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heard the white steam whistle in the night but saw Byron stretched, mouth agape like the dead, brown boot-toes pointing upward on a disarranged cot bed in a corner. Yet never learned, his whole life, who Byron really was.
    Another mystery was the bougainvillaea. It grew beneath a bicycle frame nailed high on the shack’s north wall – now why should anyone nail a bicycle, front wheel gone and frame rusted by rain, against a clapboard wall? No one could tell him, yet nobody took it down. The bougainvillaea stretched for those useless spokes. It almost touched the down-slung handle-bars. The bougainvillaea yearned to conceal all things in leaves. The plant seemed half asleep in the early morning, but became restless toward night. Sometimes a dustwind made it shudder as though dust-hands touched it roughly. And once when the sun was directly overhead the whole plant bent in pain.
    The house itself looked as if one peart wind would blow it down.
    Its floor was dirt. The curtains were guano bags. The stovepipe was stuck through a hole in the wall. Behind it rose a jagged cliff as old as America.
    One night a small rain lay the dooryard dust. Dove heard the drops tap dancing. And the sleep-drawn breath of two drunks wearied once again of useless drinking.
    He turned the smoking bitch lamp low. In the yard the Mexican stars were out, the Mexican dogs were barking. Someone was singing ‘
Poy! Pooey poy!
’ so shrill he must have been mocking the dogs. Dove touched his plant with eyes closed fast the better to understand the leaves. Beneath his fingers he felt it blooming.
    In the morning the bicycle lay in the dust and the bougainvillaea grew about it. No one so much as noticed that Dove had taken the bicycle down. He himself wasn’t sure just why.
    Yet as the magic spring of 1930 died in endless drought, Dove’s hours too grew drier day by day. Till filled with a nebulous homesickness he would shamble down a dead-end road that long ago had led men west. That led now only to tin-canned circles where hoboes hopped off the Santa Fe.
    Years before a box car had slipped a coupling, scudded downhill and turned onto its side in the chaparral. Half sunk now in sand, ruined and stripped, only its bare iron skeleton and a few beams remained to cast a meager shade on days when shade was precious as water. There were always a couple of hoboes resting there.
    One day Dove came there, curiously seeking he didn’t know what, and saw a man in khaki pants and torn shirt lying flat on his back with a bottle in his hand. When he came closer he saw it was his brother and stood studying him: a stranger sinking in the sand, like the box car ruined and stripped. He had often seen Byron drunk at home; but lying like that for everyone to look at left the boy pale with shame.
    Yet he saw boys there no older than himself passing a bottle. They boiled black coffee in open tins and ate beans stuck on a twig; rolled cigarettes singlehanded and boasted of time in jail.
    Hard time and easy, wall time and farm time, fed time and state, city time, county time, short time and good time, soft time and jawbone time, big house, little house and middle house time, industrial time and meritorious time – ‘that’s for working your ass off.’
    In jails where food was inedible, as it was in most county clinks, the men, Dove heard, bought their own by levying each newcomer to the extent of whatever he carried. If he didn’t have money he paid with his shoes. If he came in broke and barefoot too the other inmates took as many slaps at his behind as the court decreed for the felony of breaking into jail without consent of the inmates. Yet, barefoot or shod, man or mouse, he always shared in food bought outside the jail.
    He heard of a jail in Southern Louisiana where prisoners had built up a treasury of over two hundred dollars and dined the turnkey and sheriff once a week. That at the Grayson County Jail prisoners got out a weekly paper called the
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