Amerikan Eagle

“You said earlier, do I think Southerners are dumb?”

“And?” LaBayeux had a merry grin on his face.

“No, most Southerners I meet are okay guys. Not dumb.”

LaBayeux’s grin got wider. “Nice to hear.”

“So why don’t you be an okay guy and let me out of here so I can do my job?”

“Guess I don’t feel like being an okay guy today, Yankee.”

LaBayeux punched Sam in the face, and after he fell to the ground, the kicking started.

After a few long minutes the kicking stopped, and then he was picked up, ears ringing, nose bloody, ribs aching, and LaBayeux called out, “Process him, boys, take ’im away and process ’im. His ass is now ours.”

And so he was processed.

* * *

He was dragged off the porch, and he struggled, fighting, and cried out as two burly Legionnaires twisted his arms back and cuffed him, then threw him on the ground. He tried to get up and was kicked in the head. He fell flat, eyes blurry, spit running down his chin. A car came up, and more hands grabbed him, threw him in the rear, his head and torso on the floor. A Legionnaire climbed in and Sam winced, feeling cold metal at the back of his head.

“Move or fight me, bud, and then what little brains you got are gonna be splattered o’er this fine leather, got it?” came a thick Southern voice.

Sam closed his eyes, thinking, God, what a screwup, what a total and complete screwup. “Look, I’m a cop… okay? Get ahold of my boss, this’ll all be straightened out.”

The pistol barrel pressed into his skull. “Shut up. Last month I had to clean blood ’n’ brain off this leather, don’t wanna do it again.”

He shut up.

The car sped along, taking corners and dips, and Sam was thrown back and forth. The car stopped, words were exchanged, and the car sped up again, then quickly braked.

The door flew open, hands came in, and dragged him out, stood him up. He was in a fenced-in area, facing a building, concrete and stone, letters on a wooden sign outside: PROCESSING—NO TALKING.

“Let’s go,” and he was shoved in the back, then half dragged, half propelled into the building. He was slammed through an open door and was halted on a concrete floor with a drain in the center and gray metal benches on either side of the stained plaster walls. Before Sam was a metal counter with a slim man sitting on a stool, a leather-bound ledger open before him. Bare lightbulbs hung from the concrete ceiling.

The thin man coughed, picked up a fountain pen. His Legionnaire’s uniform hung off him as if it had once belonged to a heavier man. “Name?” he said, his voice reedy.

“Sam Miller. Look, can I see LaBayeux again, the commandant, there’s been a mistake—”

A slap to the rear of his head. He tried to turn, but the Legionnaires held on to him vise-tight.

The man with the pen laboriously wrote something down in the ledger. “Son, just to make it easy for you, these be the rules. I ask you a question. You answer. You give me more than an answer, then Luke back there, he’ll whack your thick head. And each time he’ll whack you harder. You keep it up, you’ll be on the cee-ment down there, bleedin’ from your noggin. So let’s go on. Address?”

“Fourteen Grayson Street, Portsmouth, New Hampshire.”

“Occupation?”

“Police inspector, city of Portsmouth.”

The man looked up. “Religion? You don’t look Jewish. What be you, then?”

“Catholic.”

The man scribbled again. “Thought so. All right, fellas, you know the drill. Get ’im through.”

His arms were twisted up, and they pushed him past the counter. Sam thought sourly of how many times he had brought prisoners to be booked back in Portsmouth, back when he was in charge, back when the prisoners weren’t people, weren’t anything save the offenses they had done: public drunkenness, brawling, petty burglary. Sam’s offense? A simple one, a new one, of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

A smaller room, also made of concrete and soiled plaster, stinking of chemicals, another drain in the center of the room. Lockers and laundry baskets and another blow to the head. “Here. Strip.”

Sam didn’t move.

Another, harder blow. His knees sagged and then the cuffs were freed, and he was lifted back up. A Legionnaire said, “You’re gonna be naked here in a sec, and your choice whether you’re gonna be bleedin’ hard or not.”

Sam fumbled at his buttons while three Legionnaires watched him, and he had a quick, sharp memory of his first time in a locker room in high school, his first time being naked in front of other men, feeling awkward, shy, embarrassed, like everybody was staring at him.