The Pledge (35 page)

A half hour later, the gate of the tank was opened and Bruce was told to step out. “Bacon, B. N., right?” the marshal said.

Bruce nodded.

“Come on. I'm taking you out of this nuthouse to jail. It'll be an improvement.” And with that, he snapped the handcuffs on Bruce and led him through a passageway to where a panel truck with iron gates and two facing benches was waiting. There were six men in the truck, four black men sitting together on one bench, two white men on the bench facing them, all of them handcuffed. Bruce was told to sit next to the two white men. The gates were closed and locked, and the truck drove on out of the Federal building.

It was raining, a properly gloomy day for such a ride. No one in the bus spoke. Looking at his watch, Bruce saw that it was only three o'clock. Incredible that so much had happened in a day that was far from over! He closed his eyes. Was this real? Was anything real? The circumstances that had brought him here blurred over. Looking out of the gates at the rear of the truck, he realized that they had passed through a stone archway, where high wooden doors were closing behind them. Then the truck came to a stop, the gates were unlocked, and they were told by a guard to get out. Their handcuffs were removed.

What was strange and unusual — a little more than everything being strange and unusual — was the silence. No one spoke, no one complained, no one protested. He was perhaps a little better dressed than the other men in the bus with him, but otherwise they were perfectly normal-looking people. Nothing marked them as criminal.

The seven men were marched through the walled yard and into the prison. Gates opened and closed, electrically operated, and then he was in a hall with counters and cages on each side. He was told to empty his pockets; and his wallet, watch, keys, and small notebook were put into an envelope and marked. Then he moved on a few steps to another counter, and here he was told to strip down to the skin and fold his clothes and put them on the counter. In this hallway, the walls painted government green, the gloom hardly broken by the small bulbs in their ceiling sockets, he had a feeling of being in some surrealist hell, and this feeling was intensified as the other men stripped naked and took their places on the bench alongside him. The look of the place, the guards in uniform, the line of naked men huddled on the bench — all of it brought back the image and memory of the concentration camps in Germany, where the inmates were stripped naked before going to their death in the gas chambers. He couldn't escape his thoughts; he was a writer and he dealt in images and memories; and the comparison became even more poignant when, after their clothes were put in bags and marked, they were led into a long, tiled shower room where ceiling jets, controlled from beyond a glass panel by the guards, sprayed them with hot water. There was a basket of bars of brown soap, and a microphone voice told them to wash up and soap up and wash up again.

Then they went into another tiled room, where there was a wide metal bin filled with an antifungus solution. They walked through this and then they were given towels. Again, as Bruce dried himself, the silence penetrated and disturbed him. For the moment, his world of words had vanished.

Then, still naked, they went through a cursory medical examination by two physicians, and then they were marched into another room, where Bruce was given underwear, blue shirt, blue cotton trousers, socks, and shoes. He sat on a bench and dressed himself.

Then they were taken into the prison proper, where the cells rose in four horseshoe-shaped tiers. Bruce was separated from the others, and the black prisoners were separated from the white prisoners. He was taken to the second tier. The door of a cell opened by remote control. “There's home, Bacon,” the guard said. Home was a cell that measured six feet by eight feet and contained two beds, one on top of the other, a toilet bowl with no toilet seat, and a sink — and another prisoner. He was a boy, no more than seventeen, blond, blue-eyed, slender, and with delicate features. He stood at the other end of the cell, eyeing Bruce with what appeared to be a mixture of fear and suspicion.

“My name's Frank Jenner,” the boy said.

“Bruce Bacon.”

“What are you in for?”

“Contempt of Congress,” Bruce said, smiling for the first time since leaving the courtroom.

“What the hell is that?”

Bruce shook his head. “Hard to explain. Well — refusing to cooperate with a congressional committee, for whatever that's worth.”

“You didn't kill anyone?”

“Oh, no. I'm not here for killing anyone. What makes you think I am?”

“I didn't think you are. I just asked.”

“Why?”

“Because this here row of cells, twelve of them, they call it death row. They keep condemned men here until their appeals wash out, and then they send them off to Leavenworth.”

“Who did you kill?” Bruce asked.

“I didn't kill nobody. It's the only empty cell they got, so they put me here after I was raped. You never been in the slammer before?”

