“Well, what else can you call it,” Billy Gammon, young lawyer, says to his colleague, assistant and investigator Baco Bates, “what do you think of when you consider it, this
He stops to look out the big picture window of the Shawl House restaurant across the square where the young men, known far and wide as the KO Boys, are just now passing hidden from view inside a big black panel van on their way the two blocks from the county jail to the courthouse. “Think of it,” Billy says, drunk at eight thirty in the morning, hardly ever undrunk these days and what of it, he would say, smiling at you as if you are his best friend once removed and the easiest person to believe in he has seen in a while, “think of the singular and well nigh mythological power of prison, Baco, of how no matter how strong or seemingly permanent that hard little flint representation, icy diamond of hopefulness or chagrin might be, that soul, I mean, you throw it through the doors of a prison and it is gone forever, dissolved into the dust and grease and sweat and the long black mordancy of that place. It makes me shudder just to think about it.”
The panel van, traveling as slowly as a hearse, rounds the corner at Cooper street, passing the Red Rooster café where several of the older men in the community sit at the back table having breakfast, the shadows of the sycamores passing soft hands over the top and sides of the van from which, if you are a small boy sneaked away from school to watch this, you would not have heard a single sound emanating, as if the truck carried not eight negro youths to what you could call their
“Jesus, Mohammed, old Confucius — you name it, Baco — truest of true loves, filial pieties of all kinds and duration, that time you stole granddaddy’s watch and sold it for passage to the Orient—”
“That wadn’t me,” Baco, a tall, bony man so skinny you thought he might crack in a big enough wind, fold in two, break apart and blow in sections away, says. “I stole a jewelry box, but I didn’t steal nary watch.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Billy says. “It could be a watch or a pair of patent leather dancing shoes or a celluloid collar you picked up off the street that had a bloodstain on it that was a clue to solving the crime of the century, or a crust of, I don’t know, of grease picked off the axle of the tumbrel carrying Marie Antoinette to the guillotine — it passes through that prison gate and disappears, gone to oblivion. Forever lost. Those boys’ lives and everything they got inside em, good or bad, is forever lost.”
As usual he has spoken too much. Baco looks with pity at him. He looks at Billy in the face, in his own face a mix of aggravation and fondness, and says, “You gon show up over there?”
“I suppose I might,” Billy says. “Sometimes I feel like I could stick my hand inside those gates and it would just disappear. I’d draw back a stump. Or I could walk right on in and I’d draw back. . nothing. It gives me a curious relief to let my mind circulate among such thoughts.”
These are the early days of the trial, and it is time to get moving. A big man with an untrained shock of hair the color of iron rust, he hoists himself up and begins to make his way to the courthouse.
