Stephen King - The Stand

He turned his head to the left (another bolt of pain, this one not so killing) and saw a rough concrete wall. Cracks ran through it. It had been extensively written on. Some of the writing was new, some old, most illiterate. THIS PLACE HAS BUGS. LOUIS DRAGONSKY, 1987. I LIKE IT IN MY ASSHOLE. DTS CAN BE FUN. GEORGE RAMPLING IS A JERK-OFF. I STILL LOVE YOU SUZANNE. THIS PLACE SUX, JERRY. CLYDE D. FRED 1981. There were pictures of large dangling penises, gigantic breasts, crudely drawn vaginas. It all gave Nick a sense of place. He was in a jail cell.

Carefully, he propped himself on his elbows, let his feet (clad in paper slippers) drop over the edge of the cot, and then swung up to a sitting position. The large economy-size pain rocked his head again and his backbone gave out an alarming creak. His stomach rolled alarmingly in his gut, and a fainting kind of nausea seized him, the most dismaying and unmanning kind, the kind that makes you feel like crying out to God to make it stop.

Instead of crying out—he couldn’t have done that—Nick leaned over his knees, one hand on each cheek, and waited for it to pass. After a while, it did. He could feel the Band-Aids that had been placed over the furrow on his cheek, and by wrinkling that side of his face a couple of times he decided that some sawbones had sunk a couple of stitches in there for good measure.

He looked around. He was in a small cell shaped like a Saltine box stood on end. Beyond the end of the cot was a barred door. At the head of the cot was a lidless, ringless toilet. Behind and above him—he saw this by craning his stiff neck very, very carefully—was a small barred window.

After he had sat on the edge of the cot long enough to feel sure he wasn’t going to pass out, he hooked the shapeless gray pajama pants he was wearing down around his knees, squatted on the can, and urinated for what seemed at least an hour. When he was finished he stood up, holding on to the edge of the cot like an old man. He looked apprehensively into the bowl for signs of blood, but his urine had been clear. He flushed it away.

He walked carefully over to the barred door and looked out into a short corridor. To his left was the drunk tank. An old man was lying on one of its five bunks, a hand like driftwood dangling on the floor. To the right the corridor ended in a door that was chocked open. In the center of the corridor was a dangling green-shaded light like the kind he had seen in pool-halls.

A shadow rose, danced on the propped-open door, and then a large man in khaki suntans walked into the corridor. He was wearing a Sam Browne belt and a big pistol. He hooked his thumbs into his pants pockets and looked at Nick for almost a full minute without speaking. Then he said, “When I was a boy we caught ourselves a mountain lion up in the hills and shot it and then drug it twenty mile back to town over dirt hardpan. What was left of that creature when we got home was the sorriest-lookin sight I ever saw. You the second-sorriest, boy.”

Nick thought it had the feel of a prepared speech, care fully honed and treasured, saved for out-of-towners and vags that occupied the barred Saltine boxes from time to time.

“You got a name, Babalugah?”

Nick put a finger to his swelled and lacerated lips and shook his head. He put a hand over his mouth, then cut the air with it in a soft diagonal hashmark and shook his head again.

“What? Cain’t talk? What’s this happy horseshit?” The words were amiable enough, but Nick couldn’t follow tones or inflections. He plucked an invisible pen from the air and wrote with it.

“You want a pencil?”

Nick nodded.

“If you’re mute, how come you don’t have none of those cards?”

Nick shrugged. He turned out his empty pockets. He balled his fists and shadowboxed the air, which sent another bolt of pain through his head and another wave of nausea through his stomach. He finished by tapping his own temples lightly with his fists, rolling his eyes up, and sagging on the bars. Then he pointed to his empty pockets.

“You were robbed.”

Nick nodded.

The man in khaki turned away and went back into his office. A moment later he returned with a dull pencil and a notepad. He thrust them through the bars. Written across the top of each notesheet was MEMO and From The Desk Of Sheriff John Baker .

Nick turned the pad around and tapped the pencil eraser at the name. He raised questioning eyebrows.

“Yeah, that’s me. Who are you?”

“Nick Andros,” he wrote. He put his hand through the bars.

Baker shook his head. “I ain’t gonna shake with you. You deaf, too?”

Nick nodded.

“What happened to you tonight? Doc Soames and his wife almost ran you down like a woodchuck, boy.”

“Beat up & robbed. A mile or so from a rdhouse on Main St. Zack’s Place.”

“That hangout’s no place for a kid like you, Babalugah. You surely aren’t old enough to drink.”

Nick shook his head indignantly. “I’m twenty-two,” he wrote. “I can have a couple of beers without getting beaten up & robbed for them, can’t I?”

Baker read this with a sourly amused look on his face. “It don’t appear you can in Shoyo. What you doing here, kid?”

Nick tore the first sheet off the memo pad, crumpled it in a ball, dropped it on the floor. Before he could begin to write his reply, an arm shot through the bars and a steel hand clutched his shoulder. Nick’s head jerked up.

“My wife neatens these cells,” Baker said, “and I don’t see any need for you to litter yours up. Go throw that in the john.”

Nick bent over, wincing at the pain in his back, and fished the ball of paper off the floor. He took it over to the toilet, tossed it in, and then looked up at Baker with his eyebrows raised. Baker nodded.

Nick came back. This time he wrote longer, pencil flying over the paper. Baker reflected that teaching a deaf-mute kid to read and write was probably quite a trick, and this Nick Andros must have some pretty good equipment upstairs to have caught the hang of it. There were fellows here in Shoyo, Arkansas, who had never properly caught the hang of it, and more than a few of them hung out in Zack’s. But he supposed you couldn’t expect a kid who just blew into town to know that.

Nick handed the pad through the bars.

“I’ve been traveling around but I’m not a vag. Spent today working for a man named Rich Ellerton about 6 miles west of here. I cleaned his barn & put up a load of hay in his loft., Last week I was in Watts, Okla., running fence. The men who beat me up got my week’s pay.”

“You sure it was Rich Ellerton you was working for? I can check that, you know.” Baker had torn off Nick’s explanation, folded it to wallet-photo size, and tucked it into his shirt pocket.

Nick nodded.

“You see his dog?”

Nick nodded.

“What kind was it?”

Nick gestured for the pad. “Big Doberman,” he wrote. “But nice. Not mean.”

Baker nodded, turned away, and went back into his office. Nick stood at the bars, watching anxiously. A moment later, Baker returned with a big keyring, unlocked the holding cell, and pushed it back on its track.

“Come on in the office,” Baker said. “You want some breakfast?”

Nick shook his head, then made pouring and drinking motions.

“Coffee? Got that. You take cream and sugar?”

Nick shook his head.

“Take it like a man, huh?” Baker laughed. “Come on.”

Baker started up the hallway, and although he was speaking, Nick was unable to hear what he was saying with his back turned and his lips hidden. “I don’t mind the company. I got insomnia. It’s got so I can’t sleep more’n three or four hours most nights. M’wife wants me to go see some big-shot doctor up in Pine Bluff. If it keeps on, I just might do it. I mean, looka this—here I am, five in the morning, not even light out, and there I sit eatin aigs and greazy home fries from the truck stop up the road.”