Kindness for Weakness (11 page)

“What’s a berserker?” Wilfred says, but everyone ignores him because his questions can go on forever, until no one remembers what we were talking about in the first place.

It’s my serve against Double X, and I’m playing really well, but nobody seems to notice; they are too excited about this Rivera guy.

Double X pauses before his serve. “Well, homeboy was in a fight, right? Punched this dude so hard in the face that
the dude almost died!” He hits a soft arcing shot, and I smash it back to take the lead for the first time in the game.

Coty fetches the ball for us and says, “I heard he’s locked up at Penfield Secure.”

“True,” says Double X. “True. But he assaulted a guard, so guess what? Homeboy getting transferred here!” He is excited because this will bump him up in standing within his gang if he can buddy up with Moses, or so Freddie says.

I rip a serve across his backhand. He connects but sprays it wide off the table, ending the game. This means that I am the new Bravo Unit champion, at least until someone beats me. It’s the first time I’ve been good at something, but nobody seems to care right now. Double X hands his paddle to Wilfred, grinning even though he’s just been dethroned.

They keep talking about Moses like he’s a superhero. Moses is going to kick the guards’ asses and free us. Moses is going to bitch slap Horvath and Pike and force them to serve us pizzas in the staff break room. Moses is going to bring down Division of Youth Services with his righteous fists.

I listen to the stories, but I don’t care about Moses Rivera. I’ve got too many things going on in my own head to think about a gangland savior coming to Morton to fight it out with Horvath and the other guards. I’m thinking about my mother and if she’s ever going to call or visit. Probably not. Maybe she’s sick or something. I try to stop worrying, but I can’t. Not in here, at least. In my room at bedtime I listen to the clock hammering away. I count out five
hundred ticks. When I get tired of that, I put my ear to the crack in the door to listen to the guards.

Horvath says, “You know that Rivera kid, the boxer?”

“Yeah. So?” says Pike.

“I heard he’s coming here. Next week.”

“Waste of taxpayer money, if you ask me. He’s a real specimen, though. Benches, like, three-fifty.”

“He’s just a punk,” says Horvath. “First time he talks shit, he’ll hit the floor just like everyone else.”

“Tune him up good.”

“That’s right.”

Pike’s laugh, high-pitched and wheezy, makes my skin crawl, and later I dream of hitting the floor.

All day I look forward to Louis’s visit, but he never shows. Doesn’t call, either. Part of me knew he’d blow it off, but I still hoped. I mean, to get off the unit for a couple of hours and talk to my brother … it would have been nice.
Fuck it
, I think.
No, fuck him. Fuck Louis and all of his bullshit
.

The rest of the day drags until we go to the gym to play basketball. Freddie and I are the last ones picked because we’re terrible at sports. Every time I get the ball, Mr. Pike blows the whistle for double dribbling or traveling. Freddie knows how to dribble, but he misses the entire backboard whenever he shoots. The only player who is worse is Oskar, the Dr. Seuss kid. Oskar spends a lot of time with the psychologist, Dr. Souza. Other times he sleeps or just stares at his hands.

The one occasion I catch a pass, Antwon sticks out his foot, and I go sprawling across the floor. The ball bounces loose and rolls over to Oskar, who is standing at the edge of the game watching us with his big vacant eyes. He looks at the ball blankly and then bends down to pick it up.

The rest of us watch to see what he will do; even Horvath and Pike seem curious. Oskar holds the ball, staring back at us. He bounces it with both of his hands, like a little kid, smiling. Slowly he makes his way toward his own team’s basket, and we all back away to clear a lane. When he’s close enough, Oskar holds the ball between his legs and launches it up into the air. Incredibly, it bounces off the backboard and drops neatly into the hoop without touching the rim. He turns to look at us, eyes still empty.

Tony claps once, then again. He shoots us all a look that says we’d better clap, too; we do. Oskar tries to smile, but it comes out forced and crooked. He tries to laugh, but it comes out in big choking sobs. He shuffles off the court and starts banging his head on the concrete block wall. He does it hard enough to split open his forehead, smearing blood on the white industrial paint. By the time the guards realize what is happening, Oskar has slid down onto his knees and is rocking back and forth, crying, a thick stream of blood running down his face. It drips off his chin and pools on the green rubber floor. Horvath and Pike move in on him slowly, like confused wrestlers, trying to figure out what to do with an opponent who has just flopped to the mat and pinned himself. They’re not sure if they should restrain him or try to help him. But how do you help someone like Oskar? Now he is sitting, completely still, looking intently at his hands.

