"Swan Peak" - читать интересную книгу автора (Burke James Lee)

CHAPTER 4

ONE MONTH EARLIER, on a piece of baked hardpan out in West Texas, within sight of the shimmering outline of the Van Horn Mountains, a convict by the name of Jimmy Dale Greenwood was finishing his second year on a three-to-five bit, all of it served in a contract prison, courtesy of a judge who didn’t like half-breeds in general and smart-ass hillbilly singers like Jimmy Dale in particular.

The contract prison was a squat blockhouse nightmare that, except for the parallel rows of electric fences topped with coils of razor wire surrounding the buildings, resembled a sewage plant more than a penal facility. Most of the work done by the inmates was meant to be punitive and not rehabilitative in nature. In fact, both inmates and prison personnel referred to the work as “the hard road.” The hard road came complete with mounted gunbulls, leather-cuff ankle restraints, and orange jumpsuits that rubbed the skin like sandpaper in winter and became portable ovens in summer.

The majority of the personnel were not deliberately cruel. But drought and wildfires and the loss of family farms weren’t of their making, and shepherding prison inmates on a tar-patch crew beat delivering Domino’s pizzas or clerking at the adult-video store on the interstate. The line “It’s your misfortune and none of my own,” from the classic trail drover’s lament, seemed an accurate summation of the Texas contract gunbull’s attitude toward his charges.

Most of the inmates in the contract prison were recidivists and didn’t question their fate or the power structure under which they lived. That meant they didn’t grab-ass, eyeball, complain about the food, dog it on the job, wise off to Hispanic guys with Gothic-letter tats, or sass the hacks. If you committed the crime, you stacked the time. Then one day you popped out on the other end of your jolt and got a lot of gone between you and West Texas. It was that simple. Or should have been.

Jimmy Dale went down ostensibly for grand theft, the arrest being made after he crashed the stolen vehicle he was driving at ninety an hour through a police barricade. In reality, the judge dropped the jailhouse on Jimmy Dale’s head because of an unprosecutable knife beef that had taken place outside a saloon off Interstate 10. Jimmy Dale never denied he drove the shank hilt-deep into the victim’s chest. Nor did he deny boosting the car. What was he supposed to do? he explained to the highway patrol. Hang around and hope the victim’s friends in the Sheriff’s Department didn’t use him for a piñata? The problem for the DA was the fact that the victim pulled the shank, not Jimmy Dale. Another problem was that the victim was a pimp who believed he had the right to beat up his whores in the parking lot. Also, his claim that Jimmy Dale had butted into his business would probably not flush with a jury made up of First Assembly and Church of Christ members. Last, the stabbing victim was the judge’s nephew, and the judge had indicated to the DA that he didn’t see any need for feeding the liberal media’s appetite for scandal.

After two years on the hard road, with a shot at early parole because of overcrowding in the system, Jimmy Dale had the bad luck to fall under the supervision of one Troyce Nix, a six-feet-five-inch gunbull who once confessed to his peers, “Nothing gives me more pleasure than watching a full-grown man piss his pants.”

Nix had another inclination, one that for years he had satisfied with rental videos or on the Internet or across the border in Mexico. His inclination had cost him two marriages and his career as an MP in the United States Army. He saw nothing unusual about his behavior, much less perverse. In a coupling of any kind, he was always the male, never the female; hence, he was not a homosexual. Anyone who doubted that fact, particularly his sexual partner, was given a lesson about the true nature of physical dominance.

You set your parameters, you drew your lines. When people crossed your lines, you slapped them into shape. What was wrong with that? Troyce had worked at the Abu Ghraib prison, thirty-two klicks west of Baghdad. When one of his current colleagues asked him what it was like, Troyce replied, “At least none of the graduates come back for seconds.”

“No, after y’all got finished with them, they was probably busy blowing the shit out of American soldiers with IEDs,” one of the other hacks said.

The hack who made the remark was fired three weeks later.

