It was from the Klaudio courthouse that he tried his first escape. During a recess in which the prisoners were taken out of the courtroom to an unoccupied office belonging to the state farm agency in the company of the lawyers and a burly jailer who spit tobacco juice into a white ceramic mug he carried everywhere, Delvin made his first jump. They were on the third floor and looked out of three tall windows cracked to let a little air into the room. They had taken the chains and shackles off because the accused were supposed to be sufficiently cowed. Gammon was talking to him about his love of football when the bailiff stepped out to get a fresh chaw of tobacco. Brown’s Mule. He hadn’t thought about escaping, or not in the way he was used to thinking. A pressure — was that it? — had built up. Something, a scraping in him, low distant rasping he hardly noticed, and this worrisome discomposing in his body — this jumpiness: they had built up. Azalea bushes planted around the courthouse were not in bloom, but they were thick with gray-green leaves. Which meant the ground underneath them after these late rains would probably be soggy.
This was the sixth time they’d been in the room. This was the first time the bailiff had stepped out.
He was ready, but still, after the door closed behind the bailiff, he hesitated. Maybe the man was coming right back. Maybe the punishment for trying to escape was too severe. Maybe they would beat him. Maybe the lawyers, these rectifying white men, would desert him. Maybe he would be hurt in the fall.
Carl Crawford, carrying a strange formal quality, his face pimply with ingrown hairs, leaned toward Rollie Gregory, twirling his long fingers; Rollie laughed his crackly, misbelieving laugh. Little Buster Wayfield stared at the ceiling, moving his mouth like he was talking. Gammon was just telling him about Jim Thorpe, an Indian hero, an athlete, a performer for white men, who had been humiliated on a football field down in Florida a few years back by Red Grange and his team of NFL brutes, white men still paying the Indians back for Custer.
Then, click: he simply moved. A dart toward the window. He caught the look of surprise on Gammon’s face. Coover and Bony looked at him and Bony in a quiet voice that sounded to Delvin like a scream, cried, “Where you going?” Everything else, even the broad day outside and the whole fraudulent enterprise they were mired in, went quiet. The window was heavy but with a hard shove of one hand he forced it fully open and before anybody moved he was out into the air. He fell twenty feet. After the first four or five the fall seemed like flying. A sense of terrifying weightlessness filled him just before he crashed ass first into the azalea bushes. A branch tore through his pants and cut a deep scratch into the side of his leg. But he wasn’t hurt.
He rolled out of the bush, scrambled to his feet — the sight of the long red scratch under the khaki cloth almost made him sick — and began to run across the wide mushy lawn. A large woman in a pink dress stared at him with her mouth open. A man on the cement walk skipped a step as if he was getting out of Delvin’s way though he wasn’t anywhere near him. A voice cried out from the courthouse porch. “That’s one of them nigras.” Shouts went up, the noise beating against his body like hard rain out of the blue sky, but he was running, fleet, the town moving past him in a blur of little specks of life jumping — the squirrel hanging upside down from a catalpa branch, a little boy pop-eyed and grinning, a woman waving a yellow scarf in front of her face — all additions, subtracting as they went by, as he went by, plunging into space as he ran, each step a fall, each a bungle and bluster and a soaring, each carrying him nowhere and everywhere, and he was running, running. .
He made it to the corner, dashed across the street, turned right and headed down past a big furniture store. There were three brown leather armchairs in the picture window, arranged looking out, empty — lonely, he thought. An outside staircase led up the side of the gray brick building across the street. He liked outdoor staircases. He was running hard. Up ahead the picture show had Joan Crawford and Clark Gable on the marquee. He had never seen either of them. There looked to be an empty lot on the other side of the theater and beyond it a large white frame building with bushes around it and past that a big yard and past that a little copse of mulberry trees. He thought he could make it to the trees and be gone. He smelled boiled peanuts. The sky was stripped of clouds.
Just then, without warning, a man tackled him. Delvin went sprawling onto his chest on the pavement. He tried to get up but the man held him. In a second another man was on him and then another. He could smell tobacco and raw vinegary sweat and corn whiskey. The men — white men — were cursing him. He writhed against the rough load of bodies — white bodies closer than any white bodies had ever been: hands, fingers gouging, elbows knocking, feet kicking and stomping and knees hitting him in the back and between the legs and an unshaven cheek scraping against his and he could hear somebody’s soft panting like the panting of a dog and somebody’s scratchy breath whistled in his ear and he almost laughed because the whistle seemed like the first bars of that song, what was the one? He made a whimpering sound that he had not known was in him. A woman somewhere close by was screaming. He kicked out with his feet, or tried to, but he couldn’t get traction, couldn’t reach any step or ledge to prise himself free.
It was no use. A silence like a gathering poison filled him.
The power that keeps the world spinning turned and stooped to him and the power behind this power bent down too and the others in the endless line and these powers looked at him and didn’t say anything or do anything and then they went on and he lay still.
“Ah me,” he whispered, “ah me.”
5
Judge said, Everything that happened to those boys happened for cause.
But Gammon said, That’s not true, Your Honor. We wouldn’t be back here arguing about it for the tenth time—
Fourth, the judge said.
Fourth time, Your Honor — if we were just lying.
Not just, the judge said. You’re also using up my life and my patience.
I’m sorry Your Honor feels that way. But there’ve been other judges. Not only you, Sir.
Because you wore them into early graves, the judge said and gazed bleakly out the window as if he saw death riding by on a horse out there.
Bulky pinches his toe but that doesn’t wake him and then Milo comes up close and blows softly into his face and Delvin smells his earthy breath and begins the long swim up from a grassy bottom and breaks the surface what seems hours later with his head aching and a dizziness in the quick of his eyes.
At first he doesn’t think he can move. He is too heavy to rise into the world. Milo squeezes his shoulder and the pressure begins to pump life into him.
“That’s fine,” he whispers, “I’m right on it.”
Halfway and leftover, crumpled and spread back out, sheared into pieces weighted with stone, concentrated as a chunk of quartz. He rolls over and falls from the bunk and is caught by the men, the escape artists, around him.