The noon sun was like a blast-swollen blister in the center of a livid yellow bowl.
The whole free men gang of us assigned to the fields were doing stoop work in the rows of truck vegetables. When we’d started work at seven the deep trenches between the rows were still damp from the irrigation flooding, but by nine the land itself was crusted hard as rock with the sun reflected on it.
About five minutes before Handecker called the noon break, I was on the verge of wild laughter. I had thought I could take it. The fields were whirling around me. Half the time the vegetable rows were streaked across the stark sky. Every time I bent over, I was afraid I was going to fall flat on my face.
We staggered over to any inch of shade we could find beside the old buses. The ones that got there last were out of luck. Servers from the messhall came out with cold meat sandwiches and iced tea or iced coffee.
The only way I’d endured working all morning in that heat was by glancing around, trying to figure the best way to walk off this place when the time came. I didn’t think it would be very long. If Buster Kane mentioned me to the two cops in Fort MacKeeney, though my name wouldn’t mean anything to them, it would mean something if they checked, or if Fred Palmer had gone to the sheriff’s office for local co-operation. Fred wouldn’t do that until he’d exhausted everything else. Asking help was an effeminate symptom of weakness. But he would accept help as a last resort, even from hicksville cops for whom he had nothing but contempt.
Now I sprawled in the shade of the truck, trying to figure what would happen if Barton M. Cassel found out that Mitch Walker, fugitive, was working as a free man at Great Plains Empire. Howell had acted as if he didn’t want to know anything about me, had even hinted that he’d been on the run those years ago when he found this place.
I tried to swallow my sandwich through my parched throat, thinking about Howell. He could stay on here, with whatever that soul-sickness was that was eating at him worse than any ulcer ever could. I wanted to hide as long as I could, and then I wanted out
I heard Handecker’s voice near me and I tried to close my ears against it because the heat had made me giddy and that voice scraped my nerves raw. I couldn’t do it. He was talking to somebody less than two feet away from me.
I turned over on my back. Under my breath, I cursed. Both the little Mexican named Jose and old man Hogan had flopped down beside me to eat their lunch. Wasn’t it bad enough they bunked beside me at night? I wanted no trouble of any kind, and everybody knew these two were swimming in trouble with Handecker and Potter.
“Sorry to send you back there, kid, but I got to have that roster. I can’t check off the payroll without it”
Jose’s dark face was sickly pale. Beside him Old Man Hogan was shaking his head back and forth. I decided it was an involuntary reaction. Old Man Hogan began shaking his head every time Handecker or Potter came near him.
“All the way to the barracks?” Jose’s mouth quivered. “It’d take me an hour, Mr. Handecker.”
“I know that, kid, and I’m sorry. But you better get started. You ought to be back before the lunch hour ends. You don’t want to get docked for missing any work time. Huh?”
He stared down at the kid, letting him chew that over. Old Man Hogan went on shaking his head.
Handecker laughed. “If you hurry, Tamale, you ought to get back before the work whistle ... You know, kid, I wouldn’t dock you, but it’s Mr. Barton M. Cassel’s rule. Everybody’s got to be on the job when that work whistle blows. Better not waste no more time, kid.”
He was still smiling, but his voice had hardened.
It seemed to me it had taken Jose one hell of a long time to read Handecker’s message, but at last he got it. He stood up and trotted across the rows, going toward the farm buildings that were hazy in the heat-distorted distance.
I hadn’t realized I had stopped eating until my iced tea spilled on my fist when I gripped my paper cup so tightly I crushed it.
Handecker glanced at me. He grinned, mouth pulling, “How’s them sandwiches, kid?”
I just stared at him, didn’t speak.
He went on grinning and spoke to Hogan. “Pop, there are some stakes at the end of all these rows. Somebody should have checked them stakes this morning. Everytime they irrigate, some of them stakes get washed out I want them checked, right now. Should of done it this morning. There’d be hell to pay if Mr. Barton M. Cassel was to come out here and find some of them stakes down. Get with it, will you, old-timer?”
Hogan’s narrow head was shaking now as if he had palsy.
He glanced once at me, but I looked away. Then he lifted his head, watching Jose go across the sun-blasted fields. He looked up at Handecker finally and stood up.
“Sure, Mr. Handecker,” he said. “Sure.”
He dropped the remainder of his sandwich and his paper cup where he stood in a childish gesture of defiance.
