Appeared in 2006 anthology Jigsaw Nation,
edited by Edward J. McFadden III and E. Sedia
“State of Blues”
by
Gene Stewart
Ms. President, proud to meet you, ma’am. Yes, I’m the oldest here, they tell me. Sure, I’ll tell you about it. Why not?
He had one of those soap opera actor names, Derrick Jackass Trent or something. That alone did it for me but then he opened his mouth and started demanding things in a loud, flat bray suitable for a donkey on crank. Entitlement stressed every syllable and posed him primly.
A core certainty that merely by demand he could have it all, now.
Almost.
What galled was how smug he was when his pasty face turned to me and said, “Well?”
He wasn’t, not after I was done with him. Well, that is. He was more like hospitalized and unlikely ever to be the same.
Had he not been a Homeland Insecurity officer I might have gotten off with a warning. Well, maybe a few months in the slammer. Because he was one of those Nazi thugs, though, I drew twenty-five years to life with no chance of parole.
Breaking out is hard to do.
I worked at my prison job of making Bonsai trees for wealthy housewives in retirement communities and kept a low profile during food riots and hunger strikes. Never understood any of it.
Being Scottish in ancestry I learned to like the maggots. Extra protein was nothing to sneer at in those cess pools run by for-profit government subcontractors. They skimped on everything possible and then cut it down some more, every penny begrudged if it had to be spent on fulfilling their contract. I swear they wouldn’t be happy with one hundred per cent profit; they’d demand an extra ten or twenty percent for their trouble.
It was during my fifth year that the country split. We were told about it on the PA system. Warden Carlysle bellowed out a statement from the junta. It said we had to pick what category we fell into, reality or belief.
Most of us didn’t believe a thing and hated reality so it was a choice that made no sense to us. We found out on scuttlebutt that it meant you had to decide whether to call yourself a believer in some religion or a nonbeliever.
Seems the religious right had finally had enough pretending to tolerate anyone but themselves. Not that they ever did a very good job of it. But still, they’d finally gotten fed up and now they basically said fine: Anyone who didn’t believe in their guff could damned well go live in the blue states.
We asked around and best guess was that blue states meant the northeast, the great-lakes states, and the west coast.
Well hell, some of us figured. We’d rather not be surrounded by religious maniacs with redemption in their walnut-sized brains and a branding iron in either hand. Far better to go with reality; at least then you knew where you stood.
First impressions can be deceiving.
I was shipped out on a bus three days after I’d handed in my form with the Reality box checked. I hungered for so much I could not say.
Good thing I had a stash and knew where some others were. I managed to eke out a living on chocolate and peanut butter but it makes you sick after awhile.
The bus ride was long and thirsty. No water, no rest stops, robotic driver, doors welded shut, windows sealed, and AC set at about 90 degrees F. Guess what the F stood for.
From Louisiana, where I’d run afoul of their so-called laws.
I thought back, smiling, then frowning, then looking tough.
I’d broken that soap-opera-looking fed’s face and some of his other bones, too, and finally they tasered me and I did the jitterbug and fell over and they beat me blue and purple and tied me up for the trip to the pen. Trials happen these days only for the rich, and then only as a kind of Noh play, formal and meaningless, to entertain their friends.
Nine years later I’m still wearing those coveralls I had on that day, by the way. Clothes are strictly optional in for-profit prisons. The only concession is any article of clothing you might need to do whatever slave work that prison performs.
Slave labor is what prisons are all about. Few outside the system know that. Ask any CEO though. He knows where to find workers that make NAFTA slaves look like overpaid vacationers.
I was hoping realists would be more reasonable about things like feeding and clothing us. Or giving us medical attention. In Shreveport Pen we were told basically to pray if we got hurt or sick. It was amazing to us how harshly God treated us. A cut finger could get infected and soon there goes the arm, and since that was done without anesthetics or even a clean saw — they used one of the rip saws from the lumber workers unit, I swear — well, few survived the new and better infection if shock didn’t kill them first.
God’s will.
In the bus we were better off before some of the cons who couldn’t take the heat puked. After that it was getting kind of uncomfortable. When the first one died of heat stroke or thirst or what ever it was, well, let’s just say the body dumps things it doesn’t need once it decides to end the synergy, and gasses are among the first to go.
