Out of Sight

Chino gave him a nod but didn't make room, tell any of his people at the table to get up. Lulu sat next to him with a neat tray of macaroni and Jell-O and a cup of milk they gave inmates under twenty-one years of age to build strong, healthy bodies.

Foley ate his noon dinner at a table of outlaw bikers, consV who bought half-pint bottles of rum Foley sold for three times what he paid Pup to sneak the stuff in. He sat there listening to the outlaws having fun, comparing his rum to piss and running with it, enjoying their use of the word, speculating on what land it was, dog piss, cat piss, how about alligator piss? They liked that one. Foley saw it had to be an uncommon kind of piss, said, "How about chicken piss?" and the table showed him bad teeth and the food they were chewing with grins and grunts of appreciation. Foley worked through his dinner and went outside to smoke a cigarette and wait for Chino.

Lulu tagging along when he came, Lulu cute as a bug with his girlish eyelashes and pouty way of looking at you. Chino had had to punch out many a suitor to keep Lulu for his own. He had told Foley Lulu wasn't a homosexual before entering this life, but had become one and was good at it. Confiding things like that after Foley told Chino he was the most aggressive welterweight he had ever seen fight. Saw him lose to Mau-ricio Bravo in L.A. when Foley was doing banks out there. Saw him lose to the Mexican kid, Palomino, at the Grand in Las Vegastough break, the TKO in the sixth when Chino's right eye closed and they stopped the fight. Foley said, "I never saw a fighter take as many shots as you did and keep coming back-outside of Rocky Balboa." Chino's record was 22 and 17, not good if you were the fighter, not bad if you admired him for staying with it as long as he did. Foley was the only Anglo the Cuban allowed to get close.

He had his arm around Lulu's shoulder as they approached, then let it slip down to hook his thumb in Lulu's belt, the next thing to having him on a leash.

Foley said, "Today's the day, huh? You excited?"

The man was cool, no expression.

"I told you, man, Super Bowl Sunday."

"Yeah, but I see you moved it up."

Now a glint showed in his eyes.

"Why you think is today?"

"You were out running this morning, sticking to your routine, anybody happened to notice. But you only did a couple of miles, saving yourself for the main event. Then I see you eating about ten pounds of macaroni. Carbohydrates for endurance."

"You want," Chino said, "I tole you you can come."

"I would, but I can't stand to get dirty."

"Is finish. All we do now is go out."

"You sure you're past the fence?"

"Fifteen and a half meters, one to spare."

From the covered crawl space beneath the prison chapel to the grass just beyond the razor wire perimeter fence. They had been digging since before Christmas with their hands and a broken shovel, using scrap lumber from the construction site of a new wing being added to the chapel to shore up the walls of the tunnel. It was Christmas Day Foley happened to see Chino and Lulu come out of the ficus bushes in front of the chapel, their faces streaked with black dirt, muck, but wearing clean blues.

What were they doing, making out in the bushes? That wasn't Chino's style, so Foley the fight fan said, "Don't tell me about it 'less you want to." And Chino said that time to his Anglo friend, "You want to go with us?"

Foley said he didn't want any part of it-only three feet of crawl space underneath the chapel, pitch-dark in there, maybe run into fucking mole rats face-to-face. No thanks. He'd said to Chino, "Don't you know you're digging through Everglades muck? I've talked to people. They say it's wet and'll cave in on you." Chino said, yeah, that's what people thought, but the tunnel only caved in once. If they were careful, took their time, the muck stuck together and became dry and was okay. He told Foley they had dug down four feet and then out toward the fence, the tunnel a meter wide and a meter high. One man at a time dug and the muck was passed back and spread around the crawl space under there, so nobody was going to see it. They worked two at a time in dirty clothes they kept there and put on clean ones before coming out.

Foley said to Chino that Christmas Day, "If I caught on, how come none of the hacks have?"

Chino said, "I think they believe like you no one can dig a tunnel in muck. Or they don't want to crawl in there and find out. They see us dirty they think we work construction."

It was that day Chino said they were going out Super Bowl Sunday, when everyone would be watching the game, six o'clock.

But now they were going out five days early.

"You finish ahead of schedule?"

Chino looked toward the fence along the front of the yard, between the administration building and the gun tower close to the chapel.

"You see what they doing, those posts out there?