The Girls He Adored

18

Forty-five minutes after the cell door clanged shut behind Pender, it slid open again. Max shuffled in and took a seat on the iron bunk suspended from the wall, as far from his temporary cellmate as possible. When his pupils had adjusted to the dim light- weak fluorescents flickering behind a dense mesh grille in the ceiling-he saw that the other man in the cell was another goddamn gorilla, every bit as large as the almost-late Refugio Cortes, and just as mean looking.

Max could feel Alicea pushing him to make a switch. No fucking way, Max told her. We're not going through that again.

Ish would have concurred, had he been consulted. It was Ish who'd analyzed the vicious cycle after the first time around. Feeling sexually threatened by the brutal Cortes, Max had dispatched Alicea to deal with him. But Alicea's feminine charms only inflamed the passions of Cortes, who had been doing a threemonth stretch of county time for possession of methamphetamine. Whereupon Cortes had told Alicea, in his charmingly accented Pachuco, to “save up your spit, puto, or maybe you like a dry verga up your culo?”

But when Cortes showed up after lights-out (actually, they only dimmed), it wasn't Alicea waiting for him, but Lee. Lee was the alter who'd studied both karate and kung-fu, wrestled in high school at a hundred and twenty-eight pounds, and boxed in Juvie. When Lee looked into a mirror, however, he saw, not a slender junior lightweight but a light-heavyweight with a twenty-inch neck and pectorals like Batman's breastplate. And since everybody on the outside saw him as a little guy, this actually provided him a formidable advantage when he was picking on somebody his “own” size.

When he was up against a gorilla like Cortes, Lee's speed and agility were even more valuable than his strength. What gave him a real edge, however, was a trick his best friend Buckley had taught him to help him survive the no-holds-barred call-outs that were a primary source of evening entertainment at the Umpqua County Juvenile Ranch.

It was simple enough, the Buckley maneuver, but it took a fearful-amount of will and practice. Decide on your first offensive move, then start counting down from ten in the mind. The trick is to make the move any time before reaching one.

Three, five, even nine-the count doesn't matter, so long as it hasn't been predetermined. That way the opponent never sees any of the usual warning flickers, the tensing of muscles, the shifting of eyes, that normally precede an attack. This makes the maneuver especially effective against experienced fighters, men who have trained themselves to watch for precisely those clues.

So here comes Cortes with his rank smell, and his dick waving in the dark. And although such behavior was personally repugnant to Lee, he impersonated Alicea long enough to put the brute at ease… ten

… kneeling before the big man… nine… fondling him until he was hard… eight… then giving him a twisting, twofisted hand job… seven… as if in preparation for oral sex to follow. Six… five…

At four he struck, bending Cortes's penile shaft in the middle like he was breaking a celery stalk in half. Cortes was momentarily paralyzed by what must have been excruciating pain, giving Lee enough time to straighten up, deliver a blow to Cortes's Adam's apple with the side of his left hand and another, with the heel of his right hand, to his nose.

Cortes was unconscious before he hit the ground, which did not deter Lee from jumping up and down on his rib cage, then stripping down his jumpsuit, turning him over, spreading his legs apart until his privates were on the floor, and grinding them under his heel as if he were putting out a cigarette butt.

The deputies in charge of the pod responded quickly, but it was too late to save anything but Cortes's life-the whole episode (from soup to nuts, in Max's humorous phrase) had taken no more than three minutes. And this time it was Lee who took the beating from the guards. Lee didn't mind pain-it only made him stronger.

In the end, the encounter with Cortes worked out satisfactorily for Maxwell. It ensured that he would be housed alone for the rest of his stay, and gave him a certain cachet among both the guards and the other inmates. But there was nothing to be gained by another such episode. For one thing, Max had learned over the years that you had to space the major thrills out, or you'd get jaded. For another, you might get away with destroying one cellmate, but do it twice and your jailers would start taking extraordinary precautions, which was the last thing he wanted.

So this time he kept Alicea rigidly suppressed. You so much as try to come out, Max informed her, and I will slice up this face until it's so hideous not even Miss Miller will be able to look at us.

Then he called Mose, his memory trace personality, into co-consciousness with him, narrowed his eyes until they were nearly, but not entirely shut, lest the new gorilla try to jump him despite his restraints, and had Mose reread him the last chapter of Ulysses, Molly Bloom's soliloquy, while waiting to be brought from the cell to the courthouse, where he figured to have his best chance at escaping.

Ulysses was their favorite book. Max remembered the first time they'd seen it. “Look!” the nine-year-old had cried, spying it in the bookshelf in Miss Miller's living room. “Look, a book about me!”

A few hours later Miss Miller, her breasts perfumed like Molly's, had read him-or rather, Christopher-that last chapter out loud in bed. And though he was too young to understand much of it, like Leopold Bloom's, Christopher's own heart was going like mad, and yes he said along with her, yes I will, Yes.