Do Not Pass Go (5 page)

She dropped the dish towel and doubled over again.

“They caught him with drugs on the way to work. They pulled him over for a headlight, and they found drugs.” She rocked in anguish, her head nearly touching her knees.

The headlight. Who would drive in ice fog, in the dark long winter nights, with one headlight out? Dad would. Deet had worried about it. “I'll get to it tomorrow,” Dad had said. A surge of fury made Deet's head throb. Stupid.
Stupid
.

Then it hit him what she'd said. Drugs? Dad? That couldn't be right. There was no way his dad would have anything to do with drugs. He didn't even drink, just a beer every once in a while.

“It's a mistake, Mom,” Deet told her. “Dad wouldn't do drugs. That's crazy.”

She looked at him. “It's not a mistake.”

She covered her face with her hands and began to cry again.

All those classes they'd had in school about drugs. He'd never even gotten the names straight. It had seemed to have nothing to do with him. How you could tell if someone was using drugs. The eyes. Change in disposition. Some other stuff he'd forgotten. Dad was not some drugged-out idiot like they were talking about.

They sat on the edge of her bed for a long time, silent. Deet thought he should get up, make her some coffee, but when he stood up, she grabbed his hand.

“He wanted to keep that wrecker job. So Gary, the new tire guy, gave him something that would keep him awake, give him energy.” She stared furiously at the
wall. “Gary,” she said with loathing, as if she could see him there.

“I thought it was a terrible idea, and I told him just to quit, we'd get by without his working two jobs. He said it wouldn't do any harm, but it did, Deet. He was so jittery, and he couldn't sleep, even after he'd put in sixteen hours at work.”

Deet sat down on the bed again and tried to think.

Deet had a terrible thought. “Grandpa,” he said.

They stared at each other, wide-eyed.

“Does he have to know?” Deet asked.

She squeezed her eyes shut tight. “Everyone will have to know, Deet.”

The newspaper. Marriage licenses, divorces, and births.

Police blotter, list of arrests, court column.

Everybody read those. Tomorrow maybe, Dad would be in the newpaper, and everyone would know. All the kids at school. Mr. Hodges. Mr.
Hodges
. What about P.J. and Jam? When they went to school, some horrible kids would say,
Your dad's in ja-il, your dad's in ja-il
. Dan and Willy and Bingo. With the cold
weather they were working double time, and how would they make out without Dad?

Deet was sick with shame. It hadn't done any good to not talk in class, to sit in the back row, to stay away from people. He was going to be stared at anyway, he was going to be exposed. Deet wished he never had to leave the house, never had to see a human being again, he felt so ashamed.

What if there were some way to turn time backward. What if you had one chance to push a button and then that day had never happened, you could start all over again on the day before, only you could make sure that whatever it was wouldn't happen again. If only you had one more chance before the world came to an end. If only you could do that one thing that would keep the disaster from happening.

When Deet finally went to bed, he stared at the ceiling and began to think about all the jail movies he'd seen. Nightmares of cold cement, bars and beatings, fights, attacks, indescribable terrors. The cold clang of the cell doors. Those fat, sullen guards. Dad in there with horrible criminals, murderers. Gentle,
cheerful Dad. Deet wanted to put his arms around him, to protect him from this thing that had happened to him.

It wasn't the first time he'd felt helpless being just a kid, but it was the worst.

When Deet woke up the next
morning, for a minute he didn't remember what had happened, but he felt something dark and horrible hanging around the bed. Then he remembered.

Dad was in jail.

He got up and was sick in the bathroom. The acid from his stomach burned his throat. He brushed his teeth and rinsed his mouth to get rid of the taste. Then he sat on the edge of the bathtub and looked at the faded pink towels draped carelessly on the rack. Mom's hair dryer, hair spray, face creams, the toothpaste cap on the floor. Everything looked dangerous and unreal.

While he pulled on his clothes, he could hear his mom talking on the telephone, her voice low and tight. She didn't sound like herself. Deet never thought about going to school that day, never thought about waking
the girls up. Their regular life had ended, it seemed, as thoroughly as if they'd been kidnapped by aliens and dropped on the moon.

When he heard the back door shut, Deet walked stiffly to the kitchen. It smelled like fresh coffee, the way it usually smelled. He ached all over, as if he had the flu. He heard the car start. It was very cold out still, and if Mom were going out she'd have to let it run for a while to heat up.

When she came back in, Deet asked, “Where are you going?”

“I made an appointment to talk to a lawyer.” She was very pale, and she wore no earrings or makeup; her hair was pulled back and fastened at her neck. She looked older. Deet wondered how she could move, make herself start the car, get things done. He felt drained and limp, as if everything would be too much effort.

“How'd you know what lawyer to call?”

“Yellow Pages,” she said.

She was different today. Hard to believe she'd seemed helpless with crying last night. Now she looked like someone else, someone hard and purposeful. Deet
didn't know how that had happened. She began to put on her winter gear, snow pants and heavy boots, and then she poured herself a cup of coffee. She sat on the edge of her chair to drink it, everything about her urgent.

