The Wrong Side of Murder Creek

by Bob Zellner

  So they put me in one of the cells in the general cell block. It had a wall on one side and three sides were bars from ceiling to floor. I might be away from them so they couldn’t kill me, but they would still throw water on me, or they would take shifts and poke me with a broom handle through the bars. So the psychological torture continued.

  I saw the lawyer one more time and told him I could not hold out much longer. After he left I didn’t know if my plea had done any good until a couple of jailers showed up and said to get my things, I was being transferred. I smiled at the notion of “gathering up my things.” I had a single item. Except the clothes I had worn for over two weeks, I possessed a tattered cowboy novel I’d been given by one of the good guys in the cell. I cherished that book, having read it several times.

  Trudging down the gray prison hallway with the guards, one in front the other behind, I was still somewhat apprehensive. Any change from the tortuous conditions I had endured for two weeks was certainly welcomed, but I was suspicious that the “authorities” had any intention of making life more bearable. The risk, I decided—no matter what, was worth it.

  I thought I had died and gone to heaven when, rounding a corner into a short corridor just off the main guard desk, I spied the hand of my dear friend Charles McDew protruding from a tiny opening in a solid steel door. Passing by I heard him whisper, “My brother, thank you, God!”

  Afraid to speak, for fear of jeopardizing a chance to be close to my brother and friend, I was glad when the guards shoved me into the next tiny cell, slammed the door and disappeared. Listening for their retreating footsteps, I heard a whisper from the next cell, “Zellner, I thought you were dead!”

  “I’m okay,” I lied, about to break into tears. “A little worse for wear, for sure, but still here. How you doing?”

  “Hot!” Chuck hissed. “You’ll see soon.”

  “What do you mean, and why are we whispering?

  “Never mind that now,” McDew replied, “but look across this little hall. See that fire extinguisher hanging on the wall?”

  “Yeah, I see it, why?”

  “Well, if you give me a minute, I’m gonna tell you. We got plenty of time, don’cha think? See that shiny silver plaque on the side of the extinguisher facing us?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, you hillbilly, if you look close you can see my face reflected in its shininess.”

  “It’s hard to see,” I said.

  “Wait, I’ll stick my hand out this little slit. Maybe you’ll see the movement?”

  “I see it,” I shouted, “I can see you, Chuck!”

  “Shuuuush, if you keep hollerin, they”ll come back and take you back where you been. But first they gonna whip yo’ ass till it won’t hold shucks. They whipped the last one in that cell something pitiful when all he did was speak to me, and he was white, too.”

  McDew was doing that white accent thing he does.

  “By the way, where you been?” he asked.

  “In holy hell,” I said. “I been staying with the white people . . . I’ll tell you about it later. Hey, Chuck, can you see me in the fire extinguisher?”

  “Of course, I can see your face, ofay. You can see mine, and I can see yours—but yours is so ugly I can’t remember why I wanted to see it in the first place.” He was clearly delighted.

  “If you keep talking in that fake Southern accent, they going to come back, and it won’t be me they be whippin’,” I said. In addition to bantering with him, I spontaneously burst into song. I was so happy to be here next to Chuckie. Happiness didn’t last long, however.

  “Is your cell getting hotter?” I asked Chuck.

  “Getting? What you talking about? My cell ain’t getting hotter, it’s been hot.”

  I touched his wall and involuntarily jerked my hand back, “It feels like an oven,” I gasped.

  “Feels like? It IS an oven. Don’t you realize that yo’ poor ignorant peckerwood ass has been thrown in the sweat box?”

  “The what, Chuck? I can’t take much more of this, man. How long you been in there?”

  “I been in here ever since the night me and you were captured by these Nazis, how long do you think I been in this hole?”

  I tried to cheer him up. “Let’s talk about something else and take our minds off of it. You got anything to read?” I asked.

  “To read!” Chuck whispered in a soft scream, “Bob, you really know how to hurt a guy. I have a candy wrapper. If I read the bleeping wrapper one more time, I promise you I will go stark raving, homicidally mad!”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “And you?” Chuck asked in his best sarcasm, “What’s in your library today? What did you check out?”

  “Well, I have a book,” I said.

  “You have a WHAT!!”

  “I have a book.”

  I told him that an inmate had slipped it to me when I was in an isolation cell in the center of the cell block. I kept it hidden as much as possible and the guards had not seemed to notice when they brought me down here. I told McDew that I had practiced a lot of magic in my short life and I had a way of hiding something in plain view. “Obviously, you didn’t notice the book either, when I came in.”

  “Zellner, could you spare me the magic and the hiding and just hand it over to me.”

  “And how am I going to do that, genius? Maybe yo’ magic is stronger than my magic.”

  Silence. “Don’t rush me, I’m thinking.” McDew said.

  “Take your time. Like you said we got plenty of time. And see, like I said, talking about the book took our minds off the heat. Right?”

  He then suggested that while he was thinking, I could tell him about the book. “Tell me everything from the very beginning. What’s the book about anyway? Is it fiction, what?”

  I explained that it was fiction and not a book I would normally read but that it had been a godsend and I considered it to be very valuable in the circumstances . . .

