yard to the main cell block, then through the iron-cage gate where bare overhead lights showed the stone passageway and the cell doors on both sides. The guards didn’t say anything to him. They stopped at Cell No. 8, unlocked the door, pushed him inside, and clanged the ironwork shut behind him.
As their steps faded in the passageway, Harold Jackson could make out two tiers of bunks and feel the closeness of the walls and was aware of a man breathing in his sleep. He wasn’t sure how many were in this cell. He let his eyes get used to the darkness before he took a step, then another, the leg chains clinking in the silence. The back wall wasn’t three steps away. The bunks, three decks high on both sides of him, were close enough to touch. Which would make this a six-man room, he figured, about eight feet by nine feet. Blanket-covered shapes lay close to him in the middle bunks. He couldn’t make out the top ones and didn’t want to feel around; but he could see the bottom racks were empty. Harold Jackson squatted on the floor and ducked into the right-side bunk.
The three-tiered bunks and the smell of the place reminded him of the troopship, though it had been awful hot down in the hold. Ten days sweating down in that dark hold while the ship was tied up at Tampa and they wouldn’t let any of the Negro troops go ashore, not even to walk the dock and stretch their legs. He never did learn the name of that ship, and he didn’t care. When they landed at Siboney, Harold Jackson walked off through the jungle and up into the hills. For two weeks he stayed with a Cuban family and ate sugar cane and got a kick out of how they couldn’t speak any English, though they were Negro, same as he was. When he had rested and felt good he returned to the base and they threw him in the stockade. They said he was a deserter. He said he came back, didn’t he? They said he was still a deserter.
He had never been in a cell that was this cold. Not even at Leavenworth. Up there in the Kansas winter the cold times were in the exercise yard, stamping your feet and moving to keep warm; the cell was all right, maybe a little cold sometimes. That was a funny thing, most of the jails he remembered as being hot: the prison farm wagon that was like a circus cage and the city jails and the army stockade in Cuba. He’d be sitting on a bench sweating or laying in the rack sweating, slapping mosquitoes, scratching, or watching the cockroaches fooling around and running nowhere. Cockroaches never looked like they knew where they were going. No, the heat was all right. The heat, the bugs were like part of being in jail. The cold was something he would have to get used to. Pretend it was hot. Pretend he was in Cuba. If he had to pick a jail to be in, out of all the places—if somebody said, “You got to go to jail for ten years, but we let you pick the place”—he’d pick the stockade at Siboney. Not because it was a good jail, but because it was in Cuba, and Cuba was a nice-looking place, with the ocean and the trees and plenty of shade. That’s a long way away, Harold Jackson said to himself. You ain’t going to see it again.
There wasn’t any wind. The cold just lay over him and didn’t go away. His body was all right; it was his feet and his hands. Harold Jackson rolled to his side to reach down below the leg-irons that dug hard into his ankles and work his shoes off, then put his hands, palms together like he was praying, between the warmth of his legs. There was no use worrying about where he was. He would think of Cuba and go to sleep.
In the morning, in the moments before opening his eyes, he wasn’t sure where he was. He was confused because a minute ago he’d have sworn he’d been holding a piece of sugar cane, the purple peeled back in knife strips and he was sucking, chewing the pulp to draw out the sweet juice. But he wasn’t holding any cane now, and he wasn’t in Cuba.
The bunk jiggled, strained, and moved back in place as somebody got down from above him. There were sounds of movement in the small cell, at least two men.
“You don’t believe it, take a look.”
“Jesus Christ,” another voice said, a younger voice. “What’s he doing in here?”
Both of them white voices. Harold Jackson could feel them standing between the bunks. He opened his eyes a little bit at a time until he was looking at prison-striped legs. It wasn’t much lighter in the cell than before, when he’d gone to sleep, but he could see the stripes all right and he knew that outside it was morning.
