Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

It was no use. A silence like a gathering poison filled him.

The power that keeps the world spinning turned and stooped to him and the power behind this power bent down too and the others in the endless line and these powers looked at him and didn’t say anything or do anything and then they went on and he lay still.

“Ah me,” he whispered, “ah me.”

Judge said, Everything that happened to those boys happened for cause.

But Gammon said, That’s not true, Your Honor. We wouldn’t be back here arguing about it for the tenth time—

Fourth, the judge said.

Fourth time, Your Honor — if we were just lying.

Not just, the judge said. You’re also using up my life and my patience.

I’m sorry Your Honor feels that way. But there’ve been other judges. Not only you, Sir.

Because you wore them into early graves, the judge said and gazed bleakly out the window as if he saw death riding by on a horse out there.

Bulky pinches his toe but that doesn’t wake him and then Milo comes up close and blows softly into his face and Delvin smells his earthy breath and begins the long swim up from a grassy bottom and breaks the surface what seems hours later with his head aching and a dizziness in the quick of his eyes.

At first he doesn’t think he can move. He is too heavy to rise into the world. Milo squeezes his shoulder and the pressure begins to pump life into him.

“That’s fine,” he whispers, “I’m right on it.”

Halfway and leftover, crumpled and spread back out, sheared into pieces weighted with stone, concentrated as a chunk of quartz. He rolls over and falls from the bunk and is caught by the men, the escape artists, around him.

“I’m fit for it,” he whispers.

None but themselves are awake — there are seven of them — or only those like Dumpy Links who lies hours on his back looking up at the board underside of the barracks roof. Or Morcell Jackson who tortures himself with sexual memories of the common-law wife he strangled over in Hattiesburg. Maybe another couple kept awake by fear or rage. Cul Sampson who cries all night. None of these, according to the report, see anything. They know better than to ask Bulky if they can come, though Dumpy is on his feet naked and crouched down, ready to scurry out the door, before Bulky with a look sends him back.

It is a warm, moonless night. The Milky Way lies sloshed-over and frothing. They can see fine. They follow Bulky to the forge and wait while he crawls under the raised floor to get the rope. He comes out covered in dust and grinning.

“Fucking spiders all over me,” he whispers, and he is telling the truth. Milo brushes them off, little black widows that never really sleep. The men are all barefoot. The coiled rope as big as a sheep carcass thrown over his shoulder. “All right,” he whispers, his voice tight with the effort.

They head around the shed to the big sweet gum whose star-stretched shadow almost reaches the fence and crouch at its base. In the dimness a distant guard seems to move in slow motion along the side of the machine shop. Another, the bruiser, Jock Anglin, standing in the door of the guard shack, thrusts his potbelly into the night. He is just close enough for Delvin to make out the quart milk bottle in his left hand, horsemint tea he sips through the damp nights. Even this far away they can smell the citronella from the lit coil inside the shack. The oily, fruity aroma and then the smell of the river breezing up through the woods. They have no boat to travel that way (Delvin’s is long gone) and there are towns both up and downstream, heartless sheriff’s deputies patrolling. The laws promise the citizenry that there will be no trouble from villainous africanos and they mean it, sending men on patrols that take them into darkened alleys and along river branches and into shadowy parks and down the sleeping or insomniac streets. Forty miles south the river becomes tidal, smelling of the Gulf and freedom, but that is a long way and scary in its own right.

Delvin shivers in the almost cool of the almost dark night. Off in the woods raccoons make thin yipping sounds, probably debating over a scrap of food. A widow bird lets loose its bit of vocal material. Crickets saw their instruments. The fence gleams like a silver net, ragged at the top with coils of rusty barbed wire that look like shriveled nests. How you going to work the rope? Delvin asked. The fence is fifteen feet high, eighteen maybe with the barbed wire. They kneel in the dark under the tree, waiting. The sickness sways in Delvin like an ancient fernery, heavy and moist. If he lets himself lean back, and let go, he will be asleep before he hits the ground. He wonders if his father is alive, imagines him getting up from a poker game maybe, out in Abilene or El Paso, a man who can speak Spanish and has a passel of half mexican children. Sometimes he pictures him in a straw boater, dancing on a stage in scuffed white shoes. His anger rises. He crabs forward to Bulky who crouches in the deepest shade by the bench peering out.

“How you plan to do this?” he says. His face is hot and the pain in his shoulders has increased. Milo beside him slaps softly at mosquitoes. Delvin feels a familiar despair. The malaria brings with it an evocation of many kinds of dumb woe and he is caught now in some of the dumbest. “Jesus damn christ,” he whispers.

Milo looks expectantly at him. This is a frolic for him, and Delvin can tell he is experiencing a run of freshened life.

Over at the pens the hogs snuffle and one lets out a short squeal. Bulky has the rope on his shoulder. He measures out half of it and bunches this up with the other half. The grass rope is lightweight, but Bulky has woven so much of it that the bundle is heavy. Delvin asks again what he is going to do but Bulky ignores him.

“Ah, nah,” Delvin says his voice not really audible. He is beginning to feel foolish, not just beginning; but what does it matter, they are already in a prison. He begins to chuckle, low, the sounds more like quiet coughing.

Bulky looks back at him, vexed. He is crouched low.

Milo lets his hand rest on Bulky’s shoulder. Delvin thinks he must have something already worked out with the smaller man. Bulky has moved farther forward, followed by Milo, until the two of them make a single block under the tree. Together they ease to the edge of the big tree’s midnight shade. Delvin thinks he can hear the chatter and clicking of the raccoons. Together Bulky and Milo rise.

Delvin says softly, “Yall don’t,” but Milo is on his feet running behind Bulky who has the rope looped out and his arm back to throw it. At the fence, holding to the ends of the rope, he throws it as a man would throw a big lifesaving ring. The coils unloose like a card trick. The body of the rope catches in the top of the wire among the barbed jumble and hangs. Bulky pulls down hard and the fence bends toward him. He and Milo stand right up against the wire pulling on the free ends of the rope. The big fence bends where the rope catches it. Bulky scampers up the two strands of rope with Milo right behind him.

Their bare toes hook in the wire as they go up.

Delvin drags himself up against the tree’s grooved bark. He knows he can’t make it. He is sick to his stomach.

The men reach the top and Bulky first and then Milo rolls over the rope covering the tangle of barbed wire and drops to the grass on other side. Bulky hits on his tailbone, Milo on his feet and knees; they are both in an instant up and running, Bulky with a limp. They are followed by two others and then two more moving fast after that, men scrambling and wavering like visions in the dim light.