The Investigator asked the Lieutenant which of his numerous assignments at Orion did he value most.
“Death Row. I prefer Death Row.”
“And why is that, Lieutenant?”
“Well, say. Nobody ever asked me that question before. And the answer is—Death Row because the men are mostly all settled in. Not like the new recruits that haven’t been sorted out yet and haven’t figured it out yet, they’re inside—could be a guy twenty years old, he’s in for life, just getting to catch on, that’s a guy so wild and desperate he’d kill anybody he could get his hands on and that includes himself—why the new guys hang themselves, the first few days you really have to watch them. Not one percent of them is what you’d call ‘sane’—once they get inside. But a Death Row inmate, he’s different. He could be ‘crazy’ too—but it’s a more settled kind of crazy. He’d be trying to figure legal briefs, writing letters to lawyers, judges, newspapers, TV—his mind would be crazy but not violent-like. And there’s just enough of them on Death Row whose sentences are commuted, or there’s some history of it, the average Death Row inmate can have hope. Some of them been here like twelve, fifteen—eighteen years. The lawyers keep filing appeals and the ‘anti-capital-punishment’ people keep showing up out front to demonstrate when there’s an execution. It’s like a carnival, with TV cameras. Now, it’s on the Internet. This old guy Pop Krunk, that was executed last month, he’d been on Death Row here since 1987. Walked with a cane, then in a wheelchair—his legs just went. He had a white beard, like some kinda crazy Santa Claus, so it was like real interesting to talk with him. They accumulate wisdom on Death Row. You kind of grow old together. They’re more thoughtful, the majority. They don’t have to share a cell like the rest of the population—most of them now, it’s three to a cell, and supposed to be just two. But it’s three. So they’re crammed together like animals and when they get sick, like swine flu, Christ!—it ain’t a pretty sight. Even if they don’t kill one another they can infect one another, bad. But Death Row is like, the elite. And their cells are bigger too, six feet by nine feet by nine-and-a-half (in height). I never thought about it before—till you asked me, sir—I mean, Professor. My answer is Death Row.”
The Intern, listening intently, did not turn to glance at the Investigator.
She admired her employer for his methodical ways: he inveigled people into saying far more than they believed they were saying; volunteering to confide in him, as to a friend. He was an artist of words as another might be an artist of music: he could “play” compositions to evoke emotions in others, and this was the purpose of the SHAME! series. He was an emotional man, himself—yet it was an intellectual outrage he wanted to evoke in his audience, a sense of the terrible violation of a moral contract with other individuals, different from themselves. (And in the case of animals, of a species different from their species.) He chose to write bluntly and directly—not “calculatedly.” When he could, he allowed others to speak in his place, like the Lieutenant whose words he was recording, without the Lieutenant knowing.
“Through here, folks! Best to hold your breath as long as you can.”
The Lieutenant led the tour-group into a vast room like an airplane hangar, filled with long tables and chairs—a dining room. Adjacent to this vast room was a second vast room similarly furnished. Though the dining rooms were empty it was not difficult to imagine inmates crammed at the tables—a buzz and mutter of male voices, a clattering of plates, cafeteria trays. The smells were a mix—garbagey, rotted, rancid, gaseous, excretory. Old, stale, spilled food, and old, stale, spilled urine. The Intern felt a little leap of nausea.
“Staggered lunch-hours, the inmates feed. Cell Block A, Cell Block B, Cell Block C, Cell Block D—they all come through here like cattle through a chute.”
Each wall of each room was covered in a highly detailed, bizarre and hallucinatory mural, or mosaic of murals, executed by an amateur artist with but a primitive sense of perspective, the human face and the human body. Heads were over-large on dwarf-torsos, arms were spindly and legs foreshortened. The faces were pasty-pale, dull-blank like the faces of the dead. Were the murals a peek into Hell, or a mirroring of the dining halls?
At a height of about ten feet above the floor, catwalks circled the dining hall, for guards to overlook the scene. Prominent on the catwalks were signs NO WARNING SHOTS.
