The Jail

How I Found the car was I went with the truck looking for some plows and a harrow and a mowing machine, horse-drawn stuff we had a chance to sell to a fellow who was farming produce on shares—tomatoes, in particular. You can't cultivate tomatoes with a tractor. The sticks are too high. He had located a pair of mules. He was a Do-Right, but that is another story. A Do-Right is a member of a small religion we have in west Tennessee wherein a man pledges that he will do right and if a Do-Right is not lazy, he's a fair credit risk. So he needed the implements and I said I'd go look and see if I could locate them over on my grandmother's place.

I got into the truck and drove over there. It was July and I looked over her cotton and beans and saw that everything looked good. She'd built her cage-laying shed spang at the other end of the 2000 acres instead of putting it on the main road like I advised her and I crossed the stock gaps and the dust powdered on the hood of my green truck. I put up the windows and put the air conditioning on and turned up the music on the country station and presently I saw the laying house and drove on back to the barn, white painted and neat. I found the key on my ring and unlocked the doors and swung them open and saw the implements almost at once and the stalls just as they had been left, cleaned out and swept after the last mule died. It was a fine old barn and maybe I still would not have found the car except that I went walking down the hall, looking in the big old box stalls and thinking how it was when I was a boy. It was the fourth stall down and when I saw the car, red and low and foreign, with a good bit of dust on it that had filtered down from the old loft above, I took a look at the outer wallboards and could see where they had been removed in order to put the car in there. My first thought was of Sheriff, my little brother, for I well knew his love of cars. And I thought, Well, Sheriff has bought a car and for some reason stored it in here without saying a word to anybody about it. Then I stepped inside the stall and stooped down and rubbed the barn dust off the license plate. New York State, 1965—I crouched there in the silence of the barn and pondered that. 1 could feel my heart beating. I stood up and opened the car door on the driver's side. It sure needed greasing, for it kind of groaned—a coffin-lid groan—and I looked inside and saw that it was probably British and next saw that it was a Jaguar. You don't see a whole lot of Jaguars in west Tennessee. Fact of the business, you so rarely see one now that the interstate has been put through that there just isn't any telling when the last Jaguar came through Pinoak, Tennessee. The interstate, which cut us off the mainstream of travel between Florida and the Midwestern states, was opened in 1966.

I saw something on the steering column held by little coil springs and celluloid. I took it off the column and read the name on the New York driver's license. S. Jerome Luben, male, black hair, brown eyes, age 26, address on Riverside Drive, New York City. Nobody with a name like Luben could be mistaken for a member of the Pinoak Missionary Baptist Church. I tossed the license, celluloid, coil springs and all, onto the driver's seat and closed the door. It shut with a sound that was somehow so final I stood there another full minute at least before I could move. The dust of nine years in a mule barn was on my hands.

The year 1965 was the year Sheriff left home for the Marines. I recalled the day he left. I recalled a lot of things, including the way he kept whispering something and nodding to Henry. Henry is the nigger who has worked for my grandmother since he was a little boy: he kind of waited on Sheriff and buddied around with him since Sheriff was little.

Did I say my little brother is spoiled? Spoiled rotten. The baby in the family. My mother thought she was in the change of life and went around eight months thinking he was a tumor and probably malignant until she finally went to the doctor after she had got our family lawyer, Oman Hedgepath, to make her will, which would have left most of her estate for the support of foreign missions. Mother worried about the souls of the heathens. When Ocie Pentecost told her she was pregnant, I think she felt cheated. A month later, here came Sheriff. That is not his name, of course. His real name is Caleb Batsell Beeman Baxter. Mother had an uncle in Somerton whose name was Caleb and he got into real estate and insurance and put his signs up so they read: C. Batsell Beeman for Everything in Real Estate and Insurance Needs. He put that sign on every road leading in and out of town and had a fine income all his life right up to the moment he fell into the wheat bin and suffocated. Wheat is like water, you fall into it and you go under. Uncle Batsell could not swim.

