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&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 inmate who had been locked in both wrist and leg manacles. He leaned forward, his chains tinkling, and removed a leather-craft tool from his shoe, one with a thin, needle-sharp steel hook on the end. Then he inserted the tip into the lock on his right wrist and twisted gingerly, as though he were correcting the mechanism in the back of a clock.
When the serrated steel tongue of the manacle popped loose, Jessie slipped a small bar of soap into his mouth and started to work on his leg chains. Skyler Doolittle’s hand closed around his like a large ball of bread dough.
“You go, I go,” Skyler whispered.
Jessie’s hair was coal black, his narrow face cratered with acne scars, his dark eyes wired. His lips were pinched together to hold the soap that was melting inside his mouth. A thought, a moment’s resentment, the consideration of alternatives, perhaps, seemed to hover in front of his eyes, then disappear. He inserted the tool in the manacle on Skyler’s left wrist. His fingertips were black with grime, his nails as thick as tortoiseshell, but he rotated the shaft of the leather-craft tool as delicately as a surgeon.
A minute later Jessie rolled a topless container of Liquid-plumr down the aisle and collapsed on the floor, writhing, his feet thrashing, his mouth white with foam.
The deputy riding shotgun stared back through the wire mesh.
“Pull it over. Stump’s done swallowed drain cleaner,” he said to the driver.
The bus stopped on the swale. The guard by the front door got up out of his seat, unholstered his revolver and set it on the dashboard. He unlocked the wire-mesh door that gave onto the aisle.
The guard was near retirement, his face ruddy with emphysema, his stomach hanging over his belt like a sack of grain. His hand touched Stump’s shoulder.
“Hold on, son. We’ll get the medics here. They’ll pump you out,” he said.
Then Jessie was on his feet, the tape-wrapped shank pressed against the guard’s jugular.
“You key that radio and I’ll slice his pipe,” he said to the driver, who was young, only two years on the job, and had suddenly realized the cost of underestimating the potential of the men he ferried back and forth daily from a half dozen service institutions.
Jessie pushed the older guard down the aisle, through the wire-mesh door, and picked up the revolver off the dashboard. He pointed it at the side of the driver’s head and pulled the driver’s gun from its holster.
“Drive the bus down that side road into them pines,” he said.
The bus bounced down a dirt road into deep shade, past a pond that was green with lichen and dimpled with the tracings of insects and dragonflies. Jessie reached past the steering wheel and turned off the ignition.
“Y’all get out,” he said.
“What you gonna do, Jessie?” the driver said.
“Some days a guy just gets up and brushes his teeth in the commode,” he replied.
“Them state hospital people are gonna certify you. You won’t never do time,” the older guard said.
“They give me electroshock, bossman. I bit right through that rubber hose they put in my mouth. Lordie, I cain’t go through that un again,” Jessie said.