Ginny Gall полностью

He paced the cell back and forth until he was tired or one of the other boys told him to please, dammit, quit. Or somebody with a problem, some ordinary problem, some ailment or fabrication, some Bonette with a blister where he’d rubbed his thumb against his bunk or Carl with a knee that hurt or Butter whose throat always ached from all the crying in his sleep, took his attention. Delvin would dip the tail of his shirt in the water bucket and press it against the back of Buster’s neck while the slim boy clutched his hand. He could feel Buster’s pulse through the cloth. “I’m about to buster out of my skin,” Buster said, and laughed at his only joke. Delvin sat up with Carl, who liked to pray. With Rollie, who lied about everything. Rollie’s long, up-curled lip made him look like he was about to say something important, but he never did. He had the training for these ministrations and he knew they would help ease his own panic. He was the one called most often to confer with the lawyers, especially by Gammon, the young man from down the road in Tuxer. Gammon seemed not so scared of him. In the courtroom at the two tables pushed together in an L shape Gammon sat beside him and often scratched notes to him on the large pale brown sheets he carried into the courtroom. It’s going to be all right, he wrote; foolishly, Delvin thought. Things are going to work out. No, they aint, Delvin had written back. Things have already been busted to pieces. Beyond fixing. That was the point, wadn’t it? But the words, written down, scared him. When Gammon scribbled his note on the same slip of paper and passed it to him, Delvin scratched his own words out.

It was from the Klaudio courthouse that he tried his first escape. During a recess in which the prisoners were taken out of the courtroom to an unoccupied office belonging to the state farm agency in the company of the lawyers and a burly jailer who spit tobacco juice into a white ceramic mug he carried everywhere, Delvin made his first jump. They were on the third floor and looked out of three tall windows cracked to let a little air into the room. They had taken the chains and shackles off because the accused were supposed to be sufficiently cowed. Gammon was talking to him about his love of football when the bailiff stepped out to get a fresh chaw of tobacco. Brown’s Mule. He hadn’t thought about escaping, or not in the way he was used to thinking. A pressure — was that it? — had built up. Something, a scraping in him, low distant rasping he hardly noticed, and this worrisome discomposing in his body — this jumpiness: they had built up. Azalea bushes planted around the courthouse were not in bloom, but they were thick with gray-green leaves. Which meant the ground underneath them after these late rains would probably be soggy.

This was the sixth time they’d been in the room. This was the first time the bailiff had stepped out.

He was ready, but still, after the door closed behind the bailiff, he hesitated. Maybe the man was coming right back. Maybe the punishment for trying to escape was too severe. Maybe they would beat him. Maybe the lawyers, these rectifying white men, would desert him. Maybe he would be hurt in the fall.

Carl Crawford, carrying a strange formal quality, his face pimply with ingrown hairs, leaned toward Rollie Gregory, twirling his long fingers; Rollie laughed his crackly, misbelieving laugh. Little Buster Wayfield stared at the ceiling, moving his mouth like he was talking. Gammon was just telling him about Jim Thorpe, an Indian hero, an athlete, a performer for white men, who had been humiliated on a football field down in Florida a few years back by Red Grange and his team of NFL brutes, white men still paying the Indians back for Custer.

Then, click: he simply moved. A dart toward the window. He caught the look of surprise on Gammon’s face. Coover and Bony looked at him and Bony in a quiet voice that sounded to Delvin like a scream, cried, “Where you going?” Everything else, even the broad day outside and the whole fraudulent enterprise they were mired in, went quiet. The window was heavy but with a hard shove of one hand he forced it fully open and before anybody moved he was out into the air. He fell twenty feet. After the first four or five the fall seemed like flying. A sense of terrifying weightlessness filled him just before he crashed ass first into the azalea bushes. A branch tore through his pants and cut a deep scratch into the side of his leg. But he wasn’t hurt.