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By Root 471 0

sat and sulked and ignored the meals that were delivered to him three times a day. At the beginning of June he stopped eating altogether - he told Dick, "You can wait around for the rope. But not me" - and from that moment he refused to touch food or water, or say one word to anybody. The fast lasted five days before the warden took it seriously. On the sixth day he ordered Smith transferred to the prison hospital, but the move did not lessen Perry's resolve; when attempts were made to force-feed him he fought back, tossed his head and clenched his jaws until they were rigid as horseshoes. Eventually, he had to be pinioned and fed intravenously or through a tube inserted in a nostril. Even so, over the next nine weeks his weight fell from 168 to 115 pounds, and the warden was warned that forced-feeding alone could not keep the patient alive indefinitely. Dick, though impressed by Perry's will power, would not concede that his purpose was suicide; even when Perry was reported to be in a coma, he told Andrews, with whom he had become friendly, that his former confederate was faking. "He just wants them to think he's crazy." Andrews, a compulsive eater (he had filled a scrapbook with illustrated edibles, everything from strawberry shortcake to roasted pig), said, "Maybe he is crazy. Starving himself like that."

"He just wants to get out of here. Play-acting. So they'll say he's crazy and put him in the crazy house." Dick afterward grew fond of quoting Andrews' reply, for it seemed to him a fine specimen of the boy's "funny thinking," his "off on a cloud" complacency. "Well," Andrews allegedly said, "it sure strikes me a hard way to do it. Starving yourself. Because sooner or later we'll all get out of here. Either walk out - or be carried out in a coffin. Myself, I don't care whether I walk or get carried. It's all the same in the end." Dick said, "The trouble with you, Andy, you've got no respect for human life. Including your own." Andrews agreed. "And," he said, "I'll tell you something else. If ever I do get out of here alive, I mean over the walls and clear out - well, maybe nobody will know where Andy went, but they'll sure hell know where Andy's been." All summer Perry undulated between half-awake stupors and sickly, sweat-drenched sleep. Voices roared through his head; one voice persistently asked him, "Where is Jesus? Where?" And once he woke up shouting, "The bird is Jesus! The bird is Jesus!" His favorite old theatrical fantasy, the one in which he thought of himself as "Perry O'Parsons, The One-Man Symphony,"-returned in the guise of a recurrent dream. The dream's geographical center was a Las Vegas night club where, wearing a white top hat and a white tuxedo, he strutted about a spotlighted stage playing in turn a harmonica, a guitar, a banjo, drums, sang "You Are My Sunshine," and tap-danced up a short flight of gold-painted prop steps; at the top, standing on a platform, he took a bow. There was no applause, none, and yet thousands of patrons packed the vast and gaudy room - a strange audience, mostly men and mostly Negroes. Staring at them, the perspiring entertainer at last understood their silence, for suddenly he knew that these were phantoms, the ghosts of the legally annihilated, the hanged, the gassed, the electrocuted - and in the same instant he realized that he was there to join them, that the gold-painted steps had led to a scaffold, that the platform on which he stood was opening beneath him. His top hat tumbled; urinating, defecating, Perry O'Parsons entered eternity. One afternoon he escaped from a dream and wakened to find the warden standing beside his bed. The warden said, "Sounds like you were having a little nightmare?" But Perry wouldn't answer him, and the warden, who on several occasions had visited the hospital and tried to persuade the prisoner to cease his fast, said, "I have something here. From your father. I thought you might want to see it." Perry, his eyes glitteringly immense in a face now almost phosphorescently pale, studied the ceiling; and presently, after placing a picture