There was an expression of utter terror on his face, and his precious hair was seriously mussed up for the first time since I’d met him, all in spikes and tangles. He looked like someone who has just escaped being raped.
There was a moment of utter stop then, a quiet so thick that the only sound was the sobbing whistle of Percy’s breathing. What broke it was cackling laughter, so sudden and so completely its own mad thing that it was shocking. Wharton, was my first thought, but it wasn’t him. It was Delacroix, standing in the open door of his cell and pointing at Percy. The mouse was back on his shoulder, and Delacroix looked like a small but malevolent male witch, complete with imp.
“Lookit him, he done piss his pants!” Delacroix howled. “Lookit what the big man done! Bus’ other people wid ‘is stick, mais oui some mauvais homme, but when someone touch him, he make water in ‘is pants jus’ like a baby!”
He laughed and pointed, all his fear and hatred of Percy coming out in that derisive laughter. Percy stared at him, seemingly incapable of moving or speaking. Wharton stepped back to the bars of his cell, looked down at the dark splotch on the front of Percy’s trousers – it was small but it was there, and no question about what it was – and grinned. “Somebody ought to buy the tough boy a didy,” he said, and went back to his bunk, chuffing laughter.
Brutal went down to Delacroix’s cell, but the Cajun had ducked inside and thrown himself on his bunk before Brutal could get there.
I reached out and grasped Percy’s shoulder. “Percy-” I began, but that was as far as I got. He came to life, shaking my hand off. He looked down at the front of his pants, saw the spot spreading there, and blushed a dark, fiery red. He looked up at me again, then at Harry and Dean. I remember being glad that Old Toot-Toot was gone. If he’d been around, the story would have been all over the prison in a single day.
And, given Percy’s last name-an unfortunate one, in this context – it was a story that would have been told with the relish of high glee for years to come.
“You talk about this to anyone, and you’ll all be on the breadlines in a week,” he whispered fiercely. It was the sort of crack that would have made me want to swat him under other circumstances, but under these, I only pitied him. I think he saw that pity, and it made it worse with him – like having an open wound scoured with nettles.
‘”What goes on here stays here,” Dean said quietly. “You don’t have to worry about that.”
Percy looked back over his shoulder, toward Delacroix’s cell. Brutal was just locking the door, and from inside, deadly clear, we could still hear Delacroix giggling. Percy’s look was as black as thunder. I thought of telling him that you reaped what you sowed in this life, and then decided this might not be the right time for a scripture lesson.
“As for him – ” he began, but never finished. He left, instead, head down, to go into the storage room and look for a dry pair of pants.
“He’s so purty,” Wharton said in a dreamy voice. Harry told him to shut the fuck up before he went down to the restraint room just on general damned principles. Wharton folded his arms on his chest, closed his eyes, and appeared to go to sleep.
9.
The night before Delacroix’s execution came down hotter and muggier than ever – eighty-one degrees by the thermometer outside the Admin readyroom window when I clocked in at six. Eighty-one degrees at the end of October, think of that, and thunder rumbling in the west like it does in July. I’d met a member of my congregation in town that afternoon, and he had asked me, with apparent seriousness, if I thought such unseasonable weather could be a sign of the Last Times. I said that I was sure not, but it crossed my mind that it was Last Times for Eduard Delacroix, all right. Yes indeed it was.