Troyce’s body was covered with reddish-blond hair that seemed to glow like a nimbus in the sunlight. On the hard road, he wore a white straw hat coned up on the sides, shades, and needle-nosed cowboy boots that a trusty spit-shined every night. His olive-green trousers and shirt, with red piping on the pockets, were always starched and pressed, his black gunbelt polished. With his military posture, his shirt tucked tightly into his belt, he was a fine-looking man, his face serene, his voice neutral in tone. In some instances, he was almost fatherly toward the inmates under his supervision.

Jimmy Dale Greenwood was a different matter. Other than his conviction for grand auto, Jimmy Dale came into the prison population without a sheet. More simply stated, he wasn’t a criminal by nature and didn’t belong there. Also, it was impossible to read his expression or to know what he was thinking. He had a way of making enigmatic remarks that seemed to float on the edges of provocation and insult.

“I hear you left pecker tracks in a lot of white women’s beds,” one of the gunbulls said to him.

“I reckon it beats writing your name on the washroom wall, boss,” Jimmy Dale replied.

The gunbull was going to put Jimmy Dale on the barrel that night. But Troyce Nix intervened and, at the close of the workday, told Jimmy Dale to climb up in the truck cab and ride back to the prison compound with him.

“I stink pretty bad, Cap’n,” Jimmy Dale said.

Troyce grinned at him from behind his shades, the gearstick knob throbbing in his palm. “You’ll stink a whole lot worse if you spend the night standing on the barrel and dribbling in your pants,” he said.

Troyce was silent as they drove toward the compound, the dust from the alkali flats drifting through the windows. Up ahead, another truck towed the trailer that contained the gunbulls’ horses. Jimmy Dale could see the horses’ rumps swaying back and forth with the motion of the trailer, desiccated pieces of manure blowing into the wind. Troyce pulled a cigarette from his pack with his mouth and lit it with the lighter from the dashboard. The smoke leaked from his mouth like damp cotton.

“If you was wanting to buy a used horse trailer, what would you look for first?” Troyce asked.

“The floor,” Jimmy Dale replied.

“Why’s that?”

“’Cause if it’s got dry rot in it, your horse’s foot can punch through it on the highway.”

“If you was to build a floor on a trailer, how would you go about it?”

“I’d use only treated two-by-four planks. I’d use only bolts and screws instead of nails so there wouldn’t be cracks to soak up moisture. I’d put the planks in snug but with enough space between them so they could drain and aerate.”

“How come you know so much about horses and tack?”

“I’m a rodeo bum, boss.”

“Thought you was a country-and-western singer.”

“I guess shitkicking can cover lots of categories.”

Troyce laughed, appraising Jimmy Dale through his shades. “I want you to put a new floor in that trailer for me. Do a good job, and I’ll write you up for half trusty and give you an indoor job. In three months you’ll be up for full trusty.”

“I’ll be up for parole before then.”

Troyce swerved the truck around a jackrabbit that had bolted across the road. Or at least appeared to swerve around it. When he glanced into the side mirror, his face seemed to contain more than idle curiosity. “I wouldn’t necessarily count on that,” he said.

“I’ll build you a good floor, boss. I appreciate anything you can do for me,” Jimmy Dale said.

“Yeah, you’re gonna do just fine. Have a smoke.” Troyce shook a cigarette loose from the pack, offering the firm white cylinder to Jimmy Dale, holding his eyes when Jimmy Dale took it.

Just before they entered the compound, the truck bounced over a series of potholes. Troyce’s hand slipped off the gearshift, and the pads of his fingers brushed softly across Jimmy Dale’s thigh. For Jimmy Dale, the sensation was like the tiny feet of a small animal tickling across his skin, and it caused his penis to shrivel in his skivvies.

THE CONTRACT PRISON was run military-style. At 7:58 P.M. sharp, the count man shouted, “In the house!” At eight P.M. he shouted, “Locking it down!” Then the steel doors slid collectively into place, clanging shut in unison with a sound that reverberated through the building. The count man and the screw behind him began their walk down the bullrun, the count man whanging his baton on the bars as he passed each cell, the screw ticking check marks on his clipboard.

