Live by Night Page 0,40

you climb over them teeth and jump out. But it decides. Not you." Mr. Hammond swung his enormous ring of keys in a circle before hooking them to his belt. "You wait."

"For how long?" Joe asked.

"Till it says so." Mr. Hammond walked up the tier.

The boy who came for him next was just that, a boy. Trembling and jump-eyed and no less dangerous for it. Joe was walking to the Saturday shower when the kid dislodged himself from the line about ten men up and walked down toward Joe.

Joe knew from the moment the kid left the line that he was coming for him, but there was nothing he could do to stop it. The kid wore his striped prison pants and coat and carried his towel and soap bar like the rest of them, but he also had a potato peeler in his right hand, its edges sharpened by a whetstone.

Joe stepped to meet the kid and the kid acted like he was moving on, but then he dropped his towel and soap, planted his foot, and swung his arm at Joe's head. Joe feinted to his right and the kid must have anticipated that because he went to his left and sank the potato peeler into Joe's inner thigh. Joe didn't have time to register the pain before he heard the kid pull it back out. It was the sound that enraged him. It sounded like fish parts sucked into a drain. His flesh, his blood, his meat hung off the edges of the weapon.

On his next pass, the kid lunged for Joe's abdomen or groin: Joe couldn't tell in all the ragged breathing and left-right, right-left scrabbling. He stepped inside the kid's arms and gripped the back of his head and pulled it to his chest. The kid stabbed him again, this time in the hip, but it was a feeble stab with no momentum behind it. Still hurt worse than a dog bite. When the kid pulled his arm back to get a better thrust, Joe ran him backward until he cracked the kid's head against the granite wall.

The kid sighed and dropped the potato peeler, and Joe banged his head off the wall twice more to be sure. The kid slid to the floor.

Joe had never seen him before.

In the infirmary, a doctor cleaned his wounds, sutured the one in his thigh, and wrapped it tightly in gauze. The doctor, who smelled of something chemical, told him to keep off the leg and the hip for a while.

"How do I do that?" Joe asked.

The doctor went on as if Joe had never spoken. "And keep the wounds clean. Change the dressing twice a day."

"Do you have more dressing for me?"

"No," the doctor said, as if embittered by the stupidity of the question.

"So . . . "

"Good as new," the doctor said and stepped back.

He waited for the guards to come and mete out their punishment for the fight. He waited to hear if the boy who'd attacked him was alive or dead. But no one said anything to him. It was as if he'd imagined the whole incident.

At lights-out, he asked Mr. Hammond if he'd heard about the fight on the way to the showers.

"No."

"No, you didn't hear?" Joe asked. "Or, no, it didn't happen?"

"No," Mr. Hammond said and walked away.

A few days after the stabbing, an inmate spoke to him. There was little special about the man's voice - it was lightly accented (Italian, he guessed) and a bit gravelly - but after a week of almost total silence it sounded so beautiful that Joe's throat closed up and his chest filled.

He was an old man with thick glasses too big for his face. He approached Joe in the yard as Joe limped across it. He'd been in the line to the showers on Saturday. Joe remembered him because he'd looked so frail one could only imagine the horrors this place had foisted upon him over the years.

"Do you think they'll run out of men to fight you soon?"

He was about Joe's height. He was bald up top, a shade of silver on the sides that matched his pencil-thin mustache. Long legs and a short, pudgy torso. Tiny hands. Something delicate about the way he moved, almost tiptoeing, like a cat burglar, but eyes as innocent and hopeful as a child's on his first day of school.

"I don't think they can run out," Joe said. "Lot of candidates."

"Won't you get tired?"

"Sure," Joe said. "But