Half of Paradise by James Lee Burke Page B

number,” he said. “It’s the truck that was stolen out in Gretna yesterday.”
    Toussaint looked out the window at the fields and listened to the whirr of the cars on the highway.
    “They add on three years for auto theft,” the driver said.
    “I didn’t steal it,” Toussaint said.
    “Where did you get the furs?”
    “Bonham paid me to drive them out of the state.”
    “How did you think you were going to get past us?” the second officer said.
    “I didn’t have nothing to do with no robbery. The stuff you want is already in Mississippi. Them pelts is worthless.”
    They didn’t understand Toussaint and ignored him. He looked at the fields and said nothing while the officer in front used the radio to put in a call for another car to come pick up the stolen truck. Both of the policemen felt they had done a good job in capturing Toussaint and the load of furs. While they waited for the other car to arrive, the driver asked Toussaint how he had hurt his hand. When the Negro told him the driver said he should have stuck to prizefighting.

AVERY BROUSSARD

    The main room (called the drunk tank) of the parish jail was on the second story of the building. The walls and floor and ceiling were made from concrete. There were two barred and wire-grated windows to each wall. In the summer the room was damp and foul smelling from sweat and lack of ventilation. Once a month the trusties cleaned the room with disinfectant, but it did no good. The stench was always there. There was no way to get rid of it. They scrubbed the concrete with sand and brushes and whitewashed the walls and ceiling, and even sprayed the room with insecticide, but it was useless. The stench was on the men’s bodies, in their clothes, in the tick mattresses; everything in the room had that same thick, sour odor to it.
    In the center was a low boxlike structure made entirely of iron that was called the tank. It sat squat and ugly in the middle of the floor, like a room within a room. The walls were painted gray and perforated with small square holes. The tank was divided into cells, each containing four iron bunks welded to the walls. There was a narrow corridor that ran the length of the structure, separating the cells into two opposite rows. It was here in the tank where the stench was worst. There was little air and no lighting and the walls were covered with moisture. Every afternoon at five o’clock the inmates were locked in the tank for the night. It was usually overcrowded, and some of the men slept on the floor in the corridor.
    At seven in the morning the jailer opened the door to the main room and the trusties wheeled in the food carts and unlocked the tank. The area outside the tank was called the bullpen, where the men were allowed to move about during the day. The jailer always stood in the doorway and watched the men line up with their tin plates and spoons for breakfast and lunch (there was no supper). There was a white line painted on the floor, forming a six-foot square around the doorway where he stood. This was the deadline, and none of the inmates was allowed across it when the door was open. If they did come past the line, they would be knocked to the floor by either the jailer or one of the trusties. The jailer, large and heavyset, was a careful man and took no chances.
    During the day the men could do as they pleased in the bullpen. The room had to be kept clean, and it was forbidden to throw anything out the windows, whether a cigarette end or a scrap of paper, or call down to the people in the street. If a rule was broken, one of two things could happen. Everyone could be thrown in the tank and left there for several days, or the person who broke the rule would be dragged off to the hole, which was in another part of the building. The hole was a cast-iron cage, like the tank, except much smaller in size with enough room for only two men. It was ordinarily used to hold men who were condemned to death and awaiting execution,