Forty Lashes Less One

kill a man all right; you stay in here with the bread the rest of your life. So the best thing would be to stand up and let the man stand up and hit him straightaway and beat him enough but not too much. Beat him just right.

He said, “Hey, boy, you ready?”

“Any time,” Raymond answered.

“Get up then.”

Raymond moved stiffly, bringing up his knees to rise.

“What’s the matter with you?”

“I’ll tell you something,” Raymond said. “If you’re any good, maybe you won’t get beat too bad. But after I sleep and rest my arms and legs I’ll break your jaw.”

“What’s the matters with your arms and legs?”

“From swimming the river.”

Harold Jackson stared at him, interested. He hadn’t thought of why the man had been put in here. Now he remembered the whistle. “You saying you tried to bust out?”

“I got across.”

“How many of you?”

Raymond hesitated. “I went alone.”

“And they over there waiting.”

“Nobody was waiting. They come in a boat.”

“Broad daylight—man, you must be one dumb Indin fella.”

Raymond’s legs cramped as he started to rise, and he had to ease down again, slowly.

“We got time,” Harold Jackson said. “Don’t be in a hurry to get yourself injured.”

“Tomorrow,” Raymond said, “when the sun’s over the hole and I can see your black nigger face in here.”

Harold saw the chain around the man’s neck and his legs straining to pull it tight. “Indin, you’re going to need plenty medicine before I’m through with you.”

“The only thing I’m worried about is catching you,” Raymond said. “I hear a nigger would rather run than fight.”

“Any running I do, red brother, is going to be right at your head.”

“I got to see that.”

“Keep your eyes open, Indin. You won’t see nothing once I get to you.”

There was a silence before Raymond said, “I’ll tell you something. It don’t matter, but I want you to know it anyway. I’m no Indian. I’m Mexican born in the United States, in the territory of Arizona.”

“Yeah,” Harold Jackson said. “Well, I’m Filipina born in Fort Valley, Georgia.”

“Field nigger is what you are.”

“Digger Indin talking, eats rats and weed roots.”

“I got to listen to a goddamn field hand.”

“I’ve worked some fields,” Harold said. “I’ve plowed and picked cotton, I’ve skinned mules and dug privies and I’ve busted rock. But I ain’t never followed behind another convict and emptied his bucket for him. White or black. No body.”

Raymond’s tone was lower. “You saw me carrying a bucket this morning?”

“Man, I don’t have to see you, I know you carry one every morning. Frank Shelby says dive into it, you dive.”

“Who says I work for Frank Shelby?”

“He say scratch my ass, you scratch it. He say go pour your coffee on that nigger’s head, you jump up and do it. Man, if I’m a field nigger you ain’t no better than a house nigger.” Harold Jackson laughed out loud. “Red nigger, that’s all you are, boy. A different color but the same thing.”

The pain in Raymond’s thighs couldn’t hold him this time. He lunged for the dark figure across the cell to drive into him and slam his black skull against the wall. But he went in high. Harold got under him and dumped him and rolled to his feet. They met in the middle of the cell, in the dim shaft of light from the air hole, and beat each other with fists until they grappled and kneed and strained against each other and finally went down.

When the guard came in with their bread and water, they were fighting on the hard-packed floor. He yelled to another guard who came fast with a wheelbarrow, pushing it through the door and the short passageway into the cell. They shoveled sand at Harold and Raymond, throwing it stinging hard into their faces until they broke apart and lay gasping on the floor. A little while later another guard came in with irons and chained them to ring bolts on opposite sides of the cell. The door slammed closed and again they were in darkness.

Bob Fisher came through the main gate at eight-fifteen that evening, not letting on he was in a hurry as he crossed the lighted area toward the convicts’ mess hall.

He’d wanted to get back by eight—about the time they’d be bringing the two women out of their cellblock and over to the cook shack. But his wife had started in again about staying here and not wanting to move to Florence. She said after sixteen years in this house it was their home. She said a rolling stone gathered no moss, and that it wasn’t good to be moving all the time. He reminded her they had moved twice in twenty-seven years, counting the move from Missouri. She said then it was about time they settled; a family should stay put, once it planted roots. What family? he asked her. Me and you? His wife said she didn’t know anybody in Florence and wasn’t sure she wanted to. She didn’t even know if there was a Baptist church in Florence. What if there wasn’t? What was she supposed to do then? Bob Fisher said that maybe she would keep her fat ass home for a change and do some cooking and baking, instead of sitting with them other fatties all day making patchwork quilts and bad-mouthing everybody in town who wasn’t a paid-up member of the church. He didn’t honestly care where she spent her time, or whether she baked pies and cakes or not. It was something to throw at her when she started in nagging about staying in Yuma. She said how could anybody cook for a person who came home at all hours with whiskey stinking up his breath? Yes, he had stopped and had a drink at the railroad hotel, because he’d had to talk to the express agent about moving equipment to Florence. Florence, his wife said. She wished she had never heard the name—the same name as her cousin who was still living in Sedalia, but now she didn’t even like to think of her cousin any more and they had grown up together as little girls. Bob Fisher couldn’t picture his wife as a little girl. No, that tub of fat couldn’t have ever been a little girl. He didn’t tell her that. He told her he had to get back to the prison, and left without finishing his coffee.

Fisher walked past the outside stairway and turned the corner of the mess hall. There were lights across the way in the main cellblock. He moved out into the yard enough to look up at the second floor of the mess hall and saw a light on in the superintendent’s office. The little Sunday school teacher was still there, or had come back after supper. Before going home Fisher had brought in his written report of the escape and the file on Raymond San Carlos. The Sunday school teacher had been putting his books away, taking them out of a suitcase and lining them up evenly on the shelf. He’d said just lay the report on the desk and turned back to his books. What would he be doing now? Probably reading his Bible.

Past the latrine adobe Fisher walked over to the mess hall and tried the door. Locked for the night. Now he moved down the length of the building, keeping close to the shadowed wall though moving at a leisurely pace—just out for a stroll, checking around, if anybody was curious. At the end of the building he stopped and looked both ways before crossing over into the narrow darkness between the cook-shack adobe and the tailor shop.

Now all he had to do was find the right brick to get a free show. About chin-high it was, on the right side of the cook-shack chimney that stuck out from the wall about a foot and would partly hide him as he pressed in close. Fisher worked a finger in on both sides of the brick that had been chipped loose some months before, and pulled it out as slowly as he could. He didn’t look inside right away; no, he always put the brick on the ground first and set himself, his feet wide apart and his shoulders hunched a little so the opening would be exactly at eye level. They would be just past the black iron range, this side of the work table where they always placed the washtub, with the bare electric light on right above them.

Fisher looked in. Goddamn Almighty, just in time.

Just as Norma Davis was taking off her striped shirt, already unbuttoned, slipping it off her shoulders to let loose those round white ninnies that were like nothing he had ever seen before. Beauties, and she knew it, too, the way she stuck them out, standing with her hands on her hips and her belly a round little mound curving down into her skirt. What was she waiting for? Come on, Fisher said, take the skirt off and get in the tub. He didn’t like it when they only washed from the waist up. With all the rock dust in the air and bugs from the mattresses and