Читаем Ginny Gall полностью

Delvin can’t figure why so many are on duty and then he thinks he can and worries crazily about it. In a few minutes they will have the dogs working. Delvin can hear them baying over in their compound near the mule barn. He tries to get up but he can’t. He wants now to run for the rope but he knows he won’t do that. He turns on his side, grasps the trunk and pulls himself up, sitting, half lying with his back to the tree. Arnold Anderson, a short, round-faced guard from Tennessee, comes around the side of the big gum.

“Whoa,” he cries and raises his shotgun at him. “Here’s one of em got too scared to go,” he yells. He is laughing and sweating and jumpy with juice. Escapes scare most of the guards half to death. Going after these villains isn’t like hunting quail or rabbits. It is dangerous. Anderson waves the gun at Delvin.

“Get down on the ground, pancake.”

He knows Delvin by name but Delvin can see he isn’t going to know him right now. He slides to the ground and presses his face into the dirt. My home. He smells something sweet and his mind flies to a field of grain he and the professor’d passed one late afternoon in Arkansas when the sun looked like it was sinking right down into the yellow wheat. He is sleepy. He wishes he could lie with his face in the dirt and sleep his life away.

They had to put them on the stand because there was nothing else to do. The two doctors said the women had been raped (at least they’d had sexual relations, Your Honor) and four of the white boys who’d been in the fight said they’d seen the negroes with the women and the women said they’d been held down and raped and nobody, white or colored, stood up and said the boys didn’t do it and God wasn’t up to testifying on this one so of course they had to put them on the stand.

Two of them couldn’t follow the simplest question.

They don’t even goddamn know they’re being tried for anything, Pullen said. He had just gotten a haircut and his hair gleamed like the procedure included a fresh shellacking and he smelled of a musky scalp rub. He laughed when he said this. They were sitting in the front room of their hotel office with the supper dishes stacked around them on the big cypresswood table covered with a stained white tablecloth.

You’re correct there, Davis, Gammon said. He had taken to calling Pullen by his first name though he knew he didn’t like it.

Four of the boys wouldn’t have much to say except they didn’t do it.

Hell, Pullen said picking with his fingernail at the rind of beef fat that still had the blue slaughterhouse stamp on it, half of em can’t even remember what it is they are charged with.

Well, long as you can remember, Davis, Billy Gammon said.

Har, har, Pullen gusted, a look of malevolence in his large narrowed gray eyes.