A World of Thieves

bunch of red grapes. His jaw wasn’t broken but over the next few days he’d have a devil of a time eating. I’d jammed a couple of knuckles on my hand but at least it wasn’t broken. Most people have no idea how easily you can break your hand on somebody’s head. It’s why they invented boxing gloves.

As we went out to formation some of the cons were grinning at me. “Ain’t this boy something,” one said. “A regular Dempsey.”

“Dempsey, hell,” said another. “Tunney’s more like it.”

And from then on, Tunney’s what they called me. None of the cons would try me again, not even Garrison, who would tell me I had a hell of punch and then let me be, like all the rest of them.

The pushers were a different story. They rode me hard from the very first day, cursing me, ordering me to work faster. I’d set my jaws tight and keep hacking at the cane and if I ever said anything it was only “Yeah boss, working faster.” But as the days became weeks they pushed me harder still. Sometimes they’d hit me across the back and legs with a stripped cane stalk and it was all I could do to keep from going at them with my cane knife. I’d have to remind myself over and over of everything Buck and Russell taught me.

Still, word had it that the captain wanted the cop killer to earn a whipping and a day in a sweatbox, to get an early taste of what was in store for him if he tried getting tough in Camp M. Some of the cons told me he wouldn’t let the pushers ease up on me till I was punished. It was no secret why I was there—every con’s crime was common knowledge in the camp. They said I was lucky the gun bulls were convicts too, because they didn’t have it in for cop killers like freeman guards did. A cop killer in a prison with freeman guards was real likely to get shot dead “while trying to escape.”

I figured the sooner it happened the sooner the pushers would quit riding me, so the next time a pusher hit me with a stalk I snatched it out of his hand and cut it in two with a swipe of my cane knife and flung the stub in his face.

The cons around us laughed and one said, “Do that to his fucken neck, Tunney.”

The pusher hollered, “Trouble here!” but the gun bosses had been watching the whole thing and were already on their way.

I spent the rest of the day in leg shackles, trying to dig a six-foot hole in the soft muck beside the bayou, a swarm of mosquitoes feeding on my face and neck. The hole naturally filled up with muddy water as fast as I shoveled it out, but that was the idea—it was a job that couldn’t be done, no matter how long and hard you went at it. After a couple of hours, I hadn’t managed to do much except dig a small pool of muck up to my shins.

One of the gun bulls came over and said, “How you like your new job, hardcase?”

“It’s a Sisyphean ordeal,” I said.

That took the smirk off his face. “You watch your fucken mouth, boy,” he said.

When we got back to camp at dusk, the field boss made his report and the captain sentenced me to thirty lashes and a day in the box.

I had already witnessed a couple of whippings by then, so I knew what I was in for. If you were going in the sweatbox after the lashing, you stripped naked, but if you were getting nothing more than the whipping, you only dropped your pants. Either way, you knelt in front of the whipping log—a portion of oak trunk about three feet thick—and hugged yourself to it with one arm and held up your balls with your other hand in case the whip tip snapped up between your legs. The whipping guard would lay into you with a leather strap some three inches wide and four feet long and attached to a long wooden handle. With the proper wrist action, he could tear up your ass pretty well in twenty strokes, the usual number the captain called for.

The first guy I saw whipped got twenty, and he couldn’t sit for a week after. The second guy I saw get it had it worse. Fifty strokes for punching a pusher. He passed out at forty and his legs slacked apart and he revived with a scream when the next stroke popped him in the nuts. Then he fainted again till it was over. He had to be carried to the sweatbox, his ripped ass dripping blood and his testicles looking like purple baseballs.

I’d learn later that only one guy was willing to bet I wouldn’t squawk for the whole thirty lashes. He lost on number twenty-three. Once you cry out it’s hard to keep from doing it the rest of the way, and I yelled again on the next stroke. But I managed to hold it to a grunt on the last six. I could feel my legs quivering with the effort of staying clamped together—and felt the piss run hot over the hand I held my balls with. I didn’t know how hard I was biting my tongue until it was over and I tasted the blood.

