“What’re you in for?” Aldo asked, picking his teeth with his pen.

“What are you in for?”

“Rape,” Aldo said.

Jack did not want to admit to Aldo that he had been charged with the same offense. He didn’t want to admit it to himself, either. “Well, I didn’t do what they say.”

At that, Aldo tipped back his head and laughed. “None of us has, Teach,” he said. “Not a single one.”

The minimum-security pod resembled a daisy: small groups of bunks sticking out like petals from the central common room. Unlike the floors downstairs, there were no cells, just one universal locked door and a guard’s booth in the middle. The bathrooms were separate from the sleeping area, and inmates had the freedom to go there as they pleased.

Jack deliberately went to the bathroom a half hour before lights out, when everyone else was still watching TV. He glanced into the common room in passing. A big black man sat closest to the television, the remote control in his fist. He was the highest in the pecking order, the one who got to choose all the programming. Other inmates sat according to their association with him, closest buddies sitting just behind him, and so on, until you got to the row of stragglers far back, who simply did their best to stay out of his way.

By the time Jack returned to his bunk, Aldo was gone. He quickly stripped down to his shorts and T-shirt and crawled into bed, facing into the wall. As he drifted off, he dreamed of autumn, with its crisp apple air and sword-edged blue sky. He pictured his team running drills through the muddy soil, cleats kicking up small tufts of earth so that by the end of the day’s practice, the girls had completely changed the lay of the land. He saw their ponytails streaming out behind them, ribbons on the wind.

He woke up suddenly, sweating, as he always did when he thought of what had happened. But before he could even push the memory away, he was stunned to feel a hand at his throat, pinning him against the thin mattress. At first all Jack could see were the yellowed eggs of the man’s eyes. Then he spoke, his teeth gleaming in the darkness. “You’re breathing my fucking air.”

The man was the one he’d seen earlier holding the television remote, the one Aldo had referred to as Mountain. Muscles rippled beneath the sleeves of his T-shirt, and at eye level with Jack in the upper bunk, he was easily six and a half feet tall. Jack reached for the hand pinning his windpipe. “There’s plenty of air,” he rasped.

“There was plenty before you came, asshole. Now I have to share it with you.”

“I’m sorry,” Jack choked. “I’ll stop.”

Almost immediately, the big man’s hold eased. Without another word Mountain hefted himself into his own bed. Jack lay awake, trying not to breathe, trying not to recall how Mountain’s thick fingers had let go of his throat and begun to caress it gently instead.

The cows surprised Jack. Chained individually to their milking stanchions, he had first thought this was some kind of cruel joke: prison animals being locked up. But a few days of the routine of the farm and he realized that they never got turned loose-not out of cruelty but because that was where they were comfortable. Jack would watch their languid, drowsy expressions and wonder if it would be like this for him, too-after so many months of being incarcerated, did you simply stop fighting it?

The twin brothers who ran the farm had assigned him feed duty, which involved mixing grains from two different silos in an automatic overhead chute and then carrying the wheelbarrow load to the small troughs in front of the cows. Jack had done it early this morning before the milking; now, at just past 4:30, he was scheduled to do it again. He maneuvered the wheelbarrow to the far end of the huge barn. It was shrouded in cobwebs and poorly lit, and this morning Jack had had the scare of a lifetime when a bat dove out of the rafters and skittered onion-skin wings along his shoulder.

The automatic mixing mechanism was powered by a toggle switch on one of the heavy upright wooden beams. Jack flipped it, then waited for the grain to fill the top of the chute. The noise made by the machine vibrating to life was deafening, sound pounding around like a hailstorm.

The first punch, square in the kidney, drove him to his knees. Jack scrambled for purchase on the cement floor, twisting to see who had attacked him from behind.

“Get up,” Mountain said. “I ain’t done.”

It cost three dollars to go to the jail’s nurse. Mostly, this was because she was one of the few females on site and inmates would rather malinger and watch her breasts shifting beneath her white uniform than sit in a six-foot-by-six-foot cell, or thresh grain. Inmates who paid the fee were granted twenty minutes on one of the two padded tables and a free sample of Tylenol.

Jack was brought there by a security guard, who assured him that this visit was on the house. One of the twins who ran the farm had found Jack buried up to his neck in a heap of feed, blood spreading over his blue denim shirt in the shape of a valentine heart. Jack hadn’t been asked any questions, nor had he volunteered information.

The nurse gathered her materials on a metal tray. “Want to tell me what happened?”

Jack could barely speak past the blinding pain that came every time he moved his head. “Nosebleed,” he choked out.

“First nosebleed I’ve ever seen that involved broken nasal cartilage. How about that contusion on your spine, and your ribs? Or should I guess . . . you were kicked by a cow?”

“Sounds good,” Jack said.

Shaking her head, she packed his nostrils with cotton and sent him back to the pod. There, in the common room, men sat playing board games. Jack made his way to an unoccupied table and began to play solitaire.

Suddenly, two tables away, Aldo lunged across a Scrabble board and grabbed another inmate by the lapels. “You callin’ me a liar?”

The man looked him in the eye. “Yeah, LeGrande. That’s exactly what I’m doing.”

Jack averted his gaze and turned over the queen of spades. Put it there, on the column with the five of diamonds . . .

“I’m telling you, it’s a word,” Aldo insisted.

Hearing the commotion, the correctional officer on duty appeared. “What’s the matter, Aldo? Someone not want to share his toys with you?”

Aldo jammed his finger at the game board. “Isn’t this a word?”

The guard leaned closer. “O-C-H-E-R. I’ve never heard it.”

“It’s a word,” Jack said quietly.

Aldo turned with a smug grin. “You tell ’em, Teach. I read it in one of your books.”

“Ocher,” Jack said. “It’s a color. Kind of orange.”

“Twenty-seven points,” Aldo added.

His opponent narrowed his eyes at Jack. “Why the hell should I listen to you?”

“Because he studies all kinds of stuff,” Aldo said. “He knows the answers to all kinds of questions.”

Jack wished Aldo would just shut up. “Not the ones that matter,” he muttered.

Jack scraped the shovel along the concrete, holding his breath against the pungent stink of manure as he tossed another load into the wheelbarrow. The cows twisted their muscular necks to blink at him with great brown eyes, their udders already swollen with milk again and distending their legs like a bellows.

One of the cows lowed at him, batting eyelashes as long as his pinky. Gently, he moved his shovel to one hand and traced the marbled black-and-white pattern of her hips and side. The heat and softness of it made his throat close.

Without warning, his shovel was knocked away and he found himself sprawled facedown. He felt the scratch of hay against his temple, the fetid puddle of manure beneath his cheek, and the cold bare air on his backside as his jeans were wrenched down. The deep voice of Mountain Felcher curled at the nape of his neck. “How much you know, Einstein? You know that I was gonna do this to you?”