Swan Peak by James Lee Burke Page A

wrapped in a rubber sheet when he was an infant and left to his fate. For some reason, to Jimmy Dale, those words were even worse than the dream.
    His housemate was Beeville Hicks, a four-time loser whose enemy was freedom, not confinement. Long ago Beeville had flattened all the veins in his arms, destroyed his career as a steel-guitar player, and murdered his wife along the way. He was toothless, his skin like plastic wrap on his bones, his forehead tattooed with a red swastika, his hair as long and coarse as a horse’s tail. Oddly, in spite of his violent history and his tattoo and his friendship with members of the AB, Beeville was basically a kind man who, had he not been a heroin addict, probably would not have hung washlines of paper all over the western United States. When Jimmy Dale asked Beeville why he had killed his old lady, he replied, “I’m not rightly sure. I knowed she was screwing the milkman, but she was a homely thing, and I couldn’t hold that against her. Yes sir, that’s a good question.”
    For his last birthday, Beeville’s daughter had brought him his old scrapbook, which she had found in her attic. It was probably the finest gift Beeville had ever received, since few inmates or prison personnel believed his stories regarding the celebrities he had known or worked with. Beeville plastered his “house” wall with torn magazine pages and cracked black-and-white photographs showing him with Billy Joe Shaver, Texas Ruby, Moon Mullican, Stony Cooper and Wilma Lee, Floyd Tillman, Waylon Jennings, and Bob Wills.
    He was eating a piece of gingerbread cake on the bottom bunk, what he called “scarf,” the crumbs dripping off his hand, his naked back rounded, his vertebrae trying to poke through his skin. “I hear Cap’n Nix is going to have you working for him in the shop,” he said to Jimmy Dale.
    “That looks like the plan,” Jimmy Dale said from the top bunk. In the silence that followed, he leaned over the bunk and looked down at Beeville. “What about it?”
    “You got a lot of talent. Not just in your fingers, either. You got an old-style voice, like Jimmie Rodgers. Ain’t many got that kind of voice anymore. Maybe Haggard or Dwight Yoakam has got it, but not nobody else I know of.”
    “Will you take the collard greens out of your mouth?”
    “I got this swastika put on my head in Huntsville because I thought it’d protect me. I was right. Nobody would touch me with a toilet plunger. When I come out, nobody in the music business would touch me, either. How’s that for smarts?”
    Jimmy Dale lay back on his pillow and stared at the ceiling. It was steel, painted white, and the rivets that held it in place were orange around the rims. He could almost feel the ceiling’s weight crushing down on his chest. “If I don’t go along with Nix, he’ll screw me at my hearing.”
    “He’ll screw you in the shop and do it at your hearing, both. Go out max time, Jimmy Dale. You’ll still have your voice, you’ll still be a solid con. How about that girl you sang duet with? She’s still out there somewhere, ain’t she?”
    Jimmy Dale heard somebody scream in the block, maybe a fish taking it from a couple of AB guys who had paid a screw to provide them a fresh experience. He laid his arm across his eyes and felt the moisture on his skin.
    “What was that gal’s name?” Beeville asked.
    “Jamie Sue,” Jimmy Dale replied. “Jamie Sue Stapleton.”
    “I saw her at a gig in Austin once. She looked like a movie star. Where’s she at?”
    “Will you shut up, old man? Just for once eat your rat food and shut up.”
    Jimmy Dale’s ears were ringing as though he were in a plane dropping out of clouds, the face of a rock cliff rushing toward him. He leaned over the side of his bunk again, hoping the walls would stop spinning. “I’m sorry, Bee. I’m just off my feed.”
    Beeville dipped his head down, eating the crumbs from his palm, and showed no indication that he had heard either