Swan Peak (Dave Robicheaux 17)

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.

“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?”