up on the front of his shirt. His first week inside it happened twice on the cafeteria line when the guy standing directly in front of him had been attacked.
One got a sharpened toothbrush in his right ass cheek. Four days later the other took a seven-inch length of shower pipe upside the head. Both of them had walked to the infirmary under their own power, but it did a quick job of fine-tuning Shad’s slam instincts.
A few of the guys on C-Block started calling him a jonah. That only helped to steer everyone clear. They laughed it off but it was constantly in the back of their minds, as they watched Shad standing there with another con’s blood on his clothes, knowing he had nothing to do with it. Being in the wrong place at the worst time.
Like all institutions, the joint had plenty of its own irrational and arbitrary beliefs. You had to study on how to live within them.
If you did damage, or had harm done to you, that was one thing. But if you were drawing the bad luck toward you, and it missed and nabbed the guy on your left, then you got a different kind of mark. Some of these men had been in Vietnam, a few of the old-timers in Korea, and they still had this war mentality that the new meat would cause the most damage because he didn’t know where to step.
The Haitians and Mexicans were especially superstitious and gave a wide berth to Shad most of the time. Except for this one inmate called Little Pepe-Pepito-a five-foot-nothing monstrosity as wide as he was tall, with immense tattooed arms so huge they didn’t look real.
Pepito got it into his head that Shad was giving him the evil eye, putting some kind of curse on him and his tribe. It had to do with Shad’s books and always being in the library. Pepito figured there was a great amount of mystical knowledge and conjurings that could be found if you knew how to use the Dewey Decimal System properly. He thought Shad was a witch.
Little Pepe considered himself an honorable man. He was in for strangling his sister’s husband with a Venetian blinds cord because the guy raised his voice at the dinner table, played poker, occasionally spanked his seven kids, and had taken too big a bite out of a coke deal they were in on together. Pepito’s nephews and nieces were everything to him, and it still grated his soul a bit that he’d killed their father in front of them on Easter. Pepito was a stand-up guy if you caught him on the right day.
His indignation remained righteous. He had a family to protect inside the slam as well as out. Even though the leader of his tribe had turned down Little Pepe’s request to shank the witch, he planned to do it anyway. On the cafeteria line, where the spells seemed to be landing on others.
Shad had a copy of
He could already feel himself being forgotten by her, and was saddened by the fact that he didn’t really mind. Her cursive script had a stop-and-go jitter to it, as if she had to walk away every few sentences and come back later after thinking up something else to tell him. She mainly wrote about people and events that didn’t matter to him and never would. She asked him nothing. He thought about the determination it took to go through four pages to your lover and not ask a single question.
A new resolve had begun to fill him in the slam-as his detachment from the hollow continued to change him into some new version of himself.
Tushie Kline stood three or four guys behind him in line, eyeing
That afternoon, he felt the angry heat on the back of his neck and eyed Tush first, knowing there was going to be a problem there soon. But not right at that second. He scanned beyond the cons slopping mashed potatoes, beef patties, and string beans onto the metal plates and saw the insanely abnormal arms of Little Pepe swinging toward him. If he had a shiv, Shad couldn’t see it within those enormous fists.
Not much time to do anything except bark a cuss, reach over the counter, grab up the tray of burgers, and hurl it into Pepito’s face.
It was enough to get everyone yelling and laughing and for the bulls to run over. Shad’s luck held as he faded into the crowd and the bulls had no one to grab except Pepito, who was spouting off biblical passages in Spanish.
They didn’t throw Little Pepe into solitary because he hadn’t really been fighting, but two days later the leader of the tribe had him killed for disobeying orders.
So now Shad was coming out of Griff’s Suds’n’Pump holding a handful of change and a bottle of engine cleaner when the dead breath whispered and got his hackles up.
He took two more steps across the parking lot as Zeke Hester’s belligerent presence descended upon him.
Shad paused, listening to the sudden rush of air swirling behind him. He had compromised his hands, which was a dumb but understandable mistake. You tried to be on guard as much as possible, but you just couldn’t do it all the time. Immediately he dropped what he was carrying and spun to his right as Zeke’s fist plowed forward like a steam engine about to derail.
Zeke Hester stood six-four, weighed in at about 280, his body solidified from working on road crews since dropping out of school when he was fifteen. He was river bottom swamp scum who never bothered with pulling the legs off spiders or torturing small animals-he went straight to the weakest kids in grade school and started drawing blood. He moved up quickly to intimidating teachers, beating the drunks sleeping at the edge of the trailer park, and troubling girls at the roller rink in Waynescross.
Jake had been right when he’d said that prison had agreed with Shad. A crazy thing, but there it was. On the inside he’d lost his youthful clumsiness and earned a lissome agility. Working out in the gym every afternoon, honing himself, losing a beer gut and packing on an extra twenty pounds of crafted muscle. Two years with nothing to do but exercise your mind and body and try to keep from losing control. Sometimes it worked in your favor. It felt good to have real speed even when the highway patrol wasn’t chasing you back and forth across the river.
Zeke did an ungainly dance, trying to keep himself from falling as he overshot and wheeled in a half circle. Shad planted his foot on Zeke’s ass, kicked out, and sent him sprawling onto the pavement.
Here we go.
When Zeke looked up his face was filled with murderous frenzy. His cracked front tooth had worn away to a black nub. His gums were already rotted too, and he’d be down to eating nothing but succotash and applesauce by the time he was thirty. The busted cheekbone lay unnaturally flat and angled a little too far back toward his ear.
What Shad told M’am was true. He could kill this man with a very small amount of guilt. The realization disturbed him a bit, but not all that much, considering.
“I want to talk to you,” Shad said.
Zeke hadn’t shaved much or had a decent haircut since he was sixteen. His feral, savage appearance played well with the role he was going for. You had to cultivate your persona, your disguise.
If he was ever shorn down you’d see a pink face full of cutie-pie chubsie-ubsieness, all the weakness inside him scrawled into his soft, muddy face. When they were kids, the girls used to like him because he looked sort of like a lost puppy, until they got a look at his eyes.
Zeke scrambled on the ground for something to throw, but all he could find was the engine cleaner. He clambered to his feet and hurled the bottle at Shad like it was a brick. It flew over Shad’s left shoulder and splattered against the gas pumps.
“Been waitin’ two years to pay you back!”
“That so?”
“It is!”
Shad knew guys who liked to play the moment out, grinning before a brawl, warming up to it. All that mattered to them was ego and image. They went through the day acting like there was a camera covering their every move. Like there was a group of teenage girls sitting on a couch somewhere watching them, cheering them on, getting sweaty. It was much harder to fight when you were alone.
“You should’ve waited and put this off for as long as you could, Zeke.”