With evident seriousness the Lieutenant was praising the “prison-artist” who’d been paroled from Orion in 1981 but had died not long afterward in a detention house in Tampa where he’d been picked up for vagrancy in a squatters’ village under Interstate 75. The Intern wanted to shut her eyes, she could not bear to see the deformed heads and faces, the blank dead eyes.
The Lieutenant was praising the deceased artist, unless the Lieutenant was mocking the claims of others of the deceased artist—“DeVuonna is compared to ‘Michael-angelo’—the Italian artist—in his use of wall-space and parts of the ceiling, too. There was a special fund for ‘preserving DeVuonna’ . . .”
The Intern shut her eyes for just a moment. How delicious, yet how dangerous! She was afraid of falling asleep on her feet.
The Lieutenant then seemed to be chiding his visitors, urging them farther into the room—“We are not leaving quite so soon, folks! Relax.” The young-woman sociology students were seated at one of the long tables, the Intern and the Investigator and others at a nearby table, a trapped audience for the Lieutenant who continued to regale them with tales of episodes that had happened in the dining rooms, not so long ago. By this time the females in the tour-group had grown quiet. The men had removed their jackets, beginning to perspire. Only the white-haired Investigator maintained an air of curiosity, and gave no sign of feeling ill or faint.
The Lieutenant was showing his audience a box of items—homemade weapons discovered in the possession of inmates in the dining room within the past month. These were a toothbrush whittled sharp as an ice pick, a rusted razor blade attached to a cardboard handle, a metal hook fashioned out of large paper clips, a spike with a duct-tape grip that looked as if it were ideal for eye-gouging. “We keep ’em like in a museum, locked in here. Any weird thing you can think of, that could be a weapon, our inmates have already thought of at Orion.”
Almost proudly the Lieutenant spoke.
Suddenly a door was opened at the rear of the dining hall. Two burly COs entered ushering before them several inmates in blue uniforms—the intrusion was startling, and distracting; the tour-group visitors stared at the inmates only a few yards from them, who stared back at them. Their eyes were stark and glassy and dead-seeming like eyes in the mural, except they were moving. Three of the inmates were dark-skinned, the fourth a light-skinned Hispanic in his mid- or late twenties who wore his hair in a tiny braid at the nape of his neck and who swung himself along on crutches with a grim little wince of his jaws.
Quickly the Intern looked away from the young Hispanic not wanting to lock eyes with his.
Wounded. A veteran.
A recent veteran: Iraq? Afghanistan?
She felt a wave of sickness, guilt. A guilt so profound, it was a sickness in the gut.
She did not look after the young man who was of her age, her generation. She felt the fury in his shoulders, that were muscled, and in his upper arms, his forearms and strong hands gripping the crutches that allowed him to move with a kind of stealthy swiftness, far faster than one would expect of a crippled boy.
That is, a wounded veteran.
It seemed to the Intern that no one in the tour-group wished to acknowledge the wounded inmate, nor even the other inmates. The Lieutenant called out a greeting to his fellow COs who saluted him with deadpan protocol—“Sir!”
Where the COs and the inmates had come from at this time and where they were going wasn’t explained. The Intern was made to feel, as the others surely felt, how easily it could happen that inmates might break loose from their captors, for there were so many more inmates than corrections officers . . .
/> Probably, the inmates were kitchen-workers. They were headed for the kitchen to prepare for the massive upcoming lunch.
The Lieutenant was saying, “Most people are curious about how we feed two thousand six hundred sixty-eight inmates in general population—maximum security—three times a day. Well—it ain’t easy! First, a bell goes and they’re marched out of their cell blocks into the dining hall and along the walls—there, and there—and through the cafeteria line, get their trays and food, return to the dining hall here, and sit. And I mean sit in their designated places, only. If they sit at some table not designated for them there’s the danger of retaliation—like, their throat cut. Anybody fucks around—(excuse me, ladies)—he’s stripped and tossed into solitary. Twenty minutes in and out—a bell goes—they’re marched back to their cells. It’s like cattle through a chute—they’re going in one direction, one at a time. And the food ain’t bad, either—the inmates are damn hungry, the way they eat.”
