Dirty White Boys

by Stephen Hunter

  Beside him, his brother Jeff, who had driven up to Oklahoma City to pick him up, also shivered.

  “Damned cold,” said Russ.

  “Damned cold,” said Jeff.

  Russ was back from his first two months in the East; he hadn’t had an easy time of it and had already dropped a course; but he felt better and knew that somehow, he’d make it through. Jeff was looking good. He’d gotten his grades up and now, a junior with a driver’s license, his own inherited truck, he even had a girlfriend, a pretty young woman who was the daughter of a colonel at the fort. He was working out every day after school to get ready for ball in the spring.

  The two young men left the truck, which smelled so of their father. They looked around, shifting a little on their feet to stay warm, but without much luck.

  Russ looked at his watch.

  “We may as well go on out there,” he said.

  “Yeah,” said Jeff. “Get it over with.”

  They stepped between gnarled scrub oaks and through a frail metal gate, and walked among the gravestones on the prairie. There were so many of them. The wind rose and whipped and snapped, and the high grass bent in its force. Out here: always the wind.

  There was no wind like this back in New Jersey, thought Russ. There’s no wind like it anywhere.

  After some minutes of hunting, they came at last to the stone, which was one of but many in a neighborhood of stones. Like its companions, it was nondescript polished granite, about as austere a symbol of a life as could be imagined, completely without frill or sentimentality.

  Russ tried to feel something but he really couldn’t. He felt phony, ridiculous, absurd.

  He looked down at the marker, which summed up a man’s life in a set of years.

  1926–1994.

  And beneath that, the inscription: A LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICER.

  And beneath that another inscription: HE DID HIS DUTY.

  “Poor old bastard,” said Jeff.

  “I wonder why he did it,” said Russ.

  And below that the name: CARL D. HENDERSON.

  “He did it because he thought it went with the job,” said their father, rising from the other side of C.D.’s gravestone, where he’d been alone for some time. And then he said, “Thank you boys for coming. I appreciate it much. Hi, Russ. You’re looking great.”

  “Thanks Dad, I’m okay. I didn’t see your car.”

  “I didn’t feel like driving today, that little thing with its piddly automatic. Mommy dropped me off. She had to go to pick up the turkey.”

  Russ looked at his father and remembered the last time he’d seen him, near death in the hospital. The survivor was a graver man, thin and solemn, his skin still almost gray. Now and then a faraway look would come over him. The bullet that had gone through C.D. Henderson’s aorta had then struck Bud, breaking his clavicle and destroying the nerves in his right arm, then coursing downward to destroy a lung before coming to rest behind his spleen.

  Thank God there’d been a doctor on the chopper; he’d taken one look at C.D. and known it was all over, cut Bud’s chest open there in the grass and massaged his heart back to life before they medevacked him to Comanche General Shocktrauma where he’d fought the reaper for three months until finally pulling out of it.

  “You’re looking great, Dad,” lied Russ.

  “This goddamn retirement’s got me cranky as a mule,” Bud said. “But I’ll get used it. Well, you boys ready for the party?”

  “Yes sir,” said Jeff.

  Bud pulled out a fresh bottle of I. W. Harper and cracked it open. Without much ceremony he took a long, smoky swallow. He passed it to Russ and then to Jeff, who each took a gulp.

  “Wow,” said Jeff, blinking at the power of the fluid.

  “I ever catch you doing that on your own, I’ll wale the hide off you!” Bud said, taking the bottle from Jeff.

  Then he turned and poured the rest of the liquor into the ground next to C.D.’s stone.

  “The old goat was always trying to git me to drink with him,” Bud said. “Well, now I finally got around to it. And I brought my boys, too, just like he wanted. This one’s on you, old man.”

  Then he turned, and looked at his two sons. Russ for once wasn’t wearing the habitual scowl of the young intellectual; and Jeff looked a little wobbly for his first taste of hard liquor.

  “All right,” he said. “Let’s go home.”

  Some time that same week, Richard blinked, and blinked again, as the doors opened and he stepped out of the ambulance onto the sidewalk of Prison Boulevard with his guards. He had a little impulse to shield his eyes, though it was impossible; handcuffs and anklecuffs bound to an iron belt held his limbs secure.

