Lewis’s nerves had burned him up so much that morning that he just about wore me out, but now that he was up there on the platform finding his voice, it seemed he was a natural all along. If you asked me about him then, I couldn’t have told you much. I didn’t even know his real name. He was new to the party, that much was obvious, and he’d let on that it was his first speech. But party brass took the rules seriously, and we weren’t meant to share information about our personal lives. “It’s a den of snakes,” Lewis shouted, throwing up his arms, pointing at City Hall across the street. Eight, nine cops stood outside the building and watched us—intimidation, I guessed—but the crowd didn’t pay them any mind. They just bobbed their heads and hollered each time Lewis made a point.

It was a late February afternoon, three weeks after I’d arrived in Dallas. The sky was gunmetal gray and misting, the wind a hatchet. Still, it looked like half the city was out there. I scanned the crowd and gave up when I lost count, glanced up at Lewis just as he slammed a hand on the podium. A couple of the cops across the street rustled, and even from where I stood next to the platform, I could tell they were going over plans. The truth was, I hoped the big turnout wouldn’t stop them from making themselves look bad.

On paper, the party listed me as a fulltime recruiter. The unwritten part of my job, though, was provocation—and when it came to that, cops were easy work. All through history every cop was a hotheaded bastard, but if you wanted to pin down a moment when it was especially simple to burn them up, that’d be 1931. Maybe half the country was out of work. The other half was standing around with their hands in their pockets, unable to do anything other than watch their crops wither. I didn’t know how many were as good as starving to death. If a man went outside those days, spoke up on a corner, and said he believed everyone should be able to afford a meal without breaking the bank, it’d end with some cop coming along and swinging his club, then blood on the pavement. Most of them just wanted to crack a head or two, I imagined, but some really believed they were saving the republic.

The cops were cutting us sharp eyes now. Lewis peered past the crowd, then flashed me a face full of worry. I turned, cut through the side of the crowd to get another look at the cops. Their hands hovered near the batons hitched to their belts. Knots of townsfolk stood between them and us. Men, women, a handful of kids here and there, all of them dressed in tattered, old clothes, their faces either downturned or worked up with rage over some crime Lewis was railing about. I moved back to my spot near the front column, bowed my head to urge Lewis to go on. I hadn’t clued him in on the whole plan, but if he did his job right, they’d rush in any moment and knock us into the headlines.

Another row of cops marched up behind the ones who were already there. It’d happen soon. I took a snort of snuff and pumped a fist at Lewis. He paused a moment, then went on. No one in the crowd could have noticed, but his old uncertainty was crawling back onto his face. He was twenty-five, twenty-six, about a decade younger than me, and though the twang in his accent made me fairly certain he came from somewhere nearby, he was soft for a country boy. It bothered me that I had to hold his hand through it all, but what could I do?

“Make a weapon of whatever you got layin’ around,” he shouted, “and use that son of a bitch to knock these bastards on their asses before it’s too late.” I mouthed the words before it’s too late with him, proud I’d come up with that line on the ride down. Lewis did a dramatic pause, really played it up, then: “Grab the first fork, butterknife—hell, anything—and get down to takin’ back every single thing these crooks took you for.”

On cue, the cops rushed into the crowd. They cleared a path clean down the middle, shoving aside women, slinging kids to the ground, cracking old men. Townsfolk tore off, elbowing one another aside, some falling.

“Coder,” Lewis shouted. I followed his voice, found him in the hustle of bodies. A cop had Lewis’s arm cranked behind his back, torquing his shoulder joint, and Lewis was wincing. I moved to run toward him, but before I could catch my stride, another cop nabbed me by the nape. Cuffs clicked around my wrists and flames fired through my fingertips. The cop swung me around to face him, smiling a top row of half-rotted teeth. I craned my neck to check on Lewis, and just then he caught a quick elbow to the skull. He wobbled, nearly out on his feet.

“Name?” the cop behind me said.

Getting arrested wasn’t part of my plan. I was still running what it meant in my mind when the cop jabbed a baton into my spine.

“Your name, son?”

“I’m goddamn near forty years old,” I told him.

This time he swung the baton, put it sidelong against my back. I hit my knees and he yanked me back up. The crowd wasn’t much now. Just a few stragglers putting on as pedestrians who’d stumbled into a sudden moment of chaos.

“Just tell me your goddamn name so I don’t got to wear myself out hurtin’ you.”

“Coder.” I knew better than to offer more than that.

“Hell kinda name’s Coder?”

“It’s the kind my mother gave me.”

“Your mother, huh? I wouldn’t mind askin’ her a few questions right about now. And you’re sayin’ your mother gave you this ‘Coder’ as a first name?”

“C.J. … C.J. Coder.”

“Stand for somethin’?”

“Liberation, mostly.”

I braced myself for the baton, but what came next was a knee against my tailbone. My legs gave out, but the cop hauled me up by the handcuffs before I could hit the pavement.

