The Pledge (36 page)

“As far as my own health is concerned, I'm in excellent shape, and facing the monster is a lot less awful than thinking about it. The few men I've spoken to snort down twelve months and say they can do that kind of time standing on one foot. But since most of them are repeaters and spend most of their lives in jail, I don't find their expertise very comforting. However, while not on one foot, I'll come through it all right, and learn something in the bargain. As I said earlier, excluding the afternoon they brought me here, I have spent only two days in prison and I think I've learned more about capital punishment and crime than I knew in all my years outside. Let me add one thing: I love you very much.”

His letter to his mother and father was more flagrantly cheerful.

He spent eleven days in his cell, and then he was called out for transfer.

MILL BOG

   

T
HE GUARD
at the door of his cell block said, “You're moving on, Bacon. Anything personal in there?”

“Some notes.”

“Give them to me. They'll be returned to you when your term is up. Anything else?”

“I'm halfway through my book.” He was now reading
The Forsyte Saga
because it was long, the specific of first choice from the library cart. He had never read it before, and he was delighted with it and halfway through it. “Can I take it with me?” he asked the guard.

“No, leave the book. Take your toothbrush, toothpaste, and shaving stuff. That's government issue.”

Jenner sat on his upper cot, knees drawn, head bent, his eyes full of tears that he was trying to hide. Bruce had left something with him. It had taken a few days for Bruce to draw him out, and then they talked for hours. Bruce talked about defending himself. You don't accept it, you don't accept anything from those sick bastards. You fight it — every inch of the way. Now Bruce, the first man in his life who wanted nothing from him, who could answer his questions, and who could make life something other than a meaningless nightmare, was going away. He'd never see Bruce again. He'd never have a friend or a defender again.

Bruce reached up to him. “So long, kid.”

He wouldn't take Bruce's hand. He said, “Shit, get your ass out of here! I don't need you!”

“Pussy ass,” the guard said.

Bruce said nothing. He followed the guard down the circular stairs to the room where he had surrendered his clothes, and there the same brown bag was handed back to him.

“Bacon, Bruce Nathaniel. Take these and get dressed. Throw your clothes into the basket. Your valuables will be turned over to the marshal and they'll go with you to your destination.”

The eleven days in the cell with Jenner had constituted a valid separation from the world. His own clothes were strange to him, and he put them on in a sort of daze. Where was he going? At least he'd get out of this red brick medieval madhouse. After he had dressed himself, he was handcuffed and taken through the rooms he had traversed on his way in and through a pair of high iron doors into the courtyard. It was a cold, dismal day, the rain light but fine and cutting, about nine o'clock in the morning now. He and the guard waited under the projecting arch of the doorway, sheltered there from the rain. They waited in silence for about ten minutes before the car came. Bruce resisted an impulse to ask the guard where he would be going. He disliked asking questions of any of the guards, disliked speaking to them, although common sense told him that they were civil service people, doing what job they were fit for and, where he was concerned, doing nothing to provoke a personal vendetta. It didn't help. He hated them.

The car, a big, four-door Buick, was let into the yard through the high outer gates, and it pulled over to where Bruce and the guard waited under the arch of the doorway. The guard then gave the driver, a United States marshal, the bag containing Bruce's wallet, keys, and watch, and an envelope with his transfer orders. The guard opened the back door and motioned for Bruce to get in.

“Take off the handcuffs,” Bruce said.

The marshal, a large, round-faced man, said, “They'll come off when we get where we're going. Suppose you get in and relax.”

Bruce bent, stepped into the car, and found the seat comfortable enough. The back section was separated from the front by a metal screen, and when the driver got in, the doors automatically locked. Bruce was still in the grip of the excitement of leaving the cell and the prison and tasting at least the partial freedom of sitting in a car and moving through the city. “Can you hear me?” he asked the marshal.

“I can hear you.”

“Where are we going?”

“West Virginia, a facility called Mill Bog. Now listen, Bacon, we'll be spending the next few hours in this car, so just you sit back and relax and be a good guy, and we'll have a nice easy trip. I don't know how much time they slapped you with, but like I tell everyone who sits down in back of this car, the penalty for trying to escape is five years tacked on to the time you already got.”

