‘I know who you are. Write purty well, do you?’
‘Yes,’ Morris spoke with no hesitation or false modesty. The way Roy Allgood had suddenly found another place to be wasn’t lost on him.
‘Could you write a letter to my wife, if I sort of tell you what to say? Only put it in, like, better words?’
‘I could do that, and I will, but I’ve got a little problem.’
‘I know what your problem is,’ his new acquaintance said. ‘You write my wife a letter that’ll make her happy, maybe stop her divorce talk, you ain’t gonna have no more trouble with that skinny bitchboy in your house.’
I’m the skinny bitchboy in my house, Morris thought, but he felt the tiniest glimmer of hope. ‘Sir, I’m going to write your wife the prettiest letter she ever got in her life.’
Looking at Duckworth’s huge arms, he thought of something he’d seen on a nature program. There was a kind of bird that lived in the mouths of crocodiles, granted survival on a day-to-day basis by pecking bits of food out of the reptiles’ jaws. Morris thought that kind of bird probably had a pretty good deal.
‘I’d need some paper.’ Thinking of the reformatory, where five lousy sheets of Blue Horse was all you ever got, paper with big spots of pulp floating in it like pre-cancerous moles.
‘I’ll get you paper. All you want. You just write that letter, and at the end say ever’ word came from my mouth and you just wrote it down.’
‘Okay, tell me what would make her most happy to hear.’
Duck considered, then brightened. ‘That she throws a fine fuck?’
‘She’ll know that already.’ It was Morris’s turn to consider. ‘What part of her does she say she’d change, if she could?’
Duck’s frown deepened. ‘I dunno, she always says her ass is too big. But you can’t say that, it’ll make things worse instead of better.’
‘No, what I’ll write is how much you love to put your hands on it and squeeze it.’
Duck was smiling now. ‘Better watch out or I’ll be rapin you myself.’
‘What’s her favorite dress? Does she have one?’
‘Yeah, a green one. It’s silk. Her ma gave it to her last year, just before I went up. She wears that one when we go out dancin.’ He looked down at the ground. ‘She better not be dancin now, but she might be. I know that. Maybe I can’t write much more than my own fuckin name, but I ain’t no stupe.’
‘I could write how much you like to squeeze her bottom when she’s wearing that green dress, how’s that? I could say thinking of that gets you hot.’
Duck looked at Morris with an expression that was utterly foreign to Morris’s Waynesville experience. It was respect. ‘Say, that’s not bad.’
Morris was still working on it. Sex wasn’t all women thought about when they thought about men; sex wasn’t romance. ‘What color is her hair?’
‘Well, right now I don’t know. She’s what you call a brownette when there ain’t no dye in it.’
Brown didn’t sing, at least not to Morris, but there were ways you could skate around stuff like that. It occurred to him that this was very much like selling a product in an ad agency, and he pushed the idea away. Survival was survival. He said, ‘I’ll write how much you like to see the sun shining in her hair, especially in the morning.’
Duck didn’t reply. He was staring at Morris with his bushy eyebrows furrowed together.
‘What? No good?’
Duck seized Morris’s arm, and for one terrible moment Morris was sure he was going to break it like a dead branch. HATE was tattooed on the fingers of the big man’s knuckles. Duck breathed, ‘It’s like poitry. I’ll get you the paper tomorrow. There’s lots in the liberry.’
That night, when Morris returned to the cellblock after a three-to-nine shift spent blue-dying, his house was empty. Rolf Venziano, in the next cell, told Morris that Roy Allgood had been taken to the infirmary. When Allgood returned the next day, both his eyes were black and his nose had been splinted. He looked at Morris from his bunk, then rolled over and faced the wall.
Warren Duckworth was Morris’s first client. Over the next thirty-six years, he had many.