"I'll be at the sheriff's department by eight. If you want to give us some information, you're welcome to come in."

"Sabelle told me you were an intelligent man. Who do you think broke the big stories of our time? My Lai, Watergate, CIA dope smuggling, Reagan's gun deals in Nicaragua? It was always the media, not the government, not the cops. Why not lose the 'plain folks' attitude?"

I stepped out of the boat into the shallows and felt the coldness through my rubber boots. I set the bailing can down on the ramp, wrapped the bow chain in my palm and snugged the boat's keel against the waving moss at the base of the concrete pad, and cleared an obstruction from my throat.

He slipped his glasses off his face, dropped them loosely in the pocket of his baggy shirt, smiling all the while.

"Thanks for coming by," I said.

I walked up the ramp, then climbed the set of side stairs onto the dock. I saw him walk toward his car and shake his head at Sabelle.

A moment later she came quickly down the dock toward me. She wore old jeans, a flannel shirt, pink tennis shoes, and walked splayfooted like a teenage girl.

"I look like hell. He came by my place at five this morning," she said.

"You look good, Sabelle. You always do," I said.

"They've moved Daddy into a cellhouse full of blacks."

"That doesn't sound right. He can request isolation."

"He'll die before he'll let anybody think he's scared. In the meantime they steal his cigarettes, spit in his food, throw pig shit in his hair, and nobody does anything about it." Her eyes began to film.

"I'll call this gunbull I know."

"They're going to kill him, Dave. I know it. It's a matter of time."

Out on the road, Lonnie Felton waited behind the steering wheel of his Lincoln.

"Don't let this guy Felton use you," I said.

"Use me? Who else cares about us?" Even with makeup, her face looked stark, as shiny as ceramic, in the lacy veil of sunlight through the cypress trees. She turned and walked back up the dock, her pink underwear winking through a small thread-worn hole in the rump of her jeans.

The sheriff was turned sideways in his swivel chair, his bifocals mounted on his nose, twisting strips of pink and white crepe paper into the shape of camellias. On his windowsill was a row of potted plants, which he watered daily from a hand-painted teakettle. He looked like an aging greengrocer more than a law officer, and in fact had run a dry cleaning business before his election to office, but he had been humble enough to listen to advice, and over the years we had all come to respect his judgment and integrity.

Only one door in his life had remained closed to us, his time with the First Marine Division at the Chosin Reservoir during the Korean War, until last year, when he suffered a heart attack and told me from a bed in Iberia General, his breath as stale as withered flowers, of bugles echoing off frozen hills and wounds that looked like roses frozen in snow.

I sat down across from him. His desk blotter was covered with crepe paper camellias.

"I volunteered to help decorate the stage for my granddaughter's school play. You any good at this?" he said.

"No, not really. A movie director, a fellow named Lonnie Felton, was out at my place with Sabelle Crown this morning. They say some blacks are trying to re-create the Garden of Gethsemane for Aaron Crown. I called Angola, but I didn't get any help."

"Don't look for any. We made him the stink on shit."

"I beg your pardon?"

"A lot of us, not everybody, but a lot of us, treated people of color pretty badly. Aaron represents everything that's vile in the white race. So he's doing our time."

"You think these movie guys are right, he's innocent?"

"I didn't say that. Look, human beings do bad things sometimes, particularly in groups. Then we start to forget about it. But there's always one guy hanging around to remind us of what we did or what we used to be. That's Aaron. He's the toilet that won't flush… Did I say something funny?"

"No, sir."

"Good, because what I've got on my mind isn't funny. Karyn LaRose and her attorney were in here earlier this morning." He set his elbows on his desk blotter, flipped an unfinished paper flower to the side. "Guess what she had to tell me about your visit last night at her house?"

"I won't even try to."

"They're not calling it rape, if that makes you feel any better." He opened his desk drawer and read silently from a clipboard. "The words are 'lascivious intention,''attempted sexual battery,' and 'indecent liberties.' What do you have to say?" His gaze moved away from my face, then came back and stayed there.

"Nothing. It's a lie."

"I wish the court would just accept my word on the perps. I wish I didn't have to offer any evidence. Boy, that'd be great."

I told him what had happened, felt the heat climbing into my voice, wiped the film of perspiration off my palms onto my slacks.

His eyes lingered on the scratch Karyn had put on my cheek.

"I think it's a lie, too," he said. He dropped the clipboard inside the drawer and closed it. "But I have to conduct an internal investigation just the same."

"I go on the desk?"

"No. I'm not going to have my department manipulated for someone's political interests, and that's what this is about. You're getting too close to something in this Aaron Crown business. But you stay away from her."

I still had my morning mail in my hand. On the top was a pink memo slip with a message from Bootsie, asking me to meet her for lunch.

"How public is this going to get?" I asked.

"My feeling is she doesn't intend it to be public. Aside from the fact I know you, that was the main reason I didn't believe her. Her whole account is calculated to be vague. Her charges don't require her to offer physical evidence-vaginal smears, pubic hair, that kind of stuff. This is meant as a warning from the LaRose family. If I have to, I'll carry this back to them on a dung fork, podna."

He folded his hands on the desk, his face suffused with the ruddy glow of his hypertension.

Way to go, skipper, I thought.

Most people in prison deserve to be there. Old-time recidivists who are down on a bad beef will usually admit they're guilty of other crimes, perhaps much worse ones than the crimes they're down for.

There're exceptions, but not many. So their burden is of their own creation. But it is never an easy one, no matter how modern the facility or how vituperative the rhetoric about country club jails.

You're a nineteen-year-old fish, uneducated, frightened, with an IQ of around 100. At the reception center you rebuff a trusty wolf who works in records and wants to introduce you to jailhouse romance, so the trusty makes sure you go up the road with a bad jacket (the word is out, you snitched off a solid con and caused him to lose his good-time).

You just hit main pop and you're already jammed up, worried about the shank in the chow line, the Molotov cocktail shattered inside your cell, the whispered threat in the soybean field about the experience awaiting you in the shower that night.

So you make a conscious choice to survive and find a benefactor, "an old man," and become a full-time punk, one step above the yard bitches. You mule blues, prune-o, and Afghan skunk for the big stripes; inside a metal toolshed that aches with heat, you participate in the savaging of another fish, who for just a moment reminds you of someone you used to know.

Then a day comes when you think you can get free. You're mainline now, two years down with a jacket full of goodtime. You hear morning birdsong that you didn't notice before; you allow your mind to linger on the outside, the face of a girl in a small town, a job in a piney woods timber mill that smells of rosin and hot oil on a ripsaw, an ordinary day not governed by fear.