Finally he is able to get up and shuffle around. First thing he staggers over to Conrad’s bunk and stands looking into the wasted gray face. He feels his heart pour out of his body. And over there Little Buster, twentysome now and the property of Danny Crakes, Little Buster, thirteen years old when they were dragged off the train in Klaudio, a rapist without a hair on his balls. Danny Crakes with his bodyguards Roscoe and Bluebelle stood over Little Buster’s bed weeping noisy tears. “Hey, he aint going to die,” Delvin, in between chills, raised up on his bed and said. He didn’t know whether he was or not but he couldn’t help himself speaking out against those malefactious tears. It was a sign he was getting better. Danny Crakes didn’t even bother to look at him. Bluebelle, huge, with a head like a torpedo, shot him a glance through tear-webbed lashes. He shook an incidental fist. A former africano cotton-bale-lifting champion, he could hardly raise his hands above his head. Crakes, though he was not a Catholic or known to practice any form of religion, licked his finger and made the sign of the cross on Little Buster’s forehead. He later made his bodyguards memorize a short prayer of his own devising and with him prompting the words he made them recite it in whispery voices to the sleeping boy.
Little Buster had not understood what was happening to the eight KO Boys. He knew they were jerked from the train, but he didn’t know what for and had no idea what was coming. “That is to say,” Delvin had told Gammon, “beyond the common understanding that they are in a country run by white folks for white folks, so nigger get out of the way.” Fire flashed in Gammon’s eyes and subsided. How fast that fire subsided was a gauge you measured the next blow by. Something bad was coming for the colored man caught napping — who didn’t know that? “Tell me what really happened,” Gammon said.
Delvin looks over at the boy, at his narrow forehead with the slightly raised ridge running down it, at the eyes that are black as shoe polish — and helplessly friendly back then when he first saw him on the train sucking on a lemon as he sat on a flatcar — at the soft mouth, still untorn. And now he is a surly galboy with nothing to hold on to except these brutes. They say DC uses these boys and when he is tired of them drowns them with his own hands in the swamp.
