“Got a touch of virus, I think.”

“You look like you was rope-drug down a staircase,” Beeville Hicks said.

Jimmy Dale stared at the steel-plated ceiling, one hand pressed on his stomach, wondering if he had bled into his skivvies.

“What’d he do to you, boy?”

“Nothing.”

Beeville was sitting on the edge of his bunk, his back humped. He popped a pimple on his shoulder and looked at his fingers. “I got turned out when I was seventeen. It goes away with time.” When Jimmy Dale didn’t reply, Beeville said, “What you aiming to do?”

“I don’t rightly know.”

Beeville stood up and began buttoning his shirt. His toothless mouth was ringed with deep creases where the flesh had collapsed. “I’ll see if I can sneak you a banana back,” he said.

“I told you, I ain’t hungry, Bee.”

“Better eat up. It ain’t over with Nix. He takes it out on the guy he’s got the yen for. I feel sorry for you.”

Jimmy Dale closed his eyes and swallowed.

The full-court press started Monday after lunch.

“Cap’n Rankin says he come in for some center cutters on the ditching machine. He says you sassed him,” Troyce Nix said.

Jimmy Dale set down his acetylene torch and pulled his goggles up on his forehead with his thumb. The motes of dust were as bright as grains of sand in the shafts of sunlight shining through the windows. “I don’t think I done that, boss,” he replied. “I just want to stack my time and not bother nobody. I don’t want nobody bothering me, either, boss.”

“You calling Cap’n Rankin a liar?”

“No sir.”

“Then why’d you sass him?”

“I guess it’s just been one of them kind of days, boss.”

Nix pulled his gloves from his back pocket and flipped them idly on his palm. “You’re either the dumbest breed I ever met or the slowest learner. Which is it?”

“Probably both, boss.”

Nix shook his head as he walked out of the shop. Through the window, Jimmy Dale saw him talking to two other screws. While Nix talked, the other two men stared in Jimmy Dale’s direction, their expressions opaque in the shadow of their cowboy hats.

That afternoon at quitting time, Jimmy Dale was told he wouldn’t be showering or heading for the chow hall. Instead, he was escorted to what was called “the barrel,” an empty upended fifty-gallon oil drum that sat on a stretch of green grass in an alcove between two lockdown units. A flood lamp shone down on the barrel, bathing the inmate who stood on the barrel in a white light from evening until sunrise. Throughout the night, while he tried to keep his balance, the inmate could see the gunbulls in the roofed towers on the fence corners, their cigars or cigarettes glowing in the dark. Before an inmate climbed onto the barrel, he was allowed to relieve himself and to drink one glass of water. If the inmate fell from the barrel during the night, he not only had to climb back on it, he had to spend another night on it. If he relieved himself in his pants, he spent another night on it. If he called out to the hacks, he spent another night on it. An inmate who was sent to the barrel learned that his relationship to the barrel was open-ended.

Early Tuesday morning Jimmy Dale was escorted back to his tier, his knees like rubber, the backs of his thighs still tingling, his body crawling with stink. He was allowed to shower and dress in clean state blues and eat breakfast in the chow hall. Then he reported for work on time, at eight A.M., in the shop.

“You gonna give me a good day, Jimmy Dale?” Nix said to him.

“Yes sir, boss.”

“You already eat?”

“Yes sir.”

“Think I was too hard on you?”

“Stuff happens. I don’t study on it.”

“Stick this Hershey bar in your pocket.”

“I’m all right, boss.”

“A workingman gets hungry by midmorning. I’m going out to my camp Friday afternoon and put them fence posts in. You reckon you can screw a posthole digger into hardpan? It ain’t a skill every man’s got.”

Jimmy Dale tried to look Nix in the face but couldn’t do it. He wet his lips and tried to keep his eyes focused. His legs seemed to be buckling under him, a fetid odor rising from his armpits, even though he had showered that morning. For just a moment he thought he was going to be sick again. A grin tugged at the corner of Nix’s mouth.

“Whatever you say, boss. I don’t want no more trouble,” Jimmy Dale said.

“Let me ask you something. That woman you was singing with, wasn’t her name Jamie Sue Something?”

“I don’t even remember, boss.”

Nix removed a folded newspaper from his back pocket. It was pressed and rounded by the tightness of his buttock against the fabric of his uniform. “Is this her?”

Jimmy Dale studied the three-column color photo of a gold-haired woman singing onstage at an evangelical rally in Albuquerque. She was dressed in an evening gown that rippled like blue ice water on her figure. The HD-28 Martin guitar Jimmy Dale had given her hung on a braided strap from her neck. “Never seen the bitch,” he said.

“Her name is Jamie Sue Wellstone. It says here she sung for the president of the United States.”

“She sure ain’t sung for the likes of me. Most of the women I hung with had bad cases of hoof-and-mouth. That’s a fact, boss. I’m lucky I ain’t loaded with diseases.”

Nix rolled the newspaper into a cone and tapped it on the edge of a trash barrel, taking Jimmy Dale’s measure. The barrel was stuffed with empty motor-oil cans, shredded cardboard boxes, and a windshield that had been ripped out of a wrecked pickup truck. Nix dropped the newspaper into the barrel. “Friday,” he said.

Friday it is, motherfucker, Jimmy Dale said to himself, inhaling a breath that was as sharp as a razor in his throat.

EVERY JAIL HAS its own economy. Almost every item and form of service sold on the outside can be purchased for smokes, “scarf,” or cash on the inside. Booze, skag, weed, yard bitches, and premium food delivered to your house are all available. You just have to know the right inmate or sometimes the right screws.

Weapons and contract hits are another matter. Frying a man in his house with a Molotov made from gasoline and paraffin can be done fairly easily. It takes little skill to make the Molotov, and usually a meltdown with little control over his life is assigned to race past the cell and light up the victim.

But a good shank is a work of both ingenuity and craft because the materials are limited and the process is time-consuming and must be accomplished in clandestine and circuitous fashion. If possible, the shank should come from a source other than the person who plans to use it. A toothbrush handle can be heated and molded around a razor blade. Nails can be sharpened on concrete, shoved through a block of wood, and turned into dirks. A scrap of tin can be cut into a pie shape, honed on all the edges, and inserted neatly into a grooved and wire-wrapped piece of mop handle. The materials are primitive, the craftsmen imaginative, their skill as traditional as that of medieval guild members.

Before his last fall for breaking and entering, Hidalgo had been a glazier in Pasadena, California. On Tuesday night a punk by the name of Mackey Fitch who did errands for the AB and sometimes for his cousin Beeville Hicks dropped two and a half cartons of smokes on Hidalgo’s bunk.

“You turning sweet on me?” Hidalgo said.

“Bee said he owed you these smokes. He said if you want to drop something off at his house, that would be okay. But make sure you do it by Thursday night.”

“I’ll check my calendar on that, Mackey. Tell Bee thanks for these free smokes.”

“Anytime,” Mackey said.

IT WAS HOT and bright, and there was a yellow cast in the clouds Friday morning when Jimmy Dale left the prison compound in the stake truck with Troyce Nix.