Virginia Reeves - Work Like Any Other

“Wait,” Taylor says, as though Jones were just another of his dogs.

Taylor moves ahead, his face trained on the spot where the man went down. I picture that escaping man still going, working his way woodward under the cover of the cotton, elbow-crawling along a furrow line.

How Taylor can move so quickly, I don’t know. He’s already yards away. The field guard before him has moved out of the line. Other men are around, too, working the field, all in stripes. Taylor’s warning shot has brought them up tall, their hands paused in their picking, their eyes on the scene. They’re all pulling for the downed man. I can see it. They are granting him a tunnel, a secret passage there, exactly where he’s fallen, a corridor to the ocean where a ship waits. I want it for him, too.

But he returns to us, his body rising up through the cotton, pricked and ragged.

“Stop!” Taylor shouts once more. He levels his gun. I am close enough to hear him say, “All right, then. I’m gonna do this.”

How is it that a shot fired across land can sound so much fiercer than one fired toward the sky? I have never heard anything so loud.

The man falls, and Taylor looks around. Shock is on his face, a little fear. He’s sweating and pale, and he shouts at the men in the field, “Keep to your work!”

To me and the other two, he says, “Best bring those dogs on up here, just in case that didn’t land where I think it did.”

The other guard is there already, marking the spot, and Taylor’s mumbling to himself as he walks. My dog is quiet, but still pulling. We level up with Taylor, and I hear that he’s counting. “Nine,” I hear him say. “Ten, eleven.” He’s counting his steps.

Nineteen, it turns out. He fired from nineteen steps away.

My dog brays when she sees the downed man, and he covers his face. “Don’t put that dog on me. I’m not running. Please, just don’t put no dog on me.”

I pull the dog back, and Taylor tells her to sit.

The skin on the man’s side is torn up, and when he moves his hands from his face, I nearly don’t recognize him through the pain. His name is Jennings. We do a little business here and there — milk that I sneak from the dairy in exchange for cigarettes. It’s another act of theft, I know, and I have stolen enough, but smoking is one of the only graces I have found here, one of the only familiar routines.

“We best get this boy to the hospital,” Taylor says to the other guard. “Get some men. They can make a sling of their sacks. Come on, now. Boy’s losing blood.”

The men materialize, sprouting up out of the last of the cotton as though they’d always been there. A tall man with only one tooth — a front one — slides his sack under Jennings’ head and shoulders. He takes one side and a short fellow takes the other. Two more are at Jennings’s waist, two more at his feet. They lift him, and the sounds that come from his mouth are gut-shot and black, like the blood wetting the midway sack, like the blood spotting the plants. It’s bright on the cotton, dark on the stems and ground. The crops are crushed down in a circle here, stamped out in a near-perfect ring.

“Put those dogs away,” Taylor says to us as he goes.

We watch the men heave Jennings away. They move toward one of the wider row lines so they can walk easier. The fields are still stunned into disorder, the guards caught up in whispering, the men in clumps. If ever a dog boy was to run, this would be the time. We could push our dogs off toward the woods on some trail we’d contrived, deep into thick cover before anyone would notice we’d gone the wrong way. We could part and run our own directions, me with this dog at my waist, crossing creeks, scaling Montgomery, swimming rivers and lakes until we reached Marie’s land. I could walk up the drive with this beast, both of us tired from our chase—“Rabbits,” I could tell my wife and son. “We’ve been hunting rabbits.”

“What the hell you still doing out here, boy?”

I don’t know the guard who’s turned his holler on me, but he’s approaching. He’s motioning with his gun. “Taylor told you to put that dog up,” he shouts. “Go on, now.”

“Sir,” I say, and tug my dog back toward the pens, the other two men off ahead of me. They’re quiet when I catch up.

“Lead that dog on into her run and then you can unhook,” Jones says.

I’m nervous to enter the pen with the pushing throng of dogs, but I ease myself through the sagging gate anyway.

“Hell of a thing,” Jones continues. He’s staring at me when I look up. “Hell of a thing.”

“Yeah.” It is some sort of hell, this thing we’ve seen with its dogs and sirens, its cotton and striped men, its blasts and shots and blood.

“That’s not what this job’s about. Ain’t never seen that before. Never seen Taylor shoot a man.”

“Nope,” the other dog boy, Jackson, says. “First for me, too, and I been out on these dogs since Taylor started the goddamn pack.”

I set my dog loose among the thicket of bodies — snouts and tails pushing their way into other snouts and tails. They’re not interested in me, all of the remaining dogs crowding round the one I brought back as though asking about her day. What was the chase like? I hear them asking with their eyes. You get it?

Taylor is away with Jennings, the other guards back at their posts. The three of us convicts are alone here with these dogs, and the itch to run takes me full by the shoulders, shaking me to standing tall and alert.

“There aren’t any guards around,” I venture.

Jones laughs. “You thinking about running? That your ticket?”

“Luck to you,” Jackson says, joining in the laughter.

“What?” I ask them.

“This is the best there is,” Jones says. “You get put out here on these dogs, and you’re looking at trustee ranks, early parole, time outside the damn wall. But you run when you’re out here? A broken trustee’s the bottom of this ladder. You don’t climb anywhere, and you sure as hell don’t get paroled.”

“That’s right,” Jackson says.

I know what Marie would counsel in this situation: “Patience, Roscoe. Do the work. Let the reward come later.”

But I just saw a man shot, I would tell her. I am an electrician. I should not be here.

“Best thing for you to do is head over to the gate,” Jones says. “Get yourself back inside that wall and wait to hear from Taylor.” He gives me a leveled, honest stare. “These dogs are good. And your scent will be damn easy to track, starting at the pens as you are.”

The image of these dogs after me melts the itch away — me as the runner and these men as the chasers tied to dogs. I can hear the men shouting and the beasts’ whining behind me, their quick feet and their snuffling breaths. They suck in every speck of my scent, tiny bits of dust that fire a need in their brains. Follow, those bits say. Find .

I don’t want to be chased.

So I leave the pens, Jones and Jackson there with the dogs. I head back to the guard at the outer gate who shoved his gun into my back earlier, and I look away from the smirk on his face.

Beau unlocks the interior door and shoves me through with the barrel of his gun. “Get on back to the dairy. Don’t belong out here anyway.”

“I’m going, sir.” I’m glad of the gate and the door swinging shut behind me. I prefer the mulled quiet of the dairy barn to what I’ve seen and done today. I imagine Marie laughing at the irony of this — my wanting of a barn.

JENNINGSleaves the hospital the next morning.

“Wasn’t so bad,” he tells us in the yard. “They got all the shot out.” The triumph in his voice doesn’t match the blood in his eyes, or the shuffle in his walk, the way his hand goes to his side again and again, pressing. The next day, his back’s bowed, a crease that never rights itself, and then he starts sweating, his face gone gray and dusky.