The New Americans

Long, filthy fingernails scratched at a lice-ridden beard to quell the itching.  The old stain-frayed tick pillow had long since lost its case and, from the looks of it, had been past down from prisoner to prisoner for the past 50 years.  The man’s oily matted hair reached half way down his back.  It stuck to his sweaty skin as he tossed and turned on the rust-covered springs of his makeshift bunk. 
The man’s eyelids fluttered as his mind reviewed miserable days gone by.  His dreams always seemed worst at dawn when his sleep was deepest.  Sadly, he could never get resolution to the tragic storyline that looped through his head. 
 A familiar banging began outside.  A normal man would’ve jumped out of his skin at the atomic pounding of a guard’s baton on steel jail doors, but after a decade, he’d gotten used to the traumatic sounds.
 “Get yer lazy arse up, convict!” the menacing guard shouted in a gruff Belfast voice. 
“On yer feet.”  A second guard flanked the first as he nodded down the line for the jailer to open the door.  The bolt clunked automatically and released as the man, still half-asleep, swung his legs sideways and jumped to the floor. 
Although Ulster Irish Republican Army prisoners were ordered to wear orange jumpsuits, adding indignation, as it was the color of their sworn enemies.  His clothes, like his comrades were merely tattered rags with filth blunting the color.  These IRA volunteers had always been defiant, choosing to ignore prison garb as a rejection of their criminal characterization and forcing their captures to treat them as they saw themselves: political prisoners.  The man’s tatters hung on him like dirty strips of machine shop clothes sewn together, ragged and rough and looked as if it hadn’t been washed in years: a prison violation overlooked by the guards all too happy to keep their wards as uncomfortable as humanly possible. 
The visual combination of homeless dumpster-diver and grizzled gold miner was not nearly as startling as the stench of his body odor that preceded him.   He bent one knee slightly so as not to pass out from military-style attention, then turned to face the wall as he had a thousand times before, stopping six inches from his nose.  One didn’t dare eye a guard or screw, as they were known.  This had been a hellhole like Long Kesh, Prison or the Maze, but now simply a crumbling structure filled with ghosts ready for re-purposing.  And whether you were a political prisoner or one of the world’s worst criminals, the guards ruled the roost here -- period.
 The jail door opened and the two guards entered in uniform fashion.  The lead screw orated like an academy drill sergeant.  “Michael Ruairí McCann, today you are to be released from your incarceration pending all documentation, are you aware of this?”  The guard robotically relayed as if done a hundred times a day.  McCann nodded slightly.  Suddenly, he heard a chink as four long lengths of chain dropped from the second guard’s hand and fell hard to the floor.  This was the noise McCann hated most.  The chains.  Would he be beaten again with them, strangled until he was unconscious, only to then be revived, and throttled over and over again?