After he had sat on the edge of the cot long enough to feel sure he wasn't going to pass out, he hooked the shapeless gray pajama pants he was wearing down around his knees, squatted on the can, and urinated for what seemed at least an hour. When he was finished he stood up, holding on to the edge of the cot like an old man. He looked apprehensively into the bowl for signs of blood, but his urine had been clear. He flushed it away.
He walked carefully over to the barred door and looked out into a short corridor. To his left was the drunk tank. An old man was lying on one of its five bunks, a hand like driftwood dangling on the floor. To the right the corridor ended in a door that was chocked open. In the center of the corridor was a dangling green-shaded light like the kind he had seen in pool-halls.
A shadow rose, danced on the propped-open door, and then a large man in khaki suntans walked into the corridor. He was wearing a Sam Browne belt and a big pistol. He hooked his thumbs into his pants pockets and looked at Nick for almost a full minute without speaking. Then he said, "When I was a boy we caught ourselves a mountain lion up in the hills and shot it and then drug it twenty mile back to town over dirt hardpan. What was left of that creature when we got home was the sorriest-lookin sight I ever saw. You the second-sorriest, boy."
Nick thought it had the feel of a prepared speech, care fully honed and treasured, saved for out-of-towners and vags that occupied the barred Saltine boxes from time to time.
"You got a name, Babalugah?"
Nick put a finger to his swelled and lacerated lips and shook his head. He put a hand over his mouth, then cut the air with it in a soft diagonal hashmark and shook his head again.
"What? Cain't talk? What's this happy horseshit?" The words were amiable enough, but Nick couldn't follow tones or inflections. He plucked an invisible pen from the air and wrote with it.
"You want a pencil?"
Nick nodded.
"If you're mute, how come you don't have none of those cards?"
Nick shrugged. He turned out his empty pockets. He balled his fists and shadowboxed the air, which sent another bolt of pain through his head and another wave of nausea through his stomach. He finished by tapping his own temples lightly with his fists, rolling his eyes up, and sagging on the bars. Then he pointed to his empty pockets.
"You were robbed."
Nick nodded.
The man in khaki turned away and went back into his office. A moment later he returned with a dull pencil and a notepad. He thrust them through the bars. Written across the top of each notesheet was MEMO and From The Desk Of Sheriff John Baker.
Nick turned the pad around and tapped the pencil eraser at the name. He raised questioning eyebrows.
"Yeah, that's me. Who are you?"
"Nick Andros," he wrote. He put his hand through the bars.
Baker shook his head. "I ain't gonna shake with you. You deaf, too?"
Nick nodded.
"What happened to you tonight? Doc Soames and his wife almost ran you down like a woodchuck, boy."
"Beat up & robbed. A mile or so from a rdhouse on Main St. Zack's Place."
"That hangout's no place for a kid like you, Babalugah. You surely aren't old enough to drink."
Nick shook his head indignantly. "I'm twenty-two," he wrote. "I can have a couple of beers without getting beaten up & robbed for them, can't I?"
Baker read this with a sourly amused look on his face. "It don't appear you can in Shoyo. What you doing here, kid?"
Nick tore the first sheet off the memo pad, crumpled it in a ball, dropped it on the floor. Before he could begin to write his reply, an arm shot through the bars and a steel hand clutched his shoulder. Nick's head jerked up.
"My wife neatens these cells," Baker said, "and I don't see any need for you to litter yours up. Go throw that in the john."
Nick bent over, wincing at the pain in his back, and fished the ball of paper off the floor. He took it over to the toilet, tossed it in, and then looked up at Baker with his eyebrows raised. Baker nodded.
Nick came back. This time he wrote longer, pencil flying over the paper. Baker reflected that teaching a deaf-mute kid to read and write was probably quite a trick, and this Nick Andros must have some pretty good equipment upstairs to have caught the hang of it. There were fellows here in Shoyo, Arkansas, who had never properly caught the hang of it, and more than a few of them hung out in Zack's. But he supposed you couldn't expect a kid who just blew into town to know that.
Nick handed the pad through the bars.
"I've been traveling around but I'm not a vag. Spent today working for a man named Rich Ellerton about 6 miles west of here. I cleaned his barn & put up a load of hay in his loft., Last week I was in Watts, Okla., running fence. The men who beat me up got my week's pay."
"You sure it was Rich Ellerton you was working for? I can check that, you know." Baker had torn off Nick's explanation, folded it to wallet-photo size, and tucked it into his shirt pocket.
