The Lost Get-Back Boogie

I reached in my pocket and felt a wadded dollar bill with a quarter inside.

“Forget about him,” the deputy said, and locked the cell door.

“Hey, man, what these cats got down on you?” the Negro said.

“I don’t know. I haven’t been booked yet.”

“I mean, you got in the man’s face last night or something?”

“I didn’t read it like that. Maybe I did.”

“Let me have a smoke.”

There were two cigarettes left, and I gave him one and lit the other. He sat on the floor in his white undershorts, his knees splayed, and ate the eggs with one hand and held the cigarette in the back of his knuckles. His skin was absolutely black.

“I got a hundred and eighty to do,” he said. “But I don’t do nothing except wash cars. The judge says he’d send me to the joint, but you can’t cowboy with one arm.”

He laughed, and the dried eggs fell from his bad teeth back into the plate. “I’ll tell you why they ain’t put me in Deer Lodge, brother. Because they won’t take no niggers up there. That’s right. There ain’t a colored man in that whole joint.”

I sat on my bunk and drank the coffee from the paper cup. It tasted like iodine.

“You a paperhanger?” he said.

“No.”

“I ax you this because, you see, this is my living place, and they bring in this white whale that moans at night and makes gas every fifteen minutes. I don’t like jailing with no queer, either.”

“His family will come for him eventually,” I said.

“Which means me and you, brother.”

“OK, let me give it to you. Five in Louisiana for manslaughter. Maybe another jolt here for shooting up some people who leaned on me.”

He pressed the scrambled eggs into the spoon with his thumb and dropped them into his mouth, then took a puff off his cigarette and laughed again.

“What they putting you badasses in with me for?”

“I think the man wants to talk with me,” I said.

I heard the deputy’s keys and leather soles in the corridor.

“They ain’t bad guys,” the Negro said. “Mo

st of them work another job in town. Just don’t stick your finger in the wrong place.”

The deputy who had brought breakfast with the Indian trusty turned the key and opened the cell door.

“Let’s get it, Paret,” he said.

He didn’t have the handcuffs out, nor did he catch me under the arm, which I waited automatically for him to do.

“Down the stairs,” he said.

“What’s going on?”

“Just walk.”

We went down the spiral metal staircase to the first floor, and I had to squint at the sudden light off the yellow walls. I looked over at the door to the booking room, the box camera on its tripod, and the ink pad, rollers, and cleansing cream on the counter.