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All Good Men

Terry Tanner

Largo Loco, bad Spanish for the tall madman, wasn't the tallest convict in Yuma Penitentiary, or the most insane. There was a Swede with two inches more height, and several men just as crazy, but the name stuck to the gaunt Mexican because Lazaro Lujan was hard for the gringos to remember. He'd counted on being hanged after chopping up his wife and four kids with an ax in a drunken rage, and had been crying about the injustice of a life sentence since the day he got there.

"I'll get you a rope, if it'll stop your whining," I used to tell him.

"Veneno," he'd say, hissing the word and flicking his tongue, like a serpent speaking. He'd told everyone in the joint about the twenty-dollar gold piece he swallowed the day he was arrested, and had re-swallowed regularly to keep from being killed for it. Nobody ever saw the money.

"Out of circulation," was the way he put it. "You get for me the veneno, and I'll get for you the gold."

I came here chained to Jasper Sipes and his brother, Martin, and haven't spoken to either man since the day we left the courtroom. Jasper was sure I planned to hill him, which was true. To wear on his nerves, I used to stare at him when no one was looking. He took my squint as some kind of evil-eye, and it spooked him so bad that he took a swing at my neck with a shovel, and got himself thrown into solitaire.

Seeing things others miss is the way I get by, taking notice and thinking things through. When they put me to work tending the chickens, I wondered why we were feeding them clean, unbroken wheat from gunnysacks stacked in a shed beside the henhouse, and where the dead rats came from that the hens would be pecking at some mornings. Playing dumb, like I didn't really care, I learned that the territorial legislature had decided three year back to put the convicts at Yuma to work raising wheat to help feed themselves. Like a lot of half-assed ideas, it didn't work out, but the prison was left with two tons of poisoned seed-grain. Chickens don't die from eating strychnine, and that's why the warden fed it to them, not to us prisoners, or any of the other livestock.

I began rinsing the grain every morning before throwing it to the chickens, and dumping the water in an old crock to evaporate. It was five months before I could scrape two teaspoons of white residue off the pot.

The captain switched me from chicken duty to kitchen cleanup before Largo Loco came into the place, so I had what I had and no chance to get any more. I didn't want to give Jasper too big a dose, and have him taste it, and I sure didn't want to give him too little. I told Largo Loco I'd take his twenty bucks. If half of my veneno worked on him, I'd know I had a lethal dose for Jasper.  We set a date for the deal, allowing him a couple of day to get his fingers on the coin. 

The stash had been in my cell, wrapped in waxed paper, and I put it in a tobacco sack and carried it to the kitchen, where I stuck half of it in a hole in the mortar behind the kitchen stove, and used a dab of mud to hide it. Then I wandered through the main yard, and slipped Largo Loco his half. The gold piece looked clean as the day it was minted, but I spit on both sides and rubbed it on my pants, before swallowing it myself. With Largo gone, everybody would be looking for it, and the turnkeys would be shaking down the cells for more poison.

My client took a long time dying; it wasn't over until late the next morning. If he told anybody where he got the stuff, the accusation was lost in the gasping Spanish maledictions he spewed at everyone he knew, dead and alive. After that I slept better, knowing I had enough left for Jasper. I'd decided to do Martin in the yard, in bright daylight.

I had the run of the kitchen, since I'd started fixing for the warden and his occasional guests those little niceties beyond Josefina's bread and beans imagination. That common little Mexican woman trudged up the hill from Yuma every morning at dawn and supervised the preparation of a daily fare as common as she. I could see from his rounded belly and the way he prowled the kitchen that Warden Seth Pike yearned for something better. While mopping up one afternoon, I overheard him bragging to one of his captains about how well they used to eat in New Orleans, when he was stationed there with the Army.  Next day, I let it be known around the yard that I'd once cooked at a famous whorehouse and restaurant in the Crescent City. It was a lie, of course. I'd never been east of San Antonio, and the only cooking I'd ever done was on a chuck wagon in New Mexico, when I broke my ankle and couldn't ride. But illusion serves as truth to a hungry man; that's common jailhouse wisdom.

