“I hear you left pecker tracks in a lot of white women’s beds,” one of the gunbulls said to him.

“I reckon it beats writing your name on the washroom wall, boss,” Jimmy Dale replied.

The gunbull was going to put Jimmy Dale on the barrel that night. But Troyce Nix intervened and, at the close of the workday, told Jimmy Dale to climb up in the truck cab and ride back to the prison compound with him.

“I stink pretty bad, Cap’n,” Jimmy Dale said.

Troyce grinned at him from behind his shades, the gearstick knob throbbing in his palm. “You’ll stink a whole lot worse if you spend the night standing on the barrel and dribbling in your pants,” he said.

Troyce was silent as they drove toward the compound, the dust from the alkali flats drifting through the windows. Up ahead, another truck towed the trailer that contained the gunbulls’ horses. Jimmy Dale could see the horses’ rumps swaying back and forth with the motion of the trailer, desiccated pieces of manure blowing into the wind. Troyce pulled a cigarette from his pack with his mouth and lit it with the lighter from the dashboard. The smoke leaked from his mouth like damp cotton.

“If you was wanting to buy a used horse trailer, what would you look for first?” Troyce asked.

“The floor,” Jimmy Dale replied.

“Why’s that?”

“’Cause if it’s got dry rot in it, your horse’s foot can punch through it on the highway.”

“If you was to build a floor on a trailer, how would you go about it?”

“I’d use only treated two-by-four planks. I’d use only bolts and screws instead of nails so there wouldn’t be cracks to soak up moisture. I’d put the planks in snug but with enough space between them so they could drain and aerate.”

“How come you know so much about horses and tack?”

“I’m a rodeo bum, boss.”

“Thought you was a country-and-western singer.”

“I guess shitkicking can cover lots of categories.”

Troyce laughed, appraising Jimmy Dale through his shades. “I want you to put a new floor in that trailer for me. Do a good job, and I’ll write you up for half trusty and give you an indoor job. In three months you’ll be up for full trusty.”

“I’ll be up for parole before then.”

Troyce swerved the truck around a jackrabbit that had bolted across the road. Or at least appeared to swerve around it. When he glanced into the side mirror, his face seemed to contain more than idle curiosity. “I wouldn’t necessarily count on that,” he said.

“I’ll build you a good floor, boss. I appreciate anything you can do for me,” Jimmy Dale said.

“Yeah, you’re gonna do just fine. Have a smoke.” Troyce shook a cigarette loose from the pack, offering the firm white cylinder to Jimmy Dale, holding his eyes when Jimmy Dale took it.

Just before they entered the compound, the truck bounced over a series of potholes. Troyce’s hand slipped off the gearshift, and the pads of his fingers brushed softly across Jimmy Dale’s thigh. For Jimmy Dale, the sensation was like the tiny feet of a small animal tickling across his skin, and it caused his penis to shrivel in his skivvies.

THE CONTRACT PRISON was run military-style. At 7:58 P.M. sharp, the count man shouted, “In the house!” At eight P.M. he shouted, “Locking it down!” Then the steel doors slid collectively into place, clanging shut in unison with a sound that reverberated through the building. The count man and the screw behind him began their walk down the bullrun, the count man whanging his baton on the bars as he passed each cell, the screw ticking check marks on his clipboard.

Jimmy Dale hated this part of the day, trapped between daylight and darkness, between motion and inertia, between the illusion that he worked under the same sky and breathed the same air as other human beings and the knowledge that he was little more than a state-owned cipher entombed in a five-by-eight-foot steel box.

The echoes of the count man’s baton on the bars trailed away in the distance, then the lights dimmed and he could hear the commode in his cell gurgling in the gloom. Jimmy Dale’s nightmares waited for him just beyond the edge of sleep. In the worst of them, he was deep underground, pinned in a long tunnel, his arms crushed against his sides, the breath squeezed from his lungs. In his dream he cried out for his mother to free him, but his mother was not there. A psychiatrist had told him once that he had probably been wrapped in a rubber sheet when he was an infant and left to his fate. For some reason, to Jimmy Dale, those words were even worse than the dream.

His housemate was Beeville Hicks, a four-time loser whose enemy was freedom, not confinement. Long ago Beeville had flattened all the veins in his arms, destroyed his career as a steel-guitar player, and murdered his wife along the way. He was toothless, his skin like plastic wrap on his bones, his forehead tattooed with a red swastika, his hair as long and coarse as a horse’s tail. Oddly, in spite of his violent history and his tattoo and his friendship with members of the AB, Beeville was basically a kind man who, had he not been a heroin addict, probably would not have hung washlines of paper all over the western United States. When Jimmy Dale asked Beeville why he had killed his old lady, he replied, “I’m not rightly sure. I knowed she was screwing the milkman, but she was a homely thing, and I couldn’t hold that against her. Yes sir, that’s a good question.”

For his last birthday, Beeville’s daughter had brought him his old scrapbook, which she had found in her attic. It was probably the finest gift Beeville had ever received, since few inmates or prison personnel believed his stories regarding the celebrities he had known or worked with. Beeville plastered his “house” wall with torn magazine pages and cracked black-and-white photographs showing him with Billy Joe Shaver, Texas Ruby, Moon Mullican, Stony Cooper and Wilma Lee, Floyd Tillman, Waylon Jennings, and Bob Wills.

He was eating a piece of gingerbread cake on the bottom bunk, what he called “scarf,” the crumbs dripping off his hand, his naked back rounded, his vertebrae trying to poke through his skin. “I hear Cap’n Nix is going to have you working for him in the shop,” he said to Jimmy Dale.

“That looks like the plan,” Jimmy Dale said from the top bunk. In the silence that followed, he leaned over the bunk and looked down at Beeville. “What about it?”

“You got a lot of talent. Not just in your fingers, either. You got an old-style voice, like Jimmie Rodgers. Ain’t many got that kind of voice anymore. Maybe Haggard or Dwight Yoakam has got it, but not nobody else I know of.”

“Will you take the collard greens out of your mouth?”

“I got this swastika put on my head in Huntsville because I thought it’d protect me. I was right. Nobody would touch me with a toilet plunger. When I come out, nobody in the music business would touch me, either. How’s that for smarts?”

Jimmy Dale lay back on his pillow and stared at the ceiling. It was steel, painted white, and the rivets that held it in place were orange around the rims. He could almost feel the ceiling’s weight crushing down on his chest. “If I don’t go along with Nix, he’ll screw me at my hearing.”

“He’ll screw you in the shop and do it at your hearing, both. Go out max time, Jimmy Dale. You’ll still have your voice, you’ll still be a solid con. How about that girl you sang duet with? She’s still out there somewhere, ain’t she?”

Jimmy Dale heard somebody scream in the block, maybe a fish taking it from a couple of AB guys who had paid a screw to provide them a fresh experience. He laid his arm across his eyes and felt the moisture on his skin.

“What was that gal’s name?” Beeville asked.

“Jamie Sue,” Jimmy Dale replied. “Jamie Sue Stapleton.”

“I saw her at a gig in Austin once. She looked like a movie star. Where’s she at?”