It was a cold, windswept gray morning with hailstones on the ground, and Dixon had just left the shack with the wood detail.
“I think he’s a snitch,” Ramos said. “I seen him eating some vitamin pills in the dark last night.”
We were hunched around the iron stove, bent toward the heat. Our breaths steamed out like ice in the silence.
“Are you sure?” I said.
“He took three of them out of his pocket and swallowed them dry.”
“I don’t know about no vitamin pills,” Joe Bob, our ex-convict, said, “but I got something in my pecker that goes off when I get near a snitch, and that boy gives me a real bone.”
“If you’re right, what are we going to do with him?” another man said.
“For openers, you better start shutting up about running,” Joe Bob said. His sandy red hair stuck out from under his stocking cap, and he chewed on the flattened end of a matchstick in one corner of his mouth.
“We ice him,” Ramos said.
“Hey, cut that shit, man,” Joe Bob said. “Ding’ll waste the whole shack.”
“No, he ain’t,” Ramos said. “I’ll tell Kwong that Dixon’s been spitting blood and ask him for some eggs, and then we wait a few days and smother him.”
“I tell you, buddy, they ain’t that stupid,” Joe Bob said.
“We got to take him out one way or another,” O.J., the bootlegger from Okema, said. “If Ding’s greasing him, he’s got to burn somebody.”
“Yeah, you don’t fuck around with guys like this.”
“There’s other ways to get a snitch out of the shack,” Joe Bob said. “We can turn the Turk loose on him, and he’ll ask Ding to transfer over with the pros.”
“You’re not sure about him, anyway,” I said. “He could have gotten those pills off of somebody else in the yard.”
“You know that’s a lot of crap, too, Holland. He smelled like a snitch when he first come in here,” Ramos said.
“He’s a pimp and a wheeler, and that’s all he’s been his whole life. That doesn’t mean he’s working for Ding,” I said.
“I’ll do it in the middle of the night,” Ramos said. “There won’t be no sound, and he’ll look just like every other guy we drug out in the yard.”
“I ain’t telling you what to do,” Joe Bob said, “but you got some pretty amateur shit in your head for this kind of scene. Ding might be a harelip dickhead, but he ain’t dumb and he’s going to fry our balls in a skillet before you get done with this caper.”
“The sonofabitch has to go. What else are we going to do with him?” O.J. said.
“If you got to ice him, use your head a minute and do it out in the yard,” Joe Bob said. “Catch him in a bunch during exercise time and bust him open with the Turk’s trowel. You’ll probably get shot, anyway, but maybe the rest of us won’t get knocked off with you.”
“If you don’t want in it, just stay out of my face,” Ramos said.
“Like I said, I ain’t trying to grow any hairs in your asshole. You just don’t know what you’re doing. Like this escape caper. I chain-ganged in the roughest joint in the South, and I started to run once myself, but you got to be out of your goddamn mind to try and crack a place like this. You got two fences to cut through, there’s a hundred yards of bare ground between both of them, and them gooks up on the platform ain’t going to be reading fortune cookies while you’re hauling for Dixie. You better get your head rewired before Ding lays you out in the yard like he done to that Greek that took off from the wood detail.”
“If I get nailed I’ll buy it running on the other side of that wire,” Ramos said. “I ain’t going to stay here and shit my insides out till somebody rolls me into the yard like a tumblebug. There’s a colored sergeant with a compass and some pliers for the fence, and he figures if we can make it to the sea we can steal a boat and get out far enough for one of our choppers to pick us up.”
“Goddamn, if that ain’t a real pistol, Ramos. I once knew a guy that climbed into the back of a garbage truck with chains on, buried himself in the trash, and rode down the highway with the hacks looking all over for him. Except he almost got fried when they unloaded the truck in the county incinerator. But you got him beat, buddy. Running across North Korea with a nigra. Now that’s cool. You guys ought to stand out like shit in an ice cream factory.”
Ramos didn’t say anything more. He glared at the gray ash in the grate awhile, then paced around the shack, beating his arms in the cold. He didn’t have the intelligence or prison experience to argue with Joe Bob, but we knew that he planned to kill Dixon, regardless of what anyone said.
And it wasn’t long before Dixon knew it, too. He came in from the wood detail late that afternoon, his face red and chafed with windburn, and dropped a load of sticks and roots by the stove. There was snow in his hair, and his quilted pants were wet up to the knees. In the silence we heard Kwong lock the chain on the door. Dixon pulled off his mittens with his teeth and stuck his hands under his armpits.
“Somebody else is going on that bastard next time,” he said. “That whole goddamn field’s picked clean. I broke two fingernails digging down to the ground.”
No one answered.
“Shit, look at them.”
We turned our faces away or found things to do that would remove us from the eventual meeting of eyes between Ramos and Dixon. But instead it was O.J. and Bertie Fast, the drag queen, who tore open the wrapper and let Dixon look for just a moment inside the box.
“What is this crap, anyway?” Dixon said. “Maybe I didn’t wipe my ass clean this morning or something. Don’t I smell sweet enough to you, house mouse?”
“I didn’t say anything,” Bertie said, his voice weak and his eyes searching for a spot on the far wall.
“House mouse, you better not hold out on me.”
“Fuck off, man,” O.J. said. He was sticking twigs into the fire grate, and his jawbones were flat against the skin.
“What’s the deal, then?” Dixon said. “You want me to kick in part of my chow for the soup? Okay. No sweat. Is everybody cool now?”
“Where did you get vitamin pills?” O.J. said.
“Vitamins? You must have a wild crab loose in your brain.” But he was surprised, and there was a flicker of fear in his face.
“Yeah. Like those little red ones Ding gives to the pros,” O.J. said.
“You better see a wig mechanic when you get out of here. You got real problems.”
“You’re up to your bottom lip in Shit’s Creek, buddy,” Joe Bob said. “This ain’t the time to be a Yankee smart-ass.”
“You guys have been flogging your pole too much or something. I mean what kind of joint is this, anyway? I spend the whole day digging in the ice with Kwong jabbing me in the ass, and I come back and you guys got me nailed for a pro.”
“How did you get the pills?” I said.
Everyone was looking at him now. The snow in his hair had melted, and his face was damp with water and perspiration. He held his two bruised fingers in one hand and glanced at the locked door.
“I traded them off a spade in the yard for some cigarettes. All right, so I didn’t share them. Big deal. You going to tear my balls out because I want to stay alive?”
“Which spade?” O.J. said.
“I don’t know. He’s with the N.C.O.’s.”
“There ain’t but one over there,” Ramos said.
“Maybe he’s an enlisted man. What difference does it make? All those boons look alike.”
“Get it straight, cousin,” Joe Bob said.
“You guys already want to fry me. It don’t make any difference what I say. You’ve been pissed ever since I come in here because I wouldn’t put in my chow for guys that were already dead. All of you got a Purple Heart nailed right up in the middle of your forehead because you keep some poor sonofabitch alive a few extra days so he can shit more blood and chew his tongue raw. If I buy it I hope there ain’t a bunch like you around.”
