A good whip man can keep you at maximum pain for the longest time. With control and an awareness of the human nervous system he can hit you where a previous blow's nerves aren't already sending out signals; he can make each blow, that is, a new blow.
Willie struggled to provide drama for the lesson, as Bigboy, proving a very good whip man, crooned to him, but he was not with it, and couldn't keep up his part. Earl heard what he knew was a death rattle, for he had heard it in the islands so many times, a kind of low gurgle as some valve or other lets go while life passes from the body.
'Sarge, he's out,' Earl heard one of the assistants say.
'He's not out,' said Bigboy, who knew of such things, 'he's dead. He's gone.'
'He didn't last long, did he?'
'It's hard to tell,' said Bigboy. 'Sometimes the scrawniest ones, they last for hours and hours. And the big fellas, they just go fast, because something in their brain tells ' it's too much and it clicks off.'
'You know more about niggers than any man alive, sir,' said the assistant.
'No, it's the warden who knows niggers. I learned all this from him,' said Bigboy. later that day?or maybe later that month or year?he was alone with Bigboy. The guard lit a Camel from a fresh pack, passed it over. Earl took it, though he couldn't look Bigboy in the eyes, for Bigboy had begun to preside over his mind, to loom, to move through his dreams. He felt fear, because he had no power.
'Go on, boy. Smoke that cigarette.'
Earl smoked hard. The first glimmer of pleasure in what seemed like years, though really it had only been days.
'Look here,' said Bigboy, 'you've done well, even I have to admit it.'
'Sir, I haven't done nothing. Just tellin' the truth, that's all.'
'So here's what we'll do. You tell us who you are. Okay? We'll have to check it. For a few days, we'll let you alone, move you to a nicer place. Food. No discipline. Plenty of smokes. You like the girls?
We'll git you a nice dark field gal for a night of fun. We have a part of the setup here we call '-town. You know what that means, don't you?
Let me tell you, Jack, she'll make you forget all your bruises.
If we can make some sort of deal with your agency, a kind of you-scratch-my back-we-scratch-yours arrangement, then we'll let you go.
You can look back on all this as a character-building exercise. Hell, we didn't break any bones. You lost some sleep, that was all.'
'My name is Jack Bogash. I am ' And so it continued.
They took him to the hose room and hosed him down, blowing the filth and excrescence off of him. His chains, finally, were unlocked. He was given a prison uniform, newly laundered, a rough, striped garment, and a pair of old boots to wear. When he was done, he was chained again, but more lightly: not festooned with chains so much, but merely handcuffed and ankle-cuffed, the two bonds joined by a single strand of chain.
He was led out of the Whipping House, his home for however many days it had been. He blinked. The sun was hot. It was daylight, when there is no night or day in the Whipping House. Bigboy ran the convoy, with two guards on either side and another behind him with a riot gun, in case Earl had breakaway designs.
They walked from the Whipping House past what Earl had identified as the Store, and Earl felt as if he were some kind of freak show all his own, the man with two heads or six arms or three noses, visiting town.
All the Negro women in line to get into the Store stared at him, for they had never seen a white man in chains before and were committing the image to memory, to tell their grandchildren about, that day at Thebes where a white man was treated like a Negro.
They came to the once grand house whose Doric columns seemed romantic proclamations of a time past. That house rose above them all, something out of one of those movies full of belles in fancy dresses and young Confederate cavalry officers heading off to fight the blue bellies and defend a way of life. But there were no liveried Negroes in service at the doors to hold them open, and up close the old house showed how rotted it was, how forlorn, how its paint peeled; some of its windows were boarded over, its shrubbery and bushes were not tended at all, were overgrown and weedy. If a hundred years ago this house had commanded a plantation, today that memory was a ghost.
Up the three steps they went, and into a foyer, where the furniture lay under sheets. In rooms and corridors beyond, Earl glimpsed other rooms and corridors, also shrouded and dusty. But Bigboy led them to the right, through a single door, into the one room that was functional. It was the warden's office, where the man himself sat behind a desk.
He looked up, so mild, at Earl. He was baby-fat plump, bald with a spray of white hair on his temples, maybe sixty or so, eyes distorted behind glasses. He wore a battered linen suit, a white shirt gone to gray, and a black string tie, like a hero of the Confederacy in his declining days.
'Here he is, Warden,' said Bigboy.
Earl stood before the man, who looked him up and down.
'My, my, my,' he said, 'you are a strong one, aren't you?'
Earl had no words for this man. He said nothing.
He was prodded.
'Convict, when Warden says something you reply right quick.'
'I ain't no convict,' said Earl. 'This here's all a big misunderstanding.'
Something jacked him hard in the ribs.
'And you call him sir, convict.'
'Sir.' 'My, my, my,' said the warden. 'Well now, convict, you seem to have raised a right smart ruckus in our little pea patch. Yes, sir, you do have a talent for chaos.'
'Sir, my name is Jack Bogash of Little Rock, Arkansas. I come down to your state in quest of deer-hunting leases in unhunted areas, with the idea of starting up a hunting business. I don't know what these fellas have told you, but some men come out of the woods in a powerful sweat and offered me money to help them, and the one was very convincing and I did need money, so I got involved. I had no idea no law-breaking was involved. This is all just one big misunderstanding.'
'I see, I see,' said the warden. 'And what happened in our county, a detained man being broke out, a chase through the woods, some tricks played on some dogs, all that I have had reported to me, all that didn't happen then, that's what you're sayin', is it?'
'Sir, there was '
'Another man. Yes. Well, convict, I just don't know what to do here.
You say one thing, the reports say another. Now what am I supposed to do?'
'Sir, I don't know nothing about no report. I only know what happened.'
'Now, convict,' said the warden, 'if that is so, can you ' tell me one damn thing?'
'If I can, sir. My brain ain't working too well with all the pounding it's been getting.'
'It seems to me that if you were who you say you are and were not who we say you are, you would be screamin' bloody murder for a lawyer. That is what all innocent men accused unjustly demand, for they understand that the lawyer is their emissary before justice. They demand phone calls, they demand to call their wives and see their children, they demand to return to the world they claim they have been unjustly removed from. The world means something to them, it means a lot. They cannot in any way quickly make an adjustment to their new surroundings. That has been my experience.'
'Sir, I just tried to cooperate with the deputies and then the guards, sir. That's all I '
'Now, a natural criminal mind, or some kind of trained man, on the other hand, he doesn't waste time in mourning. No sir. He understands right fast he's in a new world with new rules, a new system, with new lords and masters, new traditions, new possibilities. And he sets about as fast as a skinned cat to master what he's got before him. He's used to quick thinking, quick adaptation. Hell, that even may be why he got in the business he got in, ' he's so dad gummed quick at it. Your undercover man and here I could mean on whichever side of the law, for it is my theory that detectives and criminals bear a marked similarity in personality is above all a realist. They tell me you are a realist, convict. That you play weak and scared and stupid, but underneath it all, you're calculating your next move, trying to figure out what's going on, aiming at your best chance of survival. You ain't done one thing, not one thing, the man you say you are would have done.'
