Both here for murder. Both born the same year. Both had served time. Both had sketchy backgrounds and no living relatives anybody knew of. The deserter and the deserted.
A man raised on a share-crop farm in Georgia; joined the army and, four months later, was listed as a deserter. Court-martialed, sentenced to hard labor.
A man raised on the San Carlos Indian reservation; deserted by his Apache renegade father before he was born. Father believed killed in Mexico; mother’s whereabouts unknown.
Both of them in the snake den now, a little room carved out of stone, with no light and hardly any air. Waiting to get at each other.
Maybe the sooner he talked to them the better. Bring them both out in ten days—no matter what Bob Fisher thought about it. Ten days was long enough. They needed spiritual guidance as much as they needed corporal punishment. He’d tell Fisher in the morning.
As soon as Mr. Manly got into bed he started thinking of Norma Davis again, seeing her clearly with the bare light right over her and her body gleaming with soap and water. He saw her in the room then, her body still slippery-looking in the moonlight that was coming through the window. Before she could reach the bed, Mr. Manly switched on the night-table lamp, grabbed hold of his Bible and leafed as fast as he could to St. Paul’s letters to the Corinthians.
For nine days neither of them spoke. They sat facing each other, their leg-irons chained to ring bolts that were cemented in the floor. Harold would stand and stretch and lean against the wall and Raymond would watch him. Later on Raymond would get up for a while and Harold would watch. They never stood up at the same time or looked at each other directly. There was silence except for the sound of the chains when they moved. Each pretended to be alone in the darkness of the cell, though each was intently aware of the other’s presence. Every day about noon a guard brought them hardtack and water. The guard was not allowed to speak to them, and neither of them spoke to him. It was funny their not talking, he told the other guards. It was spooky. He had never known a man in the snake den not to talk a storm when he was brought his bread and water. But these two sat there as if they had been hypnotized.
The morning of the tenth day Raymond said, “They going to let you out today.” The sound of his voice was strange, like someone else’s voice. He wanted to clear his throat, but wouldn’t let himself do it with the other man watching him. He said, “Don’t go anywhere, because when I get out of here I’m going to come looking for you.”
“I be waiting,” was all Harold Jackson said.
At midday the sun appeared in the air shaft and gradually faded. Nobody brought their bread and water. They had been hungry for the first few days but were not hungry now. They waited and it was early evening when the guard came in with a hammer and pounded the ring bolts open, both of them, Raymond watching him curiously but not saying anything. Another guard came in with shovels and a bucket of sand and told them to clean up their mess.
Bob Fisher was waiting outside. He watched them come out blinking and squinting in the daylight, both of them filthy stinking dirty, the Negro with a growth of beard and the Indian’s bony face hollowed and sick-looking. He watched their gaze creep over the yard toward the main cellblock where the convicts were standing around and sitting by the wall, most of them looking this way.
“You can be good children,” Fisher said, “or you can go back in there, I don’t care which. I catch you fighting, twenty days. I catch you looking mean, twenty days.” He looked directly at Raymond. “I catch you swimming again, thirty days and leg-irons a year. You understand me?”
For supper they had fried mush and syrup, all they wanted. After, they were marched over to the main cellblock. Raymond looked for Frank Shelby in the groups standing around outside, but didn’t see him. He saw Junior and nodded. Junior gave him a deadpan look. The guard, R. E. Baylis, told them to get their blankets and any gear they wanted to bring along.
“You putting us in another cell?” Raymond asked him. “How about make it different cells? Ten days, I’ll smell him the rest of my life.”
“Come on,” Baylis said. He marched them down the passageway and through the rear gate of the cellblock.
“Wait a minute,” Raymond said. “Where we going?”
The guard looked around at him. “Didn’t nobody tell you? You two boys are going to live in the TB yard.”
5
A work detail was making adobe bricks over by the south wall, inside the yard. They mixed mud and water and straw, stirred it into a heavy wet paste and poured it into wooden forms. There were bricks drying all along the base of the wall and scrap lumber from the forms and stacks of finished bricks, ready to be used here or sold in town.
Harold Jackson and Raymond San Carlos had to come across the yard with their wheelbarrows to pick up bricks and haul them back to the TB cellblock that was like a prison within a prison: a walled-off area with its own exercise yard. There were eight cells here, in a row facing the yard, half of them empty. The four tubercular convicts stayed in their cells most of the time or sat in the shade and watched Harold and Raymond work, giving them advice and telling them when a line of bricks wasn’t straight. They were working on the face wall of the empty cells, tearing out the weathered, crumbling adobe and putting in new bricks; repairing cells that would probably never again be occupied. This was their main job. They worked at it side by side without saying a word to each other. They also had to bring the tubercular convicts their meals, and sometimes get cough medicine from the sick ward. A guard gave them white cotton doctor masks they could put on over their nose and mouth for whenever they went into the TB cells; but the masks were hot and hard to breathe through, so they didn’t wear them after the first day. They used the masks, and a few rags they found, to pad the leg-irons where the metal dug into their ankles.
The third day out of the snake den Raymond began talking to the convicts on the brick detail. He recognized Joe Dean in the group, but didn’t speak to him directly. He said, man alive, it was good to breathe fresh air again and feel the sun. He took off his hat and looked up at the sky. All the convicts except Joe Dean went on working. Raymond said, even being over with the lungers was better than the snake den. He said somebody must have made a mistake, he was supposed to be in thirty days for trying to escape, but they let him out after ten. Raymond smiled; he said he wasn’t going to mention it to them, though.
Joe Dean was watching him, leaning on his shovel. “You take care of him yet?”
“Take care of who?” Raymond asked him.
“The nigger boy. I hear he stomped you.”
“Nobody stomped me. Where’d you hear that?”
“Had to chain him up.”
“They chained us both.”
“Looks like you’re partners now,” Joe Dean said.
“I’m not partners with him. They make us work together, that’s all.”
“You going to fight him?”
“Sure, when I get a chance.”
“He don’t look too anxious,” another convict said. “That nigger’s a big old boy.”
“I got to wait for the right time,” Raymond said. “That’s all.”
He came back later for another wheelbarrow load of bricks and stood watching them as they worked the mud and mixed in straw. Finally he asked if anybody had seen Frank around.
“Frank who you talking about?” Joe Dean asked.
“Frank Shelby.”
“Listen to him,” Joe Dean said. “He wants to know has anybody seen Frank.”
“I got to talk to him,” Raymond said. “See if he can get me out of there.”
“Scared of TB, huh?”
