named Buzz Moore and another one they called Eljay. They kept at him every day. One of them would say, “What’s that in his hair?” and pretend to pick something out, holding it between two fingers and studying it closely. “Why, it’s some fuzz off a turkey feather, must have got stuck there from his headdress.” Sometimes when it was hot and dry one of these two would look up at the sky and say, “Hey, chief, commence dancing and see if you can get us some rain down here.” They asked him if he ever thought about white women, which he would never in his life ever get to have. They’d drink whiskey in front of him and not give him any, saying it was against the law to give an Indian firewater. Things like that.
At first it hadn’t been too hard to hold on and go along with the kidding. Riding for Sedona was a good job, and worth it. Raymond would usually grin and say nothing. A couple of times he tried to tell them he was American and only his name was Mexican. He had made up what he thought was a pretty good story.
“See, my father’s name was Armando de San Carlos y Zamora. He was born in Mexico, I don’t know where, but I know he come up here to find work and that’s when he met my mother who’s an American, Maria Ramirez, and they got married. So when I’m born here, I’m American too.”
He remembered Buzz Moore saying, “Maria Ramirez? What kind of American name is that?”
The other one, Eljay, who never let him alone, said, “So are Apache Indins American if you want to call everybody who’s born in this country American. But anybody knows Indins ain’t citizens. And if you ain’t a citizen, you ain’t American.” He said to Raymond, “You ever vote?”
“I ain’t never been where there was anything to vote about,” Raymond answered.
“You go to school?”
“A couple of years.”
“Then you don’t know anything about what is a U. S. citizen. Can you read and write?”
Raymond shook his head.
“There you are,” Eljay said.
Buzz Moore said then, “His daddy could have been Indin. They got Indins in Mexico like anywhere else. Why old Geronimo himself lived down there and could have sired a whole tribe of little Indins.”
And Eljay said, “You want to know the simple truth? He’s Chiricahua Apache, born and reared on the San Carlos Indin reservation, and that’s how he got his fancy name. Made it up so people wouldn’t think he was Indin.”
“Well,” Buzz Moore said, “he could be some part Mexican.”
“If that’s so,” Eljay said, “what we got here is a red greaser.”
They got a kick out of that and called him the red greaser through the winter and into April—until the day up in the high meadows they were gathering spring calves and their mammas and chasing them down to the valley graze. They were using revolvers and shotguns part of the time to scare the stock out of the brush stands and box canyons and keep them moving. Raymond remembered the feel of the 12-gauge Remington, holding it pointed up with the stock tight against his thigh. He would fire it this way when he was chasing stock—aiming straight up—and would feel the Remington kick against his leg. He kept off by himself most of the day, enjoying the good feeling of being alone in high country. He remembered the day vividly: the clean line of the peaks towering against the sky, the shadowed canyons and the slopes spotted yellow with arrowroot blossoms. He liked the silence; he liked being here alone and not having to think about anything or talk to anybody.
It wasn’t until the end of the day he realized how sore his leg was from the shotgun butt punching it. Raymond swung down off the sorrel he’d been riding and limped noticeably as he walked toward the cook fire. Eljay was standing there. Eljay took one look and said, “Hey, greaser, is that some kind of one-legged Indin dance you’re doing?” Raymond stopped. He raised the Remington and shot Eljay square in the chest with both loads.
On this morning in February, 1909, as he picked up the slop bucket and followed his two cellmates out into the passageway. Raymond had served almost four years of a life sentence for second-degree murder.
The guard, R. E. Baylis, didn’t lay his crowbar against No. 14, the last door at the east end of the cellblock. He opened the door and stepped inside and waited for Frank Shelby to look up from his bunk.
“You need to be on the supply detail today?” R. E. Baylis asked.
“What’s today?”
“Tuesday.”
“Tomorrow,” Shelby said. “What’s it like out?”
“Bright and fair, going to be warm.”
“Put me on an outside detail.”
“We got a party building a wall over by the cemetery.”
“Hauling the bricks?”
“Bricks already there.”
“That’ll be all right,” Shelby said. He sat up, swinging his legs over the side of the bunk. He was alone in the cell, in the upper of a double bunk. The triple bunk opposite him was stacked with cardboard boxes and a wooden crate and a few canvas sacks. A shelf and mirror hung from the back wall. There was also a chair by the wall with a hole cut out of the seat and a bucket underneath. A roll of toilet paper rested on one of the arms. The convicts called the chair Shelby’s throne. “Get somebody to empty the bucket, will you?” Looking at the guard again, Shelby said, “You need anything?”
R. E. Baylis touched his breast pocket. “Well, I guess I could use some chew.”
“Box right by your head,” Shelby said. “I got Mail Pouch and Red Man. Or I got some Copenhagen if you want.”
R. E. Baylis fished a hand in the box. “I might as well take a couple—case I don’t see you again today.”
“You know where to find me.” Shelby dropped to the floor, pulled on half-boots, hopping a couple of times to keep his balance, then ran a hand through his dark hair as he straightened up, standing now in his boots and long underwear. “I believe I was supposed to get a clean outfit today.”
“Washing machine broke down yesterday.”
“Tomorrow then for sure, uh?” Shelby had an easy, unhurried way of talking. It was known that he never raised his voice or got excited. They said the way you told if he was mad or irritated, he would fool with his mustache; he would keep smoothing it down with two fingers until he decided what had to be done and either did it himself or had somebody else do it. Frank Shelby was serving forty-five years for armed robbery and second-degree murder and had brought three of his men with him to Yuma, each of them found guilty on the same counts and serving thirty years apiece.
Junior was one of them. He banged through the cell door as Shelby was getting into his prison stripes, buttoning his coat. “You got your mean go-to-hell look on this morning,” Shelby said. “Was that you yelling just now?”
“They stuck a nigger in our cell last night while we was asleep.” Junior turned to nail the guard with his look, putting the blame on him.
“It wasn’t me,” R. E. Baylis said. “I just come on duty.”
“You don’t throw his black ass out, we will,” Junior said. By Jesus, this was Worley Lewis, Jr. talking, nineteen-year-old convict going on forty-nine before he would ever see the outside of a penitentiary, but he was one of Frank Shelby’s own and that said he could stand up to a guard and mouth him if he had a good enough reason. “I’m telling you, Soonzy’ll kill the son of a bitch.”
“I’ll find out why—” the guard began.
“It was a mistake,” Shelby said. “Put him in the wrong cell is all.”
“He’s in there now, great big buck. Joe Dean seen him first, woke me up, and I swear I couldn’t believe my eyes.”
Shelby went over to the mirror and picked up a comb from the shelf. “It’s nothing to get upset about,” he said, making a part and slanting the dark hair carefully across his forehead. “Tonight they’ll put him someplace else.”
“Well, if we can,” the guard said.
Shelby was watching him in the mirror: the gray-looking man in the gray guard uniform, R. E. Baylis, who might have been a town constable or a deputy sheriff twenty years ago. “What’s the trouble?” Shelby asked.
“I mean he might have been ordered put there, I don’t know.”
“Ordered by who?”
“Bob Fisher. I say I don’t know for sure.”
