Critical Injuries (14 page)

James was home. Dinner was over. Jamie was out somewhere with Bethany. Alix was in the basement with Tim, Mavis's boy, with whom she had played more or less since the day Isla went off to work. They'd played house, computer games, and soccer together, had had spats and tussles and giggling secrets together. “That's the way to grow up,” Isla had thought, watching them. “So there's nothing so mysterious you lose your head for no good reason.” Between being friends with Tim and sharing a bathroom with Jamie, she didn't think Alix could have too many odd or unrealistic notions about the attractions of males.

Evidently she was wrong.

She heard a roar from under her feet. By the time she'd reached the bottom of the basement stairs James was hauling narrow, pale Tim out from under the pool table with such ferocity, gripping his poor thin arm that Tim's head cracked on the underside of the table. Alix was still under there. “What's going on?” Isla called, although she could see what was going on, and only intended to break the moment, break James's grip.

For a moment longer, while the boy steadied himself on his feet, James held on. When he let go, it was so that he had both hands free to start swatting at Tim, open-handed blows to Tim's dancing, dodging head. Tim, looking unfamiliar in this dimly lit drama, was hampered by loosened, unfastened pants. He ducked under one of James's flailing hands, gripped the material at his waist, made a run for it. Panicked and solely intent on escape, he brushed past Isla and pounded up the stairs, out the front door, away.

Alix was unfolding herself from under the pool table in far more leisurely fashion. James was panting. Alix regarded her father calmly, her red hair standing out in the light like a fiery angel's. Her little green plaid shirt, her worn favourite, was untucked and hung partly open. She didn't even have breasts yet! What, if Tim were groping her, had he been groping?

James was trembling. When he yelled, all his words ran together in Isla's ears. They may have done likewise with Alix, who watched him gravely, steadily, not moving or speaking, until he wound down. Then she nodded, stepped around him, stepped around Isla, climbed the stairs, went silently to her room. Isla, who couldn't think of a word to say, also turned and went back upstairs. She listened to James, still in the basement, pounding his fists on this and that, and pacing. She was astonished by his heat, by his rage, but she was far more amazed by Alix.

Later, in bed, still in a fury, James said, “Do something. And keep that kid out of this house.”

“Oh no, I don't think so. They've been friends a long time. That wouldn't work.”

“Well, make something work. Did you see what they were doing?”

She sighed. “They're exploring. We do have to speak with her, but you know, this is just the beginning. There's a lot of hormones ahead. And you could talk to her too, I mean without yelling and getting upset. It's not just my job.”

Truthfully, she didn't know what she could say to Alix. What unnerved her was not Alix's lust but that gentle, remote expression as she regarded her father. She had looked as unfamiliar as a stranger right then. She'd looked untouchable.

If Tim could touch her, good luck to him, Isla thought, which made her giggle, so that James turned in bed to look at her. “There's nothing funny about it,” he snapped.

She guessed there probably wasn't. “I'm just trying to remember what it was like to be twelve. Pretty confusing, as I recall. You feel caught in the middle then. Between one thing and another.”

“They did not look confused to me.”

Well, his daughter hadn't. Poor Tim, though. “I expect he was terrorized enough to keep his hands to himself for some time. And everything else, too.” She heard herself giggle again, and again James looked at her sharply. “But Alix wasn't exactly cowering, was she? That was an unusual kind of look she was giving you.” Isla heard in her voice a tinge of satisfaction, and what was that about? “I guess it is something to try to sort out, but James, you can't just tell me to deal with it.”

He shifted unhappily. “I only thought, you're both female, you'd know how to talk to her about that sort of thing.”

“About sex? Lust? What? I
have
done that. Maybe what she hasn't heard is a man. What Tim might have had in mind, and what she needs to look out for in the future. Maybe she needs that little chat.”

But then all their lives turned over, and whatever Isla had thought Alix might have needed to look out for in the future became something quite different. As it did for herself, for Jamie and, not least by any means, for James.

How had he managed? Had his brain not felt explosive? Filled to bursting with his composted, degraded little privacies? What a masterpiece of will, to carry on his regular life, expanding his business, fretting over its large and small matters, eating their dinners, occasionally taking their children to movies, occasionally supervising their homework, occasionally turning to Isla in their bed, giving no signs, no hints at all.

