Carthage (31 page)

“Sir, you are absolutely correct. Can’t blame the prison-system for the population that’s crammed in it.”

They were being led along a coarse-gravel path that pained the Intern’s feet, even in hiking boots. At the rear of a building they stood observing inmates working with metal—“license-plate manufacture”—and with wood—“furniture-manufacture.” The inmates were of all ages including surprisingly old—“lifers” in their fifties, sixties—some of them with straggling beards, bald heads and canes; amid the younger men, of whom the majority were dark-skinned, here and there were “disabled”—canes, walkers, even wheelchairs. The Intern was distracted from the Lieutenant’s words staring at these men who were oblivious—(or wished to give that impression)—to being rudely observed by civilian-strangers.

Her heart beat rapidly. She hoped they would not—would not turn, to see
her.

Criminals, they were—“convicts.” Yet she had to suppose they were very likely veterans—“wounded in action.”

The woman professor standing close beside the Intern turned to her, with a look of concern.

“Excuse me? Are you—feeling faint?”

The Intern had been breathing strangely. The Intern had been feeling very shaky.

As if blood were draining from her head. Sensation draining downward out of her brain.

“Yes. No. Thank you. I am—fine.”

The Intern made an effort to listen to the Lieutenant questioning his fellow COs in charge of furniture-and-license-plate manufacture in the facility. Their exchanges had the air of much-repeated words yet were not uninteresting nonetheless.

The tour-group civilians were lavish in their praise like doting parents or grandparents confronted with the work of brain-damaged children.

“Gosh this is very good work! This is just—excellent work.”

“This is—these are—pieces of furniture I would buy myself. I could imagine, buying . . .”

“. . . this table, is it maplewood? It looks really solid . . .”

“. . . for our sons’ room, I would buy a bureau like this. Good and solid and . . .”

“So smooth and
shiny
. It’s like, shellacked?—no slivers . . .”

They were informed that most government offices in the state of Florida were furnished by furniture-makers at one or another of the prison facilities. A number of schools, community colleges.

“Y’see, prison is a ‘learning opportunity.’ It ain’t just taking courses like how to read, write—it’s learning a trade, too.”

The Lieutenant seemed to be addressing the Investigator who was inspecting the furniture at close hand, with an expression of affable scrutiny.

“Some men get paroled from Orion, they’re hired right-away by furniture companies—ain’t no problem them getting back in the job market.”

Next, the Lieutenant led his charges on a hike uphill. Soon a number of the tour-visitors were panting. At the corner of a high gaunt building they were led abruptly left, and down an incline—in front of them, a sudden expanse of open land, part-pavement and part-scrubby grassland, the “Yard.”

The civilians stared. Hundreds—could it be
hundreds
?—of inmates were in the Yard, under the supervision of what appeared to be, to the casual eye, a very few guards.

Though there were guards in the watch-towers of course. Stationed at intervals along the fifteen-foot electrified wire fence.

The Lieutenant explained how gangs of inmates—African-Americans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Cubans, “whites”—with now, more recent in past decades, “Chinese”—had taken possession of particular parts of the Yard, that were off-limits to all other gangs. “Inside, it’s your skin-color that matters. Not one other thing so much.
That
never changes.”

They were surprised to see a number of older inmates—the Investigator’s age, at least. Several had long white wispy beards and walked with canes on the dirt track while younger inmates jogged past them. Elsewhere inmates were shooting basketballs at netless rims, lifting weights, doing exercises; standing about, pacing—restless. You were aware of “race”—skin color. It was as the Lieutenant had said, the men were self-segregated by skin color and the fact was a depressing one yet unmistakable, unarguable. The Intern would have liked to confront the Investigator:
Where is your idealism about race blindness now?

For the Investigator was far more idealistic than the Intern. The Investigator placed his faith in the future—in “a” future—in which social justice had at last been eradicated as one might wish to eradicate, in the state of Florida, for instance, a particular plant- or animal-invader that was devastating native species.

The tour-group was quiet now as they followed the Lieutenant blindly through the Yard. Not all of the inmates had noticed the tour- group but those who had were staring, some of them openly, others covertly like children. In the Yard, on the scrubby ground, cloud-shadows passed swift and fleet as the shadows of predator birds.

