Carthage (30 page)

Just inside the prison gate was a metal-detector checkpoint through which the Lieutenant drove his visitors like a herd-dog driving sheep. Again they showed their laminated ID cards, this time to a frowning guard who stared at them suspiciously as if he’d never seen a tour-group before. The guard stamped their wrists with invisible ink warning them that, if they washed the ink off, the entire facility would go into lockdown—“Nobody
in
,
and nobody
out
.”

Other guards were moving through the checkpoint with them. It was protocol, the Lieutenant said, for visitors to allow COs to go ahead of civilians.

The Intern moved without hesitation. Her heart was beating calmly. In such times of wonderment it is good to recall
I am not really meant to be alive—this is all posthumous. I will endure.

“Step along, folks. This way.
Don’t stray from my side
.”

Now they were inside the facility, or rather in an interior courtyard of the facility. Underfoot was a scrubby open area of cobblestones edged with weeds and, to the right, a weatherworn stucco building upon which a rainbow mural had been painted, very likely by inmates. The Intern glanced back at the others in the tour-group—the students of whom all but two were female, the (female) professor, several middle-aged men, all white—and, in his distinguished pinstripe suit, the Investigator who’d already begun taking notes in his little pocket notebook.

The Investigator’s Sony watch, with the large state-of-the-art face in which dates, tides, sunsets and sunrises were registered, was visible on his wrist, and set to take instantaneous mini-pictures, the Intern knew.

Her own Sony watch, a gift from the Investigator, wasn’t so conspicuous on the Intern’s wrist, nor did she feel comfortable about using it. The Investigator had rehearsed picture-taking with her—numerous times—but the Investigator had told her not to take pictures inside the facility if she was anxious about doing so: to take pictures here was in violation of Florida law, and she could be arrested.

He
had no intention of being caught, or arrested.
He
prided himself on never once having been discovered when he’d gone undercover on a project, since the late 1970s.

The Lieutenant was telling them about the history of the Orion Maximum Security Correctional Facility for Men, founded in 1907, on just twenty acres of land. In subsequent decades the prison was enlarged and in 1939 the current Death Row unit was built, holding thirty-five prisoners. In 1982, other maximum-security facilities were built in central Florida, to accommodate a “growing increase” in the prison population—“Due mainly to drugs and drug-trafficking in the Miami area.” In the state of Florida there were three other Death Row institutions—Florida State Prison, or Starke Prison; Union Correctional Institution in Raiford; and Lowell Correctional Institution Annex, where women on Death Row were housed.

From her research the Intern knew most of this. The Lieutenant’s voice was brisk and hearty and grating to her ears. The Intern saw how the Lieutenant’s pebble-colored eyes moved over the individuals of the tour-group, compulsively. He had no need to listen to himself speak—he’d said these words many times, and knew to pause when he expected smiles, or nervous laughter. For it seemed that the Lieutenant was always counting the members of the tour-group—he couldn’t help himself.

The Intern sometimes found herself counting—people, figures, objects. Who knows why?

A way of fixing the infinite. Stopping time before it flows—away.

It was an M. C. Escher predilection, maybe. A compulsion.

Badly she wanted to draw—something. Her fingers twitched, as the Investigator’s fingers twitched, with the need to collect, to record. In this forbidden place, in particular. Where they moved like wraiths,
undercover.

The Intern, as “Sabbath McSwain,” had had an art exhibit, with two other young women artists, at the Females Without Borders center at the Temple Park. After a long absence of creating art—of feeling the wish to create art, still less the energy and hope of such effort—the Intern had worked for several exhilarated weeks on intricately rendered pen-and-ink drawings, not of Escher-like visionary subjects but of individuals she’d observed close-up, and intimately: some of them had been customers in the failing bookstore, faces that had appealed to her, a kindred loneliness in them as in herself, and that peculiar
yearning
.

The instinct for abstraction had waned in her. The instinct for a witty acquisition of being, through quantification and repetition. Now, she seemed to care mostly for individual faces: quirky, homely, unself-conscious, unique. Millions of individuals, very few of any particular distinction yet all of them unique. Here was the mystery!

