by Edward Abbey
Okay, then why is your body here?
Well now, the Judge he calls it assault. I done hit a man and he falls down. Didn’t hit him hard but he falls down like a log. Maybe he wasn’t standin very good.
Why’d you hit him, Rev’rend?
Well now, you see it was like this: this here fella and me was workin together in this barbership. He was barber, I was porter and shoeshinin man. One day we have a argument about who left the soap where. A argument.
Hoskins, you ain’t got sense enough to pour piss out of a boot.
What happened then, Rev’rend?
Well now, we’s havin this here argument about who left the soap where when the boss walks in. The boss. Manager.
What soap, Rev’rend?
This soap we use for washin up our hands and so on. In the crapper. Both of us usin the same piece of soap. I disremember what kind of soap it was, exactly. White, that’s all, and not very big. Kinda little.
What happens when the boss walks in, Rev’rend?
Well damned if he doesn’t tell me to get my hat and coat and get out. Just like that Don’t even wanta know what we arguin about. Well I tell him about the soap and he just gets mad. Like that Just gets mad.
What’d you do then, Rev’rend?
Nothin. I get my hat and coat only I ain’t got no coat and starts to leave and then ole boss he thinks I ain’t leavin fast enough so he tries to gimme a kick. Don’t that beat all? Tries to kick me cause I ain’t movin fast enough to suit him. Man musta been crazy.
Is that when you got mad, Rev’rend?
Oh I don’t get mad. I never get mad. I’ll punish a man, maybe, but I never gets mad. It ain’t right for a man to get mad. A man ain’t no dog, even if he smell like one. That’s the way I feels about it Yessir. Never get mad.
Well, why’d you hit him, Rev’rend?
Oh I didn’t hit him. I hit t’other fella.
The other fella. Which fella?
The barber. The fella I hit No sir, I don’t get mad never. It ain’t right. No sir.
Well, which one did you hit, Rev’rend, the barber or the boss?
Well now, the boss be was a barber too. Yes, he barbered there just like t’other fella. Only he owned it too. Owned ever bit of it Yessir. Only he don’t own me. No sir.
You got me kinda mixed up, Rev’rend.
Yessir, thass just the way I felt: kinda mixed up. I weren’t mad, no sir, but I hit him and he falls down. Didn’t hit him hard but he falls down anyway like a dead log. Falls right down.
You kill him, Rev’rend?
No sir, I don’t think so. He’s all right. Leastways he look all right when he come to court. Not a mark on him, except on his left eye. No sir. He looked fine. I shoulda hit him harder.
Well, Rev’rend, I still can’t figure which man you hit.
Well now, I don’t remember too good myself but I sure hit one of them. Yessir. Knocked him right down. Right down on the floor. Now I weren’t mad but I hit him. Not hard but he falls down. Down like a log. Thass the way it was.
I wish I’d seen that fight, Rev’rend.
Well now, it was really somethin. Sure was.
An aquatic implosion and the rattle of strangled pipes: the steel bars hummed, the steel walls vibrated, the resonance flashed through the recumbent bones of forty living men. Again, from a different cell, another roar of water: again the plumbing shook and groaned and whistled with the intensity and lunacy of impending disaster.
While Bondi wrangled with himself: Oh, that dreary old paradox? The libertine-anarchist choosing himself into prison? That? A little simple conviction would help here. My emotions become ideas, my ideas emotions. But here I lie, a victim of both. Should be home milking the goddamned goat. Minding my own business.
He watched a breath of moisture evaporate from the steel barrier three feet above his face. He sniffed and rubbed his eyes.
Agua!
The word passed with telegraphic speed from one end of the cellblock to the other. Agua! Water! Douse your lights, hide your smokes, your weapons, hide your words and thoughts.
Agua, agua, agua!
The five cells occupied about half of the block. They were divided by a narrow corridor from the single rectangular steel cage called the bullpen, where the prisoners spent their daylight hours and ate their meals. The corridor had one entrance, or exit, a steel door heavy and ponderous as the gate of a bank vault, which permitted passage from the cellblock to an adjoining anteroom and the rest of the building. This door was now being opened, screeching on its bearing-less hinges, rumbling and grinding and scraping on the cement floor.