“The initials, asshole. My experience’s someone got initials for a name, they usually stand for somethin’ else.”

“My name’s just C.J. Coder, officer.” I considered giving him a little more hell, but Lewis was in bad shape, nearly crying. “My ID’s in my pocket, you want to check for yourself.”

The cop slipped my wallet from my back pocket, opened it, and read the name aloud, “C.J. Coder.” He laughed a little, then stuffed the wallet back into its place. “That mother of yours you speakin’ of must’ve been a real scholar.”

It wasn’t a bad question, truth be told. I didn’t have a clue how the party came up with our handles. All I knew was when you received travel orders, whoever delivered them also gave you an identity to use. You didn’t get a say in it, and besides, it was better to stick to whatever name they picked so that they could keep track of you if you landed in trouble.

A group of men had gathered on the corner, lighting up cigarettes. Women standing nearby pinned their hands to their dresses against the wind. A tangle of children shoved one another to get a better look. Then I noticed the reporter. He wore one of those stupid hats reporters wore back then. His face was red from the cold and he watched the scene carefully, looking away only to scribble in a little notebook. You could tell from how he paid close attention he thought he’d picked up a real scoop. I almost felt bad for him. I didn’t figure too many people gave much of a shit about cops beating on a couple communists, but if it’d get our names in the evening headlines, I’d play it up for him.

When the cop eased his grip on my cuffs, I swung my torso as hard as I could, tried to break loose. The cop jerked me back, clocked the back of my head with a closed fist. “All y’all see this happening right here in front of your own eyes,” I hollered. He tugged me toward a prowl car. “Your tax money’s going to this, and for what—us insisting you ought to have a fair shake?”

“Shut your goddamn mouth,” the cop snapped. He threw all his weight into shoving me into the prowl car’s backseat, then climbed in behind the wheel. He stuck his head out the window and motioned to the other cops, who turned and set off walking back to a pair of horses tied up outside City Hall. Lewis was seated next to me, slumped in on himself and limp. Quiet, brooding fear was at work on his face.

“You alright, Lew?”

He fiddled with his arms behind his back, adjusted himself. “This’s bad, Coder.” He let out a drawn-out breath to put an emphasis on it. “Real bad.”

“Hell, Lewis.” I turned to see the reporter again. “This is just fine.”

The cop cranked over the engine and made a fuss clearing his throat, then fixed an angry look on us in his rearview. “I’d say it’s about time for y’all to shut the shit up.”

Lewis huffed and muttered something I couldn’t make out. He turned away and stared out the window. The cop flicked on the red light, then honked twice to clear the bystanders from the street in front of us. The prowl car picked up speed. We bounced around in the backseat as it beat over potholes on the way to the station.

The roads were slick and, even though the cop was taking his time, the prowl car slewed around corners. Lewis closed his eyes, put on this pitiful look. I watched downtown out the window. A man on a big quarter horse, its coat brown and frosted with specks of white, edged near the curb to let the prowl car pass. He leaned his head to get a look at Lewis and me in the back and rifled tobacco spit out of the side of his mouth. We came up on a cluster of carriages, each parked at a slant near an intersection. The cop reached across the passenger seat and rolled down the window. “Move your asses and stop blockin’ traffic,” he yelled, “or I’ll be back for y’all next.”

“Lew,” I said, but his mind was elsewhere.

I grew up in what they once called the middle class, went to a state university back in Missouri, and didn’t sign up for the party until a couple of years after graduation. The government was sweeping up anyone they called communists or fellow travelers, putting them on boats to who knows where, and harassing anyone that had a different opinion about Washington shipping kids off to die in Europe during the war over there. Families were torn apart. Young men got wound up in graves in France while the Spanish flu buried a few hundred thousand here at home. How anyone could have stood by with folded arms, I really didn’t understand. I put in my notice at the bank where I worked, marched down to the party headquarters in K.C., and got to work helping the comrades make the country a little fairer. But over the years, the work wore me down and became a job just like any other. Clock in, clock out. Do the least work you could get away with, follow the rules just enough to keep out of trouble with the brass.

The officer braked at a stop sign, checked us in the rearview. I gave him a little smile, but Lewis had his chin on his chest, staring at his lap. It was irking me that Jerry sent me out with someone that had a stomach as weak as Lewis’s. I thought about the day Jerry gave me the marching orders.

“Dallas? What the hell’s in Dallas?”

Jerry was rolling a cigarette, sitting behind the desk in his cramped office, stacks of party newspapers and pamphlets all around him.

“You joined up, when—’18?” he said. “You were just a baby when the machine was puttin’ all its weight into crushin’ the party. But you were here”—he meant Missouri, the Midwest—“and didn’t see how rotten it got down south.”

I’d followed the news in Oklahoma and Texas, all the states where the government tried to wipe out the party. Jerry took any chance he got to school me on party history, and though he never came out and said it, he liked going on and on about some moment in time when I was still a clueless middle-class kid while he was in the trenches.

