One of the men who had stepped back and had his head turned because he couldn't stand watching Bubba work suddenly felt his head inside something very big. And when he saw large fingers close over his eyes, he knew his head was in Bubba's hands. He tried to let out a big scream, but there was that finger sticking down his throat, and then he thought he heard a very big crack, but then there was no hearing and there wasn't even a thought.
"Bubba, beautiful fella. We got de car. De new car, baby," said Dice, grinning very hard. Bubba had started on their own men.
"Right," said Bubba.
Dice looked around for a place for Bubba to wipe his hands. There were only two places. Dice's suit or the other man they had picked up for the work.
Dice quickly pointed to the other man.
Bubba wiped and the man screamed. Bubba had wiped too hard. Bubba suddenly realized that he had done a wrong thing. His own man was whimpering softly in his giant hands. Bubba looked to Dice. He knew he could trust Dice.
Bubba was the only man from Roxbury who trusted Dice. If people could get close to Bubba, they would have told him that Dice was no good. But people did not get close to Bubba. Only Dice got close to Bubba, and Dice made a living from the big man. The only problem was that Bubba was a victim of enthusiasm. Once he got started, he was like a long freight train; he took a while to stop. It was not that Bubba was es-
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pecially vicious, Dice thought. It was that those big hands needed something to do once they got started.
Bubba had been six-foot-two and 240 pounds in junior high school. Naturally, he was the greatest thing in the Tiny Tot Football League, the division for boys fourteen and under.
Bubba's football career started and ended there. He could not realize that the play had been whistled dead. Coaches tried jumping on him to teach him, but Bubba could never stop thinking that a tackle was only the beginning.
An opposing quarterback who would never walk again sued successfully, proving that Bubba did not play football, he mugged.
The junior high tried him with the big boys in high school. Bubba put a fullback into a wheelchair for life, by running after the stretcher to finish him off while the fullback looked helplessly up to the sky.
Bubba never made love to a woman more than once.
He tried professional boxing, but he hated the gloves on his hands. Bubba knocked out his first opponent in fourteen seconds of the first round. His manager was delighted, until the referee couldn't get Bubba up off his prostrate opponent.
Frustrated to agony, Bubba tore off the gloves with his teeth so he could get at the other boxer's skull better with his bare hands.
The referee tried breaking a stool over Bubba's head to stop him. Then someone came into the ring with a lead pipe that he brought smashing down on Bubba's big head. The pipe could have splintered a pier piling, it came down with such force. Bubba looked up and scratched his head. The pipe had caught his attention.
When he concentrated, Bubba realized that he was supposed to stop crushing things with his hands. But the concentration was hard for Bubba.
Now in the kitchen of the white man's Cape Cod home, Bubba realized he had already killed one of his own men and was in the process of killing another. The man was half dead. Bubba looked to Dice. 53
"What we do, Dice?"
"You started it, you finish it, big fella," Dice said. "You leave him here, he gonna be singing all songs to de fuzz. He gonna say you did it."
"No. Won' say nuffin," said the man in Bubba's hands.
"He say he won' say nuffin," said Bubba.
"Dey all say dat when you gots dey head in you hands. He won' say nuffin now. He say it plenty looking at dem Boston blues, dem fuzz. Who you friend anyway?"
"You my friend, Dice."
"Who never lie to you?" asked Dice.
Bubba thought a moment. "Ain't nobody never lie to me. Everybody lie to me," he said accurately.
"Well, who lie to you nicest, then?" asked Dice.
"You be de nices', Dice."
"Den finish what you start, so we don't be doin' no life in Ambrose Prison."
When Bubba heard Ambrose, his hands convulsed instinctively. A loud crack filled the room, and the man spat out his lifeless inanards like a toothpaste tube squashed by a brick.
Bubba did not even notice this. He was thinking of his two years in Ambrose State Penitentiary. Ambrose was where prisoners were sent when all other prisons failed.
Not even Ambrose was strong enough for Bubba. The guards had locked him in solitary confinement one night, and in the morning they found the steel cell door torn in half, the way some men did with telephone books.
He had failed to escape only because he had jammed the secondary door himself. The three-inch steel there had managed to hold.
They built a special open-air prison for Bubba. It was four walls of steel-reinforced concrete, set into the rocky ground. It was a steel-lined pit. One warden from out of state saw it and said it reminded him of a rhino pit he had once seen in the Paris zoo.
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The Ambrose pit for Bubba had used the same design, the warden was told. Except for Bubba there was an extra layer of steel reinforcement. And with Bubba no one dared enter to clean the cage.
His food was thrown down from above. Bubba knew it was mealtime when lunch landed on his head.
Bubba was lonely. It was the loneliest time in Bubba's life, and it hurt more than anything he knew. He would have given anything just for somebody to talk to him. Even to threaten him would have been all right.
Then Dice entered his life.
Every day someone would lower a bucket to collect the leavings from Bubba's pit lavatory. But this day, someone spoke. None of the others had spoken because they didn't want Bubba to get to know them by name because later, he might want to shake hands with them.
"You a sucker. You know why you down dere and I up here?" said the man.
" 'Cause dey gots to have somebody to haul up de shit," said Bubba.
" 'Cause I realize my potential. I am a potentiator of my life. You don' se« me in ao pit. I don' waste my potential, see?"
"What potential?" asked Bubba to the man with the bucket in his hand.
"Potential be what you can achieve in ufe. I am an achievorator. You an under-achievorator. Dat why you down dere. You bé de under-one. I be de over-one."
"You still haulin' shit, nigger," said Bubba.
"Today. But soon I be outside in a boss hog. You gon' stay dere till de sun dry up. Yessuh. When you die, dey just fill in de hole and dat be you grave."
This thought horrified the big man, and he had dreams of great truckloads of earth coming down on him. The next day, the same man was up above removing the bucket.