Dirty White Boys (2 page)

Richard took the criticism like a man and spent another week on revisions. When he made his final submission, Lamar was quite pleased.

“Goddamn, Richard. You got a gift, if I do say so myself. Now, say, I wanted you to try other things. You know, other things I see in my head, could you do it?”

“I know I could,” said Richard.

“Goddamn, ain’t that something. I want you to draw what I tell you. You do that, I’ll look after you. Got it?”

“Yes sir,” said Richard, and the deal was done.

Why was it so satisfying? He didn’t know. But it was,
and it was a newfound source of pleasure. He could just dream something up and Richard would make it appear on paper. It really made him happy. So Lamar swelled a little with pleasure, taking happiness from the pleasures of his well-ordered world. Everybody feared him. He could fuck just about any of the white boys and half the niggers if he so chose. He had a percentage of three dope smuggling operations, including a methamphetamine lab in Caddo county that muled in a pound of crystal a week. He had his cousin Odell about as happy as that poor boy could ever be. He had Richard to draw whatsoever he chose. He was a wealthy man.

But then, ahead of him, something moved in the vapor, and it all changed, it all went away.

Lamar, startled, looked up. No-goddamned-body was supposed to be in here. He paid Harry Funt, the hack, four cartons of cigarettes a week to make sure nobody disturbed him in his private time.

“Who’s that, goddammit?” barked Lamar.

A huge, dark shape emerged from the steam, just as buck naked as Lamar, gleaming and globular.

“Goddamn, Junior, ain’t nobody supposed to be in here. I bought this goddamn time, fair and square.”

Junior Jefferson went close to four hundred pounds, and naked, his giant body seemed like something out of a movie, especially the way he shone in the light. He had a goddamned strange look in his eyes, too. Lamar didn’t like this at all. His feral instincts came alert. Junior was a known rapist and child molester, and perhaps the only man in D block who didn’t fear Lamar or his monster cousin Odell.

“You know the goddamn rules, Junior,” said Lamar, backing up just a bit. “It’s mine, I paid for it. Paid Harry Funt, It’s the goddamned rules.”

“Rules be shit,” said Junior and reached down and grabbed his cock to show Lamar. It was stiff as a bat and strangely blue.

“Git me some white pussy,” said Junior. “Git me some whiteboy asshole, yas, I am.”

“You fucking nigger, you stay away. We got a gang truce and you is over the limits.”

“Your dumb motherfucker cousin O-dell, he done dissed Daddy Cool and so Daddy Cool sold your ass to Rodney Smalls who done give it to me. You gonna service the niggers for a month.”

Lamar knew in a second it was possible. That Odell! That boy was born without a brain in his head! It wasn’t just the soft part of his mouth and lip that was missing but a goddamned part of his thinker, too! But if he dissed Daddy, there was no sense in disciplining him, because he was too dumb to know pain from pleasure; worse yet, he had no ability to
mag-ine
fear. So to punish Odell would be pointless; Daddy must have decided to punish Lamar in his place, and Lamar saw the terrible justice in it: he was responsible for Odell. Odell was family.

“You got something wrong, nigger. I don’t take it in the ass. I give it in the ass, but I don’t never take it there.”

Junior said, “I asked for you special, Lamar, ’cause you so pretty.”

Lamar had seen Junior kill a bitch in D yard once, just by squashing him against a wall. A snitch, the bitch deserved it; still, Junior just rammed him against the wall, capturing the bitch’s face in his huge belly and sloppy, saggy chest. The bitch beat and chirped, but it was over in two minutes. That’s how fast it could happen in the yard.

Junior advanced on him like the earth itself, set on swallowing him up. Lamar had no weapons; his shank was in his shaving kit in the shitter. He had no boots to kick with.
He was outweighed by a good two hundred pounds of meat and, though strong, was not near strong enough. But he wasn’t scared. It was funny: he
never
got scared. He laughed a little bit. He liked having his back to the wall and everything on the line. It was exciting.

He paused, gathering strength as the giant wobbled in, arms spread, fingers grasping. Just as Junior closed, he hit Junior a powerful blow right above the heart, his
F U C K
fist driven forward like a steam piston, and the blow sent the echo of meat pounding meat against the hiss of the showers. He followed up with a
Y O U
! to the solar plexus, but it didn’t slow Junior a goddamned bit, he just butted Lamar with his belly back against the wall and leaned on him.

“Drain you of air, then when you half dead, do you like a doggy. Then you be movin’ to my cell, yes sir. You gots a busy night ahead.”

Junior’s rich laughter filled the air as his arms squished around Lamar, his immense bulk flattening Lamar’s ribcage, crushing his heart. Lamar felt his head bobbing like that of a dying fish flopping on the dock for the amusement of small boys. With a ham hand, Junior grabbed hold of Lamar’s hair and quieted the head and then, beaming with pleasure, bent to give his victim a little kiss.

Deoxygenated, Lamar watched helplessly as the nigger lips gathered to form a dainty seal, then felt a scream of helplessness erupt from his lungs, which shocked Junior a hair, giving Lamar a whisker of a chance. His neck snapped upward, unfolding almost like a turtle’s, and in a second he’d sunk his teeth into Junior’s nose. He bit and bit, almost choking on the blood, and he couldn’t hear Junior scream. But scream Junior did, pulling away, his hands flying reflexively to the torn appendage. Lamar spit some gristle out, bent in a flash and struck upward, another piston stroke that landed in Junior’s balls, crushing one testicle.
Junior staggered, seemed to lose it, then flared up in rage just as Lamar drilled him a savage
FUCK
in the throat, this time with a quarter fist so that his knuckles were sharp like a blade. They roared through the flab covering Junior’s larynx, but they reached that treasure and crushed it. Junior went down to his knees, gasping. He begged for mercy with his eyes, but Lamar was not into mercy; he quickly flanked the giant and with another open hand drove
FUCK
into the back of his neck. Junior jerked forward as if the blow had a charge of electricity with it and put up a weak arm to ward off more punches, but Lamar kept hitting him in the high spine and the neck, a
F U C K
and then a
Y O U
!, using the heel of his palms so that he would break none of his own bones, over and over and over, until the big man lay still.

Lamar stood up from his handiwork, breathing hard. His hands hurt. He was shaking involuntarily. The blood raced and thundered in his brain.

“Fuck with me, see what it gets you,” he explained.

Like a great beached whale, Junior somehow rolled over. Blood gushed from his mouth and nose. Horror showed in his eyes. A great slobby 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 Odell 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 Odell 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 Odell 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 homeboys 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 Odell. And with the two of us gone, little brother, what you think they gonna do to you? You’ll be the fuckboy to end all fuckboys. 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.