“You heard about Hickey, the closure of The Rebel, that whole mess.” Jerry used his palm to push spilled tobacco into a pile. “There’s not much of a party down there now.”

I knew it’d bother Sarah—she was sick of me taking off for months, and we had the boy to think about now—but I wasn’t in any position to turn down the work. Everyone could see how I’d slacked off the last two or three years, how I’d failed to meet my recruitment quota. Jerry was doing me a favor, wanted to make me look more committed and useful in the party’s eyes. “Won’t be hard to get a few dozen recruits in a city where we hardly have a presence anymore,” he said. “You get thirty, forty people to start paying dues, it’ll look like a win.”

I told Jerry I was up for the job and didn’t think twice, but the closer my departure day got, the more Sarah became nervous. She rode with me in the cab to the station in K.C., our baby boy babbling in her lap. Worry was eating her up, and on the platform, I hugged her tight and asked her to tell me what was bothering her. “Thirteen years you been at it,” she said. “You been lucky, but we got a boy to think of now.” She lifted the child to the level of my face, tensed her eyebrows until I finally leaned in and kissed his cheek. “I don’t know. I’m just worried your luck ain’t gonna last your whole life.”

The whole ride down to Texas, I thought about the country. I remembered my last trip to Milwaukee, a few months earlier, and the shantytowns springing up all over the city. The papers predicted the Midwest would just about clear out, what with all the families piling their lives onto wagons and leaving behind land their fathers and grandfathers had made lives out of. Even the kids, they were saying, were forming gangs and hoboing the rails out west.

The Katy Line knifed through Kansas and Oklahoma. I pressed my face to the window, watched the world outside as the train hammered through black blizzards and dead, dusty fields. When the train finally quaked into the station, Lewis was waiting there on the platform, a red bandana wrapped around his coat sleeve just like Jerry had said. We shook hands, started down the steps out of the station.

“Might be we ought to discuss the situation,” he said. He came off as frail, maybe frightened, and I got the feeling a loud enough noise could kill him. “You got any experience down around here? I’m from—”

I clutched his shoulder, cut him off quickly. “We’ve got rules, Lew.”

“Right, but—”

I raised my hand to shut him up. “The less I know, the less I can spill.”

He got himself together, guided me around downtown. He led me to the Magnolia Building, where the oil bigwigs sat around and counted their cash on some floor high up, and then the factories perched on the bank of the Trinity River, where the workers had gone on strike five times since New Year’s.

We got to work. Within a week, the Dallas Dispatch described us as “out-of-towners” and “provocateurs,” the police followed us around town, and for the first time in years, I didn’t feel right about phoning it in. We kept at it, passed out pamphlets at the warehouses and factories. I schooled Lewis on the party’s ways, taught him to never use the words communism or socialism unless he was speaking to people who’d already joined up.

“What are we supposed to call it then?”

“Call what?” I was studying the face of the Magnolia Building, imagining slates of red flags fluttering in the wind outside.

“What we’re askin’ them to join.”

“Call it justice, fairness, take your pick. Or don’t call it anything, Lew.” I offered him a pinch of snuff, and he took it. “Just point up there.” The sun reflected off the windows of the building. “Ask them if it’s right some folks have backup pantries full of food and their stomachs ache all night. Hell, ask them if they hate rich people as much as you do.”

The cop pulled the prowl car into a spot in front of the jailhouse. Lewis placed his hands over his eyes. My back was still throbbing from the baton. “This our stop, officer?”

The officer grinned in the rearview. “Oh, yeah.” He pulled the brake, opened his door. “It’s home, far as you’re concerned.”

In the booking room, we were handed off to a gray-headed cop who had an unlit cigar in the ashtray next to him. He made us push our fingertips against an ink-soaked sponge, then stamp them on a little card. He scrawled each of our names next to the prints, then said, “You gonna come peacefully, right?”

I told him we wouldn’t cause any trouble and we followed him to a cell at the end of a long hallway.

“Enjoy,” he said, shutting and locking the cell door.

The inside of the cell was cold and humid, stank of sweat and piss. I scanned the faces of thieves and shineheads crowded shoulder-to-shoulder on the benches. The walls were gray and wet and covered in scratch marks, and the bars in the only window had been welded back together. Men huddled together in the corner, whispered in Spanish too soft and quick for me to follow.

Lewis and I found a free corner of bench at the far end. We sat and didn’t speak. I pictured the reporter typing up a dispatch at his desk, maybe taking a nip off a flask, and took comfort in the notion we’d soon be let out. The sunlight grew dim through the window and Lewis wrapped his arms around himself.

“There something the matter with you?”

Lewis gave me serious eyes. “Don’t got a good feelin’ about bein’ here,” he said. He looked around the cell and then turned to face me. “There’s shit about this city you don’t understand.”

