The two deputies laughed while we drove onto an off ramp to a highway. We were twenty minutes from Charleston, in the country. In the distance we could see a complex of low beige buildings surrounded by chain-link fences topped with coils of barbed wire. “That’s the Charleston County Jail, boys,” the deputy said.
Twelve hours after we’d been caught in Five-Fathom Creek, we were standing in the receiving area of the Charleston County Jail. We were tired and utterly defeated. John was not cracking jokes. Ireland looked terrible, kept complaining that his stomach was getting worse. I just watched, dazed, as they unlocked the chains, pulled them through the rings on our belts. They unfastened our belts and pointed to a black guy standing in the hall. “Follow him,” the white deputy said.
We followed the black clerk into a room and gave him our watches and wallets, which he put into manila envelopes and labeled with a felt-tip pen. Then he fingerprinted us. When he finished, he told us to wait outside in the hallway.
We stood against the wall and watched the cops coming and going at the main entrance. A woman behind a tall desk talked on a radio and answered the phone. Guards walked in and nodded at us vaguely as they walked by. All this coming and going inside a county jail was kind of interesting if you’d never seen it before. It was a testimony to our fatigue that it took us fifteen minutes to realize that we could just walk out the door.
“Nobody’s watching the damn door!” John hissed.
I stared at the door and watched a guard walk out unnoticed. The woman was talking on the phone and didn’t press a buzzer to unlock the door; the door was just open. Now and then, somebody would look at us, but since we were dressed in our sailing clothes, we just looked like run-of-the-mill American deadbeats, possibly homeless, certainly not prisoners. We were invisible as far as people trained to watch people dressed as prisoners were concerned.
“We could just walk out of here,” I said.
John laughed. “I know! It’s unbelievable!”
Ireland looked at us, grimacing. He said his stomach was twisting up in knots. His suntanned skin had paled and he winced when he said, “They want us to walk out; then they shoot us.”
“Naw,” John said. “They’re not that smart. These people are just working. They don’t give a shit about us.” He walked toward the door.
I followed, wondering just how far we could get, but John veered from the door and walked up to the woman behind the tall desk. We stood about ten feet from the glass doors to freedom, staring at the woman. She looked up, smiled, and said “May I help you?” with a look of faint surprise on her face from, I believe, our general haggard appearance.
“Maybe,” John said. He looked at me and back at the woman. “We’re prisoners. Checking in.”
The woman grinned, leaned back ready for a big laugh, then snapped forward, assuming the posture of open-mouthed incredulity. “Excuse me?” she said.
“We’re prisoners,” John said. “Guy told us to wait here, but it’s been a half hour.”
The woman was nodding as John spoke, but she was distracted, looking everywhere for a guard. One came up behind us and got in line, waiting his turn.
“Johnson,” the woman blurted to the guard. “These men are prisoners.”
Johnson jerked out of a daydream stupor, which people who work in places like this develop as a survival skill, and stared at us like we’d just stepped off a spaceship.
“Prisoners?”
“Yessir,” I said. “Guy told us to wait—”
“What guy?”
I pointed to the room where we had checked our stuff.
“Goddammit,” Johnson said. He leaned close to the woman and said, “Call Willy and tell him to get his ass back to work!”
The woman nodded quickly and punched a phone button. Meanwhile, Johnson escorted us down the hall that led into the depths of the Charleston County Jail.
Everything was made of poured concrete in this jail. The floors, the walls—no bricks. They’d painted the floors gray and the walls pale green in keeping with the building’s spirit of dull utility.
Johnson stopped at a door marked clothing room and opened it. Inside the small room, floor-to-ceiling shelves were filled with what can only be described as rags—blue and gray tattered pants and shirts. Johnson handed us each a net laundry bag. “Take off your civvies and put everything in the bag,” he said.
Johnson waited impatiently by the door as we stripped. Another guard stopped at the doorway. “Thought you went home.”
“Thought so, too,” Johnson said.
I wanted to ask Johnson if he meant for us to turn in our underwear, too, but he was busy. So I just stood there in my Jockeys and waited. I wasn’t in a big hurry. I saw myself in a detached way, standing nearly naked in a place where they kept men in cages. I thought I should feel something. Fear or nervousness, something. I felt numb.
“What happened?” said the guard.
“Fucking Willy had these guys standing around next to the goddamn front door.”
“We supposed to put our underwear in the bag, too?” John asked me.
“I dunno—”
“Yeah. Everything goes in the bag,” Johnson said.
“Standing by the door?” the guard said, smiling like he was going to pop.
“Yeah,” Johnson said. “That damn nig—” He paused and looked up and down the hallway. “That damn nigger is about spacey as they come,” Johnson said.
The guard laughed. He seemed to be looking at me, so I smiled back. I knew Willy was spacey, too. Willy didn’t allow me to keep my toothbrush when we checked in—I had it in my jacket pocket—but said they’d give me another one. That’s pretty spacey, isn’t it? A toothbrush is a toothbrush—isn’t it? The guard saw me smiling and glanced at Johnson and nodded at me. Johnson turned around and saw the three of us standing naked, holding three laundry bags of stinking clothes. He jerked his head to the shelves. “Grab yourselves a set of clothes. You get one shirt, one pair of pants, pair of socks.” We nodded.
“Somebody’d been up shit creek if these boys had’ve taken off,” Johnson said to the guard. “And you can just damn well bet I’d be the one without the paddle.”
“I know it,” the guard said. “Jenkins has a hair up his ass when it comes to you, Roy. What’d you ever do to that man?”
I couldn’t find any pants that weren’t tom to literal shreds, and I was getting pissed about it. This is America, isn’t it? “Look at this shit,” I said to John. “These are fucking rags.”
“They’re what you get, boy,” Johnson said, irritated. “Get that shit on and let’s get out of here.”
I pulled on the most intact pair of pants I could find and rooted around the shelves for a shirt.
“The fucker had to come down and catch me one night when I was looped at the Alibi,” Johnson said. “Ever since, he’s been giving me shit for it.”
The guard shook his head, grinning at Johnson’s wild ways.
I found a shirt which had two buttons and put it on. I was trying to find some socks. The guard checked the hallway and said, “Yeah. Jenkins can be a real ball-buster about drinking,” he said.
We were all three properly dressed prisoners now, standing there in tattered blue uniforms that had been worn by hundreds of men over the last ten years or so, standing in socks, holding our bags of civilian clothes, waiting for Johnson to tell us what to do next before we dropped from exhaustion. “You got that right. I’m thinking I’ll transfer to state—” Johnson stopped when he saw the guard looking at us. He turned around. “All right. Put your bags over on that shelf. Grab a blanket and let’s get out of here,” Johnson said, pointing to a stack of gray woolen blankets on the floor. I’d missed them; thought they were cleaning rags. We each stashed our gear on the shelf and grabbed an armload of ragged blanket and clutched it to our chests. “Do we get shoes?” John asked.