Lovers, sec-fiends, bugs in flight, the tricked, the maimed, the tortured, the terribly fallen and the sly. All those who are wired to nobody, and for whom nobody prays.
That the public defender defends by saying, ‘Your Honor, this man has had his chance.’
Country Kline rolled a cigarette one-handed, drew the string of the sack with his teeth and lit it with a flint device cupped carefully in his palm, as though fearing Dove might divine its magic and patent it; it looked like Dove would see freedom first. ‘My glin-wheel,’ he explained cryptically, and handed Dove a cigarette already lit.
Dove took a deep drag. ‘I made a small errow myself,’ he admitted, ‘I figured it would work better the second time than the first, being as I’d already a bit of practice at it.’
And he waited for Country to ask ‘Practice at what?’
‘Practice at what?’ Country at last obliged him.
‘Practice at playin’ dead. It seemed to me that was the coward’s way out so I took it. I held my breath ’n stared straight up ’n never moved a muscle. All I fergot was not to talk. So whenever they didn’t have anything else to do that week, they’d put me on a stretcher n’ carry me in the police wagon over to another station ’n set me down ’n tell the other policemen, “He’s dead, you don’t have to feed him,”’n then they’d leave me there. When it came meal time all the other guys got bologna except me. “Lay down, ghost,” they’d tell me. I wasn’t suppose to get no bologna because I was dead, you see.’
‘I see,’ Country assured him, ‘go on.’
‘Well, all the other criminals caught on and they’d holler, “How you feeling today, ghost?” “I feel like hell is a mile away ’n the fences is all down” is what I’d tell them. Because I felt like hell was a mile away ’n all the fences was down.’
‘How long did that keep on?’
‘Why them fellows acted like they now thought nothing could kill me. I was in five stations last week. Finally I told them if I didn’t get something to eat pretty soon I really would die ’n then the joke would be on them. So they finally give me something but I still don’t know what it was. I guess the joke begun to wear. You know another funny thing – not eating like that loosed up every one of my choppers but except the very one I could best have spore?’
Dove waggled that chopper that would never come quite all the way loose.
On the wall above his blanket someone who’d checked out long ago had scratched: Poor John Mendoza. He went East. He went West. He went the way he thought was best. He loved his girl but nobody believed him.
In the weighted hours of the blue-moon night Dove thought about Poor John Mendoza and wished that his girl had believed in him.
He learned how to get an extra drag out of a cigarette by wetting his lips when the snipe was too small to be held in the fingers. He learned how to split a match four ways. And every night, before turning in, pursued lice across his blanket with burning matches. When a louse was caught he crackled once, and died.
One morning Make-Believe Murphy suddenly appointed himself meal distributor. Although all the tins were practically identical, he began a pretense that each had been designated for a particular prisoner. For some reason everyone submitted to this nonsense, while Murphy identified each with an eye for minute differences in the way the cornbread had been sliced.
‘Yo tengo hambre, Campañero,’ Gonzales complained when he felt himself shorted.
‘We’re all hungry, buddy,’ Murphy assured him but keeping his left palm closed, ‘nobody’s getting shorted.’
‘Then you can open your hand,’ Dove told Murphy, ‘so we can see for sure nobody is getting shorted.’
‘I don’t have to open my hand to nobody,’ Murphy clenched his fingers so fast cornbread crumbs pinched out of his fist, ‘Or do you figure you’re big enough to make me?’
‘I don’t have to make you,’ Dove conceded, ‘if you don’t it’ll just go to prove you are shortin’ the man.’
Murphy opened his fist slowly, as though hoping enough of the bread had pinched out to make it look like a fair distribution after all. But at least half of Vicente’s slice lay there pleading guilty to everything. Dove picked it out of his palm and tossed it to Vicente.
Murphy reddened but said nothing more.
‘I wouldn’t of done that if I were you,’ Country warned Dove, ‘that was the Mexican’s quarrel, not yours. What did I tell you about shaking another man’s jolt?’
‘We’re all shaking somebody else’s jolt anyhow, Country,’ Dove decided.
Kline was the only one of the prisoners who didn’t care whether he got cornbread or not. ‘Eat mine,’ he sometimes told Dove, extending his plate, and while Dove ate would wail a cheerful dirge—
Great itching lumps formed below Dove’s skin, and traveled so fast he could see them move. If he touched the cluster above his knee and then touched his ankle, in a minute his ankle was swollen and itching too. He waited till the turnkey passed, then threw open his shirt – ‘These whelps give me a terrible eetch, mister.’ The turnkey saw the nauseous lumps and returned with a spray-gun filled with insecticide.
‘All you got is the nettle hives,’ he told Dove, ‘this’ll burn your hide but it’ll cure it.’
Dove declined. ‘I’d ruther have my hide scrofuloed than scalded,’ he voted to stick with the nettle hives.
That night he saw himself lying asleep in a bed two stories over a murmurous street. Lights like fireflies went on and off, a piano played in an unseen court. And under the music as he slept and saw himself asleep, Dove heard a metal whirring as of tiny wheels on stone.
And sidewise, hand over stump and stump over hand, heard the hard ascent of the legless man up a gaslit stair begin.
Coming on as he’d been coming for years, by bar light, by star light, by mist light by stair, breathing heavier with each step, yet sure in his final hour to claim his own at last. There was time, just barely time, to lock the door against him. The key was in the lock but he lacked the strength to give it a full turn. Dove saw the rubber point of the short-hand crutch, that the cripple used to help him up stairwells, come through the wood of the door like the door was dust and wakened wishing he had never dreamt.
Bad air and boils – yet sometimes there came a day so blue it caught at the heart like a sense of loss – all these days too blue, all lost. Rainy days were melancholy but sunny ones were worse. When it was raining out there he could sink into a sullen half-dream where nothing could touch him. But blue days recalled his every folly and he’d think, ‘So much time gone! So little time left! Scarcely time left for a boy to rise!’
Murphy sat in his own cell, bent above a small digest called Guidance, which revealed, for one dollar a year, how to grow rich through prayer.
‘It don’t do no good for a man to rise these days, son,’ was Country Kline’s curious philosophy, ‘for that can’t be done any longer except on the necks of others. And when you make it that way, all the satisfaction is taken out of it. Son, I hope you don’t mind my saying so, but you got pimp wrote large all over you – but that’s the sorriest way of all to rise, and the reason I’ll tell you why – if God ever made anything better than a hustling girl He’s kept it to Himself. There’s no trick in not going down the drain if you don’t live in the sink. But you take a woman who makes her living where the water is sucking the weaker bugs down and she don’t go down, she’s twice the woman that one who never had to fight for her soul is.’