The Animal Factory: A Novel by Edward Bunker

Author:Edward Bunker [Bunker, Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Literary, Noir
ISBN: 9781466852976
Google: _W2zAAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2013-09-23T12:00:00+00:00

Now that he didn’t have to go to the furniture factory, Ron followed Earl’s example of sleeping through breakfast and coming out on the lunch unlock. He ate that meal with Earl, and sometimes with T.J. or a couple of others. He liked Earl’s friends, the warm camaraderie, and yet never felt entirely at ease. The unease grew to discomfort when many of them gathered in a crowd, so he avoided them when they flocked together, finding that he had to go to the library, chapel, or elsewhere. Earl watched his nervousness and understood, but usually stayed with the clique himself. In the afternoons, after work call, they went to play handball or to sit in the lower yard and talk. The conversations were more deeply personal than any in Ron‘s life. He was unaccustomed to analyzing his relationships with his mother, Pamela, or why he put such an absolute premium on money, which was an obsession with him. He talked about his life outside and could tell that Earl respected him. He told one lie, thinking it would please Earl; it was in answer to the question if he was committed to crime. He answered, “Yes,” but the truth was that he didn’t know. His future was undecided; the clay wasn’t yet hard.

Earl explained why he sometimes kept away from Ron. The unlikely relationship was bound to be viewed by many convicts as that of a jocker and his kid. “I pull ’em up,” Earl said. “But I can’t stop thirty-five hundred convicts individually … and if I did it would be, ‘Methinks thou dost protest too much.’ So it’s best if I keep as much heat off you as I can.”

“I couldn’t care less what they think.”

“In a way you’re right, but in a way you’re not. You may spend a lot of years kicking around these places. You never know. If you get a jacket as a punk, you’ll have that wherever you go. It’ll come up twenty years from now. It’s the next worse thing to being jacketed as a stool pigeon. All a man in prison has is his name among his peers.”

Ron thought it was an exaggeration. As long as he himself knew the truth, it didn’t matter what ignorant convicts thought. In the coming months, his attitude would change. He learned that a good name was important, critically so. He saw a man with friends get slapped and do nothing about it. The friends turned their backs and the man was thereafter made to pay his canteen for protection until he finally checked into protective custody and got transferred. Any sign of weakness invited aggression, and the greatest sign was to get buggered. He saw a good-looking young man with blond hair, from a middle-class background, come in and the wolves descend. The newcomer had no friends. In a month he was wearing skin-tight jeans without back pockets. His eyebrows were blocked, and in the eyes something had died. The tough young Mexicans who had turned the blond into a queen eventually “sold” him.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.