The forty men in their five cells became silent, cautious.
The door stopped, fully open, and a man came in, stooping under the lintel. A huge man, shambling like a trained bear, and wearing the khaki uniform and leather harness of a Bernal County deputy. His holster was empty; in his left hand he held a billyclub. Slowly he lumbered down the corridor, stopping for a minute or more in front of each cell, carefully inspecting each man within, then moving on.
No one would look at him; all eyes were turned to the floor under the pressure of his red stare. Only when he had passed to the next cell did some of the men dare to glance at one another with shamed and half-frightened faces.
No one spoke a word; no one whispered. The only sound was the shuffling tread of the huge man in the uniform; when he stopped to examine the inmates of a cell the silence became complete.
He came, this bear, this dark enormous man, to the cell in which Bondi lay. He stared balefully at the seven prisoners crouching on their bunks, studying each one in turn, and then raised his eyes to Bondi. Bondi, who had never seen him before, stared back.
He saw two red eyes, small and intent and without depth, as if made of tin, sunk deep in a welter of corrugations and protected by an overhang of bone and leather and ragged Mack brows. He saw these two eyes, dangerous and animal and implacable with power and hatred, and could see nothing else. And as he looked and waited he became aware of the challenge passing and growing between them, of the silent instinctive struggle for recognition and submission. Bondi felt the chill of fear on the skin of his neck, at his fingertips, and a deadly dryness in his mouth; he turned his head, looked away and though instantly conscious of shame, even of anger, could not compel himself to return that man’s unblinking gaze. Could not, though he hated himself for his cowardice. Instead he lay still and silent on his bunk, watching the black forearm of Timothy Greene braced rigidly against the opposite wall. And until the guard moved away, for a full five minutes he lay fixed and tense in the same position looking at the same object, waiting with a burning face and cold queasy stomach for the enemy to release him from the implied violence of that stare.
Gutierrez the guard tramped the length of the corridor, huge and silent and malevolent, crouched to pass through the doorway and was gone. After him the massive door swung slowly shut, dull gray iron grinding in friction, harsh and cold in its finality.
An instant of silence and then the men remembered their humanity, became unrigid and looked at each other and talked, grinned and laughed uneasily, relit cigarettes and talked.
He’s after somebody.
Now that ain’t no lie. The Bear is a-lookin for somebody. Somebody is in bad trouble.
He’s in for it.
That ain’t no lie. He’s gonna git it. Yessir.
Glad it ain’t me. Brother!
You said it, chum. You done said it.
Bondi sat quiet on his bunk, saying nothing aloud, busy at disemboweling his own soul, examining with an attempt at a sterlized logic the soft glistening blue-veined innards of his spirit. While darkness gathered within and around him and the bad air of the cell settled under its own weight of smoke, sweat, human vapors. The sun was gone—its light was gone. Through the filthy frosted glass of the window beyond the grid of bars he could see the muted glow of evening neon, the swing of automobile lights, the yellow rectangles of lighted windows, a
ll the multiple refractions of the great American night.
And then from far below, from somewhere deep in the heart of the labyrinthine jailhouse, came the sound of a man’s voice—singing. As if from far away, muffled by barriers of steel and brick and cement, the thin sound of a man singing, a wild drunken singing with the quality of an Indian’s wail and the wind’s intoxication, the music that a wolf might make if it could sing like a man.
I’m dreaming, thought Bondi, sitting up suddenly, hearing that old and remembered song, that familiar voice, I’m dreaming like a kid on the night before Christmas, like an angel the day before Easter. He sat upright on his steel bed, listening tensely, straining his senses to hear and feel. I’m dreaming, I’m dreaming, I’m dreaming, he thought.
The sound of a man singing.
5
BURNS DID NOT WALK FAR; HE STOPPED AT THE first bar he came to, a small cantina at the edge of the unpaved road and close outside the official limits of Duke City.
