Everyone laughed, their mouths full of empty spaces and gold and lead fillings. Then the outside bell rang, and the third lock, which controlled the next section of the breezeway, hissed back in a suck of air.
“Got to scarf it down and put some protein in the pecker. Do something good for me tonight,” West said, and popped two fingers off his thumbnail into my arm as he walked past me toward the lock with the other men.
“Just leave the guitar on the table,” the hack said. “The state car is leaving out at one.”
I picked up my box and followed him back through the lock. He held up my discharge slip to the hack by the levers, which was unnecessary, since the lock was already opened and all the old bosses along the breezeway knew that I was going out that day anyway. But as I watched him walk in front of me, with his starched khaki shirt shaping and reshaping across his back like iron, I realized that he would be holding up papers of denial or permission with a whitened click of knuckles for the rest of his life.
“You better move unless you want to walk down to the highway,” he said halfway over his shoulder.
We went to Possessions, and he waited while the trusty looked through the rows of alphabetized manila envelopes that were stuffed into the tiers of shelves and hung with stringed, circular tags. The trusty flipped his stiffened fingers down a row in a rattling of glue and paper and shook out one flattened envelope and brushed the dust off the top with his palm. The hack bit on a matchstick and looked at his watch.
“Check it and sign for it,” the trusty said. “You got forty-three dollars coming in discharge money and fifty-eight in your commissary fund. I can’t give you nothing but fives and ones and some silver. They done cleaned me out this morning.”
“That’s all right,” I said.
I opened the manila envelope and took out the things that I had entered the Calcasieu Parish jail with two years and three months before, after I had killed a man: a blunted minié ball perforated with a hole that I had used as a weight when I fished as a boy on Bayou Teche and Spanish Lake; the gold vest watch my father gave me when I graduated from high school; a Swiss army knife with a can opener, screwdriver, and a saw that could build a cabin; one die from a pair of dice, the only thing I brought back from thirteen months in Korea because they had separated me from sixteen others who went up Heartbreak Ridge and stayed there in that pile of wasted ash; and a billfold with all the celluloid-enclosed pieces of identification that are so important to us, now outdated and worthless in their cracked description of who the bearer was.
We walked out of the Block into the brilliant sunlight, and the hack drove us down the front road past the small clapboard cottages where the free people lived. The wash on the lines straightened and dropped in the wind, the tiny gardens were planted with chrysanthemums and rosebushes, and housewives in print dresses appeared quickly in open screen doors to shout at the children in the yard. It could have been a scene surgically removed from a working-class neighborhood, except for the presence of the Negro trusties watering the grass or weeding a vegetable patch.
Then there was the front gate, with three strands of barbed wire leaned inward on top and the wooden gun tower to one side. The oiled road on the other side bounced and shimmered with heat waves and stretched off through the green border of trees and second growth on the edge of the ditches. I got out of the car with my cardboard box under my arm.
“Paret coming out,” the hack said.
I knew he was going to try to shake hands while the gate was being swung back over the cattle guard, and I kept my attention fixed on the road and used my free hand to look for a cigarette in my shirt pocket. The hack shook a Camel loose from his pack and held it up to me.
“Well, thanks, Mr. Benson,” I said.
“Keep the rest of them. I got some more in the cage.” So I had to shake hands with him after all. He got back in the truck with a pinch of light in his iron face, his role a little more secure.
I walked across the cattle guard and heard the gate rattle and lock behind me. Four other men with cardboard boxes and suits similar to mine (we had a choice of three styles upon discharge) sat on the wooden waiting bench by the fence. The shade of the gun tower broke in an oblong square across their bodies.
“The state car ought to be up in a minute, Paret,” the gateman said. He was one of the old ones, left over from the thirties, and he had probably killed and buried more men in the levee than any other hack on the farm. Now he was almost seventy, covered with the kind of obscene white fat that comes from years of drinking corn whiskey, and there wasn’t a town in Louisiana or Mississippi where he could retire in safety from the convicts whom he had put on anthills or run double-time with wheelbarrows up and down the levee until they collapsed on their hands and knees.
“I think I need to hoof this one,” I said.
“It’s twenty miles out to that highway, boy.” And he didn’t say it unkindly. The word came to him as automatically as anything else that he raised up out of thirty-five years of doing almost the same type of time that the rest of us pulled.
“I know that, boss. But I got to stretch it out.” I didn’t turn to look at him, but I knew that his slate-green eyes were staring into my back with a mixture of resentment and impotence at seeing a piece of personal property moved across a line into a world in which he himself could not function.
The dead water in the ditches along the road was covered with lily pads, and dragonflies flicked with their purple wings above the newly opened flowers. The leaves on the trees were coated with dust, and the red-black soil at the roots was lined with the tracings of night crawlers. I was perspiring under my coat, and I pulled it off with one hand and stuck it through the twine wrapped around the cardboard box. A mile up the road I heard the tires of the state car whining hotly down the oiled surface. They slowed in second gear alongside me, the hack bent forward into the steering wheel so he could speak past his passenger.
“That’s a hot son of a bitch to walk, and you probably ain’t going to hitch no ride on the highway.”
I smiled and shook the palm of my hand at them, and after the car had accelerated away in a bright-yellow cloud of gravel and dust and oil, someone shot the finger out the back window.
I threw the cardboard box into the ditch and walked three more miles to a beer tavern and cafe set off by the side of the road in a circle of gravel. The faded wooden sides of the building were covered with rotted election posters (DON’T GET CAUGHT SHORT — VOTE LONG — SPEEDY O. LONG, A SLAVE TO NO MAN AND A SERVANT TO ALL), flaking and rusted tin signs advertising Hadacol and Carry-On, and stickers for Brown Mule, Calumet baking powder, and Doctor Tichner’s Painless Laxative. A huge live-oak tree, covered with Spanish moss, grew by one side of the building, and its roots had swelled under the wall with enough strength to bend the window jamb.
It was dark and cool inside, with a wooden ceiling fan turning overhead, and the bar shined with the dull light of the neon beer signs and the emptiness of the room. It felt strange to pull out the chair from the bar and scrape it into position and sit down. The bartender was in the kitchen talking with a Negro girl. His arms were covered with tattoos and a heavy growth of white hair. He wore a folded butcher’s apron tied around his great girth of stomach.
“Hey, podna, how about a Jax down here?” I said.
He leaned into the service window, his heavy arms folded in front of him and his head extended under the enclosure.
“Just get it out of the cooler, mister, and I’ll be with you in a minute.”