He said, eventually, that it was a separate, and small, part of his life. Perhaps so, to him, although that he could see it that way was in itself what? Very ill.

Besides being a separate and small part of his life, it was criminal. That wasn't even to mention that it was wicked, immoral — all those words that didn't too often come up in their household, or in most households in general as far as she knew. He must have known that, would have had to be monstrously stupid not to.

That was the third time in her life she had anything to do with the cops.

And this is what she means about how stupid seventeen-year-olds are.

They're so stupid they get hankerings, cravings, for men who wind up, years later, like James.

Other seventeen-year-olds are so stupid that to blot out fathers like James, they absorb terrible shit into their bodies, or begin undetectable journeys towards some ridiculous, unfathomable faith.

Or they're so stupid they shoot people without actually, necessarily, meaning to.

They're so stupid, she thinks, it's almost necessary to feel sorry for them. They are defenceless in their stupidity, and arrogant in it, too. They know nothing about being thirty-nine-year-old mothers doing their best to get accustomed to humiliation and horror, or forty-nine-year-old women getting accustomed to joy, and they care nothing, either.

They are damaged and dangerous.

They need embracing, they need to be held tight and restrained. They need to be kept out of harm's way until the danger is past. They are haphazard and foolish and need looking after. Isla obviously failed to accomplish this duty. Other people, strangers to her, have obviously failed also, and now here she is, after another encounter with cops, knowing precisely the full and desperate results of these failures.

Pretty Good Punishment

Roddy'd have thought being in jail would be mainly sitting around without much to do but watch his back, but not so. It's abrupt and startling and loud, but it sure isn't slack. It also isn't a jail, exactly, but a detention centre. As Ed Conrad, the lawyer his dad found, explains it, some people serve short sentences here, the ones convicted of fairly minor, relatively harmless crimes like break and enter; not like attempted murder, armed robbery. But others are like Roddy, being held for court appearances on charges they haven't been found guilty of, at least not yet. Either they can't get bail or they don't have enough money for it. Roddy's probably in both boats: bail's been denied, but even if it wasn't, Ed Conrad said it could be something like ten thousand dollars, or even more, maybe twenty, or fifty, and there's no way his grandmother or his dad could come up with so much. If they would; and maybe they wouldn't.

This is his third day. There's a system here for organizing the day and also for organizing the future, even if nobody knows yet what or how long the next part of his future will be. It's amazing, how an act that's extraordinary to Roddy gets absorbed like it's normal into a process that's already worked out. Like he's one car on an assembly line, getting put together like every other car with just a few individual options.

The only time something doesn't seem to be happening is at night and even then it's not totally quiet, and lights are left burning. He has nightmares. Every morning so far he's wakened up shaken and scared; like in a movie where somebody's doing something like going up a dark staircase and you know there's something awful just waiting and you want to yell out, “No! Don't! Be careful! Turn back!” but the person keeps going up anyway, and something bad happens. That sort of nightmare.

But even waking up shaken, he isn't confused. Since the very first morning here, he's known right off where he is. Well, it'd be hard to get confused in a small bare grey room with a metal cot, a little sink, and a lidless crapper; totally different from his ceiling-sloped room at home, with its pictures pinned to the walls and his own deep bed where he should be, with a bag of money tucked away underneath. That other, parallel life he had in mind.

Things happen in sleep, he guesses. Like moving overnight from one world to another. Life from before is already so much a memory it's like it's somebody else's memory. The present is unstable and the future for sure is unknown, but the past — it's some other place and person altogether. Which is so weird it makes him light-headed.

There's more to it, though, this knowing right away, before he even has his eyes open. Maybe it's air, maybe sound, maybe light. Or maybe it's believing deep down that where he is, is where he belongs.

How can Mike stand being out there, free, knowing he must be in the wrong place? But maybe Mike doesn't know that. He likely has other things on his mind.

He wasn't in court when Roddy was. That was the first morning. Other people showed up, Roddy's grandmother and his dad, Ed Conrad of course, but not Mike.

Roddy got driven there in a van with a few other guys and a couple of guards; cops, he guessed. There wasn't much talking. He didn't know anybody. The courthouse, where he'd never been before, is next to the regional government building and looks like a regular office except up on the second floor, where he got taken, it's separated into two big courtrooms plus a bunch of smaller rooms. He saw his lawyer in one of them with some other guys and a couple of women, laughing.

