I think he only asked about four or five questions the whole time, always the same ones, droning on and on like some kind of invisible bee in my ear. “Who is your commanding officer? Where is the .50-caliber ammunition kept in Lewis County? How many safe houses do you know about and where are they? Who besides yourself killed Lieutenant Leon Sorels? Who killed Supreme Court Justice Samuel Rothstein?” (They apparently had never figured that one out.) “Where is John Corbett Morgan?” On and on and on. I lost control of my body and emptied my bowels and my bladder very early on in the proceedings, which they all ignored, and my flesh around the attached electrodes began to char and smoke and sizzle, so after a while the place smelled like a weenie roast in a toilet as I burned alive in my own shit. In answer to every question I simply screamed out the senseless mantra “Big beef bones for our dog!” whereupon Goldberg touched a toggle switch and fried my fingertips or my spine or toes or my or my nose or my nuts again, or he gave a signal and one of the guards tightened the collar again, or the bitch stepped forward and gave me a shallow muscle injection of the acid again once she ran out of fingernails.
How did I get through it without breaking? Well, the mantra about the beef bones helped. Charlie was right. When you’re in pain you can convince yourself of irrational things, and I convinced myself that this nonsensical phrase was in fact the answer to all of Goldberg’s questions and if I just kept shouting it long enough and loud enough he would finally understand and stop torturing me. I know that sounds absurd, but like I said, when a monster is toasting your balls with electric shock you don’t think too clearly. It also helped that about halfway through I realized that Goldberg wasn’t really interested in anything I had to say and he was just torturing me for the enjoyment of it, and somewhere in my increasingly jumbled mind I understood that nothing I could say would stop him from doing it. He was enjoying himself too much. I heard him giggle. And you know, I think that was the first time I knew for absolute certain in my heart that the NVA had won. Because the Americans were out of ideas. They were about to lose everything, lose part of their precious United States itself, and this was all they could think of to do about it. They should have sent a George Washington or an Abraham Lincoln or at least a General Grant to deal with us. Instead they sent a sick little Jew in a suit who from what I could hear was probably sitting behind that table masturbating while he tortured another man’s sexual organs and body. This is the mark of the greatest nation in the world? Horse shit. The United States was a weak and senile and crumbling empire run by criminals and degenerates and cowards. I had the living proof of it every time Goldberg flicked that switch.
They kept shooting water into my mouth from a sports bottle to make sure I would be able to speak if and when I decided to do so, and finally I did. “You’re going to die, Goldberg,” I croaked in an attempt to laugh. “We are going to beat you bloody and send every one of you Amurrican cowards running out of the Northwest like little sissies crying for your mamas, and my comrades are going to find you and burn you alive, crisp as the ovens in Auschwitz should have done if they’d ever existed. We owe you kikes a Holocaust and you’re going to get one!” Goldberg screamed in rage and hit the switch again and I blacked out.
I have no idea how long the session lasted. Probably a lot shorter than it seemed, because the human body can take only so much punishment, and Goldberg intended to make a meal out of me. I wish I could say that I bit the ear off the dyke when they finally unstrapped me and pulled me out of the chair, but I was too weak and disoriented to do anything except dry-heave and moan. “See you tomorrow, Shane, me lad,” babbled Goldberg dementedly. “I think tomorrow we’ll start with the dentists’ drills. Zzzzweeeeeeeeeeeee!” as he made a noise imitating a drill. Even as crushed as I was, my heart leaped in fear. I’d put on a brave show today, but I knew the dentist’s drill would be it. I’d break. I would scream for mercy from a Jew. I would tell whatever lie he wanted me to tell, accuse whoever he wanted me to accuse, reveal Rooney and my greatest and most intimate secrets if only he’d keep that drill away from my teeth. I lay in my cell in agony and just tried to shut it all down in my mind. I prayed for death, and I would have tried to kill myself but I couldn’t even move off my pallet in my cell.