“I'm not going to try to escape, so why can't you take these damn handcuffs off?”

“I don't bend the rules, Bacon, so just sit back and enjoy the ride. If you have to piss or take a crap, tell me about it.”

For the next half hour, the rain and mist obscured the view; then the sky lightened, the clouds began to break, and shafts of sunlight cut through. The window alongside Bruce was slightly open, and the sweet cold air was like a benediction. They were riding through farm country that soon began to give way to rolling, wooded hills.

“What's it like — this place we're going to?”

“Light security. That's as good as you can get in a Federal facility. It's a work prison, so you won't get bored, and it's in the middle of a Federal forest. A long way from anywhere. You could be going to worse places, believe me, and now shut up and let me drive.”

About an hour later, they stopped at a gas station with a roadside coffee bar. The marshal stood at the toilet door while Bruce used the bathroom, and then he ushered Bruce back to the car and locked him in.

“Hungry?” he asked Bruce.

“Not so you could notice.”

“How about a doughnut and a cup of coffee?”

He munched the doughnut and sipped the coffee with appreciation. Road signs told him that they were passing through Charlottesville. He saw people in the streets, men, women, children, stores, cars, policemen at traffic crossings — there was the whole world that he had once been a part of, free to come and go as he wished. Now he was in a cage, a trapped animal.

The farms became fewer, and the rolling forested hills turned into low mountains. The sky was blue, spotted here and there with cotton balls of cumulus clouds — a cold, clean fall day, the air clear and pine-scented. His depression disappeared. How could he be depressed in a land so wild and beautiful? He began to look forward to his destination. What was a light security prison? Well, whatever it might be, it could hardly be worse than the soul-shrinking place he had come from. Another hour passed, and now they were winding up into the flat-sided mountains of the Alleghenys. It was a totally wild, primeval, and beautiful place, the air full of pine scent, the leaf-stripped birches columns of white supporting a roof of old maple and oak.

The prison was like nothing he had expected, the entrance without gates or walls, only a sprawling building of wood and stone, painted government brown, situated on a slight rise; and beyond that a great sweep of green lawn, with World War Two-type barracks spotted here and there around it, all of it more like an army camp than a prison.

The marshal parked the Buick in front of a sign that said
MILL BOG CORRECTIONAL FACILITY
, opened the door for Bruce to step out, unlocked his handcuffs, and tossed them back into the car. Evidently here, at the end of anywhere or nowhere, handcuffs were a redundancy. He led Bruce into the building and into a room with a long bench, counter, and wooden lockers behind the counter. To the guard behind the counter, the marshal said crisply, “Here he is. Bacon, Bruce Nathaniel.”

The marshal delivered the bag of Bruce's possessions, received a signed receipt, left Bruce and the building, and drove away. The guard, studying Bruce thoughtfully, asked, “You're not one of the Hollywood crowd?”

“New York,” Bruce said.

“Right. The foreign correspondent. Very well, Bruce, come along and we'll get you some prison clothes.”

He led Bruce into another room, where he told him to strip down to his skin — and pointed to the door to showers. As before, Bruce showered and walked in disinfectant, and then returned, towel wrapped around him, to be led into a supply room.

“Size forty-four?”

“That should do it,” Bruce agreed. He was given jeans washed endless times, blue cotton shirt, undershirt and shorts, heavy socks and shoes, a heavy U.S. Army jacket, and a new set of toilet articles. His watch was returned to him. He was told that the money in his wallet would be considered a deposit, and that he could draw a dollar a week canteen money for cigarettes, shaving cream or soap, and candy. “Your clothes will be cleaned and returned to you when you're released, as will your other possessions.”

