hundred-odd inmates in an arena built for three hundred, and the solemn guards, with their automatic rifles, paid only nominal attention to what was going on.
“Hey, pachuco, hey, grin ga Romeo’s got something for you to suck on, my pretty one.”
It was the Mexicans. Cholos, they called themselves.
They were as bad as the blacks. Sexy, graceful men, so full of laughter, eyes flashing with passion, weirdly stylish under their red bandannas and hair nets. Blinding, bleached-white T-shirts. The blacks had their ways, too: they brought the steamy urban music of their culture to their space, and you could hear the soul sounds blasting out twenty-four hours a day. They were like superb ebony warriors, with hard muscles sculpted from sheer anthracite coal, glistening with sweat, so wonderfully graceful and body proud. Scary.
So scary. And then the red gang, calling itself ND-NZ, with those letters elaborately tattooed around their biceps in some picturesque calligraphy that was clearly the work of a genius. They looked at him with flat eyes, as if his lifeform didn't register on their radar screens. They never teased or challenged, but only watched him with their savage, indifferent eyes, and he knew they were imagining hurting him out of sheer boredom.
But none of the gangs was as bad as the white boys, who really ran the Mac, the tribe of mutants and scum, tattooed and slob by their hair greased up like Vikings on a raid, their squirrely eyes narrow with evil cunning. They would fuck you or kill you in a second, as if it made not a penny's worth of difference to them. Fat, with bulging white bellies and purple wreaths of convict tattooing proudly inscribed on their chalky skin, they were the outlaw elite. Goatees, full hillbilly beards, ponytails; hair, at any rate, in its many forms. Deviance was their religion, indifference to pain, their own or others, its highest form of expression. Some of them even had some teeth.
In his terror, Richard yearned for Lamar's protection, yearned even to see the idiot O’Dell. He knew he didn't dare disappoint Liamar, who Could be a stern disciplinarian. So somehow he kept himself on track, pushing ahead through the mob, waiting for his heart to go into vapor lock
The Mac without Lamar? Jesus, it terrified him. He'd be-'Wi-shud.”
He looked up. It was his other savior. It was O’Dell.
Working quickly, Lamar went down two cells to Freddy the Dentist's, where Freddy was painting the engine of some twin-engined World War II fighter plane model, and sent Freddy off to find Harry Funt, the hack. Harry Funt was the absolute centerpiece of the scam he had already, with stunning speed that no IQ test could ever hope to measure, conceptualized in his mind by drawing upon the immense archival wealth of data he held in his head about the Mac.
Lamar looked at his watch. Twenty till. The men would start filing back in shortly. Goddamned Harry better show.
He went to his cell. He took his best shank out from under the toilet bowl, a wicked two-incher cut down from a butter knife. Cost him two cartons. Would kill a man in one swipe if you got him right. He'd done it, twice, too. That made him feel a little better. He'd go down fighting at least.
Been fighting his whole goddamn life. Cards always against him. But it didn't matter, he was a man, he'd do the job. He could get through anything. Once, when he was nineteen, a couple of Cherokee deputies in Anadarko had worked him over for three long days, broken his nose, his jaw, his cheekbone, four ribs, and the fingers of his left hand. They thought he'd raped this squaw girl. He had, and several others too frightened to complain, but he never gave them the goddamn satisfaction of hearing him admit it.
That hadn't been the first time he'd spit teeth and blood.
He went to his collection of stroke books, dug through Juggs and Leg Show and Dears and Rears and came at last to the November 1992 Penthouse. He took it out gingerly, opened it to the centerfold, and there he discovered the Picture.
It was Lamar the Lion and his bitch princess. He looked at it, seeing his own features in the king of the jungle and the submissiveness across the woman's beautiful face that was the highest form of love. Richard had finally gotten her tits right. They weren't real big floppers. He hated floppers.
He liked them kind of tight, muscley, so they'd move when she ran but wouldn't bang. The lines around the central form were heavily etched, because he'd ran over them with a pencil himself, hoping to find out how Richard had done it. But his lines somehow made it heavier.