But once again, either the luck of the Irish or the hand of God intervened. Was it some kind of weird karmic synchronicity? Did God hear what I’d threatened the son of a bitch with and answer my prayer? However it came about, Special Agent Bruce Goldberg never got the pleasure of seeing me crack under his dentist’s drill, because he never returned to that place to continue torturing me. What goes around does indeed come around, and by some cosmic coincidence, that night in his affluent suburban home, it came around for the little Jew Goldberg as it had come around for big Jew Rothstein. Goldberg and his family lived in a special “gated community,” a kind of fortified compound that Federal employees in the Northwest were given as married quarters, although by then it should have been clear that nowhere was safe and I can only conclude that ZOG’s incredible arrogance tripped them up again. Someone was able to breach the security, and Goldberg and his family were executed by the Northwest Volunteer Army that night, the Jew himself being burned alive by the necklace, the gasoline-soaked tire that Third World negroid savages had used with such glee for generations. I later learned that this mission had been carried out by a hand-picked group of Volunteers led by a man who later became President of the Republic, a man whose wife Goldberg had murdered in prison. More synchronicity?
I’ve never yet figured out whether there is a God, ma’am, and I guess I’ll be finding out soon, but the signs are encouraging. Because in my lifetime at least, despite His grotesque sense of humor, there’s been a little justice, and where there’s smoke there’s fire.
They left me alone after that, which might have had something to do with my threats against Goldberg and the quick vindication thereof. They might have become convinced that I had some secret way of communicating with the Volunteers and they didn’t want to risk ending up like Brucie. So I got off with only one Federal torture session, which by NVA standards was easy time indeed. The days went by, day in and day out, week in and week out. I had no way to tell time in that place where there was no darkness. At first I didn’t notice, and was glad only of being left alone in order to let my wounds heal. I must have suffered some kind of tissue damage that led to a fever, because I have some memory of white-coated medics standing over my mattress in the cell and injecting me with something and swabbing something on the burns from the electrodes and the acid. Then it was only endless sameness and boredom until I was probably half insane from sensory and mental deprivation. I know now that ayear passed. The final year of the revolution.
* * *
The first inkling I got that things were changing was that the food seemed to improve slightly. Alongside the Styrofoam plate of crap I began to see things like fruit on my plastic tray, peeled orange segments, an apple, a peach. I knew that these things might have been injected with drugs, but by then I was so starving for some kind of variety in my diet that I simply didn’t care anymore. I examined the fruit carefully for needle marks, and when I was unable to find any obvious signs of tampering I went ahead and ate it, nor did I seem to suffer from any ill effects. I began to get plates with actual meals on them—a tin pannikin of honest to God hot beef stew even if it was out of a can, some hamburger that was recognizable as hamburger, tuna salad with dill pickles and some vegetables, and to go with the bread all of a sudden there were little segments of butter or margarine, and after a few more weeks even little restaurant packets of jam. Along with the spork they also gave us a little wooden spatula type thing, part knife and part spoon, that we could use to spread the butter and jam onto the bread. One meal had a small half-pint plastic bottle of spring water with a screw-on cap, and I decided to risk keeping the bottle when I put the tray back on the little shelf in the door. The tray disappeared, there was no subsequent beating, and thereafter I could fill th
e bottle from the sink and actually drink from something besides my cupped hand. Little things like that are like gold in prison; I prized that plastic bottle more than any golden goblet.
Then one day the little slot in my door clattered, and it wasn’t a food tray that appeared on the shelf, but a book! A paperback Louis L’Amour Western, which I leaped on and devoured in less than two hours. When I gave back my tray the next time I put the book on it, and when it was collected I said to whoever was outside like Oliver Twist, “Please, sir, may I have some more?” A few hours later, by my reckoning, another paperback dropped into the slot. This time it was a much larger one, a Sweet Savage about a maiden who is abducted by a dark prince (as in black hair) and carried off on his charger to his castle where he rips her bodice and forces her into 101 Levantine deviations but with truly mighty and gentle Byronic passion, etc., etc. God, it was drivel! But compared to simply doing pushups and staring at the walls for twenty-three hours every day that was manna from Heaven and I devoured it down to the last hackwork sentence. When I was done I put it on my food tray and when the slot opened to take it, “Look, I know you’re trying to get me to rat and I won’t do that, but I really do appreciate the books. As long as you’re trying to bribe me with literature, any chance of some of the good old stuff, Dickens or Trollope or maybe even some Booth Tarkington?”
