Dirty White Boys Read Free

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 hurtinghim. 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 professionan 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