Then it was into the box. Four feet square and solid oak. At the bottom of one wall was a small opening about a foot long and three fingers high. That was where they slid in your bread and water twice a day. The floor was dirt and packed with the waste of the countless men who’d been in there before me. The smell was something to choke on, and at first I thought I might suffocate, but after a while I wasn’t even aware of it—there’s probably nothing you can’t get used to when you don’t have any choice. I couldn’t sit up because of my wounded ass, only lie curled up on my side. By law, a man could be boxed for up to three days at a time, and I’d heard of guys who went crazy, guys who died of the heat.

Buck said the way to beat the box was to form a red dot in your mind and concentrate on nothing but that. You’d go into a kind of trance and the time would be up before you knew it. He said it helped with pain too—you could put it all in the dot and contain it better. I tried it, and it took a while to get right, but I finally did. Sometimes I’d doze off, then snap awake and the pain would be there again, like a rat that snuck in while the room was dark, and I’d have to chase it back into the dot.

I heard things through the night—stirrings and splashings from the swamp, the rough coughs of gators in the bayou, the cries of weak things getting killed by stronger ones. I heard the camp rouse in the early morning. Heard footfalls and then the rasp of a tin plate pushed in through the slot. The shallow plate was filled with water and two slices of bread were soaking in it and I slurped down the whole soggy mess. The slot was showing gray dawnlight when I heard the cons go off to work. And I went back to the red dot.

The slot light was almost entirely faded when the cons returned to camp. I couldn’t see the slot at all by the time the bolt shot back and the door swung open and a boss said to get out of there.

The rush of fresh air made my eyes water and burned my nose and throat, and I felt the barely scabbed wounds on my ass come open as I crawled out. The boss dropped my clothes in front of me and walked off through the shadows to the guard barrack. The other cons were already at supper in the mess shack.

My cramped muscles ached to the bone as I stood up, but it wasn’t as bad as I expected, and I slowly got dressed. The worst part was pulling my pants up over my raw ass. But an amber half-moon was well up in the east and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d taken such pleasure in looking at the sky, in simply breathing the night air. On some French Quarter evening, probably. A memory of Brenda Marie lying naked in moonlight of exactly this color caught me so completely off guard I felt like I’d been seized by the throat.

I chased the image out of my head and cursed myself for a careless fool who deserved another ass-whipping. Then limped off to the mess shack.

Never think about what your woman might be doing on the outside—that was another Buck-and-Russell rule. Pretty soon you’d start imagining her with another guy and make yourself crazy. The guy who didn’t have a woman when he took a fall was the lucky one. If you did have one, forget her, forget her completely. If you had to think of her, think of her as married to somebody you never met, as a mother of six kids and fifty pounds fatter than you last saw her. Think of her as dead if you had to. If she knew where you were and wrote you a letter, don’t even open it before putting a match to it.

Brenda Marie didn’t know where I was, so there was no chance I’d be tempted to read a letter from her, and when I saw how miserable so many of the cons would be for days after receiving a letter from a woman, I was glad none came for me. She wasn’t the only girl I’d been spending time with in New Orleans but she was the smartest and best-looking, a rare combination for damn sure. I’d had a lot of swell nights in her Vieux Carre apartment. But I wasn’t in love with her. The hardest thing about imagining her with another guy was in wanting to be the guy, and that was hard enough.

You never know—that was the chief rule and the one I held to the tightest. You never know what’ll happen. I reminded myself of it every damn day. That one and the one about never believing the only way out was by the state’s permission. Buck said anybody who passed up a chance to escape didn’t deserve to be a free man. Russell only partly agreed. He thought a guy ought to escape whenever he could unless he had less than six months left to do. It wasn’t worth the risk if he was so close to getting let out anyway.

Buck said he’d take any chance that came along, even if he only had a month left to do, a week, a goddam hour. He could get pretty extreme in his arguments in order to drive home a point.

But it wasn’t just talk with them. When they were hardly more than kids they pulled down a one-year