"I don't know you, never brought you no grief, never given you no truck, but you always in my face and on my case. What is it wit' you, Chuck?"

"I don't think you're hearing me. Rosebud Hulin is out of your life. We're together on that, right?"

"You wrapped too tight for your job, man. I got a girl over there can take care of that for you, unzipper your problem, know what I'm sayin', but in the meantime don't be jabbing your finger at me."

"Just so you understand later why it all went south, you shouldn't call a guy 'Chuck,' not unless you've paid some dues, humped a sixty-pound pack for twenty klicks in the rain, had Sir Charles kick your ass, seen your friends blown into hamburger, that sort of thing. You reading me, partner?"

"You got a serious jones, Lou'sana Chuck. Now shake your cakes down the road, before I have you picked up," he said.

I caught him solidly on the jaw with a right cross, snapping his head sideways, slinging food out of his mouth, then hooked him in the eye and caught him with another right, this time in the throat, before he could get off the bar stool. He threw two fast punches at me, off balance, unable to draw his arms back for a full swing, and I slipped one of his punches, took the other on the ear, and then hit him with everything I had.

I put my whole weight into each blow, breaking his nose, splitting his mouth against his teeth, gashing open the skin above one eye. He managed to roll off the stool and right himself, even to get his guard up and catch me once, hard, in the chest, but I drove my fist into his rib cage, right under the heart, and saw his willpower leave him, his resistance drain from his face, like water bursting from the bottom of a balloon. I hooked him in the kidney, then in the stomach, doubling him over, forcing him to cling to the stool for support.

But I couldn't let go of it. I seized the back of his head and drove his face down on the knurled edge of the bar, smashing it into the wood, over and over, while behind me women screamed and a tall black man with orange and purple hair and rings through his eyebrows tried to get his arms around me and put himself between me and Jimmy Dean Styles.

I pulled my.45 and barrel-stroked the man with orange and purple hair across the face, knocking him to the floor, then racked a round into the chamber and aimed the sight between his eyes, my hands streaked with Jimmy Style's blood, shaking on the grips.

"I'll get out of town. I promise. Don't do it, man. Please," the man on the floor said, turning his face to one side.

A dark stain spread through his slacks.

I was arrested before I could get out of the parking lot. Ten minutes later I was escorted in cuffs inside the St. Martin Parish Jail, my shirt split down the back, and pushed inside the drunk tank. My skin felt dead to the touch, my muscles without texture or tone, as though I had just come off a two-day whiskey drunk. The voices of the inmates around me seemed muffled, filtered through wet cotton, even though some of them appeared to know me and were speaking directly in my face. In my mind's eye I saw a homeless man bent under a cross made of a rolled yellow tent stuffed with all his earthly belongings, and I knew that for all of us who had been there the war would never be over and the real enemy was not Jimmy Sty but a violent creature who rose with me in the morning and lived quietly inside my skin, waiting for the proper moment to vent his rage upon the world.

CHAPTER 17

When the Iberia sheriff arrived at the jail, I thought he would have me released. Instead, he had me moved out of the drunk tank to an empty holding cell, one with a drain hole and a urine-streaked, rusty grate in the center of a cement floor, graffiti and female breasts and male genitalia smoked on the ceiling with Bic lighters. I sat on a wooden bench, the sheriff in a chair on the other side of the bars, his eyes deep-set with his anger and disappointment. I felt light-headed and my hands were swollen and as thick as grapefruit when I tried to close them.

"Were you trying to kill him?" the sheriff asked.

"Maybe."

"Everyone in the bar says there was no provocation. They say Styles was just sitting on a stool and you went apeshit and starting tearing him apart."

"He owns the bar. He owns most of the people in it. I'm a cop. What are they supposed to say?"

"You're being charged with felony assault."

"Thanks for passing on the news," I said.

"You just going to sit there and act like a wiseass?"

"Styles is a human toilet. Someone should have ripped out his spokes a long time ago," I said.

He rose from his chair and put on his Stetson hat and stared down at me, the light from a high window breaking around his head.

"You want me to call your wife, or can you handle that yourself?" he asked.

"You know, there is something you could do for me. I'd really appreciate a pack of gum from the machine out in the hall. That would really be nice," I replied.

I sat for twenty minutes, listening to all the sounds that are common to any jailhouse environment: steel doors clanging, toilets flushing, trusties dragging wash buckets down the corridor, Mariel felons yelling at one another in Spanish, a blaring television set tuned to a stock car race, a three-hundred-pound biker, wrapped in chains and stink, his hair like a lion's mane, deciding to make his captors earn their money when they tried to shove him inside a cell.

I took off my ruined shirt and rolled it into a ball for a pillow and lay down on the wooden bench and placed my arm over my eyes. Then I heard footsteps in the corridor again and, vain fool that all drunks are, thought it was the sheriff, my friend, returning to set things straight.

But the sheriff did not return, nor did anyone take me out of the holding cell or indicate when I might be arraigned.

The unpleasantness of jailhouse life has less to do with confusion and the cacophony of noise that fills the inside of your head twenty-four hours a day than it does with your disconnection from the outside world and the fact that for you time stops when the cell door slams behind you.

You make no decisions for yourself. You are strip-searched by a bored turnkey who fits on polyethylene gloves before he pries your buttocks apart, then fingerprinted, photographed, given a cleansing cream and a dirty rag to remove the ink from your hands, spoken to in a toneless voice by people who never address you as an individual or look into your face, as though eye contact would grant you a level of personal identity that you do not deserve.

Then you sit. Or lie on the floor. Or try to find anyplace in a crowded cell away from the open toilet that eventually you will use in full view of everyone in the cell and anyone passing in the corridor. But most of the time you simply wait. No sexual encounters in the shower, no racial beefs with blacks or the Mariels from Castro's prisons whose space is rented for them by the G, no meetings with Damon Runyon street characters or O. Henry safecrackers. Most of the miscreants are hapless and stupid. Out-of-control hardcases are sedated, forced to shower, powdered with disinfectant, and transferred to hospitals. The screws are usually duffers worried about their prostates.

You wait in a vacuum, maybe in a large, colorless room, one more face among the faceless and uneducated and inept and self-pitying, convinced you are not like the others, that it is only bad luck that has put you here. After a while you wonder what it is you are waiting for, then realize you're thinking about your next meal, a chance to use the toilet or to stand a few moments at a window that looks out upon a tree. One morning you ask somebody which day of the week it is.