  I told him the title was Riders of the Sawtooth Range.

  “Cowboys? Great, just what I need, cowboys!”

  “I told you it wasn’t something that I would . . .”

  “Okay, okay, go ahead . . .”

  “Well it’s about these two cowboys way out on the . . .”

  “Sawtooth range . . .”

  “ . . . Sawtooth range herding cows and they have to make expense reports before they can get any more money for grub, etc.”

  I told Chuck that the whole point of the story, it seemed, was that neither of them could read or write or at least they couldn’t spell. McDew opined that they were a lot like me. I asked how he knew about my spelling and he reminded me that he was the chairman of the organization and who did I think had been reading my reports.

  “Oh, never mind,” I said.

  I went on to explain that one of the cowboys, Clyde, the smart one, had suggested that they copy some of the words off the stuff they already had like the can for kerosene, which of course said, “kerosene.” Another that they were able to lift was chewing tobacco because that’s what it said on the tobacco pouch. The only other one they managed was on the note the boss had left them with which clearly stated “be sure to itemize each item you list in the ‘Miscellaneous’ category.” The funny part was the weekly expense account they had to leave at the trading post for the boss.

  “That’s the funny part?” Chuck asked helplessly. “Okay, but don’t give away the ending. I’ll save that till I get my hands on the book itself.”

  “Have you figured that out yet?” I asked hopefully. “How I get this treasure over to you?”

  “No, now that you had to go and ask . . . But go on.”

  “Well there’s not that much more,” I said. “But it sure takes one’s mind off this goddamned heat,” watching more sweat drip on the The Riders of the Sawtooth Range.

/>   Chuck was suddenly very serious, “Z, are you drinking a lot of water?”

  “No, why?”

  “Man, you’re more ignorant than dirt! Doncha know you got to drink water like you never ever drank it before, if you expect to get out of that hot box over there alive and in your right mind?”

  “Why?” I asked, suddenly aware of a powerful thirst.

  “Because, by the time you feel thirsty, it’s too late, you will never be able to catch up. I take a sip of this hot spit they call water, running out of my drinking fountain-slash-wash basin, once a minute whether I want it or not. Ain’t you ever been in a sweat box before?”

  “McDew,” I said, “how am I supposed to know about these things? This is only the second time in my life I have been in jail, as you know, if you have been reading my reports as you say you have,” I finished lamely. Now I was drinking water like my life depended on it.

  “Okay,” I said, “I’m drinking.”

  “See that you keep it up,” Chuck advised. “The best thing these fascists can hope for is for you to pass out from the heat and they will find yo ass too late—so sad. By the way there’s a trusty here, a Louisiana brother, who has tried to be friendly. I don’t exactly trust him as far as I can throw him, but he is bringing me some salt and—”

  “He’s bringing you some salt?” I replied, trying to sound interested. I was suddenly deathly tired and I noticed I had stopped sweating. I was drinking water now like there was no tomorrow, but I could not quench my thirst. I saw a blurred vision on the black wall of a tall glass with fog on the outside, ice cubes floating on cool spring water with a sprig of green mint. I felt somewhat faint and Chuck’s voice was slowly receding but I could still hear him talking . . . something about salt.

  “—and next time he brings me some salt, I will ask him to give you some and you can hand him the book and he will pass it over to me.”

  “What has salt got to do with anything?” I managed to whisper. We were still crouched at the tiny slits in our cells, clinging to the first genuinely friendly contact either of us had had for weeks.

  “Salt, you crazy cracker, is what’s kept me breathin’ for two weeks and will keep you alive. You can’t sweat like this and live without salt; yo’ brain can’t take it.”

  I vaguely heard McDew giving me a lecture on electrolytes and how African Americans had adapted over the years to hard labor in hot climates and that’s why it was so important for me to be sure to take my salt and drink plenty of water because poor-ass white boys like me could not take this heat like black men, blah blah blah . . .

  I remember the last thing I tried to say to McDew was not to get his hopes up about the book, especially the ending, because there were several pages missing in the back and it was hard to tell how many.

  “Man, you had to tell me that. Why didn’t you just wait for me to find out?”

  “I didn’t want to disappoint you,” I mumbled. “And, besides, you can have fun making up your own endings. I made up a whole bunch.”

  “Swell,” Chuck mimicked my accent, “Just spare me your endings and let me make up some of my own—WHEN I GET THE BOOK! Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said before slipping to the floor.

  After a while I realized I was lying on the floor which was slightly cooler than the air above. I could hear Chuck’s faint voice calling my name, telling me to put my face at the bottom of the door and breathe the air from the corridor. He kept asking if I was all right but I could not muster the energy to answer. A while later I heard McDew hissing loudly, “Here they come, can you believe this?”

  Loud banging began on what seemed to be the door of his cell and a harsh male voice said, “Wake up in there, nigga, you got visitors, now you watch yo mouth and be nice to these little girls. This here, ladies, is our black communist Jew, and in a minute you’ll see our white communist.”

  I heard giggles. Big Voice bragged, “You might say we have with us today a black Red and a white Red, I don’t know which one smells the worst, don’t you get too close now, you hear?

