By comparison the poultry farmer from Humboldt County who’d been sent up for child abuse seemed, for all his belly-aching, or maybe because of it, normal and reasonable, a man with a grievance who wanted you to know just how all-out miserable he was. Daniel tried talking to him, or rather, listening, to help him get his mind more settled, but after a very short time the man developed a loop, saying the same things over in almost the identical words as the first and then the second time through — how sorry he was for what he’d done, how he hadn’t meant to harm the child, though she had baited him and knew she was at fault, how the insurance might pay for the chickens but not for all the work, not for the time, how children need their parents and the authority they represent; and then, again, how sorry he was for what he’d done. Which was (as Daniel later found out) to beat his daughter unconscious and almost to death with the carcass of a hen.
To get away from him Daniel wandered about the compound, facing up to his bad news item by item — the stink of the open latrines, the not much nicer stink inside the dormitories, where a few of the feeblest prisoners were laid out on the floor, sleeping or watching the sunlight inch along the grimy sheets of plywood. One of them asked him for a glass of water, which he went and drew at the tap outside, not in a glass, since there were none to be found, but in a paper cup from McDonald’s so old and crunched out of shape it barely served to hold the water till he got back inside.
The strangest thing about Spirit Lake was the absence of bars, barbed wire, or other signs of their true condition. There weren’t even guards. The prisoners ran their own prison democratically, which meant, as it did in the bigger democracy outside, that almost everyone was cheated, held ransom, and victimized except for the little self-appointed army that ran the place. This was not a lesson that Daniel learned at once. It took many days and as many skimped dinners before the message got across that unless he reached some kind of accommodation with the powers-that-be he wasn’t going to survive even as long as to September, when he expected to be paroled back to school. It was possible, actually, to starve to death. That, in fact, was what was happening to the people in the dormitory. If you didn’t work, the prison didn’t feed you, and if you didn’t have money, or know someone who did, that was it.
What he did learn that first morning, and unforgettably, was that the P-W lozenge sealed in his innards was the authentic and bonafide sting of death.
Some time around noon there was a commotion among the other convalescent prisoners. They were shouting at the poultry farmer Daniel had talked to earlier, who was running full tilt down the gravel road going to the highway. When he’d gone a hundred yards and was about the same distance from the fieldstone posts that marked the entrance to the compound a whistle started blowing. A few yards farther on the farmer doubled over; radio signals broadcast by P-W security system as he passed through the second perimeter had detonated the plastic explosive in the lozenge in his stomach.
In a while the Warden’s pickup appeared far off down the highway, hooting and flashing its lights.
“You know,” said one of the black prisoners, in a reflective, ingratiating tone, like an announcer’s, “I could see that coming a mile away, a mile away. It’s always that kind that lets go first.”
“Dumb shit,” said a girl who had something wrong with her legs. “That’s all he was, a dumb shit.”
“Oh, I’m not so sure,” said the black. “Anyone can get an attack of conscience. Usually it takes a bit more abuse, not just the idea.”
“Do many people… uh… ?” It was the first Daniel had spoken, except to fend off questions.
“Let go? A camp this size, about one a week, I’d say. Less in summer, more in winter, but that’s the average.”
Others agreed. Some disagreed. Soon they were comparing notes again. The farmer’s body, meanwhile, had been loaded into the rear of the pickup. Before he got back into the cab, the guard waved at the watching prisoners. They did not wave back. The truck did a u-turn and returned, squealing, back to the green horizon from which it had appeared.
Originally the P-W security system (the initials commemorated the Welsh physicians who developed it, Drs. Pole and Williams) had employed less drastic means of reforming character than instant death. When triggered, the earliest lozenges released only enough toxins to cause momentary, acute nausea and colonic spasms. In this form the P-W system had been hailed as the Model-T of behavioral engineering. Within a decade of its commercial availability there was scarcely a prison anywhere in the world that hadn’t converted to its use. Though the motive for reform may have been economic, the result invariably was a more humane prison environment, simple because there was no longer a need for the same close scrutiny and precautions. It was for this reason that Drs. Pole and Williams were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991.
Only gradually, and never in the United States, was its use extended to so-called “hostage populations” of potentially dissident civilians — the Basques in Spain, Jews in Russia, the Irish in England, and so on. It was in these countries that explosives began to replace toxins and where, too, systems of decimation and mass reprisal were developed, whereby a central broadcasting system could transmit coded signals that could put to death any implanted individual, any group or a given proportion of that group, or, conceivably, an entire population. The largest achieved kill-ratio was the decimation of Palestinians living in the Gasa Strip, and this was not the consequence of a human decision but of computer error. Usually the mere presence of the P-W system was sufficient to preclude its use except in individual cases.
At the Spirit Lake Correction Facility it was possible to send out work crews to farms and industries within a radius of fifty miles (the range of the system’s central radio tower) with no other supervision than the black box by which the prisoners, singly or as a group, could be directed, controlled, and, if need be, extirpated. The result was a work-force of singular effectiveness that brought the State of Iowa revenues far in excess of the cost of administration. However, the system was just as successful in reducing crime, and so there was never enough convict labor to meet the demands of the area’s farms and factories, which had to resort to the more troublesome (if somewhat less costly) migrant workers, recruited in the bankrupt cities of the eastern seaboard.
It was such urban migrants who, falling afoul of the law, constituted by far the better part of the prison population at Spirit Lake. Daniel had never in his life known such various, interesting people, and it wasn’t just Daniel who was impressed. They all seemed to take an inflated view of their collective identity, as though they were an exiled aristrocracy, beings larger and more honorable than the dogged trolls and dwarves of day-to-day life. Which is not to say that they were nice to each other (or to Daniel); they weren’t. The resentment they felt for the world at large, their sense of having been marked, almost literally, for the slaughter, was too great to be contained. It could lead even the mildest of them at times to betray this theoretical sodality for the sake of a hamburger or a laugh or the rush that accompanied the smash of your own fist into any available face. But the bad moments were like firecrackers — they exploded and a smell lingered for a few hours and then even that was gone — while the good moments were like sunlight, a fact so basic you almost never considered it was there.