Nick nodded.
"You see his dog?"
Nick nodded.
"What kind was it?"
Nick gestured for the pad. "Big Doberman," he wrote. "But nice. Not mean."
Baker nodded, turned away, and went back into his office. Nick stood at the bars, watching anxiously. A moment later, Baker returned with a big keyring, unlocked the holding cell, and pushed it back on its track.
"Come on in the office," Baker said. "You want some breakfast?"
Nick shook his head, then made pouring and drinking motions.
"Coffee? Got that. You take cream and sugar?"
Nick shook his head.
"Take it like a man, huh?" Baker laughed. "Come on."
Baker started up the hallway, and although he was speaking, Nick was unable to hear what he was saying with his back turned and his lips hidden. "I don't mind the company. I got insomnia. It's got so I can't sleep more'n three or four hours most nights. M'wife wants me to go see some big-shot doctor up in Pine Bluff. If it keeps on, I just might do it. I mean, looka this-here I am, five in the morning, not even light out, and there I sit eatin aigs and greazy home fries from the truck stop up the road."
He turned on the last phrase and Nick caught " … truck stop up the road." He raised his eyebrows and shrugged his shoulders to indicate his puzzlement.
"Don't matter," Baker said. "Not to a young kid like you, anyway."
In the outer office, Baker poured him a cup of black coffee out of a huge thermos. The sheriff's half-finished breakfast plate stood on his desk blotter, and he pulled it back to himself. Nick sipped the coffee. It hurt his mouth, but it was good.
He tapped Baker on the shoulder, and when he looked up, Nick pointed to the coffee, rubbed his stomach, and winked soberly.
Baker smiled. "You better say it's good. My wife Jane puts it up." He tucked half a hard-fried egg into his mouth, chewed, and then pointed at Nick with his fork. "You're pretty good. Just like one of those pantomimers. Bet you don't have much trouble makin yourself understood, huh?"
Nick made a seesawing gesture with his hand in midair. Comme ?i, comme ?a.
"I ain't gonna hold you," Baker said, mopping up grease with a slice of toasted Wonder Bread, "but I tell you what. If you stick around, maybe we can get the guys who did this to you. You game?"
Nick nodded and wrote: "You think I can get my week's pay back?"
"Not a chance," Baker said flatly. "I'm just a hick sheriff, boy. For somethin like that, you'd be wantin Oral Roberts."
Nick nodded and shrugged. Putting his hands together, he made a bird flying away.
"Yeah, like that. How many were there?"
Nick held up four fingers, shrugged, then held up five.
"Think you could identify any of them?"
Nick held up one finger and wrote: "Big & blond. Your size, maybe a little heavier. Gray shirt & pants. He was wearing a big ring. 3rd finger right hand. Purple stone. That's what cut me."
As Baker read this, a change came over his face. First concern, then anger. Nick, thinking the anger was directed against him, became frightened again.
"Oh Jesus Christ," Baker said. "This here's a full commode slopping over for sure. You sure?"
Nick nodded reluctantly.
"Anything else? You see anything else?"
Nick thought hard, then wrote: "Small scar. On his forehead."
Baker looked at the words. "That's Ray Booth," he said. "My brother-in-law. Thanks, kid. Five in the morning and my day's wrecked already."
Nick's eyes opened a little wider, and he made a cautious gesture of commiseration.
"Well, all right," Baker said, more to himself than to Nick. "He's a bad actor. Janey knows it. He beat her up enough times when they was kids together. Still, they're brother n sister and I guess I can forget my lovin for this week."
Nick looked down, embarrassed. After a moment Baker shook his shoulder so-that Nick would see him speaking.
"It probably won't do any good anyway," he said. "Ray ‘n his jerk-off buddies'll just swear each other up. Your word against theirs. Did you get any licks in?"
"Kicked this Ray in the guts," Nick wrote. "Got another one in the nose. Might have broken it."
"Ray chums around with Vince Hogan, Billy Warner, and Mike Childress, mostly," Baker said. "I might be able to get Vince alone and break him down. He's got all the spine of a dyin jellyfish. If I could get him I could go after Mike and Billy. Ray got that ring in a fraternity at LSU. He flunked out his sophomore year." He paused, drumming his fingers against the rim of his breakfast plate. "I guess we could give it a go, kid, if you wanted to. But I'll warn you in advance, we probably won't get them. They're as vicious and cowardly as a dogpack, but they're town boys and you're just a deaf-mute drifter. And if they got off, they'd come after you."