Page 46 of The Reformatory

“There is more than this,” Robert whispered against the wood in his mouth.

The floor creaked under the warden’s boot. A low whistle and snap sounded above Robert, and then pain tore across his back as surely as if it had claws. Fire, Robert thought. Most of his scream stayed bottled in his throat. His jaw clamped down so hard on the wood chip he thought he loosened a tooth. Just as Robert began to think the pain wasn’t so bad, the numbness wore off his back in a wave and he felt surely his skin must have peeled in two.

Robert writhed and screamed. Then came the next, laid across the first. He would have spat out the wood if he could, if it weren’t so fixed to his teeth, because pain was choking him. Wild in him.

“Stop—” Robert tried to say, muffled, but the whistle and snap sounded, and his body went rigid, and when the lash came, it seemed to snap his spine apart. Robert’s head flung right and left as he screamed, and if not for the wood chip he might have bitten his tongue off when his chin hit the edge of the table so hard, he saw sparks before his eyes.

By the fourth lash, or the fifth—he lost count, one fire burning into the next—his throat was raw and his jaw pulsed and he was sure his back must be a solid pool of blood streaming to the floor. Pastor Jenkins’s threats of hellfire could be no worse than this! Boys got beat like this for being late to curfew or fighting or talking too much at night? Boys got beat like this for everyday things his teacher might rap his wrist with a ruler for? The wrongness rang in his head.

“This ain’t right,” Robert tried to say, a mush against the saliva-drenched chip in his mouth, which still would not budge no matter how much he tried to scream. “This ain’t right!”

His outburst met another lash—a harder one. His skin melted open beneath the cutting leather, and he knew it was far worse than the rest as he flopped on the table. To hold him in place, a man clamped each arm harder on either side of him, another held both of his legs. The edge of the table dug into his throat, and for the first time Robert stopped screaming. His nose was clogged. The new panic from not breathing was worse than the pain, so he remembered to slow his hitching breaths: Don’t move. Don’t move. Don’t move. And soon the men loosened their grip a bit, and he could shift his neck enough to keep the table from crushing his throat.

For the next five lashes, maybe six, he whimpered but could not scream. He was melting from the table, beneath Boone’s muddy work boots and Warden Haddock’s pointed shiny snakeskin ones, beneath the floor, into the red-brown soil, past the long-forgotten ashes from the fire in 1920, all the way to the bones buried at Boot Hill. Vibrating pain coiled across his back, but no pain could touch him where he was buried in the soil. His body was far above him, the world black. He hoped he had willed himself to die.

Kindred spirits awaited him here: boys who had been afraid of beatings and dogs, whose skin had been torn or charred, whose bones had snapped, spirits circling the site of their shared tragedy. They rose from the stink of the wrong done to them, and he could almost see them in the dark: blinking eyes around, straining to have their faces remembered.

I see you, he told them, and it almost wasn’t a lie because sometimes he did see shadows of noses and chins in rows around him. I see you. And when he did not see their faces, he saw their stories: Jim, who had run away one too many times and his family never saw him again after they found a note from the sheriff tacked to their front door. Jesse, whose family had sold him to the Reformatory for fifty dollars because they thought it would teach him not to sass back. Russell, who went truant each fall to help his uncle paint houses. And Reynaldo and Justin and Emory and John, who had done nothing beyond being left alone by their parents, torn away by drinking or sickness or death, just like him. The dead boys were called every name except Murdered: accident or oversight or cautionary tale.

“He fainted dead away,” said a voice he remembered was Crutcher’s.

Robert heard, but did not feel, the final lash do its unholy work across his tattered skin. “Guess fifteen’s enough, then,” the warden said. “I’ve got a headache anyways.”

It was Mama, Robert knew. Mama was giving the warden headaches when he wanted to hurt him, just as she had in his office. A fiddle’s whine from the radio niggled at Robert’s ear, bringing light through his closed eyelids. Even half senseless and full of rage and pain, he knew better than to open his eyes, or the warden might change his mind and keep whipping him. And if the warden spoke a single word to him, Robert worried he would spit in his face. Oh yes, he would. Robert never had wanted to kill anyone—before now. He wished he could summon a grenade to burn through the shed’s roof and split Haddock in two. If Robert were a conjurer, Haddock would be dead already. The entire shed would be burning, even if he were still inside to burn with it.

