He was looking at a cracked gray cement ceiling. Pipes wrapped in insulation zigzagged beneath it. A large beetle was trundling busily along one of these pipes. Bisecting his field of vision was a chain. He raised his head slightly, sending a monstrous bolt of pain through it, and saw another chain running from the outside foot of the bunk to a bolt in the wall.
He turned his head to the left (another bolt of pain, this one not so killing) and saw a rough concrete wall. Cracks ran through it. It had been extensively written on. Some of the writing was new, some old, most illiterate. THIS PLACE HAS BUGS. LOUIS DRAGONSKY, 1987. I LIKE IT IN MY ASSHOLE. DTS CAN BE FUN. GEORGE RAMPLING IS A JERK-OFF. I STILL LOVE YOU SUZANNE. THIS PLACE SUX, JERRY. CLYDE D. FRED 1981. There were pictures of large dangling penises, gigantic br**sts, crudely drawn vaginas. It all gave Nick a sense of place. He was in a jail cell.
Carefully, he propped himself on his elbows, let his feet (clad in paper slippers) drop over the edge of the cot, and then swung up to a sitting position. The large economy-size pain rocked his head again and his backbone gave out an alarming creak. His stomach rolled alarmingly in his gut, and a fainting kind of nausea seized him, the most dismaying and unmanning kind, the kind that makes you feel like crying out to God to make it stop.
Instead of crying out - he couldn't have done that - Nick leaned over his knees, one hand on each cheek, and waited for it to pass. After a while, it did. He could feel the Band-Aids that had been placed over the furrow on his cheek, and by wrinkling that side of his face a couple of times he decided that some sawbones had sunk a couple of stitches in there for good measure.
He looked around. He was in a small cell shaped like a Saltine box stood on end. Beyond the end of the cot was a barred door. At the head of the cot was a lidless, ringless toilet. Behind and above him - he saw this by craning his stiff neck very, very carefully - was a small barred window.
After he had sat on the edge of the cot long enough to feel sure he wasn't going to pass out, he hooked the shapeless gray pajama pants he was wearing down around his knees, squatted on the can, and urinated for what seemed at least an hour. When he was finished he stood up, holding on to the edge of the cot like an old man. He looked apprehensively into the bowl for signs of blood, but his urine had been clear. He flushed it away.
He walked carefully over to the barred door and looked out into a short corridor. To his left was the drunk tank. An old man was lying on one of its five bunks, a hand like driftwood dangling on the floor. To the right the corridor ended in a door that was chocked open. In the center of the corridor was a dangling green-shaded light like the kind he had seen in pool-halls.
A shadow rose, danced on the propped-open door, and then a large man in khaki suntans walked into the corridor. He was wearing a Sam Browne belt and a big pistol. He hooked his thumbs into his pants pockets and looked at Nick for almost a full minute without speaking. Then he said, "When I was a boy we caught ourselves a mountain lion up in the hills and shot it and then drug it twenty mile back to town over dirt hardpan. What was left of that creature when we got home was the sorriest-lookin sight I ever saw. You the second-sorriest, boy."
Nick thought it had the feel of a prepared speech, care fully honed and treasured, saved for out-of-towners and vags that occupied the barred Saltine boxes from time to time.
"You got a name, Babalugah?"
Nick put a finger to his swelled and lacerated lips and shook his head. He put a hand over his mouth, then cut the air with it in a soft diagonal hashmark and shook his head again.
"What? Cain't talk? What's this happy horseshit?" The words were amiable enough, but Nick couldn't follow tones or inflections. He plucked an invisible pen from the air and wrote with it.
"You want a pencil?"
Nick nodded.
"If you're mute, how come you don't have none of those cards?"
Nick shrugged. He turned out his empty pockets. He balled his fists and shadowboxed the air, which sent another bolt of pain through his head and another wave of nausea through his stomach. He finished by tapping his own temples lightly with his fists, rolling his eyes up, and sagging on the bars. Then he pointed to his empty pockets.
"You were robbed."
Nick nodded.
The man in khaki turned away and went back into his office. A moment later he returned with a dull pencil and a notepad. He thrust them through the bars. Written across the top of each notesheet was MEMO and From The Desk Of Sheriff John Baker.
Nick turned the pad around and tapped the pencil eraser at the name. He raised questioning eyebrows.
"Yeah, that's me. Who are you?"
"Nick Andros," he wrote. He put his hand through the bars.
Baker shook his head. "I ain't gonna shake with you. You deaf, too?"
Nick nodded.
"What happened to you tonight? Doc Soames and his wife almost ran you down like a woodchuck, boy."
"Beat up & robbed. A mile or so from a rdhouse on Main St. Zack's Place."
"That hangout's no place for a kid like you, Babalugah. You surely aren't old enough to drink."