of him, his eyes wide open behind the gold-frame glasses.

“You want to see the snake den,” Bob Fisher said. “Come on, we got somebody else wants to see it too.”

After breakfast, as the work details were forming in the yard, the turnkey and the new superintendent and two guards marched Harold Jackson past the groups all the way to the snake den at the back of the yard.

Raymond San Carlos looked at the colored boy as he went by. He had never seen him before this morning. Nobody would see him now for about a week. It didn’t matter. Dumb nigger had done something to Shelby and would have to learn, that’s all.

While Raymond was still watching them—going one at a time into the cell now—one of the guards, R. E. Baylis, pulled him out of the stone quarry gang and took him over to another detail. Raymond couldn’t figure it out until he saw Shelby in the group and knew Shelby had arranged it. A reward for pouring coffee on a man. He was out of that man-breaking quarry and on Shelby’s detail because he’d done what he was told. Why not?

As a guard with a Winchester marched them out the main gate Raymond was thinking: Why not do it the easy way? Maybe things were going to be better and this was the beginning of it: get in with Shelby, work for him; have all the cigarettes he wanted, some tequila at night to put him to sleep, no hard-labor details. He could be out of here maybe in twenty years if he never did nothing to wear leg-irons or get put in the snake den. Twenty years, he would be almost fifty years old. He couldn’t change that. Or he could do whatever he felt like doing and not smile at people like Frank Shelby and Junior and the two convicts in his cell. He could get his head pounded against the stone wall and spend the rest of his life here. It was a lot to think about, but it made the most sense to get in with Shelby. He would be as dumb as the nigger if he didn’t.

Outside the walls, the eight-man detail was marched past the water cistern—their gaze going up the mound of earth past the stonework to the guard tower that looked like a bandstand sitting up there, a nice shady pavilion where a rapid-fire weapon was trained on the main gate—then down the grade to a path that took them along the bluff overlooking the river. They followed it until they reached the cemetery.

Beyond the rows of headstones an adobe wall, low, and uneven, under construction, stood two to three feet high on the riverside of the cemetery.

Junior said, “What do they want a wall for? Them boys don’t have to be kept in.”

“They want a wall,” Shelby said, “because it’s a good place for a wall and there ain’t nothing else for us to do.”

Raymond agreed four year’s worth to that. The work was to keep them busy. Everybody knew they would be moving out of here soon, but every day they pounded rocks into gravel for the roads and made adobe bricks and built and repaired walls and levees and cleared brush along the riverbank. It was a wide river with a current—down the slope and across the flat stretch of mud beach to the water—maybe a hundred yards across. There was nothing on the other side—no houses, only a low bank and what looked to be heavy brush. The land over there could be a swamp or a desert; nobody had ever said what it was like, only that it was California.

All morning they laid the big adobe bricks in place, gradually raising the level string higher as they worked on a section of wall at a time. It was dirty, muddy work, and hot out in the open. Raymond couldn’t figure out why Shelby was on this detail, unless he felt he needed sunshine and exercise. He laid about half as many bricks as anybody else, and didn’t talk to anybody except his three friends. It surprised Raymond when Shelby began working on the other side of the wall from him and told him he had done all right in the mess hall this morning. Raymond nodded; he didn’t know what to say. A few minutes went by before Shelby spoke again.

“You want to join us?”

Raymond looked at him. “You mean work for you?”

“I mean go with us,” Shelby said. He tapped a brick in place with the handle of his trowel and sliced off the mortar oozing out from under the brick. “Don’t look around. Say yes or no.”

“I don’t know where you’re going.”

“I know you don’t. You say yes or no before I tell you.”

“All right,” Raymond said. “Yes.”

“Can you swim?”

“You mean the river?”

“It’s the only thing I see around here to swim,” Shelby said. “I’m not going to explain it all now.”

“I don’t know—”

“Yes, you do, Raymond. You’re going to run for the river when I tell you. You’re going to swim straight across and find a boat hidden in the brush, put there for us, and you’re going to row back fast as you can and meet us swimming over.”

“If we’re all swimming what do you want the boat for?”

“In case anybody can’t make it all the way.”

“I’m not sure I can, even.”

“You’re going to find out,” Shelby said.

“How wide is it here?”

“Three hundred fifty feet. That’s not so far.”

The river had looked cool and inviting before; not to swim across, but to sit in and splash around and get clean after sweating all morning in the adobe mud.