“Line up!” Mr. E hustles us out of the gym, straight to the cafeteria without showering or changing. When we come back to the unit, Oskar’s room is empty. A box of his
belongings has been placed outside his door; I peek inside and see a pile of his books.
Horton Hears a Who!
sits on top.

“Where’d he go?” I ask.

“Mental hospital,” says Tony.

“For, like, the tenth fucking time,” says Bobby. “Kid’s bat shit crazy.”

“Shut up, Bobby,” Tony says.

“You ain’t the boss of me!”

“No, but shut up anyway.”

And, for once, Bobby does.

Tonight Mr. E and Samson throw a pizza party for the whole unit to celebrate Tony’s release. The two guards pay for a movie and food with their own money. Levon, a football player from Queens, asks if they’re going to do the same for him.

“Sure,” Samson says. “When you get your Honors Stage.”

Levon groans. “Ain’t none of us ever getting Honors Stage. Tony just a freak.”

“Speak for yo’self,” says Wilfred. “I got four good days behind me.”

Samson laughs and tells Wilfred that he is off to a good start but he’ll need eighty-six more good days.

The movie is
Transformers II
, which everyone seems to like. Even Antwon, who hates everything. Or at least that’s what he’d like us to believe.

“I’ll take that yellow Camaro,” he says. “That’s tight.”

Predictably, Double X and Coty agree.

We all get two slices of pizza, a cup of soda, and a piece of chocolate cake that Tony’s mother sent in for the occasion. He says that his entire family drove up from New York City and is staying at a fancy Holiday Inn, just so they can pick him up early in the morning.

“They don’t want me to ride in no transport van, so they borrowed my uncle’s Lincoln. They gonna take me home in style!”

Antwon says that Lincolns are crap, but Tony doesn’t take the bait.

“Y’all can say whatever you want,” says Tony. “Because tomorrow I’m free. No more Morton for me. No more nasty-ass chili dogs and sandwiches made from government cheese and the bad parts of animals that don’t even exist. You know, like them bologna animals and meat loaf animals.”

Samson laughs. “What’s the first thing you’re going to do when you get home?”

“I’m gonna eat my mom’s cooking,” he says. “Then I’m gonna see my girl, and then my homeboys. Don’t worry, Samson. I ain’t gonna party or nothing. But I’m not living like a monk, neither!”

Before lights-out Mr. E says, “Right now I have something to say to Tony, but you all might want to hear it, too. If not, that’s fine; you can go get ready for bed.”

No one moves.

“One of the things I like about people is that everybody has their own story. Doesn’t matter if it’s a lawyer, or a cop, or somebody’s mother cleaning office buildings or
working as a home health aide. And all of
you
have stories, too, even if you don’t realize it. But right now I want to tell you mine.”

“I come to the United States when I was thirteen. From Grenada, a small island. My family was broke so we lived in the projects and got everything from the Goodwill: shoes, clothes, furniture. Even the knickknacks and the pictures on the wall.”

There is a chorus of uh-huhs from kids who know this part from their own experiences.

“Me and my cousin, Raymond, got our asses kicked every single day because we had secondhand clothes and Caribbean accents that the other kids said were stuck-up. Then we joined a gang and no one messed with us. We had friends and respect.”

Coty, Double X, Levon, and Antwon all say, “Yeah, I hear that,” and “True, true.”

Mr. Eboue continues, “Until I got busted and locked up. At a place just like this, but it’s closed now because a kid was killed there.”

“Who kilt him?” says Wilfred. Mr. E ignores him and continues.

“I followed the rules in lockup, but I didn’t learn anything. So when I got out, I thought I had outsmarted the system. But what I didn’t know is that the system doesn’t care if you change. The system is like a machine; all it cares about is its gears and levers and shit. Input and output. If you do six months and earn your stage, you go home. Lots of kids are getting arrested and the system needs your bed? That means you go home whether you’re ready or not.”

“So everything was cool until I got off the bus in Brooklyn and learned that my cousin, Raymond, had been shot dead in some gang shit. Nobody told me!”

