Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

They don’t bother to pull him to his feet. They simply fold the door back and fling him down the steps.

The red dog has every joint bone in his body already hurting so he hardly feels it when he hits the ground on his face and chest, though the cut from the glove keeps stinging for the three days he lies in the dark mostly sleeping or re-stuporized by the malaria. Snakes, come out of some phantom place, crawl over him like the times before, but like the times before they don’t bite. They like the warmth of his body. To him they seem clean and pure, as if the ugliness and dirt of the underworld never touches them. There is no grime, no dust, nothing alien on their long bodies that are cool and dry, and the scales under his fingertips, snugly fastened and hard, flexing as the snake stretches out its length, fascinate him.

“We got no reason to spite each other,” he says to them, dark writhers in the stinky dark. They keep the rats away.

The bugs keep up their poking and probing. He rubs dirt on his body to keep the mosquitoes at bay, and when he feels the thin sharp scuttle of a scorpion he stays as still as possible. They never bite him either.

Only the doodlebugs are unimpressed by his efforts or his stature, if that is what it is, as a god among the vermin.

“Chief of the itty-bits,” he says to himself like he is five years old.

The snappish little front-loaded doodlebugs have a tendency to clamp their jaws shut on whatever living things they come in contact with.

“Yi lord,” he cries softly, holding his position so the four-foot swamp rattler lying in the crook of his elbow won’t be disturbed.

He dreams of his mother. She had curly toes with brown nails that had a shine to them. She smelled like he knew heaven smelled. She liked to jump up and down and sing so loud Mr. Culver from next door would send a child over to tell her to stop. She couldn’t read well but she could get anything that was in a picture. She carried photographs around with her of people she didn’t know, given to her by people she didn’t know. My sweets, she called them. She got angry like an animal would get angry, wild and quick and lunging. He never minded being hit by her — not afterwards — he was a child, how could he mind? She looked at him sometimes like she would eat him up with a great relish. He likes that when he thinks about it. In the dreams she runs like the wind, her pale heels flashing.

In his black cabinet under the ground he feels himself jump. His body twitches, not sharply, but in a long slow undulation like a fish moving just under the surface of a dark pond. The snake coiled in his elbow rustles and the stubby rattle purrs. A couple of scorpions nestled against his chest probe with their claws. Centipedes feather their dry legs. “Yi lord,” he says softly. He can sense himself about to fly.

On the fourth night as he lies on his back resting, not so tired, the dog slunk back for now into its cave, he watches as the lid of his cabinet begins slowly to creak upward. He thinks for a second it is the sky itself tipping away and almost hollers out. But it is only Bill Francis, a convict machinist from Carmichael, Louisiana, raising the door. The door was locked with a nail stuck through the hasp.

Delvin hears the whistle of breath. “My God, what a stink,” a whispering voice says.

Moonlight shines into the hole. The lid drops and is caught. “Sweet Jesus,” another voice says.

“Come out,” the first voice says, like King Darius calling to Daniel, calling to the subterranean one.

Delvin tries his voice. It still works though it croaks and rasps. “Let me say my farewells,” he whispers.

“Yall step back,” Bill Francis says.

Delvin detaches himself carefully from his companions of the pit. It takes a short while but he moves steadily until he can get to his knees and then to his feet. It is difficult but not impossible to climb the eight steps. The air rich with cleaned-off life. The bosky smell of the trees. The undergirded reek of the fields. A freshly birthed world. It makes him modest.

“Come on, boon,” Bill says, taking him by the wrist. The man gives him a long look. “We thought you might be swole up and bit by now, but you got a special way.”

What are they doing here, these convicts? They are all convicts. It is too complicated to ask. They’re raising me, he thinks. Gon do some running? I expect so.

He follows as best he can as they make their way behind the work sheds and into the old barn where the mules were formerly kept and to the back where the old privies are. Bill and his crew have been working on a tunnel that has its entrance in the dried shit pit, and they are now finished with it. He has told Delvin that if he is still on the premises he will have a place in the string of folks going out. They have a rope ladder under the second seat — it is an eight-holer — that lets down through the old crumbled, desiccated shit. The tunnel runs horizontally forty feet to the other side of the back wire. It comes up behind the new barns and is only a few steps from the woods.

There are twelve of them and in a matter of six or seven minutes they are all out and running — through wild fennel and rabbit tobacco and bristleweed and goose grass and oxalis and copperleaf and paspalum and pigweed and poke — into the rustling cotton field.

It makes Delvin feel foolish. Just — what was it? — four nights, or weeks, maybe it was weeks, ago, he was trying to make up his mind to climb Bulky’s rope. He misses Milo. He tries to ask if anybody’s heard about Bulky, but Macky Bird, a light timer, shakes him off. He hopes Milo is out there somewhere waiting. It is another little dream. He smells of modified shit and dirt and snake musk and of sweat and animal excretions and of his own piss that spilled back on him when he peed. Webfoot Bilkins is the only one of the escapees besides Bill that he knows well. Most are boys from the machine shop and the planing mill.

They run in a straggle line to the woods and when they reach the trees they slip gradually to a scattering. They are headed to the river which is the way escapees know not to go. The only way out is through the swamp — so he thought. But maybe they have something planned, something fixed. The guards haven’t come after them, not yet anyway. Maybe Bill Francis paid in some way for a clear path and maybe the way downriver is open. Maybe a miracle has occurred. The moon shines through leafy trees spattering white on the ground. A large bird lifts from a branch and flaps ponderously away. It looks like no bird Delvin has ever seem, larger than a hawk or an owl. Maybe an eagle, he thinks. He is barefooted but nothing he steps on bothers him.

After a while he comes to the riverbank. Some of the men are just putting out in a little snub-nose boat. When he tries to get in, they push him away.

“We got too many already,” a voice says, he thinks it comes from Artus Manigalt, one of the mill workers, a man from up north somewhere.

A large hand shoves him in the chest and he slips and falls into the water. The water feels good but he is suddenly — oddly — afraid of snakes. He almost laughs at this but the fear is real like a knife rasping on his skin. He ducks his head under to clear his thinking and to get a start on some cleanness and maybe to make himself all right about being scared; when he comes up the boat is sliding out into the current. One of the men has a paddle and he is trying to get one of the others to use it. The other man turns his face away and the first man hits him in the back of the head. Others grab him and there is a brief mute struggle and then somebody says, “You cotched him,” and then there is quiet and then comes the soft, heavy splashing of a body let go of, and then paddling begins. Delvin’s hand half rises, issuing a farewell, and suddenly it is like it was all those years before when the white boy cried out in the woods and he thought they had killed someone, how suddenly alone he’d felt. That was what they always wanted you to feel. And here it is with them now, with him — and he twirls around, reaching for something, a handhold he forgot he needed, and he feels a slick root and for a second it is the body of a snake and he prays as one would pray to an estranged brother on the road of darkness in the middle of the night — yes, he says, yes, it’s all right, and he looks down into the water that purls softly against his legs, looks at moving blackness, and then he begins to move.