  The wind was chilly, the sky bright. He shivered, and felt phantom aches. He, too, had recovered from his wounds, which were surprisingly minor given the fact that four state troopers had fired at him in almost the same second that he had fired into Henderson and Pewtie. What was it Lamar had said? “Ain’t nobody knows how to shoot no more”? Well, another thing Lamar had been right about.

  One bullet broke his rib; another passed cleanly through his chest, and two more through the fleshy part of his leg. He’d known he wasn’t going to die. In fact what hurt the most was that one trooper had kicked him in the head as he lay on the ground. He thought they were going to let him bleed to death. But he disappointed them and would not die.

  Most of the last months had been passed in the confines of a friendly institution, the Kingsville Hospital ‘for the Criminally Insane, where loving doctors had tended him and cared for him, but something had changed. He was remote and unresponsive and they’d tried so hard to reach him, but he just looked at them. They seemed from, another planet somehow. And in the last months, when he was ambulatory, they’d urged him to draw again. But he just stared at the pencils and the paper and saw blankness.

  The adjudication was simple. Sparing the state the expense of trying him, his lawyer pled him guilty to first degree murder on the proviso that he not be given the death penalty. His lawyer told him he couldn’t be considered for parole for seventeen years. He wasn’t charged in the escape, because his lawyer convinced the court that Lamar had forced him to go along, and he wasn’t charged in the murder of the guard or the delivery man or any of the citizens or policemen in the robbery of the Wichita Falls Denny’s. His greatest character witness was old John Stepford, who told prosecutors, “He didn’t do a thing. He just sat there and cried while Lamar and Odell did the terrible things to my poor wife and I. Richard was a damned coward. Couldn’t hurt a flea.”

  If Richard had an opinion, he kept it to himself. He had become a near mute, a sullen watcher, slow to move, his face sealed off from human expression. Who knew what danced behind his eyes, for they, too, had become dull and hooded.

  “There it is, Richard,” said the head of the guard detail, “just like you left it.”

  It hadn’t changed a bit.

  McAlester State Penitentiary loomed above him, its high, white walls blazing in the sun, giving it the aspect of a Camelot, a fabled Moorish city, a walled fortress in Tibet. The Mac. The Big Mac. It would have him back at last.

  He blinked again: from here he could only see the walls, and just the briefest half a top story of the cellblock that had been his world for four months before Lamar had taken him on that mad, crazed dash. He looked around, but there was nothing to see except walls.

  The Mac, he thought. I am back.

  Now I have to pay.

  He knew he would probably die.

  The blacks would get him. Probably it would be the blacks. His whiteness would inflame them; they’d be on him in a second, fuck his ass and kill him and laugh about it. He could try and punk for a big con but … seventeen years of blow jobs?

  Maybe the Mexicans, the cholos. They loved to cut up gringos in the showers. They would get him fast. Or the red guys, those impassive mongol savages with their elaborate tattooed biceps bracelet, N-D-N-Z.

  But he kn
ew: It would be the blacks.

  The doors clanked open.

  A lieutenant he recognized waited.

  “Well, howdy there, Richard. Known you’d come back, sooner or later. They all do.”

  Richard said nothing.

  “Hell, Lamar and Odell are back. They’re over there, in the goddamned prison cemetery. Who else’d have ’em? Ain’t going into a graveyard with quality folks, that’s for sure.”

  Richard remembered the cemetery vaguely. A nondescript parcel of junk land off to the west, beyond the agriculture center, where members of the prison community, bull and con alike, were interred.

  “I’d like to see them sometime,” Richard said.

  “Well, we’ll have to see about that, Richard,” said the guard. “Some things are more possible than others. They ain’t going anywheres, that’s for sure.”

  Richard just nodded bitterly, wondering how it would happen.

  Processing was indifferent and efficient; he had no belongings, really, to confiscate, and just gave himself over to the institution.

  Now, with an armful of clothes and in new prison dungarees, he entered the cellblock and walked along the catwalk to where he would spend the rest of his life.

