Dirty White Boys

CHAPTER 1

Three men at McAlester State Penitentiary had larger penises than Lamar Pye, but all were black and therefore, by Lamar's own figuring, hardly human at all. His was the largest penis ever seen on a white man in that prison or any of the others in which Lamar had spent so much of his adult life. It was a monster, a snake, a ropey, veiny thing that hardly looked at all like what it was but rather like some form of rubber tubing.

Therefore he was Number One on the fag hit parade, but the fags knew to stay away and could only dream of him in private. Lamar wasn't a fag, although, when the spirit moved him, he was a butt fucker He wasn't a boss con's fuck boy either, or a punk, or a bitch or a mary or a snitch, and he carried a simple message in the graceful economy of his movements: to fuck with me is to fuck with death itself.

It helped, of course, that he was also protected by Daddy Cool, the bullet-pocked biker king who ran the Mac's dirty white boys; with Daddy's special mojo protecting him and his own reputation as a man-killer, almost nobody, con or guard alike, messed with him. And it helped that his hulking cousin O’Dell stood ready to back him up on the dime if it went down hard. But mainly it was just Lamar and his attitude. He was the prince of the Dirty White Boys.

It was four o’clock in the afternoon, on a day like any other in the institution's melancholy history as Oklahoma's toughest prison. In the guard quarters, through two levels of security off the D corridor, Lamar turned on the shower and let the water hit him. Its blast struck his bulging muscles, washed the sweat away. This was his favorite moment of the day, and as a ranking lifer, he had earned the right to a private second or two in the hack's shower before lockup. It meant as much to him as a million dollars in the bank, and he knew he'd never have a million dollars in the bank.

What he had was a nice, fresh bar of Dial soap, which he'd just unwrapped: none of that green liquid disinfectant soap the regular cons used in their showers.

Lamar Pye was thirty-eight years old, with a tangle of thick hair, which he generally wore braided down his back or in a ponytail. Though he had an open, friendly face and warm eyes showing over a nose that had seen much wear, he also had fuck and you! inscribed across the knuckles of his left and right fists and born to kick ass on his left forearm, all in the spidery and uncertain blue ink of a freehand convict tattoo artist. On his right forearm, in the same wobbly line, was a pictograph of a dagger jammed halfway to its hilt into the flesh. A stream of red droplets wiggled out of it. On his left wrist it said shadow of death under a crude but unmistakably effective rendering of a skull. On the top of his right hand, it said white greased lightning, with a rat-tailed squiggle in fading blue indicating a lightning bolt. Lamar couldn't even remember getting that one.

He must have been drunk or high or something. He just woke up one goddamned day during a two-year slide for assault with intent up at Crabtree State in Helena and there it was. Craziest damn thing.

The water felt so good when it blasted against the swollen bulges of his muscles, with the contrast between the hissing steam and the sense of cooling. Two hundred curls with the seventy-five-pound bar, two hundred squat thrusts with the two-hundred-pound bar on his shoulders, a long goddamned time under the chest machine, hoisting two hundred pounds of dead weight until he was swollen like a tire on a hot day. When the water hit his muscles and deflated him, man, that felt so cool!

Lamar contemplated his chest in the hissing steam.

Looking downward he saw an endless field of possibility.

His chest was wide and white and not particularly hairy. It was wide open. You could put anything on it you wanted.

It was Richard who’d got his head turned in this direction.

Newboy Richard was so scared of them he hadn't said a thing for a week, and Lamar at first wanted just to torture him for a while before he fucked him and sold him to Rodney Smalls's niggers for cigarettes, but goddamn Richard was so weak it wouldn't have meant a thing. All Richard would do was sit there with a pencil and some kind of tablet, his hand flying over the surface of the paper, as if by concentrating so hard he could make it all go away. Or read funny little books with no pictures, underlining things furiously.

Though he clung to Lamar's shadow like a dog whenever Lamar went into the yard.

Finally Lamar had said, "Goddamn you, boy, what is that shit you're working at?”

Addressed directly, Richard had seemed to melt. His puffy face trembled as the color fled his cheeks. He quivered like a leaf in a high breeze. Then he said, "Art.”

“Art who?” Lamar demanded.

“Art art,” said Richard.

“You know. Art. Pictures. What the imagination can show.”

“Fuck all that shit,” said Lamar. Now he really wanted to hurt Richard. He hated when somebody threw a word at him. Mag-i-nation. Fuck that. But weirdly curious, he bent over and looked at what Richard had been diddling.

Goddamn, it was Lamar! It was Lamar himself, fearsome as a lion, scared of no man, looking like some kind of ancient king or Viking. Under a frosty moon. Lamar, with a mighty sword, ready to slay enemies by the thousands. The whole thing had a spooky feel to it, some kind of magic or something. Somewhere inside, Lamar felt a little thing move.

“The fuck,” he said, "that ain't the way it is. I'm a hard timer goddamned inmate butt fucker I ain't no goddamned hero.”

“I—I just drew what my mind saw,” said Richard.

