Nightmare Man was screaming his accursed word again.
Ben didn't want to hear it. He covered his ears. "Go away! I don't want nothin' to do with you. Get outta my head!"
Someone who wasn't Nightmare Man pulled one of his hands away and shouted into the exposed ear, "There ain't no one in your head, bastard! Ain't no brains in there, neither!"
Jolted awake, Ben sat up and said a few choice words of his own to Teufel. The guard slapped him, hard - as he'd expected. He achieved the small victory of not letting his head snap back with the blow.
As epithets went in this place, "bastard" was tame. But on his first day, Ben had made the mistake of letting the guards see that it hurt him. They'd realized he really was a bastard, in the literal sense of the word, and they never let him live it down.
"Got a new buddy for you," Teufel snarled. He'd already rousted Mac Brodie out of the bed next to Ben's, and now he half-threw a sniffling boy onto it. "You get the prize location, Wooten! Next to the crazy man who howls in his sleep all night."
Ben squinted to see the kid called Wooten in the dim light. Well, look what we have here. Younger'n me, looks like I could blow him off that bed if I breathed on him. It's about time I get replaced at the bottom o' the peckin' order.
Then he stopped, appalled at his own thoughts. God Almighty. I ain't been here but three months, an' already I'm wishin' abuse on someone else. What am I turnin' into?
He shuddered. As Teufel swaggered away, he said quietly to the kid, "I hope I won't keep you awake. I just have bad dreams - can't help it. But I ain't crazy, an' I don't mean you no harm. My name's Ben."
A shockingly young voice quavered, "Th-thank you, Ben. I'm Clem."
Ben dropped back on his own bed, with a weary "G'night, Clem."
As always, he'd forgotten Nightmare Man's stupid word.
As always, he didn't care.
x
x
x
In the days that followed, Ben tried to protect the boy, and succeeded fairly well. It seemed his unexpected toughness really had made an impression on the guards.
He usually didn't talk much, didn't ask questions of others because he didn't want them asking questions of him. But he couldn't help being curious about Clem Wooten.
"How long you in for?" he whispered one night as they lay in their side-by-side beds, both unable to get back to sleep after one of Ben's nightmares.
"T-ten years."
"Jeez, same as me. What did you do?"
"Stole a car."
"Hell," Ben muttered, "you don't look old enough to know how to drive a car."
"I'm fifteen!" Clem said defensively. Then he admitted, "I figured it wouldn't be much diff'rent than a tractor. But I did crack it up. That's why I got caught."
"Why'd you steal it?" Ben asked him. "Just joy-ridin'?" He's a kid, can't they see that? Takin' ten years of his life for a thing like that is the real crime.
" 'Course not! I took the car to go look for my sister, 'cuz she'd run off. Ma was worried sick about her."
"Your sister?" That put the incident in a new light. "How old is she?"
Clem sighed. "Mary's eighteen. Old enough to have a right to leave home - I guess I shouldn't have said she 'run off.' The thing is, she was gonna hitchhike all the way to Tulsa, hopin' to find work there. Ma was sure she'd get herself raped an' strangled."
"So...your sister set out to hitchhike to Tulsa," Ben said slowly. "You stole a car 'cuz you wanted to protect her, but you wrecked the car an' wound up here. What happened to your sister?"
"She did get picked up by a piece o' trash what raped her, but at least he didn't strangle her. She made it to Tulsa. An' became a whore."
All Ben could say to that was "Oh."
x
x
x
After a long pause, Clem asked, "What about you?"
Ben had been hoping he wouldn't ask. But he answered all my questions. Turnabout is fair play.
"Robbery," he said quietly. "I got caught tryin' to rob a grocer - not my first time, I'd been doin' it for months. 'Armed robbery with a deadly weapon,' they called it."
"No shit! You were really a robber?"
Ben winced; what he heard in the kid's voice was admiration.
"What was the deadly weapon?" Clem asked.
"There warn't no deadly weapon. I just had an empty pop bottle under my jacket, holdin' it to look like a gun."
Clem sat up in bed. "B-but...they caught you, they arrested you. Didn't they find out that all you had was a pop bottle?"
"Sure they did." By now Ben was too worn out to be bitter. "They said a pop bottle could be a deadly weapon, 'cuz I could break it an' slash someone with it."
"But you never had done nothin' like that?"
"No, an' I never would have. But that last grocer had a rifle under the counter, an' he called my bluff. Held me at gunpoint an' yelled for help till the law showed up. There was no way I could prove what I woulda done if the grocer hadn't had a better weapon than mine."
Clem asked the sensible question, "If you weren't willin' to hurt no one, why didn't you just burgle, break into stores at night?"
" 'Cuz with so much poverty, there'd been a lot o' break-ins, an' storekeepers had pretty much stopped leavin' cash in the till when they went home."
After the boy had thought about that for a minute or so, he asked, "Was it poverty made you a robber?"
"Damn right it was," Ben told him. "The Depression an' the climate changes ruined us. Our crops failed, my ma was gonna lose the farm she'd inherited from her folks..."
He hated talking about it, but he reminded himself again that this kid had told him everything. "Ma didn't have much use for me. I guess she thought I took after my old man, who'd deserted her." That's true, as far as it goes. "But I loved her anyway, y'know? So I left home - she was prob'ly glad to see me go - but then I stole money, an' I kept sneakin' back an' leavin' envelopes full o' money at her door. Never much, but it was somethin'. I never kept none for myself.
"I didn't know what she was doin' with it. Common sense woulda told her who was leavin' it, an' how I'd got it. I thought she might just burn it up. But maybe she'd keep it an' use it. Maybe she'd even convince herself it came from someone else, from kind neighbors. Not that we had kind neighbors."
"Did you ever find out?" Clem asked him.
"Yeah," Ben said bleakly, "at my trial. Guess what? Every time Ma heard on the radio who'd been robbed, she went an' left the envelope at their door. She gave it all back, every friggin' dime, didn't even open the envelopes!" He realized he was crying, and hoped his young friend wouldn't notice.
"So it was all for nothin'?" The kid was shaking his head in disbelief. "I know you ain't that much older'n me. Your ma gave all the money back, you never hurt no one or carried a real weapon, an' they still sentenced you to ten years in this place?"
"Right. It was all for nothin'. Plus, I learned at the trial that Ma's took ill. She needs me, but that didn't make no diff'rence neither." Ben took a deep breath, steadied his voice with an effort, and said, "There ain't much mercy in the world these days, Clem."