Dead I Well May Be (18 page)

The van drove quickly out of town and onto a straight road. There were no windows, so you couldn’t see anything except for a little scrape in the blacked-out glass partition between us and the drivers. Through that, there were tiny glimpses of what I took to be a two-lane highway through what looked like jungle. It must have been a pretty good road, since we weren’t bounced about and the vehicle managed to go quite fast.

The boys seemed in ok shape. No bruises and no cuts. We looked each other up and down to reassure ourselves, and Fergal tried to say something, but we couldn’t understand him and he eventually gave up. Scotchy closed his eyes and somehow managed to doze. The rest of us laughed behind our gags when he started to snore.

After a couple of hours, the van turned, and this time the road wasn’t so good. The going was slower, and we followed this trail for about another hour.

Finally, the van stopped, and we heard voices outside and then, very slowly, we heard it move again as if we were pulling in somewhere. Scotchy woke and the boys tensed up.

The back doors opened.

The sunlight blinding. A huge trail of dust that you couldn’t see through. A smell of piss and shit.

I blinked a few times. The dust cleared. We were in a prison.

Four guard towers hung over a central courtyard, and around the courtyard, almost like a cloister, there were cells, each with a big metal door slotted with a Judas hole. I looked around me. The walls at the front gate stretched about thirty feet high, rolls of razor wire on top. Also at the gate sat a three-story building that I took to be the guardhouse. Through the gate, surrounding the complex, I could see another
fence with razor wire on top. The guard towers had spotlights, and the guards themselves were men in faded blue uniforms who carried double-barreled shotguns. There were no other prisoners about, but you could sense their presence behind the cell doors. It seemed to me that if you could get through the cell wall, all you had to do was make it over the fence and you were out of there. It didn’t appear very secure, and that reassured me. It made me think that this must be a remand prison for nondangerous felons.

There was some discussion between our driver and the prison guards. We stood around and waited. Heat, an azure sky, the gray prison walls, the dusty white courtyard.

After a time the van drove off, the big metal gates opening to let it through. Half a dozen guards came and led us over to one of the cells. They opened it up and shoved us inside. They took our handcuffs off but produced manacles, which they then bolted to our wrists in front of us. Between the manacles, they locked an eighteen-inch-long piece of chain: heavy iron, old, but still strong. Then they made us all sit down. The cell was stifling and the floor stank. The only ventilation came through a tiny barred hole on the wall near the ceiling. Cobwebs hung on the ceiling and the floor was alive with insects. When we were sitting, the guards put a manacle on our left ankle, which was connected to another heavy chain. There were six ring bolts embedded in the concrete floor, and they positioned us so that we were all near at least one of them. The guards produced huge padlocks and attached each ankle chain to a ring bolt. A guard pointed to a black bucket in the corner, and they all went out and locked the door behind them.

We ripped off our gags and all started speaking at once. Everyone had suffered more or less the same treatment. The sham with the confessions, no access to a lawyer or anyone from the outside. No one had talked. No one. Not even Andy. I was so proud of the boys. I couldn’t believe it. Jesus, even Andy. He was pleased with himself. We were all excited. I mean, we were in a hell of a spot, but we were pumped to at least be with each other. Scotchy was the first to come out with an important question:

Where’s Big Bob? he asked.

They said because he had an American passport he was being dealt with differently, I answered.

Oh, Scotchy said, skeptically.

Why, what do you think? I asked.

I don’t think anything, Bruce, Scotchy said.

Fergal stood and stretched. You could do that and maybe walk about three feet before your ankle chain stopped you.

How long do you think we’re going to be here? Fergal asked.

We all shook our heads. I was thinking that this would be it until the trial. Why bother to move us at all unless it was a reasonably permanent change? And letting us all be in the same cell together wasn’t too bright, unless they were completely confident about winning their case, which with the video they probably were.

They said we were looking at twenty years, Andy said, quietly.

No way, Scotchy said, reassuringly. No way, Andy. For a start, Darkey will pull some strings. That’s how these countries work. We’ll sit tight, Andy boy, and sooner or later they’ll have to give us a lawyer. This isn’t Africa, this is Mexico. They need to keep tight with America, do things right.

