Excerpt 1:
Beckman squatted in the corner, thinking. His cell mate,
staring at him from darkened caves, kept his worn and spotted coat pulled close
to his body, even though it was hot in the cell.
Beckman stared back and, with a surge of daring, asked the
man, "What are you here for?"
The man, without changing his expression--he had no
expression to begin with--said through ventriloquist lips, "food and
shelter."
"You mean you got arrested so that you could come here
to eat and sleep?"
The man nodded. "It used to be easy. All you had to do
was stagger down the street and they would pick you up, but now--I had to get
on the bus and go all the way to Germantown. I staggered around out there about
fifteen minutes before they came and got me. It's getting to be a real problem.
I don't do it much, you know, not like some of the other fellas who are always
trying to get in here. I just do it whenever I really need a square meal and
can't find it no other way."
"One thing I've always wanted to ask men like you."
"Men like me?" the cell mate repeated, with a
smile.
"How did it happen? How did you end up like this?"
"You've asked the wrong man, my friend. You should ask
them." The man swept his arm toward the cell door and window, "They'd
know better than I would. All I seem to remember is one day realizing that I
didn't care about anything. They could do what they wanted to me." He
swept his arms toward the window again "and I didn't give a real damn. I
figured I'd be dead in a week, but that didn't happen. I've lived like this for
ten years now, and still don't give a damn."
The man stared at Beckman more intensely and, with a smile,
said, "Young man, I think we have a lot in common."
Beckman was struck with horror. He crouched back in his
corner, his former courage gone. The cell mate stared at him for a long time,
then climbed into his bunk and lay facing the wall.
Beckman trembled in the heat of his corner. The prophetic
truth of the man's words resounded in his head, obliterating thought as well as
standing beliefs, invalidated memory, and pounded with demonic force at the
walls of his heart.
Excerpt 2:
Beckman struggled with renewed desperation at his bonds;
pulling, jerking, twisting, when unexpectedly he felt them
give,
just a little, then more, struggling until he had wiggled a
hand free.
Quickly he pulled the rest of the cords from his other hand
and
ankles, then untied Honey, who was breathing the way she had
in
the back seat of the Model A.
“Quietly now, let’s creep out of here.”
Honey nodded, disheveling her hair. “The keys,” Honey
whispered.
Beckman put his finger to his lips. “Go to the car. I’ll get
them
from his pocket. If you’ll . . . ”
“No way. I’m sticking with you.”
“All right, but be very quiet.”
Together they tiptoed to the old man. Beckman, with soundless
gentility, picked the man up from the table and leaned him
upright
in the chair, retching at the decayed stench that swam up
from his
body. The moment Beckman reached into his pocket the man’s
eye
popped open with drunken surprise. Beckman jammed his hand
into the man’s pocket again, fingers hunting madly for the
keys.
The old man opened his mouth, but before he could get
anything
out, Honey grabbed one of the bones off the table. It was
sharp and
jagged at one end where it had been broken and gnawed.
Holding
the rounded joint end and, using the jagged end of the bone
as a
primitive knife, she jabbed it into the man’s one good eye.
He yelled, a bubbly, underwater type
scream and fell backward. Beckman
quickly found the keys in the other pocket as the old man
twisted
in agony on the floor.
Excerpt 3:
Beckman thought that this would be an excellent metaphor for
his first novel, just the thing he had been looking for.
Often during that month, the screaming cats got to him. The very first notes
would send him raging to the window to fling it open and shout down,
“Quiet!” The cats hardly glanced up. It was apparent that
they were
somewhere outside of his control.
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