Jimmy Dale hated this part of the day, trapped between daylight and darkness, between motion and inertia, between the illusion that he worked under the same sky and breathed the same air as other human beings and the knowledge that he was little more than a state-owned cipher entombed in a five-by-eight-foot steel box.

The echoes of the count man’s baton on the bars trailed away in the distance, then the lights dimmed and he could hear the commode in his cell gurgling in the gloom. Jimmy Dale’s nightmares waited for him just beyond the edge of sleep. In the worst of them, he was deep underground, pinned in a long tunnel, his arms crushed against his sides, the breath squeezed from his lungs. In his dream he cried out for his mother to free him, but his mother was not there. A psychiatrist had told him once that he had probably been wrapped in a rubber sheet when he was an infant and left to his fate. For some reason, to Jimmy Dale, those words were even worse than the dream.

His housemate was Beeville Hicks, a four-time loser whose enemy was freedom, not confinement. Long ago Beeville had flattened all the veins in his arms, destroyed his career as a steel-guitar player, and murdered his wife along the way. He was toothless, his skin like plastic wrap on his bones, his forehead tattooed with a red swastika, his hair as long and coarse as a horse’s tail. Oddly, in spite of his violent history and his tattoo and his friendship with members of the AB, Beeville was basically a kind man who, had he not been a heroin addict, probably would not have hung washlines of paper all over the western United States. When Jimmy Dale asked Beeville why he had killed his old lady, he replied, “I’m not rightly sure. I knowed she was screwing the milkman, but she was a homely thing, and I couldn’t hold that against her. Yes sir, that’s a good question.”

For his last birthday, Beeville’s daughter had brought him his old scrapbook, which she had found in her attic. It was probably the finest gift Beeville had ever received, since few inmates or prison personnel believed his stories regarding the celebrities he had known or worked with. Beeville plastered his “house” wall with torn magazine pages and cracked black-and-white photographs showing him with Billy Joe Shaver, Texas Ruby, Moon Mullican, Stony Cooper and Wilma Lee, Floyd Tillman, Waylon Jennings, and Bob Wills.

He was eating a piece of gingerbread cake on the bottom bunk, what he called “scarf,” the crumbs dripping off his hand, his naked back rounded, his vertebrae trying to poke through his skin. “I hear Cap’n Nix is going to have you working for him in the shop,” he said to Jimmy Dale.

“That looks like the plan,” Jimmy Dale said from the top bunk. In the silence that followed, he leaned over the bunk and looked down at Beeville. “What about it?”

“You got a lot of talent. Not just in your fingers, either. You got an old-style voice, like Jimmie Rodgers. Ain’t many got that kind of voice anymore. Maybe Haggard or Dwight Yoakam has got it, but not nobody else I know of.”

“Will you take the collard greens out of your mouth?”

“I got this swastika put on my head in Huntsville because I thought it’d protect me. I was right. Nobody would touch me with a toilet plunger. When I come out, nobody in the music business would touch me, either. How’s that for smarts?”

Jimmy Dale lay back on his pillow and stared at the ceiling. It was steel, painted white, and the rivets that held it in place were orange around the rims. He could almost feel the ceiling’s weight crushing down on his chest. “If I don’t go along with Nix, he’ll screw me at my hearing.”

“He’ll screw you in the shop and do it at your hearing, both. Go out max time, Jimmy Dale. You’ll still have your voice, you’ll still be a solid con. How about that girl you sang duet with? She’s still out there somewhere, ain’t she?”

Jimmy Dale heard somebody scream in the block, maybe a fish taking it from a couple of AB guys who had paid a screw to provide them a fresh experience. He laid his arm across his eyes and felt the moisture on his skin.

“What was that gal’s name?” Beeville asked.

“Jamie Sue,” Jimmy Dale replied. “Jamie Sue Stapleton.”

“I saw her at a gig in Austin once. She looked like a movie star. Where’s she at?”