Yeah, they’ll give us lawyers, Fergal said hopefully, sitting down again.

That’s right, eventually we’ll get a lawyer, and you’ll see how Darkey comes through for us, Scotchy said, and I could see he really believed it, he wasn’t just saying it for us.

When will Darkey get us out? Andy asked.

Well now, Andy, don’t for one thing get your hopes up. I mean, he can’t just get us out. He’ll send a boy, and he’ll probably make us plead guilty to something, so he will. Darkey White is Darkey White, but he’s not God. We’ll do time, but it won’t be much, Scotchy said sagely.

How much is much, do you think? Fergal asked.

I don’t know, but not hard time, nothing like that. Just enough to make you tough and give you a story for the girls back home, Scotchy said and winked at him.

I didn’t say anything. I was thinking of Big Bob. I was thinking of the map he had. I was wondering where the hell he was now, and I had a terrible suspicion that I knew exactly where that might be.

We talked some more. Our morale was pretty good, Scotchy had done a job cheering us. Night came, and we lay down on the concrete floor. The temperature dipped, and it got a little cold. I was thankful
that I’d been wearing my jeans the day we’d left; the boys, of course, were all still in their shorts. The insects were tiny bugs that you got used to. The spiders up there had eaten all the bigger ones, but still, with them and the hard floor, it was difficult getting over to sleep….

In the morning we’d half-filled the slop bucket. It had been a bugger passing it around all chained up. We waited for the guards to come and open up the door to let us pour it out. The smell was bad and flies were hovering around it. The heat was no worse than my place in Manhattan but, like I say, the stench was terrible.

There are rats, you know, Fergal said while we waited.

I didn’t see any, I said.

There’s rats and lizards and they come onto you when you’re sleeping, Andy said.

Andy had woken loudly a few times in the night, terrified. I wondered if he was imagining it, but then I did see a couple of rats skulking near the door. The gap under the door was only about half an inch, but rats can do an impressive limbo when they want to. They didn’t bother me, though, they’ve never bothered me, and wee lizards I could handle as well. And the boys, I knew, would get used to them.

You’ll get used to them, you’ll see, I said, but Andy looked doubtful.

We waited all morning but no guards came, and it wasn’t until evening that the cell door opened and a guard put down a jug of water and four bowls of rice.

Veinte minutos
, he said and closed the door behind him.

We ate greedily and drank the water, and he came half an hour later for the empty bowls and the carafe. We hadn’t finished the water, so we all desperately took a final swig before he grabbed it back.

Here, we want to empty the bucket, Scotchy said, but the guard didn’t understand.

Bucketo uh, Andy tried, but the door was already closed.

In the night, something big bit me—a spider, I think—and I was concerned that it was poisonous, but in the morning I was fine. Scotchy kept us all talking, and that night our morale wasn’t too bad either.

The black bucket was close to overflowing with piss now, and most of us had succumbed to a drizzly diarrhea. We hoped that today was the day they let us empty it. But we were wrong. We eventually learned that
you slopped out every third day. The prison was on a quadrangle, but one of the cell blocks was empty, so there were three walls of prisoners. Every third day, a cell block was allowed to slop out and spend the morning exercising in the yard. We had heard them come every morning and knew that sooner or later our turn would arrive, or at least we hoped so.

There was no prison work and no canteen and no medical facilities. Prisoners stayed in their cells all the time except for that one morning every three days. We guessed that the prison held three or four hundred prisoners, with maybe thirty or forty guards, though it was impossible to tell for sure.

When the prisoners were let out we heard a lot of talk, and once a voice outside our cell said:

Gringos. Hello, America.

On that first third morning the guards came and undid the padlocks on the ring bolts at our ankles. They put the padlocks in a sack and went out, leaving the door open. We were still shackled at the wrists, but we all immediately got up. The guards yelled at us to sit down. They jabbered something important in Spanish that I hoped Andy was getting since he had the language.

What’s he saying? I asked Andy.

He’s saying we have to wait until, a word I don’t know, I think the whistle, I think, Andy said.

