“Movement, that is the sine qua non of this universe,” Gammon says. “Keep it moving.” He has developed motes in his right eye and though the doctor assures him they are harmless, they scare him. “What is wrong with this malefactorous boys of Klaudio, this KO Boys thing, is it has stopped moving. Everything living that can still twitch is bailing out of that ratless grounded ship.” He has haplessly married a game-legged woman from the capital whose family owns a string of peanut mills in four states and who wants him to give up the law and go traveling with her. “The prosecutors want to live happily. The juries, the judges, the defense lawyers, the uncoddled and spiritually mutilated accused — they want to live happily. Even the white boys who got their asses kicked. Even the two
He looks heavily at his listeners, a couple of beat reporters plus loafers and afternoon drinkers and ex-preachers — the common habitues of the Constitution Bar on State street. He wishes he was singing Schubert lieder in a choir. He signals the barkeep for another.
“The exasperated gents sitting at their restaurant tables ordering without menu or leaning back in Adirondack chairs under the scuppernong arbor drowsy with the heavy wine of ripe grapes and the soothing hum of honeybees, or jumping from a third-story window to escape the Meredith Hotel fire on Custom street, or sitting on a doughnut cushion to ease their hemorrhoids at the Melody mule and horse auction in Loris, or watching their young daughters dive from the ten-foot board into the clear green waters of Aucilla Springs, or walking or fighting or sleeping or arguing with an associate or straining on the crapper or praying or whining or crying out to God or cursing the day they were born — these men, who by circumstance or personal effort have become embroiled in this calamity, cannot quite get this dear woman, lying snoring on her back, I expect, as we speak, through the balmy hours of a late spring Saturday morning, say — have not been able to prevail, or suggest with enough persuasiveness, or lean against with appropriate gesturing, or outwait or outwit, to retrieve from her a recantation that would set them free.
“This is a true story,” he says, sipping assertively from his iced whiskey. “Of course it is human nature to buy into positions that claim the means to solve problems of assault against the well-being of the one buying. So there are those deeply disposed to carry the hurt forth and onward.”
His listeners have mostly turned away.
Gammon knows that later in the afternoon about dusk, even drunk, he will begin to wish he was dead. It is something he has almost grown used to.
These are some of the factors Delvin struggles against at this time.
The latest trial, its facts rubbed, squeezed and twisted to produce enough juice to quench the mortal thirst of its participants, lurches wheezing to its end. Coover Broadfoot’s sentence is reduced to three more years, to be served in the restful conditions of Burning Mountain prison. Bony, who has shanked his cellmate, and Delvin Walker, the chosen, will go on as if these extra trials haven’t happened. Delvin is not however returned to Uniball, where he would be thrust back into his punishment conditions, but sent onward like a dupe in a prank to the next skookum house on the list of houses for Uniball troublemakers, down on the Salt Plateau in the middle of the state.
After a few years in the soppy heat — after another trial in which the by-now-wobbling parties, as the day fades to sunset, fight like weary and desperate, numbed and baffled dogs — he is shunted on to Acheron, a raw spot in the woods in the southern regions.
From there he has just now escaped.
