On the Yard Read Online Free Page B

with forceless bitterness.
    â€œIt’ll come to you,” Nunn said.
    â€œThat it do,” Henry Jackson added.
    â€œLike, when rape’s inevitable,” Nunn continued slyly, “relax and enjoy it.”
    Manning felt the blood burning in his face as he stared at the metal wall above the heads of the prisoners seated on the opposite bench. He wouldn’t look at them for fear they were all smiling at him. Instead he found himself studying a crude drawing of a man and a woman making love. The genitals were grossly exaggerated, and in the balloon above the woman’s head she was saying: Moan! Oh, do it to me, Big Daddy! While Big Daddy had been made to say: Shake that thing, Bitch!
    Manning shuddered. The obscenity was as intolerable as the feel of slime. He closed his eyes, but the grotesque caricature immediately came to life in his mind, and the figures began to move in a slow grind of animal pleasure. The image seemed to tip as somehow his viewpoint altered and he became involved and once again saw Debbie’s soft young face turned aside on her pillow, her profile in places almost indistinguishable from the white cloth and in others chalked vividly against the black tangle of her long hair. He saw her eye-lids flutter and once again felt the first subtle shift of her hips beneath his own, and again, as he had that night, he gasped. After years of dullness a wave of fierce and masculine energy had trapped him like a rabbit in a snare and exposed him as an object of disgust and derision. He opened his eyes. No one was paying him any attention. Nunn was rolling a cigarette, his motions precise to the point of fussiness, and Henry Jackson was watching as if he were trying to memorize how it was done. Manning looked away and found himself staring at a tall, very thin boy who was drawing still another picture on the wall.
    Sheldon Wilson, sometimes called Stick because he was over six-foot-three and under one hundred and sixty pounds, was drawing the Vampire. The Vampire had the Devil’s hairline and nostrils round and dark as pennies. The fangs, drinking teeth soon to be set to the world’s soft throat, were blunt and functional as soda straws.
    Stick’s two followers, both with the title of General, watched their leader work. One was seventeen, the other eighteen. The younger had the round dull eyes and slack mouth of a borderline defective, while the older seemed only slightly brighter. Stick, in sharp contrast to his Generals, had an air of sullen keenness. A dark, mean look. His narrow face was shaped like a trowel, and his eyes, small and set close together, were the rivets that fixed the blade to the handle. He was nineteen, and before he was sixteen he had been expelled from several high schools. Twice for hitting teachers, both women, and a third time for breaking into the school at night to paint Fascist slogans in the hallways. He had also invaded the girls’ lavatory, broken open the sanitary pad dispenser, and scattered the pads. Following this incident a school psychologist characterized him as “seriously disturbed” and recommended treatment in an institutional setting, which Stick knew in plain words meant he should be stashed in some nut house, and, in his own phrase, he cooled it. He became quiet, withdrawn, and normal enough if one ignored the large swastikas on the cover of his binder. And he wasn’t the first boy to have found a kind of negative magic in this discredited symbol; in a way its banality was almost reassuring. Then the swastikas were replaced by the Vampire.
    The three of them, the Generals and Stick, comprised the total membership of the Vampires, an organization dedicated to world domination. They stood convicted of robbery, an attempt to levy tax for their treasury, which at the time of their arrest totaled three dollars and ten cents. The money was first held for evidence, then returned to the man they had robbed. They had spent ninety