Dirty White Boys - Страница 3

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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-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.