Jones would play country music anywhere they allowed him to, but he particularly liked going up to Chelsea because hardly anyone knew him there. The gig was at the civic center near the Burlington Northern railroad tracks, where every Friday night thirty or forty farm couples, many in their seventies and eighties, gather for potluck supper and to push and pull one another around the dance floor. Jones usually plays backup rhythm, but this time he stepped up to the mike to employ his thin, reedy voice in service of a blue-grass song that started off "There's a cabin in the pines in the hills of Caroline/and a blue-eyed girl is waiting there for me." During a smoking break outside, he took some ribbing about how Porter Wagoner must be missing his suit by now, when the lead guitarist in the group, who hits more than seven feet in his boots and cowboy hat, slipped Jones a piece of paper with his name and address on it and said quietly, out of anyone's hearing, "You write me a letter, and I'll write ya' back."
June 30 started with a blinding rainstorm that for half an hour forced cars on the freeways encircling Tulsa to pull off to the side. Jennifer had taken two Ambiens the night before, but still didn't manage to sleep. Jones was awakened at 4:00 a.m. by the cat pouncing on his chest. The prison wanted him there by noon, and I volunteered to drive him the two hours down to Oklahoma City because friends had advised it would be too wrenching for the family to drop Jones off. Holly wasn't there because the doctor said that she was too close to her delivery date to travel up from Dallas. Jay's younger daughter Terri, twenty-nine, arrived with her husband, Jay Q., and a dozen Krispy Kreme doughnuts, while Jones attended to a list of last things to do. Yes, he fitted a fresh propane tank onto the cooker out on the deck. Yes, he canceled his cell phone, and he told Jennifer where to go in case of a tornado. Get down into that little closet in the basement, where she keeps Miss Celie's dog food, he says. The whole house can blow away, and that room will still be standing.
Terri started reading out of the prison manual. "Daddy, it says to take your eyeglasses and a lot of change for the vending machine."
"Sweetheart, they don't let you have money."
"Yes, they do, and you can take your wedding ring and-" Jennifer cut in to tell him not to forget his medicine.
"Mom, I don't know if you can take your medicine," Terri said. This made Jennifer start to cry.
"He has to take his medicine."
"No, he can take his eyeglasses, he can take his Bible or a religious medal and he can take his wedding ring, as long as it doesn't have any stones, and that's it."
As it neared 9 a.m., Jones wanted to get going, get it over with. He hates good-byes. "Jennifer, if it comes down to it, and you have a choice to make between taking the advice of some psychologist or your daughters, take your daughters' advice. They know you better."
Jennifer wasn't hearing much because she was sobbing uncontrollably. "Oh, Jay," she said. "You know, this is the first time I haven't had to pack for you when you're going somewhere."
They hugged for two or three minutes at the front door, and then Jones broke off and got in the car and waved.
Home for Jones now is an eight-foot-by-fourteen-foot room in F pod on the seventh floor of the Transfer Center, a newly constructed high-rise near the Will Rogers World Airport. It has orange brick walls and tall slit windows, eight inches wide, that from a distance look like the loopholes in a medieval castle. He sleeps in the top bunk and shares a toilet and writing desk with his cellmate, a fifty-six-year-old white-collar offender also from Tulsa. (Following the advice in his handbook, Jones doesn't want to say what crime he committed.) Like Jones, permanent members of the service cadre are doing time mostly for nonviolent offenses-parole violators on drug charges, counterfeiters, child pornographers-and no fighting is tolerated. The only major fight on Jones's pod so far occurred one morning when he was awakened by two inmates trading blows just outside his door, spattering blood all over the day-room floor. From what Jones heard, it was over a piece of chicken smuggled in from the kitchen. Both men were taken immediately to the special housing unit, or "hole," and shortly thereafter transferred to a higher-level institution.
For a time, Jones's job was in the prison library, where he photocopied pages for inmates' law cases and wheeled around the book cart. He regarded it as the highlight of his day, taken up otherwise by watching TV and playing endless rounds of bridge and pinochle with three of the older inmates. Recently, he was reassigned as an orderly on the "smoke deck," an outdoor area covered with razor wire where he picks up butts and wipes down tables. His family sends him books, but he never got much pleasure out of reading. "Weekends are the hardest because of the utter boredom," he says. "You don't work, but you get up at the same time because you can only sleep for so long, and then there's nothing to do."
His spirits rose considerably last August when the chaplain issued him an old guitar to practice with in his room so he could play along with the hymns during the Thursday and Sunday services. He lost the guitar, though, when he was transferred to the Tulsa County Jail for the Bartmann trial and it was given to someone else. Adding to his disappointment was the fact that unlike Jones, Bartmann ended up getting off without any punishment. The government put up fifty-three witnesses and spent thirty-eight trial days laying out its case, but besides what Jones had to say, its evidence was all circumstantial. After a week of deliberation, the jury decided that the U.S. attorney had not proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Bartmann knew anything about the Dimat scam. They voted to acquit.
Jones's testimony for the government was covered heavily in the Tulsa paper, which meant it got all over the prison. A few of the inmates now snub him in the cafeteria. But not many, he says. "The rat issue is one that doesn't bother me," he says. "There is a certain population, very small, maybe ten percent, that that would bother. But the people who have a problem with it are generally not the people I would care very much about anyway."
Jones's visits from family members-spread among Jennifer and his daughters and his brother Joe, they average one every weekend- also come with a certain amount of discomfort. Depending on the guard's mood of the day, Jones may or may not be required to strip naked after the visit and bend over in a duck squat so that anything secreted in his anal cavity would drop out onto the floor. The one plus side of prison is that he is now getting a full night's sleep, "better than I have for four years," he says. "After all, I've got no worries anymore. The only worries you have are the ones you create, and it's hard to create one in here. It's a very controlled, very organized environment. Anticipation of the unknown was a factor before, and now that that's been realized, there's nothing left. It is what it is, and you learn to live with it."
As for Jennifer, to the general surprise of her family, she seems to be doing just fine. "I've enjoyed myself, going to movies, out to dinner," she said last December, as Miss Celie still pranced about on the plush carpet. Outside there was a for-sale sign on the lawn, and Jennifer had been looking for a smaller place near Holly's in Dallas. "I wondered what it would be like, being without a man, but it's kind of fun," she said. "Do you know every strong relationship that I had with another woman Jay has always made fun of?" She now sees Dr. Ferraro only every other Thursday and misses no more appointments because she is in bed crying. "Right now we're going through my hate for my husband," she said. "I love him, but I get so mad at him-thinking what he did just boggles my mind sometimes. Dr. Ferraro suggested that when the time is right I write Jay a letter and tell him how I feel. Sometimes when I go see him, I want to tell him: 'Yes, it's hugs and kisses and love right here, but I can't tell you how I feel in front of the inmate population and the guards. Sometime we've got to discuss that.'