Summary

Italian Tom arrived at the Kalamazoo County jail and started recounting the backstory of his scars to the first-person narrator. The narrator listened because he had resolved to hear out people who approached him, and the jail crew had yet to turn on The Price Is Right TV show, on which "the hope for a good outcome" "transfixed" (2) the narrator. Tom proceeded with a story of the Cadillac that hit him in the town Cadillac, setting off a chain of internal inquiries for the narrator about chance and meaning (e.g., "And who's in charge of meaning? The liar? The lied to?" [3]), and awaking well-read, crack-addicted inmate Ricky Brown from his fake nap to dismiss all of it as meaningless.

In an aside, the narrator described a rumor the jail had been steadily sinking into the Native American soil upon which the jail was...