Free November Mourns by Tom Piccirilli Page A

attacked.
    One got a sharpened toothbrush in his right ass cheek. Four days later the other took a seven-inch length of shower pipe upside the head. Both of them had walked to the infirmary under their own power, but it did a quick job of fine-tuning Shad’s slam instincts.
    A few of the guys on C-Block started calling him a jonah. That only helped to steer everyone clear. They laughed it off but it was constantly in the back of their minds, as they watched Shad standing there with another con’s blood on his clothes, knowing he had nothing to do with it. Being in the wrong place at the worst time.
    Like all institutions, the joint had plenty of its own irrational and arbitrary beliefs. You had to study on how to live within them.
    If you did damage, or had harm done to you, that was one thing. But if you were drawing the bad luck toward you, and it missed and nabbed the guy on your left, then you got a different kind of mark. Some of these men had been in Vietnam, a few of the old-timers in Korea, and they still had this war mentality that the new meat would cause the most damage because he didn’t know where to step.
    The Haitians and Mexicans were especially superstitious and gave a wide berth to Shad most of the time. Except for this one inmate called Little Pepe—Pepito—a five-foot-nothing monstrosity as wide as he was tall, with immense tattooed arms so huge they didn’t look real.
    Pepito got it into his head that Shad was giving him the evil eye, putting some kind of curse on him and his tribe. It had to do with Shad’s books and always being in the library. Pepito figured there was a great amount of mystical knowledge and conjurings that could be found if you knew how to use the Dewey Decimal System properly. He thought Shad was a witch.
    Little Pepe considered himself an honorable man. He was in for strangling his sister’s husband with a Venetian blinds cord because the guy raised his voice at the dinner table, played poker, occasionally spanked his seven kids, and had taken too big a bite out of a coke deal they were in on together. Pepito’s nephews and nieces were everything to him, and it still grated his soul a bit that he’d killed their father in front of them on Easter. Pepito was a stand-up guy if you caught him on the right day.
    His indignation remained righteous. He had a family to protect inside the slam as well as out. Even though the leader of his tribe had turned down Little Pepe’s request to shank the witch, he planned to do it anyway. On the cafeteria line, where the spells seemed to be landing on others.
    Shad had a copy of
A Canticle for Leibowitz
in his back pocket, which, he realized too late, also miffed the Aryans, but not enough for them to take a poke at him. He had just received the second of Elfie Danforth’s letters, and it held his place about halfway through the book.
    He could already feel himself being forgotten by her, and was saddened by the fact that he didn’t really mind. Her cursive script had a stop-and-go jitter to it, as if she had to walk away every few sentences and come back later after thinking up something else to tell him. She mainly wrote about people and events that didn’t matter to him and never would. She asked him nothing. He thought about the determination it took to go through four pages to your lover and not ask a single question.
    A new resolve had begun to fill him in the slam—as his detachment from the hollow continued to change him into some new version of himself.
    Tushie Kline stood three or four guys behind him in line, eyeing
A Canticle for Leibowitz
and planning to rob Shad’s cell in a couple of days. Shad knew there were plans being formed that held him at their center, but he couldn’t pinpoint the who or why yet. He kept hoping the jonah thing would help him out a bit more than it appeared to be doing.
    That afternoon, he felt the angry heat on the back of his neck and eyed Tush first, knowing there was going to be a problem