“First time,” wondering how the boy could put it like that, casually, as if it were an ordinary daily happening.

“What do you do?”

“I'm a writer.”

A loud scream of bells filled the prison.

“We eat now,” the boy said. “You can follow me if you want to. The doors will open in a minute.”

With a great clanging, all the doors of all the cells opened simultaneously. It was a scene Bruce remembered from every Hollywood prison film, the tiers of cells, each tier horseshoe-shaped with a narrow outside passageway, one tier piled upon another, and in the well at the bottom, row after row of the long metal tables at which the convicts had their meals. Bruce, following the blond boy, went down a circular staircase and got into a cafeteria-style line. He picked up his aluminum tray, knife and fork and tin cup, and moved on to where the food was being served. His tray was divided into four sections. Behind the counter, convicts served the food.

“Potatoes?”

Bruce nodded. A large spoon of potatoes was slapped onto his tray.

“Turnips?” Another serving spoon full of turnips.

“Carrots?”

“Hash?”

“Bread?”

Two thick slices of bread were slapped onto his tray. Whatever had happened to justice in his country, nutrition was not one of the victims. He moved on, carrying the food-laden tray, sliding into the first bench that was not already filled. He sat there then, viewing his pile of food without pleasure, sick at the thought of consuming any food at all. Meanwhile, two large, hard-looking convicts on either side of him were noisily and enthusiastically putting away their food. The noise was gusto and chewing, since no talking was allowed at mealtime, but a whisper in his ear asked whether or not he intended to eat.

“I can't eat.”

“You leave food on the tray, you do ten days in the hole.”

Bruce knew about the hole. Everyone knew about the hole. All the literary and film and media images that were drummed into Americans for hours every day had come to life for Bruce. The hole was a cell without windows, without light, without a bed or a proper toilet. The hole was terror, isolation, and madness, but to be put into solitary confinement for leaving food on a tray —

“He's right,” the convict on the other side whispered. “You want help?”

“Please.”

With quick movement, the two convicts divided the food, half on each plate. Bruce breathed a sigh of relief while the two convicts shoveled his dinner into their mouths. They thanked him and he thanked them, all in whispers that left lips motionless. Bruce was relieved. He felt silly but relieved, and he was determined to limit his food in the future. The hole was not a pleasant thought. He was sufficiently aware of himself to know that he was an oddity, his tall, stalwart height, his horn-rimmed glasses, his slight stoop that came of years of crouching over a typewriter. His full mouth of teeth separated him from the run of the prisoners, their mouths full of gaping spaces. Already, he was beginning to characterize them. Here and there was hostility, anger fixed and unremitting, but most of them appeared to be neutral, wary, but neutral, poor people, gaps in their teeth, as if poverty could be measured in the mouth, young most of them, and white. The blacks were elsewhere.

Back in his cell, the electric gates slammed closed, the boy, Frank Jenner, told him that he was sleeping in the top bed but if Bruce wanted the top bed, he could have it. Bruce was just as satisfied with the bottom bed. The boy was trying to make a friend — or at least to neutralize an enemy. He was trapped in a system where everyone was his enemy. He was a sexual prize. “Just don't be afraid of me,” Bruce said. “I'm straight. I won't touch you.” He listened to himself speaking, amazed at what he was saying. Out of one world into another world, and nothing resembled what he had read or seen. He was promising a kid that he wouldn't rape him. It wasn't a question of homosexuality; it was a matter of prison. It had happened once. Jenner told him how it had happened, his eyes full of tears that he fought to keep back. He wanted to be a tough guy, but he had no equipment for it. He was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, raped and brutalized by his father as a child, a runaway at age twelve, two years in a home for runaways in Denver, and then a runaway from there, and finally in the District of Columbia, working for an old black gardener and living in a corner of the old man's shed. Among others, the gardener worked for Judge Bradford Jones of the Appellate Court. Jones had a daughter who was fifteen and sexually adventurous enough to get herself into a situation where Frank Jenner had fondled her. He claimed it was a single time, a single embrace, but the judge discovered them and had Frank arrested for carnal knowledge. The boy had been here in this penitentiary for seven months now, no hearing, no indictment, no bail. “Who would go bail for me?” he said to Bruce. “I'll rot here. I'll die here.”