The Investigator hadn’t wanted an assistant who was
creative
. The Intern would hide from him this impulse, never would she confide in him that she’d had an exhibit at the Females Without Borders center. (Which possibly the Investigator had seen, though he wouldn’t have remembered her name attached to twenty-five pen-and-ink portraits of extreme simplicity.)

The Intern smiled: overhearing one of the young women in the tour-group murmur to a companion that the Investigator—“that man, there—with the white hair”—was “some kind of retired chief justice”—a remark which, the Intern thought, would amuse her employer when she told him.

“Any questions, folks? If not, follow me!”

The Lieutenant had finished the opening passages of his tour-speech. Now he was leading his fifteen visitors across the courtyard and into the stucco chapel.

“This is our ‘non-denominational’ house of worship, folks. We are very proud of our chapel.”

The interior was spartan, with pinewood pews, a low ceiling, sputtering candles against a wall and a plain T-cross, not a crucifix, elevated at the front of the room. There was a pulpit banked with artificial calla lilies and behind the pulpit stood a light-skinned black man in blue prison uniform, about thirty-five years old, nervously waiting to address the group. He had a boyish face, eager eyes. The Lieutenant introduced him as “Juan-Carlos”—a “lifer”—that is, the inmate had been given an indeterminate prison sentence—“thirty years to life”—from which he might, at some point in the future, be paroled.

Juan-Carlos spoke rapidly, staring out into the pews with shining eyes. His voice had a gospel-lilt. Telling of how he’d made a “bad choice” as a boy, joining a gang, in Miami, drug-dealing-gang—“thown my own life away like garbage”—and ever after, “tryin to retrieve it through the help of Christ Our Lord.”

Aged fifteen he’d been initiated into the gang. He’d been involved in a “cutting”—later, a “killing”—though he hadn’t killed anyone himself he’d been present at an execution of two men and so he was guilty—“felony murder.”

Also his own loving mother, he’d stolen from, and struck in the face—she’d died, of some junkie beating on her, he understood it was
his fault.

Every day praying, Juan-Carlos said, for the men he’d seen die. Bled to death on the street. For the families of the boys. Every day praying for his momma. And for himself, his soul. Every day twenty-two years, eight months since the men died.

The New Year of that year, that followed, when he was seventeen years old and Jesus had come into his soul like a “blinding comet.”

The Intern was moved by Juan-Carlos’s words. The Intern would have liked to press her hands against her ears, not to hear more.

Thown my life away.

Garbage.

The chapel-talk was ending. The Lieutenant stood in the aisle asking the tour-visitors if they had questions for Juan-Carlos.

At first no one spoke. Then, the woman professor lifted her hand to ask what had been Juan-Carlos’s “gang-affiliation” but the Lieutenant interrupted—“Sorry, ma’am! That can’t be revealed.”

Several others asked questions, about parole. Juan-Carlos said that he’d been interviewed by the parole board twice, and turned down twice, but that he would not give up—he would re-apply, next year.

“Every day I pray to God, to thank Him, I was not sentenced to death. For it might have happened—and I would be on Death Row this morning, and not here speakin with you. Amen!”

The Investigator raised his hand to ask a question. All looked at him—the white-haired gentleman in the expensive-looking suit, white shirt and tie, of whom it was rumored he was a retired judge.

But the Investigator’s question was not a sensational one. He asked only if Juan-Carlos was taking courses in the prison? High school courses, vocational courses?

Juan-Carlos shook his head,
no
. There were no courses for inmates in Orion, right now.

“So you don’t have a high school diploma, obviously. So if you are paroled—what will you do, outside?”

Juan-Carlos smiled at the Investigator. Juan-Carlos said he’d worked in the “license-plate” shop, he had experience
there
.

“Reading skills? Writing? Math?”

Juan-Carlos would have attempted an answer except the Lieutenant interrupted, irritably: “Thank you, sir, for your question. It’s a very good question, we will think about it. But now—time to move on.”

Juan-Carlos was ushered from the pulpit by a guard in a dun-colored uniform. The Lieutenant led his tour-group out of the chapel in two columns, back to the cobblestone courtyard. Overhead the sky remained white-glowering and opaque. Like a thin rubber film stretched tight.

