Carthage (32 page)

The Lieutenant was showing his audience a box of items—homemade weapons discovered in the possession of inmates in the dining room within the past month. These were a toothbrush whittled sharp as an ice pick, a rusted razor blade attached to a cardboard handle, a metal hook fashioned out of large paper clips, a spike with a duct-tape grip that looked as if it were ideal for eye-gouging. “We keep ’em like in a museum, locked in here. Any weird thing you can think of, that could be a weapon, our inmates have already thought of at Orion.”

Almost proudly the Lieutenant spoke.

Suddenly a door was opened at the rear of the dining hall. Two burly COs entered ushering before them several inmates in blue uniforms—the intrusion was startling, and distracting; the tour-group visitors stared at the inmates only a few yards from them, who stared back at them. Their eyes were stark and glassy and dead-seeming like eyes in the mural, except they were moving. Three of the inmates were dark-skinned, the fourth a light-skinned Hispanic in his mid- or late twenties who wore his hair in a tiny braid at the nape of his neck and who swung himself along on crutches with a grim little wince of his jaws.

Quickly the Intern looked away from the young Hispanic not wanting to lock eyes with his.

Wounded. A veteran.

A recent veteran: Iraq? Afghanistan?

She felt a wave of sickness, guilt. A guilt so profound, it was a sickness in the gut.

She did not look after the young man who was of her age, her generation. She felt the fury in his shoulders, that were muscled, and in his upper arms, his forearms and strong hands gripping the crutches that allowed him to move with a kind of stealthy swiftness, far faster than one would expect of a crippled boy.

That is, a wounded veteran.

It seemed to the Intern that no one in the tour-group wished to acknowledge the wounded inmate, nor even the other inmates. The Lieutenant called out a greeting to his fellow COs who saluted him with deadpan protocol—“
Sir!
”

Where the COs and the inmates had come from at this time and where they were going wasn’t explained. The Intern was made to feel, as the others surely felt, how easily it could happen that inmates might break loose from their captors, for there were so many more inmates than corrections officers . . .

Probably, the inmates were kitchen-workers. They were headed for the kitchen to prepare for the massive upcoming lunch.

The Lieutenant was saying, “Most people are curious about how we feed two thousand six hundred sixty-eight inmates in general population—maximum security—three times a day. Well—it ain’t easy! First, a bell goes and they’re marched out of their cell blocks into the dining hall and along the walls—there, and there—and through the cafeteria line, get their trays and food, return to the dining hall here, and
sit.
And I mean
sit
in their designated places, only. If they sit at some table not designated for them there’s the danger of retaliation—like, their throat cut. Anybody fucks around—(excuse me, ladies)—he’s stripped and tossed into solitary. Twenty minutes in and out—a bell goes—they’re marched back to their cells. It’s like cattle through a chute—they’re going in one direction, one at a time. And the food ain’t bad, either—the inmates are damn hungry, the way they eat.”

Though the vast dining halls were empty it wasn’t difficult to envision prisoners crammed together at the tables, and to hear their muffled, surging voices, the clatter of plates and cutlery. It wasn’t difficult to imagine an intensification of smells—food, spillage, unwashed flesh, intestinal gases. It was not difficult to sense the prisoners’ desperation, and the danger in that desperation.

From somewhere in the building, possibly from the kitchen area at the rear, into which the inmates and COs had disappeared, there came a sound of raised voices, a door shut hard, clanging pot-lids. The Intern felt uneasy, apprehensive; a touch of panic, that inmates would swarm into the dining room, their voices booming, echoing. Yet the Lieutenant continued his maddeningly matter-of-fact speech, a kind of harangue—making some point about “mass-food.”

“Folks! Two volunteers are needed.”

The Lieutenant snapped his fingers. At the signal a kitchen-worker inmate, a smiling young black man in a hairnet, long-sleeved blue T-shirt, blue pants with
P R I S O N E R
in white on the right leg, appeared with a tray of “sample food” on a platter: something breaded and nubby—chicken nuggets?—a small slab of grayish-fatty meat, mashed potatoes and gravy; a burrito, French fries; melted “American cheese” sandwich, a jelly-glaze donut.

“You must all be hungry,” the Lieutenant said, teasing, to the tour-group. “Lunch is yet far off. So—volunteers?”

