The Ultimate Egoist Read Online Free PDF

was none of my business. I shut up. But I was astonished at that long spiel of his. I didn’t know he could talk that much.
    Lunch came and went, and he got his share, in spite of myself, and a little more. Nothing much was said; Crawley just didn’t seem to be interested in anything that went on around him. You’d think a guy whose trial is coming up would worry about it. You’d think a guy who was planning a jail-break would worry about it. Not Crawley. He just sat and waited for the time to come. Damn if I didn’t do all his fretting for him!
    At two o’clock the bolts shot back. I said, “Come on, Crawley. We got a chance to stretch our legs in the area. If you got any money you can buy something to read or smoke.”
    Crawley said, “I’m okay here. Besides, I got no money. They sell candy?”
    “Yeah.”
    “You got money?”
    “Yep. Twenty cents. Tobacco for me for another two weeks at the rate of two or three home-made cigarettes per day. There ain’t one penny for anyone or anything else.”
    “Hell with that. Bring back four candy bars. Two marshmallow, one coconut, one fudge.”
    I laughed in his face and went out, thinking that here was one time when I’d have a story to tell the rest of the boys that would keep a lifer laughing. But somehow I never did get a chance to say anything to anybody about Crawley. I couldn’t tell you how it happened. Istarted to talk to one fellow and the guard called him over. I said howdy to another and he told me to dry up, he had some blues he wanted to soak in. It just didn’t work out. Once I really thought I had a start—one of the stoolies, this time; but just as I said, “Hey, you ought to get a load of my cellmate,” the bell rang for us to get back in the cells. I just had time to get to the prison store before the shutter banged down over the counter. I went back up to my deck and into my cell. I pitched Crawley his candy bars. He took them without saying aye, yes, or no—or thanks.
    Hardly a word passed between us until long after supper. He wanted to know how to fix one blanket so it felt like two. I showed him. Then I hopped into the upper bunk and said:
    “Try sleepin’ tonight.”
    He said, “What’s the matter with you?”
    “You was talking in your sleep last night.”
    “I wasn’t talking to myself,” he said defensively.
    “You sure wasn’t talking to me.”
    “I was talking to—my brother,” said Crawley, and he laughed. My God, what a laugh that was. It was sort of dragged out of him, and it was grating and high-pitched and muffled and it went on and on. I looked over the edge of the bunk, thinking maybe he wasn’t laughing, maybe he was having a fit. His face was strained, his eyes were screwed shut. All right, but his mouth was shut. His lips were clamped tight together.
His mouth was shut
and he went on laughing! He was laughing from inside somewhere, from his chest, some way I never even heard of before. I couldn’t stand it. If that laughing didn’t stop right away I’d have to stop breathing. My heart would stop breathing. My life was squirting out through my pores, turning to sweat. The laughter went higher and higher, just as loud, just as shrill, and I knew I could hear it and Crawley could, but no one else. It went up and up until I stopped hearing it, but even then I knew it was still going on and up, and though I couldn’t hear it any more, I knew when it stopped. My back teeth ached from the way my jaws had driven them into the gums. I think I passed out, and then slept afterward. I don’t remember the lights going out at nine, or the guards checking up.
    I been slugged before, many a time, and I know what it’s like to come to after being knocked out. But when I came out of this it was more like waking up, so I must have slept. Anyway, it wasn’t morning. Must have been about three or four, before the sun came up. There was a weak moon hanging around outside the old walls, poking a gray finger in at us, me and