Well today they tell me they gon send me upstate a ways and it’s my day with ol sparky and they’re happy to send me to him. I tells em that we ain’t got no ol sparky and ol sparky’s down in Florida and ain’t  nothin so grand up here to have no nickname. The guard just eyeballs me mean like like he’s gon scare me when he just told me I’m gonna meet the reaper.
He likes to put the scare in me. When I first got up here he used to tell me I was goin to hell and he would make sure it hurt and I don’t deserve to breathe his air and all that. So one day I’m sitting in in my box and my buckets steaming and the bedframe’d sear you to the touch and Donny’s goin on about my sins so I tell him, I says “I bet you hell ain’t half as hot as Fayetteville and the people ain’t so ugly.”
And then he stops preaching to me because he figures I’m clown and he can’t consort with no clown so now he just stares at me through the bars like one day he’s gonna look at me just right and I’ll just keel over right here.
Ain’t nothing new to me though. People been trying to put the fear of God in me since he sent me here and I ain’t met a man I couldn’t lick yet.
Even lil Thomas from Springfield couldn’t whoop me, and he was big as an ox and twice as mean. He was stupid too. I remember he couldn’t never do arithmetic unless there was food involved. If you ask him what’s two plus two he’d look at you cross eyed, but you ask him how many donuts in a half dozen and you’ll hear six in four different languages.
And one day lol Thomas says he wants to hit me. That was his way. He wasn’t no sneak so he wouldn’t jump you. But he never told nobody why they was gettin hit. I figure Thomas woke up and the first person he saw in his mind’s eye, that’s who he would hit.
But I wasn’t scared of being hit so I tell Thomas he could come up out of a hole like a Chinaman and it wouldn’t be no thing to me. And he gets real hot cus his daddy got killed by a Chinaman over there and he figures I’m calling him a Chinaman and he tells folks he’s gonna kill me. He says he’s gonna grab me and shake me like a dog until I just snap up and die there.
And so now I’m worried. I ain’t scared of being hit but here comes this one big as a Rhinoceros and three times as mean and he’s says he gonna shake me like a dog.
I’m slick though. That’s what they called me, ain’t nobody from here to Dallas ever called me smart but they all thought I was slick. So I go down there to the patch of dirt by the school where everyone did their whoopings. And I go there and pick up a little rock that sat just right in my hand. And I wait for the boys to come down there to see blood and I start stomping. I start hollerin like an Indian and I’m stomping . And the boys see me kicking up dirt and they start to saying im crazy and that I’m really gonna kill lil Thomas.
With the way things get goin in school Thomas has heard it all by the time it’s time to fight. He’s looking at me sideways and like he wants to kill me more cussa this. And so he starts walking to me and I swing on him with my rock hand and hit him right behind the ear. Then he starts dancing, like a chicken. One foot going this way left foot going that, and he ain’t all there so he can’t sat down on either foot and he’s just stumbling and bumbling all over like a drunk. The boys was laughing but I wasnt, I was looking at him and I was sad because I didn’t know his daddy was killed by a chinaman. He barely knew his daddy and how the hell I’m sposed to account for all that.
I ran out of the clearing and I never went to that school again. I never got to apologize for calling him a Chinaman and he never let me forget it. Here I am a day under fifty and you could still go down to Ive’s and see him swallow a gallon of malt telling folks that Sammy Willis cracked him with a cinderblock and run off.