The Lost Get-Back Boogie

I kept my face expressionless and looked at his massive weight leaning into the desk.

“I mean, do you believe you’re just going to walk out of it? That you can come into this county as a parolee and destroy fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of machinery and go back to your guitar?”

“You don’t have anything, Sheriff.”

“Before you go back to the tank, let me give you something to roll around. How do you think you got five the first time? And believe me, son, you’re just about to become a two-time loser.”

The deputy walked me in the handcuffs back to the front of the building, then pointed me toward a spiral metal stairs.

“My coat’s in the holding cell,” I said.

“You’ll get it later.”

“Do I get booked?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

He locked me in a four-man cell upstairs with a wire-mesh and barred window that looked out on a brick alley. I could hear heat thunder and dry lightning out in the mountains, and momentarily the alley walls would flicker with a white light. There was a rolled tick mattress and a blanket on one empty iron bunk, and I sat down and rested the weight of my cast on my thigh and began to take off my shoes with one hand. Then a large black head, glistening like shoe polish in the gloom, leaned over the bunk above me, and before I could even look into the wine-red eyes, the odor of muscatel and snuff and jail-house funk washed over me.

“Hey, blood,” the man said, “do you got a cigarette for a brother? I been up here a whole day with this white whale that’s got money stuck up his ass but won’t give the screw two bits for some cigarettes.”

I handed up the pack, but the Negro dropped off the bunk with one arm, and then I saw the black, puckered stump on his other shoulder. He picked a cigarette out with his fingernails and pulled down his white boxer undershorts and squatted on the seatless toilet. I unrolled the mattress and lay down with my head pointed toward the door and the draft of the corridor, then looked across the cell at the white whale. He lay on his back with his trousers and shoes on, and his stomach rose up like a mountain under his dirty white shirt. The fat in his cheeks hung back against his bones, and his eyes stared like burnt glass into the bottom of the bunk overhead.

I heard the Negro cracking wind into the toilet, and I turned on my stomach and lit a cigarette.

“Now catch this,” the Negro said. “They grabbed this cat on a morals charge. Eleven-year-old boy in a hotel room. The screw says all he’s got to do is pick up the phone and he’s out. But he just lays there and says ‘Jesus, forgive me.’”

“You shut up,” the white man said quietly.

“He says that, too,” the Negro said. “Every time I tell him to loosen up with some change. You ain’t crazy, too, are you, brother?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. Then I wondered, Good Lord, am I?

“He won’t eat his food, and now they don’t even bring him none.”

The cell was hot from the heat rising in the building, but I folded the blanket over my head and tried to close the sickening odors, the Negro, and the sad man out of my consciousness. The thunder echoed across the mountains like rows of distant cannon, and as I lay with my forehead damp against my wrist and the mothball smell of the blanket enveloping me, I slipped away through the concrete floor and the resonating clang of iron through jail corridors, melting with the softness of a morphine dream into yesterday when I could still turn the dial a degree in either direction and reshape the day into sunlight on trout streams, blue shadows on the pines in the canyons, or just a glass of iced tea on a lazy porch.

I awoke sometime in the middle of the night to the rain falling on the windowsill. The drops sprayed inside on the concrete floor, and I could smell the cool wetness blowing through the air shaft. I felt a sick ache in my heart, and I lay on my back and smoked, waiting for it to pass, but it wouldn’t. In the darkness I felt the beginnings of a new awareness about myself, one that I had always denied before. When I was in Angola, I never thought of myself as a real con, a professional loser who would always be up before some kind of authority. I was just a juke-joint country musician who had acted by chance or accident in a beer and marijuana fog without thinking. But I realized now that I killed that man because I wanted to. I had shot people in Korea, and when I put my hand in my pocket for the knife, I knew exactly what I was doing.

Now I had run right back to jail, just like every recidivist who is always sure he will stay on the street but works full time at falling again. And maybe you got your whole ticket punched this time, I thought. Yes, maybe this is the whole shot, and you never saw it during those two years you waited for that cosmic mistake in time and place to correct itself.

“Put the board up in the window, blood,” the Negro said.

I got off the bunk and picked up the piece of shaped plywood that fitted into the frame against the bars. The mist blew into my face, and I looked at the glistening brick of the alley wall and heard a train whistle blow in the distance.

“Come on, man. I feel like somebody pissed on my mattress,” the Negro said.

In the morning an Indian trusty and a deputy opened the cell and handed us two tin plates of cold scrambled eggs and bread and black coffee in paper cups.

“Is he going to eat today?” the Indian said.

The Negro touched the white whale on the knee. He lay in the bunk with his face toward the wall, and the black hair on his buttocks showed above his trousers.

“Better eat now. The man don’t bring it back again till two o’clock,” the Negro said.

The whale didn’t answer, and the Negro held his palm up in a gesture of failure in trying to reason with a lunatic.

“If you want any candy or cigarettes from the machine, give me the money and I’ll bring it back to you this afternoon,” the Indian said.