  Again, the immensity of it. It towered over him; he thought of a cobra’s flared hood, the sense of darkness enveloping. There was no daylight. Out on the yard, things were progressing as normal. He heard the shouts from the basketball and handball courts, the clunk of heavy iron being pumped by inmate bodybuilders. Other rogue sounds: Latino music, cheesy and loud; soul music; country; and the yammer, the gibber of many men talking, seething, bucking, clawing for space and individuality and … survival in the most primeval of places. Smells: farts, sweat, bile, vomit, shit. Iron and stone everywhere, the slight vibration of the grid of the catwalk beneath him, the cells slipping by on the right, each festooned with pictures of various saints and sluts.

  Until at last … home.

  “Here you go, Richard. D-fifty-eight. Sorry, there ain’t no doubles. You in with a rapist, a road captain of a cycle gang and a guy who likes to cut people. Not your average Sunday school choir.”

  Richard knew where they’d put him, too. Back bunk, upper, where the farts coalesced in the air and in hot weather the atmosphere was most like the inside of a sub, while in the winter it was the coldest. Every square inch of wall would be taken up with pictures from the inner lives of other men, and he’d have no say in anything. His own cellmates might even kill him, just for the shit of it, when they got tired of jacking off or buttslamming each other.

  Richard slipped in.

  Hmmmmm.

  It must be some mistake.

  He didn’t get it.

  “Don’t ask me, Richard. We let you boys work out who sleeps where.”

  There was an open bunk, but it wasn’t the rear upper but the front lower.

  Hmmmmmmm.

  The best bunk in the cell.

  And all the pictures had been scraped off the wall; he could hang anything he wanted.

  He looked at it dully. Nothing showed on his face.

  “Okay, Richard. You on your own. You be a good boy now, and if you git in trouble, you call us.”

  “Sure.”

  The detail left and Richard was alone.

  He sat on the bunk.

  Then he looked at the two desks and again was astounded. Normally the desks belonged to the two strongest men and fuck the two weakest. Sometimes a deal could be worked out where all four shared, if all four were of equal power. But … both desks stood vacant, the materials they had previously contained stacked neatly over to one side of the room, as if it was up to him to choose the best one.

  Richard sat for a number of hours trying to work out the puzzle. He had one little task to perform. He carefully unfolded a print he’d ordered, and then hung it, Scotch-taping it precisely centered above the desk.

  Then, in time, he had to go to the bathroom.

  It used to terrify him. In the stall-less bathrooms, naked to the world, you were at maximum vulnerability. He’d trained himself only to go when Lamar or Odell went. But there was no Lamar and Odell. They were in the ground a mile away.

  Yet once again, he was amazed at his own torpor. The trip to the bathrooms didn’t particularly frighten him. He just got up and went. What would happen would happen, and maybe sooner was better than later.

  He stood, left his cell, and walked along the catwalk until he reached the john. He ducked in. A scrawny black man looked at him, said nothing, and departed.

  Richard sat and shat. Then he rose, buckled his pants, and took his time washing his hands.

  He walked out and then he saw them.

  There were four of them, big and black.

  They came from nowhere—or actually, out of a cell. Suddenly they blocked off the catwalk ahead of him.

  He looked about. Far above, a guard with a Mini-14 patrolled on the shooting walk, but he was looking in another direction.

  And so, he thought: Here it is. At last. My fate.

  One of them was immensely puffed up from working out; his ebony muscles, sculpted and glowing, stood out on his body like haunches of beef or inflated sausages. He wore a red bandanna. Another was lanky and sullen, with Michael Jackson’s pretty hair, a gold necklace, and ropey, veiny arms. His eyes were deader than coal. The third was just a kid, eager to impress, his face drawn in tight and impassive to broadcast the word tough to the world. He looked at Richard with haughty eyes. And the fourth was the famous head-boss nigger, Rodney Smalls. Rodney looked at him through narrow eyes.

  Rodney was an immense man, sagacious and violent, a magnificent despot, who ruled with an iron hand. Rodney rarely ventured out of his cell, preferring to run things among the blacks from there.