Well, whoever it was had a sense of humor. A few hours later the slot rattled and I was looking at a paperback copy of Moby Dick. “Thanks!” I yelled through the slot. “If you’ll tell me who you are I’ll try to get the boys to go easy on you when the time comes!” I never got a response, but for days after that I stood on the decks of the Pequod and chased the great white whale. After that there was all kinds of great stuff, Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, and even a battered library copy from somewhere of Tarkington’s Seventeen. Let me tell you, if ever you need to refresh your sense of the absurd, try sitting on the floor next to a stainless steel toilet in a featureless ZOG prison cell with only white light and the air conditioning for sensory stimulation, and reading about the adventures of Silly Bill Baxter and Flopit and big lummox George Crooper overeating and puking his guts out at a circa-1914 teenagers’ picnic. I had noticed by this time that not only were they being nice to me but Bruce Goldberg hadn’t dragged me back downstairs for another session with the dentists’ drills, but I had no way of knowing why. I figured that this was some kind of change in Federal policy and I would eventually be approached with some kind of attempt to flip me and turn me into an informer. But it never happened.
Then one day the cell door opened, the guards came in and slapped the manacles and belly bands on me in the usual manner, and I was marched out into the corridor. But this time was different. This time all the cell doors up and down the corridor were open and other manacled prisoners in the orange jumpsuits were being pulled down the hall by pairs of guards. We shuffled down endless corridors and all of a sudden we went through a door and we were outside. It was night, the first time I had actually seen the stars overhead in God alone knew how long. Around me in long lines were my fellow prisoners dressed in Gulag orange, mostly men but a few women as well, maybe fifty of us. There was a barred prison bus pulled up in the central yard of the prison, and the guards were herding us onto the bus. I was slapped down into a seat next to a big man I’d never seen before, maybe forty years old, a stubbled face. The guard hooked my wrist cuffs onto a staple on the seat so my hands were down between my legs, and walked down the aisle. For the first time since my capture, I was alone with a fellow prisoner. I looked at him. “What the hell?” I asked.
“They’re probably going to take us off someplace nice and isolated, whack us all out, and bury us in the woods,” said the Volunteer grimly. “Bob Donner, B Company, Number Two Spokane Brigade. And you, comrade?”
“Shane Ryan, E Company, South Sound Brigade,” I said in reply. “How long have you been in here? Do you know what month and year it is now?”
“I have no idea on either question.”
I leaned forward. “How about you, comrade?” I asked the middle-aged woman in the seat front of me. “What unit? How long have you been here in Uncle Slime’s pleasure palace? Can you tell me what’s been going on with the war?”
“Sergeant Martha Price, quartermaster for the Seattle East Side Brigade. Christ, I don’t know, it seems so long ago,” she whispered. “They got me up in North Bend, just after Jock Graham’s Number Two Brigade boys blew the 520 bridge over the Lake Union.”
“That was after my time,” I said with a delighted chuckle. “Bet that fucked up Seattle like a Chinese fire drill!”
“Quiet back there!” bellowed a voice from the front of the bus. But none of the guards came back to punish us.
“No beating,” whispered the woman dryly. “Not a good sign if they’re not bothering to thump us.”
