“I don’t have to. There’s a couple of bondsmen here who’d love to do a favor for Sally Dee. Why not? It doesn’t cost them anything. Unless you jump the bond.”
“Let him do it for you, Dave,” Dixie Lee said.
“I think I’m going to have to sweat this one out.”
“Why? You got to prove you’re an honest man?” Clete said.
“Thanks just the same, Cletus.”
“You’re pissing me off. You think I’m trying to sign you up for the Mafia or something?”
“I don’t know what you’re trying to do. In fact, I don’t understand anything you’ve done.”
“Maybe it’s because you’re not listening too well.”
“Maybe so.”
He lit a cigarette and flipped the burnt match against the wall. He blew smoke out his nose.
“There’s no strings,” he said.
“Come on.”
“You got my word.”
“They’ll boil you down to glue, Clete. Bartend in Algiers, sell debit insurance. Just get away from them.”
“I thought maybe I could make up for some bad things I did to you, partner.”
“I don’t hold a grudge.”
“You never forget anything, Dave. You store it up in you and feed it and stoke it until it’s a furnace.”
“I’m changing.”
“Yeah, that’s why they got you locked up with the shitbags.”
“What can I say?”
“Nothing,” Clete said. “Here’s my cigarettes. Trade them to the geeks for their food.”
“Dave, I’d go your bond if I had the money,” Dixie Lee said. “But if I stepped on a dime right now, I could tell you if it was heads or tails.”
“But the man’s not hearing us,” Clete said. “Right, Dave? You’re up on the high road, and the rest of us sweaty bastards have to toil our way through the flies.”
He went to the door and banged the side of his fist against one of the bars.
“Open up,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Write me a postcard. Polson, Montana. In fact, if you get out of this dog shit, come see me. The beer’s cold, you got to knock the trout back in the lake with an oar. A reasonable person might even say it’s better than taking showers with queers and child molesters. But what do I know?”
He mashed his cigarette out on the concrete floor while the deputy unlocked the door. The deputy took him and Dixie Lee downstairs in the elevator, and I sat alone in the room, waiting for the deputy to return, my back bent over, my forearms propped loosely on my thighs, my eyes staring at the tiny webbed cracks in the floor.
The next day two deputies brought Jerome back from the jail ward at the charity hospital. The stitches on his forehead looked like small black butterflies laced in his skin. He stared out the windows, talked to himself, urinated on the floor of his cell. The biker and the rapist from Alabama told him the jailer had left the key to the main door in the toilet. He knelt by the bowl, staring into the water, while the other two encouraged him.
“You can’t see it. It’s way down in the pipe,” the biker said, and grabbed himself and grinned at the other man.