After supper and after a walk around the compound in the Sunday dusk that smells of green pecans, after a few short conversations with this or that wise or feckless one, he heads back to his bed. The sheet still smells faintly of his body. Milo squats next to him.
“We’ll wake you,” Delvin says.
The boy’s eyes shine. He lets his hand fall on the boy’s; the pull of his flesh that always smells faintly of wood smoke is strong; he grips the two middle fingers and lets go. He wants to grab the boy’s shirt collar and pull him down, smash his face right into his own. The boy’s fine soft lips are sweet. He wants everything in him, wants the weight of flesh on him, wants to feel his hands, the ingenious fingers, the energy that leaps into him from Milo’s touch. But he is too tired. He wants to sleep and he wants to be alone even more than he wants the boy. He wants to escape into oblivion. His shoulders ache deep in the sockets.
Milo runs his hand over Delvin’s knuckles.
“You feel like you coming back to life,” he says. “I like that.”
He grins. Around them others are getting ready for their night’s endeavors, alone or with a friend. The bell rings for lights out. Little Boy Dunlap blows out the lanterns. He makes a little funny squealing sound after he blows out the last one. Sam Brown, Little Boy’s protector, laughs as he always does. The prisoners can hear guards out in the yards talking. They will be walking around all night. They have a routine not difficult to keep track of. Delvin lies listening to the footfalls. He recognizes Blubber Watts’s heavy step. Blubber will beat you to death if you give him half a reason. Or no reason at all, Delvin thinks just before he vanishes into sleep.
<p><strong>4</strong></p>There was plenty of room in the jail, but for safety’s sake they were kept now in two holding cells at the courthouse. Deputies, sweating in the heat, brought them up the back stairs to the third floor and through a side door into another holding cell, this a large room with benches around the walls and, screwed into blocks set into the walls, steel rings heavy chains ran through. The negroes — become the KO boys — were cuffed to these chains. Their legs were shackled. Nobody’d told Little Buster or Butter Beecham about working the cloth of their pants under the shackles, so they had sores now around their ankles. These sores that were beginning to ulcerate kept them awake at night. Delvin listened to them moaning and crying in the bunks across from him. He had gotten up to see to them but there was nothing he could do; he regretted forgetting to tell them about the tuck-in. He mentioned the problem to Billy Gammon and Gammon told the deputies, but the deputies didn’t care. His words bounced off their impervious eyeballs and lay withered and derelict on the floor. He thought maybe if I keep talking I’ll build a pile of words that’ll bury them, but he knew there weren’t enough words.
Gammon told the deputies that the doc said they’d have to delay the trial if the boys got sick or hurt and he’d heard the sheriff complaining already about how much the damn trial was costing the county; he tried that.
“You the ones costing the county,” Deputy Fred Wirkle said with a slapped-on smirk. “You ought to plead those jigs out and let us get on to frying em.”
