Carthage (33 page)

Only the Investigator was unperturbed. Stately-tall, courtly-mannered, with airy-floating white hair and an expression of just-perceptible disapproval, the oldest member of the tour-group took the Lieutenant aside to say: “Don’t you think this is a little risky, Lieutenant? Provocative? That the prisoners might get over-aroused? And your visitors endangered?”

“No one is ‘endangered’—that’s ridiculous. The men are secured in their cells. They can’t possibly break out. Don’t linger looking into the cells, and don’t linger making conversation with them. This is one of the concluding features of our tour through Orion. Everybody agrees afterward, you won’t know the ‘feel’ of a maximum-security prison without the ‘march around the block.’ ”

But the Investigator had nettled the Lieutenant, who felt his authority challenged.

The Intern had sized up the situation with the three inmates outside their cells: they were being marched off, taken away to another part of the prison; though looking like parodies of maximum-security prisoners, it seemed likely that they were being escorted to parole hearings, or had even been granted parole, or had “maxed-out”—for they weren’t handcuffed or secured in any way. This was a relief—was it? The Intern had never seen close-up anyone quite like the tattooed Nazi: a member of the notorious Aryan Brotherhood.

When they’d researched the Death Row prisons, the Intern had also looked into the Death Row prisoners and the crimes they’d been convicted of committing.

The Intern had come to realize, as the Investigator had suggested, that, if you were a foe of capital punishment, it was a good idea not to know what condemned prisoners had been convicted of doing to their victims. Good not to temper mercy with too much information.

Despite her anxiety the Intern was clear-minded enough to position herself at the very head of the line. She was small, agile, quick on her feet—no problem to her, to slip past slow-moving others.

Her instinct was to save herself. It was immediate, and primitive. It had nothing to do with conscience, duty, or “good.” She knew what was coming now and hoped to escape the worst of the punishment.

The Lieutenant was taking up the rear—he would drive the tour-group forward. But the Intern would walk first, and fast; she would press to the left, against the railing, and would not glance into any of the cells, if she could prevent herself; she didn’t wish to provoke any of the inmates, particularly she didn’t wish any of the inmates to grasp that she wasn’t a slight-bodied young man but a young woman in boy’s clothing.

Several of the young-woman sociology students were asking the Lieutenant if they could stay behind but the Lieutenant told them no, absolutely not.

“This is the full-tour of Orion! You signed up for the full-tour! You will not leave Orion without completing the full-tour, girls! Let’s begin.”

A cruel merriment shone in the pebbly eyes. The Intern thought
He hates us. As much as the inmates hate him.

The march began. The Intern, at the head of the line, managed to pass by most of the cells before the inhabitants, crowded inside, realized what the situation was—a tour-group being marched around the cell block by the Lieutenant—and let out howls of excitement and derision particularly directed toward the females.

The Intern strode forward, swiftly. The Intern bit her lower lip.

The Intern thought
I am not “female”—not as the others are. These men have no interest in me.

Yet the Intern felt the men lunging at her. The Intern felt the air agitated by their arms thrust through the bars, their outstretched fingers grabbing at her. The Intern could not but hear the obscenities spat from their lips, as more and more inmates caught on that a tour-group was being led past the cells, a phenomenon that must have been familiar to them, and maddening.

Not all the inmates behaved like enraged beasts. The Intern would realize later. Probably less than one-half. Less than one-third. But these others, who held back, or simply stared at the swift-passing procession of frightened civilians, went unremarked.

Savage animals. What would they do, if they could get at us.

At the females, particularly.

God let me get through it. Just a little farther!

It was a cruel lesson. The Lieutenant wanted them to know: the value of prisons, cell-bars. The value of incarceration, punishment.

Putting human beings against human beings. Rousing human beings to a fever-pitch of resentment, fury. Terror.

Particularly, there was sex-hatred here. The women were made to feel how precarious their well-being was, how dependent they were upon the protection of other men, against these beast-men.

It was a crude, cruel and simplistic ruse. The Intern understood, intellectually. Yet the Intern was deeply shaken, and would not soon forget.

(Wondering: where was the Investigator? Was he thinking these same things? Or, being a man, was he less shaken, less terrified? Probably he’d positioned himself at the very rear of the line, just in front of the Lieutenant. Here were the most vulnerable positions, for every inmate in the first-tier of the cell block would be aroused and alerted by the time the Investigator walked past his cell; every inmate was prepared, if he wanted to lunge against the bars, and grab at the civilian.)

