He held out his arms. ‘C’mere.’ She did, and he gave her a strong hug. Then he held her by the shoulders and looked at her sternly. ‘But that money … it wasn’t me.’
‘Uh-huh, okay. So was that notebook you were reading stuck in with the money? I bet it was.’ She giggled. ‘You looked so guilty that night when I walked in on you.’
He rolled his eyes. ‘Go to bed, short stuff.’
‘Okay.’ At the door she turned back. ‘I liked those private changing booths, though. And something else. Want to know? You’ll think it’s weird.’
‘Go ahead, lay it on me.’
‘The kids wear uniforms. For the girls it’s gray skirts with white blouses and white kneesocks. There are also sweaters, if you want. Some gray like the skirts and some this pretty dark red – hunter red they call it, Barbara said.’
‘Uniforms,’ Pete said, bemused. ‘You like the idea of uniforms.’
‘Knew you’d think it was weird. Because boys don’t know how girls are. Girls can be mean if you’re wearing the wrong clothes, or even if you wear the right ones too much. You can wear different blouses, or your sneakers on Tuesdays and Thursdays, you can do different things with your hair, but pretty soon they – the mean girls – figure out you’ve only got three jumpers and six good school skirts. Then they say stuff. But when everyone wears the same thing every day … except maybe the sweater’s a different color …’ She blew back those few errant strands again. ‘Boys don’t have the same problem.’
‘I actually do get it,’ Pete said.
‘Anyway, Mom’s going to teach me how to make my own clothes, then I’ll have more. Simplicity, Butterick. Also, I’ve got friends. Plenty of them.’
‘Ellen, for instance.’
‘Ellen’s okay.’
And headed for a rewarding job as a waitress or a drive-thru girl after high school, Pete thought but did not say. If she doesn’t get pregnant at sixteen, that is.
‘I just wanted to tell you not to worry. If you were.’
‘I wasn’t,’ Pete said. ‘I know you’ll be fine. And it wasn’t me who sent the money. Honest.’
She gave him a smile, both sad and complicit, that made her look like anything but a little girl. ‘Okay. Gotcha.’
She left, closing the door gently behind her.
Pete lay awake for a long time that night. Not long after, he made the biggest mistake of his life.
1979 – 2014
Morris Randolph Bellamy was sentenced to life in prison on January 11th, 1979, and for a brief time things went fast before they went slow. And slow. And slow. His intake at Waynesville State Prison was completed by six P.M. the day of his sentencing. His cellmate, a convicted murderer named Roy Allgood, raped him for the first time forty-five minutes after lights-out.
‘Hold still and don’t you shit on my cock, young man,’ he whispered in Morris’s ear. ‘If you do that, I’ll cut your nose. You’ll look like a pig been bit by a allygator.’
Morris, who had been raped before, held still, biting his forearm to keep from screaming. He thought of Jimmy Gold, as Jimmy had been before he started chasing the Golden Buck. When he had still been an authentic hero. He thought of Harold Fineman, Jimmy’s high school friend (Morris had never had a high school friend himself), saying that all good things must end, which implied the converse was also true: bad things must end, too.
This particular bad thing went on for a long time, and while it did, Morris repeated Jimmy’s mantra from The Runner over and over in his mind: Shit don’t mean shit, shit don’t mean shit, shit don’t mean shit. It helped.
A little.
In the weeks that followed, he was ass-raped by Allgood on some nights and mouth-raped on others. On the whole, he preferred taking it up the ass, where there were no tastebuds. Either way, he thought that Cora Ann Hooper, the woman he had so foolishly attacked while in a blackout, was getting what she would probably have considered perfect justice. On the other hand, she’d only had to endure an unwanted invader once.
There was a clothing factory attached to Waynesville. The factory made jeans and the kind of shirts workmen wore. On his fifth day in the dyehouse, one of Allgood’s friends took him by the wrist, led Morris around the number three blue-vat, and told him to unbuckle his pants. ‘You just hold still and let me do the rest,’ he said. When he was finished, he said, ‘I ain’t a fag, or anything, but I got to get along, same as anyone. Tell anyone I’m a fag and I’ll fuckin kill you.’
‘I won’t,’ Morris said. Shit don’t mean shit, he told himself. Shit don’t mean shit.
One day in mid-March of 1979, a Hell’s Angel type with tattooed slabs of muscle strolled up to Morris in the exercise yard. ‘Can you write?’ this fellow said with an unmistakable Deep-South accent – kin you raht? ‘I hear you can write.’
‘Yes, I can write,’ Morris said. He saw Allgood approach, notice who was walking beside Morris, and sheer off toward the basketball court at the far end of the yard.
‘I’m Warren Duckworth. Most folks call me Duck.’
‘I’m Morris Bel—’