Swan Peak (6 page)

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.