Ginny Gall (46 page)

The next day he returns the shard to Placer who loses it in a game of two punch to a man who breaks it against a bone in his hip trying to stab a vein. “He never meant to go tits up either,” Placer says, disgusted.

On a sunny morning in late September when the cattails in the road ditches are starting to fray Delvin and three of the leftover KO Boys are shipped to Uniball, a brick and wire stronghold out in the western part of the state, and there, a month later, Delvin is raped for the first time. The rapist, a metal worker from Missouri named Big Cordell Owlsley, decided Delvin was his kind of boy, and one afternoon in bleak weather he shoves him against a stack of wet lumber and holds him there while Delvin tries to knock his hand away and can’t. God save me, he silently says. They are in the shadows in back of the
carpentry shop where nobody can see them except those who could spy on them from the slit windows of their cells. It is a show. The lumber has a sour smell. My stage, Delvin thinks, pitying himself and angry. Cordell spins him around and pins him against the raw boards and holds him until he stops squirming. The big man wants first to get across to him that Delvin is not strong or able and he does this. He pulls Delvin’s stripes down, and as he does so Delvin recalls somebody doing this years ago when he was a child in the foundling home and he feels now as he did then, helpless and brokenhearted. It is near dark, fall going on wintertime, and cold on his bare ass and the wood is wet against his thighs and he thinks
I got to dry off
and he says this like a prayer but the man pays no mind. Big C’s stiff wrinkled penis bangs against him, knocking on the door that he forces open, lifting as he does so. He’s smeared grease on himself that he got from a thick streak on the leg of his uniform. Searing pain skeets up into Delvin’s chest and down his legs and then, like a wave, slackens and he can feel it rolling back in a slow decline that becomes more fantastical and sustaining as it goes. He leans forward against the wood and the hardness and sourness of the logs do not bother him so much. A humid disgust rolls sloppily through him. Then he presses back hard against the man’s belly that he can feel jamming his spine and this is fantastical too, impossible to believe and somehow encouraging, and for a second he feels safe and without much to care about and then the humiliation and the shame build a putrid radiance and he knows himself hopeless and desolate like a child hurled down into muddy water, except more helpless and smaller than a child, and he wishes the man would go ahead and kill him.

In a few seconds Big Cordell is through. He turns Delvin around and embraces him and leans with him against the sour lumber so their two bodies are heaped together like spillage left over from a botched organic process, some feral disaster and murderous unoxidized carnage, something done now for good, and then as Cordell gets his strength back he cuffs him in the temple with the heel of his hand and tells him he is lucky not to be dead.

“Yeah, dead,” Delvin wheezes and Big C cuffs him again.

Everybody who didn’t see it says he did and they are all for it, or close to all because they knew what was up when they saw it. The three KO boys who came with him to Uniball look pityingly at him, scared near witless, he thinks, and one, Carl Crawford, mocks him to his face. For three days he walks with a limp and then for some reason extends it in duration until he becomes known for his limp, a made-up thing, something private to himself no one else knows the truth of. Shame turns his face at first and he knows he is hurt deep and this shakes him but in prison each day is the same, you can count on that and he begins to merge with the sameness, the eat and sleep and work of it and the walk and the muttering and the lights on all the time and nobody your brother but everybody your kin and he returns slowly to himself despite the shame. Nobody cares how he feels about it and he waits for that time to come for him too.

The curtain raiser rape is the initiation. Tidal, hurried at first then less so, the ushering frenzy never quite gone from it, the drear and loneliness underneath it not ever quite obscured, the sense he gets not of endearment or even of partnership maintained like a necessary toll, the distancing, the forsaken man standing in rain at the edge of a muddy field part of it, a regular feature, still times come when he reaches back and strokes the man’s sleek body. Occasionally Big C pulls him around so he faces him. He holds his forearm over Delvin’s eyes. “Got me some,” he says, maybe those words or others drowned in the corrosions of his own energy, but mostly there are no features at all beyond the squeak and slap of flesh and his greedy eyes looking. “You get out of here,” Big C says when it is over and pulls him back and kisses him sloppily on the mouth and then half throws him away. He wants Delvin ripely and keeps him handy like a ripped-away branch stuck in a bucket of water, until one day Delvin, grown stronger, sprouts, coming into himself fully despite delays, more steely in his mind, and without caring much about what happens, turns suddenly in the big man’s arms and batters his skull half in with a piece of angle iron.