“Will you shut up, old man? Just for once eat your rat food and shut up.”

Jimmy Dale’s ears were ringing as though he were in a plane dropping out of clouds, the face of a rock cliff rushing toward him. He leaned over the side of his bunk again, hoping the walls would stop spinning. “I’m sorry, Bee. I’m just off my feed.”

Beeville dipped his head down, eating the crumbs from his palm, and showed no indication that he had heard either the insult or the apology. When he finished his gingerbread, he wiped his hands with a piece of toilet paper and threw the paper into the commode. “Life’s a bitch, ain’t it?” he said.

DURING THE NEXT two weeks, Jimmy Dale built a floor for Troyce Nix’s horse trailer, then a desk for his office and a gun cabinet for his house. Nix seemed to pay little attention to Jimmy Dale except to check occasionally on the progress of the work.

Then one scorching afternoon, while Jimmy Dale was running an acetylene torch in the shop, Troyce dropped a fresh set of state blues on a bench and told him to take a shower in back and change clothes.

“What’s going on, boss?” Jimmy Dale said.

“I just got you bumped up to full trusty. I need you to go in town with me and load some spool wire,” Troyce Nix said.

“Hidalgo going, too, boss?” Jimmy Dale said, half smiling.

Troyce Nix did not acknowledge the question.

Jimmy Dale lathered himself under the showerhead inside the tin stall in the back of the shop, staring through the window at the clouds of yellow dust blowing across the hardpan. A skinny Mexican kid pushing a broom glanced back over his shoulder, then looked at Jimmy Dale. His shirt was wadded up and hanging from his back pocket, his skin peppered with sweat and welding soot from the shop, his back tattooed with an enormous picture of the Virgin Mary. “Watch your ass today,” he said.

“We’re going to town for wire. It ain’t a big deal, Hidalgo,” Jimmy Dale said.

“Make him use grease. I heard a guy say it was like a freight train.”

“You close your mouth,” Jimmy Dale said.

Hidalgo paused in his sweeping, his expression reflective, his eyes downcast. “I thought you was stand-up, Jimmy Dale. You can’t go out max time, man?”

The trip to town was uneventful. Jimmy Dale loaded a dozen wire spools in the bed of the stake truck, chained up the tailgate, and got back in the cab with Troyce Nix. The only thing that bothered him was that the employees at the hardware store could have loaded the spools and Nix actually had no need of him. On the way back to the prison, Nix took note of the time and yawned. “It’s been a hot one, ain’t it?” he said.

“Yes sir, and to be followed by a warming spell, I expect,” Jimmy Dale said.

But Nix was not interested in Jimmy Dale’s attempt at humor. He turned off the state road onto a dirt track that led across a long stretch of cinnamon-colored earth and mesquite trees and scrub oak. The dirt track wound into a bank of hills and a canyon where a paintless frame house with a gallery was tucked against a bluff, one side of it shaded by a hackberry tree.

“That yonder is my camp, a place where I drink whiskey and shoot coyotes and cougars sometimes. That windmill puts out the sweetest, coldest water you ever drunk. Take that sack out from under your seat.”

Jimmy Dale reached between his legs and felt the tip of a paper bag. When he pulled on it, the bottle inside clanked against the seat.

“Crack it open and hand it to me,” Nix said.

“Boss, I don’t want to get in no trouble,” Jimmy Dale said.

“All of you are the same, ain’t you?”

“Sir?”

“Under it all, you’re three years old and fixing to shit your diapers.”

Nix took the pint of vodka from Jimmy Dale and cracked off the cap. He drank from the neck like he was swallowing soda water, his throat working smoothly, his eyes fixed on the shadows spreading across the canyon floor. He braked the truck between the windmill and the frame house. A dust devil spun across the hardpan and broke apart against the gallery. “Get out,” he said.

“Boss-”

“That wire ain’t for the compound. It’s for a mustang lot I’m putting in before the federal auction. I been off the clock and on my own time since noon. There ain’t nothing wrong that’s going on here. Now, you move your ass, boy. You’re starting to piss me off.”

