“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.
“Suh! Suh! 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.
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 ’em 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 ’ho-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.”
&
nbsp; “My name is Jack Bogash. I am—”
And so it continued.
14
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 ’splain to 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, ’cause he’s so dadgummed 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.”
“Sir, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I am Jack—”
“Now, see, there you go. Bigboy, did you see that? He’s playing stupid again. But if you watched his eyes as I spoke, as I did, as I know you did, what did you see?”
“Warden, what you see all the time,” said Bigboy. “His pupils narrowed and darkened, his head got real still, and he put it down a bit, as if it could help him hear better. His eyes didn’t move, he was concentrating so hard. And when we brought him over here and in here, you should have seen him looking and memorizing.”
“How many Negro women were out front at the Store waiting admittance, Bigboy?”
“Warden, I don’t know.”
“I’ll bet he does. Convict, how many?”
“Don’t know, sir.”
“Five or six?”
Actually it was seven.
“Don’t know, sir.”
“I watched his eyes again, Bigboy. He didn’t involuntarily respond to either five or six, because he knows it was seven.”
“Sir, y’all are way beyond me.”
“Well, you have presented me with a problem here, boy. Now I want you to work it through that achy brain of yours what I should do. Okay? You with me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Okay. What I see before me can’t be Jack Bogash of Little Rock. There’s no Jack Bogash in Little Rock. Documents phony, but very fine phonys. Skills highly developed. Marine background. Tough, smart, violent. No, you’d be Mr. X. Mr. X is an agent. Maybe he was hired by someone in Arkansas, or maybe in Washington. He’s a white man, he’s very smart, he’s been around. He’s what you might call a professional operator. Yes, sir. Now, we can’t do anything with him until we figure out who he is, why he’s here, what his goal is. Unless we know that, we don’t know a thing, but if we know that, then suddenly there are possibilities. Without that, we’re just stuck with another convict. And being a convict here, sir, is no picnic, for we believe that convicts should suffer for their crimes against society.”
“My name is Jack Bogash—
”
“Damn! I thought I explained it to you. There is no Jack Bogash. Jack Bogash doesn’t help a thing. Jack Bogash isn’t here. Jack Bogash doesn’t exist. Jack Bogash is a fantasy, or a professional identity, well camouflaged, well thought out. I don’t want to hear that again from you, convict. You understand. You are pulling a stunt, and you know how we deal with stunts.”
“Sir, I am Jack Bo—”
“Okay, Secret Agent X. You have made your choice. Sergeant Bigboy, take Secret Agent X to the coffin.”
15
SAM sent his letter of report to his client, Davis Trugood, in Chicago and waited anxiously for a reply. He thought a telegram might be the fastest way, or a long distance call, which would come on the third day, but on that day there was no response. Then came the fourth, with nothing either.
In the meantime, he fretted wretchedly, and was unpleasant to everybody. But he was hardest on himself, and for the intense relief he felt at being out of Thebes County, even if Earl was still there. He wished he didn’t feel such pure joy in simple survival, in small things like his wife’s grits on the table in the morning and his children’s sullenness.
He had punishing horrors to be got through still, the worst of which was a terrible session with Junie and little Bobbie Lee, in which he assured them that Earl was fine, he was on confidential business regarding a legal matter for Sam and in no danger. He would report in soon, if he didn’t reach Junie first.
Junie had become somewhat passive by this time in her life. She knew Earl’s ways and his nature, and if she didn’t accept it or understand it, she had made peace with the fact that her life would in some way be shaped by his needs.