So swiftly the sample-food had appeared, obviously this was a part of the tour. Between the Lieutenant and the smiling young black man with oily-kinky hair flattened by a hairnet there passed a sidelong glance of complicity.

“Yo, Harman? You fix up a pretty-good samplin’ for us, for today?”

“Yessir sure has. Yessir Loo-t’nent.”

The Lieutenant spoke with excruciating comic-condescension. Yet, Harman seemed to mind not at all and fell in immediately with the banter.

No one wanted to come forward. The Intern hoped that the Investigator wouldn’t glance over at her, to signal her.

At last, two of the younger visitors—both sociology students—a girl with a long swishing ponytail, a young man in a Marlins baseball cap—came forward, with apprehensive smiles.

“Good, good! Thank you! Just a few bites of each! I think you will be favorably impressed by the quality.”

The Lieutenant—smirking, or sincere—seated the volunteers in front of the tray. Slowly and self-consciously they began to eat.

The girl ate chicken nuggets with her fingers, the young man speared a piece of “beef-steak” and ate. Mashed potatoes and gravy, fries—burrito . . . The volunteers bravely chewed, swallowed. “Not bad, eh? Compliments to the chef?” The Lieutenant laughed.

Like a watchful parent he stood over the volunteers seeing that they sampled a bit of everything. It seemed to the Intern that the girl-student was beginning to look sick, and the boy-student’s jaws were grinding with grim tenacity.

The Intern knew enough of what kitchen-conditions might be in an institution like this, to feel a shudder of dread at the prospect of eating such food. The Investigator would know, too. Of course. She didn’t dare glance in his direction. Toxic bacteria breeding, invisibly swarming as in a petri dish . . .

What a joke, those admonitions in restaurant restrooms—
Employees are required to wash their hands thoroughly with soap and water before returning to work.
How much more ironic, in this maximum-security prison.

The Lieutenant was answering less painfully clinical questions from visitors about food preparation at Orion. “Well, see—as you’d expect—ninety-three percent of the prison services are provided by inmates. Couldn’t afford the luxury of ‘incarceration’ otherwise.”

The volunteers were eating more slowly. More slowly chewing, and swallowing. With a wink of merriment the Lieutenant said, “Not bad, eh? Compliments to Harman-yo, here—
he the chef
.”

The black boy in the hairnet laughed showing a flash of teeth.

The ponytail girl smiled faintly. The young man in the Marlins cap wiped at his mouth with the back of his hand.

“See, if you’re hungry, you eat. If you ain’t eating, then you ain’t hungry. Law of nature.”

The Lieutenant offered the other visitors the remains of the prison-food sample. When no one accepted he picked up a chicken nugget—turned it in his fingers but with a mysterious chuckle decided not to pop it into his mouth.

“Harman-yo. You turnin’ into a real pro, once you get outta here you’re gonna cut some swath through South Beach, yo. Take my word for it, son.”

At last, led out of the dining hall. Outside, the Intern drew a deep breath of fresh air.

How badly she wanted to detach herself from the tour-group, and escape back to the entrance. So exhausted, she could have crawled back to the entrance.

Except, the Investigator would be terribly disappointed in her.

Disapproving, disgusted with Sabbath McSwain.

A few yards away oblivious of her. Scribbling notes in his little notebook. The dining-hall episode hadn’t bothered the Investigator, much. Or, he’d put it quickly out of his mind.

Next, the Lieutenant led the group on a brisk little hike.

Cell Block C in a fortified stucco building that, to enter, required passing through another checkpoint. The (invisible) ink code on the civilians’ wrists was checked in ultraviolet light. The Intern’s laminated driver’s license issued to
Sabbath McSwain
was examined closely if to no particular purpose. The sociology professor asked the Lieutenant why they were going through another checkpoint, since they’d already gone through two checkpoints, and the Lieutenant retorted with none of the affability he’d been beaming on his charges for the past ninety minutes or more: “Ma’am, it’s how it
is
. You don’t wish to comply, I can find a CO to take you back to the entrance and you can take yourself home with no further ado.”

The woman was rebuffed, red-faced. No more flirty exchanges with the Lieutenant, for her!

This was a crazed place, the Intern was beginning to see. You could not fully comprehend the craziness for you saw only surfaces, edges and outlines of things. You saw
faces
not what was
beneath.

