A DISTANT THUNDER

by H. A. Covington

  Each of us had tiny individual cells, with the walls made of some odd spongy material so we couldn’t commit suicide by running against them and dashing out our brains. There were no windows and the place was ventilated purely by air conditioning from a single high vent. Sometimes they would pump hydrogen sulfide, rotten egg gas, into the air conditioning vents and make us sick and nauseated and weak with puking and dry heaving. I never did figure out why. I suspect it was just for meanness. There didn’t seem to be any other point to a lot the things they did at Auburn. There was a sort of block in one corner with a thin foam rubber mattress and no pillow, and a stainless steel toilet with no seat, and a sink. Other than that, nothing else. No chair, no table, no mirror. There we stayed for twenty-three hours per day. For one hour every day I was manacled and taken down to a glassed-in exercise room almost like a handball court, and instead of walking in a yard I was put on a treadmill, a stairwalker, with my cuffed wrists attached to a bar, and the guard started the machine. You climbed the stair for a solid hour or else you got some badly barked shins. I used to look forward to the treadmill because it exhausted me to the point where I would sleep when I got back to my cell. There was nothing else to do for the next twenty-three hours.

  Well, I think it was the next twenty-three hours. I always assumed we got one exercise per day, but after a while I couldn’t tell. The first thing you lost at Auburn was any sense of time. There were watches or clocks, no calendars, the guards would simply hit you or juice you with their agonizers if you asked them what day it was, and no windows to the outside at all, so you didn’t know whether or not it was night or day. Showers were at intervals that might have been once a week. At least my orange jumpsuit and my carcass both were usually pretty ripe by shower time. I would be dragged down to a small glassed-in shower cubicle, uncuffed, stripped of my jumpsuit if I didn’t peel it off quick enough, locked in the shower cube and then hit with about three minutes of water from top and side nozzles.

  Sometimes scalding hot, sometimes ice cold, sometimes lukewarm. No soap, no washrag; I would claw the dead skin and dirt and crud from my body as best I could with my fingernails while the shower was going. I was then given maybe twenty seconds to dry myself with a piece of cloth the size of a dish towel, then tossed another jumpsuit and another pair of cardboard disposable slippers, knocked around a bit or hit with agony juice if I didn’t dress fast enough, manacled again and dragged back to my cell until the next time.

  Meals appeared on a Styrofoam tray at what might have been normal intervals. I couldn’t really tell, since I had no points of reference by which to tell time other than my body clock, but it seemed to me that meals were staggered—judging by my hunger sometimes there would be as long as twelve hours or more between meals and sometimes as little as an hour. There was no differentiation between the meals to tell which was supposed to be breakfast. I’m sure that was something they did deliberately to confuse us and disorient us. The food was awful, a couple of cuts below TV dinners or airline food, but very similar, and of course never enough of it. The Styrofoam tray would be sealed with cellophane and would contain three “courses”: a small square or patty of something that might have been some preparation of meat, a starchy yellow or white vegetable of some kind like corn or baked beans or some cold mashed potatoes, a greenish vegetable like peas or string beans, a single slice of bread with no butter or margarine, and a wax paper half pint of milk. Sometimes the meat would be a single cold hot dog, sometimes a little patty of some ground meat that tasted odd, sometimes a single small chicken drumstick (at least I assume it was chicken; it might have been pigeon the way it tasted.) To eat this feast with we got a plastic spork, a spoon with a couple of small tines on the tip. After the war it came out that it was a common practice for the Feds to drug the food of certain prisoners to keep them quiet or induce hallucinations for interrogation purposes, etc. So far as I know they never bothered to dope me, but they did try to drive me insane.

  Overhead was an inset flourescent light that was on twenty-four hours a day. It was like the Ministry of Love prison described by Orwell in 1984, “the place where there is no darkness.” Or so I thought—until one day the light went out, and for God alone knows how long afterward I was in total blackness.