When a long, hot fire was needed for baking, local cooks preferred to use ironwood. The iron in the name may be optimistic, but it doesn't behave quite like wood, either, being much heavier and harder than mesquite, or oak. It took a week of watching the firewood box before I found just the right piece, a splinter, really, flat and narrow, less than ten-inches long. Shaping the stake against the stones of my cell became something of a nighttime hobby for me, and when the balance felt right, I polished the sides until they were smooth as a maiden's thigh, and sharpened the tapered edges by working them against the steel bars. When walking the yard, I'd carry it in the crotch of my pants, to have it ready when my chance came. It came on a Sunday, when the guards atop the wooden tower were eating watermelon and tossing the rinds out into the desert, popping at them with rifles and revolvers. Gunfire from the tower wasn't unusual; it gave the guards a chance to strut and was supposed to have a sobering effect on the residents. All eyes were watching them that afternoon, frisky as colts, blasting away at the rinds and taunting each other between shots.

Martin Sipes stood in the shade at the corner of the yard, spinning a bullshit story. I edged closer, pretending to listen, and when I heard gunshots clustered together like popping corn, I brushed carelessly against his back and drove the splinter deep, angling it high. Steadying him for a moment by his quivering arm, I shoved the blunt end again, with the heel of my hand, until it disappeared inside him. I walked slowly away while he leaned in the corner with his mouth moving and no sound coming out. Everybody else walked away, too.

Nobody remembered seeing me anywhere near him; as far as the others could recall, he was alone when it happened. Naturally, Pike had to slap me around a little and lock me up, but everybody knew that with zero evidence there would be no trial. I heard later that he joked privately about the mysterious Apache who'd snuck up and put that fat little arrow into Martin Sipes from over the wall. I'd done Martin first because he was the younger of the two brothers, and by far the less wary. Jasper did the thinking for them both.

***

We 'd been riding together a couple of weeks, when we got the idea to stop the stage on the Prescott road. We were lucky, as it turned out; there was a rich couple on board, and we took the shotgun by surprise. Jasper went into the brush with the woman, and left her there. Nobody got killed, and we divvied up the money and took off, with me heading for Camp Verde, where I knew some riders I could bunk with. The Sipes brothers made a beeline for Wickenburg, and got caught before dawn. By the time they rounded me up, they'd had plenty of time to convince the sheriff I'd planned the robbery and done the rape, and they just happened to be riding with me. The judge gave them each five years to serve, and their testimony got me life without parole. From their point of view, I could understand why Jasper would lie to save himself, and Martin would lie to save his brother. On the other hand, I don't forgive a thing just because I understand it.                                              

 Warden Pike wasn't a cruel man. After the initial beating—which everyone agreed was proper—he paid me no mind, except to order that I always had water, and something to eat now and then. He even sent Padre Nilos by to visit me. It’s a jailer's oldest trick, keeping a man alone until he's thinking in circles, and running a priest in to lead him from the wilderness when his mind is judged soft enough. I ignored the papist for a couple of months. Late in July, I came down with the chills and fever rising from that tangle of marsh between the high ground of the prison and the cool waters of the Colorado River. I was pretty sure I was dying, and not that sorry for it, so weary was I of the isolation, and of the heat; an extreme I'd never seen before, making me feel I was slow-roasting in a stone oven.

My only disappointment was not to be dying clean, and I don't mean that state-of-grace horseshit that Padre Nilos talked about to his flock of black sheep. Closing books is what I mean, and balancing scales. Even the warden had to know that killing Sipes wasn't a matter of choice, but one of obligation. In the craw of Yuma Penitentiary, we were all seeds or rocks, and the soft were soon rendered pulp. I'm as gravelly as the next man, and with Martin gone and the means at hand to get Jasper, I was making a place for myself at Yuma. My mistake was in underestimating Warden Pike. Lacking any evidence, I thought he'd keep me in isolation for a few months, and then let me work my way back to the kitchen. Instead, he seemed determined to keep me in that little stone niche if it meant eating Josefina's cooking forever.

If I talked to the padre when the fever was on me, I can't say. A fevered man is likely to talk to anyone who visits him, whether his own mother as a ghost, or some forlorn figure sweeping the hall, appearing in his dreams as Gunga Din.

When my mind cleared after the fever, I could see the genuine passion Padre Nilos felt for my soul when he thought I was dying. I understood the agony he must have endured when Largo Loco slipped away, victim of his own hand, unrepentant and unredeemed. I suddenly recognized, in this tortured man, a reliable tool.