“Please don't hurt me.”

“Ah,” said Lamar, stumped. He went back to his Penthouse.

Yet the image had somehow jiggered something in Lamar.

It troubled his dreams, bumping aside for a while the stroke-book blondes who gave their rosy asses to him every night until he came and could relax. Not that night. And the next day he wanted Richard to show it to him, and the next and the next. He thought about it for nearly another week, and then he started dreaming about it.

“You know that there picture?”

“Yes,” said Richard.

“Could you do another one? From what I told you. You wouldn't have to see it or nothing. I could just fucking tell you. You could make it?”

“Er, yes, I suppose. I mean, of course.”

“Hmm,” said Lamar, thinking hard.

“You know, what I truly like, is lions. But a lion not in no jungle but in a castle. You know. And a bitch, blond, with really big tits.

And, somehow, she love the lion. She love him like a man, not like no pet. Now, I don't want no picture of the lion fucking her, but the lion could fuck her if he wanted to.”

“Ah, I think I see what you're getting at. He's, like, an archetype of a certain aggressive masculine power.”

“Huh?”

“Ah, I mean—”

“He's a lion and he's got a bitch. And she has tits. And it's all a long time ago. Got that?”

“Yes sir.”

Richard got busy. For days he huddled in the corner madly dashing away. He'd throw pictures away, cursing. He even' went to the prison library and got books with lions in them. And then finally—

“Lamar? Is this what you had in mind?”

He held out a sketch. The lion was a god, the woman a slut with huge tits, her nipples taut as bowstrings. It was master, she was slave.

“Goddamn,” said Lamar.

“Look-a-that! Man, like you got that outta my head! Damn, ain't that a goddamn piece of work! Only, now, wouldn't it be better if the lion was taller? And maybe the gal's tits weren't that big? That's too big. It don't look real. I want it to be real. I like the castle though.”

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 nick 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 pulled in a pound of crystal a week. He had his cousin O’Dell 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 O’Dell.

“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 white boy 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 O’Dell! 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 imagine fear. So to punish O’Dell 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 O’Dell. O’Dell 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 fuck 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 you! 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 I, 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 slob by 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 O’Dell 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 O’Dell 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 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.

“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 milling 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 O’Dell'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 O’Dell 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 abnor many 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 sleepy time 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 O’Dell a wide berth, even the blacks and the warriors ofN-D-N-Z, because O’Dell 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. O’Dell 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.

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

“Na kiddy ust dud,” O’Dell said impassively, face slack and dull, as if he hadn't heard what Richard just said. Rich and was beginning to understand O’Dell, which had him worried:

My kitty is dead.

O’Dell 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. O’Dell 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, O’Dell, but Lamar wants us now. It's an emergency.”

“Mergy?” asked O’Dell.

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

Awareness flickered behind O’Dell'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 O’Dell 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.

O’Dell, if Richard talks, you make him no-talk.”

“No-talk, Mar,” said O’Dell, 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 choke point into the de secure 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 his self has got to hear. You gonna be a hero, Harry.”

“He-wo,” said O’Dell.

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 new boy and two soft old boys, that's all. No sweat.”

“You watch that fucking O’Dell,” said the voice.

“He's as crazy as a goddamned loon.”

“Cleared?”

“Cleared, but you gotta show paperwork.”

Harry led the three men up the catwalk. At the top, they could turn and see the whole cellblock behind them, a cube cut with cells situated inside the larger cube of the housing building, with catwalks called shooting ways strung out parallel to each level, so that the screws could watch or blast away with water, buckshot, or .223s, as it fit their purposes.

Lamar looked at it. His home. Knew every cell, every nook and cranny, every hiding place. Only place he'd ever been happy. Where he belonged, really belonged.

“Mar,” said O’Dell.

“Go home see mamma?”

“That's right, O’Dell. O’Dell go see mamma. You just do what I say, and it'll all be fine.”

O’Dell, Lamar realized, was scared. He was leaving something that he knew. He probably couldn't even remember the outside, so small and cramped was his sad little mind.

With his elbow, he gave O’Dell a little nudge of affection.

“Lamar going to take care of O’Dell, make it all right,” he said.

The main security gate at the highest level opened.

The three inmates stepped into a cocoon of professional attention. Guards flew to them, patted them down. One of them waved a Garrett Super Scanner metal detector up and down in search of the telltale hum that revealed a hidden hat ping or razor; none came. Meanwhile, another man gave Harry's paperwork the once-over.

'-"Harry, this don't look like the goddamn lieutenant's scrawl, though goddammit, the man can hardly write his own name.”

“When he drinks a bit his hand gets scratchy,” Harry said.

“Whyn't you call him for the okay?”

The moment hung in the air. Richard had some trouble breathing, but Lamar was as slick as they come.

“You damn boys are making it so hard on me I just might change my goddamned mind. Don't want to think too long 'bout what I'm set to do. Might change my tune.”

“Lamar, you have more shit in you than a goddamn outhouse,” said the guard.

“Go on. Harry, get ’em out of here.

