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neighborhoods out east all the way to the dirt side
streets of the Mexican and black district on the far end of town.
    The sun was almost down and the square seemed filled with a
soft blue glow, the air scented with flowers and the distant smell of
watermelons in the fields. Down below, the procession of customized
cars and pickups and vans snaked around the square, the lacquered paint
jobs like glazed red and orange and purple candy, the deep-throated
Hollywood mufflers rumbling off the pavement, the exposed chromed
engines rippling with light. A beer can tinkled on a sidewalk; a
stoned-out girl stood on the leather backseat of a convertible,
undulating in a skin-tight white dress that she had pulled above her
nylons.
    Lucas's bail hearing was scheduled for nine in the morning.
For no reason I could quite explain I picked up the phone and called
the jail.
    Harley Sweet answered the phone.
    'You make sure that boy's all right tonight,' I said.
    'Say again?'
    'Bad things happen to people in your jail, Harley. They'd
better not happen to my client.'
    'Your client is a pissant I wouldn't take time to spit on if
he was burning… You liberals kill me, Billy Bob. You want to
come over here and feed Jimmy Cole and Garland T. Moon, see they got
toilet paper and showers and ain't nobody infringing on their
rights?… I didn't think so.'
    He hung up.
    Neither Harley nor I could guess how much our lives would
change because of that night's events.

----
chapter
five
    At 12:01 a.m. the turnkey stopped by
Harley Sweet's office and
signed off his shift.
    'I caught Jimmy Cole eating a bar of soap,' he said.
    'We better get a new cook,' Harley said.
    'I wouldn't let that boy get into the hospital, Harley. He's
planning something.'
    'You haven't had more trouble with Garland T. Moon, have you?'
    'No, sir.'
    'See there, it just needs Bible study.'
    At around 3 a.m. a Mexican in the drunk tank heard the cables
on the elevator working, then the wire-mesh door rattling open and a
key turning in the barred second door. Harley Sweet walked down the row
of cells past the drunk tank with a paper bag rolled in his right hand,
his leather-soled boots echoing off the concrete floor, a bleached
straw cowboy hat cocked on his head.
    The Mexican in the drunk tank, who was surrounded by men
sleeping on the floor, pressed his face against the bars and tried to
see farther down the corridor but could not.
    A key turned in another cell door and Harley's voice said,
'Turn around and lean against the wall. Your face sure don't brighten
my work. Your mama must have beat on it with an ugly stick.'
    The Mexican in the drunk tank heard scuffling, intense and
prolonged, with no words spoken, like that of men who know the cost of
a wasted movement or an exhalation of breath. Then there was a single,
abrupt gasp, a body collapsing on the floor, followed by a series of
blows, which began with a whistling sound, like a baton ripping through
the air, then the
thunk
of wood against muscle
and bone, and more blows, one after another, until the Mexican pressed
his palms against his ears and crouched in the back of the drunk tank
and hid from the sound.
    Five minutes passed, then the cell door at the end of the
corridor clanged shut again and a figure dressed like Harley walked
past the bars of the drunk tank, the straw hat held to the side of his
face. The wire-mesh door on the elevator clattered into the jamb, and
the walls hummed with the reverberations of the elevator's motor as the
cage dropped to the first floor.
    A few kids who were still dragging Main said they saw a figure
in boots and a white straw hat emerge from the side door of the
courthouse and walk across the darkened lawn to Harley's truck, tap on
his shirt pocket as though the package of cigarettes he discovered
there were a nice surprise, light one, and drive away.
     
    The turnkey who came on duty at 6 a.m.
rode up to the third
floor of the courthouse and saw nothing out of the ordinary. At 7 a.m.
the