The boy came back with the clothes and pillowcase and the old man said for me to hold out the pillowcase and for the boy to put the clothes in it and we both did as he said.
“Now you get,” the old man said. “Don’t let me see either you round here no more.” He had a wide pale scar around the forward wrist and then I saw he had one on the other wrist too. Manacle scars.
“Listen, Uncle,” I said, “I’m grateful to you for—”
“I ain’t you uncle and don’t be talking stuff. Just get.”
He pointed me out the door. Chano was already in front. A large colored boy of maybe sixteen was holding a double-barrel on him.
“See them to the river,” the old man said.
The darkness had given way to a gray dawnlight and the sun would soon be in the trees. The boy stayed well behind us as we made our way back through the woods.
When we saw the levee up ahead, we stopped to change clothes. The old man’s khaki pants were stained with blue paint and fit me fairly well around the waist although the leg bottoms didn’t cover my ankles, and the shirt, a faded green thing covered with big yellow parrots, was only a little snug through the shoulders. There were two quarters in my skunk pants and I put them in my new pocket. Chano had to roll the bottoms of his black pants and the sleeves of his purple shirt. He looked like a walking bruise.
We put what was left of our prison stripes in the clothes sack and I handed it to the boy. “I know your granddaddy was up the river too,” I said. “I seen his chain scars. What’d he do?”
He stared at me hard for a moment. “His family hungry so he stole a chicken. They give him thirty damn years. Take thirty years of a man’s life for stealing a chicken. They bigger thieves than anybody.”
“He ran this levee, didn’t he?” I said. “Long time ago.”
He shifted his eyes from one to the other of us. “You all go on and get.”
“He’s one of them who did it,” I said.
You could see he wanted to keep his mouth shut but wanted to brag on it too. There was no hiding the pride in his face. He settled for saying, “You never know.”
I couldn’t hold back a laugh. “You damn sure don’t!”
“Go on now,” he said. He backed up into the bushes and then vanished as neatly as a stage trick.
We gobbled down the ham and bread in huge ravenous bites we almost choked on, then scaled back up to the levee crest and got on the move again.
I felt grand to be shed of those convict stripes—like I was somebody real again. I waved at a passing barge and the pilot waved back. I exchanged nods with a colored family fishing for bream from the bank with canepoles. I sang for a while as we went along—“Way Down Yonder in New Orleans,” “Ain’t We Got Fun,” “Breezin’Along with the Breeze”—mixing in a few oldies for the hell of it: “A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight” and “The Man That Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo” and “Hello Ma Baby.” Chano smiled and bobbed his head in time to the tunes.
The sun was above the trees when we heard the ringings and whistlings and clankings of trains and caught the smells of cinders and lubricating oil. A minute later we came in view of the Baton Rouge railyard. We figured to get some sleep in the nearby woods before jumping a freight for New Orleans, but almost as soon as I closed my eyes I was taken with a sharp pain in my gut, and I barely managed to keep from shitting my pants before getting them down and squatting behind a bush.
I had to drop my pants several times over the next two hours. I didn’t know what to blame, the water or the food, but Chano didn’t have any problem. I’d heard that a Mexican stomach could stand anything and now I believed it. Naturally I didn’t get much rest between attacks, and when they finally eased off I was too wrung out to do anything but sleep.
At some point I dreamt I was back in Camp M and hearing the morning bell, and I started awake to the clanging of a train and remembered where I was. I laughed out loud and Chano rolled over and grinned at me. He was probably feeling as goofy as I was to be free. It occurred to me that I didn’t know what he had in mind to do.
“Know somebody in New Orleans?” I said.
He shook his head, then jutted his chin at me in question.
“Yeah. It’s where I’m headed. Where you going?”
He jutted his chin to westward.
“Texas?”
He shrugged.
“Mexico?”
He shrugged again. I didn’t blame him. Never tell anybody anything you didn’t have to. In his case it was easy to keep from talking too much.
“Good plan,” I said, and he smiled.
Right after sundown we cut through the woods and came out by the tracks just past the railyard. I was still feeling a little peaked but at least my gut had settled. We didn’t have long to wait before the next southbound started chugging out, slowly gaining speed, and we ran to it and swung up into an empty slat-sided cattle car. I hugged myself against the chill wind as we sat with our legs dangling out and watched the darkening countryside go rolling by.
Not an hour later we saw the lights of New Orleans up ahead and the train began to slow down. About fifty yards before it entered the railyard we jumped off and tumbled down the rocky bed grade and I generally banged up whatever part of me hadn’t been sore already.
We brushed ourselves off as the rest of the cars went clacking by. If there was something to be said I was the one who’d have to say it, but I couldn’t come up with anything. He flapped a hand at the west side of the railyard and I nodded and hooked my thumb toward town. He looked at the ground around him like somebody checking to see if he’d dropped something.
“Hey,” I said. I dug in my pocket and took out the two quarters and held one out to him. “In case you feel like buying yourself a car.”
He looked at the two-bit piece a moment, then smiled and took it and put it in his pocket. Then raised a hand in farewell and turned and quickly crossed over the tracks and into the deeper shadows and was gone.
The French Quarter was as loud as usual this Saturday night. Klaxons blatting on the streets, boat horns blaring on the river. People laughing, shouting their conversations. Jazz pulsing from the clubs and all along the streets in a jangling tangle of melodies. I stood on a corner and took it all in, this swell free world I’d been away from for more than nine months.
The sidewalks were packed with carousers, with couples and sailors and here and there some college kids, with tourists and conventioneers. Everybody happy and most of them drunk and trying hard to stay that way, passing their flasks around, Prohibition be damned. Hustlers of every stripe working the streets. Short-conners and whores, monte players, hot-stuff sellers. The rubes getting skinned by pickpockets even as they swayed to the curbside fiddlers and accordionists and popped their fingers along with the tapdancing colored boys.
Women everywhere—sweet Christ, the women. Laughing and teasing with their beaus. Doing little dance moves as they went down the street, flashing their legs under short flouncy skirts and flapper dresses. Showing off all that skin in numbers with no back to them and necklines down to there. I was already light in the head from the aromas wafting out of the restaurants, and the nearness of so much finelooking stuff after I’d been so long without it made me even dizzier. It didn’t help that I was feeling wrung out and a fever was creeping up on me. The evening was pleasantly cool but I was soaked with sweat.
Down the street I spotted some guys I recognized—a pair of second-story men and a fence named Pogo George, who had a store on Canal. They were arguing on the sidewalk in front of the Paris Theatre. I kept my face averted as I went by.