We threw him into the restraint room like he was cargo, and watched him lie on the floor, bucking hard
in the straitjacket next to the drain we had once checked for the mouse which had started its E Block life as Steamboat Willy.
“I don’t much care if he swallows his tongue or something and dies,” Dean said in his hoarse and raspy voice, “but think of the paperwork, boys! It’d never end.”
“Never mind the paperwork, think of the hearing,” Harry said gloomily. “We’d lose our damned jobs.
End up picking peas down Mississippi. You know what Mississippi is, don’t you? It’s the Indian word for asshole.”
“He ain’t gonna die, and he ain’t gonna swallow his tongue, either,” Brutal said. “When we open this door tomorrow, he’s gonna be just fine. Take my word for it.”
That’s the way it was, too. The man we took back to his cell the next night at nine was quiet, pallid, and seemingly chastened. He walked with his head down, made no effort to attack anyone when the straitjacket came off, and only stared listlessly at me when I told him it would go just the same the next time, and he just had to ask himself how much time he wanted to spend pissing in his pants and eating baby-food a spoonful at a time.
“I’ll be good, boss, I learnt my lesson,” he whispered in a humble little voice as we put him back in his cell. Brutal looked at me and winked.
Late the next day, William Wharton, who was Billy the Kid to himself and never that bushwhacking John Law Wild Bill Hickok, bought a moon-pie from Old Toot-Toot. Wharton had been expressly forbidden any such commerce, but the afternoon crew was composed of floaters, as I think I have said, and the deal went down. Toot himself undoubtedly knew better, but to him the snack-wagon was always a case of a nickel is a nickel, a dime is a dime, I’d sing another chorus but I don’t have the time.
That night, when Brutal ran his check-round, Wharton was standing at the door of his cell. He waited until Brutal looked up at him, then slammed the heels of his hands into his bulging cheeks and shot a thick and amazingly long stream of chocolate sludge into Brutal’s face. He had crammed the entire moon-pie into his trap, held it there until it liquefied, and then used it like chewing tobacco.
Wharton fell back on his bunk wearing a chocolate goatee, kicking his legs and screaming with laughter and pointing to Brutal, who was wearing a lot more than a goatee. “Li’l Black Sambo, yassuh, boss, yassuh, howdoo you do?” Wharton held his belly and howled. “Gosh, if it had only been ka-ka! I wish it had been! If I’d had me some of that—”
“You are ka-ka,” Brutal growled, “and I hope you got your bags packed, because you’re going back down to your favorite toilet.”
Once again Wharton was bundled into the strait jacket, and once again we stowed him in the room with the soft walls. Two days, this time. Sometimes we could hear him raving in there, sometimes we could hear him promising that he’d be good, that he’d come to his senses and be good, and sometimes we could hear him screaming that he needed a doctor, that he was dying. Mostly, though, he was silent. And he was silent when we took him out again, too, walking, back to his cell with his head down and his eyes dull, not responding when Harry said, “Remember, it’s up to you.” He would be all right for a while, and then he’d try something else. There was nothing he did that hadn’t been tried before (well, except for the thing with the moon-pie, maybe; even Brutal admitted that was pretty original), but his sheer persistence
was scary. I was afraid that sooner or later someone’s attention might lapse and there would be hell to pay. And the situation might continue for quite awhile, because somewhere he had a lawyer who was beating the bushes, telling folks how wrong it would be to kill this fellow upon whose brow the dew of youth had not yet dried – and who was, incidentally, as white as old Jeff Davis. There was no sense complaining about it, because keeping Wharton out of the chair was his lawyer’s job. Keeping him safely jugged was ours. And in the end, Old Sparky would almost certainly have him, lawyer or no lawyer.