Something in the picture he liked so very much. Nothing had ever pleased him quite that much. He folded it up and put it in his pocket just as Harry Funt came in. Harry, the oldest of the hacks, was in his blue uniform, with a walkie-talkie and a baton but no firearm.
“Lamar—” Freddy said.
“We're getting out. Now. The three of us, Richard, O’Dell, and me—and you.”
Harry just looked at him. He gulped. Some water came into his pale old eyes.
“Lamar—”
“Had to kill me that nigger Junior Jefferson in the showers.
He was going to fuck me. Now I know you got annex forms in the office and you can get us out of the cellblock and by security, at least into the A corridor and into Admin Two.”
There was nothing in the old man at all, no guts, no outrage, just a sense of wiltedness, like a flower in the frost, waiting on a cold night's death. He looked down, begging for mercy.
“I can't, Lamar. Please don't make me. Got a wife needs a operation. My granddaughter got one of them breathing problems, we got to keep her—” But Lamar had never been into mercy.
“Oh yes you can. Harry.
“Cause when they find Junior, all hell's going to break out and the niggers will kill me. I can't let that happen to me and mine. I'll turn snitch, and you been milling in scat for Daddy Cool and copilots and phennies for Rodney and nobody knows you're working both sides but me. You even do a load of crystal meth now and again. Right? Now, let me tell you how fast I will sell you to both of them, old man. Just that fast. There won't be enough of you left to feed O’Dell's cats.”
Harry threw a fast, nervous look at his watch. He had about twelve minutes until lockup. Then he gave it up, exactly as Lamar's shrewd calculus had predicted.
“Okay,” he said.
“But it would help if you'd conk me one, too. It won't look so bad. I might even get a medal.”
It wasn't that O’Dell was big. It wasn't that he had a cleft palate and the gap under his nose was like the dark fissure of the Mariana Trench. It wasn't that his arms were abnor many long, and it wasn't that his teeth were black or that, owing to his physical deformity, he was a mouth breather and issued raspy wheezes wherever he went.
More than anything it was the strange, almost lozenge shape of his head as it soared outward, almost exploding from the pointy little chin into a broad, pale forehead topped, most absurdly, by a flame of red hair. He had freckles, like any Huck Finn, but his eyes were almost always devoid of emotion.
He held out a dead cat. It had just stopped moving. He had been holding it tightly a few minutes earlier. He shook it to bring it back to life, but it remained still and even floppy.
Kiddy, he thought. Kiddy no no. Kiddy no mew? Kiddy sleepy time Kiddy. KIDDY be jumpy! Kiddy jumpy jumpy jumpy. Make kiddy be jumpy-jump. Dell no like em kiddy ust no no. Sleepytime kiddy baby.
Standing nervously before him, Richard thought, Jesus, who framed thy fearful asymmetry? William Blake himself couldn't have thought this guy up.
Everyone gave O’Dell a wide berth, even the blacks and the warriors ofN-D-N-Z, because O’Dell was known to have no fear. Even in this behavioral grease trap, he could inspire fear because he literally had none. Only Lamar could control him or even reach him, and Lamar rented him out to Daddy Cool for disciplinary tasks. O’Dell would walk into a crowd of blacks without noticing them and maim the man among them who’d earned Daddy's disapproval. Then he'd walk away, his face implacably impassive.
“O’Dell, Lamar needs us. He sent me to get you. Come on, quick.”
“Na kiddy ust dud,” O’Dell said impassively, face slack and dull, as if he hadn't heard what Richard just said. Rich and was beginning to understand O’Dell, which had him worried:
My kitty is dead.
O’Dell held up the tiny cat, limp in his huge hands. The fur between its ears was strangely wet, as if he had been licking it.
Richard thought he'd puke. O’Dell was a squalid mountain of man-child, with the brain of a fish, and the docile demeanor of an old beagle until Lamar told him to act otherwise.
