PAC-4 SPRING

Original © 1984 Gordon Alder

All rights reserved

Quenton squinted hard at the big orange sun and its small yellow companion in the mid-morning sky. Their rays were refracted by the drops of sweat that clung to his thick eyebrows and he sucked the hot air sharply as other drops stung his eyes. The heat was bad but the yellow powder for soil that stuck to every centimeter of exposed and sweating skin was worse. Trailing behind the team as the plow sliced through the lemon-colored dirt, Quenton was forced to breathe the yellow dust cloud until he knew his lungs must be the same mustard hue as the sweat-soaked stain on his arms and hands.

This and the heavy, brittle rocks that jarred his whole body and locked his teeth together each time the plow gored a new chunk of volcanic residue hidden in the shallow powder, daring him to relax his grip on the plastic handles slippery with sweat. ‘Whoa!" he called, and Gee and Haw plodded two steps further and stopped, wondering why he had stopped before hearing the gritch of the plowshare against cadmium silicate. Quenton yanked his bandanna down and spit, yellow from the fine powder that filtered between the threads and into his mouth and throat. He grimaced and for a moment felt queasy at the sight of it. He was almost certain the yellow dust was slowly poisoning him as he labored behind the team day after day. And for what? To bury the seeds 15 centimeters deep into the yellow stuff, like the agricultural agent said, as if he actually knew what it was like to sweat behind a plow.

At least the Aggie was the only authority figure they had to deal with here on PAC-4. There were no guards; none of those behavioral psychologists who poked and probed around into your psyche, assuming childhood deprivation or worse was at the root of every inmate’s antisocial behavior. Though with Clara and the heat and the insidious yellow dust to contend with, Quenton sometimes wondered if he wouldn’t be better off back in a cell - a clean, cool cell in Triloch Prison. At least there he didn’t have to worry about raising enough food to eat.

Yet all in all the Aggie was decent, and he did seem to take some personal interest in their welfare. Quenton knew that too many penal system employees regarded their charges with open contempt and only counted the days to retirement. Karl wasn’t like that. He smiled easily and was extremely patient with what a lot of them would classify as dumb questions, so that Quenton himself had finally come around to asking about things he didn’t know or wasn’t sure about. Things concerning the chickens, the horses and just plain planting, with some expectation that somehow the seeds would actually germinate (he was becoming more familiar with words like that) and things would grow just like they were supposed to.

"Hell," Quenton thought, "I never planted anything, not even a flower, yet Karl never seemed to doubt that something would grow, even if I made a mistake here and there." That was a laugh. From the time he had run away from home as a kid, to the time he had pushed the knife through the punk’s leather jacket, his whole life had been an endless succession of mistakes. He wondered what made Karl so certain his luck could suddenly change. Quenton himself had never had that kind of optimism toward his future. He imagined Karl had never had his kind of doubt.