“Where you want it, boss?”

Nix let the heat die in his voice. “Up yonder, on the slope. Watch you don’t step in none of them armadillo holes. I don’t want to have to haul you to the infirmary.”

Jimmy Dale worked the spools of wire off the truck bed and carried them one at a time up an incline, the heat in the metal scorching his hands and forearms. He set the spools in a row by a stack of treated fence posts, his heart beating, Nix’s silhouette like a scorched tin cutout against the sun. Why had he been so foolish? Why hadn’t he listened to Beeville and Hidalgo? He tried to pretend that acceptance of Nix’s explanation about the side trip to the camp would get him safely back in the truck, on the road back to the prison, back to eight P.M. lockdown and the chance to undo his own naïveté in thinking he could outwit a career gunbull who had worked at Abu Ghraib. But even as he had these thoughts, he knew that of his own volition, he had climbed into a concrete mixer.

Nix took off his shirt, released the chain on the windmill, and washed his face and chest and under his arms in the sluice of water that exploded from the pipe. His shoulders were ridged with fine red hair, his stomach corrugated, his chest flat, like a boxer’s. He removed a pair of yellow leather gloves from his back pocket and fitted them on. As an afterthought, he removed his shades and set them on top of his folded shirt.

“How hard you ever been hit?” he said.

“I been beat up by the best there is, boss.”

“We’ll see.” Nix grinned and looked at the dust gusting down an arroyo. The windmill blades clattered against the sky, and water sluiced out of the pipe onto the tip of his boot. He balled his right hand and made a gesture with it, causing Jimmy Dale to flinch. Then he hit Jimmy Dale unexpectedly with his left, the blow landing like a bee sting on his ear, just before the right fist caught Jimmy Dale square on the jaw and knocked him headlong in the dust.

Nix pulled a pair of handcuffs loose from the back of his belt and dropped them on Jimmy’s Dale stomach. “Put these on, and let’s get you into the house. I got some iodine for that cut. You can yell all you want. It won’t bother nobody.”

During the next half hour, Jimmy Dale tried to go to a private place in his mind, one where he was inviolate and apart from what was happening to his body. He was even willing to journey to the tunnel in his nightmares where his arms were pinioned at his sides and the breath was crushed from his lungs. But this kind of fantasy anodyne was not available for Jimmy Dale. Hidalgo had mentioned a freight train when he warned him about Nix’s potential. But a freight train didn’t smell of testosterone and hair oil, and it didn’t have unshaved jaws that felt like emery paper, and it didn’t have a wet mouth laboring by Jimmy Dale’s ear; nor did it make sounds that were less than human and simultaneously plaintive with need.

When Nix was finished, he bent over with his handcuff key and released Jimmy Dale’s wrists. Then he looked down at him with the most bizarre expression Jimmy Dale had ever seen on a human being’s face. “Go outside and wash yourself at the windmill,” he said. “You turn my stomach.”

THE NEXT MORNING was Saturday. When the gate screw hit the seven A.M. buzzer and opened all the cell doors on the tier, Jimmy Dale climbed down from his bunk, vomited in the commode, and climbed up on his bunk again.

“You ain’t gonna eat?” Beeville Hicks asked.

“Got a touch of virus, I think.”

“You look like you was rope-drug down a staircase,” Beeville Hicks said.

Jimmy Dale stared at the steel-plated ceiling, one hand pressed on his stomach, wondering if he had bled into his skivvies.

“What’d he do to you, boy?”

“Nothing.”

Beeville was sitting on the edge of his bunk, his back humped. He popped a pimple on his shoulder and looked at his fingers. “I got turned out when I was seventeen. It goes away with time.” When Jimmy Dale didn’t reply, Beeville said, “What you aiming to do?”

“I don’t rightly know.”

Beeville stood up and began buttoning his shirt. His toothless mouth was ringed with deep creases where the flesh had collapsed. “I’ll see if I can sneak you a banana back,” he said.