  I mean total blackness, complete absence of light, the kind of complete darkness that occurs nowhere in nature. The only sound in the black was the sound of the air conditioning, and then after a while that went off and there complete silence. There was no food appearing in the little slot in the door for a long time, long enough for me to get really hungry. I think the idea was to convince me that something had happened, the prison had been buried by an earthquake or a nuclear bomb had hit or something, or else that they’d just decided to kill me by entombing me alive. I thought out all the variations about what might be going on, and I decided that either the light and the air conditioning would come back on and I would live, or else it wouldn’t and I would eventually die, and since I had no say of any kind in the matter I might as well just sit back and see how it played out. So I found my way to the sink in the darkness. I found it wasn’t working and the water in the toilet was treated with some kind of disinfectant and so wasn’t drinkable. Not good. I knew I couldn’t let myself think about being thirsty or I’d lose it, so I lay down on my bunk and put myself into a kind of fugue state separating my mind from my body, something I had gotten very good at during my time there. My time spent in the Dundee library as a kid once more stood me in good stead. I started traveling in time like Professor Standing in Jack London’s The Star Rover. I re-lived my life in my memory as closely as I could, starting from my earliest recollections of the nice house in Dundee when we still had some money and before my brothers became scum, and then progressing on through the Bobby Fernandez incident, so forth and so on. With a long digression on all the books I’d read; I think under those intense conditions I was actually able to re-read Penrod in my mind with maybe eighty percent accuracy.

  If you totally concentrate your mind you can actually shut off the thirst and hunger signals from your body. I was almost up to the point in Dundee High where I met Rooney when the lights came back on, and in a way I was glad. It was still too soon for me to re-live those memories. The air conditioning came on again and a cool breeze seemed to waft away a bit of the stale stink of my own body and waste. I have no idea how long I was in darkness, but the light almost blinded me. I staggered to the sink. It was working again and I shoveled cupped handful after handful of water into my mouth, and I flushed the stinking toilet over and over. The meals resumed at whatever intervals they came at, I got dragged to the shower again, and the whole routine resumed like nothing had happened. The only thing I can figure is they wanted to see if I would lose my mind.

  Then one day the door opened and in stepped two of the guards. This time they did not wear masks, which was not a good sign. There was a big huge nigger with a shaved head and one of those little Lion of Judah goatees the homeys liked to wear, a kind of black Dummy-Dummy, and there was a chunky blond bull-dykey woman, thirty-something, dishwater blond. Behind them came a man in a suit, his face somewhat older and his hair a little more gray than I remembered. Special Agent Bruce Goldberg.

  “You look like jack shit, Shaney, me bhoyo,” he said, grinning at me like a loon. “You really should have made that call all those years ago, Shane. You really should have.” I knew by his voice he had become quite insane. The mask he had worn when we first met at Dundee High was gone, and the Jew was no longer pretending, no longer hiding. Now he just let all that Talmudic hatred hang out. I’ve always thought Jews were a bit nuts anyway. Any race of people who would elevate paranoid schizophrenia to a religion would have to be. He who had been trying to drive me out of my mind with the blackness had failed, and now he was nuts and I was still sane. I knew then I could beat him before he killed me. I sat up on the bed and then staggered to my feet to face him. I stared at him, my eyes still blinking from the bright flourescent
light, and since I knew he was going to kill me anyway and it didn’t make any difference, I moistened my lips and said, “Sorels spilled his guts about you before we cacked him. We know where you live now, kike. You’re on the to-do list. You’ll be seeing your big buddy soon.” The nigger and the dyke waded into me with their short lead-weighted truncheons and I didn’t get to complete my sentence. After the beating was over Goldberg loomed over me while they held me upright in their arms, battered and bloody and dazed.