“Then tell me what I need to know, but keep to the rules.”

Lewis leaned in, but before he could get a word out, a shinehead stood and stamped to the cell door. He screamed something strangled and then the other shineheads rose from their spots on the benches and joined him.

“What’s this all about?”

Lewis half-raised his head to me, then studied his hands. “Probably gettin’ the shakes, is all.”

The shineheads switched to singing whiskey songs and then sang themselves too tired to go on. They pounded on the concrete walls and then tired of that, too, and lay down and each set about the work of getting some sleep.

By the time it all settled down, Lewis had curled up in a ball on the floor. I didn’t know if he was sleeping or just falling to pieces. I closed my eyes and stared at the dark behind the lids until I drifted off, still sitting upright. In my dream, my boy was twenty and hungry and desperate for honest work. Then he was forty and part-time at a factory and rotten with fear over how he’d feed his own son. Then he was sixty and limping and loitering outside bakeries, begging for someone to do him a kindness.

I woke to the clanging of a club on the steel bars. Lewis’s head was on my thigh and I gently guided it to the floor. Sunlight striped through the window bars. The guard handed out small rolls to whoever reached the cell door first and then ran out and left the rest of us without breakfast.

The next time the guard returned, an hour or so later, trailing behind him was a shirtless man with old, graying tattoos and an uneven mustache. I watched the guard open the cell door and the man enter. He was squeezing one hand into a fist, punching the palm of the other.

Lewis sat up. “The shit’s goin’ on?”

I stood and moved to a bench. The guard pointed at the man, who was now bouncing in place, shaking his arms loose. “This here’s a boxing champion,” he shouted. “He’s here to teach these criminal reds a little somethin’ about our city.”

I braced myself, but the boxer tore across the cell straight toward Lewis. Lewis was looking around, unsure of what was happening, and before I could take it all in myself, the first blow had knocked Lewis out cold. The boxer stood over Lewis and watched his arms and legs twitch. Then the boxer rotated and held up his fists for everyone to see. “Which one of y’all’s the other red?”

The boxer turned and took in the faces around him. When he turned his back toward me, I lunged as fast as I could across six, seven feet of floor. My knuckles cracked on his skull and a shock shot through my hand. The boxer fell face first, bounced his chin off the lip of the bench. I went to Lewis and tried to hoist him up, but he was dead weight. I slapped him until he started blinking, still unsure of where he was.

When Lewis caught his bearings, he ran his eyes from my face downward and stopped halfway. “Christ in Heaven,” he said.

“You alright, Lew?”

“The hell happened to your goddamn hand?”

I looked down and saw the fingers dangling, dislocated. I popped one back in place and felt a sharp pulse fire through my arm. The pain hummed so hard I forgot about the guard until the baton split the back of my skull.

An officer led us to a room elsewhere in the jailhouse. He gestured to a table bolted to the floor, with two chairs on one side and another on the opposite end. Once we were in our seats, he handcuffed each of us to the table and left without a word.

The window was cracked and frigid air bit in through the bars. Exposed water pipes gridded two walls of the room, and poor upkeep, I guessed, had etched tiny fractures into webs across the concrete surface. Lewis lowered his head, blew snot into his elbow ditch, and focused on a small bloodstain on the ground, jittering his knee hard enough to shake the table.

“Cut that shit out, Lew.” I flicked my head to the mirror on the wall across from us. “You’re acting too nervous.”

“I am nervous.”

“Yeah, well, on the other side of that mirror, there’s a cop taking notes on how guilty we look.”

Lewis didn’t seem to understand, but he stilled his knee. “Coder, how’s it you know whether one of them bastards’s back there watchin’ us?”

“Nearly fifteen years in the party’s how. I’ve been in lockup before. K.C., Milwaukee, you name it. Every time I got taken in, they were on the lookout for all the small little details that made us seem guilty.”

Lewis shook his head.

“Lew, I’m telling you right now that it’s all going to be fine.” I remembered the mirror, considered my words. “We haven’t broken any law. Not one. Shit, what we did was talk to some people, tell them that we believe the laws ought to be the same for everyone, poor or not.”

“Sure, but I’m from here and—”

I kneed his hip bone beneath the table, not hard but sharp enough to let him know how serious I was. “Tell me what you want to say without saying any of what you’re about to say.”

“What I’m sayin’ is I’m from Texas.”

“Lew,” I warned.

“Listen, I don’t mean no insult to you or the party, but might be I could tell you a few things about this part of the country you don’t get. I’ve seen with my own eyes how—”

I stomped on his foot with all the force I could manage. It wasn’t that I couldn’t see how scared he was, that he wasn’t in his right mind, but I was getting fed up with him not listening. “Not a single goddamned detail.”

Lewis shrunk, sunk into himself, started to open his mouth. I ground my heel down on his toes until he whimpered, bit the inside of his cheek. “Sorry,” he finally managed.

