The Brave Cowboy (17 page)

“Sure,” said Burns; “in a minute.”

There was a sudden crash of plumbing, the suck and snarl of violent waters, the jarring pipes. Then the cellblock door ground open, screeching on its hinges, and four trusties came in with their mops, buckets, evil-smelling liquids, and sick, sneaky, suspicious faces. Silently and promptly they went to work while the guard watched them from the doorway, remote in his power and authority, immediate in his menace.

Burns sat down on the foot of Bondi’s pallet. He said nothing. Bondi watched him, observing with conscious interest his friend’s predatory profile, the black hat concealing the eyes in shadow, the black hair grown wild and curly over the nape of the neck. Poor Jack, he thought, poor old Jack—born too late, out of place, out of time. Look at him, the scheming atavist, all wound up in reality looking for a tunnel back to his boy’s dream world of space and horses and sunlight.

One of the trusties shuffled by in the corridor past their cell, pushing a broom, followed by a second trusty leaning despondently on the handle of a sopping, rancid mop. The sour disinfectant smell of public institutions poured into the cell, recalling Bondi to his former preoccupations. That ancient legal stink, he growled to himself; the smog of history, the foul stench of the dead but unburied past.

“Awful,” Burns mumbled, as if sharing the thought “Gotta get outa here before we die of pure misery.”

But necessary, thought Bondi, given the situation: “What’d you say?” he asked Burns.”

“What?” Burns said. He scratched at his bristling chin. “Stop mumblin,” he said, scratching his chin and staring at the floor. “We oughta get started right away.”

“A few more minutes,” Bondi said, “You’re the one that’s mumbling,” he added.

“I’m figurin,” said Burns.

“I should hope so. What will you do if and when yon chew your way out of here?”

Burns looked at the six other men in the cell—the two Navajos, sombre and motionless, a pair of Pueblo Indians whispering together, the old gray vagrant Konowalski crumpled on his bunk, one adobe-colored Mexican washing his socks in the toilet bowl. “What’ll I do?” Burns said. “I ain’t sure; guess I’ll head for the tracks and hop the first freight outa town. What else?” He stared at Bondi now, his eyes a little stern with reproval.

Bondi understood, remembering suddenly that he and Burns were not alone. Am I a complete fool? he thought. I’m not taking this affair seriously enough. An alarming lack of native wit. “I suppose that’s the only thing you can do.” he said aloud. He was thinking, however, that the cowboy would surely go directly to his—Bondi’s—house to recover his gear and his horse. And there, if anyone had been perceptive enough to notice the obvious alliance between Bondi and the cowboy, exactly there is where the Law would go first, seeking Burns or news of him.

They heard again the grinding squeal of metal on metal, then the rumble and crash of the cellblock door. They’ve gone, thought Bondi.

“They all out?” Burns said.

Bondi stood up, went to the gate of the cell and looked down the center corridor. The door was shut— no sign or sound of trusties or guard. “They’ve gone,” he said; “but it might be a good idea to wait a few more minutes. The guard might be hanging around in the hall outside.”

“What of it?” Burns said; “he can’t see us unless he comes in.”

“He might be able to hear the file.”

“Hear it? Through all them walls?”

“Well, I don’t know,” Bondi said; “I said he might. How should I know? How much noise are you planning to make?”

“Not much.” Burns stood by the bars, listening. “How can we tell if the guard’s gone?”

“We can’t,” Bondi said; “not from here. You might get one of those lads in the bullpen to check for you.”

“All right,” Burns said, “that’s what we’ll do.” He went to the front of the cell and looked across the corridor into the yellow gloom of the bullpen, where several shadows in human shape straggled miserably over the cold cement or lay prone on steel tabletops. “Hey!” Burns said; “hey, one of you fellas…”

No one made any move to answer him; he was about to speak again but was interrupted by the flushing of the toilet in the adjoining cell. He waited until the clamor had died down, then called again. “Hey! one of you fellas do me a favor?”

One of the men slouching about the pen came close to the bars on the other side of the corridor; he scowled at Burns. “What’re we supposed to sleep on?” he said; “they ain’t no mattresses or blankets in here.”

“Look pardner,” Burns said, “I’ll give you my blanket if you’ll help me out some. Is the guard gone?”

“How about a pad too?” the man said.

“Okay. But you gotta help me. Is the guard gone?”

