Dirty White Boys Read Online Free

his pale old eyes.
    “Lamar—”
    “Had to kill me that nigger Junior Jefferson in the showers. He was going to fuck me. Now I know you got annex forms in the office and you can get us out of the cellblock and by security, at least into the A corridor and into Admin Two.”
    There was nothing in the old man at all, no guts, no outrage, just a sense of wiltedness, like a flower in the frost, waiting on a cold night’s death. He looked down, begging for mercy.
    “I can’t, Lamar. Please don’t make me. Got a wife needs a operation. My granddaughter got one of them breathing problems, we got to keep her—”
    But Lamar had never been into mercy.
    “Oh yes you can, Harry. ’Cause when they find Junior, all hell’s going to break out and the niggers will kill me. I can’t let that happen to me and mine. I’ll turn snitch, and you been muling in scat for Daddy Cool
and
copilots and phennies for Rodney and nobody knows you’re working both sides but me. You even do a load of crystal meth now and again. Right? Now, let me tell you how fast I will sell you to both of them, old man. Just that fast. There won’t be enough of you left to feed Odell’s cats.”
    Harry threw a fast, nervous look at his watch. He had about twelve minutes until lockup. Then he gave it up, exactly as Lamar’s shrewd calculus had predicted.
    “Okay,” he said. “But it would help if you’d conk me one, too. It won’t look so bad. I might even get a medal.”
    It wasn’t that Odell was big. It wasn’t that he had a cleft palate and the gap under his nose was like the dark fissure of the Mariana Trench. It wasn’t that his arms were abnormallylong, and it wasn’t that his teeth were black or that, owing to his physical deformity, he was a mouth breather and issued raspy wheezes wherever he went.
    More than anything it was the strange, almost lozenge shape of his head as it soared outward, almost exploding from the pointy little chin into a broad, pale forehead topped, most absurdly, by a flame of red hair. He had freckles, like any Huck Finn, but his eyes were almost always devoid of emotion.
    He held out a dead cat. It had just stopped moving. He had been holding it tightly a few minutes earlier. He shook it to bring it back to life, but it remained still and even floppy.
    Kiddy
, he thought.
Kiddy no no. Kiddy no mew? Kiddy sleepytime. Kiddy. KIDDY be jumpy! Kiddy jumpy jumpy jumpy. Make kiddy be jumpy-jump. Dell no like em kiddy ust no no. Sleepytime kiddy baby
.
    Standing nervously before him, Richard thought,
Jesus, who framed thy fearful asymmetry? William Blake himself couldn’t have thought this guy up
.
    Everyone gave Odell a wide berth, even the blacks and the warriors of N-D-N-Z, because Odell was known to have no fear. Even in this behavioral grease trap, he could inspire fear because he literally had none. Only Lamar could control him or even reach him, and Lamar rented him out to Daddy Cool for disciplinary tasks. Odell would walk into a crowd of blacks without noticing them and maim the man among them who’d earned Daddy’s disapproval. Then he’d walk away, his face implacably impassive.
    “Odell, Lamar needs us. He sent me to get you. Come on, quick.”
    “Na kiddy ust dud,” Odell said impassively, face slack and dull, as if he hadn’t heard what Richard just said. Richardwas beginning to understand Odell, which had him worried: My kitty is dead.
    Odell held up the tiny cat, limp in his huge hands. The fur between its ears was strangely wet, as if he had been licking it.
    Richard thought he’d puke. Odell was a squalid mountain of man-child, with the brain of a fish, and the docile demeanor of an old beagle until Lamar told him to act otherwise.
    “That’s too bad, Odell, but Lamar wants us now. It’s an emergency.”
    “Mergy?” asked Odell.
    “A hurry-hurry-Odell,” said Richard, aping the strange language in which Lamar communicated with Odell.
    Awareness flickered behind Odell’s dim eyes.
    “Huwwy