Maybe the Mexicans, the cholos. They loved to cut up gringos in the showers. They would get him fast. Or the red guys, those impassive mongol savages with their elaborate tattooed biceps bracelet, nd-nz.
But he knew: It would be the blacks.
The doors clanked open.
A lieutenant he recognized waited.
“Well, howdy there, Richard. Known you'd come back, sooner or later.
They all do.”
Richard said nothing.
“Hell, Lamar and O’Dell are back. They're over there, in the goddamned prison cemetery. Who else'd have ’em?
Ain't going into a graveyard with quality folks, that's for sure.”
Richard remembered the cemetery vaguely. A nondescript parcel of junk land off to the west, beyond the agriculture center, where members of the prison community, bull and con alike, were interred.
“I'd like to see them sometime,” Richard said.
“Well, we'll have to see about that, Richard,” said the guard.
“Some things are more possible than others. They ain't going anywheres, that's for sure.”
Richard just nodded bitterly, wondering how it would happen.
Processing was indifferent and efficient; he had no belongings, really, to confiscate, and just gave himself over to the institution.
Now, with an armful of clothes and in new prison dungarees, he entered the cellblock and walked along the catwalk to where he would spend the rest of his life.
Again, the immensity of it. It towered over him; he thought of a cobra's flared hood, the sense of darkness enveloping. There was no daylight. Out on the yard, things were progressing as normal. He heard the shouts from the basketball and handball courts, the clunk of heavy iron being pumped by inmate body builders Other rogue sounds:
Latino music, cheesy and loud; soul music; country; and the yammer, the gibber of many men talking, seething, bucking, clawing for space and individuality and… survival in the most primeval of places. Smells: farts, sweat, bile, vomit, shit. Iron and stone everywhere, the slight vibration of the grid of the catwalk beneath him, the cells slipping by on the right, each festooned with pictures of various saints and sluts.
Until at last… home.
“Here you go, Richard. D-fifty-eight. Sorry, there ain't no doubles.
You in with a rapist, a road captain of a cycle gang and a guy who likes to cut people. Not your average Sunday school choir.”
Richard knew where they'd put him, too. Back bunk, upper, where the farts coalesced in the air and in hot weather the atmosphere was most like the inside of a sub, while in the winter it was the coldest.
Every square inch of wall would be taken up with pictures from the inner lives of other men, and he'd have no say in anything. His own cellmates might even kill him, just for the shit of it, when they got tired of jacking off or butt slamming each other.
Richard slipped in.
Hmmmmm.
It must be some mistake.
He didn't get it.
“Don't ask me, Richard. We let you boys work out who sleeps where.”
There was an open bunk, but it wasn't the rear upper but the front lower.
Hmmmmmmm.
The best bunk in the cell.
And all the pictures had been scraped off the wall; he could hang anything he wanted.
He looked at it dully. Nothing showed on his face.
“Okay, Richard. You on your own. You be a good boy now, and if you git in trouble, you call us.”
“Sure.”
The detail left and Richard was alone.
He sat on the bunk.
Then he looked at the two desks and again was astounded.
Normally the desks belonged to the two strongest men and fuck the two weakest. Sometimes a deal could be worked out where all four shared, if all four were of equal power. But… both desks stood vacant, the materials they had previously contained stacked neatly over to one side of the room, as if it was up to him to choose the best one.
Richard sat for a number of hours trying to work out the puzzle. He had one little task to perform. He carefully un folded a print he'd ordered, and then hung it, Scotch-taping it precisely centered above the desk.
Then, in time, he had to go to the bathroom.
It used to terrify him. In the stall-less bathrooms, naked to the world, you were at maximum vulnerability. He'd trained himself only to go when Lamar or O’Dell went. But there was no Lamar and O’Dell. They were in the ground a mile away.
Yet once again, he was amazed at his own torpor. The trip to the bathrooms didn't particularly frighten him. He just got up and went.
What would happen would happen, and maybe sooner was better than later.
He stood, left his cell, and walked along the catwalk until he reached the John. He ducked in. A scrawny black man looked at him, said nothing, and departed.
Richard sat and shat. Then he rose, buckled his pants, and took his time washing his hands.
He walked out and then he saw them.
There were four of them, big and black.
They came from nowhere—or actually, out of a cell.
Suddenly they blocked off the catwalk ahead of him.
He looked about. Far above, a guard with a Mini-14 patrolled on the shooting walk, but he was looking in another direction.
And so, he thought: Here it is. At last. My fate.
One of them was immensely puffed up from working out; his ebony muscles, sculpted and glowing, stood out on his body like haunches of beef or inflated sausages. He wore a red bandanna. Another was lanky and sullen, with Michael Jackson's pretty hair, a gold necklace, and ropey, veiny arms. His eyes were deader than coal. The third was just a kid, eager to impress, his face drawn in tight and impassive to broadcast the word tough to the world. He looked at Richard with haughty eyes. And the fourth was the famous head-boss nigger, Rodney Smalls. Rodney looked at him through narrow eyes.
Rodney was an immense man, sagacious and violent, a magnificent despot, who ruled with an iron hand. Rodney rarely ventured out of his cell, preferring to run things among the blacks from there.
But now Richard got it: He had to pay for Junior Jefferson.
He had inherited Lamar's burden of guilt.
He tried to keep his own face dull. He just stared at them as they approached.
Okay, he thought. Is this it? He wasn't particularly frightened for some odd reason.
They were on him.
“Hey, Richard.”
“Yeah?” Give them nothing. Don't let them see your fear.
“What you say, man?”
“I'm okay,” he said.
“How you doin'? You need anything, man? You need smokes? I can get you smokes.”
“Cool,” Richard said.
“Shit, man, we ain't got no beef with you. Just want you to know that up front, Richard. You okay.”
“That Richard,” said Rodney to his young charge, "he smoked two goddamned troopers. A lieutenant and a sergeant.
Blew their ET.-looking white motherfucking asses away cold. Stood up there like the motherfucking man and put them Smokey-Bear cocksuckers down. You git ’em both, Richard?”
“I capped the lieutenant,” said Richard.
“Goddamned sergeant had more lives than a cat. But I'll tell you this: He hasn't had a good night's sleep since he ran into me!”
The four black men laughed.
“Richard, you okay. Man, you got the stones. You cold, motherfucker.
You ice, man.”
Someone clapped him on the back. He felt their warmth, their love, their respect.
“You go cool, Richard. For a dirty white boy, you ain't half bad.”
He watched them walk away. The young one made a gun from a finger and aped blowing a state trooper away and they all burst out laughing.