Sleep came hard and slowly that night. Bruce lay in bed, a bed with no sheets, just a blanket and a pillow, and listened to the moans beginning. The boy in the bed over his said, “That's what makes me crazy, Mr. Bacon. It makes me crazy to listen to them every night. They moan and they whimper and they pray to God not to let them be executed, and shit, I can understand, because who the fuck wants to sit down in the electric chair, but they do it all night.”

He slept and he awakened and the whimpering and pleading went on, and he slept again, bits and pieces of sleep. The next morning, after a breakfast of oatmeal and coffee — which Bruce devoured with sudden raging hunger — they were led up to an exercise room on the roof, a closed room with a ceiling of reinforced glass, so that while light entered, there was no sight of sun or sky.

The convicts milled around pointlessly. Some walked, others stood still. It was an aimless motion without function or purpose beyond the fact that they were not in their cells. Here and there was a little eddy. A large, heavily muscled man sat cross-legged, dealing cards to four others, a handsome man whose life force fairly vibrated. “A lifer,” Jenner told Bruce. “He'll never get out. He's just here waiting for transfer. Everyone's waiting for transfer except me.” Bruce tried to imagine that life force squeezed into a cell for an entire lifetime. The man was in his thirties — middle age, old age, the vibrant muscles withered, the hair turned white, and all of it in a cell. The thought chilled him; it cut deeper than the cries of the condemned that had awakened him during the night. His guide and informant, the blond boy who stayed close to him, pointed to another eddy. “The Purple Nose Gang,” Jenner said, and then went on to explain that they were a gang of bank robbers who had blazed a trail across the country, their disguise and trademark a Halloween children's mask with a bulbous purple nose and a mustache. They were crouched in a circle over a piece of paper, on which one of them was laboriously making a diagram. “They're planning their next job,” Jenner said. “They do it every time we're up here. They're crazy.” But why not, Bruce wondered, in a world that was only less insane outside than it was in here.

He noticed that there were no blacks in evidence. The separation between the black prisoners and the white prisoners was complete, as if the state were willing to impose every indignity and punishment on the convicts except the peculiar pain of being in the same place as a black man.

In the tiny cell that he and Jenner occupied, there was a chair and a small table about twenty inches square. Bruce asked for writing paper, and it was given to him by the guard, long sheets of lined paper, and with it a sheet of instructions. “You do not write about the prison: you do not write about prisoners: you do not describe prison conditions. Any such reference will be removed from your letter.”

He wrote to Molly, “My dear darling wife: I have been here only two days, yet it seems like eternity. I am convinced that the first thing that happens when one sets foot in a prison is a total rupture of one's time sense. A second becomes a minute and a minute becomes an hour. So when I say that I miss you and think of you constantly, it is because in part of my mind, it is a long time since I held you in my arms. I have learned that this place is mainly a holding facility, and that with some exceptions, most of this population are held here no more than a few weeks. Then the men are moved to one or another of the prisons in the Federal system. Where I will be sent, I have no idea, but I'm sure you or Sylvia will be notified.

“You will note that I am learning prison talk. The convicts are referred to as the
population.
The prison is called a
facility.
The euphemisms are the
officers
' talk. The convicts call them
screws
and a number of other things that would simply be excised if I put them down. We in the population
build time.
Thereby the main function of a man in prison, building time, getting from one hour to the next. Some
fight time
, and they go crazy. All this phony expertise comes from the fact that we have been instructed to write nothing about the prison or our conditions here, which does make letter writing difficult. I don't think I violate the rule by saying that a certain amount of reading matter is provided. A library cart is pushed along the walkway and stopped in front of each cell, and you have your choice of the books on the cart. They are mostly fiction and a very odd choice indeed. One of the books, I noticed, was titled
The Great Escape.
It was so worn as to be falling to pieces, and no doubt a bitter disappointment to its readers. I thumbed through it and found it to be an Edwardian memoir of some kind, and the escape was psychological rather than literal. I chose for my selection
The Count of Monte Cristo
, not only a satisfyingly fat volume, but something I had missed in my youth. I knew enough of the plot, however, to realize it might be comforting, since my fate was so much less severe than Edmond Dantès's.