They were in foot and hand shackles on the bus so they had to shuffle as the length of the foot chain allowed, their hands in front of them tied to their feet.
Stepping down off the bus one boy no older than Bill, who was just twenty, tripped and tumbled down. Since he couldn’t use his hands to protect himself in the fall, he stood up with a bloody nose.
The boy, Bill remembered again now as he drove, as he remembered all too often all the time when he thought about it, didn’t really stand up. Two jail guards pulled him up by the shackles. Bill saw that the handcuff part cut one of his wrists. The boy stood there bleeding at his wrist and with blood dripping down his face from his nose.
“Goddamn dirty pig soiling our yard here,” one of the guards said.
A different guard stepped up to the boy. “You gonna pay for this, motherfucker. You gonna pay for it and you gonna clean it up.”
Bill was scared worse than he’d ever recalled being scared in his whole life. He was trying not to cry, trying to look tough and trying to take in everything going on around him all at once. Somehow his eyes must’ve met the eyes of one of the guards because that guard was suddenly in his face.
“You eyeballing me boy?” he said loudly, so close to Bill that Bill could feel the guard’s breath on his face and smell his stale lunch too.
“No.”
“No what?”
Bill had no clue what he was supposed to say. “No officer,” he finally managed.
“You call me sir, boy.”
“Yes sir,” Bill said.
“Lookee here,” the guard said. “We got us a bonafide genuine hippie boy.”
All the guards came over. They all wore side arms and carried shotguns. One guard cocked his shotgun and said “I see the slightest motion out the corner of my eye while I’m checking out this here hippie, I’m shooting at it first and asking about it after I shoot.”
“I’ll be damned,” one guard said.
“Remember the hippie we checked in this morning?” another one said.
“I heard he enjoyed the strip search. You gonna enjoy the strip search, boy?”
Bill did not answer.
Another guard, one who had not spoken, poked Bill in the ribs with the butt of his shotgun. “Didn’t you hear him ask you a question?”
“Yes sir,” Bill said.
“Well?” the same guard said, prodding Bill’s ribs with the shotgun with each word. “Answer his fucking question. You like it up the ass? You look like a faggot to me.”
“No sir,” Bill said.
“You a queer?”
“No sir.”
“We gonna put you in D dorm with the toughs,” the sergeant said. He hadn’t spoken before either. He stepped close to Bill. “Course that’s after the barber gets done with you.”
The sergeant stepped off and told the guards to start marching the inmates in. Just before they did, an inmate came out carrying a bucket with a brush inside it. Bill noted the inmate, in workhouse blues, was an albino.
“Thanks, whitey,” the sergeant said. “Okay now, Mr. Sharp,” he said to one of the guards, “hold the line while the bleeder cleans up his mess.”
One guard pushed the bleeder forward and forced him down to his knees. Another pushed the bucket forward with his foot, not caring that water was splashing the inmate on his knees.
The line of prisoners stood watching while the still bleeding inmate scrubbed the cement with the bristle brush. He stopped only to keep wiping his face with his sleeve so he didn’t bleed on the ground anymore.
“Anyone else wanna bleed?” one of the guards asked.
No one said anything.