“Sure he’s gone.” The fellow sagged against the bars, his hands hanging to the steel above his bead. “What would he hang around for?”

“Well, make sure,” Burns said; “take a look.”

“I don’t hafta,” the man said; “I know he’s gone.”

Burns turned to Bondi. “This one ain’t much good,” he said.

“Maybe I should have stayed in the bullpen,” Bondi said. “I could have stood guard for you all night. Maybe you’d better wait until tomorrow night.”

Burns smiled. “That’s no kinda talk for an anarchist,” he said. “We’re checkin outa here tonight. And I need you to help with the file work.”

“How about that blanket?” the man in the bullpen said.

“Don’t give it to him,” Bondi said. “He won’t look out for you. All he wants to do is sleep.”

“I know,” Burns said. “Maybe I shoulda asked one of them other cabrones.”

“Don’t bother. You won’t get anyone to stay up all night watching out for the guards just so You can file your way out of here. You can’t trust any of those boys, anyway. You’d better forget the whole thing.” Bondi rubbed the itchy spot on his shank where something had bitten him during the previous night “Mark my words,” he said.

“You gonna give me that blanket, cowboy?” The man in the bullpen leaned on the bars, now letting his arms dangle through them. The light, coming from behind his head, made it difficult to see his face. Nothing certain but the black shape, the shining bald skull.

Bondi rubbed his itch. Cockroaches, he thought, lice, spiders, ticks, worms, flies, microbes, bacilli…

“Kind of a bad-tempered bunch in that bullpen,” Burns said; “I shoulda let them alone.” He stripped the blanket from his own bunk and passed it through the bars. “Here,” he said—-“catch.” He tossed it, rolled up, through the intervening space; the man in the bullpen failed to catch it but picked it up from the floor and pulled it through to his own side.

“How about the mattress?” he said, gathering the rag of a blanket under his arm. “Huh?”

“You can go to hell,” Burns said. He turned his back to the bullpen and the corridor, went to his selected corner nearest the window. “Let’s get to work, boys,” he said, and pulled the two files out of Ms boots. Blue dull-gleaming instruments, hard, clean, perfect, fresh from the machine shops. He offered one of them to Bondi. “Take it,” he said, a sardonic grin on his face, “Or do you have to think it over first?”

You insolent bastard, Bondi thought; he stepped forward and took the file. “I’d be glad to be of assistance,” he said.

Burns squatted down by the latticework of bars. The cell consisted of one solid steel wall separating it from the next cell and three barriers of intersecting bars reaching from floor to ceiling which divided it from the corridor and the catwalk surrounding the cellblock: the cell was not a room but a cage. “I’ll start here,” Burns said, indicating a right angle of iron about eighteen inches above the floor.

Bondi went down on one knee beside him. “What shall I do?” he said. “Keep time?”

“Let’s both work on the same bar,” the cowboy said: “you on one side, me on the other. We’ll cut it through here at the bottom and then bend it up—if we can—and maybe that’ll do the trick. That might be all we need.”

The Indians watched them, and said nothing. The old vagrant slept, the Mexican twisted his socks, dripping water on the floor: he saw the glimmering files then and his eyes widened, his mouth sagged open.

Burns winked at Bondi, spat on his palms, rubbed them together, picked up his file and ground it against the iron bar—a grating sound, low-pitched and dull. Once, twice, he scraped the file across the bar, then stopped to listen. From beyond their wall came the sound of Greene singing, of Hoskins preaching, the coughs and groans and chatter of the others, an explosion of activity in the plumbing system. “Not so bad,” Burns said; he paused. “But they’ll hear us in a minute, ever one of them.”

“What can we do about it?” Bondi said.

“Nothing.” Burns went to work again, grinding his file edge into the iron bar. “We could sing… but that ain’t gonna cover it up neither. Besides, this is gonna take a mighty long time.” He filed steadily, with quick short strokes; within a few moments a small shining notch appeared on the side of the bar, and on the cement below the bright hot silvery dust began to accumulate, to glisten—iron sweat, the jewels of freedom.

Madness, thought Bondi, this is madness. He drew
his file across the bitter iron—God! He was afraid he might burst out laughing—or weeping. A spell of vertigo clouded his vision; it passed but left his nerves vibrating like violin strings. He kept on; he applied the heavy file to the bar with all the free weight of his body. Here we go, he thought, here we go—God knows where!

“Jeez!” the Mexican said, coming close to them, “what you guys doin?”

