Manhunt. Volume 2, Number 10, December, 1954

“Well, you may be pretty to the girls and baby to your mother, but you’re only another rat to me. Now get that sandsoap and rag and wash them walls down!”

The cell door slammed, footsteps went down the corridor. I looked across at the other cell, at a guy with a face like Christ’s.

“My name’s Isky. What’s yours?” he says.

I tell him and ask him what they got him on.

“I like to make fires and watch the flames.”

Yeah, that guy was gone. He set the fire and told the cops he did it.

Later, I was reading the Thirty-Seventh Psalm when I hear steps in the corridor again. My eyes ran over the words... “For evildoers shall be cut off: but those that wait upon the Lord, they shall inherit the earth.” And them footsteps grew louder till the words meant nothing. The guard opened the cell of a prisoner who bought from the commissary man and didn’t pay. I listened. Everybody did till the guard was finished and the cell door slammed shut again. Then somebody said, “He beat a hundred dollars worth of milk and sandwiches out of that poor guy.”

Everyone laughed but the man in number six.

We went for exercise in the yard. Me, I didn’t want none. I looked around the yard, then up at the tower where the guard was watching. “Hey, Bunko,” I said, “I got to write me a letter. You got a pencil?”

Bunko handed me a bitten stub. “Who you going to writer” he asked.

“My best pal,” I told him. Then I wrote the letter and handed it to him.

Say, Tiger, what’s happening around outside? Who you going with now? Tell all the girls I said hello. Tell Cora when I come out I want some stuff. I heard the Law came around again looking for Dopey. When I come out, I want to get high. I’m going straight, straight to a stick of charge. I want Belle’s skin when I come out. Yeah, I’m going to bop harder than ever. Going to shoot me another cat first day out of here. Detective Jameson told the judge I shot that man on purpose. Tell Zelma I’m going to hang her from a beam when I get out.

From Pretty Boy, the great

P.S. Tell Moms hello and don’t worry.

Bunko read it out loud and passed it back. “You can’t send this stuff out,” he said. “They’re going to read it and beat you blue-black.”

So I tore it to pieces. “Got no stamp anyhow,” I told him. “The hell with it, the hell with everybody. I got a feeling I’m not going home for a long, long time cause I shot a man.”

A whistle sounded and I looked at the grey walls and the guard in the tower. “Wish I had wings,” I said.

“Wish I had a tommy-gun and I’d blast that no-good turkey off his roost.”

“Yeah,” said Bunko, sad-faced. “I only knifed a man. I wonder when I get out?”

Two Little Hands by Fletcher Flora

Obie was everybody’s friend, because Obie was too dumb to get mad. Then Obie was forced into action...

* * *

I shouldn’t have done it to Obie. I keep telling myself that he’s really better off, that he might have come to even a worse end if it hadn’t happened the way it did, but I know that isn’t true, I know I played a dirty trick on the only guy who ever really loved me, and I know I’ll remember it as long as I live and think about it the last thing before I die. I keep thinking about how he loved to work in the fields under the hot sun with the sweat seeping through his rough blue shirt in a great dark stain until the whole shirt was sopping wet, and about how he used to take a dip afterward in the deep pool at the bend of the creek and then sit naked on the bank like a small, innocent boy and watch the shifting pattern of sunlight and shade and listen to the stirrings and splashings of small life along the bank and in the water. You can’t do things like that where Obie is now. Not in a mad house.