“Washing herself,” Mr. Manly said. “That’s all I could see she was doing.”
Bob Fisher nodded. “I hoped that was all.” He stooped to pick up the brick and paused with it at the opening. “You want to look at Tacha?”
“I think I’ve seen enough to know what they’re doing,” Mr. Manly answered. He walked out to the open yard and waited there for Fisher to replace the brick and follow him out.
“What I want to know is what you’re doing spying on them.”
“Spying? I was checking, like I told you, to see they’re not doing anything wrong.”
“What do you mean, wrong?”
“Anything that ain’t natural, then. You know what I mean. Two women together without any clothes on—I want to know there ain’t any funny business going on.”
“She was washing herself.”
“Yes, sir,” Fisher said, “that’s all I saw too. The thing is, you never know when they might start.”
Mr. Manly could still see her, the bar of yellow soap moving over her body. “I’ve never heard of anything like that. They’re both women.”
“I’ll agree with you there,” Fisher said, “but in a prison you never know. We got men with no women, and women with no men, and I’ll tell you we got to keep our eyes open if we don’t want any funny business.”
“I’ve heard tell of men,” Mr. Manly said—the sudsy water running down between her breasts—“but women. What do you suppose they do?”
“I hope I never find out,” Fisher said. He meant it, too.
He got Mr. Manly out of there before the women came out and saw them standing in the yard; he walked Mr. Manly over to the main gate and asked him if he had read the report on the escape attempt.
Mr. Manly said yes, and that he thought it showed the guards to be very alert. He wondered, though, wasn’t this Raymond San Carlos the same one the Negro has assaulted in the mess hall? The very same, Fisher said. Then wasn’t it dangerous to put them both in the same cell? Dangerous to who? Fisher asked. To them, they were liable to start fighting again and try and kill each other. They already tried, Fisher said. They were chained to the floor now out of each other’s reach. Mr. Manly asked how long they would leave them like that, and Fisher said until they made up their minds to be good and kind to each other. Mr. Manly said that could be never if there was a grudge between them. Fisher said it didn’t matter to him, it was up to the two boys.
Fisher waited in the lighted area as Mr. Manly passed through the double gates of the sally port and walked off toward the superintendent’s cottage. He was pretty sure Mr. Manly had believed his story, that he was checking on the women to see they didn’t do queer things. He’d also bet a dollar the little Sunday school teacher wouldn’t make him chink the hole up either.
That was dumb, taking all his books over to the office. Mr. Manly sat in the living room of the superintendent’s cottage, in his robe and slippers, and didn’t have a thing to read. His Bible was on the night table in the bedroom. Yes, and he’d made a note to look up what St. Paul said about being in prison, something about all he’d gone through and how one had to have perseverance. He saw Norma Davis rubbing the bar of soap over her body, sliding it up and down. No—what he wished he’d brought were the file records of the two boys in the snake den. He would have to talk to them when they got out. Say to them, look, boys, fighting never solved anything. Now forget your differences and shake hands.
They were different all right, a Negro and an Indian. But they were alike too.
Both here for murder. Both born the same year. Both had served time. Both had sketchy backgrounds and no living relatives anybody knew of. The deserter and the deserted.
A man raised on a share-crop farm in Georgia; joined the army and, four months later, was listed as a deserter. Court-martialed, sentenced to hard labor.
A man raised on the San Carlos Indian reservation; deserted by his Apache renegade father before he was born. Father believed killed in Mexico; mother’s whereabouts unknown.
Both of them in the snake den now, a little room carved out of stone, with no light and hardly any air. Waiting to get at each other.
Maybe the sooner he talked to them the better. Bring them both out in ten days—no matter what Bob Fisher thought about it. Ten days was long enough. They needed spiritual guidance as much as they needed corporal punishment. He’d tell Fisher in the morning.
As soon as Mr. Manly got into bed he started thinking of Norma Davis again, seeing her clearly with the bare light right over her and her body gleaming with soap and water. He saw her in the room then, her body still slippery-looking in the moonlight that was coming through the window. Before she could reach the bed, Mr. Manly switched on the night-table lamp, grabbed hold of his Bible and leafed as fast as he could to St. Paul’s letters to the Corinthians.
For nine days neither of them spoke. They sat facing each other, their leg-irons chained to ring bolts that were cemented in the floor. Harold would stand and stretch and lean against the wall and Raymond would watch him. Later on Raymond would get up for a while and Harold would watch. They never stood up at the same time or looked at each other directly. There was silence except for the sound of the chains when they moved. Each pretended to be alone in the darkness of the cell, though each was intently aware of the other’s presence. Every day about noon a guard brought them hardtack and water. The guard was not allowed to speak to them, and neither of them spoke to him. It was funny their not talking, he told the other guards. It was spooky. He had never known a man in the snake den not to talk a storm when he was brought his bread and water. But these two sat there as if they had been hypnotized.
The morning of the tenth day Raymond said, “They going to let you out today.” The sound of his voice was strange, like someone else’s voice. He wanted to clear his throat, but wouldn’t let himself do it with the other man watching him. He said, “Don’t go anywhere, because when I get out of here I’m going to come looking for you.”
“I be waiting,” was all Harold Jackson said.
At midday the sun appeared in the air shaft and gradually faded. Nobody brought their bread and water. They had been hungry for the first few days but were not hungry now. They waited and it was early evening when the guard came in with a hammer and pounded the ring bolts open, both of them, Raymond watching him curiously but not saying anything. Another guard came in with shovels and a bucket of sand and told them to clean up their mess.
Bob Fisher was waiting outside. He watched them come out blinking and squinting in the daylight, both of them filthy stinking dirty, the Negro with a growth of beard and the Indian’s bony face hollowed and sick-looking. He watched their gaze creep over the yard toward the main cellblock where the convicts were standing around and sitting by the wall, most of them looking this way.
“You can be good children,” Fisher said, “or you can go back in there, I don’t care which. I catch you fighting, twenty days. I catch you looking mean, twenty days.” He looked directly at Raymond. “I catch you swimming again, thirty days and leg-irons a year. You understand me?”