“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—”
“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 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.
???