Carthage by Oates Joyce Carol

Author:Oates, Joyce Carol [Oates, Joyce Carol]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2014-01-21T00:00:00+00:00

“WELL, FRIENDS! Now you know—the feel of a maximum-security prison.”

In the glowering-white March sun they staggered with exhaustion.

Even the Investigator was looking fatigued. Even the Lieutenant, glimpsed in an unguarded moment.

“Time inside is not equivalent to time outside. When a CO comes home to his family after just one day, or night—he’s been away a time they can’t measure.”

The Lieutenant chuckled, grimly.

In gratitude that they could breathe again, the visitors drew deep breaths filling their lungs. The Intern averted a wave of vertigo, shutting her eyes and biting her lower lip.

Yet she was tough, resilient. The Investigator would be impressed with his girl-assistant who hadn’t panicked as several of the other young women had panicked, begging to be excluded from the march.

Though crudely treated by the Lieutenant, who’d subjected them not only to a physical ordeal but to a considerable humiliation, the individuals of the tour-group did not seem to resent him. The Intern took note.

Now that they’d left the dreaded Cell Block C they were saying, marveling—what a good idea it is, how worth tax-money, you could not have civilization without it, prisons, punishment, guards with guns to protect you.

“In this direction, my friends, if you’ve caught your breaths—Death Row.”

The Lieutenant led them briskly along one of the coarse-graveled paths. The execution chamber attached to Death Row was the last of the stops of the prison tour.

Another half-hour, maybe. Then freedom!

The college girls were clutching at one another, breathless and laughing. The experience of the cell block had left them dazed, shaken and giddy. One of the girls had been crying and another had comforted her and another was saying O God! Was that—was that horrible . . .

Nightmare . . .

. . . never forget.

But they were out of Cell Block C now. Laughing and gasping for breath like one who has been part-strangled, released and then part-strangled and then released and now grateful simply to breathe, to be alive.

Cynically the Intern thought: they would recall the experience, in the shared giddiness of girls who’d come through a crisis together, as a particular sort of sexual frisson.

In the wake of the Lieutenant they were walking. In the direction of a particularly ugly cinder block building at the farther edge of a compound of buildings beyond which there was open, scrubby land and in the near distance the high electrified fence, the guard-tower stations.

“Don’t worry, my friends—we don’t visit Death Row. We will visit the execution chamber but not ‘Death Row’—you will not come face-to-face with the most evil.” The Lieutenant paused as if choosing his words with care though they were surely familiar words many times recited at this point in the tour.

One of the visitors asked why wasn’t Death Row part of the tour.

“Because the warden has forbidden it, that’s why. Because it has happened in the past that ‘foes of the death penalty’ agitators have managed to get included in the tour, and raised a ruckus in the cell block.” The Lieutenant shook his head, in disgust.

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