Swan Peak (7 page)

“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.