Jason Overstreet - Beneath the Darkest Sky

It was the best gift I’d been given in the five months I’d been imprisoned, my getting to work alone with James, at least for a day. With the claw ends of our hammers, the two of us stabbed at the bloodstained slats and began yanking the first two up. It was disgusting.

Punishment isolator number three was where they kept the worst of the worst zeks . It was a barracks some one hundred yards west of the entire camp, made of thick logs, rectangular like all the others, but it had a long hallway down the middle and a small guard’s room at the end. There were ten windowless, eight-by-eight chambers with heavy wooded doors in the isolator, five along each side of the hallway. We were working in the chamber at the back on the right. There was a crazy zek in each of the others.

“Make sure you don’t let that hammer slip and hit you in the eye, son,” I said, noticing the thick, dry blood that had settled on the sides of the slat I’d lifted. “Make sure the claw is dug in good before you pull. And the long nails on these boards are rusty and filthy. Don’t let ’em stick you.”

“Okay, Dad.”

“What’s the first thing you’re gonna do when we get back to Paris after we leave here soon? You should start working on your drawings again.”

I could see his emotionless mood lift a bit at my mere suggestion.

“I think I want to show Ginger how to play chess. She was always wanting to play with my friend Paul and me back in Moscow. We never let her.”

“She’ll like that.”

“Yeah.”

I placed the board aside and looked at the grayish dirt ground underneath the four-inch-high joists. I reached down and picked up a handful. It felt like brittle clay, breaking apart easily in my hands. Fluids had managed to seep through the tight cracks and stain portions of it. It smelled awful, hence the reason Koskinen had said before I’d exited, “Take some shovels and wheel barrels and remove the top foot of dirt underneath. Then replace it with fresh soil before replacing the slats.” He’d been more than correct to suggest such.

“Hey, son,” I said, “did Paul’s father ever tell him when they were going back to Seattle? I remember him constantly talking about his family planning to return soon.”

“They probably left in December.”

“Well, when we get to Paris I’ll track them down and we can plan to see them when we eventually move to Denver, Colorado.”

“Really,” he said, almost trying to crack a smile for the first time since August. “Are we really gonna move to the United States, Dad?”

“That’s my plan, son. As soon as Bobby gets us out of here and we rejoin your sister and mother in Paris, I’m going to contact some colleges there. Denver is a place I’ve always wanted to go.”

We could hear the door behind us opening.

“Bystreye!” said an isolator guard who’d obviously just arrived to replace the other guard who’d been outside in the cold guarding the front door to this point. “Work faster! I’m here now! It is my night shift now, zeks ! You Negroes can’t be lazy anymore!”

I kept my head down and continued working, trying to ignore the tall, thin man dressed in his gray uniform and visor cap, a rifle hanging from his shoulder.

“You need to finish the entire job today!” he said, taking a wooden canteen from his coat pocket. “You need to finish tonight!”

“Commander Koskinen said that two zeks , Dima Avdeyev and Roma Galkin, would be joining us tomorrow morning to help finish,” I calmly said in nervous Russian.

He pulled the corked top off of his canteen and I could see the blood rushing to his white bony face. He took a big drink and wiped the moisture from his Stalin-like, dark mustache. He wasn’t drunk, but appeared as though he’d had a bit too much for an on-duty guard. He pressed the top back on his canteen and pocketed it.

“Commander Koskinen is not my commander!” he said. “He is in charge of building shit for the Dalstroi. The only commander we listen to at this camp is the big boss, Commander Drugov. He’s in charge of zeks ! I spit on your bourgeois Koskinen! You are no different than a fucking suki !”

We kept working, our heads down, trying to ignore the word he’d used. It referred to a criminal zek who liked to collaborate with the Dalstroi officials.

“You want to go tell your Koskinen who the lazy zeks are so he will be nice to you,” he continued. “I can tell you’re that kind of filth. Look at me, you fucking suki !”

I slowly stopped working, both James and I still on our knees. I touched my son’s shoulder, signaling for him to stop pulling the wood. Then I looked up at the guard and waited.

“You think because you are not a zek with a regular job that you are special, a pridurok ?” he said. “You think this is so because your Commander Koskinen put you in charge of a brigade? You think that makes you a lucky, Negro pridurok ?”

“No,” I said, hearing this word for the first time. My ability to translate Russian still left me wondering what odd words like this meant. There were many within the camp that I was learning on a daily basis, and many had to remain Russian words, as translating them into English was difficult. The language of the camps was unique.

“Stand up!” he said, removing his shouldered rifle and holding it at his left side, barrel to the floor. “And put the hammer down.”

I did both, slowly, and with my heart rate increasing considerably. Positioned no more than three feet from him now, he reached out with his right hand and grabbed my collar, pulling me close, his breath smelling of whiskey, not vodka.

“I don’t like you,” he said, his mouth an inch from mine. “And I don’t like your bourgeois son either, always walking so proper, picking at his bushy hair. Probably filled with lice! And your Commander Koskinen is a spy. This is easy to see. He will be shot and replaced soon enough. Do you understand me, Negro zek ?”

I didn’t answer, so he proceeded to grab my jaw and repeat himself with more force.

“Do… you… understand… me … Negro zek ?”

Again I refused to answer, so he backhand slapped me across the face. Hard. I didn’t react. I just stood there, letting the sting dissipate. Using only his right, he took the canteen out again, pulling the top off with his teeth, and drank. Enraged, he threw it on the floor and rushed James, pulling him up by the arm and slugging him in the face, hard enough to drop him flat on the floor. It was a punch powerful enough to kill.

At this point, all sense of rational thought exited my mind at once. Watching James lie there on the floor, perhaps unconscious, I transformed into complete, instinctive father mode. A man of my height and age had struck my child.

As if he could sense the rage surfacing in me, he started to raise his rifle. I lunged forward and smashed him against the wall, the rifle falling to the floor. As he bounced off and tried to gather himself, I reached down to pick up my hammer. He came forward, trying to kick it away before I clutched it. But I already had the handle and his boot only clipped my wrist.

I stood and he swung at me with a right, nipping my nose. As I raised the hammer, he swung again and I stabbed his forearm with the claw, yanking it from his flesh as he cried out and stepped back. Seeing James in my periphery still lying there motionless, I raised the hammer again and rushed him. He tried to swing at me, but I kept coming forward, hitting him in the head with the face of the hammer. He fell to the floor and I straddled him, taking the hammer to his head repeatedly until I’d left him unrecognizable.