"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.
Inside the yard, about twenty other guests shuffled around and around in a circle. Their gray coveralls were dark and heavy with the rain and clung to their bodies in clammy-looking patches. All moved sluggishly through the mud with their arms hanging slack at their sides, their shoulders hunched forward against the wet chill, and their eyes turned downward, as though they were fascinated with the halting progress of their own feet. I had never seen people look so completely dispirited and tired. Only one man raised his head to look at us as we stood there. I noticed that his forehead had bright purple marks on it. These proved to be "No. 94, Property of MMF," in inch-high letters which ran from temple to temple just above his eyebrows. Incredibly enough the man grinned at us.
"You'll be sah-reeeee," he yelped. I saw him go down into the mud under a blow with a kidney-sock from a burly male guard who had been standing in the center of the cheerless little circle.