Handsome Harry Read Free

would have it, a squad car had come around the corner while we were at it and the two cops inside saw the whole thing. The car screeched up and they jumped out with their guns pointed at me, yelling drop it or else.
    So I dropped it—and the gun hit the sidewalk just so and went off again, bam, and we all flinched as the bullet glanced off the building and smacked the side of the Buick. It’s Christ’s own wonder those jumpy cops didn’t shoot me then and there.
    The guy I shot bled pretty impressively but he wasn’t in any real danger of dying, and an ambulance took him away. I was booked on attempted murder, but my mother hired a good lawyer who got the charge reduced to felonious assault.
    The lawyer did the best he could to persuade the judge that I was a high-spirited youth who meant no real harm and deserved nothing worse than a period of probation. I was wearing a new suit and was freshly barbered and looked every inch the college boy headed for a career in accounting. My bearing was attentive and respectful, my manner amiable and confident in the wisdom of the court. But the prosecutor had to go and bring up the business about Sorenson and the baseball bat back in Muncie. He insisted I was a violent personality in need of a severe rehabilitation of attitude.
    The judge agreed. He gave me two to five in the state reformatory at Jeffersonville.
     
    T here isn’t much to tell about J-Ville, as we called it. According to the rules-and-regulations booklet every inmate received on his arrival, the reformatory’s purpose was to help young offenders become useful citizens through vocational training and character guidance. In truth, the inmates were little more than slave labor for the private companies that contracted with the state to provide work inside the walls. J-ville had a small factory for making shoes, plus a carpentry shop and a garage for teaching auto mechanics. I’d heard plenty about the reformatory from guys who’d been there, so I had some idea of what to expect. Still, it took some getting used to, the constant whine of machinery and electrical saws and steam whistles, the smells of sawdust and exhaust smoke and disinfectants.
    I’d only been there about two weeks when I got jumped. One minute the shower room was full of naked guys and the next there was nobody there but me and the three hardcases who came at me. Their intention, as one of them so explicitly put it, was to break the cherry in this pretty boy’s ass. They must’ve fixed it with the guards, because the fight lasted a while and we weren’t quiet about it, but not a hack showed his face until I got a grip on one guy’s balls and twisted as hard as I could and he screamed like he was on fire. That’s when the hacks came running and found him folded up on the floor and bawling like a baby. One of his pals was down too—I’d rammed his head against the wall and he was out cold. The third guy took off before the hacks showed up.
    I had a broken nose and what felt like cracked ribs and a shiner that almost closed my eye, but I’d retained my rectal virtue. None of us finked and the superintendent gave us each three days in solitary confinement, although the other two couldn’t serve their punishment till they got out of the infirmary.
    The solitary cells were in the guardhouse basement under the mat room. The mat room was large and windowless but brightly lit and didn’t have any furnishings except for a few chairs for the guards anda dozen straw mats arranged in a wide circle in the center of the room, each mat two feet square. Commit a minor infraction and you were brought in here and made to stand on a mat for six hours in your underwear and with your hands cuffed behind you. Step off the mat without permission and you got a beating and a stretch in solitary. But the two fastest ways into the hole were by fighting or trying to escape.
    The hole cells were along the rear wall of the basement, which was always chilly and smelled