“Will you shut up, old man? Just for once eat your rat food and shut up.”

Jimmy Dale’s ears were ringing as though he were in a plane dropping out of clouds, the face of a rock cliff rushing toward him. He leaned over the side of his bunk again, hoping the walls would stop spinning. “I’m sorry, Bee. I’m just off my feed.”

Beeville dipped his head down, eating the crumbs from his palm, and showed no indication that he had heard either the insult or the apology. When he finished his gingerbread, he wiped his hands with a piece of toilet paper and threw the paper into the commode. “Life’s a bitch, ain’t it?” he said.

DURING THE NEXT two weeks, Jimmy Dale built a floor for Troyce Nix’s horse trailer, then a desk for his office and a gun cabinet for his house. Nix seemed to pay little attention to Jimmy Dale except to check occasionally on the progress of the work.

Then one scorching afternoon, while Jimmy Dale was running an acetylene torch in the shop, Troyce dropped a fresh set of state blues on a bench and told him to take a shower in back and change clothes.

“What’s going on, boss?” Jimmy Dale said.

“I just got you bumped up to full trusty. I need you to go in town with me and load some spool wire,” Troyce Nix said.

“Hidalgo going, too, boss?” Jimmy Dale said, half smiling.

Troyce Nix did not acknowledge the question.

Jimmy Dale lathered himself under the showerhead inside the tin stall in the back of the shop, staring through the window at the clouds of yellow dust blowing across the hardpan. A skinny Mexican kid pushing a broom glanced back over his shoulder, then looked at Jimmy Dale. His shirt was wadded up and hanging from his back pocket, his skin peppered with sweat and welding soot from the shop, his back tattooed with an enormous picture of the Virgin Mary. “Watch your ass today,” he said.

“We’re going to town for wire. It ain’t a big deal, Hidalgo,” Jimmy Dale said.

“Make him use grease. I heard a guy say it was like a freight train.”

“You close your mouth,” Jimmy Dale said.

Hidalgo paused in his sweeping, his expression reflective, his eyes downcast. “I thought you was stand-up, Jimmy Dale. You can’t go out max time, man?”

The trip to town was uneventful. Jimmy Dale loaded a dozen wire spools in the bed of the stake truck, chained up the tailgate, and got back in the cab with Troyce Nix. The only thing that bothered him was that the employees at the hardware store could have loaded the spools and Nix actually had no need of him. On the way back to the prison, Nix took note of the time and yawned. “It’s been a hot one, ain’t it?” he said.

“Yes sir, and to be followed by a warming spell, I expect,” Jimmy Dale said.

But Nix was not interested in Jimmy Dale’s attempt at humor. He turned off the state road onto a dirt track that led across a long stretch of cinnamon-colored earth and mesquite trees and scrub oak. The dirt track wound into a bank of hills and a canyon where a paintless frame house with a gallery was tucked against a bluff, one side of it shaded by a hackberry tree.

“That yonder is my camp, a place where I drink whiskey and shoot coyotes and cougars sometimes. That windmill puts out the sweetest, coldest water you ever drunk. Take that sack out from under your seat.”

Jimmy Dale reached between his legs and felt the tip of a paper bag. When he pulled on it, the bottle inside clanked against the seat.

“Crack it open and hand it to me,” Nix said.

“Boss, I don’t want to get in no trouble,” Jimmy Dale said.

“All of you are the same, ain’t you?”

“Sir?”

“Under it all, you’re three years old and fixing to shit your diapers.”

Nix took the pint of vodka from Jimmy Dale and cracked off the cap. He drank from the neck like he was swallowing soda water, his throat working smoothly, his eyes fixed on the shadows spreading across the canyon floor. He braked the truck between the windmill and the frame house. A dust devil spun across the hardpan and broke apart against the gallery. “Get out,” he said.

“Boss-”

“That wire ain’t for the compound. It’s for a mustang lot I’m putting in before the federal auction. I been off the clock and on my own time since noon. There ain’t nothing wrong that’s going on here. Now, you move your ass, boy. You’re starting to piss me off.”

“Where you want it, boss?”

Nix let the heat die in his voice. “Up yonder, on the slope. Watch you don’t step in none of them armadillo holes. I don’t want to have to haul you to the infirmary.”

Jimmy Dale worked the spools of wire off the truck bed and carried them one at a time up an incline, the heat in the metal scorching his hands and forearms. He set the spools in a row by a stack of treated fence posts, his heart beating, Nix’s silhouette like a scorched tin cutout against the sun. Why had he been so foolish? Why hadn’t he listened to Beeville and Hidalgo? He tried to pretend that acceptance of Nix’s explanation about the side trip to the camp would get him safely back in the truck, on the road back to the prison, back to eight P.M. lockdown and the chance to undo his own naïveté in thinking he could outwit a career gunbull who had worked at Abu Ghraib. But even as he had these thoughts, he knew that of his own volition, he had climbed into a concrete mixer.

Nix took off his shirt, released the chain on the windmill, and washed his face and chest and under his arms in the sluice of water that exploded from the pipe. His shoulders were ridged with fine red hair, his stomach corrugated, his chest flat, like a boxer’s. He removed a pair of yellow leather gloves from his back pocket and fitted them on. As an afterthought, he removed his shades and set them on top of his folded shirt.

“How hard you ever been hit?” he said.

“I been beat up by the best there is, boss.”

“We’ll see.” Nix grinned and looked at the dust gusting down an arroyo. The windmill blades clattered against the sky, and water sluiced out of the pipe onto the tip of his boot. He balled his right hand and made a gesture with it, causing Jimmy Dale to flinch. Then he hit Jimmy Dale unexpectedly with his left, the blow landing like a bee sting on his ear, just before the right fist caught Jimmy Dale square on the jaw and knocked him headlong in the dust.

Nix pulled a pair of handcuffs loose from the back of his belt and dropped them on Jimmy’s Dale stomach. “Put these on, and let’s get you into the house. I got some iodine for that cut. You can yell all you want. It won’t bother nobody.”

During the next half hour, Jimmy Dale tried to go to a private place in his mind, one where he was inviolate and apart from what was happening to his body. He was even willing to journey to the tunnel in his nightmares where his arms were pinioned at his sides and the breath was crushed from his lungs. But this kind of fantasy anodyne was not available for Jimmy Dale. Hidalgo had mentioned a freight train when he warned him about Nix’s potential. But a freight train didn’t smell of testosterone and hair oil, and it didn’t have unshaved jaws that felt like emery paper, and it didn’t have a wet mouth laboring by Jimmy Dale’s ear; nor did it make sounds that were less than human and simultaneously plaintive with need.

When Nix was finished, he bent over with his handcuff key and released Jimmy Dale’s wrists. Then he looked down at him with the most bizarre expression Jimmy Dale had ever seen on a human being’s face. “Go outside and wash yourself at the windmill,” he said. “You turn my stomach.”

THE NEXT MORNING was Saturday. When the gate screw hit the seven A.M. buzzer and opened all the cell doors on the tier, Jimmy Dale climbed down from his bunk, vomited in the commode, and climbed up on his bunk again.

“You ain’t gonna eat?” Beeville Hicks asked.