Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [86]
Another con, one of the cooks, saw the look of disgust on Jack’s face and gave him a steamy wink. Jack was actually embarrassed and could feel his already hot face reddening.
After that the prison seemed alive with affairs. It was unbelievable. These were grown men, and not queers, either. You could expect this from the few homosexuals, but to see a hardened old thief kissing a stubby Negro when he thought nobody was looking was beyond belief.
Finally Jack was approached. He was standing at the salad table, slicing carrots with a butcher knife, and one of the cooks came up behind him, made a remark about something inconsequential, and pushed his body up against Jack, his fingers touching him briefly on the hips. After the momentary shock of the contact passed, Jack said out of the corner of his mouth, “Take it on the heel and toe, or I’ll have your balls for a watch fob,” and the man backed away, offended, and said, “You don’t have to get bitchy about it.” Jack turned and gave him an evil grin, holding the butcher knife low and twirling its tip. “Split,” he said.
Yet even having refused the man had a bitchy quality about it, as if he were queer, and was available, but just not to this particular cook. And besides, there was no denying that the pressure of the man against him had roused him. It had been pleasant, damn it.
Another time, a con said to him, “Oh, we know you’re playing hard to get.” There did not seem to be any answer. It had been on the tip of Jack’s tongue to say, “Oh no I’m not,” but that hardly would have cleared the matter up.
But it was not just a question of courtship and seduction, which after all, he reasoned, probably helped a lot of the men forget themselves for a while. There were also the prison wolves, homosexual rapists, who would get it into their heads that they wanted a particular man, and then go after him with single-willed determination until they caught him in a corner somewhere. These wolves sometimes worked in pairs or threes, and it was very difficult to avoid them once they had their eyes on you. Things had been quiet for a while, because just before Jack arrived a man had been killed in the shower by one of these wolves, and there was a big crackdown. All the known wolves had been moved around and were being watched carefully. The one who had done the knifing hadn’t been caught, but the population was certain that it was a factory worker named Clifford, a gigantic Negro armed robber who had his fingers into almost every racket in the prison; an organizer, a dominant personality, a natural leader. Even the guards were afraid of him. He was serving life as a habitual criminal, and so had settled down to making the prison his own private territory. Even the tightly knit, secretive Muslim group was afraid of him, though they claimed to admire him.
Jack was not afraid of Clifford or the other wolves, but Billy was. He had been caught twice, he admitted, and both times he thought he was going to be killed. “So I just laid there and took it, man,” he said. “What the fuck, I ain’t going to die for a virgin asshole.”
The really bad times for Jack, now, were the hours spent locked up in his cell with another man, with live flesh, a warm human body that grew more attractive each night, until Jack’s fantasies no longer were about women but about Billy; how they could grapple together in secret as so many dozens of others were doing probably right at that instant, all