(The Intern would learn that the Investigator, far from being frightened of the march, had not walked fast passing the cells, but had actually lingered, in front of certain cells, in which there were men who weren’t so frantic and furious; older men, in several cases, who’d greeted him as he’d greeted them, cordially.
H’lo! How’s it going
. The Investigator was one to exude calm. Very likely, the Investigator was taking pictures of the cell block, from start to finish. In the noise and commotion, no one would have noticed. No one among the COs would so much have glanced at the white-haired gentleman when so many of the inmates were so wrought-up, so furious with sexual longing and rage, they were throwing themselves against the bars of their cells, thrusting their arms through, stretching out their fingers as if they wanted to grasp, grip, shake and throttle, tear into pieces.)

How utterly silent the tour-group civilians were, on their horrible forced march! Holding their breaths, waiting for the ordeal to end.

It was a protracted ordeal: the Lieutenant forced them to march all the way around the cell block, back to where they’d begun. The march could not have lasted more than a few minutes but felt like much longer.

The Intern, eyes lowered. The Intern, breathing through her mouth. The Intern, thinking of Zeno’s Paradox: infinity within the finite.

For each step is but a fraction of the total distance. The total distance is somewhere beyond experience.

In Zeno’s Paradox you never reach your goal.

In Zeno’s Paradox you are in a state of perpetual
yearning.

“WELL, FRIENDS!
Now you know—the
feel
of a maximum-security prison.”

In the glowering-white March sun they staggered with exhaustion.

Even the Investigator was looking fatigued. Even the Lieutenant, glimpsed in an unguarded moment.

“Time
inside
is not equivalent to time
outside
. When a CO comes home to his family after just one day, or night—he’s been away a time they can’t measure.”

The Lieutenant chuckled, grimly.

In gratitude that they could breathe again, the visitors drew deep breaths filling their lungs. The Intern averted a wave of vertigo, shutting her eyes and biting her lower lip.

Yet she was tough, resilient. The Investigator would be impressed with his girl-assistant who hadn’t panicked as several of the other young women had panicked, begging to be excluded from the march.

Though crudely treated by the Lieutenant, who’d subjected them not only to a physical ordeal but to a considerable humiliation, the individuals of the tour-group did not seem to resent him. The Intern took note.

Now that they’d left the dreaded Cell Block C they were saying, marveling—what a good idea it is, how worth tax-money, you could not have civilization without it, prisons, punishment, guards with guns to protect you.

“In this direction, my friends, if you’ve caught your breaths—Death Row.”

The Lieutenant led them briskly along one of the coarse-graveled paths. The execution chamber attached to Death Row was the last of the stops of the prison tour.

Another half-hour, maybe. Then freedom!

The college girls were clutching at one another, breathless and laughing. The experience of the cell block had left them dazed, shaken and giddy. One of the girls had been crying and another had comforted her and another was saying
O God! Was that—was that horrible . . .

Nightmare . . .

. . . never forget.

But they were out of Cell Block C now. Laughing and gasping for breath like one who has been part-strangled, released and then part-strangled and then released and now grateful simply to breathe, to be alive.

Cynically the Intern thought: they would recall the experience, in the shared giddiness of girls who’d come through a crisis together, as a particular sort of sexual frisson.

In the wake of the Lieutenant they were walking. In the direction of a particularly ugly cinder block building at the farther edge of a compound of buildings beyond which there was open, scrubby land and in the near distance the high electrified fence, the guard-tower stations.

“Don’t worry, my friends—we don’t visit Death Row. We will visit the execution chamber but not ‘Death Row’—you will not come face-to-face with the most
evil
.” The Lieutenant paused as if choosing his words with care though they were surely familiar words many times recited at this point in the tour.

One of the visitors asked why wasn’t Death Row part of the tour.

“Because the warden has forbidden it, that’s why. Because it has happened in the past that ‘foes of the death penalty’ agitators have managed to get included in the tour, and raised a ruckus in the cell block.” The Lieutenant shook his head, in disgust.

“Thing is, like I’d said before—by the time a man has been on Death Row for a while, he’s settled-in. He’s lost that evil edge, you might say. Just gotten older. Sicker. One of our ‘condemned men,’ he’d had a colon obstruction, what it turned out to be, poor bastid had lost like one hundred pounds couldn’t eat, and his gut all twisted and cancerous—he’s still alive, but ain’t nothing like the man he’d been back in 1987 when he committed the deeds that brought him to Orion. And there’s others like that, all mellow in their old age. Whereas the inmates in Cell Block C, most of them are new-recruits and the real threats—they’d tear out your throats if they could reach you, and not give a damn. There’s
evil
in that place—half the men there, or almost, could be on Death Row, you saw what they’d done to be sent to Orion.”

