The Lost Get-Back Boogie

“You want the purses and wallets, W. J. ?”

“Yeah, give them to me. I can trade them to that punk in Ash for a couple of decks.”

“Take care, babe. Don’t hang out any more on the wash line.”

“Yeah. Write me a card when you make your first million,” he said. He dropped his cigarette stub into the butt can by his bunk and picked at his toenails.

I walked down the corridor past the row of open cells and the men with bath towels around their waists clacking in their wood sandals toward the roar of water and shouting in the shower stalls. The wind through the breezeway was cool against my face and wet collar. I waited at the second lock for the hack to open up.

“You know the rec don’t open till twelve-thirty, Paret,” he said.

“Mr. Benson said he wanted me to wait for him there, boss.”

“Well, you ain’t supposed to be there.”

“Let him through, Frank,” the other hack on the lock said.

The gate slid back with its quiet rush of hydraulically released pressure. I waited in the dead space between the first and second gates for the hack to pull the combination of levers again.

Our recreation room had several folding card tables, a canteen where you could buy Koolade and soda pop, and a small library filled with worthless books donated by the Salvation Army. Anything that was either vaguely pornographic or violent or, especially, racial was somehow eaten up in a censoring process that must have begun at the time of donation and ended at the front gate. But anyway, it was thorough, because there wasn’t a plot in one of those books that wouldn’t bore the most moronic among us. I sat at a card table that was covered with burns like melted plastic insects, and rolled a cigarette from the last tobacco in my package of Virginia Extra.

I heard the lock hiss, then the noise of the first men walking through the dead space, their voices echoing briefly off the stone walls, into the recreation room, where they would wait until the dining hall opened at 12:45. They all wore clean denims and pinstripes, their hair wet and slicked back over the ears, combs clipped in their shirt pockets, pomade and aftershave lotion glistening in their pompadours and sideburns, and names like Popcorn, Snowbird, and Git-It-and-Go were Cloroxed into their trousers.

“Hey, Willard, get out them guitars,” one man said.

Each Saturday afternoon our country band played on the green stretch of lawn between the first two buildings in the Block. We had one steel guitar and pickups and amplifiers for the two flattops, and our fiddle and mandolin players held their instruments right into the microphone so we could reach out with “Orange Blossom Special” and “Please Release Me, Darling” all the way across the cane field to Camp I.

Willard, the trusty, opened the closet where the instruments were kept and handed out the two Kay flattops. The one I used had a capo fashioned from a pencil and a piece of inner-tube on the second fret of the neck. West Finley, whose brother named East was also in Angola, handed the guitar to me in his clumsy fashion, with his huge hand squeezed tight on the strings and his bad teeth grinning around his cigar.

“I mean you look slick, cotton. Them free-people clothes is fierce. I thought you was a damn movie star,” he said.

“You’ve been sniffing gas tanks again, West.”

“No shit, man. Threads like that is going to cause some kind of female riot in the bus depot.” His lean, hillbilly face was full of good humor, his mouth wide and brown with tobacco juice. “Break down my song for me, babe, because I ain’t going to be able to hear it played right for a long time.”

The others formed around us, grinning, their arms folded in front of them, with cigarettes held up casually to their mouths, waiting for West to enter the best part of his performance.

“No pick,” I said.

“Shit,” and he said it with that singular two-syllable pronunciation of the Mississippi delta: shee-it. He took an empty match cover from the ashtray, folded it in half, and handed it to me between his callused fingers. “Now let’s get it on, Iry. The boss man is going to be ladling them peas in a minute.”

Our band’s rhythm-guitar man sat across from me with the other big Kay propped on his folded thigh. I clicked the match cover once across the open strings, sharped the B and A, and turned the face of the guitar toward him so he could see my E-chord configuration on the neck. The song was an old Jimmie Rodgers piece that began, “If you don’t like my peaches, don’t shake my tree,” and then the lyrics became worse. But West was beautiful. He bopped on the waxed floor, the shined points of the alligator shoes his girl had sent him flashing above his own scuff marks, bumping and grinding as he went into the dirty boogie, his oiled, ducktailed hair collapsed in a black web over his face. One man took a small harmonica from his shirt pocket and blew a deep, train-moaning bass behind us, and West caught it and pumped the air with his loins, his arms stretched out beside him, while the other men whistled and clapped and grabbed themselves. Through a crack of shoulders I saw the young hack come through the lock into the recreation room, and I slid back down the neck to E again and bled it off quietly on the treble strings.

West’s face was perspiring and his eyes were bright. He took his cigar from the table’s edge, and his breath came short when he spoke. “When you get up to Nashville with all them sweet things on the Opry, tell them the big bopper from Bogalusa is primed and ready and will be taking requests in six more months. Tell them I quit charging, too. I done give up my selfish ways about sharing my body. They ain’t got to be Marilyn Monroe either. I ain’t a snob, cotton.”

Everyone laughed, their mouths full of empty spaces and gold and lead fillings. Then the outside bell rang, and the third lock, which controlled the next section of the breezeway, hissed back in a suck of air.

“Got to scarf it down and put some protein in the pecker. Do something good for me tonight,” West said, and popped two fingers off his thumbnail into my arm as he walked past me toward the lock with the other men.

“Just leave the guitar on the table,” the hack said. “The state car is leaving out at one.”

I picked up my box and followed him back through the lock. He held up my discharge slip to the hack by the levers, which was unnecessary, since the lock was already opened and all the old bosses along the breezeway knew that I was going out that day anyway. But as I watched him walk in front of me, with his starched khaki shirt shaping and reshaping across his back like iron, I realized that he would be holding up papers of denial or permission with a whitened click of knuckles for the rest of his life.

“You better move unless you want to walk down to the highway,” he said halfway over his shoulder.

We went to Possessions, and he waited while the trusty looked through the rows of alphabetized manila envelopes that were stuffed into the tiers of shelves and hung with stringed, circular tags. The trusty flipped his stiffened fingers down a

row in a rattling of glue and paper and shook out one flattened envelope and brushed the dust off the top with his palm. The hack bit on a matchstick and looked at his watch.