“Pick that up, Hogan.” Handecker’s voice lashed at him.
“When I come back, Mr. Handecker. Got to check them stakes. Got to check them stakes right now.”
Handecker took a step after the old man, fists knotted.
Then he stopped. I still hadn’t moved. I wanted to, but the rage in me had chilled me. My stomach was tied in knots. Handecker turned, staring at me, as if waiting for me to lift my voice. What was the matter with him? Did he think I’d taken those two derelicts to raise? Did he think I was going to stand up for them, or did he think in his own guts that somebody ought to?
Our gazes touched for a moment because I hadn’t realized I had been staring up at him so intently. The hell of it was, for the moment he didn’t look any more like a strawboss named Handecker than he did like a cop named Cotton calling a waitress a slut as she walked away from him, or like a detective named Palmer rupturing a suspect’s spleen in routine questioning.
I jerked my head around, searching the country. There was only one thing I wanted: a sure way out of here.
When the men began staggering in the rows at two-thirty, Handecker blew his whistle and called a twenty-minute break.
I straightened up slowly because I could no longer straighten up with any speed. It was as if the blast of Handecker’s whistle had taken the final twist in my back tendons to keep me knotted over.
I saw Handecker coming down the rows toward me.
I set myself, hoping he had intelligence enough not to cross me in this heat. He didn’t know I’d learned everything you could do to a man to cripple him in the space of two breaths. I had learned from the master. Hail, Fred Palmer! Everything a good detective should be. Also hail Spanish Inquisition. Also hail all atrocity reports since time began.
He moved past me, and I looked over my shoulder. Jose and Hogan had started along the rows behind me. He stopped them, the two party-poopers who wouldn’t join in the gambling last night The spoil-sports. Everybody have fun.
Handecker’s voice was amazingly quiet, and I have in me reserved an especial hatred for people who can speak softly and sweetly while white with rage inside.
“You was about twenty minutes late gettin’ back here at lunch, Josie-kid,” Handecker said, pronouncing the J instead of the Spanish H sound. “You better keep working. We wouldn’t want Mr. Barton M. Cassel telling me to dock you. Huh?”
Hogan’s head was moving and his mouth trembled. He knew he was next. He should have known in the hour and a half since noon, Handecker would have figured out some way to deal with a spoil-sport like him.
“Keep working, pop,” Handecker said to Hogan.
“Why?” The old man’s voice quavered, sounding as if he were going to cry.
“Hell, old man. You know I keep you on here when you ain’t worth a damn to Mr. Barton M. Cassel. Why, if Mr. Barton M. Cassel knowed I was keeping a man like you—at full pay—why he’d skin me. If he knowed how you barely move ... Hell, old man, these men around here got bets about you. Ever time you bend over they bet amongst theirselves whether you’ll make it or not, and after you get bent over, they make new bets on if you’ll ever straighten up again.”
“I do the best I can, Mr. Handecker.”
“Ain’t good enough. Now if I’m going to take a chance on gettin’ myself in Dutch with Mr. Barton M. Cassel over keeping you on, you got to give me a little work in return. Now hit it, old man, or walk off right now”
“No, sir, Mr. Handecker, I’ll keep working.”
Handecker heeled around and almost bumped me. I hadn’t even realized I was standing there. I looked around, dozens of other men were ringed around, too, but there was a difference. They were grinning.
I realized my face was bloodless, rutted.
Handecker said, “What’s the matter with you?”
I shook my head.
He laughed. “Hell, man, you best make a run for that shade up at them trucks. You let them other boys beat you to it, you’ll have to sit out in this here sun.”
I used all the water the barracks-master would allow me and washed my face and neck and arms to my elbows. I tried to buy a second basin from him for a dollar, but he had a gravy job and he wasn’t about to jeopardize it for a buck.
I walked out to my bunk and flopped across it. The body heat from the hundred-odd men packed in this old barracks was worse on me today than it had been yesterday. I could feel the heat still radiating from my body as if I were still reflecting the rays from the sun.
I pressed my eyes closed, then opened them. I was thankful it was a couple hours yet to chow time. I had to cool down some or food would make me ill.
“Got to get out of here.”
I turned my head. Old Man Hogan was sitting on the side of his bunk, his back to me. Beyond him, Jose was composing his daily letter in awkward Spanish letters. “Just got to get out of here.”
