Lights were burning in practically every damned shack on the grounds.
Men were shouting, bottles were breaking.
It was do or die for me.
I took my flashlight and went to the noisiest door and knocked.
Someone opened it about six inches.
"What do you want?" I said,
"I'm guarding these barracks tonight and you boys are supposed to keep quiet as much as you can" – or some such silly remark.
They slammed the door in my face.
I stood looking at the wood of it against my nose.
It was like a Western movie; the time had come for me to assert myself.
I knocked again.
They opened up wide this time.
"Listen," I said, "I don't want to come around bothering you fellows, but I'll lose my job if you make too much noise."
"Who are you?"
"I'm a guard here."
"Never seen you before."
"Well, here's my badge."
"What are you doing with that pistolcracker on your ass?"
"It isn't mine," I apologized. "I borrowed it."
"Have a drink, fer krissakes."
I didn't mind if I did. I took two.
I said, "Okay, boys?
You'll keep quiet, boys?
I'll get hell, you know."
"It's all right, kid," they said.
"Go make your rounds.
Come back for another drink if you want one."
And I went to all the doors in this manner, and pretty soon I was as drunk as anybody else.
Come dawn, it was my duty to put up the American flag on a sixty-foot pole, and this morning I put it up upside down and went home to bed.
When I came back in the evening the regular cops were sitting around grimly in the office.
"Say, bo, what was all the noise around here last night?
We've had complaints from people who live in those houses across the canyon."
"I don't know," I said. "It sounds pretty quiet right now."
"The whole contingent's gone.
You was supposed to keep order around here last night – the chief is yelling at you.
And another thing – do you know you can go to jail for putting the American flag upside down on a government pole?"
"Upside down?"
I was horrified; of course I hadn't realized it.
I did it every morning mechanically.
"Yessir," said a fat cop who'd spent twenty-two years as a guard in Alcatraz.
"You could go to jail for doing something like that."
The others nodded grimly.
They were always sitting around on their asses; they were proud of their jobs.
They handled their guns and talked about them.
They were itching to shoot somebody.
Remi and me.
The cop who had been an Alcatraz guard was potbellied and about sixty, retired but unable to keep away from the atmospheres that had nourished his dry soul all his life.
Every night he drove to work in his
'35 Ford, punched the clock exactly on time, and sat down at the rolltop desk.
He labored painfully over the simple form we all had to fill out every night – rounds, time, what happened, and so on.