He was holding out a hand-rolled cigarette. I took it and he lit it. The smoke in my lungs brought my mind back into the cell.
My benefactor was a white man about ten years my junior, thirty-five or -six. He had stringy black hair that came down to his armpits and sparse facial hair. His shirt was made from various bright-colored scraps. His eyes were different colors too.
“Reefer Bob,” he said.
“Easy Rawlins.”
“What they got you for, Easy?”
“I ran into two people in their car. Ran a red light. You?”
“They found me with a burlap sack in a field of marijuana up in the hills.”
“Really? In the middle of the day?”
“It was midnight. I guess I should’a kept the flashlight off.”
I chuckled and then felt a tidal wave of hysterical laughter in my chest. I took a deep draw on the cigarette to stem the surge.
“Yeah,” Reefer Bob was saying. “I was stupid but they can’t keep me.”
“Why not?”
“Because the bag was empty. My lawyer’ll tell ’em that I was just looking for my way outta the woods, that I’m a naturalist and was looking for mushrooms.”
He grinned and I thought about Dream Dog.
“Good for you,” I said.
“You wanna get high, Easy?”
“No thanks.”
“I got some reefer in a couple’a these cigarettes here.”
“You know, Bob,” I said. “The cops put spies in these cells.
And they’d love nothing more than to catch you with contraband in here.”
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“You a spy, Easy?” he asked.
“No. A spy would never let you know.”
“You blowin’ my mind, man,” he said. “You blowin’ my mind.”
He crawled into the lower bunk in our eight-by-six cell. I laid on my stomach in the upper bed and stared out of the criss-crossed bars of steel. I thought back to midday, when I’d buckled Feather into her seat.
Axel Bowers was far off in my mind.
I felt that somehow I’d been defeated by my own lack of heart.
g u a r d s c a m e d o w n
the hallway at midnight exactly. The jail was dark but they had flashlights to show them the way.
When they came into the cell Reefer Bob yelled, “He killed Axel.
He told me when he thought I wasn’t listening. He killed him and then stuffed him up in a elephant’s ass.”
They told me to get up and I obeyed. They asked me if I needed handcuffs and I shook my head.
We walked down the long aisle toward a faraway light.
When we reached the room I realized that this was the day of my execution. They strapped me into the gas chamber chair. On the wall there was the stopwatch that Jesus used to have to time his races when he was in high school.
I had one minute left to live when they closed the door to the chamber.
A hornet was buzzing at the portal of the door. It flew right at my eyes. I shook my head around trying to get the stinger away from my face. When it finally flew off I looked back at the stopwatch: I only had three seconds left to live.
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Rawlins!” The guard’s shout jarred me awake.
I’d dozed off for only a few moments.
“Yo!” I hopped down to the concrete floor.
Bob was huddled into a ball in the back corner of his bunk. I wondered if he really thought I was a spy. If so he’d flush the dope into our corroded tin toilet. I might have saved him three years of hard time.
e t t a m a e h a r r i s was in the transit room when they got me there.
She was a big woman but no larger that day than she had been back when we were coming up in the late thirties in Fifth Ward, Houston, Texas. Back then she was everything I ever wanted in a woman except for the fact that she was Mouse’s wife.