Jose stopped writing, looked up at the old man. He asked the question everybody asked, “Where would you go?”
“I’m old. What’s it matter? How long you think we can stand that sun? No rest? I got to get out”
I’d had it. I sat up on the side of my bunk. “You ever shot craps, old man?” I said.
He and Jose looked up at me. He nodded. “Most of my life.”
“Then what in hell you got against losing a couple bucks every night to get off Handecker’s list?”
He looked at me, shaking that head. “Why don’t they just rob us? Why don’t they just come along and take it out of our pockets?”
I shrugged. “Maybe they haven’t thought of that gimmick yet. Give them time. Meantime, they’re offering you the pleasure of being robbed, seeing all your friends robbed every night. You got to pay something for pleasure like that.”
“You ever stop to think, mister, what three or four dollars from a hundred and twenty men amounts to every night?”
“They should have it so good in Las Vegas,” I said. “And no overhead.”
“I need my money,” the boy said. “Bad.”
“You need to stay alive, too, don’t you?” I asked him.
His mouth trembled. “But to be robbed, mister. Every night. When the need is so terrible.”
“We all got our woes,” I told him.
“Got to get out of here,” the old man said.
“Why don’t you tell Howell what’s going on?” I said. They both stared at me, bloodless with fear.
“No,” Jose whispered. “Please. Somebody will hear you.”
“He’d help you.”
Jose looked ill. “Sure. Señor Howell would fix ... But we’d never get out of hell then. You can see that, can’t you?”
“We got to get out,” Hogan said.
I looked at them, shook my head. “Either that” I said, “or learn to play poker.”
The milk barns were cool, fresh, clean-smelling at eight-thirty that night.
When I walked up the ramp, Chick, the gate guard, pointed to where Evans Howell was sitting under a shaded lamp working over his clipboard on a small pine table. “There he is,” Chick said.
Howell looked up, his blonde hair was toppled dry and lank over his high, narrow forehead. He managed to smile, but it was as if it were something he had to remember to do.
He nodded toward another straight chair beside the table. “Sit down, Walker. How’d you like your first day out there?”
I looked at him, and had the sudden compulsive urge to tell him about what was happening to a Mexican kid named Jose and a battered old derelict named Hogan. I knew better. I wouldn’t help them any. In the long run they’d lose to Handecker and Potter, no matter what happened.
I sighed. “Hot,” I said. “I guess I got along all right. Except for a slight case of heat prostration.”
“How’d you like a better job?”
“What?”
“That’s right. Working with me. Like I say, those men down there are animals. We get a good man once in a while, we’re willing to step him up and give him a chance.”
“Thanks,” I said. “But no thanks. I won’t be around here that long.”
Suddenly he asked me the question they asked each other in the barracks. “Where would you go?”
“This is a big country.”
He winced, and tried to smile, gave it up. “I thought that too, once. But as long as there’s people who won’t keep their goddamn noses out of other people’s business this whole blasted country’s no bigger than that—” He held up his palm, fingers cupped tensely.
I shrugged. “I never planned to stay here.”
Now he did manage a sick smile. “Neither did I. Not when I came. But where do you think you can go where you’ll be as—” he narrowed his eyes for a moment looking at me,”—as safe as you are here?”
‘Am I safe here? Nobody’s even inquired who I am, where I came from.”
He ignored that as if I hadn’t said it. “Nobody talks about who’s working here, on either side of that fence. As long as a man does his work, doesn’t start any trouble, he gets along fine. Nobody talks off this farm about who is here. Not even Buster Kane.”
Chick, the dark-haired gate-watcher, came through the wide doorway. I saw Evans Howell get a glimpse of Chick from the corner of his eye, and then turn away, actually trying to pretend the boy wasn’t there. A shudder ran convulsively through Howell’s thin body suddenly.
Chick stood beside the table, looking almost as ill as Howell, twisting his hat in his hand.
“Mr. Howell, sir—”
Howell shut his eyes tightly for a moment, then opened them. He spoke very softly. “All right, Chick. What is it?”
“Message from the house, Mister Howell, please. Mr. Barton M. Cassel wishes to talk with you up there. Double quick.”
The pencil snapped in Howell’s long-fingered hand. For a moment he didn’t speak. Then he said, “Chick, you know Mr. Barton Cassel isn’t in the house.”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Howell. I do. But the house girl said it was sure urgent. He sure wants to see you at the house. Right now.”
