Do Not Pass Go (8 page)

Deet thought about people telling you about their mistakes. They were giving you something very special, weren't they? Like Bingo and Willy, at the shop. When Deet did something wrong, they'd laugh and tell him about something they'd done when they were just starting out.

Nothing could make you feel better than knowing
that someone else had done something stupid too. He'd have to look to see if there was a quote about this.

Every night Mom put all her tips in a glass jar in the cupboard. She said that people who looked like they couldn't afford it would tip the most, but the big-shot guys, especially if there were a lot of them at the table being loud and funny, left the least, sometimes nothing. Tips were the only thing that made a waitress job okay, because they just made minimum wage otherwise. He'd leave big tips when
he
grew up. Huge ones.

It was okay, having Mom working. Deet had to get the girls off to school, which was not a lot of fun, but Mom was home early enough to get supper and go see Dad at night.

But that didn't last long. In a few weeks they changed Mom's shift and things got a lot more complicated. She was working noon to nine, and that meant she couldn't see Dad at all, except on Saturday or Sunday, and there was no help for it.

Deet couldn't stand the idea of Dad being there alone, with no visitors except on weekends.

“Mom,” he said, “you've got to let me go visit Dad. He'll go crazy if he doesn't have visitors.” He expected a big argument, and part of him was hoping she'd win the argument. But she'd changed her attitude toward the jail, partly from going there every day, and partly from what people had said to her at work.

“I could get the school bus to drop me off in front of the theater, and walk to the jail from there. Then I could get the city bus home an hour and a half later and take care of supper and all, and get the girls to bed.”

“What about your homework?” Deet took hours and hours to do his homework. He read the textbooks, underlined them, and then outlined the chapters. He wrote questions for each chapter and then covered the answers with a paper and quizzed himself. He read extra material on whatever they were studying. Whatever the assignment he studied it twice as well as anyone had ever dreamed of. It was a matter of being thorough, and it was a matter of being afraid that he somehow wouldn't remember what was necessary when it was time for the tests.

“I'll have plenty of time to do my homework,” Deet
said. He was pretty sure there wouldn't be enough time at all.

“What about the girls? They'll be home an hour before you get here.”

“Maybe Sally would let them come there for an hour.”

So Mom called Sally, who said she'd be glad to have the girls after school for an hour and to tell Deet that she'd teach him how to cook.

The next day after school Deet
got off the school bus at the theater. His stomach had been tight all day, thinking about what he had to do. He had a copy of the visiting schedule in his pocket, which he had checked at least three times on the bus, he was so worried about being late.

Deet had never been on the street where the jail was. He crunched past house after respectable house, the old folks' home, a soccer field. A beautiful dog stood on the sidewalk, gravely offering his head to be stroked. Deet bent and gently smoothed the fur on the top of his head. He felt a sudden sorrow for the dog. Being a dog was a lot like being a prisoner. You had to do what you were told, didn't you?

It seemed he'd been walking forever, when he turned a corner and saw it. It was just getting dark, so
Deet's first view of the prison was in a gloomy half light that made it look ominous and chilling. Like a prison movie.

The jail was a big concrete building, and all around it was a chain-link fence, and all around the top of the fence was barbed wire, wrapped in loops. It looked just like the stockades in war movies where prisoners of war were being kept.
Stalag 17
. There were even huge searchlights on a towerlike thing.

It didn't look real. What did he or Dad or anyone else in his family have to do with this movie set?

Deet stopped in the parking lot and stared at the prison, his hands jammed in his parka pockets. He tried to imagine Dad inside there, kept in by all the fences and barbed wire. His mouth felt dry.

Three guards in black uniforms were standing on the front porch, stiff-legged, smoking in jerky puffs because it was so cold. They were all out of shape, bulges of fat hanging over their wide black belts. No gun holsters.

What kind of person becomes a prison guard? (What do you do for a living, sir? Oh, my job is to keep people
locked up.) Guards were probably ignorant sorts of people, who smacked their kids around, probably all had fleshy lips and small, mean eyes. People who enjoyed their power over others, like mean teachers who liked to boss little kids around.

Deet walked behind the guards, who didn't give him a glance, and opened the entrance door. He was in a small entranceway. Overhead were vicious-looking little camera eyes and speakers trained down on the people who would gather there. Big Brother is watching you.

Notices and rules were posted everywhere,
VISITORS MUST ARRIVE AT THE PROPER TIME. NO ONE WILL BE ADMITTED AFTER THE DOORS ARE LOCKED. VISITORS MUST NOT BRING KNIVES, GUNS, OR CONTRABAND SUBSTANCES INTO THE JAIL
.

