Harley Sweet answered the phone.
'You make sure that boy's all right tonight,' I said.
'Say again?'
'Bad things happen to people in your jail, Harley. They'd better not happen to my client.'
'Your client is a pissant I wouldn't take time to spit on if he was burning… You liberals kill me, Billy Bob. You want to come over here and feed Jimmy Cole and Garland T. Moon, see they got toilet paper and showers and ain't nobody infringing on their rights?… I didn't think so.'
He hung up.
Neither Harley nor I could guess how much our lives would change because of that night's events.
* * *
chapter five
At 12:01 a.m. the turnkey stopped by Harley Sweet's office and signed off his shift.
'I caught Jimmy Cole eating a bar of soap,' he said.
'We better get a new cook,' Harley said.
'I wouldn't let that boy get into the hospital, Harley. He's planning something.'
'You haven't had more trouble with Garland T. Moon, have you?'
'No, sir.'
'See there, it just needs Bible study.'
At around 3 a.m. a Mexican in the drunk tank heard the cables on the elevator working, then the wire-mesh door rattling open and a key turning in the barred second door. Harley Sweet walked down the row of cells past the drunk tank with a paper bag rolled in his right hand, his leather-soled boots echoing off the concrete floor, a bleached straw cowboy hat cocked on his head.
The Mexican in the drunk tank, who was surrounded by men sleeping on the floor, pressed his face against the bars and tried to see farther down the corridor but could not.
A key turned in another cell door and Harley's voice said, 'Turn around and lean against the wall. Your face sure don't brighten my work. Your mama must have beat on it with an ugly stick.'
The Mexican in the drunk tank heard scuffling, intense and prolonged, with no words spoken, like that of men who know the cost of a wasted movement or an exhalation of breath. Then there was a single, abrupt gasp, a body collapsing on the floor, followed by a series of blows, which began with a whistling sound, like a baton ripping through the air, then the thunk of wood against muscle and bone, and more blows, one after another, until the Mexican pressed his palms against his ears and crouched in the back of the drunk tank and hid from the sound.
Five minutes passed, then the cell door at the end of the corridor clanged shut again and a figure dressed like Harley walked past the bars of the drunk tank, the straw hat held to the side of his face. The wire-mesh door on the elevator clattered into the jamb, and the walls hummed with the reverberations of the elevator's motor as the cage dropped to the first floor.
A few kids who were still dragging Main said they saw a figure in boots and a white straw hat emerge from the side door of the courthouse and walk across the darkened lawn to Harley's truck, tap on his shirt pocket as though the package of cigarettes he discovered there were a nice surprise, light one, and drive away.
The turnkey who came on duty at 6 a.m. rode up to the third floor of the courthouse and saw nothing out of the ordinary. At 7 a.m. the trusties brought up the food carts loaded with aluminum containers of grits, fried ham, white bread, and black coffee. The men in the drunk tank were fed first, then Lucas Smothers, who had been moved into an isolation cell by the showers. A trusty stopped his food cart in front of Jimmy Cole's cell and tapped a wood serving spoon against the bars.
'Fixing to tote it back, Jimmy Cole… Hey, boy, you want to eat, you better roll it out.'
The trusty looked more closely at the man in the bunk, who was dressed in jailhouse whites, and at the striped pillow pressed down on his face with one arm, and at the thin coppery glint buried in the folds of his throat. The trusty whirled and shouted down the corridor at the turnkey: 'Inmate out on the ground, bossman!'
'What the hell you talking about? That's him right yonder,' the turnkey said, pointing through the bars. Then the turnkey saw the chipped, black baton on the floor under the bunk and the lower part of the face under the pillow. 'Oh Lord have mercy,' he said, and unlocked and flung back the door and then gingerly pulled the pillow loose from the arm folded across it like a person who cannot watch the next frames of film about to flash on a movie screen.
The copper wire had been unwrapped from the head of a broom, twisted into a hangman's noose, dropped over Harley Sweet's neck, and then razored into the flesh. Later, the medical examiner would report that the blows with the baton had been delivered while Harley Sweet strangled to death on his knees.
Garland T. Moon wolfed his breakfast and talked the trusty into filling his tin plate again with grits and the ham fat from the bottom of the serving container. Then he leaped up and grabbed the lip of a steel crossbeam at the top of his cell with his fingertips and did chin-ups in his Jockey undershorts, the veins and sinew in his body erupting across his skin like nests of twigs.
'Hey, bossman, don't Mr Sweet's mother live at 111 Fannin Street?… I'd put a guard on her if I was y'all. You got Jimmy Cole out on the ground, there ain't no telling what might happen,' he said. He dropped flat-footed from the steel crossbeam and giggled uncontrollably.
The courtroom was almost empty when Lucas Smothers appeared before the judge and had his bail reduced from $150,000 to $75,000. His father, Vernon, was supposed to appear in court with a bondsman. He didn't. I put up my property for the bond, then waited on the front steps of the courthouse for Lucas to be processed out of the jail.