  In the hall I heard a girl’s voice demanding, “Hey, say something in communist.”

  “Always willin’ to oblige, ma’am,” Chuck replied in his best fake Uncle Tom voice.

  “No, I’m serious say something in communist—you must speak the language.”

  “Okay, how’s this? Kish mir ein tuckus!”

  Throughout this interchange I was beginning to breathe again so I lifted myself back up to the slit in my door and peered out. I didn’t speak Yiddish but I was pretty certain that my friend Chuck had just told the little white girl to kiss his ass. It did seem to satisfy everyone. As they turned to my cell the little girls in school uniforms were laughing, “He said something in communist! Yeah, I heard him, “Kish mi . . . something. I never heard communist before.”

  “One of his names is ‘Zellna,’” lectured Big Voice, “sounds communist to me, and one of the commies tryin’ to raise both their bonds calls himself ‘Mister Dombrowski.’ I don’t know ’bout that black one, maybe his real name is McDooski.”

  The children were losing interest so Big Voice directed them on down the hall saying that the crazy people were even more interesting than the communists.

  In the cell right across from us, I learned, they kept mental patients, and they were naked, with excrement all over the place. We were on the psycho ward and the punishment block.

  Chuck was telling me about the poor souls across the hall, often on the way to or from some mental institution, for overnight or a week. I was still woozy from my introduction to the hot box. Chuck promised me I would “get used to it.” I did not think so. I lay on the bare steel of the bunk for a while and finally gave up and transferred to the concrete floor, the first I had ever felt that was hot.

  Late in the afternoon, as far as I could tell because here in the hole there was no daylight to be seen, Chuck hissed another warning, “Somebody’s coming, Z, get the book ready.”

  I soon heard a hurried whispered conversation. The new voice was unmistakably Creole, a real Louisiana sound. A light-skinned Negro looked through my slot and pushed in a small golf-ball-sized cloth bag, tied at the top with brown string, and whispered, “My man ova heah axed me to give you this. He still got some. You got sumthin fo me?”

  “Oh yes, I almost forgot, and thanks for the salt.” I shoved the book through the slot. In my haste, and because the slot was tight, the front cover ripped off. The back one was missing already so I hoped it wouldn’t make much difference. I passed the cover through after the man had taken the body of the book. I breathed a prayer that Chuck would get it all right; it meant so much to him.

  When he left I heard nothing, Chuck was so absorbed in the book. After a long while I ventured a whispered question to McDew.

  “How you like it? I asked.

  “Like what?”

  “The book,” I said hopefully, “how you liking the book?”

  “Don’t play with me, what the hell you mean ‘how I like the book?’” Trouble and concern mounted in his voice. “You didn’t . . . Ain’t no book showed up over here . . . Is the book gone?” He wailed.

  “I gave it to the man like you said, didn’t you tell me to get the book ready? I was ready—the man gave me the salt, and I gave him the book. He didn’t give it to you?”

  “Nooo,” Chuck moaned, “I knew he was no good. Why did I ever trust that no-count. Bob,” he said, “never trust a trusty!”

  Every time I realized that Chuck was in the cubicle next to me, I was so happy, I began to cry. Sometimes, we would sing freedom songs, and it drove the guards crazy—at one point I swear they turned up the heat to the point we could not raise our heads from the bunk. Soon, I was beginning to break under the pressure of the heat while Mc Dew begged me to hold on. He thought I was killed in McComb. Now he was afraid I would never make it out of Pari
sh Prison. After a while, I told Chuck, “I can’t take it anymore. I’m gonna start screaming.”

  “See if you can take it a little longer, because otherwise they’re gonna really hurt you.”

  “At this point, I don’t really care if they kill me.”

  “What about me? Those Visigoths might kill me, too.”

  “Too bad.” I said taking a deep breath.

  “Wait up just a minute, you never told me about the book. If you insist on getting yourself killed, you might as well tell me the story of the book. It might take your mind off the heat and besides you lost the book when I told you to be careful.”

  “You told me?” I sputtered. “Exactly whose genius idea was it to give it to the trusty in the first place?”

  “Will you just tell me the bleedin’ story and then go kill yourself?” McDew pleaded.

  “Okay,” I said, the teacher in me coming out, “Let’s review.”

  “Review hell. We don’t need no review, just get on with it. The two ignorant cowboys can’t make out an expense account—like you. You make up the worst expense accounts I have ever read . . . but never mind, tell the story.”

  I told Chuck that the book was divided into twelve chapters, one for each week the cowboys spent on the range and each chapter ended with a copy of the expense account they left at the trading post for the boss at the end of the week. The expense account for the first week said: 1. chewing tobacco 25 cent; 2. kerosene 75 cent; 3. miscellaneous 770 cent.

  The second week, I said, I think I remember they shot a coyote. That box of shot pushed the miscellaneous category up so the expense report read: 1. chewing tobacco 25 cent; 2. kerosene 75 cent; 3. miscellaneous 870 cent. The next week there was no unusual activity so the expense report read . . .

  “The same,” Chuck guessed.”

  “The next week . . .”

  “Nothing much happened.”

  “Right,” I said.