“Tell a story,” said Mr. Schaeffer, who felt nervous and helpless when he could not reach his friend. “Tell about when you went to the race track in Miami.”
“I not ever go to no race track,” said Tico Feo, thereby admitting to his wildest lie, one involving hundreds of dollars and a meeting with Bing Crosby. He did not seem to care. He produced a comb and pulled it sulkily through his hair. A few days before this comb had been the cause of a fierce quarrel. One of the men, Wink, claimed that Tico Feo had stolen the comb from him, to which the accused replied by spitting in his face. They had wrestled around until Mr. Schaeffer and another man got them separated. “Is my comb. You tell him!” Tico Feo had demanded of Mr. Schaeffer. But Mr. Schaeffer with quiet firmness had said no, it was not his friend’s comb—an answer that seemed to defeat all concerned. “Aw,” said Wink, “if he wants it so much, Christ’s sake, let the sonofabitch keep it.” And later, in a puzzled, uncertain voice, Tico Feo had said, “I thought you was my friend.” “I am,” Mr. Schaeffer had thought, though he said nothing.
“I not go to no race track, and what I said about the widow woman, that is not true also.” He puffed up his cigarette to a furious glow and looked at Mr. Schaeffer with a speculating expression. “Say, you have money, Mister?”
“Maybe twenty dollars,” said Mr. Schaeffer hesitantly, afraid of where this was leading.
“Not so good, twenty dollar,” Tico said, but without disappointment. “No important, we work our way. In Mobile I have my friend Frederico. He will put us on a boat. There will not be trouble,” and it was as though he were saying that the weather had turned colder.
There was a squeezing in Mr. Schaeffer’s heart; he could not speak.
“Nobody here can run to catch Tico. He run the fastest.”
“Shotguns run faster,” said Mr. Schaeffer in a voice hardly alive. “I’m too old,” he said, with the knowledge of age churning like nausea inside him.
Tico Feo was not listening. “Then, the world. The world, el mundo, my friend.” Standing up, he quivered like a young horse; everything seemed to draw close to him—the moon, the callings of screech owls. His breath came quickly and turned to smoke in the air. “Should we go to Madrid? Maybe someone teach me to bullfight. You think so, Mister?”
Mr. Schaeffer was not listening either. “I’m too old,” he said. “I’m too damned old.”
For the next several weeks Tico Feo kept after him—the world, el mundo, my friend; and he wanted to hide. He would shut himself in the toilet and hold his head. Nevertheless, he was excited, tantalized. What if it could come true, the race with Tico across the forests and to the sea? And he imagined himself on a boat, he who had never seen the sea, whose whole life had been land-rooted. During this time one of the convicts died, and in the yard you could hear the coffin being made. As each nail thudded into place, Mr. Schaeffer thought, “This is for me, it is mine.”
Tico Feo himself was never in better spirits; he sauntered about with a dancer’s snappy, gigolo grace, and had a joke for everyone. In the sleep house after supper his fingers popped at the guitar like firecrackers. He taught the men to cry olé, and some of them sailed their caps through the air.
When work on the road was finished, Mr. Schaeffer and Tico Feo were moved back into the forests. On Valentine’s Day they ate their lunch under a pine tree. Mr. Schaeffer had ordered a dozen oranges from the town and he peeled them slowly, the skins unraveling in a spiral; the juicier slices he gave to his friend, who was proud of how far he could spit the seeds—a good ten feet.
It was a cold beautiful day, scraps of sunlight blew about them like butterflies, and Mr. Schaeffer, who liked working with the trees, felt dim and happy. Then Tico Feo said, “That one, he no could catch a fly in his mouth.” He meant Armstrong, a hog-jowled man sitting with a shotgun propped between his legs. He was the youngest of the guards and new at the farm.
“I don’t know,” said Mr. Schaeffer. He’d watched Armstrong and noticed that, like many people who are both heavy and vain, the new guard moved with a skimming lightness. “He might could fool you.”
“I fool him, maybe,” said Tico Feo, and spit an orange seed in Armstrong’s direction. The guard scowled at him, then blew a whistle. It was the signal for work to begin.
Sometime during the afternoon the two friends came together again; that is, they were nailing turpentine buckets onto trees that stood next to each other. At a distance below them a shallow bouncing creek branched through the woods. “In water no smell,” said Tico Feo meticulously, as though remembering something he’d heard. “We run in the water; until dark we climb a tree. Yes, Mister?”
Mr. Schaeffer went on hammering, but his hand was shaking, and the hammer came down on his thumb. He looked around dazedly at his friend. His face showed no reflection of pain, and he did not put the thumb in his mouth, the way a man ordinarily might.
Tico Feo’s blue eyes seemed to swell like bubbles, and when in a voice quieter than the wind sounds in the pinetops he said, “Tomorrow,” these eyes were all that Mr. Schaeffer could see.
“Tomorrow, Mister?”
“Tomorrow,” said Mr. Schaeffer.
The first colors of morning fell upon the walls of the sleep house, and Mr. Schaeffer, who had rested little, knew that Tico Feo was awake too. With the weary eyes of a crocodile he observed the movements of his friend in the next cot. Tico Feo was unknotting the scarf that contained his treasures. First he took the pocket mirror. Its jellyfish light trembled on his face. For a while he admired himself with serious delight, and combed and slicked his hair as though he were preparing to step out to a party. Then he hung the rosary about his neck. The cologne he never opened, nor the map. The last thing he did was to tune his guitar. While the other men were dressing, he sat on the edge of his cot and tuned the guitar. It was strange, for he must have known he would never play it again.
Bird shrills followed the men through the smoky morning woods. They walked single file, fifteen men to a group, and a guard bringing up the rear of each line. Mr. Schaeffer was sweating as though it were a hot day, and he could not keep in marching step with his friend, who walked ahead, snapping his fingers and whistling at the birds.
A signal had been set. Tico Feo was to call, “Time out,” and pretend to go behind a tree. But Mr. Schaeffer did not know when it would happen.
The guard named Armstrong blew a whistle, and his men dropped from the line and separated to their various stations. Mr. Schaeffer, though going about his work as best he could, took care always to be in a position where he could keep an eye on both Tico Feo and the guard. Armstrong sat on a stump, a chew of tobacco lopsiding his face, and his gun pointing into the sun. He had the tricky eyes of a cardsharp; you could not really tell where he was looking.
Once another man gave the signal. Although Mr. Schaeffer had known at once that it was not the voice of his friend, panic had pulled at his throat like a rope. As the morning wore on there was such a drumming in his ears he was afraid he would not hear the signal when it came.
The sun climbed to the center of the sky. “He is just a lazy dreamer. It will never happen,” thought Mr. Schaeffer, daring a moment to believe this. But “First we eat,” said Tico Feo with a practical air as they set their dinner pails on the bank above the creek. They ate in silence, almost as though each bore the other a grudge, but at the end of it Mr. Schaeffer felt his friend’s hand close over his own and hold it with a tender pressure.