I walked away from him and picked up my cane pole and swung the bobber out into the current. I kept my back turned until I heard the Mercury engine roar to life and the weeds in the field clatter under the front bumper.
L.Q. Navarro leaned with one shoulder against the willow tree, rolling a cigarette. He popped a lucifer match on his thumbnail and cupped it to the cigarette, and I saw the flame flare on his mustache and dark eyes and grained skin.
' That boy will cook your liver on a stick,' he said.
Once in a while you hear about truly wicked abuses inside the system: In California, rival Hispanic and black gang members forced into a concrete-enclosed recreation area while a gunbull waits to blow away a particularly troublesome inmate as soon as the fighting starts; over in Louisiana, an inmate kept for years in solitary confinement, until he permanently damages his brain by beating his head against an iron wall; a Haitian immigrant sexually tortured with a plumber's helper in the rest room of a New York City police station.
You hope it's only a story. Or that, if true, the culpable parties have been fired or jailed themselves.
That's what you hope.
Sunday morning Skyler Doolittle went to a fundamentalist, Holy Roller church in the West End, one that had trailed its legends of snake handling, drinking poisons, and talking in tongues all the way across the chain of southern mountains into the hill country of rural Texas.
When he left the church he ate lunch at a truck stop and returned to his room in a backstreet sandstone hotel that had no air-conditioning and where the dust from a feeder lot blew through the windows above the old wood colonnade.
He turned the key in the lock and stepped inside the door. On his bed and floor and nightstand were photographs of children. The draft through the door blew the photographs into a vortex, one filled with images that made his eyes water.
Two uniformed deputies in shades stepped through the door behind him. The taller of the two was named Kyle Rose; a pale, shaved area still showed in the back of his scalp where I had driven his head into the log wall of Hugo Roberts's office. He removed the sunglasses from his face and pinched the red marks on the bridge of his nose. His mouth was a stitched line, hooked downward on the corners. He pulled the shades on the windows.
'Ain't nobody here but us chickens now,' he said.
The call came to my house Sunday night, not from Skyler Doolittle but from a janitor in the jail section of the county hospital.
'It happened out in the parking lot. I seen it from the upstairs window. They had him between two cars. This cop had some kind of electric gun in his hand,' he said.
'Skyler told you to call me?'
'Yes, sir.'
'What's your name?' I asked.
He started to speak, then hung up.
A half hour later an orderly at the hospital unlocked a plain metal door on an isolation room whose floor and walls were overlaid with mattresses. Skyler Doolittle stood in a corner, wearing nothing but boxer under-shorts that were printed with smiling blue moons. His body was streaked with red abrasions, like rope burns.
'They beat you?' I said.
'At my hotel, 'fore they took me out to the car. In the parking lot a man put a stinger on me. His name's Kyle Rose. He done it all over my back.'
'I'm going to get you transferred to a bed, Mr. Doolittle. My investigator will check on you later tonight, and I'll be back to visit you in the morning.'
Then I noticed a change in his eyes; they had taken on a color they hadn't possessed before, like lead that's been scorched in a fire. His posture, even his muscular tone, seemed different, the tendons in his fused neck like braided rope, his chest flat-plated, the upper arms swollen with glandular fluids.
'This fellow Deitrich and the man with that stinger?' he said.
'Yes?'
'My thoughts don't seem like my own no more. I ain't never hurt nobody on purpose. I'm a river-baptized man. I fear a great evil is fixing to draw me inside it. I got no place to turn with it.'
12
I was to be of little help to Skyler Doolittle. Five days later, I watched him leave Deaf Smith in a blue state bus with grilles on the windows for a state mental hospital in Austin. At the time I even thought he would be better off, safe from the torment visited upon him by Hugo Roberts's deputies.
I paid little attention to the man with fan-shaped sideburns chained hand and foot next to him.
That evening Lucas asked me to come out and see the farmhouse he had rented forty miles west of town. He said he had rented it in order to be closer to his job on an oil rig. But his pride in living on his own and paying his own way was obvious.
We stood in the front yard, surveying the bullet-pocked window glass, the scaled white paint, the gutters clogged with pine needles, the collapsed privy and the windmill wrapped with tumble brush in back. In the side yard the branches of a dead pecan tree were silhouetted like gnarled fingers against the sun.
'I got an option to buy. With a little fixing up, it'd be a right nice place,' he said.
'Yeah, it looks like it's got a lot of promise,' I said, trying to keep my face empty. From inside I could hear Elmore James singing 'My Time Ain't Long' on a CD. 'Who lives in the trailer out back?'
'Nobody reg'lar.' He looked about the yard, his expression blank.
'Nobody regular?'
'Yeah, I mean a friend or two might stay over. Come on inside. I'll show you my new electric bass.'
He had scrubbed out the interior of the house with lye water and set coffee cans planted with petunias in the windowsills and hung his twelve-string and slide guitars, mandolin, banjo, and fiddle from felt-covered hooks on the living room walls. His musical talent was enormous. He referred to country and blues and rock musicians, both living and dead, by their first or nicknames, as though he and his listener knew them intimately: Hank and Lefty, Melissa, Lester and Earl, Janice, Kitty, Emmylou, Stevie Ray, Woody and Cisco. The irony was that in his humble reverence he was unaware he was as good as or better than most of them.
I heard a car turn off the county road into the yard.
'Check out this next cut on the CD. It's 'Rocket '88,' Jackie Brenston. The first real R amp;B record ever made,' Lucas said.
Through the side window I saw a yellow convertible park in front of the dented and sagging silver trailer that was set up on cinder blocks. The driver wore a hard hat and a denim shirt that was spotted with drilling mud. The Mexican girl next to him pushed her hair back on her head with one hand. Her hair was long and dark and looked as though it had been stained with iodine.
'Jeff Deitrich and Esmeralda Ramirez are living here?' I said.
'I got him a job on my rig. The guy's trying to straighten out his life. It ain't gonna be easy for them two.'
'He's putting you in harm's way.'
'What if you'd taken that attitude when I was in trouble? I'd be chopping cotton in Huntsville Pen.'
Through the window I watched Jeff walk inside the trailer with his arm around Esmeralda's shoulders, a lunch bucket in his left hand. I let out my breath and sought words that would seem reasonable and hide the fear that gripped my heart. The wind slapped the door of the trailer into the frame like a pistol shot.
The man chained hand and foot next to Skyler Doolittle was named Jessie Stump, an armed robber, speed addict, and psychopath who shot a Mexican judge in a courtroom, jumped through a second-story glass window, and escaped into the heart of Mexico City. He was also one of my ex-clients. When I got him off on a forgery charge, he paid my fees with a bad check.
There were five inmates in jailhouse orange jumpsuits sitting on the passenger seats in the rear of the bus, and two uniformed deputy sheriffs in front, their backs protected by a wire-mesh partition. Jessie was the only
