Swan Peak Read online

“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?”