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By Root 1282 0

with the guards taking turns standing over them holding a riot gun. Jack lay face down in the ditch for over an hour, the sun burning his skull, the gravel hard against his cheek, thoughtless again, his mind and senses cleared of all obstructions; the nerves alive and waiting for the guards, the State, the authorities, to make one tiny mistake, open one tiny crack through which he could burst; not escape, that was impossible and unimportant; no, burst, destroy, kill, show them he had no limits and they would have either to break him or kill him, and the only way they could break him would be to kill him and he knew they, it, did not have the courage to do that, and he did. Waiting, then, for a tiny slipup, perhaps a softness in one of the guards, a momentary weakness or a careless mistake, the riot gun slipped a little too close while the guard lights a cigarette. They were all one to Jack. He knew the rules now. They wouldn’t kill him unless he killed them. Then they would kill him. And he would not have to go back in the hole.

Jack was very much afraid now of going to prison. He remembered the long endless moments of the approach of insanity in the hole; not the coming of relief in the form of delusion, but of cold wet terrifying madness, when nothing made sense and all illusions made him tremble with fear: all sounds made his body jerk, all dreams were awakened from in cold sweat and deadening dread of the unknown—madness, an eternity of fear. He could smell the gravel and feel it cutting into his cheek. The back of his head felt as if it was going to explode from the heat. He knew he had to move his head, turn over the other way. The smell of the gravel made him want to throw up, but he was frightened; if he threw up perhaps his intestines would come loose and hang out of his mouth. He was afraid that if he turned his head the guard would misunderstand and blow his head off; yet if he did not turn his head, raise it up, let the gravel sticking into him fall loose, he would go mad. Sweat trickled down and burned into his eyes. He was afraid to blink; they would see that and the butt of the riot gun would come down on the back of his head and spill his hot brains out over his hair and down into his eyes and he would surely go mad in that instant before death and die screaming; and remain screaming for eternity.

They had to help him back into the bus anyway, but even if he had been unchained he could not have made it alone. One of the guards gave the hard cases sandwiches and coffee after the bus got started again, and Jack felt the old wolfish hunger swelling up inside him, and made himself sit still, the sandwich in his lap, the paper cup of hot coffee in his hand, until the feeling subsided. Then he began to eat. It was a tuna salad sandwich, full of bits of celery, and it tasted very good, but the back of his neck hurt from having to bend down to eat. And the coffee was even harder. He had to suck it up from the paper container because he could not get the proper angle on it to tilt the coffee into his mouth. He got only a few hot sips before he gave up and asked the guard for a cigarette.

“Here you go, buddy,” the guard said. Jack left the cigarette in the corner of his mouth, blowing the smoke out his nose. He looked at the guard. A puffy, tired face. Even in his summer uniform the guard looked hot and tired. There were patches of sweat under his arms. Jack saw that his fingers on the riot gun were pressed white; so the man was tense. He had probably been tense all morning. In fact, Jack thought, the man was probably tense all the time he was at work. Probably every time he came to work a piece of whatever held him together disintegrated, vanished, and he would go home that much less than he had been. He would go home from work at night, the tension still stiff in his muscles, and have a drink of beer. Chino was hot; maybe the guard had a little patio out back of his house, where he had a canvas chair. He would take his can of beer out there, let himself down in the chair, and begin to drink, waiting. Maybe his