“Dad said I can see him today. I'll call to find out when. You watch the girls and try to keep their minds off this, will you, Deet? Play Chutes and Ladders with them or something.”

When she zipped her parka up, Deet could see that her hands were shaking. Before she went out, she turned to him.

“Maybe you should find a way to tell them, Deet. They'll know something's wrong when they wake up and Dad and I are both gone. You always know how to talk to them.”

He waited until Mom's car had pulled out of the driveway, and then he went outside to get the newspaper.

Deet had been thinking about the newspaper since he woke up. He was ashamed to be worrying so much about people knowing what had happened to Dad. He
was ashamed that he'd thought first of what this meant to him, Deet, not what it meant to Dad, or Mom or the girls. He was pretty sure it didn't speak very well for his character.

That ordinary newspaper sticking out of the delivery box looked evil, horrible. He took it inside and smoothed it out on the kitchen table, his stomach in a twist. Waves of cold came off the paper as he smoothed it, and the smell of ink. This newspaper, an everyday thing, had turned into something dangerous, terrifying.

Deet turned to the page that listed arrests and scanned it fast, looking for Dad's name. Nothing about Dad. Too soon, of course. The arrests listed had taken place a few days before.

Deet let himself breathe again. Maybe it wouldn't
ever
be in the paper. Maybe no one would know. Maybe they'd just let Dad go. Maybe it wasn't any big deal.

He began to read the listings again, more carefully. There was one guy arrested, stopped for speeding. Found illegal substances. Taken to the correctional facility. Deet felt his face go white again, and he felt
weak. That was no different from Dad. If that guy was in the paper, Dad would be too.

He'd never known before that the stories in the newspaper were nothing but words, told nothing real, left out all the stuff that made you know what it had been like for the people in the stories.

What did that man arrested for drugs say when they stopped him? Was he scared? Did they handcuff him? Did they make him spread out against the car while they searched him, like in the movies? Did he call his family to tell them he was in jail? Were his family waiting at home now, like Deet and the girls, waiting for more terrible things to happen?

Deet read the arrest column over again slowly a third time, and he began to worry about the things he hadn't thought of last night. What if Dad had to stay in jail for a long time? Could he keep his job? Would Dan let him work on cars? Deet imagined an unpleasant-looking customer saying, “I don't want Charley Aafedt working on my car. He's probably all doped up!” Dad wouldn't be earning any money locked up in jail. Money was why this had happened, and now it was going to be worse.
What about the medical insurance? What if P. J. had an asthma attack, how would they pay for that? Where was Dad's truck? It wasn't much good, but with the winter so cold they needed two vehicles in case one wouldn't start or something. It was always happening when it was fifty below. Maybe they wouldn't give it back to him.

He read the arrest column one more time, and words he'd never paid attention to before leaped out at him, stunned him with their power to hurt. Officer so-and-so, incarcerated, correctional center, illegal substance.

Deet went into his bedroom and sat at his desk. He pulled a pad of paper and a pencil toward him. He started to write down all the jail words he could think of, pressing hard with the pencil.

incarceration

imprisonment

captive, captured, caught

accused

convicted

criminal

crook

inmate

offender

Department of Corrections

Corrections? Like erasing a mistake and writing the right word in? Or like someone corrects your speech and then you say it right. Correctly. Somebody does something wrong and the law will correct him. You go to jail and you're corrected. Now you have it right, they say, patting you on the head when they let you out. “Corrections” was a stupid word for jail.

rehabilitation

felon

convicted, a convict, a con

misdemeanor

Your demeanor is not right, it's a mistake, it needs correction.

He couldn't think of any more, so he looked up
words for “jail” in the thesaurus. There were dozens of them.

The slammer
. That must be because of the iron doors, the noise they made when they shut, the sound bouncing off the cement-block walls, like in the movies.
Cell
. Like bees, like monks, small and tight.
Stir, stir-crazy, hoosegow,
like in the old country songs.
Lockup. The pen, penitentiary.
Where people are penitent? Sorry for their crimes?
Hard time, chain gang.

“Alice's Restaurant.” He'd thought it was funny, the part when Arlo went to jail.

Deet sat back and stared at the list.

All over the world, since the beginning of history, there had been jails and prisons and dungeons, and people had been captured and locked up. A million billion people had had this done to them. Why had he never thought about it? Now that he had, he felt that he'd been surrounded by these words all his life, but they were invisible. Some things were invisible until they happened to you.

The radio, TV, songs. “Birmingham jail, love, Birmingham jail. Send me a letter to the Birmingham
jail.” Go directly to jail, do not pass go, do not collect $200.

He used to say jail, like everybody else. A joke, a casual word. Nothing to do with him. Now that word seemed sharp and hard and full of pain.

After he'd finished his list, he
lay back on his bed. He pulled the covers over his head and curled into a tight ball. He wished he could live the rest of his life in a cave, completely hidden. He fell asleep for a little while, and though he couldn't remember what he had been dreaming, he knew it was awful. P. J. and Jam woke him up, tugging at his shirt. He blinked at them.