Nilos was hard at his mumblings that morning, eyes first open and imploring, cast toward the little window high on the wall, closed when his head bent to the stony floor in sobbing remorse. Up again to the window, down once more to the floor. With a moan, I threw myself on the floor beside him and forced a choking sob from my throat. He prayed and fumbled with his beads and I sobbed, until we were praying and sobbing together, kneeling in that shaft of window light. God, we must have been a sight to make a bishop proud!

He returned that night with a chunk of cheese and a heel of light bread, my first variation from cornbread and water in four months. When I tried to thank him, he protested that Josefina, that saint of a woman, had prepared it for me. I knew he was lying; Josefina held a convict's view of the place, resigned to serving her time like everybody else, and returning at night to her family. It was Padre Nilos who fed the outcasts.

Warden Pike didn't send for me, just stopped by one evening and talked to me through the little barred window in my cell door.

"I'm expecting some company," he said, "and was thinking on what I might feed them."

Secrets keep in jail about as long as they do at a quilting party, and I'd heard the governor was getting off the train next week, on his way to Los Angeles. He'd be traveling with the attorney general, and was prepared to discuss a new outfit the politicians were cooking up, to be called the Arizona Rangers. Pike wanted in, and the fact that the governor was stopping to see him, gave him hope.

"There's no better quail shooting in the territory than that mesquite thicket east of here," I said.

"No doubt they'd enjoy a quail shoot," he said. He stood quiet for a moment, resting his fingertips on his pink cheek. "You can understand the problems of an old bachelor in this remote station. My dear Josefina isn't a fancy cook, and those birds come out dry, when I fix them myself." He wasn't ready to ask me to cook for him, and I couldn't afford to appear anxious.

"The governor's used to eating at the Cattlemen's Club in Prescott and the best hotels in Tucson," he said. "Too bad we got no pheasant around here, chicken is so damn common."

"The key to cooking quail is to start with plenty of birds," I said, "so you can rip off the breasts and throw the backs and spindly legs to the hogs."

"We won't be short of birds. How would they be served in New Orleans?"

"I've heard that the Indians gather wild rice in a still-water pond down the river a couple miles. If you felt like sending a detail to get a few pounds, we'd have a place to start. A man might flour the breasts and lightly fry them, then wrap each one in bacon and jam them real close together in a pan and roast them hot for a few minutes in the oven."

The warden nodded knowingly.

 "The rice would have to be ready when you took them out, so everything would be hot at the same time," I said. "Of course, we'd need a sauce."

"Don't think I'm forgetting what Jasper Sipes tried to do, and what you did to his brother." He drew closer, speaking very softly. When his hat brim hit the door, he took it off and leaned in until his face filled the tiny opening. "Mr. Sipes is tucked away in my little brown jug, across the yard," he said. "Test me, sir, and I'll chain you to a cactus outside the walls, to see you never get any closer to him than you are right now."

"Yes, sir," I said, "but I doubt that Brother Sipes would harm me. He certainly stands no risk from a newly-born Christian, such as myself."

The warden walked away without answering.

Those on the expedition for wild rice cursed me roundly, and my reputation took a dive when it became known I was shamelessly kissing the warden's ass, and cooking for the governor. I could hear the muffled pop of shotguns all morning, as I finished cleaning up the roughly threshed rice. The warden sent me a hundred cleaned birds, with instructions to fix twenty for his party, and feed the rest to the guards as a special treat. I boiled down the quail backs and legs with some lard, to make a stock. Pike guarded his wine so jealously that a captain had to come to the kitchen and pour two cups directly into the pot. I tossed in a little flour, and strained it off. What the hell, it would have to do for sauce.

After supper, I set two breasts aside for myself, and sent a trustee to fetch Padre Nilos. When he came in I was eating my quail from a wooden bowl, and sipping coffee at the pine table next to the stove. I shoved the other bowl across the table, and nodded for him to sit.

"For your compassion toward the despised and imprisoned," I said, raising my coffee cup. "Will you eat with me, in the grace of God."

 He gazed fondly on the quail breast, bathed in sauce and covered with rice. "For your kindness, I thank you, brother. Do you mind if I take it with me, to eat later?"

Nobody could expect Jasper Sipes's to be a good sport and die quietly, so I took the precaution of promising two quarts of mescal to the Mexicans on both sides of his cell, if they'd put a little extra spirit into their nightly singing. Any protest he made was lost in the howling and yelping of the ranchera ballads. I didn't have the liquor in hand to pay for the concert, but everyone knew I was a man of my word.

Copyright(c) 2006 by Terry Tanner

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