A small door opened at one side of the gate and a short, stocky, well-muscled woman in a black visored cap and a shapeless black uniform came out and boarded the bus. She had our releases with her, fastened to a clipboard. She thrust this under my nose. "Read and sign, shnook!" she said in a voice that sounded like rusty boiler plate being torn away from more rusty boiler plate. The releases were in order. Our hands shook a little when we signed the papers; there was something so terribly final and irreversible about it. There would be no release except in cases of severe medical complaint, external legal involvement or national emergency. We were paid up in advance, of course. There was no turning away. Another attendant, who also looked like a matron of police, boarded the bus with a large suitcase and two of the baggy gray garments we had seen the others wearing in the swamp. No shoes, socks or underwear. "Strip and pack your clothes here, shnooks," said the woman with the empty suitcase. We did, though it was pretty awkward ... standing there in the aisle of the bus with those two gorgons staring at us. I started to save out a pack of cigarettes, but was soon disabused of this idea. The older of the two women knocked the pack from my hand, ground it under her heel on the floor and let me have one across the face with what I am almost certain must have been an old sock full of rancid hog kidneys. "What the hell was that?" I protested. "Sock fulla hog kidneys, shnook. Soft but heavy, know what I mean? Just let us do the thinkin' around here. Git outa line just once an' you'll see what we can do with a sock fulla hog kidneys." I didn't press the matter further. All I could think of was how I wanted a smoke just then. When I thought of the fresh, new pack of cigarettes with its unbroken cellophane and its twenty, pure white cylinders of fragrant Turkish and Virginia, I came as close to weeping as I had in forty years. The ground was slimy and cold under our bare feet when we got down from the bus, but the two viragos behind us gave us no time to pick our way delicately over the uneven ground. We were propelled through the small door at the side of the gate, and at last we found ourselves within the ten-foot barriers of the Misery Camp. We just looked at each other and giggled.