Mother figured Sheriff would be a lawyer like Oman Hedgepath and have a sign on his door and a shingle hanging in the breeze on Main Street, reading: C. Batsell B. Baxter, which she thought would make everybody with any law business want to see her youngest son.

As for me, I was never in her mind otherwise than somebody to run everything. To gin cotton during ginning season and combine beans during bean season, to buy hay and manage for the silage and between times build rent houses and work in the store and manage the tractor-and-implement company and make private loans and buy farms and run the sawmill—or, in other words, just like my daddy always did, to run everything and see to everything and mind everything and when there was nothing else to do, to step in behind the meat counter and weigh hams.

Not Sheriff, though. Once it got through her head that he was not a tumor, she saw him in the practice of the law. Then he started to grow up and almost from the first word he spoke, it was obvious that all in the world he would ever want to do would be to be a sheriff and enforce the law. It was all that he spoke about, and because he was the baby, we gave him toy guns and little uniforms and hats and badges. He went around dressed like that and went to school that way. What else would we call him but Sheriff? Everybody in Sligo County thought he was cute as a bug and during the strawberry festival every year, we'd build him a float in the shape of a sheriff's patrol car with little wheels on it and the aerial and all and Sheriff would ride in it, with Henry and a couple of others pulling him in the children's parade. Time and again he won first or got an honorable mention from the judges who come each year from Memphis to judge the parade and the beauty contest.

Then he got to high school and we gave him an automobile and Grandmother gave him police lights for the top of it and my father bought him a siren from Sears. I got him a real badge from a pawnshop in Memphis. It saved us from having to wonder what to do for him when it came Christmas.

If something happened in Pinoak, we had Sheriff as our private police force to investigate things and make arrests and take people over to Somerton to the jail. Nothing official, understand, but a convenience in a small place like Pinoak, where you don't have a police force.

Sheriff, for the most part, confined himself to stopping out-of-state cars if they were speeding or if they looked suspicious. He'd pull them over, get out, walk up to the driver's side and tip his hat. He was young and blond and blue-eyed and had such an innocent face. Yet behind it there was always something that made folks do exactly what he told them to do. Show their driver's license, open their trunk lid, even open their suitcases. He confiscated ever so much liquor and beer, but never went so far as to actually arrest anybody ... that I ever knew anything about.

He seemed happy and he seemed contented. When he asked if he could have a jail, my father consulted highway patrol. They advised against it. The law in Tennessee did not, they said, let folks operate private jails. That could cause problems, they said. Otherwise, as long as Sheriff never arrested anybody or gave a ticket or fined anybody, he could pretty well do as he pleased, for he was a deterrent to speeders. Pinoak got known far and wide as a speed trap. Back before they opened the interstate, the out-of-state traffic would drive through Pinoak so slow you could walk alongside it the whole two blocks. They'd come at a crawl sometimes, with Sheriff so close behind in his cruiser he was all but bumper to bumper, and Sheriff just daring them to make a wrong move or do anything sudden or reckless.

More than anything else, he liked to stop a car with a New York tag, for when that happened, like as not he'd get a loudmouth who would start to complain and bitch and raise his voice and Sheriff would end up practically taking the fellow's car apart in front of his eyes. New York drivers were a challenge to Sheriff. Looking at that red car gave me a chill in spite of the heat.

I went outside and stood just beyond the white-painted doors of the mule barn. I could see the cage-laying house and hear the hens and could smell that special odor of hen shit and cracked eggs and ground feed. I saw that Henry's truck was there, so I went down to the packing room and found him. He had collected the eggs and had them in the tank with the vibrator that washes them and he was grading them and putting them in big square cartons of 50. The cracked ones he broke all the way and put the yolks and whites into big pickle jars to be hauled to the poor farm and to the Somerton jail, because the old and the poor and the prisoners are just as well fed on cracked eggs as on whole ones and cracked eggs come a whole lot cheaper; besides, otherwise we'd have to feed the cracked ones to the hogs. Henry never looked up and the vibrator hummed and the water danced the hen shit off the eggs and the smell of (continued on page 146)The Jail(continued from page 126) spoiled eggs was in the room. The floor was a little wet. A black-and-white cat was asleep on the sofa Henry had made for himself by welding legs onto a truck seat taken from a wreck.

