By Joshua Ryan

Chapter 10: Another Tour Has Been Arranged for You

I hadn’t been given anything to eat or drink, unless you think St. Bevons Mineral Water is a drink.  I guess the idea was to make me easier to break down under questioning—though pretty soon I realized that the “questions” were just accusations that I would not be permitted to deny.  It all showed that I was getting off pretty easy with a nolo contendere.

So that was over, and things were looking up, because just when I realized that I was famished, a man in a white uniform unlocked the door of the room where they were keeping me and handed me some food.  It was a ham sandwich and a glass of mixed juice.  I wondered if these were products of Dominion Fields.

There was a sink in one corner of the room, so I did my best to tidy myself.  My hair was long enough to touch my ears, and I liked it that way—very well trimmed, but not quite corporate.  Where I lived, you could get a really great haircut for two hundred dollars, and I’d had one just before I left.  My face looked better when I got the sweat off, and my antiperspirant still seemed to have some life in it.  My shoes were a little scuffed, from being dragged, with me in them, across the airport, but the scuffing would hardly be noticed if the slacks draped just right.  And my slacks always did.  They looked fairly good, once I dusted off the dirt and the lint and the God knows what else from the police car.  Same for my shirt.  It was new, but it was already my favorite—very light green, and a perfect fit.  It really does pay to visit a tailor, even for your casual clothes.  You feel better when you look better, and I was looking good, everything considered.

Just when I was thinking, OK, I’m ready, let’s get this over with, the door opened and two cops arrived to take me to the judge.  I’d promised myself that I wouldn’t make trouble of any kind, so I didn’t lift an eyebrow when they turned me around and cuffed me behind my back, as if otherwise I would burst out of control, run out of the building, and fly to Miami.

It isn’t easy, walking in handcuffs, especially when you’re climbing a long flight of steps to the Court floor of a creaky old building, but I had a policeman on each side of me, and they wouldn’t let me fall.  I kept my eyes on my feet and made it to the courtroom, where my hands were uncuffed in back and cuffed again in front, and I was seated at a table next to my lawyer.

Judge Barrett entered—an elderly black man in British robes and a British wig.  He was old, but he was efficient.  I’d wanted a short hearing, and I got one.  “Mr. Raskins,” he said, and “Mr. Singh”—Singh was a tall young Indian, and he was the prosecutor—”I have all the filings in this case and am prepared to render judgment.”

Mr. Raskins and Mr. Singh bowed to the judge.

“The defendant will rise.”

I rose and, not knowing what I was expected to do, also bowed.

“I am gratified,” the judge said, “to be presented with a plea of nolo contendere for this offense.  As we all know, our lovely isle has long been the victim of poisonous substances introduced to our people from the outside world, and in many cases intended to be reshipped to do damage elsewhere, as is evident by the quantity of such substances apprehended in the baggage of this defendant.  Examples must be made.  Thomas Lansing, you have surrendered your passport and submitted a plea of nolo contendere, and by that submission pledged yourself to the acceptance, as final and definitively binding in this cause, of the judgment that this court is empowered to render.  Therefore, Thomas Lansing, I sentence you to the forfeiture of all property that may be in your possession on this island, and to a term of penal servitude, that term to begin at this moment and to continue to the end of your natural life, and I direct that this sentence be served in the custody of the State Labour Program.”

The judge stood up and walked briskly out of the courtroom.

Everyone has heard the expression, “I couldn’t believe my ears.”  Sometimes it’s literally true.  I couldn’t believe what I’d heard.  It was literally unbelievable.  It could not be happening.  And if something can’t happen, it isn’t happening.

I turned to my lawyer and asked, “How long will it take to appeal?”

He looked at me as if I had asked him how long it would take to walk to Mars.

“One cannot contest a conviction before which one pled no contest.  Goodbye, Mr. Lansing.  I will communicate with your brother.”

He pulled his papers together and left the room.  While he was going, two men strode up the aisle, wearing the electric blues of the SLP.  They were young, steel-eyed, Eurasian, body-sculpted, best-of-St. Bevons SLP police.  One of them shackled my legs.  The other one gripped my handcuffs, pulled them forward, and attached a leash.  They then led me out of the courtroom, along the hallway, and down the stairs.

It took me even longer to get down than it had to get up, and by the time I was outside the building a small crowd had collected.  They were pointing and laughing.  The cops led me through them to the van waiting at the curb—a brown van with black lettering on the side: SLP SERVANT TRANSPORT.  Obviously, this wasn’t the airport shuttle.  The cops jerked me toward the cargo doors at the back of the van, and I knew they were going to put me inside.  One of them worked on the three heavy padlocks that secured the doors, while his partner yanked on my leash and pulled me in closer.  The crowd was becoming more boisterous.

“You gettin new slap boy, mon?”

“You bet em,” the cop replied.

“Put em in thee sweatbox there?”

“That’s right.”

“Put em to work?”

“Oh yeh mon.”

“This one got money mon.”

It was a kid with a skateboard.  He held the board with one hand and pinched my shirt with the other, feeling how good it was.

“Yeh mon.  Hands off now.”

“Cmon mon.  Gimme some a his cash mon.”

“Nah.  Doan have it.  All gone now.”

“Gimme his clothes then mon.”

Everybody laughed.

“Nah mon.  Go way.”

“Hey slappie!”