  “Oh, my, what a bad and tough little Nazi it is. Bad little Nazi must sizzle!” he babbled, tittering loathsomely. All the time the guards were dragging me down the hall and down the flight of steps to the chair Goldberg was dancing around us like a demented child giggling, “Sizzle! Sizzle! Bad Nazi will sizzle and then we will see how tough it is! Sizzle!” I had never been in that part of the prison before and as I looked over the stairwell I saw nets had been stretched between the banisters and the wall, in order to prevent prisoners from throwing themselves off the tiers and committing suicide. I remember reading they used to do that in Russian jails back in the time of Stalin. Then they dragged me into a fairly large room to the chair, and there I sizzled, to Goldberg’s transcendent delight. The chair was on a kind of platform, presented almost like a throne. It looked like what it was, an electric chair, but not one for carrying out simple executions. On the back was not a headpiece like on Old Sparky, but an iron collar I later learned was based on the Spanish garrotte. At the back of the collar was a long-handled crank. When the crank was turned the Federal torturer could apply a nice, even constriction of the windpipe, without any embarrassing crushing of blood vessels or breaking of the neck that might terminate the interview abruptly before any useful information had been gained. I also saw that the front half of the seat had been cut away, so that the actual seat was nothing but a kind of small shelf to perch my butt on. I discovered the reason for that soon enough, when they began wiring me up. About six feet behind and to the left of the chair was a large UPS type generator of the kind used in computer systems to maintain an even electrical current, from which ran a long cable which ended in a board through which protruded some metal discs on wires, the electrodes. There was a control panel on a table beside the generator, and a box marked sterile syringes. I’d heard of the needles; we all had. Both the Feds and the NVA called them Dershowitz Doozers.

  With women prisoners the guards were always non-white males. I was manhandled into the room by the two guards, while a third one, a Hispanic of some kind, waited by the chair. In their usual style they didn’t say a word, just handled me like a piece of meat. They stripped me naked as a jaybird and then strapped me into the chair. We later learned from studying the FBI’s interrogation psychology and procedure manual, which was called the Dershowitz Protocol and had originally been introduced in Guantanamo Bay, that in interrogating white male “racists” a white female officer was always there to add a deliberate element of sexual humiliation. They closed the collar snugly but not so tight as to cut off my breathing or my speech just yet, then they began swabbing assorted parts of my body with some kind of jelly-like lubricant to increase conductivity. Then they attached five pairs of the electrodes with paper hospital tape. Special Agent Goldberg had gone off somewhere during this procedure, but now he entered the room, very businesslike in his crisp suit and carrying a briefcase. He sat down at the table behind me, and although I couldn’t see him or move my head I could hear him as he opened his briefcase and riffled some papers about. “Good morning, Shane!” he said cheerily as if we were meeting for a yuppie business breakfast. The entire bizarre outburst in my cell and as he had danced down the hall behind us might never have happened. I wondered if the Jew freak even remembered doing it. He was that wigged out. “Dear me, dear me, you really should have made that call like I told you to a few years ago,” he said again. “Racism and hatred doesn’t pay, me bonny lad, it really doesn’t, as you are about to find out. Shall we begin?” And we began.

  Once again the luck of the Irish seem to have kicked in. This will take a bit of explaining, so pardon me if I digress. About five months before I was captured, I had taken the wheel for a hit up in Seattle with two of our heavier guys up there who had heard of my driving skills, an Australian named Charlie and this lean, mean kid just off the plane from Italy named Bill Vitale. Yeah, that Bill Vitale. This was after he survived the Ravenhill ambush that wiped out Tom Murdock’s boys, and he didn’t talk much, but Charlie was fairly laid back and while we were sitting in the car waiting for the holy rabbi to make his appearance we had a long natter, and he gave me a good 411 about dealing with torture. The man knew what he was talking about and he saved me from disgracing myself. Charlie had once been arrested in Britain under the Race Relations Act and worked over by the Special Branch, who used pliers instead of electrodes and not just on the nuts but fingernails, teeth, etc. “It’s mind over matter, mate,” he explained. “When they start putting the hurt on you, wot ya gotta do is make yeself a mantra in your mind. You gotta convince yeself in yer own mind that yer mantra is the answer to all their questions, that it’s wot they’re really asking yer. In my case it was ‘Big beef bones for our dog.’ Get that inter yer mind, and make yeself believe it’s the truth, that’s wot they really want to know and ye’ve got to make them believe you. Kind of a Zen type thing, know wot I mean, mate? Anything they ask yer, ye just yell ‘Big beef bones for our dog!’ and they’ll figure ye’ve gone off yer nut and let you alone for a while to sane up.”

