Libra - Don Delillo [46]
You take your beatings in the area between the chest and groin, so bruises won’t show. This is tradition. Or a guard will put a bucket on your head and whack it with a truncheon.
If you are assigned a cell, your guard will hose out the cell while you are inside it.
There are special punishment facilities called the hole, the box, the cage—names with a vivid history familiar from the movies.
You never walk where there is room to run. You run to and from your storage box. You stop at every white line and wait for permission to cross. You run in the compound, your grub hoe held at port arms.
You are processed naked, holding your seabag above your head at arm’s length, shouting aye aye sir and no sir at the slightest sound. You are permitted to lower the seabag to the back of your neck only when you bend over to allow them to check your anal cavity for printed matter, narcotics, alcoholic beverages, digging tools, TV sets, implements of self-destruction.
This was the brig in Atsugi, a large frame building with cement floors, a number of storerooms, offices and compartments, a turn-key’s area and a large chicken-wire enclosure that contained twenty-one bunks. The enclosure was filled to capacity. New prisoners were lodged in six concrete cells located along a passageway marked with white lines. The cells were designed for single occupancy but summer was the season of misfits, runaways, violent drinkers, born losers, petty thieves, desperadoes, men of every manner of delicate temperament, and Oswald had a cellmate named Bobby Dupard, a slim sad-eyed Negro with a copper cast to his hair and skin.
Oswald, first in, got the stationary bunk. Dupard got a swayback cot and a mattress that was aglimmer with flat-bodied biting things—things you could crack between your fingernails and they’d break into two and become four and then eight, swarming back into their cottony nests to breed some more, so what was the point of even trying, according to Dupard.
They whispered to each other in the night.
“Are you saying when you kill them, they multiply?”
“I’m saying you can’t kill them. Some things too small.”
“Sleep on top of the blanket,” Oswald told him.
“They get on through. They bore through.”
“That’s termites, that bore.”
“Hey, Jim, I live with these things for years.”
“Put the blanket on the floor. Sleep on the floor.”
“Half the floor is white lines, like they foreseen. Which anyway the lice jump down on top of me.”
A nearly bare place, simple objects, basic needs. Oswald’s senses were fearfully keyed. He tasted iron on his tongue. He heard the voices from the chicken wire, guards grumbling like heavy dogs. When they hosed down the floor of the cell block he smelled the earth embedded in concrete—pebbles, gravel, slag and broken stone, all distantly mixed with ammonia, like contempt blended in.
Dupard was from Texas.
“Leads the nation in homicides,” Oswald said.
“That’s the place.”
“Whereabouts?”
“Dallas.
“I’m from Fort Worth, off and on, myself.”
“Neighbors. Ain’t that something. How old is a kid like yourself?”
“Eighteen,” Oswald told him.
“You a baby. They throw a baby into prison. How much time you bring with you?”
“Twenty-eight days. ”
“What’s the charge?”
“First I accidentally shot myself in the arm, which they court martialed me for, but suspended the sentence.”
“If it’s accidentally, what’s their point?”
“They said I used an unregistered weapon. I had a private weapon.
“Which they never handed out.”
“Which I found. But that doesn’t matter in their eyes as long as the weapon is not registered.”
“But they suspend the sentence, so then what?”
“Then there was a second court-martial.”
“Sound like somebody push his luck.”
“Based on an incident. That’s all it was.”
“I believe it.”
“There’s a sergeant, Rodriguez, that’s been giving me mess duty all the time. Doesn’t like me, which I guarantee it’s mutual. So we had words more than once. I let him know how I felt about being singled out. He told me it’s the court-martial that’s keeping me out of the radar hut, plus general standards, which