Half of Paradise

“He said I might make trusty this year.”

The men were working at the end of the canal with the picks. They thudded them into the wall of dirt and pulled the broken tree roots loose with their fingers. The sweat rolled down their bare backs, and their faces were already filmed with dust. Jeffry rested his pick and looked over at Evans.

“Somebody should kill that sonofabitch,” he said.

“He’s a mean one,” Daddy Claxton said.

“I’d like to pop his head open like you break a matchbox,” Billy Jo said.

“He’s going to make me pull my guts out,” Jeffry said.

“You ain’t the only guy in camp with the runs,” Billy Jo said.

“I got to go thirsty all the time,” Jeffry said. “I can’t never drink a sip of water without puking it right up again. When I get out I’m going down home and stick my head in a well we got and drink till there ain’t any fever left in my insides.”

“I ain’t seen a woman in four years,” Billy Jo said. “I’m going to hire the two best-looking whores in Memphis and jazz them till they’re bleeding. I ain’t done any belly-rubbing in so long I forgot what it is.”

“It ain’t but a month now,” Jeffry said.

“Why don’t you guys write it on a piece of paper and tack it on the warden’s bulletin board,” a man working next to Billy Jo said. “Jeffry and Billy Jo is breaking out in one month.”

“I remember in Folsom a guy stooled on a break,” Billy Jo said. “Somebody used a razor on him like you slice up a ham.”

“That didn’t do no good to the guys that got their butts shot off,” the man said.

Billy Jo swung his pick down hard into the wall of dirt.

“I don’t reckon you’re aiming to make trusty by turning us in?” he said.

“I got no truck with fellows like that.”

“You’re a good boy.” Billy Jo swung his pick down again.

“What are you going to do when you get out, Toussaint?” Jeffry said.

“I don’t think that far ahead.”

“That’s the best way to do it. You go nuts when you start counting time.”

Two men moved the wheelbarrows up to the front of the ditch and shoveled in the loose dirt.

“It don’t do you no good to count time,” Jeffry said. “It makes you feel like shitting in your britches when you think of what’s out there and you can’t get to none of it.”

“There’s pussy out there,” Billy Jo said. “Christ, I’m going to bathe in it when I get out.”

“This is the worst goddamn camp they got in the state,” Jeffry said. “Them goddamn Carolina chain gangs ain’t any worse off than we got it.”

“This place ain’t tough,” Billy Jo said. “I was in five pens before they sent me here.”

“You had a real successful career,” a man said. It was the same man who had baited him in the truck.

“Someday I’ll sent you a postcard and you can play with yourself while you think about me climbing between some girl’s legs.”

“How did you get that scar on your face?”

“In the Tennessee pen,” Billy Jo said.

“I heard you was cut for rutting over a nigger girl.”