Page 42 of The Reformatory

Redbone turned away, his eyes distant again. Blue was everything to him. Blue liked to play pranks and tell jokes, so maybe Blue was everything to all of Lincoln. And he was nothing to any of them. No one here cared about him the way Redbone cared about Blue.

“But I can’t neither,” Robert whispered. He’d been tender-headed even when Mama pulled a comb through his hair.

Redbone leaned back against the truck’s panel. “You better figure out how. You and me both.” His sad eyes were raised to the moon.

The truck rumbled to a stop at the far end of the campus, on the white side, within sight of the cornfields behind the fences, gray in the night. Chains clattered as the teenage boy beside them kicked his feet in rage. The older boy was the only one of the three of them whose legs and wrists were bound. Boone had carried him out of the dorm over his shoulder like he was a side of beef and dropped him into the truck while the boy screamed his ribs hurt. The boy hadn’t stopped cussing the whole time the truck sped them away from the dorm, bumping over rocks and knots of grass, every building ahead a fright in the headlight beams. The older boy’s lower lip was bleeding, or maybe his gum, the blood trickling down the right side of his chin. Neither he nor Redbone asked him what he’d done, although Boone and Crutcher would not have heard them over the engine’s rumble. The boy was scary, even in chains. Robert thought he might be one of Cleo’s friends who’d jumped him after class, but he wasn’t sure. That memory was a blur of shoes and fists.

“Don’t look at me, sissy,” the teenager said, so Robert kept his eyes away.

The truck passed the kennels, a strip of fence where at least half a dozen dogs the size of Old Man McCormack’s barked from behind the wires. The dogs ran to keep pace as the truck drove past, eager for a chase. The dogs sounded angry, not playful. Robert wondered what the dogs did when they caught you.

When the truck lurched to a stop, his heart bloated to his throat. The engine clicked after it was turned off. The small wooden structure glowing in the bright headlights looked hardly bigger than Miz Lottie’s backyard gardening shed, painted bright white.

Two white boys sat on a bench just outside the closed door. Not far off, a white man in a billed cap kept watch over them. Robert thought maybe the Funhouse couldn’t be so bad, with white boys here too—until he saw their eyes. They looked terrorized. From inside the shed came a crack of leather striking flesh, and a child’s scream after. Robert had never heard anyone scream that way except Mama, when she’d been dying. Or the voices from the fire.

“Get ’im out,” Boone said. “Haddock wants him next.”

Robert’s body shook in his corner where he sat. He scooted closer to Redbone as Boone pulled down the truck’s door with a sharp, rusty whine. Their hearts galloped with relief when Boone and Crutcher pulled the teenage boy out first and set him on his feet.

“I’m not goin’ in there, you sick sons of bitches!” the boy yelled, lunging away. Boone hit him with a knee in the stomach so fast that Robert barely saw Boone move. The teenager doubled over while Boone and Crutcher pulled him to the Funhouse door.

“You’ve all got the devil in you!” the boy screamed.

“Git on in here, doggie doggie,” the warden’s voice charged through the closed door.

“Fuck you—” the teenager started to shout, but Boone smacked his mouth. The pain turned the teenager’s rage to deep sobs instead. “Please. Please—”

“Shut the hell up,” Crutcher said. “These babies are more a man than you.”

Robert and Redbone looked at the white boys then, who in turn looked at them, mirroring them. Robert could swear he knew them although they had never met. The taller of the white boys, sandy-haired like the ghost in the kitchen, was turning a marble over in his palm. Robert wondered if he meant to use it as a weapon, but it was too small to be anything except a charm. Would he carry it through his whipping? Robert wished he had a marble—any toy—to hold.

The Funhouse door opened just as Crutcher signaled Robert and Redbone out of the truck. Robert saw only glimpses of a bare light bulb inside, the warden’s silhouette, another man behind him. The wailing Negro teenager was dragged in. A crying young white boy was led out to the white man in the billed cap, who pulled him by the arm. The boy was having trouble walking, stumbling over his feet. In the shaft of light from the doorway, Robert thought he saw streaks of blood on his back. Robert’s veins flushed with ice as if he were still in the freezer.

“Negroes wait on the other side,” Crutcher said, gesturing. He said Nee-GROES with emphasis, and Robert realized he had never heard Crutcher say the word nigger. He might hate that word as much as Papa.

Robert walked where Redbone led him, but he turned his head to lock eyes with the white boys as long as he could, as if they could stare a plan into each other’s minds. But soon he and Redbone were on the dark side of the shed, where six empty metal chairs waited, askew. Boone did not come with them. He’d gone inside the Funhouse too.

Crutcher straightened the chairs to a line and gestured for them to sit. Then he went off to pace by the fence, lighting another cigarette in the moonlight. Behind him, corn stalks shook in the breeze.

Robert’s knees still trembled after he sat. Warden Haddock was lecturing inside the shed, but his voice was too low to make out. Robert heard only the sobbing.

“Maybe they’ll get tired,” Redbone said.

They? Robert’s body tensed so much that his chair’s legs rattled.

“Two or three hold you, one beats you. They lay you on a table and take turns.”

“No talking. Talking’s what got you here,” Crutcher said, hushed. “If you can’t learn here, where will you learn?”

“I’ve learned, sir,” Robert said.

“Me too, sir.”

“Shush—you haven’t. There’s worse than this waiting for you in the world. It’s a shame for the new one, but I hope you see now to stay far away from the Funhouse.”

“Yes, sir, I see,” Robert said. His throat was crammed with tears. He wanted to say he was sorry for what he’d done, but he couldn’t remember: Was it for asking a question about running away or because he’d eaten the apple tart from Blue? Was it because he’d been late to the bunk room or because he’d kicked Lyle McCormack on Tobacco Road? He couldn’t count everything he was sorry for.

“Don’t go in there arguin’. Learn the lesson, say you’re sorry,” Crutcher said. “Put it behind you. Have a chance to grow up.” His voice seemed to crack, or had Robert imagined it? “Can’t be like your daddy, fighting battles you can’t win. His way don’t work here.”