“Lean on it,” the first deputy said.
I spread my legs and propped my hands against the roof of the automobile while his hands moved inside my thighs, then dug inside my pockets and turned them inside out. He pulled my arms behind me and snipped on the handcuffs, and the other deputy held open the door into the wire-mesh segregated backseat.
“Are you going to give us any trouble on the way back, or do you want me to sit with you?” the first deputy said.
I didn’t answer, and he locked both back doors from the outside. As the car rolled along the rutted lane, I leaned back against the handcuffs and felt the metal bite into the skin. I tried to raise myself forward to keep the pressure off my wrists, but each chuckhole in the road sent me back into the seat and another dig into my skin. The mountains had taken on a deeper blue and green from the rains, and the boulders in the creeks under the bridges were wet and shining and steaming in the sunlight at the same time. But at that moment, in my comical effort to sit rigid in the back of a sheriff’s car, I remembered a Negro kid at Angola who was handcuffed and taken down to the hole and beaten with a garden hose for stealing a peanut-butter sandwich. He spit on a hack, and so they sweated him five more days and took away his good time.
At that time, what bothered me was meeting him out on the yard after he got out of lockdown. There were still blue gashes on the insides of his lips, and while he smoked a cigarette, he told me he didn’t mind pulling the extra three years because he knew that eventually he would fall again anyway.
Seven
The holding cell was dull yellow with a crisscrossed door of flat iron strips that were coated with thick white paint. Names had been burned on the walls and ceiling with cigarette lighters, and there was a small, round drain in the center of the floor to urinate in. I sat on the concrete against the wall and smoked cigarettes and listened in my preoccupation with my own troubles to all the jailhouse complaints, stories of bum arrests, wives who should have had their teeth kicked in, and advice about how to deal with each screw on the day and night shifts. The area around the drain was covered with wet cigarette butts and reeked with a stench that made your eyes water when you had to stand over it. Two Flathead Indians were still drunk and waiting for the reservation police to pick them up; a check-writer who was already wanted in Idaho kept calling the sergeant back to the cell to ask about his wife, who was in the lock upstairs; a deranged old man, whose toothless gums were purple with snuff, sat by the drain, hawking and spitting through his knees; and then the one dangerous man, a twenty-five-year-old tar roofer, with square, callused hands that had no fingernails and were dark with cinders, leaned against the wall on a flexed arm, waiting for his wife to bring the bondsman down to the jail.
He asked me for a cigarette; then he wanted to know if I had ever pulled time. He paused a minute, lighting the cigarette with his thick, dark fingers, then asked what for.
After I told him, his muddy eyes looked at me for a moment, then stared off into the smoke. He sat down beside me and pulled his knees up before him. His white athletic socks were grimed with dirt. I said nothing to him, made no inquiry about his crime, and I could feel the sense of insult start to rise in him.
“What they got you for, podna?” I said.
“This guy give me some shit at Stockman’s last night. Like he was going to whip my ass with a pool cue. I put him once through the bathroom door. Then he learned what real shit smells like. And he ain’t going to press no charges, either, believe me.”
An hour later his wife, a vacuous and pathetic-looking blond girl in a waitress’s uniform, was at the jail with the bondsman. As I watched them through the grated door, holding hands in front of the property desk, I could see the humiliation in her face and the fear of another night and all the others to follow. They would pay out their lives in installments to bondsmen, guilty courts, finance companies, and collection agencies.
At seven that evening a deputy sheriff stood in front of the door with a pair of handcuffs hung over his index finger and waited for the sergeant to turn the lock.
“Get rid of the cigarette and put them behind you,” he said.
I flicked the butt toward the drain and waited for him to snip the cuffs around my wrists. He ran his hands under my armpits and down both sides of my trousers, then caught me under the arm with his hand. The cell door clanged behind us, and we walked down a corridor with spittoons on the floor toward the back of the building. Our shoes sucked against the damp mopping on the wooden floor, and a frosted yellow square of light shone from an office by the exit sign.
“Before we go in, tell me what the hell you thought you were going to get out of it,” he said.
“What?”
“Your parole officer said you were straight and probably wouldn’t do time again. You must have had some real ingrown hairs in your asshole, buddy.”
Inside the office the deputy took off the cuffs, and I sat down in a wood chair in front of the sheriff’s desk. The room was poorly lighted and smelled of cigars, and the desk lamp shone upward into the red corpulence of the sheriff’s round face. There was a tangle of gray hair above the V of his shirt, and the roll of fat on his stomach hung heavily on his gun belt. The red stone on his Mason’s ring glinted when he moved the wet stub of his cigar in the ashtray.
“It looks like you can’t stay out of a sheriff’s office,” he said. “Yesterday you tried to file a complaint down in Ravalli County, and today I get to meet you after you did some target practice at the mill.”
I looked him back in the eyes, but because of the lamp’s glare, I couldn’t tell yet how hard he was ready to turn it on. He took a sandwich out of his drawer and unfolded the wax paper.
“Go down to the cooler for me, John,” he said.
While the deputy was gone, he ate the sandwich and didn’t speak, and I thought, Watch out for this one. The deputy returned with a beaded can of beer and set it on the blotter. The sheriff sucked out half of it with one quick upward turn of the hand, the sandwich bread thick and white in his mouth.
“Now,” he said, “this shouldn’t take either one of us long. You know all the rules, so we don’t have to explain a lot of things. We’ll take a statement from you, you can look over it and add or change anything, and I’ll get you into court within a week and then off to Deer Lodge.”
“I don’t even know what you’re charging me with, Sheriff.”
“Son, you weren’t listening too good. I don’t have time for a game. I can charge you with any one or all of a half-dozen things. I guess about the worst one down on your sheet might be arson.”
“I don’t know what we’re talking about.” Our eyes locked together and held until he picked up his cigar.
“I see,” he said, and turned his swivel chair partly into the shadow, obscuring his face. “Well, tell us what you were up to last night.”
“I was boozing in a couple of beer joints in Lolo and another place just south of Missoula.”
“Did you meet any interesting people who might remember you?”
“Ask them. I don’t remember. I was drunk.”
“Maybe you had a little trouble with a cowboy or knocked over some chairs.”
“Don’t recall a thing.”
He turned his big, oval face abruptly back into the light.
“You’re lying, son. Yesterday you were out at the mill raising hell about your pickup and your guitars, and last night you had Buddy Riordan’s Plymouth up on that mountain, and you drilled holes in those trucks like an infantry marksman. Some of my men ain’t the brightest in the world, or you wouldn’t have gotten back across that bridge. But the deputy made you, and that’s going to get you at least a two-spot. Now, if you want to piss around with us, we’ll see how much time we can add on to it.”