There is more than this. In the grainy light of his returning, Robert Stephens heard his heartbeat, and the frantic pumping helped him remember: no, he wasn’t like the sullen ghosts who roamed this place. The warden hadn’t killed him—not yet—and Robert vowed he never would, just like Papa had escaped the lynch mob.

He was alive.

There is more than this.

He would learn.

There is more than this.

Like Papa, he would find a way to be free.

14

“… That’s why Fatima has more than doubled its smokers coast to coast.”

A familiar voice; a message he knew from home. After the commercial, the brassy theme to Dragnet played from a radio past the open infirmary doorway. Dragnet told Robert he was still alive. He woke to the rocky seas of pain across his back, cinching his shoulders, throbbing in his hurt ear. He lay shirtless on his stomach, his back swathed and bandaged, but the pain had not washed away. The bandages across his back were strips of burning sand, and breathing or moving raked Robert’s skin. The strap’s SNAP still rang where Mister Red had hit his ear too hard on McCormack Road. The warden had whipped him too hard.

Rage made the pain flare worse.

Morning. New pink-gray daylight brightened the drawn blinds over the windows. He probably couldn’t stand yet, much less walk, but even so, he noticed that the windows had no bars. This room was less than half the size of his dormitory, with twenty beds instead of forty-eight, all of them hospital white. No, not white. Nothing in the room was quite white: the sheets were gray in the daylight, the dingy walls closer to a sad, pale yellow and veined with dark cracks. Robert’s eyes tracked a row of tiny red ants marching in formation from a crack in the wall nearest him to the floor beneath his bed. The ants swarmed something sticky on the floor, battling the flies.

Redbone was far across the room, also on his stomach, snoring loudly. Somehow, Redbone had slept most of the night. Robert had barely slept at all, waking again and again to the drumbeat of his agony, hearing whimpers of three younger boys in the infirmary and the sound of the restless radio just out of sight.

Dragnet might get him through the next thirty minutes, at least. His thoughts buried themselves in the story on the radio: Detective Joe Friday and his partner, Ben Romero, are called to the city hall. (That’s not how it usually goes!) A man says he’s holding a bomb in a box on his lap, and he’ll blow up City Hall if police don’t release his brother from prison. (Holy cow!) Taking his bomb away will be a tough job, but Friday and Romero volunteer to go in to try to talk the bomber into giving up. The bomber gives them twenty-four minutes to set his brother free. (No way Friday will agree to that!) Friday and Romero tell the bomber they will never free his brother. They’re not even sure the bomb is real. (Could be a fake all along!) “You’ll let me blow up ten million dollars of taxpayers’ money?” the bomber says. Romero secretly tells Friday and the captain that he can go in and clip the bomber with his gun—or just shoot him dead.

Robert started to feel bad for the bomber. He was only doing anything he could to try to get his brother out of jail. Robert’s heart pounded at the idea of Gloria—or Papa!—trying to free him. Did Papa even know he was locked up yet? Would Papa try something as wild as this? Mama always said Papa would do anything to right a wrong.

The voices on the radio rose in a rare argument between Friday and Romero. Friday: “You can’t just walk in there and shoot him down. You have to warn him.” Captain: “No, a gun’s not the answer. We can’t shoot him until we’re positive.”

The captain was nothing like Sheriff Posey. The sheriff and his deputies wouldn’t think twice, or even once, before shooting Negroes—like they had shot Mr. Clement’s son in the apple orchard when all he’d stolen was a sack full of apples. They would shoot even if their mama was watching. Even if their children were watching. Even if they had no weapon like a box that might or might not be a bomb. In the radio world, everything worked like it should, a pretty lie. Robert’s eyes already ached, too puffy from his crying, but more tears leaked out. Now that he’d been arrested and seen the lie up close, he could never like Dragnet again.

Joe Friday wasn’t real. The Funhouse was real.