“You want to see the snake den,” Bob Fisher said. “Come on, we got somebody else wants to see it too.”
After breakfast, as the work details were forming in the yard, the turnkey and the new superintendent and two guards marched Harold Jackson past the groups all the way to the snake den at the back of the yard.
Raymond San Carlos looked at the colored boy as he went by. He had never seen him before this morning. Nobody would see him now for about a week. It didn’t matter. Dumb nigger had done something to Shelby and would have to learn, that’s all.
While Raymond was still watching them—going one at a time into the cell now—one of the guards, R. E. Baylis, pulled him out of the stone quarry gang and took him over to another detail. Raymond couldn’t figure it out until he saw Shelby in the group and knew Shelby had arranged it. A reward for pouring coffee on a man. He was out of that man-breaking quarry and on Shelby’s detail because he’d done what he was told. Why not?
As a guard with a Winchester marched them out the main gate Raymond was thinking: Why not do it the easy way? Maybe things were going to be better and this was the beginning of it: get in with Shelby, work for him; have all the cigarettes he wanted, some tequila at night to put him to sleep, no hard-labor details. He could be out of here maybe in twenty years if he never did nothing to wear leg-irons or get put in the snake den. Twenty years, he would be almost fifty years old. He couldn’t change that. Or he could do whatever he felt like doing and not smile at people like Frank Shelby and Junior and the two convicts in his cell. He could get his head pounded against the stone wall and spend the rest of his life here. It was a lot to think about, but it made the most sense to get in with Shelby. He would be as dumb as the nigger if he didn’t.
Outside the walls, the eight-man detail was marched past the water cistern—their gaze going up the mound of earth past the stonework to the guard tower that looked like a bandstand sitting up there, a nice shady pavilion where a rapid-fire weapon was trained on the main gate—then down the grade to a path that took them along the bluff overlooking the river. They followed it until they reached the cemetery.
Beyond the rows of headstones an adobe wall, low, and uneven, under construction, stood two to three feet high on the riverside of the cemetery.
Junior said, “What do they want a wall for? Them boys don’t have to be kept in.”
“They want a wall,” Shelby said, “because it’s a good place for a wall and there ain’t nothing else for us to do.”
Raymond agreed four year’s worth to that. The work was to keep them busy. Everybody knew they would be moving out of here soon, but every day they pounded rocks into gravel for the roads and made adobe bricks and built and repaired walls and levees and cleared brush along the riverbank. It was a wide river with a current—down the slope and across the flat stretch of mud beach to the water—maybe a hundred yards across. There was nothing on the other side—no houses, only a low bank and what looked to be heavy brush. The land over there could be a swamp or a desert; nobody had ever said what it was like, only that it was California.
All morning they laid the big adobe bricks in place, gradually raising the level string higher as they worked on a section of wall at a time. It was dirty, muddy work, and hot out in the open. Raymond couldn’t figure out why Shelby was on this detail, unless he felt he needed sunshine and exercise. He laid about half as many bricks as anybody else, and didn’t talk to anybody except his three friends. It surprised Raymond when Shelby began working on the other side of the wall from him and told him he had done all right in the mess hall this morning. Raymond nodded; he didn’t know what to say. A few minutes went by before Shelby spoke again.
“You want to join us?”
Raymond looked at him. “You mean work for you?”
“I mean go with us,” Shelby said. He tapped a brick in place with the handle of his trowel and sliced off the mortar oozing out from under the brick. “Don’t look around. Say yes or no.”
“I don’t know where you’re going.”
“I know you don’t. You say yes or no before I tell you.”
“All right,” Raymond said. “Yes.”
“Can you swim?”
“You mean the river?”
“It’s the only thing I see around here to swim,” Shelby said. “I’m not going to explain it all now.”
“I don’t know—”
“Yes, you do, Raymond. You’re going to run for the river when I tell you. You’re going to swim straight across and find a boat hidden in the brush, put there for us, and you’re going to row back fast as you can and meet us swimming over.”
“If we’re all swimming what do you want the boat for?”
“In case anybody can’t make it all the way.”
“I’m not sure I can, even.”
“You’re going to find out,” Shelby said.
“How wide is it here?”
“Three hundred fifty feet. That’s not so far.”
The river had looked cool and inviting before; not to swim across, but to sit in and splash around and get clean after sweating all morning in the adobe mud.
“There’s a current—”
“Don’t think about it. Just swim.”
“But the guard—what about him?”
“We’ll take care of the guard.”
“I don’t understand how we going to do it.” He was frowning in the sunlight trying to figure it out.
“Raymond, I say run, you run. All right?”
“You don’t give me any time to think about it.”
“That’s right,” Shelby said. “When I leave here you come over the wall and start working on this side.” He got up and moved down the wall about ten or twelve feet to where Soonzy and Junior were working.
Raymond stepped over the three-foot section of wall with his mortar bucket and continued working, facing the guard now who was about thirty feet away, sitting on a rise of ground with the Winchester across his lap and smoking a cigarette. Beyond him, a hundred yards or so up the slope, the prison wall and the guard tower at the northwest corner stood against the sky. The guard up there could be looking this way or he could be looking inside, into the yard of the TB cellblock. Make a run for the river with two guns within range. Maybe three, counting the main tower. There was some brush, though, a little cover before he got to the mud flat. But once they saw him, the whistle would blow and they’d be out here like they came up out of the ground, some of them shooting and some of them getting the boat, wherever the boat was kept. He didn’t have to stay with Shelby, he could go up to the high country this spring and live by himself. Maybe through the summer. Then go some place nobody knew him and get work. Maybe Mexico.
Joe Dean came along with a wheelbarrow and scooped mortar into Raymond’s bucket. “If we’re not worried,” Joe Dean said, leaning on the wall, “what’re you nervous about?”
Raymond didn’t look up at him. He didn’t like to look at the man’s mouth and tobacco-stained teeth showing in his beard. He didn’t like having anything to do with the man. He didn’t like having anything to do with Junior or Soonzy either. Or with Frank Shelby when he thought about it honestly and didn’t get it mixed up with cigarettes and tequila. But he would work with them and swim the river with them to get out of this place. He said to Joe Dean, “I’m ready any time you are.”
Joe Dean squinted up at the sun, then let his gaze come down to the guard. “It won’t be long,” he said, and moved off with his wheelbarrow.
The way they worked it, Shelby kept his eye on the guard. He waited until the man started looking for the chow wagon that would be coming around the corner from the main gate any time now. He waited until the guard was finally half-turned, looking up the slope, then gave a nod to Junior.