Dirty White Boys (3 page)

“Mrs. Lamar Pye, you sweet thang, be on your ass like a big dog,” someone called, ending in a glissando of poochy 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, gringa, 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 hairnets. 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 N-D-N-Z, 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 slobby, 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 Odell. He knew he didn’t dare disappoint Lamar, 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 vaporlock.

The Mac without Lamar? Jesus, it terrified him. He’d be—

“Wi-shud.”

He looked up. It was his other savior. It was Odell.

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, Odell, 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 muling 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 Odell’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 Odell 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 abnormally
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 sleepytime. 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 Odell a wide berth, even the blacks and the warriors of N-D-N-Z, because Odell 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. Odell 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.

“Odell, Lamar needs us. He sent me to get you. Come on, quick.”

“Na kiddy ust dud,” Odell said impassively, face slack and dull, as if he hadn’t heard what Richard just said. Richard
was beginning to understand Odell, which had him worried: My kitty is dead.

Odell 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. Odell 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.

“That’s too bad, Odell, but Lamar wants us now. It’s an emergency.”

“Mergy?” asked Odell.

“A hurry-hurry-Odell,” said Richard, aping the strange language in which Lamar communicated with Odell.

Awareness flickered behind Odell’s dim eyes.

“Huwwy huwwy,” he said, then made a half smile that increased momentarily the terrible gap in his skull. He tucked the cat in his shirt—Richard wanted to gag—and sped off. The masses parted to let him by. Nobody would dis Odell or stand against him. And in the blessed safety of his wake, Richard hurried after, feeling almost heroic.

They didn’t even reach the cell but instead were intercepted by Lamar just inside the D block door.

“Okay, boys, time to go,” said Lamar.

“Lamar, I—” began the very nervous Richard.

“Now you just shut up, Richard, and be a good boy. Odell, if Richard talks, you make him no-talk.”

“No-talk, Mar,” said Odell, love blooming in his eyes, and he turned toward Richard as if to crush his skull.

“No-talk, Wi-chud,” he said.

“No-talk,” said Richard.

They headed to the lieutenant’s office, which was empty:
the lieutenant would be in the guard’s lounge having a cup of coffee. Inside, a nervous old Harry Funt waited.

“Lamar, I got the forms, but I don’t know if this is going to work. You boys have to put on irons and chains.”

“We’ll put them on, goddamn it, Harry.”

“You’re going to conk me good?”

“Real good.”

“You want to mess up the office? This’d be where you jump me.”

“You can tell ’em we did it clean. We don’t got time for the office.”

“Okay, Lamar, if you say so. And you won’t say nothing about my participation if it doesn’t work?”

“It’s gonna work, Harry. This is Lamar talking. You believe it, Harry. Now here, you take this.”

He handed over the shank, a short, evilly sharpened blade embedded in a plastic haft.

“You don’t need no weapons, Lamar,” said Harry. “You ain’t going to hurt nobody, are you?”

“No sir, I am not,” said Lamar. “But I may have to face somebody down and a goddamn shank gets a man to thinking about what it’d feel like to get cut up bad, it surely does. Now you take it, because nobody’s going to throw the metal detector on you, Harry. Hurry now. We got to get moving.”

Harry took the blade with a shudder, sliding it into his hip pocket as if he didn’t know what it was for.

Quickly the three prisoners put on leg irons, waist chains, and handcuffs. They were not allowed to move out of the cellblock area without the bondage—it was McAlester’s oldest and strictest security arrangement.

“Now Lamar, s’pose I get asked how come I’m bringing all three you boys? Regs say only move one at a time through the chokepoint into the desecure zone.”

“You just wink, like you got three fish on a goddamn line. You caught three big-uns. We’re gonna give something up the warden hisself has got to hear. You gonna be a hero, Harry.”

“He-wo,” said Odell.

Now Richard was really scared.

Harry sullenly pushed his chained trio down the corridor.

“Take out your club, Harry,” said Lamar. “It’ll look more serious.”

Harry swallowed and did just that, and in a second they came across two hacks heading down to supervise lockdown.

“Harry, what the fuck is this?”

“Uh, you know. Lamar’s got a beef with somebody and he wants to sing to the lieutenant. Won’t talk to nobody less.”

“You wanna sing to me, Lamar?”

“Bubba, you ain’t got the heat to get me no deal. I’m gonna give the warden some names, but I need protection for me and mine and only the warden has the clout.”

“Watch him, Harry. Lamar’s too fucking smart to go on the snitch. He’s playing some fucking angle, I swear to you.”

“Lamar’s a good boy, ain’t you, Lamar,” said Harry, through dry lips.

“Lamar’s inmate scum, Harry, don’t you put your trust in him. It’ll come to grief, I swear.”

But the guards slid on down the corridor, heading to the cellblock and to their duties.

The little party reached the stairway that lead up to the cellblock exit, and Harry took out his walkie-talkie.

“Ah, Control, this is Mike-Five, ah, coming through
with three inmates, the two Pye boys and their cellmate, ah—”

“Peed,” said Richard.

“Yeah, Peed,” said Harry into the thing.

“What’s the dope, Harry?” the radio crackled. “The lieutenant okay this?”

“Say he did and you can check with him,” said Lamar.

Harry swallowed again, seemed to lose half a shade of color, and then lied badly into the radio, “Yes, he did, Control. You can check. Got me a canary wants to do some singing.”

“You need an escort?”

“No, got me a pussy newboy and two soft old boys, that’s all. No sweat.”