Forty Lashes Less One

“They can’t run in leg-irons.”

“I know they can’t. They need to work and they need to get knocked down a few times. A convict stands up to you, you better knock him down quick.”

“Have they stood up to you, Bob?”

“One of them served time in Leavenworth, the other one tried to swim the river and they’re both trying to kill one another. I call that standing up to me.”

“You say they’re hard cases, Bob, and I say they’re like little children, because they’re just now beginning to learn about living with their fellowman, which to them means living with white men and getting along with white men.”

“Long as they’re here,” Fisher said, “they damn well better. We only got one set of rules.”

Mr. Manly shook his head. “I don’t mean to change the rules for them.” It was harder to explain than he thought it would be. He couldn’t look right at Fisher; the man’s solemn expression, across the desk, distracted him. He would glance at Fisher and then look down at the sheet of paper that was partly covered with oval shapes that were like shields, and long thin lines that curved awkwardly into spearheads. “I don’t mean to treat them as privileged characters either. But we’re not going to turn them into white men, are we?”

“We sure aren’t.”

“We’re not going to tell them they’re just as good as white men, are we?”

“I don’t see how we could do that,” Fisher said.

“So we tell them what an Indian is good at and what a nigger is good at.”

“Niggers lie and Indians steal.”

“Bob, we tell them what they’re good at as members of their race. We already got it started. We tell them Indians and niggers are the best runners in the world.”

“I guess if they’re scared enough.”

“We train them hard and, by golly, they begin to believe it.”

“Yeah?”

“Once they begin to believe in something, they begin to believe in themselves.”

“Yeah?”

“That’s all there is to it.”

“Well, maybe you ought to get some white boys to run against them.”

“Bob, I’m not interested in them running races. This has got to do with distance and endurance. Being able to do something no one else in this prison can do. That race out in the yard was all wrong, more I think about it.”

“Frank Shelby said he figured the men wouldn’t mind seeing different kinds of races instead of just back and forth. He said run them all over and have them jump things—like climb up the wall on ropes, see who can get to the top first. He said he thought the men would get a kick out of that.”

“Bob, this is a show. It doesn’t prove nothing. I’m talking about these boys running miles.”

“Miles, uh?”

“Like their granddaddies used to do.”

“How’s that?”

“Like Harold Jackson’s people back in Africa. Bob, they kill lions with spears.”

“Harold killed a man with a lead pipe.”

“There,” Mr. Manly said. “That’s the difference. That’s what he’s become because he’s forgot what it’s like to be a Zulu nigger warrior.”

Jesus Christ, Bob Fisher said to himself. The little squirt shouldn’t be sitting behind the desk, he should be over in the goddamn crazy hole. He said, “You want them to run miles, uh?”

“Start them out a few miles a day. Work up to ten miles, twenty miles. We’ll see how they do.”

“Well, it will be something to see, all right, them running back and forth across the yard. I imagine the convicts will make a few remarks to them. The two boys get riled up and lose their temper, they’re back in the snake den and I don’t see you’ve made any progress at all.”

“I’ve already thought of that,” Mr. Manly said. “They’re not going to run in the yard. They’re going to run outside.”

The convicts putting up the adobe wall out at the cemetery were the first ones to see them. A man raised up to stretch the kinks out of his back and said, “Look-it up there!”

They heard the Ford Touring Car as they looked around and saw it up on the slope, moving along the north wall with the two boys running behind it. Nobody could figure it out. Somebody asked what were they chasing the car for. Another convict said they weren’t chasing the car, they were being taken somewhere. See, there was a guard in the back seat with a rifle. They could see him good against the pale wall of the prison. Nobody had ever seen convicts taken somewhere like that. Any time the car went out it went down to Yuma, but no convicts were ever in the car or behind it or anywhere near it. One of the convicts asked the work-detail guard where he supposed they were going. The guard said it beat him. That motor car belonged to Mr. Rynning and was only used for official business.

It was the stone-quarry gang that saw them next. They looked squinting up through the white dust and saw the Ford Touring Car and the two boys running to keep up with it, about twenty feet behind the car and just barely visible in all the dust the car was raising. The stone-quarry gang watched until the car was past the open rim and the only thing left to see was the dust hanging in the sunlight. Somebody said they certainly had it ass-backwards; the car was supposed to be chasing the cons. They tried to figure it out, but nobody had an answer that made much sense.

Two guards and two convicts, including Joe Dean, coming back in the wagon from delivering a load of adobe bricks in town, saw them next—saw them pass right by on the road—and Joe Dean and the other convict and the two guards turned around and watched them until the car crossed the railroad tracks and passed behind some depot sheds. Joe Dean said he could understand why the guards didn’t want the spook and the Indian riding with them, but he still had never seen anything like it in all the time he’d been here. The guards said they had never seen anything like it either. There was funny things going on. Those two had raced each other, maybe they were racing the car now. Joe Dean said Goddamn, this was the craziest prison he had ever been in.

That first day, the best they could run in one stretch was a little over a mile. They did that once: down prison hill and along the railroad tracks and out back of town, out into the country. Most of the time, in the three hours they were out, they would run as far as they could, seldom more than a quarter of a mile—then have to quit and walk for a while, breathing hard with their mouths open and their lungs on fire. They would drop thirty to forty feet back of the car and the guard with the Winchester would yell at them to come on, get the lead out of their feet.

Harold said to Raymond, “I had any lead in my feet I’d take and hit that man in the mouth with it.”

“We tell him we got to rest,” Raymond said.

They did that twice, sat down at the side of the road in the meadow grass and watched the guard coming with the rifle and the car backing up through its own dust. The first time the guard pointed the rifle and yelled for them to get on their feet. Harold told him they couldn’t move and asked him if he was going to shoot them for being tired.

“Captain, we want to run, but our legs won’t mind what we tell them.”

So the guard gave them five minutes and they sat back in the grass to let their muscles relax and stared at the distant mountains while the guards sat in the car smoking their cigarettes.

Harold said to Raymond, “What are we doing this for?”

Raymond gave him a funny look. “Because we’re tired, what do you think?”

“I mean running. What are we running for?”

“They say to run, we run.”

“It’s that little preacher.”

“Sure it is. What do you think, these guards thought of it?”

“That little man’s crazy, ain’t he?”

“I don’t know,” Raymond said. “Most of the time I don’t understand him. He’s got something in his head