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By Root 2058 0

is like hers, red, he could pass for her kid brother only she was too nice a lady to have a kid brother to get hisself in trouble and thrown in the pen. This boy had stolen a horse. Nail listened, which was all he did these days and nights, when he wasn’t running off to those sheep-cluttered hills in Stay More. The boy’s name was Ernest something, but they were calling him Timbo Red because he came from Timbo, Arkansas, up in the hills of Stone County. Timbo Red talked more or less the same way that folks up home talked. Most of these fellers in here sounded like east Arkansas or downstate somewheres or probably outlanders from some other state, but Timbo Red sounded nearly just like Nail’s kid brother Luther, and Nail took an interest in what he was doing and saying, and he took a special interest that first night when Thirteen tried to seduce the kid. Nail still couldn’t talk very strong, but he had enough strength to raise himself up and say to Timbo Red, “Boy, don’t ye let this here feller show ye his jemmison, or you’ll hate it.”

Thirteen turned on Nail. “My what?” he said.

“Keep yore pecker in yore pants, Thirteen,” Nail said.

“Shit, mine is better than yours,” Thirteen snarled. “You want to git him to yourself? I claimed him first. He’s good ripe cherry punk, and I got him, and I aint gon let no man mess with my bride.” He put his full palm over Nail’s face and pushed down hard and mashed Nail’s head down into the bunk. Then he resumed his seduction of Timbo Red, telling the kid that it wouldn’t hurt a bit, not anywhere like the way the kid would get hurt if he didn’t get his sweet ass out of those pants real damn fast.

Nail listened. He tried to tell if the kid was scared or eager or what. Some boys liked that kind of thing; there was a big old boy several bunks over who couldn’t seem to get enough of it and would drop his pants for any feller who asked, and sometimes even went around asking them. Nail listened and thought he could hear Timbo Red asking to be let alone. The way Nail’s mind ran away from him these days and wound up in that Stay More meadow faster than he could think, his mind was now beginning to believe that Timbo Red was Miss Friday or Miss Monday herself, asking old Thirteen to leave her be. Nail couldn’t just lie here and let that nice lady be took against her wishes, or even took with her wishes by somebody foul like Thirteen. Now she seemed to be squealing. It wasn’t a very happy sort of squeal. Nail’s fingers were absently fooling with the collar of his jacket, and then slipping inside the jacket and fooling with the string around his neck. And then his fingers touched that steel. It was still there; he had almost forgotten about it in the what? weeks or days or months or whatever time had passed since he had intended to use it. He still had to remember not to roll over onto his stomach at night, or, if he did, to do it carefully so the razor-sharp dagger didn’t cut his chest.

He took a deep breath and somehow got his legs up and under him so he could crouch and use what energy he had left to reach over and fall against Thirteen and pin him down and hold the dagger up to his eyes so he could get a good look at it, and then Nail said to him, “Thirteen, d’ye want to try out the edge of this and see how sharp it is? Or will you jist take my word for it?—it’ll leave a gash from one of your ears to th’other’un in jist one swipe.”

Thirteen scrambled away from the kid and away from Nail. “Where’d you git that shiv?” Thirteen asked.

“Been savin it fer ye,” Nail said. “And I’ll use it on ye if you touch her again.”

“‘Her’?” Thirteen said. “You want ‘her’ for yourself, huh?”

“Him,” Nail said, flustered. “He ast ye to leave him alone. I’m askin ye to leave him alone. Or die. You choose.”

“Them guards catch you with that pigsticker, they gon make you die,” Thirteen grumbled, but he didn’t bother the kid for the rest of that night, and maybe not for the next few nights either, Nail couldn’t tell how many nights went by, one after the other, without the kid being bothered.

One night Timbo Red