My head turned toward another voice.  It was a young guy in a cheap suit.  Some kind of office boy.  “You gonna look good in brown, slappie!”  From the sound, a young gay.  A young bitch.

“You too,” I said.

Instantly my face was smacked by the cop with the leash.  He didn’t smack me hard; no teeth were at stake.  But now I knew more about what “slappie” meant.

“You wanta gag, slap boy?  Then shut you hole.”

The crowd murmured its approval.

The other cops had now got two of the locks open.

“Well folks,” he said, “time we gettin this boy home.  Seein ya!”

“Seein ya!” the crowd responded.  The last padlock opened.  The doors of the van swung free.

“Git you ass inside,” I was told, and since even the two little steps built into the rear of the van were too much for me, the cops kindly lifted me up and bounced me in.

“Siddown, boy.”  There were shelves on each side, and they dropped me onto one of them, cuffs and shackles rattling on the steel.  Then they locked my leash to the side of the van and crashed the back doors shut.  I heard clicking and clanging sounds—padlocks.  After that, doors banging up front, and a jolt, and the van was on its way.

Because I’d never been locked in the back of a servant transport van before, I didn’t know that the springs under the cargo compartment were badly maintained.  Every bump in the pavement threatened to throw me onto the floor.  And that comment about “the sweatbox” turned out to be true. The compartment was nothing more than a steel can, and it must have been waiting in the sun for me.  Everybody had known what the judge would do.  Even my “lawyer”!  He’d have his money—my money!—“no matter what happened.”  And that was why I was enjoying the first trip of my new life, as a piece of cargo packed in a box.

There was a little window on each side of the van, but there wasn’t much air coming in—maybe because the windows were so well protected by steel bars.  Peering out, I saw the downtown vanish and lines of low concrete structures roll into view, accented with vines and flowers, and razor wire.  I guessed where the van was taking me.  I had visited there just two days before–the entrance facility of the State Labour Program.  The Chicken Coop.

The van stopped.  I heard padlocks clanking against the doors, then the doors banging against the sides of the van.  The cops dragged me out and led me by my leash into the building.  It was the same tropical-modern lobby, with the same nondescript white man sitting at the desk.  He looked up, noticed my handcuffs and leash, and said, “Right.  Hold on.”  A minute later I heard his voice saying, “New delivery, Major.”  I waited in the lobby between my guards, studying my shoes.

“Well, what have we here?”

I raised my eyes.  It was my friend Major Timmons, looking cheerful in his bright blue uniform.  He took a moment to inspect me, top to bottom.

“Unless I am mistaken,” he said, as if speaking to himself, “it is the former Mr. Thomas Lansing, the wealthy gentleman from North America who so recently engaged me in conversation.”

He took a step backward, as if to see me better.  “Apparently,” he said, “I was unable to satisfy your curiosity about our Program.  You decided to try it for yourself.  Unusual, but mildly interesting.”

“Please,” I heard myself saying. “Help me!”

“Oh, but I am helping you.  I am extending to you, Mr. Lansing, my personal welcome to your new way of life.  And now that you have been properly welcomed, allow me to state the rules that from now on will govern your life.  The rules are very simple; you should have no trouble committing them to memory.  One: Every freeman is to be obeyed.  Two: Every freeman is to be obeyed immediately and without question.  Three: Every freeman is to be addressed as ‘sir.’  Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

One of the cops reached out casually and punched me in the gut.  I jack-knifed, the wind exploding from my lungs.

“Try again,” the Major said.

“Yes . . . sir,” I gasped.  Fuck, I was crying!

The Major turned to the man at the desk.  “Thank you for alerting me,” he said.  “Show me its papers.”  A pause.  “All right.  Nothing unusual.”  Then he turned back to the cops.  “Take it in,” he said.

I was still bent and gasping for air, but I felt a tug on my leash and I had to follow. My destination was a door at the end of the lobby.  It was actually a pair of doors, beautifully paneled in mahogany, like the door of my room at the King George Hotel.  The difference was that three feet beyond these doors was a set of massive steel bars, and 50 feet beyond the bars was the concrete slab where slappies were trained and stored and fed and worked.  Before the bars were opened, I could see the slab awaiting me.  Automatically, I pulled back on my leash, but I was jerked forward, stumbling down the steps and clanking along the sidewalk that led to the slab and a low wooden building with INTAKE over the door.

It looked like one of those old bungalows you saw in the poorer parts of town—something that must have been there before the SLP took over the property.  Generous eaves, wide front porch; you could picture mom and dad and the kids sitting there in the twilight.  One of the cops went inside; the other one stood on the steps and held my leash.  In a minute the first one returned, banging the screen door behind him.  All bungalows have screen doors, I guess; that’s how you can tell that they’re bungalows . . . .  OK, that’s the kind of stuff I had running through my mind, which was clinging desperately to any fragment of the free world it could find.

“Not in there,” the cop said to his buddy.  “Mus’ be fuckin roun here someplace.”

“OK, boy,” the buddy told me.  “We march you nother way.”

He yanked my leash and pulled me to a shack standing next to the house.  It must have started as the garage, but when the door tilted up, what you saw was unpainted walls, a cracked concrete floor, and a line of bars fencing it off.  It was a cage.  Like at the zoo.  Oh my God, I thought, I’m going in the cage.

Then, yeah, they locked me inside, and strolled back toward the modern building where the offices were.

To be continued …