He paused at the door; around him was the brilliance and gold and blue of the light, the sky, the white purifying heat, the withering leaves of the cottonwoods, the dust, and the fragrance of tamarisk along the irrigation ditches. He went in and found a dusky coolness, darknes, the smell of beer, the smell of wine, the smell of Mexicans and dogs and the unemployed. The act of entering the bar was like entering a grotto, leaving the real or perhaps only imaginary world outside in the dust and sun.
The cowboy did not wait for his eyes to adapt themselves to the comparative darkness but followed his nose and intuition straight to the beertaps at the bar. He leaned there, put his booted foot on the rail, and waited.
After a few moments, the parts of a man materialized and became visible in the thick gloom behind the bar. A small man, bald and fat and brown as a bean, with truculent eyes and an itchy little mustache. He said nothing; Burns said nothing. The man waited a moment more and then said: “What’ll you have?”
Burns leaned against the bar and gazed thoughtfully at a big painting on the wall above the mirror and the rows of whisky bottles: The Cowboy’s Dream. “A tall beer,” he said, not looking at the bartender. The nude in the painting looked down at him from astride a cloudy horse; her limbs were comely, her flesh inviting, but the vague smile on her face suggested detachment, disinterest, the perils of ennui.
The bartender pushed a schooner of lager toward Burns and picked up his quarter. Burns drank deeply, thirstily, then lowered the vessel, wiped his mouth and looked around.
Three men sat at one table talking quietly in Spanish, sipping at bottled beer, chewing piñon nuts. They were looking at Burns with sullen curiosity, their eyes flat, incommunicative, with the opacity of hard rubber, their faces round and coarse featured and colored like the stubborn earth that fed them. They looked at him for several moments, while he returned their stare, then in unison all three appeared to lose interest and they looked away and at each other, continuing their sibilant low-toned palaver.
Alone at a table near the jukebox sat a young man with closed eyes, a wide-brimmed dark felt hat, tight shirt, boots, one good arm and one empty sleeve; in his one hand he held a pint bottle of whisky, half gone. The empty sleeve was doubled up and fastened to the shoulder of the shirt with a brass safety pin.
No one else was in the bar.
In leisure, with grace and affection, Jack Burns finished his beer, the keen edge already taken from his thirst and the contagion of the afternoon—almost evening now, with the sun lowering on the five volcanoes in the west. He finished his beer, ordered a second. Requested a second: the bartender was no man to be commanded. Burns requested a second beer and after a respectable interval of time had passed he received it But the lapse of time was of little concern to him; he held the schooner in his hands, caressed its cool moist surface, revolved and lifted and weighed it, set it down and took it up again, playing with it casually for several minutes before taking the first drink.
Time passed: seconds, minutes, a half hour with the ease and changelessness of time in dreams and in old cathedrals. The shaft of sunlight that poured through the window by the door steadily altered its angle of declination, and as it changed the small parallelogram of light that fell on the nude behind the bar rose up from her thighs and lap to the belly and hips. The flies crawled over her body following the light and warmth.
The young man with one arm sat unchanging in his comatose slump, his eyes still closed and his body motionless. But the bottle that had been half full was now almost empty.
Burns began his third beer. He had already quite forgotten the wine and ice cream curdling in his stomach.
The three men at the table had left and been replaced by a dozen others of the same caliber and brand: laborers on the way borne, mud farmers, men from the railroad shops.
Burns was now sitting at a table near the bar, waiting, patient as a snake in the sun. Between beers he ate peanuts and piñon nuts, tossing them by the palmful into his mouth, and dropping the little cellophane bags under the table and around his feet. He rolled a cigarette, smoked it down, and requested another beer. The beer came, standing in the big mug with overflowing head among the wet rings on his table. He blew off some of the foam, buried his nose in the mug and drank, deeply and slowly; a slight yellow glaze began to dull the intensity and conceal the depth of his eyes. Quietly, in a gentlemanly manner, the cowboy was getting drunk.