Big, gloomy portraits, probably dead judges, hung on the walls. All men. Roddy wondered if he'd do better with a woman judge, somebody who looked like his grandmother, say. But a woman judge would most likely look like the woman in the doorway of Goldie's. She wouldn't like him at all. A man might understand more how something can go accidentally wrong in just a couple of seconds. At least how something can happen that wasn't ever intended.

And that he was sorry. Which ought to count?

Anyway, nothing counted and there wasn't even a judge, just some guy who's a justice of the peace, and it wasn't a totally real court, just one for remands and, for some people, bail. His dad and his grandmother were in the second row, staring at him. They looked like they'd been up all night, kind of loose and grey in the skin. Maybe they sat in the kitchen wondering over and over where they went wrong. Roddy would have liked to be able to tell them they didn't go wrong, but also that everything did. “What the fuck,” he and Mike used to say, meaning, what did it matter what they did, good or bad or anything in between? In a huge world with too many possibilities and in a little place with hardly any,
What the fuck
made them potentially invisible, insubstantial, and free.

They were wrong, and it has come down to Roddy, and
what the fuck
doesn't apply.

Everything in court went really fast, case after case, guy after guy, boom-boom, break-and-enter, assault, driving drunk. When it was Roddy's turn a clerk or somebody read the charges —
attempted murder
,
armed robbery
— and his lawyer sighed and said, “We understand these are serious allegations, but my client has never been in trouble before with the law. He's only seventeen, and his family is willing to guarantee his next court appearance and his good behaviour in the meantime, with whatever stipulations the court cares to apply, if bail were granted.”

For an instant, Roddy wanted to add his own voice. He wanted to promise he would honest to God never even leave his own room again, if he could just go home now. Nobody would have to worry about him going outside, never mind going wrong. But of course he didn't speak up. Of course he couldn't go home. He didn't belong there.

“Bail denied,” the justice of the peace said crisply, and set the next court date for a week away. So that was that. Just as well. He did want to tell his grandmother and his dad something, though. All he could think of to do from across the room was wink at them, which was stupid, probably looked like he didn't know what he'd done. He guessed he was somebody who did important things wrong. He wondered if maybe everybody wished he was dead, that he never was born, that that wouldn't have been any great loss.

Maybe one of the kids of that woman he shot, Ed Conrad said she has two, both grown up, will shoot him down in the courtroom next time. People sometimes do that sort of thing; he's seen it on TV. It'd be fast and unexpected, and he'd be out of all this without hardly noticing.

It took all Roddy's courage to ask Ed Conrad, “The woman?” All he knew, really, was that she was alive; because of the attempted murder, not murder, charge.

The lawyer sighed. He sighs a lot, in Roddy's brief experience of him. “She'll be in hospital a while, that's for sure. Did you know she's paralyzed? Pretty unlucky shot, if you ask me, for a guy who says he doesn't know how to use a gun.” Paralyzed. Shit. The information almost drowned out the contempt in Ed Conrad's tone. Even his own lawyer was disgusted by him. Imagine her family.

Imagine his own.

He did that? Having never done anything big or important before in his life, he caused that? Lots of times when he was young, he used to imagine being somebody else, or at least doing things that didn't crop up in the life of somebody like him. He'd pictured circumstances, like Mike or maybe some littler kid drowning, where he would be a hero, jumping into the water — raging, rocky — and hauling the person to shore. He would be a picture-in-the-paper sort of hero, somebody who'd done something memorable, notable, large. Now he is somebody else. He has done something memorable, notable, large. His photograph has maybe even been in the newspaper, he doesn't know how that sort of thing works. This isn't what he intended, never what he meant.

The day here starts with a loud wake-up buzzer that scratches through speakers in the corridor ceilings. So far, Roddy's already been awake, all three mornings. There's lots of shouting, swearing, a racket of guys getting up. Everybody's supposed to make their own beds and get dressed and more or less tidied up. Everybody wears brown jumpsuits. Roddy's not built for jumpsuits. Some guys fill them out, and look tough, but his hangs off his bones.