Several guys broke fists trying to break a window for air.
We rolled into the Garden City Pen around midnight and the cons lined up like school kids to be the first off that bus. Me, I bided my time. What did I care? I’d been in the hole in Shreveport. Nothing about that bus ride bothered me much. To me it felt like tough faith, same as always.
“You men get in there and walk through the showers. Fresh clothes at the end.”
I didn’t believe it so I walked through clothed. They decided at the far end my clothes were clean enough that I could keep them. That’s how I outsmarted myself out of a new pair of overalls but that was okay.
“Anyone here who doesn’t want to be? This is a reality-based facility. No religious activity or speech of any kind will be tolerated and violators get one warning and after that you will be taken to the nearest red state border and dropped off. If you think that means freedom I suggest you look at what’s hanging from the crosses and lampposts on the other side of the border walls. Every single one of those corpses claimed to have religion, or tried to while the Jeebs strung ‘em up.”
Some coughed, some laughed, and some of us just looked down at the dust, wondering what it tasted like and how soon we’d find out.
“We recognize that some of you men are irredeemable.”
What ever the hell that means, I thought.
“We also recognize that some of you can be recovered and rehabilitated.”
A big black guy stepped up and announced the hell if he was going to let himself be rehabilitated, could he please be nailed to a cross right away? This got a laugh but not from the self-important prick giving the welcome speeches.
“Very funny. But the few of you who do manage to work your way out of the prison system will find a good life can await you. It’s up to you.”
“How come no prayin?”
He looked up from his clipboard but the screw was unable to spot who’d asked this. He smiled. “We tried separation of church and state. Got fucked anyway. No more superstition, no more lies, no pie in the sky promises of rewards later, none of that dogmatic goose-stepping.”
Guy sure could talk, I thought. If he’s getting through to even a third of these cons it’s more than I could believe. I piped up with, “No hope, you mean?” He didn’t spot me.
“How you gonna know we praying? Ain’t quite like jacking off. It don’t leave no mess or nothing.”
Big laughs, and even a few smiles from the guards.
When he stopped yapping I was shown to a cell cleaner than any I’d ever seen. It even had a mattress on the slab. A sit-down toilet, too, not just a slit to squat over. And a sink with hot and cold water, even a bar of soap. I could not get over it and kept waiting for the beating, the cockroaches, the rats.
“We hit the jackpot,” a lot of the guys kept saying.
As I said, first impressions can be deceiving.
“Why so many cams?” someone asked.
I told him, ‘A watched pot never boils over.”
He din’t get it and ast if it was true. “Yeah, it’s true. Them old sayings ain’t around for nothing.”
You guess it in one if you realized I got taken into the guard shack for a re-education cause I broke the no religion rule. Seems any old saw like that one about a watched pot is considered superstitious, which, apparently, is religion’s godfather. So they taught me. I still don’t pretend to get what they mean by that.
All I knew was I had to cut them sayings my mother drilled into me when I was a kid. If I didn’t I would break the rule and would land my ass outside the prison on the other side of the border, three feet inside a red state with a cross and nails measured just for me. Oh, I’d try to convince them I seen the light, even as the nails went into me. Everyone does; terror works miracles.
That night I wondered if there was any place left in the world where someone can just live. I mean live without anyone else messing with you.
Reminded me of whoring. No way out of it.
Inuit guy told me this. And what rang a bell was him saying at the time, “They can’t just leave us alone so we can live. Got to put their rules on us, then their boots.”
I knew what he meant.
Wild places all belong to companies that call them raw material. Can’t live in them anymore. No where to run, it meant. Even if I could earn my way or break out of prison, there was nowhere I could go to get out from under the thumb of big government of one kind or another.
Oh sure, space. Slave in free-fall, hooray. Become an asteroid miner or welder, do it for food wages, be even more trapped by the conditions than the rules.
Under pressures like these is it any wonder a lot of us just sort of went nuts? Some got religion or lost it. Some found out they was king of this or some space alien princess. Some even turned off somehow and became human ˇbeanbags, nothing but filler inside, never talking or moving on their own.
Most of that kind died quick with no water.
I kept wondering where I could find what I needed, where I could be where they didn’t constantly push it at me. Someplace I could live on my own and ask for nothing from any of them. Some place where I would never be bullied or even asked about what ever the government thought mattered.
