Джо Горес: Cases

The three of them ended up on the swamp crew, with Collinson wondering aloud about Pogo, Albert the Alligator, and Faithful Old Dog Tray. Nobody else had any idea of what the hell he was talking about.

There had been no rain since the night of their arrest, seventeen days before, so they had to stamp on their shovels to make them bite at the earth even though it had been pickaxed first. Reddish dust drifted from each shovelful of clods that went into the wheelbarrows. It reminded Collinson of emptying gondola cars of coal at Kruse Lumber back in Rochester: he and another college guy had been able to shovel fifty tons a day. He’d had to ride home on the front fender of his dad’s car because he was too filthy to ride inside.

Two men always picked, two more shoveled; the other two, unchained, wheeled the barrows. Each midday they rotated jobs. The backs of their necks were red and sore from the sun, their palms cracked from sweat-slick tool handles.

To pass the time and keep his fear at bay, Collinson told stories about Uncle Russ during his hoboing days. The other convicts would stop and listen as if they were learning something Collinson didn’t know was in the story.

Uncle Russ in Wyoming, wanting to be a cowboy. When the ranch foreman asked him if he was good with horses, Russ bragged, “Born on ’em,” though he’d never been on a horse in his life. So they cinched a stallion too tight and put him on it. Of course it started to buck.

“When Uncle Russ got bucked off, and was high in the air,” said Collinson, “he thought, ‘God, how I wish I was down on the ground.’ When he lit on the ground and broke his collarbone, he thought, ‘God, how I wish I was back up in the air again.’ ”

Then there was that argument in the San Francisco saloon.

“Uncle Russ remembered the old saying about having a chip on your shoulder, so he put a wood chip on his shoulder from the sawdust on the floor, and told the other guy, ‘Knock that off.’ ”

“Did he?” demanded Anderson, a lanky whipcord Texan with flat black hair and pale challenging eyes who was doing five hard years for rape.

“Knocked the chip off his shoulder and broke Uncle Russ’s jaw in the bargain,” said Collinson.

Anderson laughed really hard at that story.

The ones they liked best were Uncle Russ’s Alaskan years in the Army Corps of Engineers during World War II. Two of the three older men were veterans themselves — mostly of PX rip-offs and black-market cigarettes and stockade time. But Uncle Russ had helped build the Alcan Highway against a possible military thrust through Siberia and the Aleutians into Alaska. The kind of stuff men not going anywhere liked to hear about.

“They got so far out across that muskeg that they ran out of fill. But they had to get the highway built. So they just started running trucks, cars, semis full of supplies, drums of oil, anything, into that swamp and letting it all sink, until they had a foundation for the highway.”

“They ought to do that here,” said Dalton, a short, once-chubby man who suffered the heat more than the others. He’d embezzled from a bank, had stupidly hit a cop with a baseball bat while on the run. “We got no trucks, but they could use our barracks for fill.”

Collinson also told them about the Alaskan mosquitoes.

“Those muskeg mosquitoes were so big that six of them could carry a man off screaming.”

Huge bulking Blackman Brown stopped his wheelbarrow in rapt wonder. He was a gentle Negro who’d caught his wife in bed with another man, backhanded her across the mouth, and broke her neck. A long knife scar ran diagonally across his face.

“They ever find any of them men again?”

“Just bones with skin draped around them, thin as parchment paper,” said an utterly solemn Collinson. “The mosquitoes had sucked every bit of blood and meat right out of them.”

“I would of liked to of seen that.”

“Goddammit! Get to work! What we paying you for?”

That was Captain Hent, who had left his paperwork back at the compound to ramrod their crew personally. The long-timers had gone very still when he’d shown up, as if it meant more than was apparent. Hent was medium-sized, heavy-bodied, mid-forties, thick without fat, with cold blue eyes and a strong-jawed face always in need of a shave. Low on his right hip rode a .44-caliber revolver in a stained and shiny leather holster; low on his left, a razor-sharp bowie knife in a fringed leather sheath.

Collinson noticed how the long-timers reacted to Hent taking over their crew, but he just kept his silent count. Thirteen more days and a get-up to go. He kept telling himself he could do the time standing on his head, hugging the release day like a child hugging a giant teddy bear.

Then it would be just another adventure to recount.

His own this time, not Uncle Russ’s.

Things went sour on the eighteenth day. Larkie started clowning around while he shoveled, as he had done with the guard in charge before Hent.

“Cap’n,” he said.

“What is it, niggerboy?”

Captain Hent was standing beside his chair under the shade of a lone bald cypress with its trunk rising up out of the water like an upside-down trumpet; its flared base was five feet bigger around than the upper trunk. Hent’s thick arms were crossed on his chest, his hips were slung forward in a comfortable slouch. His shirt was black with sweat. By his right foot was the water jug, its sides beaded with moisture.

“How about a drink of that there water, Cap’n?”

“You know better than that, niggerboy. Only ten minutes to lunch break.”

His voice was like the baying of an old hound gone mean from too many beatings. The only other sounds were the grunts of the men, the rattle of earth in the barrows, the liquid chirping of passing redwings. Each time a man bent to shovel or pick, beads of hot sweat rained from his face onto his hands and wrists. Their bodies were caked and streaked with red clay dust.

“Cap’n.”

Hot breeze moved shadow across Hent’s face from the Spanish moss festooning the cypress. “What you want, niggerboy?”

“How ’bout giving me my time? I figure on quittin’.”

Anderson, the Texas rapist, snickered. The captain’s face reddened and his eyes got hot and hungry. He stepped closer to Larkie, unfolding his arms.

“You making fun of me, niggerboy?” he asked softly.

Larkie’s eyes widened in surprise. They became almost too wide for real surprise.

“No, Cap’n, I mos’ surely ain’t. We out here expiatin’ for our sins, sure ain’t any of us gonna draw no time.”

A spiny softshell turtle was half buried in the mud beside the levee, its pointed tubular snout just breaking the surface of the shallow brown water. Captain Hent grabbed Larkie’s shovel, made two giant steps down the side of the four-foot embankment, drove the sharpened, pointed blade down to cut the turtle almost in two. Its frantic scrabbling clouded the water with blood.

Hent chuckled and gave Larkie back his shovel. “You want lunch today, niggerboy, you eat that there turtle.”

Dale straightened up, a hand to the small of his back.

“Captain, all you got’s a gun makes you feel like God almighty. I ever get you alone without one...”

Captain Hent brought his whisker-stubbled face inches from Dale’s. “Boy, maybe tonight at the compound we’ll have us a little shot at that there. No gun. Tonight on your own time.”

In the evenings they were unchained inside the barbwire enclosure, could shower, take a dump, shave, sew, or wash their clothing. They could even, if so inclined, sit on the weathered front steps and listen to the birdlike whistle of the tree frogs, wit-wit-wit repeated a score of times without pause.