Lay Down My Sword and Shield (22 page)

It was a cold, windswept gray morning with hailstones on the ground, and Dixon had just left the shack with the wood detail.

“I think he’s a snitch,” Ramos said. “I seen him eating some vitamin pills in the dark last night.”

We were hunched around the iron stove, bent toward the heat. Our breaths steamed out like ice in the silence.

“Are you sure?” I said.

“He took three of them out of his pocket and swallowed them dry.”

“I don’t know about no vitamin pills,” Joe Bob, our ex-convict, said, “but I got something in my pecker that goes off when I get near a snitch, and that boy gives me a real bone.”

“If you’re right, what are we going to do with him?” another man said.

“For openers, you better start shutting up about running,” Joe Bob said. His sandy red hair stuck out from under his stocking cap, and he chewed on the flattened end of a matchstick in one corner of his mouth.

“We ice him,” Ramos said.

“Hey, cut that shit, man,” Joe Bob said. “Ding’ll waste the whole shack.”

“No, he ain’t,” Ramos said. “I’ll tell Kwong that Dixon’s been spitting blood and ask him for some eggs, and then we wait a few days and smother him.”

“I tell you, buddy, they ain’t that stupid,” Joe Bob said.

“We got to take him out one way or another,” O.J., the bootlegger from Okema, said. “If Ding’s greasing him, he’s got to burn somebody.”

“Yeah, you don’t fuck around with guys like this.”

“There’s other ways to get a snitch out of the shack,” Joe Bob said. “We can turn the Turk loose on him, and he’ll ask Ding to transfer over with the pros.”

“You’re not sure about him, anyway,” I said. “He could have gotten those pills off of somebody else in the yard.”

“You know that’s a lot of crap, too, Holland. He smelled like a snitch when he first come in here,” Ramos said.

“He’s a pimp and a wheeler, and that’s all he’s been his whole life. That doesn’t mean he’s working for Ding,” I said.

“I’ll do it in the middle of the night,” Ramos said. “There won’t be no sound, and he’ll look just like every other guy we drug out in the yard.”

“I ain’t telling you what to do,” Joe Bob said, “but you got some pretty amateur shit in your head for this kind of scene. Ding might be a harelip dickhead, but he ain’t dumb and he’s going to fry our balls in a skillet before you get done with this caper.”

“The sonofabitch has to go. What else are we going to do with him?” O.J. said.

“If you got to ice him, use your head a minute and do it out in the yard,” Joe Bob said. “Catch him in a bunch during exercise time and bust him open with the Turk’s trowel. You’ll probably get shot, anyway, but maybe the rest of us won’t get knocked off with you.”

“If you don’t want in it, just stay out of my face,” Ramos said.

“Like I said, I ain’t trying to grow any hairs in your asshole. You just don’t know what you’re doing. Like this escape caper. I chain-ganged in the roughest joint in the South, and I started to run once myself, but you got to be out of your goddamn mind to try and crack a place like this. You got two fences to cut through, there’s a hundred yards of bare ground between both of them, and them gooks up on the platform ain’t going to be reading fortune cookies while you’re hauling for Dixie. You better get your head rewired before Ding lays you out in the yard like he done to that Greek that took off from the wood detail.”

“If I get nailed I’ll buy it running on the other side of that wire,” Ramos said. “I ain’t going to stay here and shit my insides out till somebody rolls me into the yard like a tumblebug. There’s a colored sergeant with a compass and some pliers for the fence, and he figures if we can make it to the sea we can steal a boat and get out far enough for one of our choppers to pick us up.”

“Goddamn, if that ain’t a real pistol, Ramos. I once knew a guy that climbed into the back of a garbage truck with chains on, buried himself in the trash, and rode down the highway with the hacks looking all over for him. Except he almost got fried when they unloaded the truck in the county incinerator. But you got him beat, buddy. Running across North Korea with a nigra. Now that’s cool. You guys ought to stand out like shit in an ice cream factory.”

Ramos didn’t say anything more. He glared at the gray ash in the grate awhile, then paced around the shack, beating his arms in the cold. He didn’t have the intelligence or prison experience to argue with Joe Bob, but we knew that he planned to kill Dixon, regardless of what anyone said.

