with a normal man. You are dealing with a creation of pure will who will do what is necessary to get the job done. You have no rights. You have no recourse. You have no hopes. There is nothing for you anywhere in the universe except that you accept the power of my will, the totality of my domination, the hopelessness of all resistance.
I am superior to you physically, morally, mentally and spiritually. If you resist me, I will destroy you and never think of it again. Do you understand?'
'Sir, I am no convict. I am?'
Whap!
The beatings started. They didn't even ask him any questions, not at first. They just beat him. earl lost contact with the very concept of time. It was neither day nor night, it just was.
'Name?' 'I told your, sir.'
'Tell me again.'
'Jack. Jack Bogash. Of Little Rock. Unemployed truck driver.
Looking for hunting leases, that's all. Seemed like a start on something new. Some fellows come out of the woods, screaming of being hunted by wild darkies, or maybe Indians, I don't know. Needed my help. I done helped the old one, for money, and the other fellow, he circled around and?'
Whap!
Bigboy himself never struck Earl. Somehow it was beneath him. Another guard or two, shadowy figures that Earl never saw, administered the blows. They used short cudgels and were expert, with flexible wrists and fast hands, and could hit him a blow that hurt exquisitely and forever, yet broke no bones. They were quite practiced in this. They were professional.
'There was no other man,' Bigboy said, 'and it angers me that you think I am stupid. Convict, I am not stupid. No tracks of him, no scent of him that the dogs picked up, nothing. You penetrated the Thebes lock-up, you set up diversionary devices which you had to have improvised, you conked a guard in just such a way that he was knocked cold but not killed, you rescued a man, you led him out over miles and miles of rough territory, you set up several clever traps to confuse the dogs, you circled back and killed three dogs in about two seconds with incredible shooting and knife skills, you closed on two powerful young deputies and outfought them in a matter of seconds. If the second pack of dogs hadn't arrived, you'd have made it scot-free. This is very impressive work. It's the work of a trained man, a professional Who are you?'
'My name is Jack?' Whap!
'Are you an FBI agent? Are you a communist spy? Are you still a Marine?
Are you some sort of super Marine? Are you investigating us' What are you up to? Why are you here? Where did you learn your craft?'
'Sir. My name is Jack?' Whap!
They threw him in a cell, and just when he drifted off, they pulled him out for more.
Hoses.
Head in a bucket, gagging for air underwater.
Exhaustion, bright lights, hideous noise.
The smacking of the expertly administered cudgels, which produced such excruciating pain.
Sometimes it was Bigboy, sometimes it was others. They passed him, shift to shift to shift.
He got through it all on the strength of the one idea that permitted him survival. It was that he could make it only if he kept his identity quiet. They could not kill him until they broke him, and as long as he defied them he hurt them. His stubbornness was a weapon of ferocious power.
'We checked. Ain't no Jack Bogash. That address. A phony Who are you, boy? What you doing here?'
'My name is Jack Bo?'
Whap!
This is how he figured: they had to know who was investigating them. It would be crucial to their survival. They were smart, they were cunning, they had connections, but they knew they had enemies and they had to root them out and destroy them. A man like Sam was no enemy, not really; he was a normal fellow, indignant but not heroic. Besides, he knew nothing of the prison, only of a corrupt rural Mississippi county, which, really, was no more corrupt than any other rural Mississippi county. Earl, though, tantalized them. They somehow instinctively believed that he represented a powerful threat, and it both terrified and infuriated them.
'Jack!'
'Huh? What?'
'Jack, I called you by name twice, you didn't even look around. You forgot your name was Jack. If I called your real name, you'd have looked around fast.'
'Sir, my head is all achy and fuzzed up. Don't know nothing no more, not even my own name.'
'Which is?'
'Jack, sir. Jack Bo?'
Whap!
'Jack, you are a stubborn piece of shit, I'll say that for sure. Damn, you are a piece of stubborn shit.'
'I ain't stubborn at all, sir. I am just telling you the truth.'
Earl clung to it passionately, even as he forgot the rest of his life, for to think of that would be to weaken. He could not weaken. If he weakened, he was dead. If he let an image of his wife or son into his mind, he was poisoned.
'Jack, who you work for?'
If they knew he worked for nobody, if they knew he was just a man sworn to help a friend, then they'd put a bullet in his brain and bury him deep and forget where. Because a nobody was no threat to them. But if he was somebody?an agent of some sort, an investigator?then he represented an enemy institution and that institution had to be identified.
'Who you work for, Jack?'
'Sir, I don't work for no one. I am a poor man trying?'
Whap! and sometimes it wasn't even him they beat. One night?or maybe it was day, he could never tell?he was stirred from the blurry sanctuary of light, sporadic sleep by screams from somewhere else in the Whipping House He wasn't sure how this building was set up, but he believed he was on the first floor in a little warren off a corridor, but up above was bigger, more expansive. It was from that direction the sounds fell through the floorboards. He heard the screams of a black man.
'Suhl Suhl I swear, suh, wasn't me took them things. Suh, I knows the rules. Suh, please, I?'
He heard the sounds of physical struggle, and somehow moans, low sounds that seemed involuntary, as if they seeped out of a living man from some other orifice than his throat, as if some secret fear ducts had been opened.
'You know the rules, Willie.'
It was Bigboy, his almost accentless voice, his surprising command of the language, his lack of excitement or fear, his insistence on defining his pleasure as some kind of duty for the betterment of humanity. 'Oh, God, no, suh, please, I?'
When they hit Earl they used hand cudgels, short billy clubs, and got their power from a lot of practice and a flexible wrist. The theory behind it was to not build up too much speed, to inflict a short, sharp, incredibly painful blow to the outer muscles and the nerves, but to break no bones and rarely cut the skin.
The whip was different. The whip, wielded by an expert as it now seemed Bigboy truly was, gained incredible velocity as the snapping of a powerful wrist amplified itself as it traveled down the nine-foot leather braid to the tip, which ultimately reached supersonic speed, and when it struck it tore, brutally, gaps in the flesh, penetrated, and by the roughness of the leather pulled through the already explosive pain of the wound increased that pain even more.
Earl could tell by the sound that something obscene was happening, for the whip thrummed almost musically as it accelerated, and when it struck the snap was like a gunshot, yet there was a curiously muted quality to it, for the flesh of Willie was absorbing the complete energy of the blow.
Willie screamed and screamed and screamed. No transliteration can quite capture the agony of those utterances, for they were beyond the power of an alphabet or a writing system to record. It was just an agony, untethered by restraint and encouraged by fear, that burst alive and pulsating from his lungs.
