“You can keep your underwear and your shoes,” the hack said. “Throw your other clothes and sheets in a pile outside. Roll your mattress and don’t leave nothing behind. I’ll pick you up in the rec room when you get finished and take you over to Possessions.”
I pulled off my work uniform, put on my clack sandals, and walked down the corridor to the showers. I let the cold water boil over my head and face until my breath came short in my chest. One man on the cleaning detail had stopped mopping and was watching me through the doorless opening in the shower partition. He was a queen in Magnolia section who was finishing his second jolt for child molesting. His buttocks swelled out like a pear, and he always kept his shirt buttoned at the throat and never bathed.
“Take off, Morton. No show today, babe,” I said.
“I don’t want nothing off you,” he said, and rinsed his mop in the bucket, his soft stomach hanging over his belt.
“You guys watch the goddamn floor,” I heard somebody yell down the corridor; then came the noise of the first crews who had been knocked off from the fields. “We done cleaned it twice already. You take your goddamn shoes off.”
When I got back to my cell, the corridor was striped with the dry imprints of bare feet, and my cell partner, W. J. Posey, was sitting shirtless on his bunk, with his knees drawn up before him, smoking the wet end of a hand-rolled cigarette between his lips without removing it. His balding pate was sunburned and flecked with pieces of dead skin, and the knobs of his elbows and shoulders and the areas of bone in his chest were the color of a dead carp. He was working on five to fifteen, a three-time loser for hanging paper, and in the year we had celled together, warrants had been filed for him in three other states. His withered arms were covered with faded tattoos done in Lewisburg and Parchman, and his thick, nicotine-stained fingernails looked like claws.
I put on the shiny suit and the off-color brown shoes that had been brought to my cell the night before by the count man. I threw my sheets, blanket, and the rest of my prison uniforms and denims into the corridor, and put my underwear, work boots, and three new shirts and pairs of socks into the box the suit had come in.
“You want the purses and wallets, W. J.?”
“Yeah, give them to me. I can trade them to that punk in Ash for a couple of decks.”
“Take care, babe. Don’t hang out anymore on the wash line.”
“Yeah. Write me a card when you make your first million,” he said. He dropped his cigarette stub into the butt can by his bunk and picked at his toenails.
I walked down the corridor past the row of open cells and the men with bath towels around their waists clacking in their wood sandals toward the roar of water and shouting in the shower stalls. The wind through the breezeway was cool against my face and wet collar. I waited at the second lock for the hack to open up.
“You know the rec don’t open till twelve-thirty, Paret,” he said.
“Mr. Benson said he wanted me to wait for him there, boss.”
“Well, you ain’t supposed to be there.”
“Let him through, Frank,” the other hack on the lock said.
The gate slid back with its quiet rush of hydraulically released pressure. I waited in the dead space between the first and second gates for the hack to pull the combination of levers again.
Our recreation room had several folding card tables, a canteen where you could buy Koolade and soda pop, and a small library filled with worthless books donated by the Salvation Army. Anything that was either vaguely pornographic or violent or, especially, racial was somehow eaten up in a censoring process that must have begun at the time of donation and ended at the front gate. But anyway, it was thorough, because there wasn’t a plot in one of those books that wouldn’t bore the most moronic among us. I sat at a card table that was covered with burns like melted plastic insects, and rolled a cigarette from the last tobacco in my package of Virginia Extra.
I heard the lock hiss, then the noise of the first men walking through the dead space, their voices echoing briefly off the stone walls, into the recreation room, where they would wait until the dining hall opened at 12:45. They all wore clean denims and pinstripes, their hair wet and slicked back over the ears, combs clipped in their shirt pockets, pomade and aftershave lotion glistening in their pompadours and sideburns, and names like Popcorn, Snowbird, and Git-It-and-Go were Cloroxed into their trousers.
“Hey, Willard, get out them guitars,” one man said.
Each Saturday afternoon our country band played on the green stretch of lawn between the first two buildings in the Block. We had one steel guitar and pickups and amplifiers for the two flat-tops, and our fiddle and mandolin players held their instruments right into the microphone so we could reach out with “Orange Blossom Special” and “Please Release Me, Darling” all the way across the cane field to Camp I.
Willard, the trusty, opened the closet where the instruments were kept and handed out the two Kay flat-tops. The one I used had a capo fashioned from a pencil and a piece of inner tube on the second fret of the neck. West Finley, whose brother named East was also in Angola, handed the guitar to me in his clumsy fashion, with his huge hand squeezed tight on the strings and his bad teeth grinning around his cigar.
“I mean you look slick, cotton. Them free-people clothes is fierce. I thought you was a damn movie star,” he said.
“You’ve been sniffing gas tanks again, West.”
“No shit, man. Threads like that is going to cause some kind of female riot in the bus depot.” His lean hillbilly face was full of good humor, his mouth wide and brown with tobacco juice. “Break down my song for me, babe, because I ain’t going to be able to hear it played right for a long time.”
The others formed around us, grinning, their arms folded in front of them, with cigarettes held up casually to their mouths, waiting for West to enter the best part of his performance.
“No pick,” I said.
“Shit,” and he said it with that singular two-syllable pronunciation of the Mississippi delta: shee-it. He took an empty match cover from the ashtray, folded it in half, and handed it to me between his callused fingers. “Now let’s get it on, Iry. The boss man is going to be ladling them peas in a minute.”
Our band’s rhythm-guitar man sat across from me with the other big Kay propped on his folded thigh. I clicked the match cover once across the open strings, sharped the B and A, and turned the face of the guitar toward him so he could see my E-chord configuration on the neck. The song was an old Jimmie Rodgers piece that began, “If you don’t like my peaches, don’t shake my tree,” and then the lyrics became worse. But West was beautiful. He bopped on the waxed floor, the shined points of the alligator shoes his girl had sent him flashing above his own scuff marks, bumping and grinding as he went into the dirty boogie, his oiled, ducktailed hair collapsed in a black web over his face. One man took a small harmonica from his shirt pocket and blew a deep, train-moaning bass behind us, and West caught it and pumped the air with his loins, his arms stretched out beside him, while the other men whistled and clapped and grabbed themselves. Through a crack of shoulders I saw the young hack come through the lock into the recreation room, and I slid back down the neck to E again and bled it off quietly on the treble strings.
West’s face was perspiring and his eyes were bright. He took his cigar from the table’s edge, and his breath came short when he spoke. “When you get up to Nashville with all them sweet things on the Opry, tell them the big bopper from Bogalusa is primed and ready and will be taking requests in six more months. Tell them I quit charging, too. I done give up my selfish ways about sharing my body. They ain’t got to be Marilyn Monroe either. I ain’t a snob, cotton.”