I can't believe Lamar's turning snitch. Thought you was a tough con, Lamar.”

“Getting old,” said Lamar.

“Can't get it hard no more.

Warden's going to get me a softer joint, you know, a country club. Maybe I can get me some pussy.”

“Get ’em out of here,” said the supervisor.

“Hope the goddamned warden knows what he's in for.”

Harry escorted them down the hallway beyond the security checkpoint. It seemed like a different world suddenly;

the hallway was bright and airy, though the windows had mesh screens; it was just possible to see the green plains of Southeast Oklahoma outside as they fell away toward Oklahoma City a hundred-odd miles off, all farmland and low hills. And horizon! Richard saw the horizon between the two red turrets of the rear gate, accessible only from Admin Two, the building they were now in.

The outside world: Richard had forgotten such a place existed. The weight of the prison was its totality, its immensity:

in its grip, all other possibilities diminished, even disappeared.

He had a brief and sweet image of his life before, of the freedoms he'd had, the pleasures, the small idiotic rights. A blast of pity for himself and his helpless ways swept over him.

“In here,” said Lamar, putting his shoulder quickly against a locked door and bucking it open without a sound.

The four men were suddenly in the darkened office of the prison's medical administrator. Dr. Benteen. Benteen, who was brother-in-law to some powerful state senator, was almost a total no-show these days, with a bad drinking problem, much loathed by everyone in the prison community but untouchable.

Quickly Lamar took the keys from the hapless Harry and sprang himself; he tossed them to O’Dell, who did the same, and finally it was Richard who got them. By the time he was out, Lamar had taken up a post at the window. They were two stories up. Jesus Christ, Richard thought, what were they supposed to do, parachute?

“Yeah, he's still here, goddammit,” said Lamar.

“Parked where he always parks. That gets us ten feet less to jump. You ain't afraid of a little jump, are you, Richard?

Say twenty feet. On a nice, soft van roof.”

Richard looked: Twenty-five feet below he saw the flat roof of a white van. How had Lamar known it would be there?

“Goddamn guy 'comes to put Hostess Twinkies and HoHo Cakes in the guard's vending machines every god damned Tuesday this time. Now we jump onto that, I can hot-wire the goddamned thing, and we off. Good thang them damned hacks love their HoHo Cakes so fucking much!”

Lamar knew the prison up one side and down the other.

Just knew it cold.

“Fall long,” said O’Dell.

“Boo boo fall. Hurt O’Dell.”

“Now O’Dell, you can jump it, you know you can. See mamma, get out, okay O’Dell?” He turned to Richard.

“This boy loved his mamma. She was the only one ever treated him decent till I come along. We got to get him to her grave just once before he dies. Now O’Dell, want you to bend this goddamned metal screen out, so we can get ourselves out of here. Got to move fast—that guy's going to be moving along soon enough.”

“Lamar, you want I should tie myself up,” said Harry.

“I don't think I can get it tight enough. You may have to tie the knots for me.”

“Sure, Harry. You go on. Use your belt and the cord from that drape or maybe you can find some tape. O’Dell and I going to get this screen out. Richard, son, you just hang loose a sec, we may need you.”

But they didn't. O’Dell gathered up a length of curtain and cushioned his hands, then proceeded to punch the glass out of the window. Then he upturned the doctor's chair, pulling it apart until he had a metal strut. Inserting it in a small gap in the metalwork, he pried enough of the window mesh from its screws to get leverage; finishing with the strength of his own arms, he bent the screen back savagely, until a man could easily crawl out.

Meanwhile, Harry Funt scavenged through the office until he found some masking tape.

“This here tape'll work just fine,” he said.

“Should I gag myself, Lamar?”

“Yeah, Harry, that's great. You know, it's them little touches that make it real. This here thing is working out just great, ain't it, Richard?”

“It's great,” said Richard.

“Really very, very nice.”

“Almost ready, O’Dell?”

“Weddy,” said O’Dell.

“Lamar,” said Harry, "I did my ankles and legs. I'm going to put the gag on now. Can you do my wrists? Not too tight or nothing. And when you hit me, just enough to bring some blood. Nothing dramatic. I'm too goddamned old for drama.”

“Why, sure. Harry,” said Lamar. He waited as the old man put some cotton balls in his mouth and then ran a length of tape around his mouth to the back of his head.

Then Lamar bent behind the old man who eagerly offered his wrists behind his back and Lamar swiftly ensnared his wrists. Then Lamar wrapped several more lengths of tape around Harry's mouth.

“That's kind of tight, isn't it?” asked Richard.

“Well, maybe it is,” said Lamar.

“But we want it real.

Harry don't mind. Do you mind. Harry?” he asked.

Harry, gagging a little, shook his head no.

“Good,” said Lamar.

“Well, then, boys, we are all set.

Oh, wait, just this one little last thing.”

He bent to Harry.

“We want it real, don't we. Harry. All the details just right?”

Harry nodded.

The shank magically appeared in Lamar's hand, and he cut the old man's carotid artery.