Number eight is me, my cell. I turned to the little opening in the door. “None of your business,” I yelled. Then I hit the mattress but I can’t sleep. The damned stoolies are talking up above.
Next morning at five a guard rapped the bars with his keys. “Get up, you punk! If you don’t, you ain’t going to eat.”
Later he comes back. “So you’re Pretty Boy,” he says.
“Yeah.”
“Well, you may be pretty to the girls and baby to your mother, but you’re only another rat to me. Now get that sandsoap and rag and wash them walls down!”
The cell door slammed, footsteps went down the corridor. I looked across at the other cell, at a guy with a face like Christ’s.
“My name’s Isky. What’s yours?” he says.
I tell him and ask him what they got him on.
“I like to make fires and watch the flames.”
Yeah, that guy was gone. He set the fire and told the cops he did it.
Later, I was reading the Thirty-Seventh Psalm when I hear steps in the corridor again. My eyes ran over the words... “For evildoers shall be cut off: but those that wait upon the Lord, they shall inherit the earth.” And them footsteps grew louder till the words meant nothing. The guard opened the cell of a prisoner who bought from the commissary man and didn’t pay. I listened. Everybody did till the guard was finished and the cell door slammed shut again. Then somebody said, “He beat a hundred dollars worth of milk and sandwiches out of that poor guy.”
Everyone laughed but the man in number six.
We went for exercise in the yard. Me, I didn’t want none. I looked around the yard, then up at the tower where the guard was watching. “Hey, Bunko,” I said, “I got to write me a letter. You got a pencil?”
Bunko handed me a bitten stub. “Who you going to writer” he asked.
“My best pal,” I told him. Then I wrote the letter and handed it to him.
Say, Tiger, what’s happening around outside? Who you going with now? Tell all the girls I said hello. Tell Cora when I come out I want some stuff. I heard the Law came around again looking for Dopey. When I come out, I want to get high. I’m going straight, straight to a stick of charge. I want Belle’s skin when I come out. Yeah, I’m going to bop harder than ever. Going to shoot me another cat first day out of here. Detective Jameson told the judge I shot that man on purpose. Tell Zelma I’m going to hang her from a beam when I get out.
P.S. Tell Moms hello and don’t worry.
Bunko read it out loud and passed it back. “You can’t send this stuff out,” he said. “They’re going to read it and beat you blue-black.”
So I tore it to pieces. “Got no stamp anyhow,” I told him. “The hell with it, the hell with everybody. I got a feeling I’m not going home for a long, long time cause I shot a man.”
A whistle sounded and I looked at the grey walls and the guard in the tower. “Wish I had wings,” I said.
“Wish I had a tommy-gun and I’d blast that no-good turkey off his roost.”
“Yeah,” said Bunko, sad-faced. “I only knifed a man. I wonder when I get out?”
Two Little Hands
by Fletcher Flora
Obie was everybody’s friend, because Obie was too dumb to get mad. Then Obie was forced into action...
I shouldn’t have done it to Obie. I keep telling myself that he’s really better off, that he might have come to even a worse end if it hadn’t happened the way it did, but I know that isn’t true, I know I played a dirty trick on the only guy who ever really loved me, and I know I’ll remember it as long as I live and think about it the last thing before I die. I keep thinking about how he loved to work in the fields under the hot sun with the sweat seeping through his rough blue shirt in a great dark stain until the whole shirt was sopping wet, and about how he used to take a dip afterward in the deep pool at the bend of the creek and then sit naked on the bank like a small, innocent boy and watch the shifting pattern of sunlight and shade and listen to the stirrings and splashings of small life along the bank and in the water. You can’t do things like that where Obie is now. Not in a mad house.
He isn’t really crazy, no matter what they said. It’s just that he isn’t bright. I don’t know much about the technical gradations of intelligence, but I guess you’d call Obie an imbecile, maybe. He was a good worker, but you always had to tell him exactly what to do. You’d tell him to get the ax, he’d get the ax. You’d tell him to chop some wood, he’d chop some wood. Then, unless you’d tell him to put the ax away, he’d leave it right out in the God-damn rain or anything else. The only time he ever went ahead and did something on his own, without being told just what, was the time I’m telling about, the time I played the dirty trick on him. It got pretty trying sometimes, telling him just every little thing to do that way, and I lost my temper and cursed him more times than I can count, but I regret it now, and wish I hadn’t done it, and most of all I wish I hadn’t done what I did in the end to get him put away. I miss Obie. It’s lonely around here without him.
It happened the day I heard him singing Two Little Hands out behind the barn. Two Little Hands is a religious song, a kind of hymn, I guess, and it’s all about someone having two little hands for Jesus, and it’s supposed to be sung by kids in Sunday School and places like that. Someone had got hold of Obie early and taught him a few simple things about religion, and he was always singing this little song that he’d picked up somewhere. He only knew a few lines, because that was all he was capable of remembering, but he liked to sing what he knew, and he sang it every-time he thought to, or someone asked him to, and it was sort of funny and sad at the same time to hear the big lug do it, especially because his hands were really about the size of a brace of snow scoops.
I heard him singing this song behind the barn, and then I heard someone start to laugh as if it was the funniest God-damn thing that ever happened. There were two voices laughing, that is, a man’s and a woman’s, and I knew it was Ivy and Gunner Hoke back there with Obie. I began to feel sick then, partly because I didn’t like anyone poking fun at Obie, but mostly because it was Ivy and Gunner doing it. Ivy was my step-sister, no blood relation, and Gunner was a tall lean guy from in town who came out to see her. He was doing more than seeing her, too. I knew that as well as anything, even though I couldn’t actually prove it, and for a long time I kidded myself that I hated Gunner for that reason, because I didn’t approve of such goings-on, but now that I’m making a clean breast of everything and telling the whole story, I may as well admit that it was really because I wanted to take Ivy for myself and never could.
She was enough to make anyone want to. Gunner and I weren’t the only ones by any means, and so far as I know maybe Gunner wasn’t the only one who managed it. She did everything she could to put it in a guy’s mind, that was sure. She was certain to be sloppy fat someday, like her old lady, my stepmother, but now her body was just full and ready, like it had been tree-ripened in the hot summer sun for picking, and it had a way of projecting itself through the thin cottons she wore around the place. She knew the effect she had on me, all right, I wasn’t fooling her any, and she got a hell of a bang out of it even though she never intended to give me any house. I guess I hated her in a way just as much as I hated Gunner, but I’m trying to be honest, and I can’t be sure, because it was all mixed up with my wanting her the way I did.