“They’re going to kill us,” muttered Donner. “They may just drive the damned bus into the Sound and let us sink, but if they don’t, we need to work out a plan to rush them when they take us off when we get wherever we’re going. Let’s at least die fighting.” Then two more guards came to the back of the bus and worked their way forward, and slapped strips of masking tape over the mouths of all the prisoners. With our hands pinned down between our legs we couldn’t lean down far enough to tear the tape off. The buses started up and we rolled out the gates into the darkness. I mean darkness; Auburn is a Seattle suburb and there were nowhere near as many lights on as there should have been, just a few isolated gleams here and there showing hints of buildings and streets. It was almost like some kind of medieval plague had settled over the city. It was a bit hard for me to follow where we were going, but then we got on the interstate for a few miles and I could tell we were going south and we were into Tacoma. Then Olympia, and we got off the interstate and rolled through very dark, very silent back streets and roads. Once off to my right I saw some low gleams on hangar-like buildings and a tower, and knew we were passing the Olympia airport. We were almost on top of the spot where we’d taken down Burger King Rothstein all that endless time ago. I suddenly got some idea of what it must be like for Fatties and Feds, having to move through this darkness, knowing always that the NVA was out there waiting for them somewhere.
I recognized where we were when we pulled into Millersylvania State Park at about dawn. We parked in a large clearing by a lake that glistened with the rising sun. I could see now that it was mid summer, so I must have been inside at least a year, maybe more. Again without a word the guards went down the rows of the seats and uncuffed us, then hauled us all outside. We had neither the opportunity to plot any rush against our captors nor the opportunity actually to do so. We were stood in ranks and swiftly teams of guards came and unlocked our cuffs, cattle prods at the ready to zap any of us who tried to break bad. They took off the manacles, leaving us rubbing our wrists and ripping the tape from out mouths. We were looking around for the troops and the machine guns which we were convinced were going to cut us all down, but without a single word of explanation the guards climbed back into the bus, started the engine and drove away, leaving almost fifty Volunteers standing in a clearing wearing orange coveralls, looking at one another in puzzlement. Then we heard more engines coming and more buses pulled up into the clearing, accompanied by a truck filled in the back with armed men in a kind of khaki ensemble, and several Humvees with mounted machine guns. Federal military vehicles always had the brownish desert camouflage, inappropriate in the Northwest but a holdover from the days that the vehicles had been rolling across the Arabian or Iraqi desert. The truck and the Humvees had a rondel on their doors, a round insignia painted on their sides like the insignia you used to see on World War One French and British biplanes on the Western Front, only these rondels were blue, white, and green. Each bus had a flagstaff welded to the driver’s side and from the staff flew Tricolor flags. As we stared in amazement a man got out of one of the Humvees and came toward us. He was wearing a khaki shirt, green trousers,
high boots and a billed green cap with the same Tricolor rondel on it. I didn’t know it, but I was looking at the first uniformed NVA troops I had ever seen. A woman dressed in the same OD and khaki motif was walking by his side, only she wore a green skirt and had a pert little green beret on her head with the green rondel emblem. It was a moment before I recognized them. Carter and China Wingfield.
“What the hell is going on?” I asked, after hugging them both in wild amazement and stunned relief.
“Your lot from Auburn was the first of the good faith prisoner releases,” said Carter. “I called in every damned favor I had on the Army Council and I got them to insist that you be included in the first draft.”
“Good faith prisoner release?” I asked. “What the hell does that mean?”
“It means we’ve won!” said China, her brown eyes shining, her lovely face burning with joy. “Shane, a couple of months ago the United States government made contact with GHQ, secretly, at first through the international Red Cross and then through the Irish representative to the UN, who’s been acting as mediator. We’re meeting with them down at Longview next week. They want to negotiate a settlement! We’ve won! “
The accountants had finally surrendered. We had secured the existence of our people and a future for White children.
A Warrior For The Working Day
A Warrior For The Working Day
Tell the constable we are but warriors for the working day...
Our gilt are all besmirch’d with rainy marching in the painful field;
There’s not a piece of feather in our host, good argument, I hope, we will not fly,
And time has worn us into slovenry. But by the mass, our hearts are in the trim!
-Henry the Fifth, Act IV, Scene 3
A DISTANT THUNDER Page 45