A man in a gray suit, white button-up, and royal tie came in and set his briefcase on the table in front of us. He could have been between fifty and sixty, I wasn’t sure. His face looked younger, but he had a spray of black in his otherwise silver hair. He looked us both over, sighed, and shouted for someone to bring three glasses of water. An officer brought the water and the man set two of the glasses in front of us, then downed his and spat tobacco into it. He opened the briefcase and took a can of chewing tobacco out, stuffing a fresh bulge between his teeth and his bottom lip.

I took a sip, then made my face stern. “You think a glass of water’s enough to get us to talk, I’d say you’re mistaken.”

“Get you to talk?”

“What are you? District attorney? Interrogator?”

The man laughed and tobacco spit snagged in the corner of his mouth. “Aw, hell,” he said. “I ain’t no district attorney and I’m sure as shit not police. I’m your lawyer. If you’ll have me, that is.”

“Did the party hire you?”

“Party?” He looked confused. “Oh yeah, no. I read ‘bout y’all in the Dispatch this mornin’. My name’s George. Caught my eye—been a while since we had any of this communism business in the papers here. Mostly it’s the other side these days. Figure y’all deserve an advocate all the same. The hell you boys do, anyhow?”

“Nothin’,” Lewis said, too defensive.

I studied the man’s face, made a gut decision. “He’s here to help us, Lew.” I turned back to George. “What’s it they say we’ve done?”

“Said you got a bunch of folks riled up outside City Hall.” He worked his tie a bit looser. “That y’all were passin’ out fliers and incitin’ the workers. Told them to get weapons and let loose. Callin’ for violence. That true?”

“They had reason enough without us to get all worked up.” My work might have become a job like any other, but I knew the party line. “Far as I can tell, neither Lewis nor I employed them at such pitiful pay they can’t afford to eat more than once a day.”

“Sure, sure.” George rubbed his hands together. “But it’s you they want flailin’ on a goddamn stick right about now.”

Lewis was lost in thought, tracing a finger across the welt beneath his right eye.

George leaned in toward Lewis. “How’d you get that, son?”

“Get what?” Lewis spat on the floor.

I placed my foot back on Lewis’s toes under the table, pressed down.

“Sorry,” he said. “This shiner? Jailers sent a boxer in to beat on us. Would’ve killed me, too, but Coder ran up on him from behind and coldcocked him.”

I shook my shackled wrist to stop it from falling asleep. “Why are you asking? You think you can get that in the papers?” I wrenched my head forward for George to see. He pushed aside the hair around the wound, whistled.

“Lord Christ,” George said. “You say a boxer did that to you?”

“Jailer came in after I put down the boxer. I caught a baton to the top of my skull here.”

George sat quietly for a full minute, blinking now and then. His mouth made a smacking sound, and I could tell he was at work on an idea. “Can’t say for sure,” he said after a while, “but won’t hurt to give it a go.”

Dusk dropped outside and the cell fell quiet. The shineheads were sleeping off another near uprising. A tall, lumbering man with a bald head hauled himself up from his spot and used the bucket in the corner because a shinehead had sat on the toilet and fallen asleep there. Lewis was raw with me, trying not to make eye contact and rubbing the foot I’d stomped. I decided not to bother him for a while.

Two jailers came down the hall and peered in between the bars. One to the spot where Lewis and I sat. The other slid a key in the cell lock and opened the door with a groan. They walked up to us, clutched our collars, and led us out of the cell.

“Where are we going?” I tried.

The jailer who’d grabbed me just cuffed my hands behind my back and pressured me forward.

I could see the jailer behind Lewis better. His face was loose with exhaustion, and he seemed relieved Lewis didn’t put up a fight. We turned at the end of the corridor, then made the long, slow walk toward the last cell.

“If you gentlemen are planning on roughing us up,” I said, “you ought to know we have a lawyer who’s in touch with the papers.”

My jailer let out a gentle laugh that turned into a cough and gave me a small shove forward. The shineheads woke and started up again, their shouting echoing around the corner. When we reached the end of the hallway, the jailers let go of us and unlocked another cell. We went inside. It was smaller—just a single bench, a toilet, and a bucket—but no one else was there.

Dinnertime came and another jailer I’d not seen before passed a crusted plate through the slats. I picked up one of the rolls and looked it over, the little flecks of rot. Lewis seemed to shake himself from whatever was eating him up. He smiled and snatched his roll and disappeared the top half in one bite, gnawing the mold and all, then swallowed what was left without hardly chewing. A shinehead moaned somewhere far off down the hall. Someone shouted for him to stop, but he didn’t let up until we heard a loud slap smack off the walls all the way down to our cell.

Lewis glared at my roll. I pulled a little pinch of snuff from its hiding place in the front of my underwear, took a snort.

“Just take the goddamn roll.”

He offered an injured, half-smile, stuffed the bread in his mouth.