"S. Jerome Luben," I said. "That mean anything to you?"

He froze, egg in hand, just that quick.

"S. Jerome Luben," I said again.

He dropped the egg and it broke on the wet concrete between his black, down-at-heel shoes.

"Is he dead?" I asked.

Henry reached into the tank for another egg, got one, and then cut off the vibrator. He wiped the egg carefully on the corner of his apron. Flies were worrying about the floor, lighting at the edges of the egg he had dropped.

"Naw, sah, he ain't dead. Leastways he wadn't dead this morning."

"This morning? You saw S. Jerome Luben this morning?"

"Yes, sah. He looked OK to me." Instead of looking at me, he looked at the egg in his hand and pushed with his thumbnail at what might have been a speck on its white, curving surface. "How come you to know about him, sah?"

"I just saw his car."

"Little red automobile."

"Did you knock the wall loose?"

"I prised some of the boards loose. It wouldn't go in if I didn't prise some boards off. But now I nailed 'em back."

"Nine years ago."

"Something lack that," he said, still examining the egg. "It had to be after Christmas, wadn't it?"

"How would I know?" I said.

"It was after Christmas of sixty-five, I b'lieve it was," he said. He never looked blacker. I began to feel something between my shoulder blades in the middle of my back, a cold sensation. He was so utterly still. "Yes, sah. Sixty-five," he said.

"What happened?"

He was quiet a moment. "I tole 'em it was bound to cause trouble."

"Who—told who?"

"Your grandmother, Miss Mettie Bell. And him—Sheriff. He got on her about wanting her to give him a jail——"

"A what?"

"Jail. Tole her wouldn't nothing else make him happy that Christmas if he didn't git him a jail. Jest a teeny little jail. Two cells, he tole her. That's all he wanted Santy to bring him and what if he went away to—where was it he went?"

"Vietnam."

"Nam, that's it. What if he went there and got kilt and hadn't never had him the pleasure of a jail of his own? He started on her in the summertime in weather about like this and she sent to Birmingham for the contractor and they come and built it and she handed him the keys on Christmas Eve. I was standing in the kitchen next to the sink when she handed them keys to him and made him promise he wouldn't abuse his privilege and wouldn't make no trouble and wouldn't tell nobody local from around here anything about it. She tole me I'd have to feed anybody he locked up and keep the jail swept and mopped and cleaned good. She wadn't going to endure with no dirty jail, she said. So I promised and Sheriff, he promised, too."

I sat down on the sofa. The cat raised her head and gave me a green stare. Then, closing her eyes again, she laid her head back down. I heard the vibrator come on.

"S. Jerome Luben," I said. "Is he in the jail?"

"He was this morning when I carried him his breakfast."

"Where the hell is this jail?"

I no sooner asked than something dawned on me. It was like looking at the flat surface of a pool. You can look ever so long at the surface and you will see only the reflection of the sky and the trees, but then, sometimes very suddenly, you'll see below it—you'll see a fish or a turtle.

It had to be the poison house. We bought farm poisons in such quantities, all the new poisons and defoliants, the sprays and powders for controlling everything from the boll weevil to the cabbage butterfly, plus all the weed killers. I recalled drawing the check to the Birmingham contractor and wondering why Grandmother got somebody from Alabama instead of a Somerton builder, but it was Grandmother's money and if she wanted the poison house set off in a field on the backside of nowhere, then it was fine with me, because the poisons always gave me a headache when I had to be around them. I never went to the poison house, not I or my father or any white man. It gives you a headache, a poison room does. They say the stuff can collect in your system and shorten your life. So, for nine years, I'd been looking at a goddamned jail and had never known what it was. I had never before wondered why Grandmother would put up a two-story poison house and have a Birmingham contractor build it. Hell, I could have built the thing. Only when you are busy as I am all the time, with one season falling on you before the last one is over—starting with cabbage and strawberries and rolling right on through corn and soybeans and cotton and wheat and winter pasture and back to cabbage and strawberries again—you are so goddamned relieved when anybody will take even a little something off your back you never wonder about it and you get so you never ask questions. Nine years can flit past you like a moth in the dark. You never give it a second thought.

