What Becomes of the Broken Hearted? Read Online Free Page A

jus’ a li’l bit more’n usual, cos he was hoping Bad wouldn’t be aksing him to go down and take this bl — this Hawk cunt out. Mulla only had two weeks to go, and this was his third prison lag with only a cupla years of freedom in between, and the only women he’d ever had was ones on the block for all the boys to do and a cupla sheilas raped by the same boys after being lured, drunk, to a HQ party. When he wasn’t thinking about violence and doing bigtime armed robberies, Mulla Rota was thinking about women, about having his own girlfriend who he could (secretly) love. And if Bad ordered him down there to whack out the Hawk with a battery in a sock or stick a blade up his bl — up his Hawk arse, then it’d be anutha five years of bein’ here. And inside, a man knew he was getting to his breaking point, even if he never showed it not once.
    Now Jimmy was looking at him with those ordering eyes as they stood on the top landing and the world at the bottom was far away and yet forever close if Jimmy was gonna make the decision to send a man down to do the bizniz, reminded in that moment of inner despair, got a picture of the kid, of that Nig Heke when Jimmy’d stuck the shottie in Nig’s trembling hand and tole him he hadda lotta makin’ up to do did Nig Heke, and poor Nig, such a nice kid and could motor jus’ like his ole man who’d showed up Horse here in that pub he ruled, McClutchy’s, ended up dead along with Fattyboy Peters, plus a Hawk, in that battle they done on the main street of Two Lakes. Come to think of it, if Nig was around now he’d a have to’ve changed his name, or would he? Mulla brieflydistracted by that rather serial question of propriety and whether it could be said that Nig or nigger meant black or did it just denote a person’s race in a slangy (and racist) way? Till he pretend-casually sauntered over to the railing and took a look for himself and then felt like diving off and sidewaying himself when he saw who the Hawk was.
    But Mulla came back to his position, left of Jimmy Bad Horse, gave a sideways glance, took a deep breath and aksed (we never say ask. Ask is for them to say, real people, Utha People. We say aks) his leader, Want me to go down do it? Inside crying. Inside near to vomiting.
    Bad Horse came right over to Mulla with suspiciously aksing eyes of, if the truth be known, a coward to anutha, how come you got so much courage when you never had it before, you know that and I know that, it’s been anutha of our unspoken unnerstanin’s, what we see mirrored of each utha, but now here you are volunteering your, let’s face it, nightmare?
    Mulla? you only got a li’l while to go, Jimmy Bad Horse was giving him an out, ’cept Mulla thought it might be a trap and he weren’t walking into no trap, not one of Horse’s, they tended to have a lot of hurt in ’em, he played cards like that, too: merciless and sly, and he cheated.
    So Mulla gave anutha of his crooked smiles from all their repertoire of facial language, it was their articulation that childhood hadn’t given them in word and emotional expression equivalent, repeating near to a word his leader’s statements back there ’bout eight cell doors ago, Who the fuck cares, right? ’Cept without Jimmy’s emphatic insistence, since Mulla did care. He cared very very much for his freedom soon to come after five and a few months long years and that was jus’ this stretch, this third lag. He hadn’t lost as much remission as Jimmy, who, bein’ the bigtime prez, was obliged to do things that costim time off his remission, when they’d both got the same sentence for the rumble Nig and Fattyboy and the Hawk cunt got killed in, conspiring to cause grievous bodily harm. He was coming up thirty-six an’ he’d hardly been free in sixteen years, just long enough each time to get into serious trouble cos each time out he found coping was his hardest thing. So, naturally he couldn’t find it withinim, not now, to saythose