The Intern shielded her eyes with her fingers. The inmate’s words had been moving to her, she’d had a wish to draw his face, his lanky figure. Along his right leg were the white vertical letters
P R I S O N E R
which rendered all that the man said somehow diminished, as if a clown were speaking, to entertain his captors.

The Intern didn’t want to glance at her watch, to see how little time had passed in the chapel. Already she could see that time moved with infinite slowness inside the prison walls.

The Lieutenant herded his visitors in the direction of a squat dull-granite memorial stone with a double column of engraved names—“COs who died in the line of duty here at Orion. From 1907 to 2010.”

Beside the memorial stone was an American flag hanging at perpetual half-mast.

Many questions were asked about these deaths in the line of duty. The Lieutenant said that he had himself seen, with his own eyes, fellow COs attacked, beaten, even killed by prisoners “on a rampage”—narrowly he’d escaped being taken hostage, in the 1980s, in a “prison uprising.”

The Lieutenant told of the “most violent ten minutes” in the prison’s history, in 1969—an attempted breakout when a Black Panther defense attorney smuggled an automatic revolver into the prison, to leave with his client who smuggled it inside his clothing and, as he was being escorted back to his cell block, suddenly began shooting wildly, killing several COs and fellow inmates until he was rushed by tower-guards and shot down dead.

“Ten minutes, and ten people killed. That’s what we live with every hour of every day in this facility—what can happen to us at any time.”

One of the visitors asked what had happened to the defense attorney? Had he been arrested for smuggling the weapon into the prison?

“No. He was not arrested. He fled the country—went to Cuba. Far as I know, he’s still there.”

The Lieutenant spoke bitterly, vehemently. The Intern knew that the Investigator would have liked to question the man further: how did the “Black Panther defense attorney” smuggle the weapon through the metal-detector? How had the attorney so easily escaped the country? There had to be more to the account than what the Lieutenant had said.

But the Investigator allowed the moment to pass. It was not his strategy to arouse antagonism, still less suspicion, in any individual whom he confronted while
undercover.

In one of the newer buildings was the infirmary, but the Lieutenant wasn’t going to lead the tour-group inside.

“It ain’t the safest place. It don’t smell good. Like, lots of germs from sick people. ‘Infections.’ Last November there was swine flu, then shingles, and chicken pox—half the facility was quarantined. Lots of COs were hit—including me. Sick as a dog and lost like twenty pounds. But worst you can get in here is T.B.—some new kind of strain, there ain’t the medicine to combat it.”

Visitors asked how many “physicians” were on call at Orion.

Visitors asked if “seriously sick” prisoners were removed from the facility, to hospitals.

The Lieutenant answered these questions with a sly razor-flash of a smile. The Lieutenant said it was the “most usual thing to expect,” a man would die in the infirmary if he was an old man, a lifer.

“That’s what you have to expect, folks. If you ‘do the crime, you gotta do the time.’ If you are sent to Orion ain’t unreasonable to expect you might-be gonna die in Orion.”

Someone began to object—there should be “health and medical options” for all prisoners—but one of the older men who’d been silent until now, though grimly nodding at every remark of the Lieutenant’s, interrupted to say that it was “ridiculous” to expect maximum-security prisoners to have first-rate medical treatment any more inside prison than they’d have had outside prison.

“Taxpayers are tired of coddling these people. One in one hundred U.S. citizens is ‘incarcerated’—or will be—and one in less than ten—males—in the ‘African-American’ community is incarcerated, or will be. You can see it here at Orion—in the ‘Yard’ . . . Can’t blame the prison-system for that that’s to do with breakdown in families, family-values . . .”

The speaker was fleshy-jowled and flush-faced and had the righteous-exasperated look of a school superintendent in a troubled school-district or maybe the look of a minister of a Protestant sect just-this-side-of-respectable-middle-class. The chuckling Lieutenant agreed with the fleshy-jowled man as if to pique the more liberal-minded of his visitors—(the university professor and her students? The white-haired gentleman scribbling in his little notebook?).