Though the vast dining halls were empty it wasn’t difficult to envision prisoners crammed together at the tables, and to hear their muffled, surging voices, the clatter of plates and cutlery. It wasn’t difficult to imagine an intensification of smells—food, spillage, unwashed flesh, intestinal gases. It was not difficult to sense the prisoners’ desperation, and the danger in that desperation.
From somewhere in the building, possibly from the kitchen area at the rear, into which the inmates and COs had disappeared, there came a sound of raised voices, a door shut hard, clanging pot-lids. The Intern felt uneasy, apprehensive; a touch of panic, that inmates would swarm into the dining room, their voices booming, echoing. Yet the Lieutenant continued his maddeningly matter-of-fact speech, a kind of harangue—making some point about “mass-food.”
“Folks! Two volunteers are needed.”
The Lieutenant snapped his fingers. At the signal a kitchen-worker inmate, a smiling young black man in a hairnet, long-sleeved blue T-shirt, blue pants with P R I S O N E R in white on the right leg, appeared with a tray of “sample food” on a platter: something breaded and nubby—chicken nuggets?—a small slab of grayish-fatty meat, mashed potatoes and gravy; a burrito, French fries; melted “American cheese” sandwich, a jelly-glaze donut.
“You must all be hungry,” the Lieutenant said, teasing, to the tour-group. “Lunch is yet far off. So—volunteers?”
So swiftly the sample-food had appeared, obviously this was a part of the tour. Between the Lieutenant and the smiling young black man with oily-kinky hair flattened by a hairnet there passed a sidelong glance of complicity.
“Yo, Harman? You fix up a pretty-good samplin’ for us, for today?”
“Yessir sure has. Yessir Loo-t’nent.”
The Lieutenant spoke with excruciating comic-condescension. Yet, Harman seemed to mind not at all and fell in immediately with the banter.
No one wanted to come forward. The Intern hoped that the Investigator wouldn’t glance over at her, to signal her.
At last, two of the younger visitors—both sociology students—a girl with a long swishing ponytail, a young man in a Marlins baseball cap—came forward, with apprehensive smiles.
“Good, good! Thank you! Just a few bites of each! I think you will be favorably impressed by the quality.”
The Lieutenant—smirking, or sincere—seated the volunteers in front of the tray. Slowly and self-consciously they began to eat.
The girl ate chicken nuggets with her fingers, the young man speared a piece of “beef-steak” and ate. Mashed potatoes and gravy, fries—burrito . . . The volunteers bravely chewed, swallowed. “Not bad, eh? Compliments to the chef?” The Lieutenant laughed.
Like a watchful parent he stood over the volunteers seeing that they sampled a bit of everything. It seemed to the Intern that the girl-student was beginning to look sick, and the boy-student’s jaws were grinding with grim tenacity.
The Intern knew enough of what kitchen-conditions might be in an institution like this, to feel a shudder of dread at the prospect of eating such food. The Investigator would know, too. Of course. She didn’t dare glance in his direction. Toxic bacteria breeding, invisibly swarming as in a petri dish . . .
What a joke, those admonitions in restaurant restrooms—Employees are required to wash their hands thoroughly with soap and water before returning to work. How much more ironic, in this maximum-security prison.
The Lieutenant was answering less painfully clinical questions from visitors about food preparation at Orion. “Well, see—as you’d expect—ninety-three percent of the prison services are provided by inmates. Couldn’t afford the luxury of ‘incarceration’ otherwise.”
The volunteers were eating more slowly. More slowly chewing, and swallowing. With a wink of merriment the Lieutenant said, “Not bad, eh? Compliments to Harman-yo, here—he the chef.”
The black boy in the hairnet laughed showing a flash of teeth.
The ponytail girl smiled faintly. The young man in the Marlins cap wiped at his mouth with the back of his hand.
“See, if you’re hungry, you eat. If you ain’t eating, then you ain’t hungry. Law of nature.”