The slightest infraction upon another’s sense of himself—his pride, his integrity—his
power
—and you felt the immediate opposition, the leap of madness.

Yet somehow, the Intern wasn’t prepared for Cell Block C. After the proximity of the inmate-workers in the furniture-and-license-plate factory who’d seemed oblivious of their civilian visitors and had seemed among themselves friendly, cooperative and non-threatening. And Harman exchanging banter with the white Lieutenant.

As soon as they were ushered out of the checkpoint area and into the squat building housing Cell Block C the Intern sensed the difference. A powerful smell of men’s bodies. A sensation of strain as if the very air were viscous, vibrating.

In his mock-affable tone the Lieutenant introduced the tour-group to the cell block officers who glanced at them with barely concealed contempt. Nor did these officers exchange friendly greetings with the Lieutenant who seemed in their company suddenly fatuous, foolish. There was a high din in the air as of a thrum of angry hornets—the first tier of cells seemed to stretch away for as much as a city block, and above it—overhead—a second tier, which you could barely glimpse from the ground. As the Lieutenant spoke to the group about Cell Block C—a “new-recruit cell block mainly”—“before the men are sorted out and their gang affiliations determined”—the Intern became slowly aware of a chilling sight: on a catwalk around the cell block guards were stationed at intervals, holding automatic rifles in the crooks of their arms; the nearest guard, a severe-looking black man, was standing almost directly above the Lieutenant and his gathering of civilians, one foot up on a railing, rifle grasped in his hands as if he were prepared to fire at any moment.

Behind him and prominent on the stucco wall in full view of both tiers of cells was the ominous sign
NO WARNING SHOTS.

The Intern wanted to pluck at the Investigator’s sleeve, to make sure he’d noticed the guard overhead. The Investigator would have wanted to take pictures of this guard, the Intern was sure.

(But maybe that wouldn’t be a prudent idea, to take pictures of the armed COs. If the Investigator was caught violating prison policy, and arrested—what then?)

Before they’d come to Orion, the Intern and the Investigator had done a good deal of research into the facility. The degree of “prisoner-on-prisoner” violence—“CO-on-prisoner” violence—unsatisfactorily explained “accidents” resulting in deaths—“suspicious suicides”—was high; though no higher than comparable correctional facilities in the state of Florida, and elsewhere in the United States.

But only in Cell Block C did the Intern
feel
—a sense of personal helplessness and dismay so powerful, it could not be named . . .

The area in which the civilians were standing ill at ease and self-conscious was cramped. There was no space here for a tour-group. You could see that the Lieutenant was barely tolerated in Cell Block C and his questions, put to his fellow COs for the benefit of the civilians, were met with sullen mumbles. Like several young-woman sociology students the Intern found herself standing only a few yards from three inmates in blue uniforms who were, for some reason, not in their cells but in the aisle, and not handcuffed or shackled together. Two of the inmates were dark-skinned Hispanics and the third, the tallest, had a Caucasian-demon face threaded with broken capillaries and a blunt bald head covered in tattoos; on his bulging biceps, swastika-tattoos, a green-snake tattoo, a bloody little heart impaled upon a dagger. Seeing such a figure you would want to smile—
can this be real?
The men were staring at the Intern, and past the Intern at the uneasy university students, their faces blank as faces stitched out of leather.

What were these men doing out of their cells? No one thought to explain. The Lieutenant seemed oblivious of them.

Next, the Lieutenant herded his tour-group onto a walkway that spanned the full length of the first-tier block of cells. It seemed to be the Lieutenant’s intention to march them, single-file, around the cell block—past the cells, within a very few inches of the cell bars, and the men huddled inside.

“A word of caution, folks! Not just the ladies but gents, too. Try to stay as far to the left as you can, by this railing—do not walk too close to the cells. If one of the inmates reaches out to grab you—could be hard to extricate you from his grip. Got it?”

The Lieutenant chuckled meanly. The Intern was shocked: did the tour-guide think this was amusing? A joke? Was marching his civilian tour-group around the cell block a good idea? The young women students were looking terrified. Their professor was looking terrified. Even the several men who’d tried to affect an air of reasonable calm in the dining hall were looking concerned.