Andy had done O-level Spanish. He’d only gotten a C, but it was better than nothing. I thought I’d heard a whistle the two previous mornings, so maybe Andy was just guessing.

We waited and, sure enough, there was a whistle, and we heard the other prisoners start to come out into the yard.

Have to empty that fucking bucket, Scotchy said. Fergal, you grab it.

Why me?

Because I say so, Scotchy said. And when we get out we all stick together, is that clear?

We nodded.

Complaining, Fergal lifted the bucket gingerly, urine slopping over the sides and onto his hands. None of us had been capable of a big shit, though, so at least that was something. When we got outside, the sunlight was intense, and it took us all a minute to adjust. The other prisoners
on our block came out of their cells and the guards watched warily from the towers. I imagined this was the most dangerous time for the guards, for if we’d chosen, we could have all run out and overpowered the four guys who’d been going from cell to cell unlocking us. Probably there was some kind of rule that if anyone came out of his cell before the whistle went (at which point presumably the guards were clear), he got shot.

Prisoners emptied their slop buckets at a latrine near what we discovered later was the disused cell block. The rest walked around the yard. They were a skinny, badly dressed crew, Indian looking. About a hundred of them. The majority barefooted, bareheaded. None of them looked at us. They talked in low tones, most walking, a few immediately setting up to play dice games on the dusty ground.

We walked over to the latrine with Fergal.

Again the big sky and the dust from the prisoners’ feet rising in spirals like djinns over the cell wells. The smell of openness and air and jungle and a great mass of human beings that weren’t the boys or me.

Swarms of flies over the latrine and a streaking bird, whose plumage reflected back light in wavelengths I had missed: red and emerald green and gold.

Four guard towers, two guards a tower, shotguns, searchlights, I said to Scotchy.

He was looking at me and grinning.

Bruce, dear, it isn’t the fucking
Great Escape
. We’re sitting tight and not doing anything stupid, is that clear? he said, cheerfully.

Is that what you did in the Kesh? I asked him.

Aye, it is, as a matter of fact, he said.

I’d tried to catch him out because he had said that he had been in the Kesh, but Scotchy never remembered anything and I was hoping he’d confound me by saying No, actually, I was in the Big Bad Magab or something.

How long exactly were you in? I asked him, conversationally, but before he could answer I interrupted and pointed to where some of the prisoners were making for a big pile of straw that had been left near the front gates. I elbowed him.

It’s bedding, look, that’s what it is, I said.

Ok, we all go, he said.

He called Fergal and Andy over and we stuck together. We went over to the pile of straw and grabbed a bunch each. We wanted to take it back immediately, but we got the impression you had to wait for the whistle before going back to your cell.

Let’s just shove it in, Fergal said, but when he edged over to the cell a guard walking along the cell-block roof pointed his shotgun and yelled something at us.

What’s he saying, And?

But Andy couldn’t make head or tail of it.

See, sorry, lads, but uh, I learned Castilian, not Mexican Spanish, he explained.

So we stood there near our cell block and waited for the whistle. We were pretty conspicuous, not just as the new boys but also as the only non-Mexicans there.

Straw’ll make things easier, Fergal said, and sat down on the dust. Scotchy pulled him up, and he almost tripped over the chain still dragging behind his ankle.

Let’s just keep our eyes peeled, Scotchy scowled.

And he was right, because before we knew what was happening a gang of about a dozen or more guys had come up to us. They’d just walked over, taking a detour from their circuit, but it was so quick and confusing that suddenly they were on us from four sides. They started saying things in Spanish and pointing at us. Aye, where’s the guards now? I was thinking.

What are they saying, Andy? Scotchy asked, but Andy couldn’t get it. The head guy was a small man in a string T-shirt and baggy blue jeans. He was pointing at Scotchy’s red hair and grabbing his own and making a joke. They had surrounded us completely now and had done it so incredibly fast we hadn’t even been able to get to a wall. They were all smaller than us, but some of them had leather belts and were wrapping them around their fists. Others brandished their manacle chains. The yelling was so loud now I was sure the guards were going to intervene. I looked up at the watchtowers to see what was going on, but no one paid any attention.