“Folks, this way. Don’t stare, ain’t po-lite to stare, ain’t that been explained to you? ‘No-eye-contact’—‘no fraternization with inmates’—you got it, right?”

Briskly the Lieutenant led the visitors along another rough-gravel path. This one was protected by the open expanse of the Yard by a ten-foot wire-mesh fence. In the near distance were open urinals—the Intern was astonished to see, as other (female) individuals in the tour-group were astonished to see—about which the Lieutenant said, chiding, “ ‘Open urinals’—don’t look. It’s a protocol—
don’t look
. The inmates know to keep their eyes to themselves, but visitors have got to be reminded of good manners.
Just don’t look
. Any man using any open urinal, he’s invisible, like. Monkey-don’t-see, monkey-don’t-do.”

What did this mean? Was the Lieutenant teasing, scolding? Threatening? Quickly the Intern looked away from the open urinals.

“Anyway just step-along here, folks. No need to linger here.”

Yet the Intern saw: inmates’ eyes shifting in their sockets, across a considerable distance. They were noting the presence of females.

How, the Intern wondered, were they counting
her
?

Ugly ugly ugly. That one.

Gloating to think that
ugliness
is a shield.

Ugliness
attracts no sex-desire.

“Inmates allowed in the Yard like this, their daily exercise, they value it highly and would not jeopardize it. Dangerous felons you will not see, mostly—they are in solitary, or a special cell block, or Death Row. To get Yard rights, a man has got to show good behavior. There’s gangs out there but not the worst members. Long as nobody pushes in anybody else’s territory, there won’t be trouble. Don’t worry they’re looking at us—they don’t want nothing to do with us. The prison don’t negotiate hostages—that’s known. A CO like myself, I am not carrying a firearm. You will note, I am not carrying a firearm. So that a firearm can’t be taken from me. And if anybody tried to get around this fence, the tower-guards would see them right away. I mean, a half-second. The tower-guards call in a bullhorn—EVERYBODY DOWN! EVERYBODY DOWN! And if they do, you throw yourself down. You don’t think twice, you don’t try to figure what the hell it is, is it serious danger, or whatever it is, you hear that command and you throw yourself down and if you don’t, folks, if you’re still standing, you’re a candidate for getting shot down. That’s why we tell visitors not to wear anything remotely like blue, you don’t want to be confused with an inmate in a time of emergency. A tower-guard will shoot you down, that is his authority. The fact is—‘No Warning Shots.’ A civilian can be killed out of ignorance. If some kind of uprising started, and no warning. But look—chances are, nothing is gonna happen, see they’re just watching us without making any move, they’re too smart to make any move, broad daylight like this is. Like I said the worst guys are not out in the Yard—they’re lucky they get one hour in forty-eight for ‘exercise’ outside their cell—and it ain’t in any Yard—and a shower—and that’s it. Some of them, sheer animals, crazy-like, they’d tear your throats out with their teeth if they could, so you don’t see them, a visitor is spared the sight of them. So ladies, don’t worry! Truth is no tour-group has ever been threatened at Orion. No hostages! Not on my watch. And I been leading tours for—hell, twenty years now. Not that this is the main CO work I do, it is not, but guided-tour is what I guess not everybody at Orion is suited for, or has the talent for, so the warden counts on me and I ain’t gonna let him down. Any questions?”

The Investigator asked the Lieutenant which of his numerous assignments at Orion did he value most.

“Death Row. I prefer Death Row.”

“And why is that, Lieutenant?”