"Henry?"

"Sah?"

"Cut that goddamned thing off and come with me." I stood up, feeling lightheaded.

"Cut it off?"

"You heard me."

"But I got to grade these eggs——"

"Who feeds him his dinner?"

"Sah?"

"S. Jerome Luben."

He cut off the vibrator, wiped his hands and reached beneath his apron and hauled out his watch. He looked at it and then shucked off the apron and threw it onto the truck-seat sofa before sticking the watch back into the pocket of his gray work trousers.

"No need you to go," he said. He started out and would have gotten in his truck as though to close the matter between us once and for all. I give him credit. He was letting me have my chance to stay out of it.

"Get in my truck, Henry."

He froze again. "You don't have to go," he said.

"My truck."

He gave a sigh and turned then and went slowly to my truck and climbed into the passenger seat and slammed the door. I climbed in beside him and started the engine and felt the air conditioner take hold and start to cool me. It was the first I knew that I was sweating so heavily; it was cold sweat and dried beneath my shirt and left me clammy.

I pulled the gearshift down into drive and accelerated out through the gate, over the stock gap and into the dusty single lane that spun between the pastures, deep and green on both sides of us. Next came cotton acreage, then a bean field with corn standing far down beyond it toward the bottoms, and beyond the corn the groves of virgin cypress timber far down in the flat distance like the faraway rim of the world, as though beyond that contained edge of green there would be nothing else, just blue space and stars. West Tennessee gives that feeling and if you grow up with it, it never leaves you. It's big and lonely and a million miles from nowhere—that's the feeling. I turned through the gate and the tires slapped on the iron pipes spanning the stock gap and the poison house was straight ahead. I pulled around behind it. Sheriff's car was there, parked ramrod straight on the neat gravel apron. On the side of its white front door was a seal and above the seal the word Sheriff in dark gold, and below the seal in neat black lettering: Official Business Only.

The sawed-off shotgun was racked forward against the dashboard and the two-way radio that he always left on was talking to itself when I opened my door, cut the engine and climbed down.

Henry didn't move.

"Get out," I said and slammed my door. He opened his door and climbed down.

"No need you to git mixed into this mess, Mr. Jim," he said, giving me another chance.

The radio in Sheriff's cruiser muttered something, asked something, answered itself.

"Follow me," I said and headed for the door. It was a glassed aluminum storm door and before I opened it, I saw the desk and Sheriff propped up behind it, reading a True Detective or some such magazine. His hat was on the costumer in the corner. When I went in, grateful because the building was air conditioned, he didn't stir. Maybe he thinks it's Henry, or maybe he just doesn't care, I told myself.

Henry was behind me. The door clicked shut. Sheriff licked his thumb and turned a page. His blue gaze passed over me as though I didn't exist. He looked almost the same as he had looked the day he left for the Marines, the same tan, the same blond crewcut, the same innocent baby face. Then he saw me. The swivel desk chair creaked and he came forward until his elbows were on the desk. Then I smelled it. Henry had gone by me now into what I saw was a kitchen adjoining the office. I smelled rancid food and unwashed despair and tired mattresses and stale cigarettes—I smelled the smell of every jail in the South, from Miami to Corinth, from Memphis to Biloxi to Charleston to Birmingham—I smelled them all and every little town between. Finally, it is the smell of human fear, the scent of the caged human animal—nine years of that, one year stacked on top of the last, palpable as dust.

"Nice place," I said.

Sheriff looked at me, not sure yet what I knew. Give him credit, he's cool, I thought: my blood, my kin, my flesh. And I had as much hand in spoiling him rotten as anybody. Maybe that's what they teach you at the University of Mississippi, where I played and raised hell for four years before the Army got me. They teach you how to come home and continue to spoil the little brother in the family by letting him do what he damn well pleases. Every family needs one at least with no responsibility at all to burden him. Here sat ours.

