the sky that was fading to gray with the sun below the west wall, walking around in little circles and seeing Mr. Manly up there now. As Raymond turned away he heard Harold say, “Let’s do it again,” and he had to go along.
Harold dug all the way this time; he felt his thighs knotting and pushed it some more, down and back and, with the convicts yelling, came in a good seven strides ahead of the Indian. Right away Harold said, “Let’s do it again.”
In the fourth race he was again six or seven strides faster than Raymond.
In the fifth race, neither of them looked as if he was going to make it back to the finish. They ran pumping their arms and gasping for air, and Harold might have been ahead by a half-stride past the stairs; but Raymond stumbled and fell forward trying to catch himself, and it was hard to tell who won. There wasn’t a sound from the convicts this time. Some of them weren’t even looking this way. They were milling around, smoking cigarettes, talking among themselves.
Mr. Manly wasn’t watching the convicts. He was leaning over the railing looking down at his two boys: at Raymond lying stretched out on his back and at Harold sitting, leaning back on his hands with his face raised to the sky.
“Hey, boys,” Mr. Manly called, “you know what I want you to do now? First I want you to get up. Come on, boys, get up on your feet. Raymond, you hear me?”
“He looks like he’s out,” Fisher said.
“No, he’s all right. See?”
Mr. Manly leaned closer over the rail. “Now I want you two to walk up to each other. Go on, do as I say. It won’t hurt you. Now I want you both to reach out and shake hands….
“Don’t look up here. Look at each other and shake hands.”
Mr. Manly started to grin and, by golly, he really felt good. “Bob, look at that.”
“I see it,” Fisher said.
Mr. Manly called out now, “Boys, by the time you get done running together you’re going to be good friends. You wait and see.”
The next day, while they were working on the face wall in the TB cellblock, Raymond was squatting down mixing mortar in a bucket and groaned as he got to his feet. “Goddamn legs,” he said.
“I know what you mean,” Harold said. He was laying a brick, tapping it into place with the handle of his trowel, and hesitated as he heard his own voice and realized he had spoken to Raymond. He didn’t look over at him; he picked up another brick and laid it in place. It was quiet in the yard. The tubercular convicts were in their cells, out of the heat and the sun. Harold could hear a switch-engine working, way down the hill in the Southern Pacific yard; he could hear the freight cars banging together as they were coupled.
After a minute or so Raymond said, “I can’t hardly walk today.”
“From running,” Harold said.
“They don’t put the leg-irons back on, uh?”
“I wondered if they forgot to.”
“I think so. They wouldn’t leave them off unless they forgot.”
There was silence again until Harold said, “They can leave them off, it’s all right with me.”
“Sure,” Raymond said, “I don’t care they leave them off.”
“Place in Florida, this prison farm, you got to wear them all the time.”
“Yeah? I hope I never get sent there.”
“You ever been to Cuba?”
“No, I never have.”
“That’s a fine place. I believe I like to go back there sometime.”
“Live there?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“Look like we need some more bricks,” Raymond said.
The convicts mixing the adobe mud straightened up with their shovels in front of them as Raymond and Harold came across the yard pushing their wheelbarrows. Joe Dean stepped around to the other side of the mud so he could keep an eye on the south-wall tower guard. He waited until the two boys were close, heading for the brick pile.
“Well, now,” Joe Dean said, “I believe it’s the two sweethearts.”
“If they come back for some more,” another convict said, “I’m going to cut somebody this time.”
Joe Dean watched them begin loading the wheelbarrows. “See, what they do,” he said. “they start a ruckus so they’ll get sent to the snake den. Sure, they get in there, just the two of them. Man, they hug and kiss, do all kinds of things to each other.”
“That is Mr. Joe Dean talking,” Harold said. “I believe he wants to get hit in the mouth with a ’dobe brick.”
“I want to see you try that,” Joe Dean said.
“Sometime when the guard ain’t looking,” Harold said. “Maybe when you ain’t looking either.”
They finished loading their wheelbarrows and left.
In the mess hall at supper they sat across one end of a table. No one else sat with them. Raymond looked around at the convicts hunched over eating. No one seemed aware of them. They were all talking or concentrating on their food. He said to Harold, “Goddamn beans, they always got to burn them.”
“I’ve had worse beans,” Harold said. “Worse everything. What I like is some chicken, that’s what I miss. Chicken’s good.”
“I like a beefsteak. With peppers and catsup.”
“Beefsteak’s good too. You like fried fish?”
“I never had it.”
“You never had fish?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Man, where you been you never had fish?”
“I don’t know, I never had it.”
“We got a big river right outside.”
“I never seen anybody fishing.”
“How long it take you to swim across?”
“Maybe five minutes.”
“That’s a long time to swim.”
“Too long. They get a boat out quick.”
“Anybody try to dig out of here?”
“I never heard of it,” Raymond said. “The ones that go they always run from a work detail, outside.”
“Anybody make it?”
“Not since I been here.”
“Man start running he got to know where he’s going. He got to have a place to go to.” Harold looked up from his plate. “How long you here for?”
“Life.”
“That’s a long time, ain’t it?”
They were back at work on the cell wall the next day when a guard came and got them. It was about mid- afternoon. Neither of them asked where they were going; they figured they were going to hear another sermon from the man. They marched in front of the guard down the length of the yard and past the brick detail. When they got near the mess hall they veered a little toward the stairway and the guard said, “Keep going, straight ahead.”
Raymond and Harold couldn’t believe it. The guard marched them through the gates of the sally port and right up to Mr. Rynning’s twenty-horsepower Ford Touring Car.
“Let me try to explain it to you again,” Mr. Manly said to Bob Fisher. “I believe these boys have got to develop some pride in theirselves. I don’t mean they’re supposed to get uppity with us. I mean they got to look at theirselves as man in the sight of men, and children in the eyes of God.”
“Well, I don’t know anything about that part,” Bob Fisher said. “To me they are a couple of bad cons, and if you want my advice based on years of dealing with these people, we put their leg-irons back on.”
