“This is a true story,” he says, sipping assertively from his iced whiskey. “Of course it is human nature to buy into positions that claim the means to solve problems of assault against the well-being of the one buying. So there are those deeply disposed to carry the hurt forth and onward.”
His listeners have mostly turned away.
Gammon knows that later in the afternoon about dusk, even drunk, he will begin to wish he was dead. It is something he has almost grown used to.
These are some of the factors Delvin struggles against at this time.
The latest trial, its facts rubbed, squeezed and twisted to produce enough juice to quench the mortal thirst of its participants, lurches wheezing to its end. Coover Broadfoot’s sentence is reduced to three more years, to be served in the restful conditions of Burning Mountain prison. Bony, who has shanked his cellmate, and Delvin Walker, the chosen, will go on as if these extra trials haven’t happened. Delvin is not however returned to Uniball, where he would be thrust back into his punishment conditions, but sent onward like a dupe in a prank to the next skookum house on the list of houses for Uniball troublemakers, down on the Salt Plateau in the middle of the state.
After a few years in the soppy heat — after another trial in which the by-now-wobbling parties, as the day fades to sunset, fight like weary and desperate, numbed and baffled dogs — he is shunted on to Acheron, a raw spot in the woods in the southern regions.
From there he has just now escaped.
He sits hunched against his knees, looking out at the slowly flopping meager surf. The inshore water is the color of weak coffee and the combs of the surf too are stained a faded brown. Down the beach the blackened stumps of stubbed-off trees protrude from the gray sand. Through a thin rain he can see woody islands out in the bay. He looks up at the tops of the tall pines stirring faintly in breeze. The rain falls softly. It is mild, soothing; weather without malice. A freeboard rain. He has come a long way and he has a long way to go. But for this moment there is nothing but easily drawn breaths. He wishes Mr. Oliver was here and the Ghost and Polly and Elmer the assistant and Mrs. Parker and everybody from those days. Wherever they are, pressed down by life or sweating over some difficult task or running for their lives in a dream, let them step aside for a time and come sit on this sandy beach and rest.
He pushes up to his feet and takes a few small steps. He feels like a child, a lopsided novice, manhandled into the world. They said back in Chat-town that he was a zigzag baby. Zigzag by way of his irregular birth, by way of his wayward mother, needing all the luck he could get from the caul. They would say now that the zag had put him in prison and sent his life off into the briars. But here he is. For a moment he is here, free under these big pine trees. The wind soughs and shudders, a mild wind bringing with it hints and foretelling. He dances a few steps, swinging his shoulders, bending down, straightening his back as he moves. Under the hard hand a life moves. Somebody wrote those words and he read them. Words come all the way from some room in some city up north, some dreamer sitting alone at a table, who drew them off the reels of mystery and power in himself.
He scoops up a handful of beach sand, lets it pour through his fingers. The sand is soft, mixed in its coloring like something halfway between dirt and sand. With his gritty fingers he dabs his forehead. He knows he no longer looks as young as he is. He’s seen men in prison who look like Methuselah. A sadness, his own, the one he located early, pushes in among the hopefulness. A mournfulness — the miseries they call it in Chattanooga. Chat-town. Where people come and go. He wants to go back there, slip through like a will o’ the wisp, touch down here and there. Then he’ll see.
He lies back and listens to the surf lightly flop and sizzle, the brown Gulf water sliding up and sinking back again.
BOOK FOUR
1
He walked east on the Old Spanish Trail, sinking to his ankles in the soft gray sand, and getting rides from africano folk passing in mule-pulled wagons. The road was paved in stretches now (and in those spots marked with small signs with the number 90 and the words DIXIE HIGHWAY stamped on them in black lettering), and among the wagons, flatbed trucks and a few autos made their way under mossy live oaks and through the pine barrens between the little board-and-brick towns. He stole a two-dollar bill out of a church basket in Chipley and was caught by the preacher’s nineteen-year-old son who was home from the war Delvin had barely known was going on, but the preacher took pity on him and let him keep the money and fed him at the kitchen table and gave him fresh clothes to replace the tatters he had been given by the Drovers off their own washline back on the banks of Aufuskie river and with the money and resurrected feelings a full belly gave him he bought fishline and hooks and a cane pole and fished his way across Florida in ditch creeks, branches and rivers, pulling in croakers and bream and roasting them on fires he built off the road among the circulating night creatures and bugs. Carrying the fishing pole fed him and made him inconspicuous, a colored man with a harmless purpose trudging the highway.
In August he was in Jacksonville, living with three other men in a dirt-floored cabin on the river where he idled on his plans and worked shifting sacks in a coffee warehouse and one early morning without discussing anything with himself or saying goodbye caught a freight headed to Atlanta. The passenger compartments were crowded, but the rods were emptier than he remembered except for the old men and the crazy boys running from imaginary pursuers and he pretended to be one of the lost and blubbering crazy ones, telling a story of wild men from the west riding huge machines that chased after him.
“Hell, boy,” an old cross-eyed white man who claimed to have once been manager of a streetcar company in Long Beach, California, said, “you just been seeing them tanks.”
He knew vaguely what a tank was but he knew little else about down-to-date life in the fall of 1943, but that didn’t matter because he was playing crazy. Around him in the car men talked of war and of mighty personages and of great battles fought with big guns and these matters got into his nap dream and tore loose big chunks of space from the sky and from cities that loomed like vast archipelagos over his tiny sleeping body and in his sleep he shuddered and whimpered and cried out and the men mocked him. In the Atlanta yards a white man wanted to fight him but he knocked him down with a single backhanded punch to the face and he felt a surge of killingness shoot up inside him and he could sense himself losing dominion and he staggered sideways and anybody who looked into his eyes would think he was looking into the eyes of a hellion. The experience frightened him. It was caused by the accumulation of poisons acquired in the penitentiary, he figured, but he was not sure how to make the poisons go away and he sat in the tall sooty grass thinking until he had to get up and go because another man, a stranger with marcelled hair, had come up to him and said he knew him. He ran away from this man as fast as he could.
Later he found himself in an area of the hilly city where those of his own kind lived in shanties beside dusty red clay streets and he met a woman there and lived with her for a couple of months. At night this woman washed vegetables and ran the pea sheller at the big farmers market out on Airline Road, and in the mornings she would slide into the big bed in her pleasant back bedroom and they would make love and she would talk a little about the night’s work before going to sleep. He would get up and sit on the back steps looking at the goldenrod flowering down by the back fence and at the big hooped-over tomato plants in the garden filled with ripe fruit and the corn stalks just streaking brown and watch the little red-throated hummingbirds buzz around the statice bushes and he would think he had come into a kind of heaven. The woman wanted him to marry her but he didn’t want to do that. It was no longer because of Celia, but he didn’t want to stay in Atlanta and he couldn’t bring himself to ask this woman, Minnie May Layfield by name, to come with him. He wanted to get out of the Southland entirely. That is, after he had visited Chattanooga one more time.