“I don’t know how you can eat it all rotted through like that.” I watched his jawbone work hard. “There’s mold all over it.”

“Don’t harm you none.” Lewis stepped over to a bucket in the corner, cupped a handful of brown water up to his mouth, and drank. “Grow up rough enough, you learn to stomach all sorts of shit.”

I considered cutting him off, but he hadn’t let out too many details and no jailers had come around since they dropped us off. “Speak for yourself. I grew up rougher than most,” I lied, “and there’s not a shot in hell I’m eating anything that foul. I’ve had enough gut ache in my life as it stands.”

“Had enough hurt, huh?” Lewis spat in his palm, wiped it on his pantleg. He had a grip on himself, and I hoped it would last. “Listen, we need a plan. We need that lawyer to get us out of here real quick, but we need a plan for after that.”

“You worry too much, Lewis.”

He rubbed his eyes. “That’s not my name.”

“You need me to run down the rules again? The lawyer will get us out. Then we’ll head to the papers, tell them this whole business about the boxer, if the lawyer hasn’t already.”

“Yeah, yeah, the lawyer will get us out.” Lewis sneered and cast his gaze down. “Lawyer’s probably in on it, for all we know.”

“In on what? He’s a lawyer. The party has probably spoken with him already. He’ll get us out.”

“Could be gettin’ out without knowing where we’re goin’s about the worst shit I could imagine.”

“You prefer being in here?”

“No cuckoos in here.”

“They’re all plenty crazy down the hall.”

“Kluxers, I’m sayin’.”

“What I heard, Dallas whipped the Klan out of here years back.”

“That’s what you heard, huh.” Lewis searched my face like I wasn’t getting what he was telling me. “Let me tell you something. I’m from here—”

I raised a hand to shut him up, but he slammed a palm on his thigh.

“No, listen now. I know, and you ought to know.” His face flickered red. “Don’t matter a bit what you read here or what you hear wherever. I know this city real good, and if there’s a single goddamn thing I’m surer than shit of, it’s that there’s no whipping the Klan out of Dallas.”

“Honest to God.” I seized the back of his neck, sank my fingers into the meat until the sudden confidence left him. His hair stuck out in every direction, and he looked at me with wide eyes. “You need to shut your goddamn mouth. I didn’t write the party rules. I don’t feel one way or another about them besides the fact they exist, and we’re supposed to follow them.”

The next morning, sunlight strained through the window bars and cast stripes on the far wall. A jailer appeared outside the cell, yawned, and unlocked the door. “Time to go,” he said.

As we made our way down the hall, the jailer explained that the prosecutor had chosen not to file charges against us for the time being. If we didn’t “behave out there,” he went on, the prosecutor had “the right to do whatever the hell he pleases.”

A cop with a red, swollen nose was waiting for us at a desk in a room somewhere near the front of the jail. He pushed a piece of paper toward each of us, ordered us to sign. It said we were requested to remain in the general vicinity of Dallas for the next month while the prosecutor considered the evidence against us. I figured I’d catch the night rail back north that evening. We both signed and turned to leave.

The jailer took each of us by an elbow, guided us to the front entrance. Other jailers spotting us passing grinned and nudged one another. Lewis hadn’t said a word, so I nudged him. “You look like someone pissed in your mouth, Lew,” I told him. “We’re leaving. Everything’s fine.”

He gave me a look a doctor might before he told you it was terminal. “Let out, sure,” he said. “What’s comin’ now’s a lot worse than jail.”

“Lew,” I started to protest.

Lewis froze, tried to back up, but the cop shouldered us through the door. I followed Lewis’s gaze and saw what he had. Men in white robes, about two dozen of them, leaning against a pair of nearly identical black Ford roadsters. A few in plain clothes held flagpoles with Old Glory rippling in the wind. The cop removed our cuffs, let us loose halfway down the steps. Lewis jerked to run, but a Kluxer pulled him back by his jacket flap.

In the back of the Ford, Lewis pressed his face to the glass.

“Where is it you’re taking us? If you don’t mind me asking,” I said.

The driver wore a white mask and didn’t reply, only turned right. He tapped a finger on the steering wheel as he guided the roadster out of downtown. The homes and buildings eventually fell away and then there were only flat, yellow-grassed fields. Lewis let out a soft, frightened noise. The driver peered at us in the rearview with large blue eyes that blinked through the slits in his mask. I had a feeling he was grinning.

A leather whip snapped against my bare back, and I felt blood drizzling down. I looked at the pile of clothes the men had made me remove. Few words were said. Lewis remained quiet save for a grunt now and then to acknowledge the leather connecting with his body. Rain began to fall, first a mist then fat, heavy pellets that stung the wounds on my torso, my legs. I tried to coach myself through the pain, imagined the ways we could spin it in the papers.

A man who’d stood back and observed until now stepped forward. He removed his mask and I could tell he was letting the rain bead on his face. He crouched in front of us. “Y’all boys not comin’ back to our city to cause trouble now, are you?” he asked.