Howell shook his head. “Is the girl waiting at the gate?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then you tell her you couldn’t find me. You tell her I said to tell Mr. Barton Cassel that I was down at the barracks with the men.”
We sat there a long, slow, silent ten minutes after Chick walked back down that ramp. I stared along the cool, washed-down stalls, the shaded lights stirring easily in the light draft. Limber shadows wriggled on the scoured white walls.
After a long time, Howell glanced at me as if becoming aware of me for the first time.
“Uh ... that’s all, Walker.”
“You wanted to talk to me?”
He shook his head. “No. Not now. Some other time, Walker. But if you stay here, Walker, think over what I said. We can always use good men. But not laboring in the fields.”
He stopped talking, I got up and walked out. I glanced back. He’d forgotten me before I got as far as the big doorways.
The sudden glare of headlights stabbed huge gaping yellow holes in the night, appearing from behind me and lighting up everything around me.
I was almost back to the barracks yard gate, but suddenly I felt as though I were in the middle of a highway and a car was about to run me down.
I leaped to one side and whirled around.
That was when the big white car plunged into the gate under the cottonwoods.
There was an explosion when that speeding car ripped into the cyclone fence, the engine roared, the link-fence squealed and broke under the driving impact of the big white convertible. The gate folded forward and the car climbed up so it was almost to the barbed wire when the fence supports finally held and the car stalled. It hung there, three or four feet off the ground, the shattered headlights pointing into the sky.
Every man in the barracks poured out through the front doors. Handecker’s leather-lunged yelling was lost and finally he gave up and ran with them. They came through the gate as every light in the barnyard, including huge floods, were snapped on, making the yard around that smashed gate as bright as day.
Beyond the prison fence there was a mild riot. The men over there spilled out of their barracks in their underpants, screaming, yelling, laughing and throwing anything they could get their hands on.
They surged against the fence, pressed against it, staring across the two yards to where the woman was standing up on the front seat of the white convertible, yelling.
I turned and moved just ahead of the first wave of laborers back to the broken gate.
The woman I’d asked for a handout the day before in Fort MacKeeney was waving a whiskey bottle. Her hair was loose, long about her shoulders. She wore a sheer powder—blue nightgown and a matching negligee.
She was so drunk she could barely stand up.
“Gentlemen,” she cried, swinging the bottle in her arm. “Gentlemen, I greet you. Greetings to all of you from Barton M. Cassel and wife. Greetings.”
She toppled forward and I thought she was going to fall, not that I moved a muscle to catch her. But she only braced her hand against the top of the windshield and stared at the men ringed inside the fence, gaping up at her.
“We need some fun!” she yelled. “Let’s have some fun around here. What’s the matter with you men? Can’t you make no noise around here?”
Suddenly, her eyes focused on me. Her head moved and then jerked back. She wiped her hand across her mouth, spouting laughter. “Well, look who’s here!” at the top of her voice.
She brought the bottle overhand and smashed it against the outer windshield glass. The windshield shattered in long spidery lines but the bottle didn’t break.
“You,” she said to me. “What’s your name?”
“Walker,” I said.
“Walker what?”
“Mitch Walker, Mrs. Cassel.”
She laughed. “You know how to have fun? You know how to make some noise? No. Not you. Mitch Walker. Wait a minute, Mitch Walker. You’re a tramp. Like all the others. All of them. Wait a minute, Walker. I got something for you. I got a quarter for you.”
And she flung the bottle at me, hurling it across the front of the car with all her strength. She stood there raging with laughter. “You’re all tramps,” she screamed. “All bums. All of you out here.”
She stopped laughing and looked around wildly, searching for something, somebody in that crowd of men. She didn’t find it, and this made her laugh even louder, wilder.
By that time, two housemen had come across the yard. One of them was trying to get Mrs. Cassel to get out of the car and the other was shouting at us. “Get out of here. Go on, get back to your barracks.”
Mrs. Cassel screeched with laughter. “Yeaah. Get out of here. Circus over. Go on. Get out of here. Trash.”
The houseman spotted Potter and Handecker in the mob. “What’s the matter with you two men, Potter? Handecker? Can’t you handle these men? You like for me to tell Mr. Barton M. Cassel you can’t handle these men?”
