Conan, now--he was a big buck greaser and he would be there for the
next hour, languidly poking a piece of fluff out of the air filter on
the prison jeep. Lazy, sure. Undependable, certainly. But he kept the
cars going--and, O'Leary thought approvingly, when his sentence was up
in another year or so, he would go back to his life with his status
restored, a mechanic on the outside as he had been inside, and he
certainly would never risk coming back to the Jug by trying to pass as
Civil Service or anything else. He knew his place.
So why didn't this girl, this Sue-Ann Bradley, know hers?
II
Every prison has its Greensleeves--sometimes they are called by
different names. Old Marquette called it "the canary;" Louisiana State
called it "the red hats;" elsewhere it was called "the hole," "the
snake pit," "the Klondike." When you're in it, you don't much care what
it is called; it is a place for punishment.
And punishment is what you get.
Block O in Estates-General Correctional Institution was the
disciplinary block, and because of the green straitjackets its
inhabitants wore, it was called the Greensleeves. It was a community of
its own, an enclave within the larger city-state that was the Jug. And
like any other community, it had its leading citizens ... two of them.
Their names were Sauer and Flock.
Sue-Ann Bradley heard them before she reached the Greensleeves. She
was in a detachment of three unfortunates like herself, convoyed by an
irritable guard, climbing the steel steps toward Block O from the floor
below, when she heard the yelling.
"Owoo-o-o," screamed Sauer from one end of the cell block and
"Yow-w-w!" shrieked Flock at the other.
The inside deck guard of Block O looked nervously at the outside deck
guard. The outside guard looked impassively back--after all, he was on
the outside.
The inside guard muttered: "Wipe rats! They're getting on my nerves."
The outside guard shrugged.
"Detail, _halt_!" The two guards turned to see what was coming in as
the three new candidates for the Greensleeves slumped to a stop at the
head of the stairs. "Here they are," Sodaro told them. "Take good care
of 'em, will you? Especially the lady--she's going to like it here,
because there's plenty of wipes and greasers and figgers to keep her
company." He laughed coarsely and abandoned his charges to the Block O
guards.
The outside guard said sourly: "A woman, for God's sake. Now O'Leary
knows I hate it when there's a woman in here. It gets the others all
riled up."
"Let them in," the inside guard told him. "The others are riled up
already."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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