The Lieutenant was speaking thoughtfully. A brooding look to his brow.

“See, there’s ‘lenient’ judges and juries—ever more, every year. Folks on the outside have no idea how
evil
flourishes in times of ‘leniency’—they think, if they do good, ‘good’ is gonna get done back to them. But it ain’t that way, friends. This tour of Orion should teach you that, at least.”

The flush-faced man who’d spoken so vehemently earlier in the tour had been visibly shaken by the march around Cell Block C. He was saying, now, incensed, “ ‘Bleeding-heart liberals’—that’s the problem. All they can think to cure crime is raising taxes! A man doesn’t want to be punished, like on Death Row, he don’t have to commit the crime to get himself punished.”

There was a vague murmur of agreement among the men.

The Intern saw the Lieutenant’s pebbly eyes moving over them, half-consciously counting. For the Lieutenant was responsible for
fifteen.

They’d passed the Death Row building. Cinder block with small barred windows like half-shut eyes. By itself isolated within the prison the Death Row facility. Though it wasn’t likely, you imagined that the condemned were looking out.

From what they’d seen of the cell blocks, what appeared to be windows from the outside were just apertures in the walls, opening onto walkways or corridors. None of the cells had windows. The dining room walls had been windowless, and the work-spaces where the men had made furniture and license plates were windowless. The hot blinding Florida sun, in summer raising temperatures in such places to as high as 120 degrees, yet did not penetrate most of the prison.

The Investigator planned to interview former prisoners, if he could. The Investigator had learned that the corrections officers’ union was one of the strongest in the country, and in the state of Florida; drugs and even weapons smuggled into prison came mostly by way of COs, who were protected by their powerful union.

“Folks, you are privileged: this part of the facility, the execution chamber, is off-limits for mostly everybody. Few people come down this way. Only the death-squad teams, the ‘condemned’ and the witnesses, and our tours. Might be surprised to learn, this area is restricted from most COs.”

The Lieutenant spoke proudly. The Intern was staring ahead, at a stone wall, a door set in a stone wall. Not a door like others in the prison they’d seen but an ancient-looking door.

A damp chill wind lifted from the weedy ground that was strewn with rubble like fragments of cinder block. The Intern shuddered.

The Lieutenant waited until everyone had caught up. Standing in a semi-circle around the door sunk in the wall, that looked as if it would lead down into the earth.

In a jocular voice the Lieutenant was telling his visitors about “Old Sparky”—“Which you will not see today, folks, ’cause Old Sparky ain’t on our premises but at Raiburn. Folks think that Old Sparky is at Orion, but no—that’s a misunderstanding. We got our own ’lectric chair but it ain’t famous like Old Sparky and don’t get used anymore, the condemned man is offered his choice of lethal injection or ’lectricution nowadays and he always chooses lethal injection, poor bastid thinking it’s an easier way to go, than ’lectricution. Now, either way can be complicated. They had to retire Old Sparky he was throwing off sparks and fire half the time not working right, smoke coming out of a man’s head and any fat man, he’d be fried and frazzled and the fat melting off him like a roast-pig, that’s caused some witnesses to puke, and faint. Our ’lectric chair, last time it was used, a few years ago now, after the first jolt there’s sparks and fire erupting from the ’lectrodes on the man’s legs—it burst right from the strap and caught on fire. And smoke and sparks under the hood, on the head. We’re talking real fire—flames—half a foot high—out of the man’s head. ‘Human error’ it is attributed to. Damn smoke filled the chamber, even the death-squad guys were sick. So they called in two doctors—I guess they were ‘docs’—maybe like hospital attendants—an actual doctor holds himself off from executions like he’s too good for it. So these two came in, and tried to find a heartbeat. And the condemned man’s lawyer, one of these civil-liberties-union lawyers, just a young kid—he’s like sick to his stomach too. He’s like
begging
the warden to stop. But no execution is ever stopped—you keep going ahead. So the death-squad pulls the switch again, and there’s more God-damned sparks and smoke. And the docs check the man again, and he’s still got some kinda heartbeat. So finally a third jolt was administered. Fourteen minutes had transpired. The poor bastid in the chair is charred and smoldering like a big roast, nobody could come near him for a long time, they said. The rest of us, even the next-of-kin of the victim, that had wanted to sit close as they could, was out of there fast as the door was opened.”