Lewis frantically shook his head no, but I made my face stone. The man took hold of my chin, clenched it. “You still got some fight in you, huh? Alright then.”

He signaled to someone behind him, and a shotgun appeared in his hands. He pressed the lip of the weapon to my right eye, gently at first and then forcefully. “My name’s Dell Winford,” he said. “Just thought you got a right to know who’s killin’ you.”

I closed my eyes, peered into the lids. “Shoot his sorry ass,” someone said. The rain picked up yet more and my hands, bound behind my back, trembled. I heard murmuring through the downpour’s thrum. Ten minutes or two hours could have passed. When a shotgun finally sounded and echoed across the fields, I kept my eyes shut for fear of what it meant to open them, fear that I’d have to see myself dying. Sarah was smoking a cigarette at the supper table, the boy crawling at her feet. Jerry was gathering everyone in his office at party headquarters, swallowing hard before he gave them the news.

But when I opened my eyes, the men were breaking apart. A pair seized Lewis and me, dragged us to the bank of the creek. They kicked us, rolled us. Then there was cold water on my body, in my mouth. My head broke the creek’s surface and I caught a glimpse of the men piling into the roadsters. I went back under and held in all the air I could, kicked my legs. By the time I broke the surface again, the spot where we’d been flogged was empty except for our clothes.

I flailed, fought to keep my head above water. The current pulled me back under. Water shot down my throat. The world went black.

Lewis was still out when I came to, a blur of a man pumping on his chest. I lay looking at the sky. The rain had let up, but the air was still thick. My sight began to take shape again. Another man stood over me, said something in Spanish.

“We saw you from over there,” he said, switching to English. He nodded at a Sycamore on a distant hill.

“How much did you see?” I managed.

“All. They hurt you bad.”

“You didn’t think to help sooner?”

Lewis coughed and jerked. He tried to sit up and water fell from his mouth. The man who was working on him turned to me.

“He will be alright.” He looked me over. “If we came closer, they would have killed us.” He paused, searched for the words. “They hurt you, but they would have killed us.”

I passed out again. When I woke, we were in a shack, a fire of scrap wood burning in front of us. Lewis was glaring at the floor, a lifeless expression on his face. He turned and saw me looking at our shirts and trousers hanging on chairs next to the fire. “Almost dry,” he said. “We ought to get out of here soon as we can, case they intend to come back and finish it.”

I nodded.

Lewis didn’t make much eye contact with me on the bus ride back downtown, but when he did, he gave me a cross look that said he didn’t care to speak. Now and then he fell into a fit of coughing. I rubbed the lash marks on my thighs and flanks, felt a swell of blood beneath a gash on my forehead.

“We made it, Lew,” I tried. I looked at Lewis’s pale face, dull and nearly hanging off the bones, and fought off the feeling that my words tasted like a lie. “You’ll be fine. We can hunt down that reporter, find the lawyer. This is a big story for the party. We couldn’t have dreamed of a scandal like this.”

Lewis looked at me with something between astonishment and hate. “You mean for this to happen?”

I knew what he was getting at. “Of course not. I didn’t expect all this. I figured we’d get locked up, maybe a little roughed up. Make good headlines, you understand?”

“You shut your goddamn trap,” he snapped. His eyes were red-rimmed, his voice raw, and when he coughed again, water came back in his palm. “Goddamn this. Goddamn you, goddamn the party.”

The bus let us off on the far end of the Trinity River. We boarded a ferry and waited to pass to the eastern bank. In the distance, workers hammered away on a bridge they were putting up. The river stank of slaughterhouse runoff and made my eyes water. We got off on the other side and walked.

Once we hit Commerce, Lewis began to cough again. I ignored him. He was bent out of shape, but we had work to do. Besides, I didn’t have the stomach for his bellyaching. The downtown skyline rose like mangled knuckles. The Magnolia Building stood tall, the clouds casting crisscrossed shadows across its face. I listened to Lewis hacking and told myself we’d signed up for this, but guilt tangled in my chest.

Lewis stopped and bent forward, rested his palms on his knees while he tried to catch his breath.

“We need to keep moving.” I had the idea to find a store and borrow a phonebook, see if they’d let me use the phone to contact the lawyer.

“Keep goin’, yeah. Keep goin’.” Lewis scoffed and righted himself. “You shoulda listened.” He coughed hard and beat his hand against his chest. “But you didn’t listen, and now there’s so much goddamned water in there.”

He had a point, sure, and I could have given him a minute. I could have let him get ahold of his bearings. I could have explained what our job was again. But I didn’t want to let him make me feel any guiltier than I already did. I grabbed the front of his shirt and twisted it in my clutch, pulled him in close. “I heard everything you have to say, and to tell you the truth, you say too fucking much.”

Lewis coughed and made a choking noise and let his head fall forward. He raised it again and shoved me out of the way, walked off on his own.

