As Delvin counts it this is the night Bulky plans to make the slip; thus the occasion of his early release from the infirmary. Bulky isn’t afraid of the red dog, but he is worried about taking along a sick man. He visited Delvin in the infirmary and though no words were spoken on the subject, Delvin understood Bulky to be giving him the high sign on the decampment.
Delvin straightens up. He can bring himself to bear in whatever way is needed — this is what he always tells himself even though it isn’t always true. But now the sweet lift of floating, of drifting through the hot afternoon, calls him. He nods at Bulky and with Milo supporting him makes his way along a path that curves around behind the barracks. Milo directs him into a wide turn toward the barracks door. The shade is no cooler than the sunlight and this pleases him. He squeezes Milo’s arm to make him stop. Over beyond the next barracks, in a chokecherry tree that still has a few black berries in it, before Delvin was hauled off to the pesthouse, a mockingbird took up early morning residence. Bird won’t be there now, but he wants to make sure. The tree is the tallest of three skinny chokecherries just beyond the barracks. The mockingbird lit each morning in the highest branches of the tallest tree, the one on the right. Mockingbirds always like to be as high as they can get. Early, just after the gray light was split open by the morning’s first coloring, the bird took up its trill and its rising and falling forays, imitations of robins and bobwhites and the old brown thrasher bird, cats and even the screek of squirrels. Each morning on the way to breakfast Delvin stopped to listen. The bird is gone now. Maybe Milo’d noticed him, but he doesn’t want to be told the bird no longer comes around. Looking, staring really — no sir.
“No, sir,” the boy says as if he heard, “I aint seen him.”
And they stand gazing like communicants at the empty trees.
After the fight, the ruinous fight, all those years ago now — twelve years by today’s count — he climbed up on top of the boxcar, a blue Tweetsy car, and sat on the catwalk looking at the country. He felt strong and alive, he felt like singing outloud. Off beyond the tailing run of a big grain field the train had passed a small zoo. The zoo had a camel and a bear and a stringy panther cat, some raccoons and possums. He had seen it before on this run. The camel had two humps, one of which flopped over like a half-empty sack. The bear looked dazed. As the train passed the bear rose up on its hind legs and holding to the cage wire gazed at the train. He looked like he knew all about the fight. Delvin felt sad for the bear locked up in a cage and he remembered how the sadness mingled with the satisfaction and easy fatigue from the fight. Then it seemed, just at that moment, as if something was about to be explained, or fall into place, as if he and the bear and everything else living in the world suddenly knew about it and expected it and would be glad when it happened, but the moment slipped by like the zoo slipping by around the long bend and a salient of dark green pines.
“I missed that mockingbird,” Delvin says.
He feels all of a sudden cast down, burned through by the sun, broken up and scattered. Fool loneliness, that’s what it is, and what is he doing thinking about that?
In another minute they are in the barracks and Milo is trying to help him into bed.
“I don’t need none,” Delvin says. He wants to look strong.
He does a couple of jumps just to make Bulky, sitting on his rack three bunks away, think he is a springy character. Is Bulky paying attention? He can’t tell; maybe he is looking at him through his private mosquito net.
Delvin lets himself down again, leans back and after telling Milo to wake him in an hour goes to sleep.
Two hours later he wakes with Milo shaking him and telling him to come to supper. Bulky passes the bed as Delvin is getting up. He leans down without fully stopping, or only stopping for a second — Delvin drowsy still, hot and sweaty — and says “I’ll catch you on the right side,” and passes on smiling in that sideways way he has so he is actually smiling at something off to the other direction.
After supper and after a walk around the compound in the Sunday dusk that smells of green pecans, after a few short conversations with this or that wise or feckless one, he heads back to his bed. The sheet still smells faintly of his body. Milo squats next to him.
“We’ll wake you,” Delvin says.
The boy’s eyes shine. He lets his hand fall on the boy’s; the pull of his flesh that always smells faintly of wood smoke is strong; he grips the two middle fingers and lets go. He wants to grab the boy’s shirt collar and pull him down, smash his face right into his own. The boy’s fine soft lips are sweet. He wants everything in him, wants the weight of flesh on him, wants to feel his hands, the ingenious fingers, the energy that leaps into him from Milo’s touch. But he is too tired. He wants to sleep and he wants to be alone even more than he wants the boy. He wants to escape into oblivion. His shoulders ache deep in the sockets.
Milo runs his hand over Delvin’s knuckles.
“You feel like you coming back to life,” he says. “I like that.”
He grins. Around them others are getting ready for their night’s endeavors, alone or with a friend. The bell rings for lights out. Little Boy Dunlap blows out the lanterns. He makes a little funny squealing sound after he blows out the last one. Sam Brown, Little Boy’s protector, laughs as he always does. The prisoners can hear guards out in the yards talking. They will be walking around all night. They have a routine not difficult to keep track of. Delvin lies listening to the footfalls. He recognizes Blubber Watts’s heavy step. Blubber will beat you to death if you give him half a reason. Or no reason at all, Delvin thinks just before he vanishes into sleep.
4
There was plenty of room in the jail, but for safety’s sake they were kept now in two holding cells at the courthouse. Deputies, sweating in the heat, brought them up the back stairs to the third floor and through a side door into another holding cell, this a large room with benches around the walls and, screwed into blocks set into the walls, steel rings heavy chains ran through. The negroes — become the KO boys — were cuffed to these chains. Their legs were shackled. Nobody’d told Little Buster or Butter Beecham about working the cloth of their pants under the shackles, so they had sores now around their ankles. These sores that were beginning to ulcerate kept them awake at night. Delvin listened to them moaning and crying in the bunks across from him. He had gotten up to see to them but there was nothing he could do; he regretted forgetting to tell them about the tuck-in. He mentioned the problem to Billy Gammon and Gammon told the deputies, but the deputies didn’t care. His words bounced off their impervious eyeballs and lay withered and derelict on the floor. He thought maybe if I keep talking I’ll build a pile of words that’ll bury them, but he knew there weren’t enough words.