Like a great beached whale, Junior somehow rolled over.
Blood gushed from his mouth and nose. Horror showed in his eyes. A great slob by arm came up, as if to ward off any more blows from the smaller, tougher man. The water beat down, the steam heaved. Red liquid lapped at Junior's blackness.
“Don't hurt me no more,” he said.
“Please.”
Lamar stared at him. You could pound on someone like Junior for a year and maybe you'd fuck him up, but you wouldn't really kill him. He took a lot of killing, more killing maybe than Lamar had in him.
“Oh, god,” moaned Junior.
“You done hurt me bad. Git some help. I can't hardly breathe none.”
Lamar felt next to nothing. Only: Problem—how to shut this fat nigger up? Then: Answer. He reached into the soap dish and took the new bar of Dial in his hand. Then, quickly, he knelt to Junior.
“I think you got something stuck in your mouth,” he said.
“Better open up and let me see.”
Obediently, Junior opened his mouth, and quick as a snake, Lamar jammed the soap bar into it and with his strong thumbs forced it in deep. Junior's eyes bulged and he lifted a feeble hand toward his mouth, but Lamar slapped it away and shoved the soap still deeper, forcing it down the throat. Trapped beneath it. Junior's tongue rolled and unrolled.
Unusual sounds came from him—'Ulllccccchhhh! Ullguccchhhhhhuch!'—and he began to buck on the wet floor of the shower. The water cascaded onto them both.
Junior struggled and struggled, eyes wide, noises wet and revolting, farts and shit ripping out of his ass, filling the shower with filth and stench, as under his blackness his skin seemed to turn almost blue.
At last the big arm went limp, and his head fell heavily to the left. His eyes stared into nothingness. He was still in his own shit.
Lamar stood back.
“Get up, you fat nigger,” he said.
“I want to hurt you some more.” But Junior's eyes had filled with water.
Now how the fuck am I going to wash? Lamar wondered.
Then he took a deep breath and realized he had to get out or either Rodney Smalls and the niggers or Daddy Cool would kill him before nightfall.
Richard Peed hated the last hour before lockup the worst of all. In the yard, he could hang close to Lamar or O’Dell and in that way be protected from the predators. After lockup, he could more or less keep the two Pye boys at bay by seeming to go so limp and formless he wasn't there.
That passivity somehow made them uninterested in hurting him. And now that he'd reached some kind of provisional deal with Lamar about the drawings, he felt he'd made a real step forward toward survival for the three months that he was destined to spend in the Mac before the deal clicked in and he was removed to the minimum security joint called El Reno Federal Correctional Facility, twenty miles west of Oklahoma City.
But at four, Lamar went to the guard's shower after working out for two hours. And O’Dell went back of the kitchens to feed his cats. Richard had at least an hour of vulnerable, solitude to survive. He had taken to going to the cell and sitting as still as he could in the shadows, thinking about this painter or that, anything, just to get through it.
He was always scared. He knew he was food. Really, that's all he was. Food. A weak white man with no criminal skills, no natural cunning, no weapons whatsoever, and a stark terror of violence: He was the lowest thing in the McAlester foodchain. He was plankton. If God didn't want him eaten, why did he make him so weak and then contrive, due to no fault of Richard's own, to put him in a penitentiary?
Richard knew himself to be a uniquely talented individual.
It was merely others conspiring against him that kept him from achieving that greatness. But somehow he saw things that others didn't see and felt things that others didn't feel. It may have been that he was too damned sensitive for his own good, that he saw through so much, that made people hate him so.
But that was the burden of the artist. In a society of Philistines, he had that cross to bear. He could do it.
Richard, thirty-one, had a pillowy bouffant of blond hair and a face strangely smooth for his age. He had a long, soft body and an extremely quiet way of walking, as if his feet were somehow more delicate than others'. He was by profession an art teacher, with a master's from the Maryland Institute of Art in Baltimore, but by passion an artist, who had spent the better part of the last two decades trying to master certain intricacies of the human form. It was a problem he had never quite worked out, but now, with 877 prison days ahead of him, he thought if he concentrated, he might find some way to-'Richard, goddamn, boy, get your ass up.”
Richard, jerked from his reverie, looked up to see Lamar, his hair soaked, flying into the cell.
“Uh, I—”
“Listen, here, got to move fast. You go out behind the kitchens and bring goddamn O’Dell back here. Do you understand?”
The terror blanched across Richard's face. He swallowed as if ingesting a billiard ball. The yard was a land of terror if a rabbit like him went unescorted. The blacks would rip him up. The Aryan Brotherhood would make him a hood ornament. The home boys would make fajitas out of him.
The fags would fuck him in every orifice. The Indians would burn him at the stake. The hacks might use him for target practice.
“Richard!” barked Lamar, 'now you got to be a man today. Had to kill me a big nigger in the hack showers and—”
“You what! You kil—” Lamar was on him, rammed him backward, and got his hand around Richard's mouth to shut him up fast.
“Listen here, Richard. I am dead by nightfall if I don't get out of this place and so is poor baby O’Dell. And with the two of us gone, little brother, what you think they gonna do to you? You'll be the fuck boy to end all fuck boys Someone gonna tattoo for rent on your asshole, son. Now I cain't be seen out there, 'cause I'm supposed to be riding Junior Jefferson's dick right now. We got to get out of here.”
“Out?”
It was inconceivable to Richard.
“That's right, boy. We goin' on a little vacation before all fucking hell breaks out.”
It was all attitude, Richard knew. All it took was a certain carriage, a manly posture, a strut that stank of violence and warned all who saw you that you were the stone stud.
He puffed himself up and strutted down the corridor to the yard entrance. He stepped into the blazing light, his chest stout and his shoulders back. He was a man. Nobody could fuck with him.
“Here, kitty, kitty, kitty,” a black man sung at him.
Someone else made wet kissing sounds.
A giant tongue licked its lips, smacking with the anticipation of violent sex.
Richard melted. His knees began to shake; his breath came in terrible spurts that he had to fight to get in and out of his chest. His vision grew woozy. He walked straight ahead, pretending to be oblivious to the shouts that rose to greet him, while he ached to cry. There was no comfort in this universe, none whatsoever, nothing, nowhere. It was all Darwinism, Darwinism gone spectacularly exponential.
The strong didn't just eat the weak, they ate the strong, too.
It was a primal sink, a festival of eating.
“Mrs. Lamar Pye, you sweet thang, be on your ass like a big dog,” someone called, ending in a glissando ofpoochy sounds.
It had stunned him most of all that they had so much freedom inside. Prison? He'd imagined it as being in little cells the whole day, where you could get some constructive reading done. But no. The cells came open at seven a.m., after headcount, and then it was pretty much anything goes.
Only a few of the inmates, the connected ones, had jobs;
the rest milled and seethed in the yard, or worked out, endlessly pumping iron or playing some weird version of handball against the wall. Violence broke out casually, randomly.
It was pure Bosch, a landscape of degradation. The white walls loomed overhead, cupping the seven-
