Tony, Jess, and I were put in a holding cell a short distance from the drunk tank. Because it was a holding cell, it had no toilet or running water and contained only an iron bench that was bolted to one wall. The bars of the door had been repainted so many times that the layers of white paint formed a shell around the metal. The walls were grimed with handprints and scuff marks from people's shoes, covered with scratched drawings of genitalia and names that had been scorched into the paint with butane cigarette lighters. The heat was turned up and the cell was hot. Someone in the drunk tank began screaming and was taken out by two uniformed cops.

Tony paced up and down, took off his rust-colored sports shirt, then worked his T-shirt over his head and used it to wipe his skin.

"What's the drill with this guy? Somebody tell me what the fucking drill is," he said.

"It's Baxter. He's a bad cop. He can't make his case, so he finds something he can do," I said.

"We ain't sitting in this shithole three days. That's out," he said.

"Your lawyer had better know a judge, then."

"You got it," Tony said.

"I got to use the toilet," Jess said.

"Hey, you hear that?" Tony shouted through the bars. "We got a man in here needs to use the toilet."

His olive skin glistened with perspiration, and he kept biting his lower lip. By the time we were booked and moved up to the general population, on the second floor, his hands trembled and he couldn't drink enough water. I sat next to him on the edge of an iron bunk that hung from wall chains. His back was running with sweat now. He leaned forward on his thighs and ran his hand through his wet hair.

"Lockup is at eight o'clock," I said. "Let's go down to the shower."

"I'm cool," he answered.

"You'll feel better after a shower."

"Don't worry about me. I'm solid, man." He gripped the edge of the bunk and shuddered as though he had malaria. "Did anybody make you?"

"I don't think so. I've been out of New Orleans too long now."

"Anybody make you, get in your face, tell them we're tight."

"All right, Tony."

"There's guys in here who'll do an ex-cop, Dave. That's not a shuck."

"I think you just figured out Nate Baxter."

"Yeah, well, I'm going to square it with that cat. The word is he's getting freebies from French Quarter street whores. I know one who's got AIDS. I'm going to fix it so she gets in the sack with him."

Then he bent over and squeezed his palm across the back of his neck and said, "Oh man, the tiger's got me."

I stood him up and walked him by the arm down to the shower. Inmates lounging in the open doors of their cells or sitting on the big water pipe against the corridor wall looked at him with the curiosity and reverence of their kind-prisoners in a parish or city jail-when they were in the actual proximity of a mainline con or Mafia don. Some rose to their feet, offered to help, made an extravagant show of sympathy.

"He just got hold of some bad food," I said.

"Yeah, it's rotten, Tony," one man said.

"A roach crawled out of the grits one time, man. That's no shit," another said.

"We got a stinger and some canned goods. You're welcome to it, Tony," a third said.

Tony stood naked under the shower with his hands propped against the tiles. The water boiled his scalp white and sluiced over his olive skin and the knotted muscles in his back. In one pale buttock was a puckered red scar just above the colon. He held his face into the rush of hot water and opened and closed his small mouth like a guppy. When he turned off the faucets he breathed deeply through his nose, as though he were inhaling the morning air, and wiped his face slick with his palm.

"That's a little better," he said.

Two men farther down the shower were staring at his phallus.

"You guys got a problem with your gender or something?" he said.

"Sorry, Tony. We don't mean anything," one man said.

"Then act decent," he said.

"Sure, Tony. Everybody's glad to have you here. No, I mean, we're sorry you're busted but-"

"Get out of here," Tony said.

"Sure, anything you want. We-" Then the man lost his words, and he and his friend walked quickly out of the shower with their towels wrapped around their hips.

"That's what nobody understands about a jail. It's full of degenerates," Tony said.

I walked with him back to our cell. Through the corridor windows I could see downtown New Orleans and the glow of the city against the clouds. He put on his slacks and shirt and lay down barefoot on the bunk across from me. He folded his arm behind his head. Water dripped out of his hair onto the striped mattress.

"I'm supposed to take Paul to a soccer game tomorrow afternoon," he said.

"He'll understand," I said.

"That's not the way it works with kids. You're either there for them or you're not there."

He let out a long breath and stared at the ceiling. Somebody down the corridor shouted, "Lockup, five minutes."

"How do I get out of it, man?" he said.

"What?"

"I'm addicted. Big-time. On the spike. I got blood pressure you could cook an egg with."

"Maybe you should think about a treatment program."

"One of those thirty-day hospital jobs? What about Paul? What about my fucking wife?"

"What about her?"

"She never dresses him or plays with him. She won't take him shopping with her or to a show. But I kick her out, she'll sue for custody. That's her big edge. And, man, does she work it. I should have used that psycho Boggs to whack her out. Her and that prick over in Houston."

"Who?"

"She makes it with one of the Dio crowd from Houston. They meet in Miami. That's why she's always flying over there. Come on, man. You read a lot of books. What would you do?"

"You're trying to deal with all the monsters at the same time. Start with the addiction."

"I tried. Out at the V.A. I think I'm in it for the whole ride."

"There're ways out, Tony."

"Yeah, and you can scrub the stink out of shit, too. You came home okay, Dave. I blew it."

He turned on his side and faced the wall. When I spoke to him again, he did not answer.

The daytime noise level in any jail is grinding and ceaseless, particularly on a Saturday morning. I woke to the clanging of cell doors, shoes thudding on spiral metal stairs, cleaning crews scraping buckets across the cement floors, shower water drumming on the tile walls, radios tuned to a dozen different stations, someone cracking wind into a toilet bowl or roaring out a belch from the bottom of his bowels, inmates shouting from the windows to friends on the other side of the razor wire that bordered the street-a dirty, iron-tinged, cacophonous mix that echoed down the long concrete corridor with such an ear-numbing intensity that the individual voice was lost in it.

We lined up when the trusties wheeled in the steam carts loaded with grits, sausage, black coffee, and white bread, and later Tony and I played checkers on a homemade board in our cell. Then, because we had nothing else to do, we followed Jess down to the weight room at the end of the corridor. The weather was warm and sunny, so the solitary barred window high up on the wall was open, but the room reeked of the men clanking barbells up and down on the cement. They were stripped to the waist, or wore only their Jockey undershorts or cutoff sweatpants, their bodies laced with rivulets of sweat. They had bulging scrotums, necks like tree stumps, shoulders you could break a two-by-four across. Some of the Negroes were as black as paint, the Caucasians so white their skin had a shine to it. And they all seemed to contain a reservoir of rut and power and ruthless energy that made you shudder when you considered the fact that soon they would be back on the street.