On the Katy Line knocking north, that was the moment I kept thinking about: Lewis pounding his chest, his face just about see-through, and the words so much goddamned water in there. Sarah and my boy were waiting at the platform when the train pulled up.

“You keep safe?” she asked.

“You read the papers?”

“I did.”

“So, you already know.”

“Party sent word before it hit the papers, anyhow.”

“So you know it all went fine, then.”

“Fine?” She grabbed the meat of my arm, clamped onto it. She held the boy up to my face. “What’d happen to him if you ended up in a grave, too?”

I searched her face for an explanation, tried to understand what she was driving at. “Grave? Sarah, I don’t know what you’re going on about. We got beat up a little, threatened. I’m here now, aren’t I?”

“You’re here, but Lewis, Lew—”

“Lewis’s fine. He was headed to the hospital just to get checked out. A little shook up, is all.”

“You really don’t know?”

“I’m telling you what I know.”

“That boy’s dead.”

“Is that what the party says? He’s raw with me, believe me, but nowhere near dead.”

“I read it myself in the papers. Water all in his lungs. They called it near drowning.”

I stood there staring at her, unsure, ransacking my mind for the right words. A cold, hard wind swept across the platform, and a sudden sense of exhaustion climbed from my gut into my throat. I finally cradled the little man, carried him down the ramp, off the platform and out of the station.

At home, Sarah heated up a bowl of pork fat and corn on the stove, placed it steaming in front of me on the dinner table.

“Eat up,” she said. She pushed the paper in front of me, pointed to the headline: Red Dead in Dallas After Flogging. “And when you’re done, you’ll tell me how long you’re going to keep this up.”

The Texas Rangers mailed me a summons to discuss an ongoing investigation, published the call in the paper, as did the county prosecutor, but I didn’t bother with a reply. The Dallas dailies said it was part of a conspiracy between our lawyer, who’d now announced a run for state legislature, and a pair of criminal reds who wanted to help a sympathetic future candidate get a boost in the press.

The party called on me a lot after that, too. For a while, at least. The flogging was making headlines all the way out in New York, and the folks at the headquarters wanted C.J. Coder to tell the whole story in detail to every reporter that came knocking. I put it off, told them I needed rest, but what I didn’t tell them, what I was starting to understand, was that C.J. Coder had died in a creek some twenty miles outside of Dallas.

Time tugged ahead, healing the lash marks on my legs, sealing the gash in my forehead. Jerry stopped trying to get me to come in, and the party stopped calling on me altogether. Sarah was glad I was around for a while. She never said it, but as a year turned into two, two into three, I could see the boredom in her face, the annoyance at how often I was home. I worked odd jobs, got on a construction crew here, pitched in days at a nearby farm there. Everyone knew me by my real name. Sometimes, nearly working myself to death under the sun, I wondered how many people like Coder had disappeared, how a country erased any memory of those who came, risked limbs and lungs, to shape it into some place worth living.

At strikes in Cincinnati and Pittsburgh, years deeper into the depression, Coder would be resurrected again—a recycled identity grafted onto someone else. Droughts and dust storms were destroying families, dismembering whole communities. Banks went under. The country was a scatter of bad checks and soup kitchens. Sorrow swept door to door like an illness. Summers burned worse than I’d ever remembered. C.J. Coder, Once Nearly Flogged to Death in Dallas, Arrested on Picket Line, the Tribune put it. Prosecutor Considers Sedition Charge in Case of Red Agitator, the Daily News wrote in ’39.

Some nights, like a seizure in the soft, silhouetted hours, Lewis would appear at my side. I’d wake with a chill crawling across my chest. My boy, grown some but still small, would be crowded against my flank, Sarah snoring softly on the other side of the bed.

“The hell happened to you, Coder?” Lewis would ask.

“I can’t see Coder’s face now,” I’d say.

“You never could see what’s right in front of you.”

“No one could’ve helped you.”

Lewis would laugh, scratch the shock of hair on his head. I’d squint, search for something that hinted at the nervous kid I’d known, but he’d stay completely calm.

“That thought comfort you?”

“No, I guess it doesn’t,” I’d admit, then feel the cuffs clamped on Coder’s wrists, the fire in his fingertips. For a moment, the sharp split of his skull would return to me, then the bone-cold creek water on his skin. “Tell me now, Lew,” I’d beg. “Where was it you came from?”

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Based in Athens, Greece, Patrick Strickland is a writer and journalist from Texas. His short fiction has appeared at Epiphany, Pithead Chapel, and Porter House Review, among others. He’s the author of three nonfiction books, including You Can Kill Each Other After I Leave (Melville House 2025), and the forthcoming story collection A History of Heartache (Melville House, Spring 2026). 

Bluesky: @patrickobrienstrickland.com 

Instagram: @patrickstricklandjournalist

Website: patrickobrienstrickland.com

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