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“Almost everything we have.”
“How do you know a greaseball is lying?” Clete said. “His lips are moving.”
“Clete’s right, Adonis. You’re a bum. I think you’re about to become Shondell’s silent partner.”
“Penelope loves you,” he said. “If she goes to the authorities, her daughter will be killed. Any power I have cannot stop Mark Shondell.”
“He’s not of this earth?” I said.
“That’s right,” Adonis replied.
“Wonder why he hauled butt when I shot at him,” Clete said.
“You shot at Mark?”
“You got to do something for kicks.”
“The three of you are going to die a horrible death,” Adonis said. “Take the morphine.”
“If we go through trial by ordeal, that’s the way it is,” I said. “Now get out of here. You’re stinking up the compartment.”
I was surprised at his reaction, because I had not expected one. He blinked, and his lips parted as a child’s might if an adult pinched his cheek and shamed him in public.
“Something else you can take with you,” Clete said. “I hear Gideon Richetti wants to do me a solid. Guess what that means for you, dick-wipe.”
* * *
LATER SOMEONE TURNED off the overhead light, and immediately, the compartment was plunged into darkness. I lost track of time. An hour could have been a day, and a day could have been an hour. I wasn’t sure when I was awake or when I was dreaming. After a while the two states of mind became interchangeable, one no more rational or irrational than the other. I tried to think of the sun bursting on the horizon, splintering the blue sky with a gold radiance that reached into infinity. I also envisioned a full moon rising with the wispy, cold fragility of a communion wafer.
Whatever my fate was, I wanted it over. I wished I had not witnessed the executions in the Red Hat House at Angola. I don’t know how the condemned men didn’t go mad anticipating a death that by anyone’s measure is grotesque and cruel. Long ago I came to believe that these criminals were far braver men than I. Now I was confirmed in that belief. I had spoken with bravado to Adonis. But my words did not reflect what I felt. My breath was rank, my armpits reeking with a vinegar-like stench, my hair damp with sweat, even though the compartment was frigid.
We were given a bucket to use as a latrine. Carroll LeBlanc soiled himself. Clete snored. We felt like animals. Then, inside a deep sleep, I heard Clete call my name.
“What’s the haps, Cletus?” I said.
“I dreamed you and I were at an LSU–Ole Miss game. It was raining do
wn whiskey. We stomped Ole Miss’s ass.”
“Fuck these guys, Clete.”
“You got it, big mon. We’ve got to get our hands on a weapon.”
The hatch opened and Bell stepped into the compartment. “If you got to relieve yourselves, now’s the time,” he said.
Chapter Thirty-eight
ASIDE FROM BELL, our escorts wore zip-front silver overalls and goggles and plastic covers on their hair and plastic booties on their shoes and latex on their hands; they looked more like space aliens than medieval torturers.
I know the presence of men like these in our tale might test the limits of one’s credulity. But let me tell you of my first visit to Angola Prison. I have never told this to others because my account, if believed at all, would change nothing in the system, do no good for the victims, and depress people of goodwill who want to believe in their government, their media, and their fellow man. Since then I have never doubted that there are people in our midst, significant numbers of them, who would have worked at Auschwitz in the time it took to sign their names on the job application.
Angola was a convict-lease prison founded during Reconstruction by an odious man named Samuel James. Under his tutelage, thousands of convicts, mostly black, died of sickness, malnutrition, and physical abuse. The favorite instrument was the Black Betty. More than one hundred convicts still lie in the levee along the Mississippi River. In the second half of the twentieth century, inmates were put in narrow, perpendicular iron sweatboxes set in concrete in the middle of summer, with no space to sit down, a bucket between their legs. One man was kept there nineteen days. His body was molded to the shape of the box.
While I was a visitor, a convict who fell out on work detail was placed on an anthill. A convict who sassed a gun bull was taken to the hole and whipped with a three-foot chunk of garden hose; the man who beat him called the process “making a Christian out of a nigger.”
What kind of men were these? Uneducated peckerwoods with a jaw full of Red Man? That’s not even close. Sexual nightmares and psychopaths and the cruelest people on earth? Don’t doubt it for a minute.
Just before we reached the compartment where Shondell kept his collectibles, Clete leaned close to Carroll LeBlanc. “It’s never as bad as you think,” he said. “You fucked up, but you did it for your daughter. Streak and I don’t hold it against you.”
