Free PIGGS - A Novel with Bonus Screenplay by Neal Barrett Jr

get up and go again..."
    "Jesus, is there a point to this or what?"
    "I don' t'ink so, Jhack."
    "Now how did I know that?   Shut up, don't you tell me nothing, you hear?"
    Jack waited, waited for Ahmed to mouth off again because Ahmed always did.   He hated to sleep in the storeroom.   Not just because of Ahmed, because of the smell.   The smell was the same as the storeroom in Huntsville prison–cardboard, potatoes, lettuce and tomatoes.   Flour, sugar, things in boxes and cans.
    People didn't know cans smelled.   You get enough cans stacked up, they've got a certain smell.   They don't smell like anything but cans.
    Color was the other thing that stuck in his head.   White shirt and pants if you were good.   Pea-green if a man was truly bad.   Bad guys took great pride in their greens.   Big black dudes with rheumy eyes.   Little guys with killer eyes from "K" Wing, where the Mexican Mafia was king.   Skinhead whites from the Aryan Brotherhood.   The whites, he recalled, were either pole-thin or hog fat, nothing in between.
    Everything around you was painted in pale dirty colors that didn't have a name.   No purples, no yellows, no reds.
    The first thing he did when they let him out was buy a bright red shirt and yellow pants.   You could always spot a con who'd just come out.   He looked like a fucking rainbow for a while.
    He didn't mean to sleep but he did.   He was thinking about the day "C" Wing had gotten out of hand, and the guards had tossed in a gas grenade.   He took that thought into a dream, heard the quick explosion, saw the baby-shit yellow cloud of smoke come at him, felt his eyes and his skin and the inside of his nose begin to burn...
    ...That dream flipped into another, this one featuring Billy Joe Weal, a lifer Jack had met in the yard at one time.   Billy, who was just twenty-two, had robbed a convenience store, shot the clerk dead, and run off with eighteen dollars and thirty-nine cents.   An Oklahoma boy of the skinhead persuasion, Billy had tattoos up and down his arms of swastikas, eagles, daggers and the like.   And, across his chest, the words HI, HITLER! in bold Gothic script.
    No one, not even his Aryan brothers, had the nerve to tell him it wasn't quite right.   Billy was not only dumb, he was also a mean little shit...
    ...And, as the tar on the roof began to boil, and the room down below was hot enough to bake a brick, Ahmed cried out in his sleep, a long Iraqi curse that hopped into Jack's dream.   The words began to spill out of Billy Joe Weal, and somehow seemed to make sense...

Chapter Fifteen
     
    H utt Kenny drove his rental Buick through Martindale, Fentris, Prairie View and Luling, turned off 80 onto Interstate 10.   Ten went straight through Houston, Beaumont, Baton Rouge, and finally down to New Orleans.   Something close to five-hundred miles and nothing in between that Kenny cared to see.   What he wanted to see was the Louisiana line.   That, and a girl on Chartres Street named Jill.   Jill looked a lot like Gloria whatsit, that knockout dancer at Piggs.   Okay, she didn't, but she looked pretty good, you didn't see her in the light.
    Just thinking about Texas, Piggs, and fucking Zorro the Hick, made Kenny start to boil.   The guy was a loony, a nut.   Smart, you got to say that, but crazy as shit.   As crazy as Ambrose Junior, only Junior wasn't smart.   The old man, now, there's a guy that's smart.   Only Junior was running the show now, and he's the guy Kenny had to call.   Call up and tell him what Cecil said, how he wouldn't go along.   Even if you left out all the bad parts, Junior would blow his stack.
    And that was something scary to see.   A guy is maybe dumb, he can still put a hole in your head, it doesn't take smarts to do that.
    Hutt Kenny didn't want to stop, but he pulled in at Liberty, northeast of Houston, and filled the car up.   Had the kid check everything, drove a couple blocks, saw a Dairy Queen, and stopped.   Ordered