And it wasn’t long before Dixon knew it, too. He came in from the wood detail late that afternoon, his face red and chafed with windburn, and dropped a load of sticks and roots by the stove. There was snow in his hair, and his quilted pants were wet up to the knees. In the silence we heard Kwong lock the chain on the door. Dixon pulled off his mittens with his teeth and stuck his hands under his armpits.

“Somebody else is going on that bastard next time,” he said. “That whole goddamn field’s picked clean. I broke two fingernails digging down to the ground.”

No one answered.

“Shit, look at them.”

We turned our faces away or found things to do that would remove us from the eventual meeting of eyes between Ramos and Dixon. But instead it was O.J. and Bertie Fast, the drag queen, who tore open the wrapper and let Dixon look for just a moment inside the box.

“What is this crap, anyway?” Dixon said. “Maybe I didn’t wipe my ass clean this morning or something. Don’t I smell sweet enough to you, house mouse?”

“I didn’t say anything,” Bertie said, his voice weak and his eyes searching for a spot on the far wall.

“House mouse, you better not hold out on me.”

“Fuck off, man,” O.J. said. He was sticking twigs into the fire grate, and his jawbones were flat against the skin.

“What’s the deal, then?” Dixon said. “You want me to kick in part of my chow for the soup? Okay. No sweat. Is everybody cool now?”

“Where did you get vitamin pills?” O.J. said.

“Vitamins? You must have a wild crab loose in your brain.” But he was surprised, and there was a flicker of fear in his face.

“Yeah. Like those little red ones Ding gives to the pros,” O.J. said.

“You better see a wig mechanic when you get out of here. You got real problems.”

“You’re up to your bottom lip in Shit’s Creek, buddy,” Joe Bob said. “This ain’t the time to be a Yankee smart-ass.”

“You guys have been flogging your pole too much or something. I mean what kind of joint is this, anyway? I spend the whole day digging in the ice with Kwong jabbing me in the ass, and I come back and you guys got me nailed for a pro.”

“How did you get the pills?” I said.

Everyone was looking at him now. The snow in his hair had melted, and his face was damp with water and perspiration. He held his two bruised fingers in one hand and glanced at the locked door.

“I traded them off a spade in the yard for some cigarettes. All right, so I didn’t share them. Big deal. You going to tear my balls out because I want to stay alive?”

“Which spade?” O.J. said.

“I don’t know. He’s with the N.C.O.’s.”

“There ain’t but one over there,” Ramos said.

“Maybe he’s an enlisted man. What difference does it make? All those boons look alike.”

“Get it straight, cousin,” Joe Bob said.

“You guys already want to fry me. It don’t make any difference what I say. You’ve been pissed ever since I come in here because I wouldn’t put in my chow for guys that were already dead. All of you got a Purple Heart nailed right up in the middle of your forehead because you keep some poor sonofabitch alive a few extra days so he can shit more blood and chew his tongue raw. If I buy it I hope there ain’t a bunch like you around.”

“Okay, you got the pills off a colored sergeant,” Ramos said. He sat cross-legged on his blanket close to the stove, rubbing his dirt-caked bare feet with his hand. “That’s all we wanted to know. Next time you share anything you get in the yard.”

Dixon stared into Ramos’s face, and then realized that he was looking at his executioner.

“Not me, buddy,” he said. “You’re not going to stick my head down in the mattress. None of you pricks are. You find some other cat to hang a frame on. How about Bertie here? He don’t keep his ass soft and fat on bean cakes.”

“Quit shouting. There ain’t anybody going to bother you,” Ramos said. “Just don’t try to bullshit us next time.”

“No, you’re going to ice me. You been wanting to do it a long time, you spic, and now you got these other bastards to go in with you. Hey, Kwong!” He began beating against the wooden door with his fists and kicking his feet into the boards. The chain and padlock reverberated with the blows.

“You get down here. You hear me? I want to see Ding!”

O.J. and Ramos started for him at the same time, but Joe Bob jumped up in front of both of them and stiff-armed them with all his weight in the chest.

“The shit already hit the fan. Just ride it out and stay cool,” he said.

