Джо Горес - Cases

Gideon’s face screwed up into a pathetic squinch. “She beats on me when she’s mad, y’r honor.”

“Go on home with you now, you old reprobate.”

Seeing only flint in the judge’s gaze, Gideon shuffled sadly out of the courtroom like a lanky crane.

“Stand up, ’bos,” whispered the sheriff.

The three young men stood up as Judge Carberry turned his gaze on them. The bailiff was sitting in a straight-back chair below the bench, cleaning his fingernails with a pocketknife.

“What do we have here, Sheriff Swinton?”

“Well, your honor, these three men were hanging around town last night in the rain. When I spoke to them, they gave me evasive answers. None of them has any identification, none of them has any money, none of them has any visible means of support. No local ties that I could uncover, your honor.”

“You are telling me that they are vagrants.”

To Collinson, the two men were like actors in a play so well rehearsed that they knew each other’s lines.

“It appears that way, your honor.”

“Are they all three together, Sheriff Swinton?”

Swinton indicated Collinson. “He came into town alone, ahead of the other two, but they’re of an age.”

“I see.” The judge turned a seemingly benevolent eye on the three men. He said pleasantly, “Do you gentlemen have anything to say on your own behalf?”

Dale, deluded by the soft tones and kindly look, said, “Your honor, we were just passing through town lookin’ for work. We weren’t bothering nobody...”

“Sheriff?”

“These two, your honor, they went into the diner together.”

Carberry leaned forward on the bench like a stooping hawk. “A nigra and a white boy in Imelda Joad’s diner together?”

“Yes, your honor.”

“And they were served?”

“Chili and coffee. It was Sue Ellen, your honor.”

“And the other fellow was already in there and didn’t do or say anything to defend the young lady’s honor?”

“That’s how she stacks up, your honor.”

The judge leaned back, shook his head in gentle exasperation. “You get Sue Ellen on up here to my chambers this afternoon, Sheriff. I want to have a talk with that young lady. She’s just too softhearted for her own good.” He looked down at Collinson. “What about you, son? Any statement you want to make about all of this?”

“None, your honor.”

The judge nodded. “Three drifters off the trains.” He leaned forward on his elbows, chin on his interlaced hands. “We can’t have it, gentlemen. We won’t have it. Not in my town.”

“And a lot of new road going through,” said Larkie almost under his breath.

“What was that, boy?” demanded the judge sharply.

“Calling on the Lord, your honor. I’m a good Baptist.”

Judge Carberry nodded, picked up his gavel, pointed it at Dale. He had not asked, nor had he been given, any of their names. “You. Six months hard on the road crew.” He slammed the gavel down, bang! Pointed it at Larkie. “You. Six months hard on the road crew.” Bang! Pointed it at Collinson. “You. One month hard on the road crew.” Bang!

“All rise court is dismissed,” intoned the bailiff.

The judge disappeared back inside his chambers. Swinton checked his watch, a big old turnip on a fob that he took from his pants pocket. “Two minutes and fifty-eight seconds for you three. Judge Carberry just set hisself a new record.”

“Bluegills must be bitin’ real good,” said Larkie.

“Happens after a good rain,” said Collinson with a careless grin. But he could hardly breathe he was so scared.

“Truck’s waiting, ’bos,” said the sheriff.

The compound was four miles off the road behind barbed wire, in the last county in Georgia where road-gang prisoners still wore ankle chains. Their pay was two bits a day and found — beans and rice and a sliver of fatback at a dime a day per man. The convicts lived in a single one-story clapboard building much like an army barracks except it was feces-brown instead of urine-yellow. The unglassed, screened windows had wooden covers that could be hinged upward and held open by brace sticks.

It was set on a low ridge above the floodplain. Behind it, crowded into the dense shagbark hickory and swamp chestnut, was the outhouse; lime was dumped into its two holes once a week for sanitary purposes. There were two showers made by water pipes run up outside the back wall of the barracks and then bent over at an angle. The showerheads were tin cans with holes punched in them.

Inside the barracks, a row of twelve bunks ran down each side, set head to the wall. In the center of the room was a potbellied iron woodstove. Wire stays held its black sooty stovepipe in place. Now, in the summer heat, the stove was cold.

Captain Hent had a two-room cabin all to himself, could cook and shower, had a bed with a mattress and springs and a headboard. Since there was a convict-dug septic tank, he and the four guards in their dormitory had running water and flush toilets. There was a cook-shack and a commissary with a huge shiny padlock and heavy-mesh screens across the windows.

That first night, as they got their prison issue of clothing and the leg irons fitted around their ankles, Dale’s blue eyes showed white all around like those of a spooked horse.

“I don’t know if I can take this,” he said urgently.

“You gotta take it,” said Larkie. “Ain’t no way out short of six months or dyin’.”

Dale indicated Collinson. “Only one month for him. ”

“He kep’ his big mouth shut fronta the judge,” said Larkie, “and he wasn’t running with no nigger.” He said to Collinson, “Me ’n’ Dale jungled up together ’cause we both figured wasn’t neither of us able to whup the other one. Figure the same ’bout you. We all gotta look out for one another, you see that?”

“I see that,” said Collinson, thanking God. When the hinged iron had gone around his ankle he’d almost lashed out blindly, like a claustrophobic in a closet.

After two free hours following their evening meal of fatback and wormy beans, the twenty-four convicts were fastened to their beds like dogs in a kennel. The chain, threaded through the staples on their leg irons and passed down each row of cots and padlocked to plates in the walls, saved roll calls and night patrols.

There was supposedly no talking after the kerosene pressure lantern was extinguished, but with three bunks in a row the three of them could whisper together. Collinson wasn’t sure he could have handled that first night otherwise. It had all happened so fast. Like going down Plummer’s hill in his coaster wagon when he was a kid: once you started moving, you couldn’t stop.

Uncle Russ had been smart enough to do his hoboing west by north, not east by south, so he’d had no words of wisdom Collinson could apply to this situation.

But he got used to it. The work was hard, but just that — hard work. He already had a strong back and callused hands from six years at the lumberyard after school and summers, unloading boxcars of lumber, coal, shingles, cement, plaster, and bricks to stay in shape for football and to get money for college.

The road was being cut north through a mixed pine forest of shortleaf, longleaf, loblolly, and slash. Two crews cleared brush and cut trees, a third came along behind them to lay the roadbed.

Simultaneously the road was being pushed south across a corner of the Okefenokee, so the last road crew had to build a levee out into the swamp. This was the toughest work because it meant hauling a lot of red Georgia clay. A ’dozer and trucks could have done it in a month; but since the local pols’ graft was safe no matter what, the county would just use an endless rotating supply of men with picks and shovels and wheelbarrows for as many years as it would take.