"You never seen it before?" Sheriff said. He hollered at Henry: "What you doing in there?"

"Fixin' his dinner, scramblin' his eggs." Henry turned and stood in the kitchen door, holding a pickle jar. I could see the yolks and the whites. So they fed him cracked eggs, the same as any other prisoner in Sligo County. Henry stood patiently. He was looking down at the jar. In the opposite hand he held the lid.

"Fixin' whose dinner?" Sheriff said.

"His—upstairs," said Henry. He didn't look up and his voice was low, a sunken, below-surface sound.

"What the hell you talking about?" said Sheriff.

"He knows," Henry said in the same sunken voice.

"I found the car," I said.

"Oh," said Sheriff.

"The red car and a driver's license and a name."

"Well, now you know about him," Sheriff said. "Figured you or Dad, one was bound to come to the poison house someday. I'd say it was my office and you'd go away and not worry. How come you to find the car, Jim?"

"Just unlucky. A Do-Right wants some old tools and machinery——"

"I told Henry I'd bust his ass if he ever let it out. Didn't I tell you I'd bust your ass, Henry?"

"Yes, sah. Want me to feed him? It's time."

"Goddamn it," Sheriff said. "Goddamn it."

"Just answer me one question," I said. I heard eggs hit the hot skillet.

"Shoot."

"Why would you lock a man up and keep him locked up nine years?"

"You mean Jerome? Why would I keep him so long? It's a fair question. I never intended to leave him in here longer than just overnight to teach him a lesson. He passed through Pinoak that night doing above ninety. I risked my life and never caught him until the son of a bitch was nearly to McKay—lights and siren and giving my car a fit. Goddamn him. He could have been the death of us both. See?" He looked at me with that blue stare of innocence and passed his fingers over the crown of his close-cropped hair. "And he swore at me."

"So you locked him up for nine years. You buried him alive because he cussed you and he was from New York. Do you know how long they'll keep you in prison for this? Did it ever dawn on you?"

"I know all about it," he said.

"God help us," I said. "God help us—Henry's in it. I'm in it!"

"Look—go upstairs and talk to him. Please? Go up and let Jerome explain how it happened. He understands it and——" He stopped talking and stood up and took some keys off his belt and went to the steel security door and unlocked and opened it. I climbed the concrete stairs with Sheriff behind me.

There was a halfway at the top with a cell on either side of it and two windows and a toilet and lavatory in each cell. The cell on the right was open and had book-shelves on every wall to the ceiling. The cell on the left was closed. I saw the prisoner, a slender, black-haired man wearing blue jeans and loafers and a T-shirt. He was clean-shaven and his hair was cropped close to his head like Sheriff's and he was working at a typewriter. A book lay open beside him on the desk.

"What's for lunch?" he said. Then he saw me and pushed his chair back. On the cell floor lay the rug that used to be in my grandmother's parlor, a pattern of roses. "Who's this, Sheriff?"

"It's Jim."

"What a surprise. I'm Jerome Luben." He came to the cell door, swung it open and put out his hand to me. We shook hands. "So what brings you here?"

"He found your car," said Sheriff. "And Henry told him."

"You just now found out? Told anybody?" He was handsome in a Jewish way and looked none the worse for wear. There was premature gray at his temples, just a touch.

"Not yet I haven't told anybody," I said.

Luben looked at Sheriff. "Why don't you leave us alone for a few minutes? Tell Henry to hold my lunch. Need to explain things to Jim, don't I?"

Sheriff nodded and turned and went back down the stairs. I heard the security door clank shut.

"We can sit in here, if you like," said Luben, leading the way into the cell on the right. "My library," he said.

I recognized two of Grandmother's parlor chairs and one of her floor lamps.

"You upset, Jim?"

"A little," I said.

