They picked up tin plates and cups and passed in front of the serving tables for their beans, salt-dried beef, bread, and coffee. Soonzy and Joe Dean waited, letting Shelby go ahead of them. He paused a moment, holding his food, looking out over the long twelve-man tables and benches that were not yet half filled. Joe Dean moved up next to him. “I see plenty of people that owe us money.”
“No, I see the one I want. The Indin,” Shelby said, and started for his table.
Raymond San Carlos was pushing his spoon into the beans that were pretty good but would be a lot better with some ketchup. He looked up as Frank Shelby and Junior put their plates down across from him. He hurried and took the spoonful of beans, then took another one more slowly. He knew they had picked him for something. He was sure of it when Soonzy sat down on one side of him and Joe Dean stepped in on the other. Joe Dean acted surprised at seeing him. “Well, Raymond San Carlos,” he said, “how are you today?”
“I’m pretty good, I guess.”
Junior said, “What’re you pretty good at, Raymond?”
“I don’t know—some things, I guess.”
“You fight pretty good?”
It’s coming, Raymond said to himself, and told himself to be very calm and not look away from this little boy son-of-a-bitch friend of Frank Shelby’s. He said, “I fight sometimes. Why, you want to fight me?”
“Jesus,” Junior said. “Listen to him.”
Raymond smiled. “I thought that’s what you meant.” He picked up his coffee and took a sip.
“Don’t drink it,” Shelby said.
Raymond looked directly at him for the first time. “My coffee?”
“You see that colored boy? He’s picking up his plate.” As Raymond looked over Shelby said, “After he sits down I want you to go over and dump your coffee right on his woolly head.”
He was at the serving table now, big shoulders and narrow hips. Some of the others from the latrine had come in behind him. He was not the biggest man in the line, but he was the tallest and seemed to have the longest arms.
“You want me to fight him?”
“I said I want you to pour your coffee on his head,” Shelby answered. “That’s all I said to do. You understand that, or you want me to tell you in sign language?”
Harold Jackson took a place at the end of a table. There were two men at the other end. Shifting his gaze past them as he took a bite of bread, he could see Frank Shelby and the mouthy kid and, opposite them, the big one you would have to hit with a pipe or a pick handle to knock down, and the skinny one, Joe Dean, with the beard that looked like ass fur off a sick dog. The dark-skinned man with them, who was getting up now, he hadn’t seen before.
There were five guards in the room. No windows. One door. A stairway—at the end of the room behind the serving tables—where the turnkey and the little man from the train were coming down the stairs now: little man who said he was going to be in charge, looking all around—my, what a fine big mess hall—looking and following the turnkey, who never changed his face, looking at the grub now, nodding, smiling—yes, that would sure stick to their ribs—taking a cup of coffee the turnkey offered him and tasting it. Two of the guards walked over and now the little man was shaking hands with them.
That was when Harold felt somebody behind him brush him, and the hot coffee hitting his head was like a shock, coming into his eyes and feeling as if it was all over him.
Behind him, Raymond said, “What’d you hit my arm for?”
Harold wiped a hand down over his face, twisting around and looking up to see the dark-skinned man who had been with Shelby, an Indian-looking man standing, waiting for him. He knew Shelby was watching, Shelby and anybody else who had seen it happen.
“What’s the matter with you?” Harold said.
Raymond didn’t move. “I want to know why you hit my arm.”
“I’ll hit your mouth, boy, you want. But I ain’t going to do it here.”
Raymond let him have the tin plate, backhanding the edge of it across his eyes, and Harold was off the bench, grabbing Raymond’s wrist as Raymond hit him in the face with the coffee cup. Harold didn’t get to swing. A fist cracked against his cheekbone from the blind side. He was hit again on the other side of the face, kicked in the small of the back, and grabbed by both arms and around his neck and arched backward until he was looking at the ceiling. There were faces looking at him, the dark-skinned boy looking at him calmly, people pressing in close, then a guard’s hat and another, and the turnkey’s face with the mustache and the expression that didn’t change.
“Like he went crazy,” Junior said. “Just reared up and hit this boy.”
“I was going past,” Raymond said.
Junior was nodding. “That’s right. Frank seen it first, we look over and this spook has got Raymond by the neck. Frank says help him, and me and Soonzy grabbed the spook quick as we could.”
The turnkey reached out, but Harold didn’t feel his hand. He was looking past him.
“Let him up,” Fisher said.
Somebody kicked him again as they jerked him to his feet and let go of his arms. Harold felt his nose throbbing and felt something wet in his eyes. When he wiped at his eyes he saw the red blood on his fingers and could feel it running down his face now. The turnkey’s face was raised; he was looking off somewhere.
Fisher said, “You saw it, Frank?”
Shelby was still sitting at his table. He nodded slowly. “Same as Junior told you. That colored boy started it. Raymond hit him to get free, but he wouldn’t let go till Junior and Soonzy got over there and pinned him.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s all,” Shelby said.
“Anybody else see it start?” Fisher looked around. The convicts met his gaze as it passed over them. They waited as Fisher took his time, letting the silence in the room lengthen. When he looked at Harold Jackson again there was a moment when he seemed about to say something to him. The moment passed. He turned away and walked back to the food tables where Mr. Manly was waiting, his hands folded in front of him, his eyes wide open behind the gold-frame glasses.
“You want to see the snake den,” Bob Fisher said. “Come on, we got somebody else wants to see it too.”
After breakfast, as the work details were forming in the yard, the turnkey and the new superintendent and two guards marched Harold Jackson past the groups all the way to the snake den at the back of the yard.
Raymond San Carlos looked at the colored boy as he went by. He had never seen him before this morning. Nobody would see him now for about a week. It didn’t matter. Dumb nigger had done something to Shelby and would have to learn, that’s all.
While Raymond was still watching them—going one at a time into the cell now—one of the guards, R. E. Baylis, pulled him out of the stone quarry gang and took him over to another detail. Raymond couldn’t figure it out until he saw Shelby in the group and knew Shelby had arranged it. A reward for pouring coffee on a man. He was out of that man-breaking quarry and on Shelby’s detail because he’d done what he was told. Why not?
As a guard with a Winchester marched them out the main gate Raymond was thinking: Why not do it the easy way? Maybe things were going to be better and this was the beginning of it: get in with Shelby, work for him; have all the cigarettes he wanted, some tequila at night to put him to sleep, no hard-labor details. He could be out of here maybe in twenty years if he never did nothing to wear leg-irons or get put in the snake den. Twenty years, he would be almost fifty years old. He couldn’t change that. Or he could do whatever he felt like doing and not smile at people like Frank Shelby and Junior and the two convicts in his cell. He could get his head pounded against the stone wall and spend the rest of his life here. It was a lot to think about, but it made the most sense to get in with Shelby. He would be as dumb as the nigger if he didn’t.
Outside the walls, the eight-man detail was marched past the water cistern—their gaze going up the mound of earth past the stonework to the guard tower that looked like a bandstand sitting up there, a nice shady pavilion where a rapid-fire weapon was trained on the main gate—then down the grade to a path that took them along the bluff overlooking the river. They followed it until they reached the cemetery.
Beyond the rows of headstones an adobe wall, low, and uneven, under construction, stood two to three feet high on the riverside of the cemetery.