Tropical island was a popular dream but I knew they were all in rich boys’ pockets or under plastic-thick water. When it went, it went quick, the environment.
Came time when I was working in the prison library — big difference with red state prisons is they have no libraries — and ran across a book with a picture in it of a place called Mammoth Caves. Said it was caverns, not caves, and told the difference, which is that caverns go on and on, caves are just sort of a scoop out of the side of a mountain or hill or the ground, like a bubble.
Okay, so it was clear I had to get there.
Mammoth Caves was in a red state, though. I did not want to go back to one of those, ever. Reality might suck cause it’s so blood-stained but it was no lie. That counted for something, I figured.
I started looking for other caverns. Turns out there are lots of them. Even where I was the ground was hollow under yer feet.
You’d have to plan long and hard. You’d have to have supplies and access to more. You’d need water and coats and such. Good boots. Says in caverns mostly it’s in the fifty-five degree range. Sounded cool and inviting to me.
I’d need lights, meaning power, meaning mostly batteries. In my dreams I strung lines tapped into city grids but those were just dreams. Fire it’d be, meaning I’d need fuel. A cavern system under woods, then.
Planning how to get all that stuff arranged, hauled, and stowed, all without being noticed, into a cavern, took up a lot of time. I realized no way could a man do this alone so I recruited. Took my time, picked men only once I was sure. Tested them by telling them all kinds of other things first, see what they did with the information. If they proved out I got them near the truth and kept them at arm’s length. You never knew. It was like cold; layers worked best to keep you warm. That was something the books taught me.
I hadn’t been outside 90° F in longer than I could recall.
Still, eventually I had a dozen hand-picked men who could do the hard work needing done.
We would have picked the holidays for making our move but there was no more Easter or Christmas or any of those. Without the gloss of religion most lost their draw. No one cared about much but time off, and they took that randomly in blue states. Every worker was entitled to three weeks off any time they wanted to take it, no questions asked. Oh, we had calendar days, we called them. They were for everyone to act out social customs like shopping or gorging on food.
Us in prison acted this out. Outsiders actually did them, we gathered.
Basically there was no time when the prison was down to a skeleton crew. This meant we needed a diversion.
Fire worked only if they gave a damn about the people who might be burned. In that robot prison no one cared at all. The people were inconveniences, in fact. I’m surprised they didn’t have a fire every year just to clean things out.
Flood might work with the electronics all over. We thought about that awhile but eventually realized they’d just shut off the flow outside the prison if they had to.
Riot ended up being the over before it started.
And then I realized something. The one thing the blue states offered, other than books and education, that red stated din’t bother much with, was doctoring. And if enough of the slave population got sick they’d have to bring in doctors. And line us up in the commons area for them to poke and prod. Surely they wouldn’t schlep a doctor to each cell; that would be too much even as a joke.
Food poisoning.
And one of the guys on my crew had access now and then to the food portal, where they brought in the stuff made by the factory across the valley. Another of the blue state things about keeping stuff separated.
Seemed like our only plan so we decided why wait?
They fed us in our cells. We rarely had any commons time anyway; only encouraged trouble. If we had none I would not have been able to recruit help.
As it is, the sounds of guys puking their guts up in every cell within earshot was music to my ears.
That was until I heard the lock down clang through the prison.
Seems we were not to be herded to a doctor in the commons. Seems in fact that robots had analyzed the poison and were issuing antidote via each cell’s food slots. Many chose not to take it and croaked in puke and shit, as they’d lived.
Well, after that, fuck it, we just didn’t bother trying anymore. Did as told, kept heads down, didn’t talk much, read as much as they’d let us.
I got to like mysteries. Did people really live that good?
#
It was thirty-five years later that I got out for good behavior. That was two, three years ago. Yeah, three. I was seventy-three and rehabilitated.
Now I do wall maintenance. Keeping up the pretense, we call it.
You know, I’ve visited a few caverns in blue states since getting out and I got to tell you, I could live in one. No kidding. If only someone would take me seriously about how it can be done.
Guess I’ll be underground soon enough anyway.
Well, got to get back to work, these hedges don’t trim themselves, Ms. President. Make the wall pretty, too, huh? And thank you kindly for the water.
/// /// ///