"Don't be upset. Because what happened couldn't happen again in a thousand—a million—years. I'm not angry, you see that, don't you?"

"Yes," I said. "But what the hell happened? This is the ruination of my family—the end."

"It's not the end. Listen to me. It's back in 1965. I'm fresh out of Columbia Law School. I'm driving like a bat out of hell, with no respect for anything—asking for it. I've got long hair and a beard and I'm smoking grass and everybody who thinks the war in Vietnam is right is a pissant in my book, shit beneath my feet. Get the picture? I'm bigger and richer and smarter than the world, the entire fucking—pardon me—world. I know Southerners do not use those words."

"Not often, no," I said.

"So your brother stops me. Polite? A complete gentleman. I tell him to eat shit. I hit him. I spit on him. I'm begging him to lock me up so I can be some kind of goddamned martyr and get my ass in jail and my name in the papers and on television and go home to New York and be a fucking hero. Now, understand, my father has washed his hands of me three years earlier and put my money in a trust that keeps my checking account over flowing. I mean, he's rich and my mother was rich and she's dead and I've told him what a capitalist pig he is and he hopes to God he will never see me again. I'm scorching the highway in the backward, backwoods, medieval South, and who stops me? Your brother."

"Lord have mercy," I whispered.

"He brings me here. He and Henry have to carry me bodily. I'm not cooperating. Then I blew it all to hell."

"How?"

"I demanded my phone call."

"Phone call?"

"Phone call. My lousy phone call. And Sheriff had to tell me there isn't a phone. I said what kind of fucking jail was it with no phone? I said did he realize what was going to happen to him if I didn't get my phone call? Did he know that he had arrested a lawyer—a member of the New York bar, an officer of the court, a graduate of Columbia and much else? Did he know how fucking rich I was? Because I was going to make a career out of him. I had nothing else to do. I was going to make him and Henry and anybody else responsible for building a jail and leaving a phone out of it suffer until they'd wish they had never been born! Oy!"

I began to see. I began to see it all. He went on. He was smiling now, that was the wonder of it:

"And he finally had to tell me that his grandmother had built the jail and he wasn't really a sheriff, not even a deputy. I had rolled a joint and was blowing smoke at him and getting high and I told him as soon as he let me out, I'd see his grandmother in prison, and himself, and poor old black-ass Henry. And that did it. He was due to go to the Marines. He had already enlisted. He went away and left Henry to feed me."

I didn't want to let myself think what I was thinking. In the chambers of my mind's memory, I saw the red Jaguar in the mule barn. I heard the door chunk shut; I felt all the finality of our family's situation. Coming down to it, I saw that it was me or S. Jerome Luben.

Luben was saying, "I'm sure Sheriff will keep his word, in which event I'll be free next October. Not that I will leave." He frowned. "I find this hard to believe. I therefore know how difficult it may be for you to believe."

"Believe what, Mr. Luben?"

"That I'm finally rehabilitated. That I love the United States of America, that I'd go to war for my country if asked to serve. That I'd even volunteer. Inward things—I'm clean, I'm thinking straight. He'll unlock the door in October, you'll see."

I knew I'd have to kill him. I felt my heart stagger. He must have seen a change in my face. He looked at me quietly.

"After you're free, what will you do?" I asked. We'd bury him and the automobile. The easiest way would be to poison him, to let him die quietly in his sleep, and just as he had been carried into Sheriff's prison—unresisting but not cooperating—so would he be carried out of it and put deep in the ground. It was the only way.

Luben smiled. "Are you ready for this? I like your brother."

