Now and then he yawned; his hand moved to the pocket where his cigarettes lay, then refrained and rested idle against the black cloth of his suit, in the waxy lifelessness of shape and size like the hand of a doll.
The jury was out eight minutes.
They stood and looked at him and said he was guilty.
Motionless, his position unchanged, he looked back at them in a slow silence for several moments.
“Well, for Christ’s sake,” he said.
The judge rapped sharply with his gavel; the officer touched his arm.
“I’ll appeal,” the lawyer babbled, plunging along beside him.
“I’ll fight them through every court—”
“Sure,” Popeye said, lying on the cot and lighting a cigarette; “but not in here.
Beat it, now.
Go take a pill.”
The District Attorney was already making his plans for the appeal.
“It was too easy,” he said.
“He took it—Did you see how he took it? like he might be listening to a song he was too lazy to either like or dislike, and the Court telling him on what day they were going to break his neck.
Probably got a Memphis lawyer already there outside the supreme court door now, waiting for a wire.
I know them.
It’s them thugs like that that have made justice a laughing-stock, until even when we get a conviction, everybody knows it wont hold.”
Popeye sent for the turnkey and gave him a hundred dollar bill.
He wanted a shaving-kit and cigarettes.
“Keep the change and let me know when it’s smoked up,” he said.
“I reckon you wont be smoking with me much longer,” the turnkey said.
“You’ll get a good lawyer, this time.”
“Dont forget that lotion,” Popeye said.
“Ed Pinaud.”
He called it
“Py-nawd.”
It had been a gray summer, a little cool.
Little daylight ever reached the cell, and a light burned in the corridor all the time, falling into the cell in a broad pale mosaic, reaching the cot where his feet lay.
The turnkey gave him a chair.
He used it for a table; upon it the dollar watch lay, and a carton of cigarettes and a cracked soup bowl of stubs, and he lay on the cot, smoking and contemplating his feet while day after day passed.
The gleam of his shoes grew duller, and his clothes needed pressing, because he lay in them all the time, since it was cool in the stone cell.
One day the turnkey said:
“There’s folks here says that deppity invited killing.
He done two-three mean things folks knows about.”
Popeye smoked, his hat over his face.
The turnkey said:
“They might not a sent your telegram.
You want me to send another one for you?”
Leaning against the grating he could see Popeye’s feet, his thin, black legs motionless, merging into the delicate bulk of his prone body and the hat slanted across his averted face, the cigarette in one small hand.
His feet were in shadow, in the shadow of the turnkey’s body where it blotted out the grating.
After a while the turnkey went away quietly.
When he had six days left the turnkey offered to bring him magazines, a deck of cards.
“What for?” Popeye said.
For the first time he looked at the turnkey, his head lifted, in his smooth, pallid face his eyes round and soft as those prehensile tips on a child’s toy arrows.
Then he lay back again.
After that each morning the turnkey thrust a rolled newspaper through the door.
They fell to the floor and lay there, accumulating, unrolling and flattening slowly of their own weight in diurnal progression.
When he had three days left a Memphis lawyer arrived.
Unbidden, he rushed up to the cell.
All that morning the turnkey heard his voice raised in pleading and anger and expostulation; by noon he was hoarse, his voice not much louder than a whisper. “Are you just going to lie here and let—” “I’m all right,” Popeye said. “I didn’t send for you. Keep your nose out.”