The Lieutenant offered the other visitors the remains of the prison-food sample. When no one accepted he picked up a chicken nugget—turned it in his fingers but with a mysterious chuckle decided not to pop it into his mouth.
“Harman-yo. You turnin’ into a real pro, once you get outta here you’re gonna cut some swath through South Beach, yo. Take my word for it, son.”
At last, led out of the dining hall. Outside, the Intern drew a deep breath of fresh air.
How badly she wanted to detach herself from the tour-group, and escape back to the entrance. So exhausted, she could have crawled back to the entrance.
Except, the Investigator would be terribly disappointed in her.
Disapproving, disgusted with Sabbath McSwain.
A few yards away oblivious of her. Scribbling notes in his little notebook. The dining-hall episode hadn’t bothered the Investigator, much. Or, he’d put it quickly out of his mind.
Next, the Lieutenant led the group on a brisk little hike.
Cell Block C in a fortified stucco building that, to enter, required passing through another checkpoint. The (invisible) ink code on the civilians’ wrists was checked in ultraviolet light. The Intern’s laminated driver’s license issued to Sabbath McSwain was examined closely if to no particular purpose. The sociology professor asked the Lieutenant why they were going through another checkpoint, since they’d already gone through two checkpoints, and the Lieutenant retorted with none of the affability he’d been beaming on his charges for the past ninety minutes or more: “Ma’am, it’s how it is. You don’t wish to comply, I can find a CO to take you back to the entrance and you can take yourself home with no further ado.”
The woman was rebuffed, red-faced. No more flirty exchanges with the Lieutenant, for her!
This was a crazed place, the Intern was beginning to see. You could not fully comprehend the craziness for you saw only surfaces, edges and outlines of things. You saw faces not what was beneath.
The slightest infraction upon another’s sense of himself—his pride, his integrity—his power—and you felt the immediate opposition, the leap of madness.
Yet somehow, the Intern wasn’t prepared for Cell Block C. After the proximity of the inmate-workers in the furniture-and-license-plate factory who’d seemed oblivious of their civilian visitors and had seemed among themselves friendly, cooperative and non-threatening. And Harman exchanging banter with the white Lieutenant.
As soon as they were ushered out of the checkpoint area and into the squat building housing Cell Block C the Intern sensed the difference. A powerful smell of men’s bodies. A sensation of strain as if the very air were viscous, vibrating.
In his mock-affable tone the Lieutenant introduced the tour-group to the cell block officers who glanced at them with barely concealed contempt. Nor did these officers exchange friendly greetings with the
Lieutenant who seemed in their company suddenly fatuous, foolish. There was a high din in the air as of a thrum of angry hornets—the first tier of cells seemed to stretch away for as much as a city block, and above it—overhead—a second tier, which you could barely glimpse from the ground. As the Lieutenant spoke to the group about Cell Block C—a “new-recruit cell block mainly”—“before the men are sorted out and their gang affiliations determined”—the Intern became slowly aware of a chilling sight: on a catwalk around the cell block guards were stationed at intervals, holding automatic rifles in the crooks of their arms; the nearest guard, a severe-looking black man, was standing almost directly above the Lieutenant and his gathering of civilians, one foot up on a railing, rifle grasped in his hands as if he were prepared to fire at any moment.
Behind him and prominent on the stucco wall in full view of both tiers of cells was the ominous sign NO WARNING SHOTS.
The Intern wanted to pluck at the Investigator’s sleeve, to make sure he’d noticed the guard overhead. The Investigator would have wanted to take pictures of this guard, the Intern was sure.
(But maybe that wouldn’t be a prudent idea, to take pictures of the armed COs. If the Investigator was caught violating prison policy, and arrested—what then?)
Before they’d come to Orion, the Intern and the Investigator had done a good deal of research into the facility. The degree of “prisoner-on-prisoner” violence—“CO-on-prisoner” violence—unsatisfactorily explained “accidents” resulting in deaths—“suspicious suicides”—was high; though no higher than comparable correctional facilities in the state of Florida, and elsewhere in the United States.