The cowboy laughed. “We’re workin our way through college,” he said; “we’re goin home. Wanta come along?” Already his forehead was shining with sweat, his black hair dangling over one eye. “How about it,
cuate?
”

“This is bad,” the Mexican said. “Lots of trouble. Not for me, no thanks. I get out in a week.”

“A week’s too long for me,” Burns said, filing stead-fly on. “No more of this jailhouse stink for me…”

While Bondi, furious and amazed at his own audacity, wondered what had happened to himself: I’m in league with a fanatic, he thought, a libertine maniac. Suppose I were caught at this criminal occupation? He filed deeper into the iron. This is a criminal activity, he reminded himself, a felonious enterprise; complicity in a jailbreak. Aiding and abetting; quite serious: almost as bad as actually escaping. The Law giveth and the Law taketh away, but retaliation is forbidden and evasion of punishment itself is a crime. He felt his soft, academic muscles relenting before the resisting iron, his thoughts hesitating before the awful magnificence of Authority. But he continued to gnaw at the bar with his slender weapon; particle by particle, grain by metal grain, with painful drudging slowness, the disintegration of the bar proceeded.

Burns, in rhythm with his labor, began to sing:

A comic, Bondi said to himself, at a time like this
he reveals himself: a bloody comic! He ground at the bar and when the refrain came, joined in:

They grinned at each other through their sweat and the smoky gloom of the air; they toiled and sang and grinned like exceedingly foolish children, while the whole cellblock listened. A pang of pleasure, like an illumination, shot through Bondi’s nerves; for a few brief irrational moments he was deliriously happy. Then he, then both of them, became aware of the enveloping silence: not a complete absence of noise—somewhere an old man was coughing his lungs out, somebody was snoring in the next cell, an Indian chanted softly over his clasped hands—but a sudden and striking lapse in the gabble, shouting and mutter of jailhouse conversations.

Bondi and the cowboy stopped their work for a moment to listen. Neither said a word; they waited for the sound of the cellblock door, the voice of a guard. But there was nothing.

Then came the saxophone tones of Timothy Greene, speaking from the adjoining cell. He said: “What you boys cookin up in there? You-all sharpening up your toenails, maybe? You brushin your teeth?”

Bondi did not know what to say. He left it up to Burns. The cowboy squatted there, head tilted to one side, eyes half closed; his right hand and the file rested lightly on his left knee.

“You boys hopin maybe to leave us?” said Greene.

Burns answered this. “Yeah,” he said; “we’re hopin. And we’ll be pretty busy for a while. Don’t you worry none about us.”

“Sure ain’t gonna worry about you, man.”

“If you hear anything give us the word.”

“Sure will, man,” said Greene; “that I’ll do.”

“Much obliged,” Burns said, and lie returned to his work: Zing! Zing! went the stroking file.

Bondi sighed, crossed himself, and went back to work.

B
LUE
,
RED
,
YELLOW
,
FLASHING
AND
DANCING
—crash of machinery and a soaring wall of gray tombs, monuments, cathedrals of power… while the blue red yellow shrieks of neon—frantic, eyeball-clutching—splashed, blared in his face, blinding, inviting catastrophe: a woman, a child, a pride of young men, sightless, skin-seared, moved in agonizing slow motion across the asphalt path of his machine—forty tons of steel, iron, rubber, glass, oil, a cargo of metal and the mere thing of flesh that drove and was driven by it— himself…

He was sick, miserably and suddenly and inhumanly sick; greased convulsions of nausea in his stomach and throat, a stinging, glitter of fire and glass behind his eyes, exploding his skull…

I’ve got to stop, he repeated to himself, got to find a place to park this brute, have to get that sewage out of my stomach…

He went through a yellow light while human figures scuttled past his fenders; he blinked his watering eyes, wiped sweat and dust from his forehead, and turned at a narrow sidestreet between a warehouse—SLOAN’S MOVING AND STORAGE DON’T MAKE A MOVE—and a used-car lot and followed the dark alleyway past parked cars, back lots, garbage cans, warehouses, barbed wire, cyclone fences, telephone poles… He steered his tractor and his freight trailer into the vacant space over the black cinders of a feedmill loading lot,
parked askew, slantwise, across the entrance and half the interior, shut off the engine, leaned on the doorhandle and sagged with closed eyes, nearly falling, out and onto his knees on the ground and was sick at once, without preliminaries…