A pair of legs swung down from the opposite bunk and hung there, wool socks and yellow toenails poking out of holes. “What’re you looking at?” this one said, his voice low and heavy with sleep.
“We got a coon in here with us,” the younger voice said.
The legs came down and the space was filled with faded, dirty convict stripes. Harold Jackson turned his head a little and raised his eyes. His gaze met theirs as they hunched over to look at him, studying him as if he was something they had never seen before. There was a heavy-boned, beard-stubbled face; a blond baby-boy face; and a skinny, slick-haired face with a big cavalry mustache that drooped over the corners of the man’s mouth.
“Somebody made a mistake,” the big man said. “In the dark.”
“Joe Dean seen him right away.”
“I smelled him,” the one with the cavalry mustache said.
“Jesus,” the younger one said now, “wait till Shelby finds out.”
Harold Jackson came out of the bunk, rising slowly, uncoiling and bringing up his shoulders to stand eye to eye with the biggest of the three. He stared at the man’s dead-looking deep-set eyes and at the hairs sticking out of a nose that was scarred and one time had been broken. “You gentlemen excuse me,” Harold Jackson said, moving past the young boy and the one who was called Joe Dean. He stood with his back to them and aimed at the slop bucket against the wall.
They didn’t say anything at first; just stared at him. But as Harold Jackson started to go the younger one murmured, “Jesus Christ—” as if awed, or saying a prayer. He stared at Harold as long as he could, then broke for the door and began yelling through the ironwork, “Guard! Guard! Goddamn it, there’s a nigger in here pissing in our toilet!”
2
Raymond San Carlos heard the sound of Junior’s voice before he made out the words: somebody yelling—for a guard. Somebody gone crazy, or afraid of something. Something happening in one of the cells close by. He heard quick footsteps now, going past, and turned his head enough to look from his bunk to the door.
It was morning. The electric lights were off in the cell block and it was dark now, the way a barn with its doors open is dark. He could hear other voices now and footsteps and, getting louder, the metal-ringing sound of the guards banging crowbars on the cell doors—good morning, get up and go to the toilet and put your shoes on and fold your blankets—the iron clanging coming closer, until it was almost to them and the convict above Raymond San Carlos yelled, “All right, we hear you! God Almighty—” The other convict in the cell, across from him in an upper bunk, said, “I’d like to wake them sons of bitches up some time.” The man above Raymond said, “Break their goddamn eardrums.” The other man said, “No, I’d empty slop pails on ’em.” And the crowbar clanged against the door and was past them, banging, clanging down the passageway.
Another guard came along in a few minutes and unlocked each cell. Raymond was ready by the time he got to them, standing by the door to be first out. One of the convicts in the cell poked Raymond in the back and, when he turned around, pointed to the bucket.
“It ain’t my turn,” Raymond said.
“If I want you to empty it,” the convict said, his partner close behind him, looking over his shoulder, “then it’s your turn.”
Raymond shrugged and they stood aside to let him edge past them. He could argue with them and they could pound his head against the stone wall and say he fell out of his bunk. He could pick up the slop bucket and say, “Hey,” and when they turned around he could throw it at them. Thinking about it afterward would be good, but the getting beat up and pounded against the wall wouldn’t be good. Or they might stick his face in a bucket. God, he’d get sick, and every time he thought of it after he’d get sick.
He had learned to hold onto himself and think ahead, looking at the good results and the bad results, and decide quickly if doing something was worth it. One time he hadn’t held onto himself—the time he worked for the Sedona cattle people up on Oak Creek—and it was the reason he was here.
He had held on at first, for about a year while the other riders—some of them—kidded him about having a fancy name like Raymond San Carlos when he was Apache Indian down to the soles of his feet. Chiricahua Apache, they said. Maybe a little taller than most, but look at them black beady eyes and the flat nose. Pure Indin.
The Sedona hands got tired of it after a while; all except two boys who wouldn’t leave him alone: a boy