There was music, occasionally, when someone had a spare nickel for the jukebox; the records with their concentric striations, scratched by a blunt steel needle, produced a proximate musical effect; Mexican voices in a kind of vulpine harmony, guitars, loud trumpets pitched a semitone too sharp, the rhythmic grinding of the machine. No one listened to the music, no one cared, drunk or sober; the noise was not meant for entertainment but for the sustaining of a certain psychological atmosphere, the pervasion of space, the dispersal of unseemly silences. So that a man without anything to say and unable to think could still imagine himself at the vortex of an activity, however meaningless.
The young man with the one arm still had not moved but sat slumped in his chair as if dead; under the big hat his face seemed tense, listening, but the eyes were not open. The whisky bottle was empty, with the fingers of his one hand curled tightly around its neck.
When the light and flies had passed above the breast and reach the neck and shoulders of the nude in the painting, the young man opened his eyes and looked at Jack Burns. Burns felt the weight of that look and set his schooner down on the table, gently. As he turned his head to face the one-armed man the other inverted his grip on the neck of the bottle, brought it back behind his ear and threw it, spinning, at the cowboy’s head. Burns ducked, and the bottle smashed to pieces against the adobe wall behind him.
At first nobody stood up. And nobody said anything; the jukebox ran down a record into oblivion and then there was a short spell of silence. Nobody got up; the cowboy sat where he was, relaxed and a little drunk, staring with no more than a polite interest at the man who had thrown the bottle at him.
When the jukebox had stopped its howling and the room became silent, Burns spoke: “Why’d you throw that bottle at me, cuate? Never seen you before in my life.” He tossed a handful of peanuts into his mouth, dropped the bag on the floor and waited for a reply. The one-armed man stared bitterly at him and said nothing. “How about it?” Burns said, a bit more loudly.
The one-armed man did not answer, and did not move. Burns glanced once around the room at the silent men, the alert faces and hands. He swallowed his mouthful of chewed peanuts, took a sip from his beer, and waited without visible anxiety for something tangible to happen again.
This time the one-armed man threw his glass; Burns jerked his head aside and the glass bounced off his shoulder and slid and rolled across the wooden floor.
“Now looky here, friend,” Burns said, “you sure you got the right man? We ain’t even been properly introduced.” He sat up more formally in his chair.
The young man
with one arm stood up, saying nothing, and walked toward the cowboy. His eyes were half open now, a pair of yellow slots, and his lips moved and twisted though no words came through. He came close to Burns, standing above him; he reached up, took off his hat and swung with it at Burns’ face. The cowboy flung himself backwards, his chair going over and sliding out from under, leaving him sprawled on his back on the floor.
The one-armed man stood looking down at him, a sick grin on his face, his eyes gleaming with derision and triumph, his one fist clenched. He started to talk: “Whatsamatter, cowboy, you afraid to fight? You afraid of a one-armed man?”
Burns raised himself to his elbows and looked up at the man. His face had gone cold, expressionless, his eyes were bleak and suddenly sober. But he said: “I don’t want to fight you cuate. I’m a peaceable fella, don’t like to fight.” He started to get up and the one-armed man kicked his legs, and he fell flat on the floor again.
The one-armed man looked down at him, grinning. “Can’t stand up, cowboy? Whatsamatter with you? Like a little baby.”
Quickly Burns rolled away and over, and when the revolution was completed he was standing on his feet, erect and ready; the one-armed man, who had moved to trip him again, stopped in surprise. “All right,” Burns said; “now what were you sayin?”
The one-armed man hesitated, no longer grinning. Then he said: “I ain’t afraid of you, cowboy. I don’t give a damn how big you are or how many arms you got.”
Burns said: “Fella, you’d be a lot better off if you’d stop worryin about that one arm. If you ain’t satisfied with one arm you oughta get it chopped off.”
The one-armed man spluttered after a reply: “You mind your own goddamn business. I lost my arm at Okinawa. What’d you do? I’m a better man than you are, no matter what.”
Burns smiled, though his eyes remained hard and watchful. “Maybe you are,” he said; “it’s a hard thing to settle. Maybe you are. Why don’t we have a drink and talk it over?”
“Chinga!” the other said; “you’re afraid, you hijo de puta.”