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“This guy.” Troyce put the mug shot of Jimmy Dale Greenwood in front of him.
“You have some ID?”
Troyce took out his wallet. It had been made by a convict, rawhide-threaded along the edges, the initials T.N. cut deep inside a big star. Troyce removed a celluloid-encased photo ID and set it on the bar.
“This says you’re a prison guard,” the bartender said.
“I?
?m that, among other things.”
“This doesn’t give you jurisdiction in Montana. Maybe not a whole lot in Texas, either.”
“You know that for a fact?”
“I used to be a cop.”
“I think your waitress friend in there has seen this fellow. I’m wondering if you have, too.”
The bartender picked up the photo and tapped its edge on the bar, taking Troyce’s measure. The bartender’s pate was shiny with the oil he used on his few remaining strands of black hair, his shoulders almost too big for the immaculate oversize dress shirt he wore. His physicality was of a kind that sends other men definite signals, a quiet reminder that manners can be illusory and the rules of the cave still hold great sway in our lives.
“A drifter was in here a couple of times. He was asking about Ms. Wellstone. He looked like this guy,” the bartender said.
“You know where he is now?”
“No.”
“Does your waitress?”
“She’s not my waitress.”
Troyce smiled before he spoke. “I do something to put you out of joint?”
“Yeah, you tried to let on you’re a cop. We’re done here.”
ANYONE WHO HAS spent serious time in the gray-bar hotel chain is left with certain kinds of signatures on his person. Many hours of clanking iron on the yard produce flat-plated chests and swollen deltoids and rock-hard lats. Arms blanketed with one-color tats, called “sleeves,” indicate an inmate has been in the system a long time and is not to be messed with. Blue teardrops at the corner of the eye mean he is a member of the AB and has performed serious deeds for his Aryan brothers, sometimes including murder.
Wolves, sissies, biker badasses, and punks on the stroll all have their own body language. So do the head-shaved psychopaths to whom everyone gives a wide berth. Like Orientals, each inmate creates his own space, avoids eye contact, and stacks his own time. Even an act as simple as traversing the yard can become iconic. What is sometimes called the “con walk” is a stylized way of walking across a crowded enclosure. The signals are contradictory, but they indicate a mind-set that probably goes back to Western civilization’s earliest jails. The shoulders are rounded, the arms held almost straight down (to avoid touching another inmate’s person), the eyes looking up from under the brow, an expression psychologists call “baboon hostility.” The step is exaggerated, the knees splayed slightly and coming up higher than they should, the booted feet consuming territory in almost surreptitious fashion.
Every inmate in the institution is marked indelibly by it, and the mark is as instantly recognizable as were the numbers tattooed on the left forearms of the inmates in Nazi Germany’s concentration camps. The difference is one of degree and intention. Time in the system prints itself on every aspect of an inmate’s behavior and manner.
On Wednesday evening the weather was still cold, the air gray with rain, and at Albert’s ranch we could hear thunder inside the snow clouds that were piled along the crests of the Bitterroot Mountains. Albert asked me to take a ride with him to check on the new man he had hired to care for his horses in the next valley. He said the man’s name was J. D. Gribble.
Gribble’s cabin was little more than one-room in size, heated by a woodstove that he also cooked on. He was unshaved and wore jeans without knees and only a T-shirt under his denim jacket. He smoked hand-rolled cigarettes and kept his cigarette papers and tobacco and a folder of matches in a pouch on the same table where he ate his food. In his ashtray were paper matches he had split with his thumbnail so he could get two lights out of one match.
Albert and I drank coffee and condensed milk with the new man, then Albert went out to the barn to check on his horses. Through the window I could see lightning tremble on the sides of the hills, burning away the shadows from the brush and trees. The cabin windows were dotted with water, the interior snug and warm, still smelling of the venison the new man had cooked for his supper. In the corner was a twenty-two Remington pump, the bluing worn away, the stock badly nicked. He followed my eyes to the rifle.
“I bought that off a guy in a hobo jungle for ten dollars,” he said.
“Where you from, podna?” I asked.
“Anyplace between my mother’s womb and where I’m at now,” he replied.
“What were you down for?” I said.
“Who says I was down for anything?”
“I do,” I replied, my eyes on his.
