"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.
"How I use my potential?" asked Bubba.
"Stop breakin ' people's heads for nuffin." 55
"I likes breakin' heads."
"Den stay dere till dey fills it in on you, sucker." "Wait. Don' go. I promise I don' break no head no more. Jus' don' let dem bury me alive."
"I din' say don' break heads. Jus' don' do it for nuf-fin. Now, you willin' to come in wif me, I will use your potential and show you how I uses my potentiorator. It get me what I want, see?"
Bubba nodded.
"But you gotta do what I say. You do what I say, I get you up here wif me," said Dice, maneuvering the waste pail downwind toward the truck that would carry it away.
He returned to the edge of the pit, and looking up was Bubba's big mournful head.
"What you in for, man?" asked Dice.
"Manslaughter, felonial assault, resisting arrest, rape, molestering a child, armed robbery, three counts of mugging. I din' do one of dem muggin's."
"You left out arson," said Dice.
"Dem matches, dey be too small for my fingers," Bubba said.
"Tomorrow, dere by a lady comin' here, and no matter what dey say you done, you jes' tell her it be revolutionary."
"What dat revolutionary shit?" asked Bubba.
"Revolutionary be you can do anything you want and you can't do no wrong. You sets fire to a nursery and you say it be revolutionary, and it be all right wif lots of folks," Dice said.
"Lots of folks sound like dey be stupid," Bubba said.
"Dey be white," Dice said.
The next day, Bubba looked up and saw many people with the warden at the edge of his pit. The warden was explaining how dangerous Bubba was. But Bubba remembered what the waste collector, Dice, had said, and he yelled up, "It was revolutionary."
A white-haired old woman, hearing that, insisted that a ladder be put down, and despite warnings, she entered the pit. She was, Bubba later found out, an im-
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portant person from an important family. He did not know she was Wilhelmina Wakefield, the grand dame of support for the Third World wherever she found it, as long as it wasn't in Mamtasket. "Revolutionary," grunted Bubba.
"You're going to free us all," said Wilhelmina Wakefield. "Your revolutionary sensitivity is extraordinary and too complex for the dull white mind."
"Revolutionary," grunted Bubba again. Wilhelmina motioned up to the edge of the pit. Photographers came down. Their strobe lights frightened Bubba and he growled, but he guessed that Dice wouldn't want him breaking the photographers' heads.
The next day, on the second page of The Boston Blade, was a large picture of Bubba. His story covered the entire page. The headline read: "He Only Wanted to Free His People."
Bubba could not read the story, but Dice read it to him. The gist was that Bubba was put into the pit because his revolutionary sensitivities were too difficult for a reactionary warden to deal with.
In a full page of small newspaper type, The Blade never once mentioned one of Bubba's crimes.
When The Blade spoke, politicians listened. The mayor of Boston got on national television and discovered in his own heart, his own gut, sureness that the only reason Bubba was in jail was because Massachusetts was racist. A rally was held at the Boston Common. Religious leaders spoke. Buttons were handed out.
The buttons read: "Free Bubba."
Bumper stickers said more: "His only crime was wanting freedom. Free Bubba."
Finally, the parole board met and not only freed Bubba, but apologized to him. They also freed one Mandranus Rex Smith, alias Dice.
From then on, Bubba knew whom he trusted. What Dice never told Bubba was that he had been told what to tell Bubba. He had never met the man. But it was
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the same voice he heard on the telephone, telling him who to take care of and where to pick up the money.
So they went to work for that man, that high-class man with that high-class Boston accent, who left them money in Burger-Triumph garbage pails, but whom they had never seen. It was a perfect union. Bubba had Dice's brains and Dice had Bubba's magnificent hands.
Dice looked at his pink and gold Rolex watch as he drove his white Eldorado convertible back to Boston from Cape Cod. It was really too late to visit the other two professors at MUT, the white man and the old Chink.
They could always do that in the morning.
Bubba had had enough fun for one day anyway.
They continued on into Roxbury, where Dice preened his way up to the bar and, as he often did since he had teamed up with Bubba, tried to pick a fight.
And as always, when he had Bubba along, he couldn't manage it.
"Get yo' ugly face outen dis bar," said Dice to a slick pimp with a foxy lady Dice wanted.
"Yeah," said Bubba.
The pimp moved. The fox stayed. Life was good for Mandranus Rex Smith, alias Dice. In the morning, say at noon, he would take care of the other two scientists. Maybe even do one himself, it the one were small.
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Chapter Four
Remo tried to follow The Boston Blade. He had a half-year's issues shipped to his lab. If the contact was going to be through the media, then he might be able to see where other professors dealing with rapid-breeding bacteria had been reached.