“Well, say. Nobody ever asked me that question before. And the answer is—Death Row because the men are mostly all settled in. Not like the new recruits that haven’t been sorted out yet and haven’t figured it out yet, they’re
inside
—could be a guy twenty years old, he’s in for life, just getting to catch on, that’s a guy so wild and desperate he’d kill anybody he could get his hands on and that includes himself—why the new guys hang themselves, the first few days you really have to watch them. Not one percent of them is what you’d call ‘sane’—once they get inside. But a Death Row inmate, he’s different. He could be ‘crazy’ too—but it’s a more settled kind of crazy. He’d be trying to figure legal briefs, writing letters to lawyers, judges, newspapers, TV—his mind would be crazy but not violent-like. And there’s just enough of them on Death Row whose sentences are commuted, or there’s some history of it, the average Death Row inmate can have hope. Some of them been here like twelve, fifteen—eighteen years. The lawyers keep filing appeals and the ‘anti-capital-punishment’ people keep showing up out front to demonstrate when there’s an execution. It’s like a carnival, with TV cameras. Now, it’s on the Internet. This old guy Pop Krunk, that was executed last month, he’d been on Death Row here since 1987. Walked with a cane, then in a wheelchair—his legs just went. He had a white beard, like some kinda crazy Santa Claus, so it was like real interesting to talk with him. They accumulate wisdom on Death Row. You kind of grow old together. They’re more thoughtful, the majority. They don’t have to share a cell like the rest of the population—most of them now, it’s three to a cell, and supposed to be just two. But it’s three. So they’re crammed together like animals and when they get sick, like swine flu, Christ!—it ain’t a pretty sight. Even if they don’t kill one another they can infect one another, bad. But Death Row is like, the elite. And their cells are bigger too, six feet by nine feet by nine-and-a-half (in height). I never thought about it before—till you asked me, sir—I mean, Professor. My answer is Death Row.”

The Intern, listening intently, did not turn to glance at the Investigator.

She admired her employer for his methodical ways: he inveigled people into saying far more than they believed they were saying; volunteering to confide in him, as to a friend. He was an artist of words as another might be an artist of music: he could “play” compositions to evoke emotions in others, and this was the purpose of the
SHAME!
series. He was an emotional man, himself—yet it was an intellectual outrage he wanted to evoke in his audience, a sense of the terrible violation of a moral contract with other individuals, different from themselves. (And in the case of animals, of a species different from their species.) He chose to write bluntly and directly—not “calculatedly.” When he could, he allowed others to speak in his place, like the Lieutenant whose words he was recording, without the Lieutenant knowing.

“Through here, folks! Best to hold your breath as long as you can.”

The Lieutenant led the tour-group into a vast room like an airplane hangar, filled with long tables and chairs—a dining room. Adjacent to this vast room was a second vast room similarly furnished. Though the dining rooms were empty it was not difficult to imagine inmates crammed at the tables—a buzz and mutter of male voices, a clattering of plates, cafeteria trays. The smells were a mix—garbagey, rotted, rancid, gaseous, excretory. Old, stale, spilled food, and old, stale, spilled urine. The Intern felt a little leap of nausea.

“Staggered lunch-hours, the inmates feed. Cell Block A, Cell Block B, Cell Block C, Cell Block D—they all come through here like cattle through a chute.”

Each wall of each room was covered in a highly detailed, bizarre and hallucinatory mural, or mosaic of murals, executed by an amateur artist with but a primitive sense of perspective, the human face and the human body. Heads were over-large on dwarf-torsos, arms were spindly and legs foreshortened. The faces were pasty-pale, dull-blank like the faces of the dead. Were the murals a peek into Hell, or a mirroring of the dining halls?

At a height of about ten feet above the floor, catwalks circled the dining hall, for guards to overlook the scene. Prominent on the catwalks were signs
NO WARNING SHOTS.

With evident seriousness the Lieutenant was praising the “prison-artist” who’d been paroled from Orion in 1981 but had died not long afterward in a detention house in Tampa where he’d been picked up for vagrancy in a squatters’ village under Interstate 75. The Intern wanted to shut her eyes, she could not bear to see the deformed heads and faces, the blank dead eyes.

The Lieutenant was praising the deceased artist, unless the Lieutenant was mocking the claims of others of the deceased artist—“DeVuonna is compared to ‘Michael-angelo’—the Italian artist—in his use of wall-space and parts of the ceiling, too. There was a special fund for ‘preserving DeVuonna’ . . .”

The Intern shut her eyes for just a moment. How delicious, yet how dangerous! She was afraid of falling asleep on her feet.

The Lieutenant then seemed to be chiding his visitors, urging them farther into the room—“We are not leaving quite so soon, folks! Relax.” The young-woman sociology students were seated at one of the long tables, the Intern and the Investigator and others at a nearby table, a trapped audience for the Lieutenant who continued to regale them with tales of episodes that had happened in the dining rooms, not so long ago. By this time the females in the tour-group had grown quiet. The men had removed their jackets, beginning to perspire. Only the white-haired Investigator maintained an air of curiosity, and gave no sign of feeling ill or faint.