  But now Richard got it: He had to pay for Junior Jefferson. He had inherited Lamar’s burden of guilt.

  He tried to keep his own face dull. He just stared at them as they approached.

  Okay, he thought. Is this it? He wasn’t particularly frightened for some odd reason.

  They were on him.

  “Hey, Richard.”

  “Yeah?” Give them nothing. Don’t let them see your fear.

  “What you say, man?”

  “I’m okay,” he said.

  “How you doin’? You need anything, man? You need smokes? I can get you smokes.”

  “Cool,” Richard said.

  “Shit, man, we ain’t got no beef with you. Just want you to know that up front, Richard. You okay.”

  “That Richard,” said Rodney to his young charge, “he smoked two goddamned troopers. A lieutenant and a sergeant. Blew their E.T.-looking white motherfucking asses away cold. Stood up there like the motherfucking man and put them Smokey-Bear cocksuckers down. You git ’em both, Richard?”

  “I capped the lieutenant,” said Richard. “Goddamned sergeant had more lives than a cat. But I’ll tell you this: He hasn’t had a good night’s sleep since he ran into me!”

  The four black men laughed.

  “Richard, you okay. Man, you got the stones. You cold, motherfucker. You ice, man.”

  Someone clapped him on the back. He felt their warmth, their love, their respect.

  “You go cool, Richard. For a dirty white boy, you ain’t half bad.”

  He watched them walk away. The young one made a gun from a finger and aped blowing a state trooper away and they all burst out laughing.

  “Richard?”

  He turned. A pale white man stood before him, maybe five years younger.

  “Richard, my name is Aaron Miles. I’m one of your cellmates. I was wondering—”

  “Did I talk to you, motherfucker?” said Richard.

  “Ah—no. It’s just that—”

  “It’s just that nothing, motherfucker. If we talk, and note I don’t say when we talk but only if we talk, we talk when I say so. Do you understand, fuckboy?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Now I want half your cigarettes
,” instructed Richard. “Every week, I get half. Get it? Or I become interested in you. And you don’t want that.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Now get the fuck out of my sight.”

  The boy scurried away. Richard watched him go. He had a nice ass.

  Now, for the first time in months, he felt something: an actual sensation slid through his bones, a small, tight smile played across his face.

  He stepped back into his cell and saw his print.

  Captured in a few deft pen strokes, the creature crouched on some featureless plain, swaddled in muscle, its head twisted almost as if in a feeding frenzy, its tiny eyes black and cunning, a spasm of blood lust throbbing through it. Lion tourné vers la gauche, la tête levée, by Delacroix, who, Richard realized, had gotten the neck right.

  Ah: lions.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The author would like to thank the following friends and colleagues for their assistance, while at the same time absolving them of all blame for its excesses and inaccuracies. Besides dedicatees Mike Hill, Bob Lopez, Steve Wigler, Lenne Miller and, especially, Weyman Swagger, all of whom gave good counsel when desperately needed, the others are: Steve Woods, Pat McGuire, Floyd Jones, Jean Marbella, John Feamster, Mike Mayo, Jim Horan, and the countless Oklahomans who were indefatigably polite and hospitable as I poked around their state for several weeks.

  My agent, Esther Newberg of ICM, is the true heroine of the book, as abetted by my editor, David Rosenthal: special thanks to both of them for “getting it.” My wife Lucy, as usual, did the dishes and the bills so that I could slip off and pretend to be an Oklahoma state trooper and a badass escaped convict, which was much more fun than dishes and bills; my children—teenagers, by now, actually, Jake and Amy—were reasonably behaved throughout it all.

  Finally, I should say that though I represent certain Oklahoma State Agencies—notably the Oklahoma Highway Patrol, the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, and the Oklahoma Bureau of Prisons—the preceding work is entirely fictional and not in any way intended to reflect upon their performance of their duties.

  Stephen Hunter is the author of ten novels, including the national bestsellers Black Light, Dirty White Boys, Point of Impact, with over three million copies in print, and his latest Pale Horse Coming. He is also the chief film critic for The Washington Post and the author of a collection of criticism, Violent Screen.