  Then the holy rabbi came out of the front of the apartment house of the nineteen year-old shiksa girl he was boinking, no doubt to go home to his wife with a plausible story about how he and Jehovah had been working a late shift at the synagogue. The girl followed him out to his car and they were still canoodling and nuzzling like he wasn’t in his fifties. You’d think that with all that had been going on in the Northwest over the past couple of years, a Seattle rabbi of all people would understand by then that he didn’t need to be out in public, but I guess there’s no fool like an old fool, and that goes for Jews too. That lovely blond body must have been just too tempting. “Target’s up, mates,” said Charlie, flipping open and checking his .357. “Comrade Guillermo, would you care to do the honors in memory of absent friends?”

  “Va bene, padrone,” Vitale replied. “Grazie “ He was fairly new in the country and his English wasn’t too good as yet. He was in the back with his double-barreled Sicilian shotgun that he called a lupara, already leaning over to the left rear passenger side and rolling down the window. “I killa de slut too. She fuck-a de Jew.”

  “Knock yerself out, mate,” said Charlie cheerfully. I slid on up beside the rabbi’s Cadillac, Vitale cacked them both with one barrel of double-ought buck apiece, and for the hell of it I leaned my Webley out of the driver’s side window with my left hand and popped a couple into their skulls as they flopped on the rainy tarmac of the parking lot. I always liked little touches like that, not only killing the rabbi but letting his wife and family live with the fact that he’d been killed in the arms of a blond Gentile whore. Among her other deficiencies, Gretl from the Shetl just couldn’t measure up in the sack.

  Yes ma’am, I know, I’m talking dirty again and I’m wandering. I really don’t want to go back to that chair, but it’s part of my story and I know I have to.

  There’s no way I can describe the pain that anyone else could possibly understand, so I won’t try. I know a lot of Volunteers who underwent FBI interrogations were messed up in their heads forever, had nightmares about it until the day they died, and so on, but actually it’s not a catastrophic memory for me. Just damned nasty. First off, Rooney was dead and I didn’t really care any more whether or not I lived or died, so I wasn’t as terrorized by it all as I might have been. I’m sure somewhere in the back of my mind I still carried guilt over her death and the Federal torture must have seemed like just punishment to my subconscious. Secondly, I didn’t expect anything else from those soulles
s beings in the suits and so ever since I was captured, I had been preparing myself mentally and spiritually for it, at least insofar as anybody can. Finally, to be honest I don’t remember all that much about it. Down through the years my mind seems to have deleted most of that particular morning from my memory, and I recall it now like you might recall a particularly unpleasant trip to the dentist that took place a long time ago. The very worst part, of course, was when he shot the voltage to my balls, where the pain really does pass all human description, but as Goldberg chattily explained to me, he didn’t want to do that too often because the agony could literally send me into cardiac arrest if overused. “Dead Nazis can’t suffer any more, and we can’t have that now, can we, Shane me lad?” he chuckled. “Suffering is the wages of racism, me fine Irish bhoyo, oh yes it is, yes it is, yes it is!” (He sang the last few words.) Fortunately, the male testicle is one of the toughest parts of the body despite its high sensitivity to pain. I eventually healed and I wasn’t completely ruined for family life, as my eight children who were born years later demonstrate. I didn’t know that at the time, of course, and I actually hoped Goldberg would cut them off so they wouldn’t hurt like that. He spaced out each torment with intervals of interrogation, sometimes the electric shock, sometimes the needles injecting that agonizer acid solution beneath my fingernails or into assorted fleshy parts. I still have some scars from the subcutaneous acid shots. Sometimes the iron collar of the garrotte choked me into unconsciousness as my lungs burned like a welder’s torch for air. Then they’d ease up and let me draw a few wheezing, desperate breaths and tighten it again.