He leaves him lying evermore only partially alive, in a pile of wooden boxes used to ship the fruitcakes the prison bakery is famous for.

Everybody sees that too.

And he knows after they don’t come for him that he’ll be left alone now to walk the halls and climb and descend the steel stairs and go out the big double doors to the trucks and ride to the fields and bend his back over a hoe or drag a sack or pile the cotton in the cotton house or into the wagons for the mules to haul to the gin and he will get to eat his meals in peace and sit on his bunk scribbling into his little torn notebook (
sky like a dense gray blanket
;
somebody left a scrap of pink ribbon tied to a gallberry branch
;
for ten days the water has tasted of sulfur
) and time with him in it will pass until he can run again.

It isn’t long before he finds a sweet boy of his own. Gal boy. Frankie Overstreet, from Caning Bay, Louisiana, a strong boy who is steady and can take direction. Together they work on the next escape, which means nothing more than on Juneteenth afternoon while the cicadas shrill in the hard maple trees the two of them walk away from the work gang sent out in the aftermath of the Tull river flood. They are cutting brush and pulling it away from a two-story house that floated off its foundation and across a field into a slough behind the Mercantile Appliance factory outside Covington when Delvin, followed by Frankie, steps off a thigh-sized maple limb into a second-floor bedroom, walks through the open bedroom doorway, along the hall and down the stairs, through the living room and out an unwatched west-facing window on the other side and slips into the woods.

He is gone this time for three days shy of a month. During this time Frankie leaves on a truck hauling oysters to Texas.

In New Orleans a waitress he meets puts him up in her cottage in the sixth ward, where he gets a job washing dishes at the Empire restaurant, famous for redfish stew and an étouffée made with six kinds of seafood all caught locally. It is there that a vacationing prison guard named Elder Watkins spots him. Watkins doesn’t at first rec
ognize Delvin, but then on his way back to town, where his wife and brother wait in a French Quarter hotel, he becomes convinced that the scowling boy he glimpsed through the open kitchen door was none other than the escapee Delvin Walker, had to be. He stops in a rain squall with water dripping down his neck to use a police call box on Charles street that his brother, a New Orleans cop on furlough for taking kickbacks from restaurants such as the Empire, has lent him his key to and asks for help.

The nearest station house sends two cars and the cops capture Delvin who has not noticed Watkins; he is sitting on the steps out back, eating a bowl of crab stew and drinking from a bottle of Cuban rum with some of the busboys and the waitress Corleen Bell, who’s been soaking the male influence out of his body for the past two weeks, and he thinks he is, if not safe, free, and is beginning to feel comfortable at Corleen’s house, where as soon as he gets a little ahead he is planning to start his book of factual experience that he is calling at this time
Layaway Dixie
.

The cops come trotting down the fly space between the restaurant and the Pearl Box Factory fence on the other side and scoop Delvin up before he hardly knows what is happening. As they begin to beat him, he says calmly, “I am all right about going with you.” He says this three or four times before they knock him senseless.

Concussed, his left arm (the stronger one) broken, he is carried across state lines back to Uniball, where the arm is splinted using untreated pine flats and he is ushered into the disposal cell, one of several rooms in the basement under the former gymnasium from when Uniball was a private school for the wayward sons of rich planters. These rooms that were once storage bins have been enclosed and set with stout cross-braced metal doors, new this year, painted yellow.

Delvin is flung into the second bin from the right as you look down the hall. The throw half unsets his arm, a problem he is forced to correct on his own, which he does with his right hand pushing his back hard against the mortar wall to try to counterbalance the stabbing pain.

He screams, but then who, thrown battered and broken-armed
into moldy darkness, does not scream from time to time? The guards ignore him.

It is here he discovers that his spirit has the kind of amplification and reaching toward far places that allows him to lie still while snakes crawl over him.

Ginny Galled, you might say—a negro name, Ginny Gall, for the hell beyond hell, hell’s hell—he begins to tell himself his book.

