They head around the shed to the big sweet gum whose star-stretched shadow almost reaches the fence and crouch at its base. In the dimness a distant guard seems to move in slow motion along the side of the machine shop. Another, the bruiser, Jock Anglin, standing in the door of the guard shack, thrusts his potbelly into the night. He is just close enough for Delvin to make out the quart milk bottle in his left hand, horsemint tea he sips through the damp nights. Even this far away they can smell the citronella from the lit coil inside the shack. The oily, fruity aroma and then the smell of the river breezing up through the woods. They have no boat to travel that way (Delvin’s is long gone) and there are towns both up and downstream, heartless sheriff’s deputies patrolling. The laws promise the citizenry that there will be no trouble from villainous africanos and they mean it, sending men on patrols that take them into darkened alleys and along river branches and into shadowy parks and down the sleeping or insomniac streets. Forty miles south the river becomes tidal, smelling of the Gulf and freedom, but that is a long way and scary in its own right.
Delvin shivers in the almost cool of the almost dark night. Off in the woods raccoons make thin yipping sounds, probably debating over a scrap of food. A widow bird lets loose its bit of vocal material. Crickets saw their instruments. The fence gleams like a silver net, ragged at the top with coils of rusty barbed wire that look like shriveled nests. How you going to work the rope? Delvin asked. The fence is fifteen feet high, eighteen maybe with the barbed wire. They kneel in the dark under the tree, waiting. The sickness sways in Delvin like an ancient fernery, heavy and moist. If he lets himself lean back, and let go, he will be asleep before he hits the ground. He wonders if his father is alive, imagines him getting up from a poker game maybe, out in Abilene or El Paso, a man who can speak Spanish and has a passel of half mexican children. Sometimes he pictures him in a straw boater, dancing on a stage in scuffed white shoes. His anger rises. He crabs forward to Bulky who crouches in the deepest shade by the bench peering out.
