“Washing machine broke down yesterday.”
“Tomorrow then for sure, uh?” Shelby had an easy, unhurried way of talking. It was known that he never raised his voice or got excited. They said the way you told if he was mad or irritated, he would fool with his mustache; he would keep smoothing it down with two fingers until he decided what had to be done and either did it himself or had somebody else do it. Frank Shelby was serving forty-five years for armed robbery and second-degree murder and had brought three of his men with him to Yuma, each of them found guilty on the same counts and serving thirty years apiece.
Junior was one of them. He banged through the cell door as Shelby was getting into his prison stripes, buttoning his coat. “You got your mean go-to-hell look on this morning,” Shelby said. “Was that you yelling just now?”
“They stuck a nigger in our cell last night while we was asleep.” Junior turned to nail the guard with his look, putting the blame on him.
“It wasn’t me,” R. E. Baylis said. “I just come on duty.”
“You don’t throw his black ass out, we will,” Junior said. By Jesus, this was Worley Lewis, Jr. talking, nineteen-year-old convict going on forty-nine before he would ever see the outside of a penitentiary, but he was one of Frank Shelby’s own and that said he could stand up to a guard and mouth him if he had a good enough reason. “I’m telling you, Soonzy’ll kill the son of a bitch.”
“I’ll find out why—” the guard began.
“It was a mistake,” Shelby said. “Put him in the wrong cell is all.”
“He’s in there now, great big buck. Joe Dean seen him first, woke me up, and I swear I couldn’t believe my eyes.”
Shelby went over to the mirror and picked up a comb from the shelf. “It’s nothing to get upset about,” he said, making a part and slanting the dark hair carefully across his forehead. “Tonight they’ll put him someplace else.”
“Well, if we can,” the guard said.
Shelby was watching him in the mirror: the gray-looking man in the gray guard uniform, R. E. Baylis, who might have been a town constable or a deputy sheriff twenty years ago. “What’s the trouble?” Shelby asked.
“I mean he might have been ordered put there, I don’t know.”
“Ordered by who?”
“Bob Fisher. I say I don’t know for sure.”
Shelby turned from the mirror. “Bob don’t want any trouble.”
“Course not.”
“Then why would he want to put Sambo in with my boys?”
“I say, I don’t know.”
Shelby came toward him now, noticing the activity out in the passageway, the convicts standing around and talking, moving slowly as the guards began to form them into two rows. Shelby put a hand on the guard’s shoulder. “Mr. Baylis,” he said, “don’t worry about it. You don’t want to ask Bob Fisher; we’ll get Sambo out of there ourselves.”
“We don’t want nobody hurt or anything.”
The guard kept looking at him, but Shelby was finished. As far as he was concerned, it was done. He said to Junior, “Give Soonzy the tobacco. You take the soap and stuff.”
“It’s my turn to keep the tally.”
“Don’t give me that look, boy.”
Junior dropped his tone. “I lugged a box yesterday.”
“All right, you handle the tally, Joe Dean carries the soap and stuff.” Shelby paused, as if he was going to say something else, then looked at the guard. “Why don’t you have the colored boy empty my throne bucket?”
“It don’t matter to me,” the guard said.
So he pulled Harold Jackson out of line and told him to get down to No. 14—as Joe Dean, Soonzy, and Junior moved along the double row of convicts in the dim passageway and sold them tobacco and cigarette paper, four kinds of plug and scrap, and little tins of snuff, matches, sugar cubes, stick candy, soap bars, sewing needles and thread, playing cards, red bandana handkerchiefs, shoelaces, and combs. They didn’t take money; it would waste too much time and they only had ten minutes to go down the double line of eighty-seven men. Junior put the purchase amount in the tally book and the customer had one week to pay. If he didn’t pay in a week, he couldn’t buy any more stuff until he did. If he didn’t pay in two weeks Junior and Soonzy would get him in a cell alone and hit him a few times or stomp the man’s ribs and kidneys. If a customer wanted tequila or mescal, or corn whiskey when they had it, he’d come around to No. 14 after supper, before the doors were shut for the night, and pay a dollar a half-pint, put up in medicine bottles from the sick ward that occupied the second floor of the cell block. Shelby only sold alcohol in the morning to three or four of the convicts who needed it first thing or would never get through the day. What most of them wanted was just a day’s worth of tobacco and some paper to roll it in.
When the figure appeared outside the iron lattice Shelby said, “Come on in,” and watched the big colored boy’s reaction as he entered: his gaze shifting twice to take in the double bunk and the boxes and the throne, knowing right away this was a one-man cell.
“I’m Mr. Shelby.”
“I’m Mr. Jackson,” Harold said.
Frank Shelby touched his mustache. He smoothed it to the sides once, then let his hand drop to the edge of his bunk. His eyes remained on the impassive dark face that did not move now and was looking directly at him.
“Where you from, Mr. Jackson?”
“From Leavenworth.”
That was it. Big time con in a desert prison hole. “This place doesn’t look like much after the federal pen, uh?”
“I been to some was worse, some better.”
“What’d you get sent here for?”
“I killed a man was bothering me.”
“You get life?”
“Fifteen years.”
“Then you didn’t kill a man. You must’ve killed another colored boy.” Shelby waited.
Harold Jackson said nothing. He could wait too.
“I’m right, ain’t I?” Shelby said.
“The man said for me to come in here.”
“He told you, but it was me said for you to come in.”
Harold Jackson waited again. “You saying you the man here?”
“Ask any of them out there,” Shelby said. “The guards, anybody.”
“You bring me in to tell me about yourself?”
“No, I brought you in to empty my slop bucket.”
“Who did it before I come?”
“Anybody I told.”
“If you got people willing, you better call one of them.” Harold turned and had a hand on the door when Shelby stopped him.
“Hey, Sambo—”
Harold came around enough to look at him. “How’d you know that was my name?”
“Boy, you are sure starting off wrong,” Shelby said. “I believe you need to be by yourself a while and think it over.”
Harold didn’t have anything to say to that. He turned to the door again and left the man standing there playing with his mustache.
As he fell in at the end of the prisoner line, guard named R. E. Baylis gave him a funny look and came over.
“Where’s Shelby’s bucket at?”
“I guess it’s still in there, captain.”
“How come he didn’t have you take it?”
Harold Jackson stood at attention, looking past the man’s face to the stone wall of the passageway. “You’ll have to ask him about that, captain.”
“Here they come,” Bob Fisher said. “Look over there.”
Mr. Manly moved quickly from the side of the desk to the window to watch the double file of convicts coming this way. He was anxious to see everything this morning, especially the convicts.