“Why not?” Wilfred says.

“Because they thought I’d flip out and do something self-destructive, which is probably true.”

Levon says that his cousin got shot last year. Danny, a white kid from Schenectady, says his little brother was stabbed but didn’t die. He’s in a wheelchair now. Other kids say who in their family was killed. Mr. E waits patiently until they’re done.

“I didn’t believe that Raymond was dead. ‘Show me!’ I said to my mother, who is only, like, five feet tall and was working two jobs to pay for rent and food for me and my brothers and sisters. By that time, my father had split and started a whole new family someplace else, but that’s a whole nother kind of story. My mother just cried and took me to my old bedroom that I used to share with my cousin.”

“What’d you see?” says Wilfred again.

“Pictures from his funeral. She had them up on the walls like a shrine. ‘It was a nice funeral,’ she said. ‘You would have been proud.’ ”

Mr. E takes a moment to breathe. He touches the corner of his eye with a hand. “Man, I went off the train tracks for a long time. And let’s just say that I did some things, and that I was lucky I didn’t get locked up again. Or killed.”

“Did you find the dudes that done it?” Coty says.

Mr. E waves off the question with a hand and continues.
“But when it was all done, when I was done
reacting
 … to this thing that I couldn’t accept, I realized that the only difference between me and my cousin was that I got locked up. I was off the streets when the guns came out. Otherwise, I’d be dead, too.”

Wilfred raises his hand. “No offense, Mr. E, but what’s this story mean? That it’s good to be locked up so you don’t get shot?”

“It means that you’re all marked and you have to try to live the rest of your life so you’re not around violence.”

Wilfred nods, but he still looks confused.

Before bed Tony says his goodbyes; he’ll be leaving early in the morning while we’re all still asleep. Handshakes or hugs aren’t allowed, so he gathers up his personal items, which are a bundle of papers and a few family pictures.

“Y’all take care of yourselves,” he says. To Mr. E and Samson he says, “I’m gonna make you guys proud of me.”

“Do that by having a good life and not coming back,” says Samson.

“James,” Tony says before I go into my room. “You remember what I told you, bro?”

I give him the thumbs-up sign to show that I remember: take care of myself, fight Antwon, and let Freddie deal with his own problems.

“Thanks for the free advice,” I say.

“No problem. Have a nice life, man.”

“You too.”

Every Saturday we’re allowed to sleep in until nine o’clock, but I am awake at six, cursing my brother. Yesterday, he finally got around to calling to apologize for missing our visit. “Something came up, bro,” he said. “Next week. I promise.” Like I’m going to believe that.

So I stare out the window at the razor wire fence and the parking lot. I watch the seven-to-three staff park their Chevy Tahoes and Silverados, Ford F-150 pickups, and big Harley-Davidson motorcycles. They carry giant cups of coffee and bags of hash browns and Egg McMuffin sandwiches from McDonald’s.

The big wall-mounted clock hammers out time while, beyond my door, Horvath and Pike talk through the final hour of the eleven-to-seven shift they picked up for overtime. They are talking just to talk, to keep themselves awake. And if I didn’t know any better from what happened the other day with Bobby, I would think of them as just a couple of regular guys staying up late bullshitting, instead of hateful assholes in charge of the lives of a bunch of kids.

“You ever play baseball when you were a kid?” Horvath says.

“Yep. Wasn’t no good, though.”

“I played catcher.”

“You look like a catcher. Bet you wore them husky-sized kid jeans, right?”

Horvath ignores the joke. “My old man was the coach. He said the catcher controls the game.”

They are silent for a moment before Horvath picks up the thread of his story. I’m surprised that he even
has
a story; none of the adults I have known—not my mother, or even Mr. Pfeffer—have talked about their pasts. In a way, I don’t want to know more about Mr. Horvath, because I don’t want to understand why he is a bastard. As far as I’m concerned, he’s the biggest piece of shit I’ve ever met next to Ron. But at the same time, hearing him talk about his childhood is oddly compelling, like wanting to see a car wreck. So I keep my ear pressed to the door.

“My last year in Babe Ruth, we made it to the state championships. My old man told us the other team was better but that talent didn’t matter; what mattered was heart. He said if we wanted it bad enough, if we had the heart, we’d win.”