Dirty White Boys

by Stephen Hunter

  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.

  “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 wh
at 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.