Bruce dressed himself in the prison clothes and then was directed down a corridor to a room marked
Orientation.
There were about a dozen plain kitchen chairs in the room, but only two were occupied, both by men in convict clothes. In one, a slight man with pale blue eyes and light hair, in the other, a young man in his twenties. Bruce seated himself, and at first there was silence from all three of them. Then the older man — he looked forty but turned out to be twenty-nine — the one with the sandy hair, turned to Bruce and introduced himself. “Clem Alsta — what the hell, we're going to be here a while. Might as well know our names.”

“Bruce Bacon.”

“Harry O'Brien,” the other man said. He grinned easily. Bruce was to learn that he was a bank robber who for years had done very well by walking into small suburban banks, presenting a brown paper bag, and asking the teller to fill it up. He never carried a weapon, and since he moved from state to state, he ended up in a Federal prison five years before. At this day of transfer to Mill Bog, he had two more years to serve. Alsta was another case of two more years to serve. In the merchant marine, in nineteen forty-three, he had killed another seaman in a bitter fight. He had been sentenced to fifteen years, and now, with his time off for good behavior, he had two more years to serve.

“A damned peculiar place,” O'Brien said. “No bars on the windows, no locks on the doors. I could get up and walk out of here.”

“To where?” Bruce wondered.

“It's minimum security,” Alsta said. “You don't walk out, because if they bring you back, they don't bring you back here but Leavenworth, which I know about, and then you get five more years on your time. So you got to be a dumb son of a bitch to walk out of here.”

Bruce looked around the room. It was clean, the walls painted pale green, on one wall a steelpoint engraving of Lincoln, on the other a portrait of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. There was a small table at one end of the room, an American flag, and a chair behind the table. The dozen kitchen chairs were placed in three rows of four. A sign on the wall read
No Smoking.

Just being there, the three of them sitting alone in a room, became a sort of psychological medicine. No guard, no one to keep them from walking out if they wished, and when, after fifteen minutes or so, Bruce went to the door and peered out, the corridor was empty. It was a valid cause for reflection, Bruce decided: first, a committee of obsessed, half-demented congressmen, then a court where the scales of justice were fixed and soldered into place by a thin-lipped and apparently heartless judge, then a prison that was neither cruel nor kind, only as mindless as the hundreds of electric doors and gates that rolled back and forth constantly — and now? It is most interesting, he told himself, to be a citizen of a country so advanced, so civilized as to offer this strange prison, and so helpless before the onslaught of a few hundred primitive lunatics who could do as they pleased and say what they pleased and make a mockery out of all of it.

Then the door opened, and his off-the-cuff philosophy was laid aside.

The man who entered the room and walked up to the table, half seating himself on it, appeared to be about fifty years old and overweight without being obviously fat, a thoughtful face, and pale, intelligent eyes. He wore gold pince-nez, which he polished before he began to speak.

“You are here,” he said to them, “in a minimum security facility of the Federal prison system. I am the warden of this institution, and my name is Craig Demming. I am also the final court of appeal. I am a good master or a harsh master. That is up to you. You have all three of you come from penitentiaries of one sort or another, so you are well aware of the difference between this prison and other prisons. Mill Bog comprises twenty-two acres of space. This area is surrounded by an invisible barrier, and this barrier is marked by small white signs that say
Stay Inside.
There is one of these signs every forty feet around the entire circumference of the twenty-two acres, and while you are part of this prison population, you are not permitted to step across that invisible line without specific permission to do so. In this institution, the only door that is locked is the door to the pantry. There are no guns anywhere on the prison grounds. If we should need an armed presence, we call in the state police. By Federal law, you will be granted three days a month for good behavior. Troublemakers lose their good-time deductions. Let me also say this: in the twelve years that this facility has been in existence, there have been only eight escape attempts. They were all Kentucky men, moonshiners, who became homesick and walked out of here. They were picked up by the police in their hometowns and returned here. Now let me tell you why no one to speak of escapes from this prison without walls. No one in here has more than two years to serve, and this is the best place in the system to do time. However, if you do decide to escape and you are returned, as you surely will be, you will be penalized five years of your lives, and you will not do the time here but in a maximum security penitentiary. So it's up to you. This is a work facility, and tomorrow you'll be assigned to your jobs.”