My look must have asked him who he was trying to bullshit, because he drew a breath, smiled again and went on talking. All the pressures of New York and the world outside and his troubles with his father and the other members of his family, the drug scene, the antiwar movement, the hippie underground, he was saying, all that passed away once he was locked up here, apparently for life. "All that shit, all those pressures were suddenly gone. I say suddenly like it happened overnight, when, of course, it didn't. I was maybe four years getting anywhere with myself, trying to bribe Henry to let me escape, screaming at night. Then I decided to cut my hair and get rid of the beard. Sheriff had already told me I could have anything I wanted within reason, as long as I bought it with my own money. These books, this library, the typewriter—I've got nearly every worthwhile book there is on penology. What started as a lot of shouting back and forth between Sheriff and me became long, leisurely conversations. He taught me how to play dominoes. I used to enter chess tournaments in my other life. Sheriff taught me dominoes—a simple game but really full of genuine American integrity. When I got tired of dominoes, he went home and got his Monopoly set. It was his kindness and his honesty and, at some point, it came to me that I liked him. I saw at last that there had been no forfeiture of equity on his part. You follow me?"

"I'm not sure," I said.

"All I'm saying is that I did wrong. He arrested me and when I threatened him like I did, in effect I locked the door on myself. Now, after ten years, almost, you see the result. You see what I've become."

"Which is what?" I asked. I got the feeling you have when a salesman goes too fast and gets close to selling you a bill of goods. In a desperate way, I wanted to believe there wouldn't be any need to kill him. The thing about him was that he was so goddamned nice and likable and, what's more, his voice and his accent reminded me of Sheriff's voice, just a touch, or maybe an echo, but it got to me where I lived. Yet I knew it couldn't be possible that he was really one of us. He was a New York Jew and a lawyer and he had to hate us. He was dangerous as a rattle snake. "What are you now?" I asked.

"A model prisoner, a rehabilitated man. This is a copy of an essay for The American Journal of Penology," he said, opening the top drawer of a little olive-green filing cabinet. "Wrote it in my spare time," he said, laughing a quiet little laugh at his own joke.

I looked at the title page. "Some Problems of Local Authorities in Administering Small-Community Jails and Lockups" and, under it, "By Solomon Jerome Luben, B.A., LL.B." "Well, nice, real nice," I said. My hand was trembling.

"That's nothing. Take a look at these." And he grabbed a long tube of rolled-up papers from the top of the nearest book-shelf and started unrolling it on the library table.

Seeing the back of his neck, I thought maybe it would be better just to shoot him when he wasn't looking. If I knew Henry and Sheriff, they'd leave that part up to me.

"Don't you want to see this?" he asked.

"All right." And I moved in beside him and looked.

"Front elevation," he said. "Innovative design, eh? Wait till you see the modern features!"

All I saw was a long building.

"I'm financing the whole thing. We break ground in October, when I walk out of here. The end of the medieval monstrosity that has been the bane of every small community in the South." He peeled the top sheet aside. "Of course, there'll be a wall. Now, this is your floor plan, your maximum-security block. Dining hall is here. Exercise yard. Library, of course. Kitchen. Sheriff and I have been two years planning this little jewel. Like it?"

I stood dumfounded. Again he said his fortune was sufficient to see the place built and maintained. He, S. Jerome Luben, would be the administrator. Sheriff would provide the prisoners, of course. Henry might need help in the kitchen, with so many additional mouths to feed. "We'll have to cross that bridge when we get to it." A dreamy look came into his eyes. Small-town mayors and city officials would be brought here, in greatest secrecy, of course, he said. It was his plan to see what he called "Sheriff's great idea" applied all over the South, for openers. "Ultimately, of course, it will sweep the globe. Once they see how it cuts all the red tape. No criminal lawyers getting some bastard, some baby raper, some fiend out just because his confession got the case thrown out of court. No trial, no court. Just the jail to end all jails, with an indeterminate sentence for everybody. No mail, no phone calls. Just...." And he snapped his fingers.

"Where would you plan to build it?" I asked.

"Why, here, right here! Can you imagine a better location for the first one?" He peeled the next sheet away. "These are below ground—solitary-confinement cells, soundproof, totally dark. I tell you, Jim, when Sheriff and I get through with this thing, it's really going to be something! Oy!"

I couldn't think what to say. I couldn't think, period.

"What a plan, what a beautiful fucking plan," Jerome Luben was whispering.

The steel door opened and clanged below. Footsteps on the stairs; it was Henry—bringing the eggs.