We heard Kwong running through the frozen snow outside. Dixon’s face was white with fear, and he brought his knees into the door as though they could splinter wood and snap metal chain after his feet and fists had failed. Kwong turned the lock and threw open the door, with his burp gun slung on a leather strap around his neck and the barrel pointed like an angry god into the middle of us. His squat, thick body was framed against the gray light and the snow-covered shacks behind him, and his peasant face was concentrated in both anger and anticipation of challenge. He grabbed Dixon by his coat and threw him into the snow, then flicked off the safety on his gun.

“Crazy,” Joe Bob said, pointing to his head. “He had the shits all week.
Shea tu.
Blood coming out his hole.”

We were all frozen in front of the burp gun, each of us breathing deep in our chests, our hearts clicking like dollar watches. I couldn’t look at the gun. Dixon got to his knees in the snow and started crying.

“He needs medicine,” Joe Bob said, and held his head back and pointed his thumb into his mouth. “Shits all the time. Got shit in his brain.”

“You fucked,” Kwong said, and kicked the door shut with his foot, then locked the chain.

He must have hit Dixon with the stock of his burp gun, because we could hear the wood knock into bone, then the two of them crunched off in the snow toward Ding’s billet on the other side of the wire.

The next morning at dawn Kwong was back with two other guards. They opened the door and motioned us against the far wall of the shack with their guns before they stepped inside. The fire in the stove had died out during the night, and the room temperature must have been close to zero. We stood in our socks, shivering under the blankets we held around our shoulders, and tried to look back steadily at Kwong while his eyes passed from face to face. He already knew the ones who had been chosen for the first interrogation, but he enjoyed watching us hang from fishhooks. Then he motioned his burp gun at five of us: O.J., Bertie Fast, Joe Bob, the Turk, and me. We sat down in the middle of the floor and laced on our boots, then marched in single file across the yard with the guards on each side of us. The pale sun had just risen coldly over the hills, and as I looked at our dim shadows on the snow I felt that my last morning was now in progress, and that I should have bought it back there in the Shooting Gallery and whoever shuffles the cards had just discovered his mistake and was about to set things straight.

The wounds in my legs had never healed and had become infected, and when I slowed my pace in the snow Kwong jabbed the barrel of his gun into my scalp. I felt the skin split and I fell forward on my hands and knees. Kwong kicked me in the kidney and pulled me erect by my hair.

“You walk, cocksuck,” he said.

I put my arm over Joe Bob’s shoulder, my side in flames, and limped along with the others to the yellow brick building that Ding used for his headquarters. Bertie Fast’s eyes were wide with terror, and I could see the pulse jumping in his neck. He looked like a child in his oversized quilted uniform and all the blood had drained out of his soft, feminine face. Even Joe Bob, with scars from the black Betty on his butt, was afraid, although he held it down inside himself like a piece of sharp metal. But the wild Turk showed no fear at all, or possibly he didn’t even know what was taking place. His hot black eyes stared out of his white, twisted face, and I wondered if he had the trowel hidden somewhere inside his clothes. His tangled black hair had grown over his shoulders, and he breathed great clouds of vapor, as though he had a fever, through his rotted teeth. He stood immobile with the rest of us while Kwong knocked on the door, and I thought that beyond those hot black eyes there was a furnace instead of a brain.

Ding sat behind his desk in his starched, high-collar uniform with a tea service in front of him. Dixon stood in one corner by the oil stove, his face heavy with lack of sleep, and there was a large, swollen knot above his right eyebrow. His eyes fixed on Ding’s desk when we entered the room, and drops of sweat slid down his forehead in the red glow of the stove.

Ding finished his tea, flicked a finger for a guard to remove the tray, and lit a Russian cigarette. He leaned forward on his elbows, puffing with his harelip, his eyes concentrated like BB’s into the smoke, and I knew that we were all going to enact a long and painful ritual that would compensate Ding in part for his lack of a field command.

“I know there’s a plan for an escape,” he said, quietly. “It’s a very foolish plan that will bring you hardship. There has never been an escape from a Chinese People’s detention center, and you’re hundreds of miles from the American lines. Now, this can be very easy for you, and it will also help the men who would be shot in trying to escape. Give me their names and you can return to your building, and nothing will be done to the men involved.”

We stood in silence, and the snow melted off our clothes in the warmth of the room. I looked at Dixon, and for a moment I wished that Ramos had killed him as soon as he had come back from the wood detail. The cut in my scalp was swelling and drawing tight, and my legs felt unsteady from fear and the pain in my calves.