“There’s a current—”

“Don’t think about it. Just swim.”

“But the guard—what about him?”

“We’ll take care of the guard.”

“I don’t understand how we going to do it.” He was frowning in the sunlight trying to figure it out.

“Raymond, I say run, you run. All right?”

“You don’t give me any time to think about it.”

“That’s right,” Shelby said. “When I leave here you come over the wall and start working on this side.” He got up and moved down the wall about ten or twelve feet to where Soonzy and Junior were working.

Raymond stepped over the three-foot section of wall with his mortar bucket and continued working, facing the guard now who was about thirty feet away, sitting on a rise of ground with the Winchester across his lap and smoking a cigarette. Beyond him, a hundred yards or so up the slope, the prison wall and the guard tower at the northwest corner stood against the sky. The guard up there could be looking this way or he could be looking inside, into the yard of the TB cellblock. Make a run for the river with two guns within range. Maybe three, counting the main tower. There was some brush, though, a little cover before he got to the mud flat. But once they saw him, the whistle would blow and they’d be out here like they came up out of the ground, some of them shooting and some of them getting the boat, wherever the boat was kept. He didn’t have to stay with Shelby, he could go up to the high country this spring and live by himself. Maybe through the summer. Then go some place nobody knew him and get work. Maybe Mexico.

Joe Dean came along with a wheelbarrow and scooped mortar into Raymond’s bucket. “If we’re not worried,” Joe Dean said, leaning on the wall, “what’re you nervous about?”

Raymond didn’t look up at him. He didn’t like to look at the man’s mouth and tobacco-stained teeth showing in his beard. He didn’t like having anything to do with the man. He didn’t like having anything to do with Junior or Soonzy either. Or with Frank Shelby when he thought about it honestly and didn’t get it mixed up with cigarettes and tequila. But he would work with them and swim the river with them to get out of this place. He said to Joe Dean, “I’m ready any time you are.”

Joe Dean squinted up at the sun, then let his gaze come down to the guard. “It won’t be long,” he said, and moved off with his wheelbarrow.

The way they worked it, Shelby kept his eye on the guard. He waited until the man started looking for the chow wagon that would be coming around the corner from the main gate any time now. He waited until the guard was finally half-turned, looking up the slope, then gave a nod to Junior.

Junior jabbed his trowel into the foot of the man working next to him.

The man let out a scream and the guard was on his feet at once, coming down from the rise.

Shelby waited until the guard was hunched over the man, trying to get a look at the foot. The other convicts were crowding in for a look too and the man was holding his ankle, rocking back and forth and moaning. The guard told him goddamn-it, sit still and let him see it.

Shelby looked over at Raymond San Carlos, who was standing now, the wall in front of him as high as his hips. Shelby nodded and turned to the group around the injured man. As he pushed Joe Dean aside he glanced around again to see the wall empty where Raymond had been standing. “What time is it?” he said.

Joe Dean took out his pocket watch. “Eleven-fifty about.”

“Exactly.”

“Eleven-fifty-two.”

Shelby took the watch from Joe Dean as he leaned in to see the clean tear in the toe of the man’s shoe and the blood starting to come out. He waited a moment before moving over next to the wall. The guard was asking what happened and Junior was trying to explain how he’d tripped over the goddamn mortar bucket and, throwing his hand out as he fell, his trowel had hit the man’s shoe. His foot, the guard said—you stabbed him. Well, he hadn’t meant to, Junior told the guard. Jesus, if he’d meant to, he wouldn’t have stabbed him in the foot, would he?

From the wall Shelby watched Raymond moving quickly through the brush clumps and not looking back—very good—not hesitating until he was at the edge of the mud flats, a tiny figure way down there, something striped, hunched over in the bushes and looking around now. Go on, Shelby said, looking at the watch. What’re you waiting for? It was eleven fifty-three.

The guard was telling the man to take his shoes off, he wasn’t going to do it for him; and goddamn-it, get back and give him some air.

When Shelby looked down the slope again Raymond was in the water knee-deep, sliding into it; in a moment only his head was showing. Like he knew what he was doing, Shelby thought.

Between moans the injured man said Oh God, he believed his toes were cut off. Junior said maybe one or two; no trowel was going to take off all a man’s toes, ’less you come down hard with the edge; maybe that would do it.

Twenty yards out. Raymond wasn’t too good a swimmer, about average. Well, that was all right. If he was average then the watch would show an average time. He sure seemed to be moving slow though. Swimming was slow work.