“I told you, I ain’t hungry, Bee.”

“Better eat up. It ain’t over with Nix. He takes it out on the guy he’s got the yen for. I feel sorry for you.”

Jimmy Dale closed his eyes and swallowed.

The full-court press started Monday after lunch.

“Cap’n Rankin says he come in for some center cutters on the ditching machine. He says you sassed him,” Troyce Nix said.

Jimmy Dale set down his acetylene torch and pulled his goggles up on his forehead with his thumb. The motes of dust were as bright as grains of sand in the shafts of sunlight shining through the windows. “I don’t think I done that, boss,” he replied. “I just want to stack my time and not bother nobody. I don’t want nobody bothering me, either, boss.”

“You calling Cap’n Rankin a liar?”

“No sir.”

“Then why’d you sass him?”

“I guess it’s just been one of them kind of days, boss.”

Nix pulled his gloves from his back pocket and flipped them idly on his palm. “You’re either the dumbest breed I ever met or the slowest learner. Which is it?”

“Probably both, boss.”

Nix shook his head as he walked out of the shop. Through the window, Jimmy Dale saw him talking to two other screws. While Nix talked, the other two men stared in Jimmy Dale’s direction, their expressions opaque in the shadow of their cowboy hats.

That afternoon at quitting time, Jimmy Dale was told he wouldn’t be showering or heading for the chow hall. Instead, he was escorted to what was called “the barrel,” an empty upended fifty-gallon oil drum that sat on a stretch of green grass in an alcove between two lockdown units. A flood lamp shone down on the barrel, bathing the inmate who stood on the barrel in a white light from evening until sunrise. Throughout the night, while he tried to keep his balance, the inmate could see the gunbulls in the roofed towers on the fence corners, their cigars or cigarettes glowing in the dark. Before an inmate climbed onto the barrel, he was allowed to relieve himself and to drink one glass of water. If the inmate fell from the barrel during the night, he not only had to climb back on it, he had to spend another night on it. If he relieved himself in his pants, he spent another night on it. If he called out to the hacks, he spent another night on it. An inmate who was sent to the barrel learned that his relationship to the barrel was open-ended.

Early Tuesday morning Jimmy Dale was escorted back to his tier, his knees like rubber, the backs of his thighs still tingling, his body crawling with stink. He was allowed to shower and dress in clean state blues and eat breakfast in the chow hall. Then he reported for work on time, at eight A.M., in the shop.

“You gonna give me a good day, Jimmy Dale?” Nix said to him.

“Yes sir, boss.”

“You already eat?”

“Yes sir.”

“Think I was too hard on you?”

“Stuff happens. I don’t study on it.”

“Stick this Hershey bar in your pocket.”

“I’m all right, boss.”

“A workingman gets hungry by midmorning. I’m going out to my camp Friday afternoon and put them fence posts in. You reckon you can screw a posthole digger into hardpan? It ain’t a skill every man’s got.”

Jimmy Dale tried to look Nix in the face but couldn’t do it. He wet his lips and tried to keep his eyes focused. His legs seemed to be buckling under him, a fetid odor rising from his armpits, even though he had showered that morning. For just a moment he thought he was going to be sick again. A grin tugged at the corner of Nix’s mouth.

“Whatever you say, boss. I don’t want no more trouble,” Jimmy Dale said.

“Let me ask you something. That woman you was singing with, wasn’t her name Jamie Sue Something?”

“I don’t even remember, boss.”

Nix removed a folded newspaper from his back pocket. It was pressed and rounded by the tightness of his buttock against the fabric of his uniform. “Is this her?”

Jimmy Dale studied the three-column color photo of a gold-haired woman singing onstage at an evangelical rally in Albuquerque. She was dressed in an evening gown that rippled like blue ice water on her figure. The HD-28 Martin guitar Jimmy Dale had given her hung on a braided strap from her neck. “Never seen the bitch,” he said.

“Her name is Jamie Sue Wellstone. It says here she sung for the president of the United States.”

