“What do you say, cousin?” he said.
“I think we’ll get a new trial.”
“Half the guys in here live on new trials. They don’t talk about nothing else. They write letters like paper is going out of style.”
“The difference is that you’re not guilty of anything.”
“You know that don’t have nothing to do with serving time.”
“Listen, as soon as the appeal goes through I’m going to have you out on bond.”
“That ain’t good-guy jive, is it?”
“I don’t bullshit a client, Art.”
“All right, you don’t. But I’m hanging by my ass in here. This is a rough joint, man.”
“What’s happened?”
He rolled the cigarette and folded down the wet seam with his thumb, watching the guard at the end of the counter.
“A couple of the hacks are laying it on. They know I’m with the union, and they’re getting off their rocks while they got me in the field. Three days ago the hack said I was dogging it in the cotton and they gave me the apple-box treatment. They take you down to the hole without supper, and all night you have to stand on an upended apple crate, even though you piss your pants. If you fall off, the hole boss gives you a few knots to get your attention.”
He took a book of paper matches from his shirt, split one longways with his thumbnail, and lit his cigarette. He breathed the smoke out through the empty space in his teeth.
“The field boss already told me I’d have to wear out a hoe handle a week if I wanted to earn good time from him,” he said. “He stays so close on my ass that horse is shitting and pissing all over me. They’re going to make me build the whole five, man, and I’ll run before I do another month.”
“Don’t do that.”
“I’ll run or I’ll ice one of those bastards. I’m through with that pacifist shit. When I was standing on that box with the hole boss looking down at me from the cage, it hit me what a dumb sonofabitch I’ve been for the last five years. The Anglos want us to be pacifists, just like they taught us that blessed are the poor crap in church. Man, we never knew how blessed we were. They want us to keep our hands in our pockets while they knock the piss out of us.”
“Forget about that running stuff, you hear?”
“It’s not something you plan. You start thinking about all that time and your clock gets wound up, and you’re ready to go through the wall with your fingernails.”
Art’s voice had risen, and the guard was looking at us with his crooked eyes. The fat tissue of his mouth was pressed in a small circle around his dead cigar.
“I spent a little time in a prison compound, too,” I said.
“Then you know what that patience shit sounds like.”
“Give it another couple of weeks and I’ll turn every handle I can to have you on the street.”
“I tell you, buddy, if I make the street they’ll never get me back in again. New trial or not, they better bring the whole goddamn army with them.”
“You’ll walk out of it clean, and I have a feeling that Cecil Wayne Posey’s ass is going to get barbecued, at least if I have anything to do with it. Also, the deputy at the jail is going to have a few interviews with the F.B.I.”
“Say, you cats really pulled a scene, didn’t you? I heard them bring you in that night. Something hit the cell floor like a sack of cement, and one of the blacks in the drunk tank told me it was a tall blond guy in ice-cream pants. You didn’t believe me when I told you to keep your head down.”
“I’m learning. I haven’t made a career of getting my head beat in.”
“So I have, huh? The greaseball who always gets his ass caught in the watermelon fence.”
“I met some of the people you have to deal with. I know it’s bad.”
“Man, you didn’t see nothing. You never got closer to a migrant camp than the highway.”
“I had a small taste of the local law enforcement.”