Handecker went into action. His voice cracked like whips across the backs of the retreating men. Potter began pushing and herding the men back toward the barracks. They had them lined up and marching by the time they reached the rear gate. The prisoners were still yelling at the tops of their voices for Eve Cassel to come down there and open her circus.
I thought of something and glanced around. Every man that worked on the Great Plains Empire was in that barnyard at the moment except one.
Evans Howell was nowhere to be seen.
I came up out of a nightmare with somebody’s hand gripping my shoulder, shaking me.
In my nightmare I was being interrogated in a room alone with Fred Palmer. I was on my knees, already paralyzed by his expert questioning. I knew my kidneys were ruptured, a disc was cracked in my spine and the side of his hand across my neck had stunned me so I could not move my arms or legs. But I was still conscious, I could still feel every new agony when he struck me in every vital zone of my body.
I opened my eyes, protesting. The only light was from the two twenty-five watt bulbs that burned all night at each end of the barracks.
I recognized the face of Bub Turner, the barracks-master, the man in charge of doling out water in the men’s room.
“Hey, Walker. Hey. Get up.”
“What’s the matter? What you want? What time is it?”
“About two. They want to see you.”
“Who?” I sat up.
“Mr. Handecker. Mr. Potter. Out front of the barracks.”
I swallowed at the sudden hot water that formed around my tongue, the taste of gall. I nodded, and stood up, slipping into my slacks.
They were waiting in the dark, about ten feet from the barracks entrance. The wan shaft of the twenty-five watt bulb reached almost to their feet on the crusted ground.
They stood on each side of me when I reached the end of the light shaft and stopped.
“Walker,” Handecker said. “We want to talk to you.”
“You look like trouble, Walker,” Potter said.
“You went up to see Mr. Evans Howell tonight,” Handecker said.
“You didn’t ask us,” Potter said.
“He sent for me.”
“Still, man, you got to know better than that.”
“When you go see anybody up front, you tell us first.”
“What did he say to you?” Handecker said.
I shrugged.
“Did you say anything to him?” Potter said.
“About what?”
“Like get smart, man. We don’t want no trouble. Like the fun we try to help these poor guys have.”
“Cards? Craps?” I said it innocently.
“Yeah,” Handecker said, losing his temper. “Like cards. Like craps. Like Old Man Hogan. Like the Mexican kid. Like anything.”
“What’d you tell him?” Potter said.
“You ain’t going up there no more,” Handecker said.
“Why not?” I set myself on the balls of my feet, reading their slow-burner minds.
“Because next time you’re gonna be smarter.” Handecker spoke with a grunt, setting himself to swing.
I moved backwards before Potter could jump me or Handecker could swing that big fist. They laughed in the darkness, liking this. I wasn’t going to stand still for it.
As they set themselves again, I figured it was Handecker who’d be most enraged. And the madder a man was, the poorer fighter he was. For that moment I let Potter move as he liked, knowing he would wait for Handecker to clout me first.
I waited until Handecker started that thick arm up. I brought up my right arm just enough to ward off the blow and I caught his pants and belt buckle in my left fist, twisting it and jerking upward. He came up on his toes, grunting and I bounced him like that. For a moment his body was between Potter and me.
Handecker swung with his left but I chopped the side of my hand across his Adam’s apple and his fist fell before it even touched me.
Potter was trying to get at me around Handecker. Handecker was hanging helpless, unable to breathe. I danced him along with Potter, driving my extended fingers into his solar plexus with such force that he went insane with agony, forgetting the terrible agony in his throat.
Handecker sagged, sobbing and gasping for breath. Potter paused for a second, shocked that Handecker was hanging there helpless already. Why not? Hadn’t I learned all this in my nightmares? Hadn’t I watched that old master, Fred Palmer, cripple and paralyze men in interrogation rooms for three months? Fred Palmer. Everything a good detective should be.
As Potter paused, I doubled my fist and drove it full into Handecker’s face, releasing him at the same time. His two-hundred pounds toppled against Potter and Potter cried out, trying to untangle himself before I got to him.
He didn’t make it.
As he came up, I chopped him across the side of his neck, and he straightened, sprawling out on the ground. He struck on his face without even breaking his fall.
I stood there looking down at them a moment. Potter moved his head, mewling. I kicked him in the face and he stopped that. I turned and walked back toward the barracks, feeling good, feeling clean for the first time in a week, feeling cleaner than a shower would make me feel.