“She sure ain’t sung for the likes of me. Most of the women I hung with had bad cases of hoof-and-mouth. That’s a fact, boss. I’m lucky I ain’t loaded with diseases.”

Nix rolled the newspaper into a cone and tapped it on the edge of a trash barrel, taking Jimmy Dale’s measure. The barrel was stuffed with empty motor-oil cans, shredded cardboard boxes, and a windshield that had been ripped out of a wrecked pickup truck. Nix dropped the newspaper into the barrel. “Friday,” he said.

Friday it is, motherfucker, Jimmy Dale said to himself, inhaling a breath that was as sharp as a razor in his throat.

EVERY JAIL HAS its own economy. Almost every item and form of service sold on the outside can be purchased for smokes, “scarf,” or cash on the inside. Booze, skag, weed, yard bitches, and premium food delivered to your house are all available. You just have to know the right inmate or sometimes the right screws.

Weapons and contract hits are another matter. Frying a man in his house with a Molotov made from gasoline and paraffin can be done fairly easily. It takes little skill to make the Molotov, and usually a meltdown with little control over his life is assigned to race past the cell and light up the victim.

But a good shank is a work of both ingenuity and craft because the materials are limited and the process is time-consuming and must be accomplished in clandestine and circuitous fashion. If possible, the shank should come from a source other than the person who plans to use it. A toothbrush handle can be heated and molded around a razor blade. Nails can be sharpened on concrete, shoved through a block of wood, and turned into dirks. A scrap of tin can be cut into a pie shape, honed on all the edges, and inserted neatly into a grooved and wire-wrapped piece of mop handle. The materials are primitive, the craftsmen imaginative, their skill as traditional as that of medieval guild members.

Before his last fall for breaking and entering, Hidalgo had been a glazier in Pasadena, California. On Tuesday night a punk by the name of Mackey Fitch who did errands for the AB and sometimes for his cousin Beeville Hicks dropped two and a half cartons of smokes on Hidalgo’s bunk.

“You turning sweet on me?” Hidalgo said.

“Bee said he owed you these smokes. He said if you want to drop something off at his house, that would be okay. But make sure you do it by Thursday night.”

“I’ll check my calendar on that, Mackey. Tell Bee thanks for these free smokes.”

“Anytime,” Mackey said.

IT WAS HOT and bright, and there was a yellow cast in the clouds Friday morning when Jimmy Dale left the prison compound in the stake truck with Troyce Nix.

“See them cows bunching up in the arroyo?” Nix said. “Bet it’ll rain by noon.”

“Got to ask you something, boss. I heard you took away my good time.”

“You shouldn’t have got in Cap’n Rankin’s face.”

“I spent the night on the barrel for something I didn’t do, but I didn’t complain about it. You shouldn’t have taken away my good time.”

“Sounds like you got up with a hard-on this morning.” Nix pulled a cigarette out of a package on the dash and stuck it in his mouth. “What are we gonna do about that?”

“I want my good time back.”

“I bet you do, you little bitch.”

Nix didn’t speak the rest of the way into town. After they picked up fifty bags of crushed white rock for the trim along the walkway and gardens in front of the administration building, Nix drove to a diner and went inside and ate while Jimmy Dale sat in the truck. When Nix came out, he handed Jimmy Dale a paper bag and a cold can of soda and started the truck. “You didn’t think about taking off on me?”

“I just want my good time back,” Jimmy Dale said.

“Come Monday, I think you’ll be going back on the hard road. But that don’t change the relationship we got, you get my drift?”

They drove in silence to Nix’s camp, the land spreading with shadow, the temperature dropping, electricity leaking from the thunderclouds overhead. Jimmy Dale saw a solitary bolt of lightning strike the top of a distant mesa. It seemed to quiver there, as though it had sought out an animal and impaled it to the earth.

“You think we’re doing something illegal here, you working on my property?” Nix said.

“I thought about it.”

