I put my hands on his shoulders. He looked up at me with his mouth open, his tongue pink and thick on his bottom teeth.
"Don't do that, Jerome. There's no key in there," I said.
"What?" he said. He talked like a man who was drugged.
"Take off your shirt and wash yourself in the shower," I said.
"Come on, walk over here with me."
"We're just giving the cat a little hope," the biker said.
"Your comedy act is over," I said.
The biker wore black sunglasses. He looked at me silently and worked his tongue around his gums. The hair on his face and head looked like brown springs.
"Wrong place to be telling people shit," he said.
I released Jerome's arm and turned back toward the biker.
"Go ahead," I said.
"Go ahead, what?"
"Say something else clever."
"What are you talking about, man?"
"I want you to get in my face one more time."
I couldn't see his eyes behind the sunglasses, but his mouth was as still as though it had been painted on his skin.
Then he said, because the others were watching him, "We're a family here, man. That's how you hack it inside. You don't know that, you ain't gonna make it."
I turned on the shower for Jerome, helped him pull off his shirt, and gave him a bar of soap from my cell. Then I picked up my tin plate and banged it loudly on the main door. It didn't take long for the jailer to open up. I was standing inside the deadline when he did.
His lean face was electric with outrage.
"What the hell do you think you're doing, Robicheaux?" he said.
"You've got a retarded man here who's being abused by other inmates. Either put him in isolation or send him to Mandeville."
"Get your ass back across that line."
"Fuck you."
"That's it. You're going into lockdown," he said, and slammed the iron door.
I turned around and stared into the grinning face of the four-time loser who had murdered a family after breaking out of Sugar-land. He was completely naked, and the huge rolls of fat on his thighs and stomach hung off his frame almost like curtains. His eyes were pale, empty of all emotion, but his mouth was as red as a clown's. He took a puff off his cigarette and said, "Sounds like you're getting pretty ripe, buddy."
Then he laughed so hard, his eyes squinted shut with glee, that tears ran down his round cheeks.
Fifteen minutes later they moved me into a small room that contained a two-bunk iron cage, perforated with small squares and covered with thick layers of white paint that had been chipped and scratched with graffiti and prisoners' names. Years ago the cage had been used to hold men awaiting execution in the days when the electric chair, with two huge generators, traveled from parish to parish under tarpaulins on the back of a semi truck. Now it was used to house troublemakers and the uncontrollable. I was told that I would spend the next five days there, would have no visitors other than my lawyer, would take no showers, and would receive one meal a day at a time of my choosing.
That afternoon Batist tried to visit me and was turned away, but a Negro trusty brought me an envelope that contained a half-dozen crayon-filled pages from Alafair's coloring book, along with a rfote that she had printed out on lined paper. The colored-in pages showed palm trees and blue water, a lake full of fish, a brown horse by whose head she had written the word " Tex. " Her note read: I can spell. can spell ant in the can. I can spell cat in the hat. I have Dave. I don't say aint no more. Love. Alafair.
I hung the coloring-book pages on the inside of the cage by pressing their edges under the iron seams at the tops of the walls. It started to rain, and mist blew through the window and glistened on the bars. I unrolled the thin striped mattress on the bottom bunk and tried to sleep. I was unbelievably tired, but I couldn't tell you from what. Maybe it was because you never really sleep in a jail. Iron doors slam all day and night; drunks shake doors against the jambs, and irritated street cops retaliate by raking their batons across the bars; people are gang-banged and sodomized in the shower, their cries lost in the clouds of steam dancing off the tiles; the crazies howl their apocalyptic insight from the windows like dogs baying under a yellow moon.
But it was an even deeper fatigue, one that went deep into the bone, that left the muscles as flaccid as if they had been traversed by worms. It was a mood that I knew well, and it always descended upon me immediately before I began a two-day bender. I felt a sense of failure, moral lassitude, defeat, and fear that craved only one release. In my troubled dream I tried to will myself into one of the pages from Alafair's coloring book onto a stretch of beach dotted with palm trees, the sun hot on my bare shoulders while flecks of rain struck coldly on my skin. The water was blue and green, and red clouds of kelp were floating in the ground swell. Alafair rode her horse bareback along the edge of the surf, her mouth wide with a smile, her hair black and shiny in the sunlight.
But the pure lines of the dream wouldn't hold, and suddenly I was pouring rum into a cracked coconut shell and drinking from it with both hands. Like the sun and the rain, it was cool and warm at the same time, and it lighted my desires the way you touch a match to old newspaper stored in a dry box. I traveled to low-life New Orleans and Saigon bars, felt a woman's breath on my neck, her mouth on my ear, her hand brush my sex. Topless girls in G-strings danced barefooted on a purple-lit runway, the cigarette smoke drifting across their breasts and braceleted arms. I knocked back double shots of Beam with draft chasers, held on to the edge of the bar like a man in a gale, and looked at their brown bodies, the watery undulations of their stomachs, their eyes that were as inviting as the sweet odor of burning opium.
Then I was back on the beach, alone, trembling with a hang over. The back of Alafair's horse was empty, and he was shaking the loose reins against his neck and snorting with his nose down by the edge of the surf.
Don't lose it all, I heard Annie say.
Where is she?
She'll be back. But you've got to get your shit together, sailor.
I'm afraid.
Of what?
They're serious. They're talking about life in Angola. That's ten and a half years with good time. They've got the knife and the witnesses to pull it off, too. I don't think I'm going to get out of this one.
Sure you will.
I'd be drunk now if I was out of jail.
Maybe. But you don't know that. Easy does it and one day at a time. Right? But no more boozing and whoring in your dreams.
Annie, I didn't do it, did I?
It's not your style, baby love. The rain's starting to slack and I have to go. Be good, darling'.
I woke sweating in a bright shaft of sunlight through the window. I sat on the side of my bunk, my palms clenched on the iron edges, my mind a tangle of snakes. It was hot, the room was dripping with humidity, but I trembled all over as though a cold wind were blowing across my body. The water faucet in my rust-streaked sink ticked as loudly as a clock.
Two days later my loan was approved at a New Iberia bank, and fifteen minutes after I paid the bondsman's fee I was sprung. It was raining hard when I ran from the courthouse to the pickup truck with my paper sack of soiled clothes and toilet articles under my arm. Alafair hugged me in the snug, dry enclosure of the truck, and Batist lit a cigar and blew the smoke out his teeth as though we all had a lock on the future.
I should have been happy. But I remembered a scene I had witnessed years ago when I was a young patrolman in New Orleans.
A bunch of Black Panthers had just been brought back to a holding cell on a wrist chain from morning arraignment, and their public defender was trying to assure them that they would be treated fairly.
"Believe it or not, our system works," he said to them through the bars.
An unshaved black man in shades, beret, and black leather jacket rolled a matchstick across his tongue and said, "You got it, motherfucker. And it work for somebody else."