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By Root 2032 0

of the men thought that using the slop buckets was dandified, pretentious, effeminate: they preferred using the floor, and you had to be careful where you walked, especially if you were barefoot, as many of them were who couldn’t afford shoes. Nail never took off his brogans, but still he could feel an occasional squish beneath his feet as he stumbled through the rows of bunks, feeling his way with his hands, and touching an arm or a foot here and there, and unwittingly waking a man or two, who cursed. He reached one of the pots, black or white, just in the nick of time. The pot smelled far worse than Toy’s breath, and Nail poured into it a searing torrent of distress from his guts. He continued to squat there until long after the stabs and quakes had stopped tearing within him. He hoped that if he waited long enough, Toy would be asleep when he returned to the bunk.

But Toy suffered from insomnia and welcomed him back and resumed his long story of the Memphis brothel. Then he thought of an even better story: the time he found that nymphomaniac in the strawberry patch. He had to interrupt this story twice to allow Nail to stumble off into the darkness to the commode. Toy was still breathing his vile story when Nail managed at last to doze off.

The five o’clock gong woke him. Toy was still talking but had rolled onto his back and was telling his story to the ceiling, a tale of some De Valls Bluff girls who gang-raped a twelve-year-old Lonoke boy, not Toy but his cousin Virgil. At the fifth clang of the gong a guard yelled, “Rise and shine ’em, squad up and jump.” When Nail tried to get out of bed, he knew he was not going to be able to rise or to shine, to squad up or even to eat, let alone to jump. He was sicker than a dog, and it wasn’t any food he’d eaten that had done it either.

As Toy, Stardust, and Thirteen lined up and prepared to get into lock-step, Nail said to them, “Tell ’em I need a doctor.”

Much later in the morning two Negro trusties, not the same two who had held him when Fat Gabe laid the strap on him, came and got him and dragged him upstairs to the attic. It wasn’t a bare attic but had been fixed up into a kind of room. It had two windows, both of them rendered almost opaque by flyspecks. There were dirt-dobber nests on the rafters. The black men put him on one of the two cots and left him there. He was too sick to get up and reconnoiter the surroundings, but from where he lay he could see the blurred shapes of black bars through each flyspeck-frosted windowpane. The whole room smelled foul in a new kind of foulness that was almost a relief from the smell of Toy’s breath and the slop bucket because it was different: a smell of sickness and decay and, yes, something that Nail realized he’d never smelled before: death. The cot that Nail lay on had gray sheets that were ripped and stained but appeared to have been washed recently, while the other cot had sheets and blankets that were thick with dried blood and other discharges. The room was terribly cold yet not absolutely frigid; Nail realized that because it was in the building’s attic it received some warmth rising up from the barracks below, what little body heat the three hundred men had generated. The extreme cold of the room would not ordinarily have bothered him, but now in this sickness he was weak and began to shiver uncontrollably. Nail had enough strength to reach the other cot and remove its bloody blanket and wrap himself in it.

Eventually a man came in, accompanied by two more of the black trusties. He was dressed like them, dressed like Nail, in clothing printed with wide gray stripes. He wore thick spectacles and did not look like a criminal. He stared down at Nail not with curiosity or kindness but with a kind of boredom, and he asked, “What do you need?”

“I need a doctor, I reckon,” Nail said.

“You won’t get one,” the man said. “I used to be one. I’m the closest to one you’ll find. Gode’s my name. Now what do you need?”

“Something for my stomach,” Nail said. “Or my bowels. Or both.”

“Gaumed up or trots?”

“Trots.”

“Wee-wawed any?