“You thought wrong. I’m a founding officer and stockholder in the corporation that owns this prison. That means my living quarters come with the package. Inmate maintenance here is just like inmate maintenance at the compound. If you was thinking about getting an ACLU lawyer-”

“I just want my good time back, boss.”

“You got a bad case of mono-brain,” Nix said.

He parked the truck by the windmill and told Jimmy Dale to get the posthole digger out of the toolshed. Then he went inside to use the bathroom. Just as the first raindrops struck the ground, Jimmy Dale heard the toilet flush. He twisted the posthole digger into the ground, busting through gravel and clay that had baked as hard as ceramic. He spread the wood handles to widen the hole. Then he cleaned the blades of the posthole digger in a bucket of water and started in again. The wind puffed the hackberry tree that shaded Nix’s house. The air was cool and rain-scented, and Jimmy Dale could hear the windmill’s blades ginning behind him. A bolt of lightning exploded on top of the cliff and startled him.

“When people is scared of lightning, it’s usually ’cause they grew up in a strict church,” Nix said. He was standing on the back porch, stripped to the waist, his yellow leather gloves pulled snugly on his hands. He had tucked his trousers inside his half-topped boots, as though he didn’t want to soil his trouser cuffs. He stepped off the porch onto the ground, the wind blowing his hair, his chest taut and dry-looking in the shadowy light, the limbs of the hackberry tree thrashing above his head. “You scared of lightning?”

“Not really. Fact is, I ain’t scared of a whole lot, boss.”

“Lay the posthole digger down.”

Jimmy Dale let it drop to the side, the handles clattering against the hardpan.

“I thought I was gonna go easy on you this time. But there’s something about you that really pisses me off. I just cain’t put my finger on it,” Nix said.

“People cain’t change what they are,” Jimmy Dale replied, unbuttoning his denim shirt with his left hand.

“It makes me want to lose all restraint and flat tear you apart. Can you relate to that?” Nix said.

“All I wanted was my good time back, boss.”

“Take off your britches. Or I can do it for you.”

“I don’t give a shit what you do, boss.”

Nix looked at him quizzically. Jimmy Dale was still facing the cliff, his face turned to the wind when he needed to speak. He slipped his hand down toward his belt buckle or perhaps his side pocket.

Nix stepped closer. He touched Jimmy Dale’s shoulder and slowly turned him around. “Say that again?”

The shank Hidalgo had made for Jimmy Dale had been fashioned from a triangular piece of automotive windshield glass, the blade three inches long, as pointed as a stiletto, as sharp on the edges as a barber’s razor, the butt end inserted in the sanded-down handle of a shoe-polish applicator, all of it wrapped in a scabbard made from newspaper and electrician’s tape.

“Sorry to hurt you like this, kid, but that’s just the way it is,” Nix said.

“You got it all wrong, boss,” Jimmy Dale replied.

He turned with the shank and slashed Nix backhanded across the jaw, opening the flesh to the bone. Then he hit him twice in the chest, each time going deep, aiming for the heart or the lungs. Nix reached out toward him, either trying to keep his balance or to ward off the next blow. But Jimmy Dale got under his arm and drove the blade into Nix’s chest again, going even deeper this time and snapping it off at the hilt, as Hidalgo had instructed him. Nix struck the ground heavily, his mouth puckered, his breath coming in short gasps, as though, somehow, through an act of will, he could control the massive hemorrhage taking place inside his chest.

Jimmy Dale went through the back door of the house and pulled a shirt and pair of work pants out of Nix’s bedroom closet, streaking the interior of the house with Nix’s blood. As he changed into Nix’s clothes, he looked through the back window and saw Nix rise from the ground and then collapse below the level of the window. A sound like kettle drums was thundering in Jimmy Dale’s head.

Moments later, he was roaring down the dirt road in the stake truck, hailstones bouncing off the windshield, his hands trembling on the wheel. He skidded in a cloud of dust onto the state road and headed due west, the front end shaking when he hit ninety, the engine needle on the dash climbing into the red. Nix’s stolen clothes felt like an obscene presence on his skin.