Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [36]
Even before the reform school had shown Jack its worst he had tried to kill a guard, so the urge had been in him already; he knew that he, or the urge to kill in him, was not the result of a process of brutalization in the reformatory, he was not a victim of their stupidity and cruelty. Actually, the reform school was a model of life without artifice, without the gilding of purpose and reason to brighten the truth: that men were units to be taken care of and kept quiet—nothing else mattered except you weren’t supposed to kill them. Jack did not understand this last rule, and the only way he could comprehend it was to think that if the guards killed all the prisoners then they would be out of work. Either that, or they didn’t have the guts. He had a long time to think about it.
The guard—night watchman, really, but a man who thought of himself as a guard—had called them out of their cottage late at night just to brace them against the wall and accuse them of unnatural sex practices and walk up and down in front of them, daring them to make a move, while he sent his yellowish eyes up and down their bodies looking for signs of perversion; a stupid, illiterate central Oregon hick who couldn’t get any other kind of job, lantern-jawed and snaggle-toothed, ordering the boys around because they were the only humans on earth who had to stand still for it, his awful eyes gleaming with desires he didn’t have the guts to satisfy—and when the kid next to Jack giggled sleepily and muttered something, the guard shot his hand out and grasped the kid by the neck and jerked him out of the line, down onto his knees, and backhanded him across the face. The kid yelped in surprised anger, and Jack, out of control, feeling the pure blast of pleasure, moved toward this perfect target for his ambitions, spun the guard, hit him twice and knocked him against the wall of the cottage and fell on him, driving his fists coldly and carefully into the guard’s face and throat, Jack’s knee coming up into the guard’s groin sharply; picking him up and slamming him against the wall, one hand on his throat and the other smashing into his face—murdering him with his hands. And he would have killed him, too, if the other watchmen hadn’t heard the noise and come and pulled Jack away from his victim, clubbed him and dragged him down to the punishment cells—the hole—and left him there naked, the murder urge still burning unsatisfied in his heart; left him there for four months and three days—126 days without light—to remember, to think, to dream about his discovery.
The punishment cell was about seven feet long, four feet wide, and six feet high. The floor and walls were concrete, and there were no windows. In the iron door near the bottom was a slot through which he passed his slop can, and through which his food and water were delivered to him. They did not feed him every day, and because of that he had no way of knowing how much time had passed. After a while time ceased to exist. Time stopped in a strange way. First, he was aware that there was no present, no such thing as a moment; there was only the movement of his thoughts from past to future, from what had happened to what would happen. Then what had happened ceased to be real, as if his mind had invented a past his body could not remember; his senses were betraying him into dreams and the dreams eventually lost all contact with the senses. At first, he could not see because there was no light in his cell; then that became a delusion, and he could not see because he could not see, and then even that lost its reality, and he could not see because there was nothing to see, and never had been—his mind had tricked him into believing that there were colors and shapes, and he knew that there were no such things. At times, all his senses deserted him, and he could not feel