. . .
born on the back steps of a sporting girl’s house in Chattanooga and from there travels a crooked way through the cobbled streets of that town and into the woods and back to the visiting circus and then to the undertaker’s house where as a six-year-old boy he liked to sit on the back of the hairy-footed dray horse Old Bob. The horse was so wide he believed he could sleep on his back, get a mattress and blanket and move onto him. He asked Mr. Oliver if he could and Mr. O laughed his high sweet laugh and said why sholy you can my boy and it wasn’t until they caught him dragging the mattress from his little sleigh bed out the back door that he was stopped from trying. “But you told me,” he said to Mr. O as tears streamed down his face. “Yes, I did, and I was wrong to tell you you could do something that I couldn’t really let you do.” Mr. O was tangled up. “I’ll have to keep an eye on myself from now on,” he said. “I’ll keep an eye on you too,” the little boy said. Mr. O said, “I’m sorry, Slip,” which was what he was called around the house in those days.

When the trap in his cell door opens and his two pails are handed out to the guard and in a minute the door opens again and in are shoved two fresh buckets, one an empty slop pail and the other his week’s worth of what the underground population calls cinder soup, with a chunk of cornbread so hard it has sunk to the bottom without soaking any juice in, he is barely interrupted, even in his thoughts, or especially in his thoughts.

He continues his story. In it he lists the different local bugs and green fruits he ate as a child, including red and black ants, doodlebugs, bees, dirt dobbers, beetles of various kinds, four types of grasshoppers, worms, all raw; among the fruits he ate: green plums, blackberries and raspberries, cherries, apples, grapes, quinces and
figs. He lies quietly on his wood bunk trying to think of others. He sees his name written high on the wall of his bedroom where he climbed up a stepladder to scrawl it, using one of Mr. O’s mascara pens from the preparation room down in the basement.

The story goes uninterruptedly on.

He begins to say parts of it over to himself until they fill his memory.

The first line of the book is
I waked to the sight of a woman wildly dancing
. He says this sentence over to himself, and all the sentences that follow, until they are carved into his brain sentence after sentence and he has memorized a first chapter. The work is both exhilarating and tedious, and there begin to be times when what he says outloud is not strictly true. He didn’t really chase Jack Elbert down the alley and leg-swipe him so he fell into the barrel of an old washing machine and broke his left ankle. It didn’t happen like that. Nor did old Mr. Anse Carter say he, Delvin, was bound for the hangman’s noose. He said the Ghost was.

He goes over these parts of the story and corrects them and then changes them again, just slightly. He can’t stay away from the little changes that seem to brighten things.

He grows confused and loses his place.

He stops telling the book for a day and lies on his back, sleeping and thinking and listening to the scurrying of the rats, and realizes finally that something is breaking apart inside him. He begins to weep. For a week he cries, waking each day in the slush of himself and turning on his side and weeping, letting the tears run down his face and drop onto the packed dirt.

He thinks, well, I can maybe get to the other side of this bawling, but then his thoughts cut back to his mother and his phantom father and Mr. O and the professor in his truck and Celia—and Celia—everything becomes elaborated and tricked out with grief.

When the tears finally stop he is not redeemed or relieved or free in any way he can figure, he is only exhausted.

Above his head the heavy wooden floorboards of the kitchen creak as the cooks walk back and forth. “Yall need to go off and take
lessons
,” he cries. A muffled curse comes back. A guard he doesn’t know unlocks the door, steps in and punches him in the face. “You think that hurt?” Delvin says and licks the blood off his lips. The guard has already stepped back out into the corridor.

Sometimes in his dreams he smells horses. Sometimes in his dreams his mother squats alone beside a small night fire in woods so vast all the sound is lost in them. He wakes crying.

Noises are coming out of his mouth. The noises are unfamiliar and have a grouchy, splintery quality that scares him. It is as if some old man with bad intentions is speaking from his head. He turns on his side and tries to remember the time Mr. Oliver took him fishing. They both slipped on a blue clay bank and fell into the little pond out on Hazel Burch’s farm and scared the ducks, and a big drake came after them and scared them both. The noises are wheezing and snorting now, and he thinks, well I am a madman. He loses track after that of how things are with him, but one day the door opens wide and two men drag him out and he is carried to the infirmary and flung down onto a bed.