Stephen Hunter - Dirty White Boys

Dirty White boys

--Norman Mailer's introduction to In the Belly of the Beast by Jack
Henry Abbott

No one knows what it's like to be the bad man.

--Peter Townsend, "Behind Blue Eyes"

CHAPTER 1.

Three men at McAlester State Penitentiary had larger penises than Lamar
Pye, but all were black and therefore, by Lamar's own figuring, hardly
human at all. His was the largest penis ever seen on a white man in
that prison or any of the others in which Lamar had spent so much of
his adult life. It was a monster, a snake, a ropey, veiny thing that
hardly looked at all like what it was but rather like some form of
rubber tubing.

Therefore he was Number One on the fag hit parade, but the fags knew to
stay away and could only dream of him in private. Lamar wasn't a fag,
although, when the spirit moved him, he was a butt fucker He wasn't a
boss con's fuck boy either, or a punk, or a bitch or a mary or a
snitch, and he carried a simple message in the graceful economy of his
movements: to fuck with me is to fuck with death itself.

It helped, of course, that he was also protected by Daddy Cool, the
bullet-pocked biker king who ran the Mac's dirty white boys; with
Daddy's special mojo protecting him and his own reputation as a
man-killer, almost nobody, con or guard alike, messed with him. And it
helped that his hulking cousin O'Dell stood ready to back him up on the
dime if it went down hard. But mainly it was just Lamar and his
attitude. He was the prince of the Dirty White Boys.

It was four o'clock in the afternoon, on a day like any other in the
institution's melancholy history as Oklahoma's toughest prison. In the
guard quarters, through two levels of security off the D corridor,
Lamar turned on the shower and let the water hit him. Its blast struck
his bulging muscles, washed the sweat away. This was his favorite
moment of the day, and as a ranking lifer, he had earned the right to a
private second or two in the hack's shower before lockup. It meant as
much to him as a million dollars in the bank, and he knew he'd never
have a million dollars in the bank.

What he had was a nice, fresh bar of Dial soap, which he'd just
unwrapped: none of that green liquid disinfectant soap the regular cons
used in their showers.

Lamar Pye was thirty-eight years old, with a tangle of thick hair,
which he generally wore braided down his back or in a ponytail. Though
he had an open, friendly face and warm eyes showing over a nose that
had seen much wear, he also had fuck and you! inscribed across the
knuckles of his left and right fists and born to kick ass on his left
forearm, all in the spidery and uncertain blue ink of a freehand
convict tattoo artist. On his right forearm, in the same wobbly line,
was a pictograph of a dagger jammed halfway to its hilt into the flesh.
A stream of red droplets wiggled out of it. On his left wrist it said
shadow of death under a crude but unmistakably effective rendering of a
skull. On the top of his right hand, it said white greased lightning,
with a rat-tailed squiggle in fading blue indicating a lightning bolt.
Lamar couldn't even remember getting that one.

He must have been drunk or high or something. He just woke up one
goddamned day during a two-year slide for assault with intent up at
Crabtree State in Helena and there it was. Craziest damn thing.

The water felt so good when it blasted against the swollen bulges of
his muscles, with the contrast between the hissing steam and the sense
of cooling. Two hundred curls with the seventy-five-pound bar, two
hundred squat thrusts with the two-hundred-pound bar on his shoulders,
a long goddamned time under the chest machine, hoisting two hundred
pounds of dead weight until he was swollen like a tire on a hot day.
When the water hit his muscles and deflated him, man, that felt so
cool!

Lamar contemplated his chest in the hissing steam.

Looking downward he saw an endless field of possibility.

His chest was wide and white and not particularly hairy. It was wide
open. You could put anything on it you wanted.

It was Richard who'd got his head turned in this direction.

Newboy Richard was so scared of them he hadn't said a thing for a week,
and Lamar at first wanted just to torture him for a while before he
fucked him and sold him to Rodney Smalls's niggers for cigarettes, but
goddamn Richard was so weak it wouldn't have meant a thing. All
Richard would do was sit there with a pencil and some kind of tablet,
his hand flying over the surface of the paper, as if by concentrating
so hard he could make it all go away. Or read funny little books with
no pictures, underlining things furiously.

Though he clung to Lamar'& shadow like a dog whenever Lamar went into
the yard.

Finally Lamar had said, "Goddamn you, boy, what is that shit you're
working at?"

Addressed directly, Richard had seemed to melt. His puffy face
trembled as the color fled his cheeks. He quivered like a leaf in a
high breeze. Then he said, "Art."

"Art who?" Lamar demanded.

"Art art," said Richard.

"You know. Art. Pictures. What the imagination can show."

"Fuck all that shit," said Lamar. Now he really wanted to hurt
Richard. He hated when somebody threw a word at him. Mag-i-nation.
Fuck that. But weirdly curious, he bent over and looked at what
Richard had been diddling.

Goddamn, it was Lamar! It was Lamar himself, fearsome as a lion,
scared of no man, looking like some kind of ancient king or Viking.
Under a frosty moon. Lamar, with a mighty sword, ready to slay enemies
by the thousands. The whole thing had a spooky feel to it, some kind
of magic or something. Somewhere inside, Lamar felt a little thing
move.

"The fuck," he said, "that ain't the way it is. I'm a hard timer
goddamned inmate butt fucker I ain't no goddamned hero."

"I--I just drew what my mind saw," said Richard.

"Please don't hurt me."

"Ah," said Lamar, stumped. He went back to his Penthouse.

Yet the image had somehow jiggered something in Lamar.

It troubled his dreams, bumping aside for a while the stroke-book
blondes who gave their rosy asses to him every night until he came and
could relax. Not that night. And the next day he wanted Richard to
show it to him, and the next and the next. He thought about it for
nearly another week, and then he started dreaming about it.

"You know that there picture?"

"Yes," said Richard.

"Could you do another one? From what I told you. You wouldn't have to
see it or nothing. I could just fucking tell you. You could make
it?"

"Er, yes, I suppose. I mean, of course."

"Hmm," said Lamar, thinking hard.

"You know, what I truly like, is lions. But a lion not in no jungle
but in a castle. You know. And a bitch, blond, with really big
tits.

And, somehow, she love the lion. She love him like a man, not like no
pet. Now, I don't want no picture of the lion fucking her, but the
lion could fuck her if he wanted to."

"Ah, I think I see what you're getting at. He's, like, an archetype of
a certain aggressive masculine power."

"Huh?"

"Ah, I mean--" "He's a lion and he's got a bitch. And she has tits.
And it's all a long time ago. Got that?"

"Yes sir."

Richard got busy. For days he huddled in the corner madly dashing
away. He'd throw pictures away, cursing. He even' went to the prison
library and got books with lions in them. And then finally-"Lamar? Is
this what you had in mind?"

He held out a sketch. The lion was a god, the woman a slut with huge
tits, her nipples taut as bowstrings. It was master, she was slave.

"Goddamn," said Lamar.