His own bowels had been demanding release for some hours, but as this was only one of several agonies, and not the most pressing of them, he thought he could stand it if it meant avoiding the other prisoners. When at last there was nothing to be heard in the cell but his own gurgling gut, he risked to lift the blanket and was met with the tired light from a bulb that was never extinguished and with a stranger’s steady, hooded stare. There was a plate steel picnic table within a few feet of Henry Brusett’s bunk, and the man was sprawled along one of its benches with his back to the opposite wall of the cell. A big animal, comfortable in its lair, the man was amused by and expected Henry Brusett’s alarm at seeing him there. A trail of tattoo question marks ran down his cheek as tears. “Can I fluff up your pillow, prisoner?” Now what? Henry Brusett couldn’t fully straighten out of the S he’d made of himself on his bunk, and so he duckwalked to the back of the cell where a partial cinder-block wall was raised, the official concession to modesty upon which a flaccid two-foot penis had been inscribed.