When the chow wagon comes, the guard said, we’ll take him up in it. Two of you men go with him.

It’s coming now, somebody said.

There it was, poking along close to the wall, a driver and a helper on the seat, one of the trusties. The guard stood up and yelled for them to get down here. Shelby took time to watch the injured man as he ground his teeth together and eased his shoe off. He wasn’t wearing any socks. His toes were a mess of blood, but at least they all seemed to be there. He was lucky.

Raymond was more than halfway across now. The guard was motioning to the wagon, trying to hurry it. So Shelby watched Raymond: just a speck out there, you’d have to know where to look to find him. Wouldn’t that be something if he made it? God Almighty, dumb Indin probably could if he knew what to do once he got across. Or if he had some help waiting. But he’d look for the boat that wasn’t there and run off through the brush and see all that empty land stretching nowhere.

Eleven fifty-six. He’d be splashing around out there another minute easy before he reached the bank.

Shelby walked past the group around the injured man and called out to the guard who had gone partway up the slope, “Hey, mister!” When the guard looked around Shelby said, “I think there’s somebody out there in the water.”

The guard hesitated, but not more than a moment before he got over to the wall. He must have had a trained eye, because he spotted Raymond right away and fired the Winchester in the air. Three times in rapid succession.

Joe Dean looked up as Shelby handed him his pocket watch. “He make it?” Joe Dean asked.

“Just about.”

“How many minutes?”

“Figure five anyway, as a good average.”

Junior said to Shelby, “What do you think?”

“Well, it’s a slow way out of here,” Shelby answered. “But least we know how long it takes now and we can think on it.”

Mr. Manly jumped in his chair and swiveled around to the window when the whistle went off, a high, shrieking sound that ripped through the stillness of the office and seemed to be coming from directly overhead. The first thing he thought of, immediately, was, somebody’s trying to escape! His first day here…

Only there wasn’t a soul outside. No convicts, no guards running across the yard with guns.

Of course—they were all off on work details.

When he pressed close to the window Mr. Manly saw the woman, Norma Davis, standing in the door of the tailor shop. Way down at the end of the mess hall. He knew it was Norma, and not the other one. Standing with her hands on her hips, as if she was listening—Lord, as the awful piercing whistle kept blowing. After a few moments she turned and went inside again. Not too concerned about it.

Maybe it wasn’t an escape. Maybe it was something else. Mr. Manly went down the hall and opened the doors, looking into empty offices, some that hadn’t been used in months. He turned back and, as he reached the end of the hall and the door leading to the outside stairway, the whistle stopped. He waited, then cautiously opened the door and went outside. He could see the front gate from here: both barred doors closed and the inside and outside guards at their posts. He could call to the inside guard, ask him what was going on.

And what if the man looked up at him on the stairs and said it was the noon dinner whistle? It was just about twelve.

Or what if it was an exercise he was supposed to know about? Or a fire drill. Or anything for that matter that a prison superintendent should be aware of. The guard would tell him, “That’s the whistle to stop work for dinner, sir,” and not say anything else, but his look would be enough.

Mr. Manly didn’t know where else he might go, or where he might find the turnkey. So he went back to his office and continued reading the history file on Harold Jackson.

Born Fort Valley, Georgia, September 11, 1879.

Mr. Manly had already read that part. Field hand. No formal education. Arrested in Georgia and Florida several times for disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, striking an officer of the law. Served eighteen months on a Florida prison farm for assault. Inducted into the army April 22, 1898. Assigned to the 24th Infantry Regiment in Tampa, Florida, June 5. Shipped to Cuba.

He was going to read that part over again about Harold Jackson deserting and being court-martialed.

But Bob Fisher, the turnkey, walked in. He didn’t knock, he walked in. He looked at Mr. Manly and nodded, then gazed about the room. “If there’s something you don’t like about this office, we got some others down the hall.

“Caught one of them trying to swim the river, just about the other side when we spotted him.” Fisher stopped as Mr. Manly held up his hand and rose from the desk.

“Not right now,” Mr. Manly said. “I’m going to go have my dinner. You can give me a written report this afternoon.”

Walking past Fisher wasn’t as hard as he thought it would be. Out in the hall Mr. Manly paused and looked back in the office. “I assume you’ve put the man in the snake den.”

Fisher nodded.

“Bring me his file along with your report, Bob.” Mr. Manly turned and was gone.