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“My kids. They say I shot bof’ my kids. That’s what they say.”
“Get on back to work.”
“Yes, suh.”
The captain waited until the convict was back down the mud-flat, then said, pointing with the steel tip of his cane, “See that big one yonder, the one flinging them bags up on the levee, he raped an eighty-five-year-old woman, then snapped her neck. You tell these white boys they’re gonna have to cell with niggers like them two out yonder or they’ll lose their good-time, what do you think’s gonna happen?”
“I’m not following you.”
He drew in on his pipe, his eyes hazy with a private knowledge. It was overcast, and his lips looked sick and purple against his liver-spotted skin.
“We had two white boys shanked in the Block this year,” he said. “One a trusty, one a big stripe. We think the same nigger got both of them, but we can’t prove it. If you was a white person living up there, what would you do?”
“So maybe there’s something like the AB in Angola?”
“Call it what you want. They got their ways. The goddamn Supreme Court’s caused all this.” He paused, then continued. “They carve swastikas, crosses, lightning bolts on each other, pour ink in the sores. The black boys don’t tend to mess with them, then. Wait a minute, I’ll show you something. Shorty! Get it up here!”
“Yow boss!” A coal-black convict, with a neck like a fire hydrant, his face running with sweat, heaved a sandbag against the levee and lumbered up the incline toward us.
“What’d Boss Gilbeau put you in isolation for?” the captain asked.
“Fightin’, boss.”
“Who was you fighting with, Shorty?”
“One of them boys back in Ash.” He grinned, his eyes avoiding both of us.
“Was he white or colored, Shorty?”
“He was white, boss.”
“Show Mr. Robicheaux how you burned yourself when you got out of isolation.”
“Suh?”
“Pull up your shirt, boy, and don’t act ignorant.”
The convict named Shorty unbuttoned his sweat-spotted denim shirt and pulled the tail up over his back. There were four gray, thin, crusted lesions across his spine, like his skin had been branded by heated wires or coat hangers.
“How’d you burn yourself, Shorty?” the captain said.
“Backed into the radiator, boss.”
“What was the radiator doing on in April?”
“I don’t know, suh. I wished it ain’t been on. It sure did hurt. Yes, suh.”
“Get on back down there. Tell them others to clean it up for lunch.”
“Yes, suh.”
The captain knocked his pipe out on his boot heel and stuck it back in his holster belt. He gazed out on the wide yellow-brown sweep of the river and the heavy green line of trees on the far side. He didn’t speak.
“That’s the way it is here, huh?” I said.
“Besides dope, Raintree’s problem is his prick. He’s got rut for brains. It don’t matter if it’s male or female, if it’s warm and moving he’ll try to top it. The other thing you might look for is fortune-tellers. He had astrology maps all over his cell walls. He give a queer in Magnolia a carton of cigarettes a week to read his palm. By the way, it ain’t the AB you ought to have on your mind. Them with the swastikas I was telling you about, they get mail from some church out in Idaho called Christian Identity. Hayden Lake, Idaho.”
He raised himself up on his cane to indicate that our interview was over. I could almost hear his bones crack.
