Swan Peak by James Lee Burke

behind his shades, the gearstick knob throbbing in his palm. “You’ll stink a whole lot worse if you spend the night standing on the barrel and dribbling in your pants,” he said.
    Troyce was silent as they drove toward the compound, the dust from the alkali flats drifting through the windows. Up ahead, another truck towed the trailer that contained the gunbulls’ horses. Jimmy Dale could see the horses’ rumps swaying back and forth with the motion of the trailer, desiccated pieces of manure blowing into the wind. Troyce pulled a cigarette from his pack with his mouth and lit it with the lighter from the dashboard. The smoke leaked from his mouth like damp cotton.
    “If you was wanting to buy a used horse trailer, what would you look for first?” Troyce asked.
    “The floor,” Jimmy Dale replied.
    “Why’s that?”
    “’Cause if it’s got dry rot in it, your horse’s foot can punch through it on the highway.”
    “If you was to build a floor on a trailer, how would you go about it?”
    “I’d use only treated two-by-four planks. I’d use only bolts and screws instead of nails so there wouldn’t be cracks to soak up moisture. I’d put the planks in snug but with enough space between them so they could drain and aerate.”
    “How come you know so much about horses and tack?”
    “I’m a rodeo bum, boss.”
    “Thought you was a country-and-western singer.”
    “I guess shitkicking can cover lots of categories.”
    Troyce laughed, appraising Jimmy Dale through his shades. “I want you to put a new floor in that trailer for me. Do a good job, and I’ll write you up for half trusty and give you an indoor job. In three months you’ll be up for full trusty.”
    “I’ll be up for parole before then.”
    Troyce swerved the truck around a jackrabbit that had bolted across the road. Or at least appeared to swerve around it. When he glanced into the side mirror, his face seemed to contain more than idle curiosity. “I wouldn’t necessarily count on that,” he said.
    “I’ll build you a good floor, boss. I appreciate anything you can do for me,” Jimmy Dale said.
    “Yeah, you’re gonna do just fine. Have a smoke.” Troyce shook a cigarette loose from the pack, offering the firm white cylinder to Jimmy Dale, holding his eyes when Jimmy Dale took it.
    Just before they entered the compound, the truck bounced over a series of potholes. Troyce’s hand slipped off the gearshift, and the pads of his fingers brushed softly across Jimmy Dale’s thigh. For Jimmy Dale, the sensation was like the tiny feet of a small animal tickling across his skin, and it caused his penis to shrivel in his skivvies.
     
    THE CONTRACT PRISON was run military-style. At 7:58 P.M. sharp, the count man shouted, “In the house!” At eight P.M. he shouted, “Locking it down!” Then the steel doors slid collectively into place, clanging shut in unison with a sound that reverberated through the building. The count man and the screw behind him began their walk down the bullrun, the count man whanging his baton on the bars as he passed each cell, the screw ticking check marks on his clipboard.
    Jimmy Dale hated this part of the day, trapped between daylight and darkness, between motion and inertia, between the illusion that he worked under the same sky and breathed the same air as other human beings and the knowledge that he was little more than a state-owned cipher entombed in a five-by-eight-foot steel box.
    The echoes of the count man’s baton on the bars trailed away in the distance, then the lights dimmed and he could hear the commode in his cell gurgling in the gloom. Jimmy Dale’s nightmares waited for him just beyond the edge of sleep. In the worst of them, he was deep underground, pinned in a long tunnel, his arms crushed against his sides, the breath squeezed from his lungs. In his dream he cried out for his mother to free him, but his mother was not there. A psychiatrist had told him once that he had probably been