Inside the city jail, Jeff stuck his card in a time clock just like the one at the Sloss Works except for being painted gray rather than black. He stuck his head into the cramped little office where he had a battered desk. "Mornin', Billy," he said to his night-shift counterpart, who was writing a report at an equally beat-up desk. "What's new for me?"
"Not a whole hell of a lot," Billy Fraser answered. He was about Jeff's age, and like him a veteran-precious few white men of their generation in the CSA hadn't gone to the front. "A couple of niggers in for drunk and disorderly, and one burglar who was the easiest collar you'd ever want-dumb asshole fell out a second-story window making his getaway and broke his ankle. Yell he let out woke up the whole goddamn block. They were beating on him pretty good. He was probably glad when the cops pulled the citizens off him and hauled him away."
"Don't reckon we have to worry about him bustin' out for a while," Pinkard said with a chuckle.
"Hell, no," Fraser said. "Like I told you, a quiet night."
Jeff nodded. "Anything else I need to know?"
"Don't reckon so," the other man answered. He threw the report in his Out basket and got to his feet. "Gonna head on home and catch me some shuteye. See you tomorrow. Freedom!"
"Freedom!" Pinkard echoed. "Get some rest. I don't expect the bastards we've got locked up are going anywhere much."
"They better not," Billy Fraser said. "That'd leave us some pretty tall explaining to do." He grabbed his hat-the twin of Jeff's-from the rack, stuck it on his head, and went out whistling "The Pennsylvania Rag," a tune that had been popular during the early days of the Great War, back when the CSA had held a large part of Pennsylvania.
The first thing Jefferson Pinkard did then was look at the report Fraser had written. It was meant for the warden, not for him, but he didn't care about that. He'd discovered Billy sometimes wrote things down that he forgot to say, things Jeff needed to know. Nothing like that was in there today, but you never could tell. When you were dealing with prisoners, you couldn't be too careful, either. If his experience in the Empire of Mexico had taught him anything, that was it.
After Jeff put the report back where he'd got it, he ambled down to the kitchen and snagged himself a cup of coffee. He snagged a roll, too. One of the colored cooks clucked reproachfully at that, but he was grinning while he did it, a grin that showed several gold teeth. Jeff grinned back. He had no trouble with Negroes, as long as they remembered who the boss was.
After he did that, he prowled through the whole jail, peering into every cell to see who was where. He couldn't take the prisoners out of the cells and line them up for roll call, the way he had down in Mexico. He'd had all the room in the world down there: he'd built his prison camp on the loneliest stretch of ground he could find. Things were different in Birmingham, but he wanted to know as much about what was going on as he could.
"I ain't run away, jailer man," said a Negro named Ajax, who was doing a year for beating up another man whom he'd caught using loaded dice. The victim was also black. Had he been white, Ajax would have faced a lot more time behind bars. "I's still here. You don't got to check on me every mornin'."
"Morning I don't check on you is probably the morning you'll try some damnfool thing or other," Pinkard answered. "More I check, harder it is for me to get a nasty surprise."
Ajax reproachfully clicked his tongue between his teeth. "You ain't no fun a-tall," he said.
"You wanted fun, you shoulda thought twice about pounding on that other nigger," Jeff said.
"That cheatin' son of a bitch won ten dollars o' my money with them goddamn dice," Ajax exclaimed, nothing but indignation in his voice. "I see him when I gits out o' here, I kick his shiftless ass again, teach him not to try none o' that shit no more." If jail was supposed to rehabilitate, it wasn't working with the aggrieved Ajax.
But Jeff didn't think jail was supposed to rehabilitate. Like the other jailers he was getting to know, he thought it was supposed to keep people who belonged there inside till it was time to let them out again. He didn't worry his head about who belonged and who didn't, either. Figuring that out wasn't his job. As far as he was concerned, if somebody ended up in the Birmingham City Jail, he damn well belonged there.
By the time his rounds ended, the trusties were going through the corridors serving breakfast to the other prisoners. Jeff didn't like that, either. He thought using trusties begged for trouble, because they were so likely to be anything but. But the jail didn't have the money to hire enough guards to do everything inside that needed doing, and so trusties took care of a lot of work. He scowled at them as he headed back to his office. How much contraband did they smuggle in? They knew. Nobody else did.
He was halfway through a circuit of the jail before lunch when one of the corridor guards waved to him and called, "Hold on there. Warden wants to see you in his office right away."
"Does he?" Jeff said uselessly. The guard nodded, as if to affirm he hadn't been kidding. "What the hell does he think I did?" Pinkard muttered. The guard didn't hear that. A prisoner did, and leered at Jeff. As far as the former steelworker knew, the boss wanted to see you only when you were in trouble. Still cursing under his breath, he walked to the warden's office.
Ewell McDonald had all to himself more space than Jeff and the other assistant jailers put together. He was a beefy man in his early sixties, with his silver hair greased down and with a bushy gray mustache he'd probably worn since it was dark and stylish back in the 1890s. He heaved himself out of his swivel chair and stuck out a well-manicured hand for Jeff to shake. "Sit down, Pinkard, sit down," he boomed, sounding more like a politician on the stump than anything else. "Sit down and make yourself comfortable."
"Uh, thank you kindly, sir," Jeff replied, wondering when and how and why McDonald was going to lower the boom on him. "What can I do for you?" Might as well make it short and sweet, he thought.
Instead of answering right away, McDonald reached into his desk and pulled out a bottle of whiskey. Pinkard's eyes widened slightly, or more than slightly. Alabama was a dry state, though there were ways around that. He knew as much. He didn't expect the warden of the Birmingham City Jail to know it, or at least to show he knew it to a man he was going to bawl out. But Ewell McDonald yanked out the cork, swigged, and then passed the bottle across the wide expanse of his desk to Jeff. "Here you go, Pinkard," he said. "Have a snort."
"Thank you kindly," Pinkard said again. He knew he sounded bewildered, but couldn't help it. After he drank, he whistled appreciatively. That was real whiskey, not something cooked up in a hurry over an illegal still. He hadn't drunk anything so tasty in quite a while. He passed the bottle back, more worried than ever. McDonald wouldn't waste that kind of whiskey on him if he were in only a little trouble.
But the warden beamed at him. "You know, Pinkard, when I hired you, I reckoned I was stuck with you on account of Freedom Party business," he said. "Happens sometimes; nothing you can do but make the best of it. But I'll be goddamned if you ain't pulled your weight and then some. You weren't lyin' 'bout that prison-camp business down in Mexico, were you?"
"Lying, sir?" Pinkard shook his head. "Hell, no. I did all that stuff."
"I guess maybe you did," McDonald said. "I wouldn't have bet on it when I took you on, I'll tell you that. But you've worked out fine. Hell, son, you're doing better than some of the fellows who've been here ten years." He grabbed the whiskey bottle and tilted it back for another knock.