“Whatever you say, Percy,” Dean said, holding up his hands. He had a moment right there, he told me the next night, when he believed Percy might just take after him.
Bill Dodge strolled up then and smoothed it over. “Think you dropped this,” he said, and handed Percy his baton. “An inch lower, you woulda broken the little barstid’s back.”
Percy’s chest expanded at that. “Yeah, it wasn’t a bad shot , ” he said, carefully re-seating his headknocker in its foolish holster. “I used to be a pitcher in high school. Threw two no-hitters.”
“Is that right, now?” Bill said, and the respectful tone of voice (although he winked at Dean when Percy turned away) was enough to finish defusing the situation.
“Yep,” Percy said. “Threw one down in Knoxville. Those city boys didn’t know what hit em. Walked two. Could have had a perfect game if the ump hadn’t been such a lugoon.”
Dean could have left it at that, but he had seniority on Percy and part of a senior’s job is to instruct, and at that time – before Coffey, before Delacroix – he still thought Percy might be teachable. So he reached out and grasped the younger man’s wrist. “You want to think about what you was doing just now,” Dean said. His intention, he said later, was to sound serious but not disapproving. Not too disapproving, anyway.
Except with Percy, that didn’t work. He might not learn … but we would eventually.
“Say, Four-Eyes, I know what I was doing – trying to get that mouse! What’re you, blind?”
“You also scared the cheese out of Bill, out of me, and out of them,” Dean said, pointing in the direction of Bitterbuck and Flanders.
“So what?” Percy asked, drawing himself up. “They ain’t in cradle-school, in case you didn’t notice.
Although you guys treat them that way half the time.”
“Well, I don’t like to be scared,” Bill rumbled, “and I work here, Wetmore, in case you didn’t notice. I ain’t one of your lugoons.”
Percy gave him a look that was narrow-eyed and a touch uncertain.
“And we don’t scare them any more than we have to, because they’re under a lot of strain,” Dean said. He was still keeping his voice low. “Men that are under a lot of strain can snap. Hurt themselves. Hurt others. Sometimes get folks like us in trouble, too.”
Percy’s mouth twitched at that. “In trouble” was an idea that had power over him. Making trouble was okay. Getting into it was not.
“Our job is talking, not yelling,” Dean said. “A man who is yelling at prisoners is a man who has lost control.”
Percy knew who had written that scripture – me.
The boss. There was no love lost between Percy Wetmore and Paul Edgecombe, and this was still summer, remember – long before the real festivities started.
“You’ll do better,” Dean said, “if you think of this place as like an intensive-care ward in a hospital. It’s best to be quiet–!”
“I think of it as a bucket of piss to drown rats in,” Percy said, “and that’s all. Now let me go.”
He tore free of Dean’s hand, stepped between him and Bill, and stalked up the corridor with his head down. He walked a little too close to The President’s side – close enough so that Flanders could have reached out, grabbed him, and maybe headwhipped him with his own prized hickory baton, had Flanders been that sort of man. He wasn’t, of course, but The Chief perhaps was. The Chief, if given a chance, might have administered such a beating just to teach Percy a lesson. What Dean said to me on that subject when he told me this story the following night has stuck with me ever since, because it turned out to be a kind of prophecy. “Wetmore don’t understand that he hasn’t got any power over them,” Dean said.
“That nothing he does can really make things worse for them, that they can only be electrocuted once.
Until he gets his head around that, he’s going to be a danger to himself and to everyone else down here.”