Jerome’s arm went into the bowl, and he worked his hand down deep in the drain, splashing water up on his shirt and face.
I put my hands on his shoulders. He looked up at me with his mouth open, his tongue pink and thick on his bottom teeth.
“Don’t do that, Jerome. There’s no key in there,” I said.
“What?” he said. He talked like a man who was drugged.
“Take off your shirt and wash yourself in the shower,” I said. “Come on, walk over here with me.”
“We’re just giving the cat a little hope,” the biker said.
“Your comedy act is over,” I said.
The biker wore black sunglasses. He looked at me silently and worked his tongue around his gums. The hair on his face and head looked like brown springs.
“Wrong place to be telling people shit,” he said.
I released Jerome’s arm and turned back toward the biker.
“Go ahead,” I said.
“Go ahead, what?”
“Say something else clever.”
“What are you talking about, man?”
“I want you to get in my face one more time.”
I couldn’t see his eyes behind the sunglasses, but his mouth was as still as though it had been painted on his skin.
Then he said, because the others were watching him, “We’re a family here, man. That’s how you hack it inside. You don’t know that, you ain’t gonna make it.”
I turned on the shower for Jerome, helped him pull off his shirt, and gave him a bar of soap from my cell. Then I picked up my tin plate and banged it loudly on the main door. It didn’t take long for the jailer to open up. I was standing inside the deadline when he did.
His lean face was electric with outrage.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing, Robicheaux?” he said.
“You’ve got a retarded man here who’s being abused by other inmates. Either put him in isolation or send him to Mandeville.”
“Get your ass back across that line.”
“Fuck you.”
“That’s it. You’re going into lockdown,” he said, and slammed the iron door.
I turned around and stared into the grinning face of the four-time loser who had murdered a family after breaking out of Sugarland. He was completely naked, and the huge rolls of fat on his thighs and stomach hung off his frame almost like curtains. His eyes were pale, empty of all emotion, but his mouth was as red as a clown’s. He took a puff off his cigarette and said, “Sounds like you’re getting pretty ripe, buddy.”
Then he laughed so hard, his eyes squinted shut with glee, that tears ran down his round cheeks.
Fifteen minutes later they moved me into a small room that contained a two-bunk iron cage, perforated with small squares and covered with thick layers of white paint that had been chipped and scratched with graffiti and prisoners’ names. Years ago the cage had been used to hold men awaiting execution in the days when the electric chair, with two huge generators, traveled from parish to parish under tarpaulins on the back of a semi truck. Now it was used to house troublemakers and the uncontrollable. I was told that I would spend the next five days there, would have no visitors other than my lawyer, would take no showers, and would receive one meal a day at a time of my choosing.
That afternoon Batist tried to visit me and was turned away, but a Negro trusty brought me an envelope that contained a half-dozen crayon-filled pages from Alafair’s coloring book, along with a note that she had printed out on lined paper. The colored-in pages showed palm trees and blue water, a lake full of fish, a brown horse by whose head she had written the word “Tex.” Her note read: I can spell. I can spell ant in the can. I can spell cat in the hat. I love Dave. I don’t say aint no more. Love. Alafair.
I hung the coloring-book pages on the inside of the cage by pressing their edges under the iron seams at the tops of the walls. It started to rain, and mist blew through the window and glistened on the bars. I unrolled the thin striped mattress on the bottom bunk and tried to sleep. I was unbelievably tired, but I couldn’t tell you from what. Maybe it was because you never really sleep in a jail. Iron doors slam all day and night; drunks shake doors against the jambs, and irritated street cops retaliate by raking their batons across the bars; people are gang-banged and sodomized in the shower, their cries lost in the clouds of steam dancing off the tiles; the crazies howl their apocalyptic insight from the windows like dogs baying under a yellow moon.
But it was an even deeper fatigue, one that went deep into the bone, that left the muscles as flaccid as if they had been traversed by worms. It was a mood that I knew well, and it always descended upon me immediately before I began a two-day bender. I felt a sense of failure, moral lassitude, defeat, and fear that craved only one release. In my troubled dream I tried to will myself into one of the pages from Alafair’s coloring book—onto a stretch of beach dotted with palm trees, the sun hot on my bare shoulders while flecks of rain struck coldly on my skin. The water was blue and green, and red clouds of kelp were floating in the ground swell. Alafair rode her horse bareback along the edge of the surf, her mouth wide with a smile, her hair black and shiny in the sunlight.