They have about twenty minutes to do all that after the buzzer goes. Then the cell doors unlock and they form a line in the corridor and get herded, at least that's what it feels like, down to the cafeteria, where they line up for cereal or scrambled egg lumps, toast, milk, and juice. Like school, only without choices. That's a thing about being here: not having choices, hardly any at all.

What Roddy thinks the people who run the place should do at the start of the day if they really want to make guys feel bad about the trouble they're in, is make them stay in bed for a while after the buzzer goes. Everybody'd have to lie there looking at the bleak, stupid hours ahead, and it would make at least some of them feel bleak and stupid themselves. Which would be pretty good punishment. But maybe whoever organizes the schedule figures the night hours are better for that, and that's true, too: every night so far Roddy's lain awake for a long time turning and thrashing as if a new position could magically alter events. If one kind of pain could kill another kind, he would slam his head into walls.

So he's not surprised when other people take to violence. Nothing real big, not so far as he's seen, anyway, because there's always guards around, but little flashes: a couple of guys sort of stumbling hard into somebody else; the occasional jostling of pool cues in the rec hall; muttered threats in the shower stalls. The chemicals of anger are breathable, smellable. Being here must be how it is for a wild animal: wary, hyper-alert to small shiftings of grass and scents. Rabbits he's flushed. Moles and groundhogs tunnelling for shelter underfoot. Toads and insects blending cautiously into the background. Out there it's not anger, though, not rage turned inside out, it's survival.

It's survival here, too, probably, in a different way. Still, Roddy may not be burly, but he has words to back him up:
attempted murder, armed robbery
. Even here, those are major words. He tries to keep in mind Sean Penn, somebody like that, some small guy playing a prisoner. A certain swagger is called for, although not so much he looks like a challenge. He has also renamed himself Rod. This is no place for some kid called Roddy. It seems like a Rod really could be an attempted murderer, an armed robber. Rod might, actually, be who Roddy now is, or at least who he's becoming.

After that quick court appearance the first day — it couldn't have taken more than five minutes, although the travelling and waiting took a lot longer — he got brought back here to the detention centre. Then a guard told him he had an appointment with some guy called a counsellor, and took him off to one of the offices at the front. The guy had a file in front of him and a stack of printed papers and forms. He looked up and said, “Hi Roddy, I'm Stan Snell, we'll be working together to figure some things out for you, make some plans.”

“Rod,” he corrected, for the first time.

“Okay, whatever.” Older guy, mid-thirties maybe, how big a deal could he be, a shit job, working here? Not that it mattered what he was like, except for being a stranger with Roddy's life in his hands.

This guy wanted them to make plans? The idea of plans hadn't crossed Roddy's mind. He hadn't thought of
doing
anything in particular, just of being someplace: here, then someplace else.

“You've been remanded a week, I see.” News, Roddy saw, travelled fast. “I've already got some of your school records, so we can see where you're at, since you'll be taking classes wherever you go from here.” He could get Roddy's school records? And wasn't this summer holidays? “And we'll want to talk about any particular interests or skills you have, because there's also possibilities like woodworking, mechanics, computers, cooking, that sort of thing. Because,” and he leaned forward, looking earnest and boring right down to his short sandy hair and the dark blue tie knotted tight against the light blue shirt collar, “you obviously need a goal, or you wouldn't have wound up here. You need to want to be something. That's how you stay out of trouble. It's drifting around, no real focus, that got you here, I figure.”

Roddy couldn't say what got him here. A disaster, mainly.

“So is there anything in particular you want to be? Some ambition? A wish, or a hope?”

Besides not being in jail, or an armed robber, an attempted murderer, Roddy guessed he meant. “I don't know,” he said. He really didn't know. It'd seemed there were years and years before he had to think about being something, even though of course he also knew there were not. By seventeen, his dad already had a full-time job.

The idea of wanting something, and then actually being it, was strange. As far as he could tell, his mother was the only one in the family who had a big achievable goal and, tipping herself off a bridge, got what she intended.

“Because now's the time,” Stan Snell went on. “I know it probably doesn't feel like it, but this can actually be a good opportunity to get on the right track.” He opened a file. “I see you were suspended a couple of times and missed a lot of classes the past couple of years. Otherwise you weren't doing too badly; not failing anything, anyway. So obviously you're not stupid.” For some reason Roddy was pleased to hear that. “So why were you skipping?”