Shelby turned from the mirror. “Bob don’t want any trouble.”
“Course not.”
“Then why would he want to put Sambo in with my boys?”
“I say, I don’t know.”
Shelby came toward him now, noticing the activity out in the passageway, the convicts standing around and talking, moving slowly as the guards began to form them into two rows. Shelby put a hand on the guard’s shoulder. “Mr. Baylis,” he said, “don’t worry about it. You don’t want to ask Bob Fisher; we’ll get Sambo out of there ourselves.”
“We don’t want nobody hurt or anything.”
The guard kept looking at him, but Shelby was finished. As far as he was concerned, it was done. He said to Junior, “Give Soonzy the tobacco. You take the soap and stuff.”
“It’s my turn to keep the tally.”
“Don’t give me that look, boy.”
Junior dropped his tone. “I lugged a box yesterday.”
“All right, you handle the tally, Joe Dean carries the soap and stuff.” Shelby paused, as if he was going to say something else, then looked at the guard. “Why don’t you have the colored boy empty my throne bucket?”
“It don’t matter to me,” the guard said.
So he pulled Harold Jackson out of line and told him to get down to No. 14—as Joe Dean, Soonzy, and Junior moved along the double row of convicts in the dim passageway and sold them tobacco and cigarette paper, four kinds of plug and scrap, and little tins of snuff, matches, sugar cubes, stick candy, soap bars, sewing needles and thread, playing cards, red bandana handkerchiefs, shoelaces, and combs. They didn’t take money; it would waste too much time and they only had ten minutes to go down the double line of eighty-seven men. Junior put the purchase amount in the tally book and the customer had one week to pay. If he didn’t pay in a week, he couldn’t buy any more stuff until he did. If he didn’t pay in two weeks Junior and Soonzy would get him in a cell alone and hit him a few times or stomp the man’s ribs and kidneys. If a customer wanted tequila or mescal, or corn whiskey when they had it, he’d come around to No. 14 after supper, before the doors were shut for the night, and pay a dollar a half-pint, put up in medicine bottles from the sick ward that occupied the second floor of the cell block. Shelby only sold alcohol in the morning to three or four of the convicts who needed it first thing or would never get through the day. What most of them wanted was just a day’s worth of tobacco and some paper to roll it in.
When the figure appeared outside the iron lattice Shelby said, “Come on in,” and watched the big colored boy’s reaction as he entered: his gaze shifting twice to take in the double bunk and the boxes and the throne, knowing right away this was a one-man cell.
“I’m Mr. Shelby.”
“I’m Mr. Jackson,” Harold said.
Frank Shelby touched his mustache. He smoothed it to the sides once, then let his hand drop to the edge of his bunk. His eyes remained on the impassive dark face that did not move now and was looking directly at him.
“Where you from, Mr. Jackson?”
“From Leavenworth.”
That was it. Big time con in a desert prison hole. “This place doesn’t look like much after the federal pen, uh?”
“I been to some was worse, some better.”
“What’d you get sent here for?”
“I killed a man was bothering me.”
“You get life?”
“Fifteen years.”
“Then you didn’t kill a man. You must’ve killed another colored boy.” Shelby waited.
Harold Jackson said nothing. He could wait too.
“I’m right, ain’t I?” Shelby said.
“The man said for me to come in here.”
“He told you, but it was me said for you to come in.”
Harold Jackson waited again. “You saying you the man here?”
“Ask any of them out there,” Shelby said. “The guards, anybody.”
“You bring me in to tell me about yourself?”
“No, I brought you in to empty my slop bucket.”
“Who did it before I come?”
“Anybody I told.”
“If you got people willing, you better call one of them.” Harold turned and had a hand on the door when Shelby stopped him.
“Hey, Sambo—”
Harold came around enough to look at him. “How’d you know that was my name?”
“Boy, you are sure starting off wrong,” Shelby said. “I believe you need to be by yourself a while and think it over.”
Harold didn’t have anything to say to that. He turned to the door again and left the man standing there playing with his mustache.
As he fell in at the end of the prisoner line, guard named R. E. Baylis gave him a funny look and came over.
“Where’s Shelby’s bucket at?”
“I guess it’s still in there, captain.”
“How come he didn’t have you take it?”
Harold Jackson stood at attention, looking past the man’s face to the stone wall of the passageway. “You’ll have to ask him about that, captain.”
“Here they come,” Bob Fisher said. “Look over there.”
Mr. Manly moved quickly from the side of the desk to the window to watch the double file of convicts coming this way. He was anxious to see everything this morning, especially the convicts.
“Is that all of them?”
“In the main cell block. About ninety.”
“I thought there’d be more.” Mr. Manly studied the double file closely but wasn’t able to single out Harold Jackson. All the convicts looked alike. No, that was wrong; they didn’t all look alike.
“Since we’re shutting down we haven’t been getting as many.”
“They’re all different, aren’t they?”
“How’s that?” Bob Fisher said.
Mr. Manly didn’t answer, or didn’t hear him. He stood at the window of the superintendent’s office—the largest of a row of offices over the mess hall—and watched the convicts as they came across the yard, passed beyond the end of a low adobe, and came into view again almost directly below the window. The line reached the door of the mess hall and came to a stop.
Their uniforms looked the same, all of them wearing prison stripes, all faded gray and white. It was the hats that were different, light-colored felt hats and a few straw hats, almost identical hats, but all worn at a different angle: straight, low over the eyes, to the side, cocked like a dandy would wear his hat, the brim funneled, the brim up in front, the brim down all around. The hats were as different as the men must be different. He should make a note of that. See if anything had been written on the subject: determining a man’s character by the way he wore his hat. But there wasn’t a note pad or any paper on the desk and he didn’t want to ask Fisher for it right at the moment.
He was looking down at all the hats. He couldn’t see any of their faces clearly, and wouldn’t unless a man looked up. Nobody was looking up.
They were all looking back toward the yard. Most of them turning now so they wouldn’t have to strain their necks. All those men suddenly interested in something and turning to look.
“The women convicts,” Bob Fisher said.
Mr. Manly saw them then. My God—two women.
Fisher pressed closer to him at the window. Mr. Manly could smell tobacco on the man’s breath. “They just