No
kidding
.

A sign directed him to a button that he could push to enter.

A buzzer sounded and Deet could hear the locks on the door click. He pulled the door open and stepped inside the waiting room, his mouth still dry. He stopped
a minute to look around for the registration book Mom had told him about.

The room looked like any public place, shiny white vinyl tiles, fluorescent lights, tan cork bulletin boards filled with notices of some sort. Impersonal, ugly, cold.

There were three doors, two for the bathrooms and another that was behind an arch, a sort of gateway with no gate. A copy machine sat between the two bathroom doors, a water fountain to the right of it. One shabby-looking wooden bench had its back to the copier, and there was a coatrack and a set of dented, short metal lockers in the corner. The paint on the lockers was chipped and dirty.

There was another room behind a glass partition. The floors in there were covered with scruffy-looking carpet, the walls were cement blocks, painted white, and there were chairs, thirty or so, arranged in a semicircle, facing the glass. A little light came into that room through glass bricks, but there were no windows.

A woman dressed in what looked like a German peasant costume with a full skirt and tight black satin vest was behind the registration window.

She looked up nervously when he approached the window.

“I want to see my dad.” Deet's lips were so dry he felt he had to pry them apart to speak.

“Is your dad an inmate?” she asked in a rattled sort of way. She seemed so nervous that Deet was afraid he'd gotten the time wrong, had come to the wrong place.

Deet nodded and gave her his birth certificate, which Mom said he'd have to show to prove that he was old enough to visit by himself. She wrote a number from the certificate in a book on the desk and then pointed to the registration book lying on the counter in front of her.

“Put his name here, your name and address and your social security number.” She looked suddenly worried. “Do you know your social security number?”

Deet nodded, feeling insulted. He'd known his social security number since he was
five
, since he'd known there were such things as social security numbers.

Deet filled in the next line on the book in his careful printing. The names on the lines above his were written carelessly. He saw the name of the man who had been
arrested before Dad, the first day Deet had looked in the paper for Dad's name. He'd had a visitor today.

Before he finished writing there were people behind him waiting to sign in. Deet hung up his parka on the hooks by the lockers and went to sit on the bench, but he worried that the bench wasn't big enough for all the people, so he went to a corner by the lockers and leaned back against the wall, trying to look as if he was at ease.

He didn't look at the guard who stood off to one side, obviously waiting for something. If he didn't look at him, he wouldn't exist.

A young curly-haired guy, squarely built and as short as Deet, came up to stand next to him. He had brown eyes, concerned and sympathetic. He was wearing some kind of work overalls, and his name patch said
ANDY
.

“How's it going, man?” he asked. Deet smiled back a little. Not much you could say to that question lately. Except
It's going awful
. Deet had an almost uncontrollable compulsion to ask the guy what he was doing there, who he was visiting, what had that person done
to get in jail, how long had he been in there. He wanted to ask how he could stand to be here.

Andy had the air of someone who had been here a lot and would know what was going on, so Deet gestured toward the room behind the glass wall.

“What's that room?”

“That's the contact visit room,” Andy said. “A few days every week you can go in there for a visit, and there's no glass between you.”

Deet nodded. Mom had told him about contact visits. She hadn't had one yet, because there was a lot of paperwork to go through before you were allowed a contact visit. A lot of checking to see if you were a trustworthy person and all that.

Deet looked at the other people who had signed in. He never paid much attention to people ordinarily, but here he seemed to be overcome with curiosity.

An old woman and an old man, both trim and neat, their white hair silky and smooth, sat on the bench, their feet primly set side by side. They looked like twins. A fat girl, very pretty, had a fat baby who chortled and crowed at everyone. She carried the baby on her hip
facing outward, and the baby spun a thin thread of drool onto the floor, while his mother talked to everyone in the room, the guard, the gray-haired couple. This was not a horrible experience for her. She was completely at home here.

The woman behind the glass window dashed out and announced with a little flutter of her fingers, “You can go in now.”

Andy jerked his head at Deet to show him to follow.

“Not too many today,” he said. “Eight people are allowed to have visitors, because there are only eight phones. Actually there are nine phones, but the one phone has never been fixed ever since I've been coming here.”

Deet, the old couple, Andy, and the fat girl with the baby. That meant only four prisoners would have a visit. His mom said the jail was overcrowded, people sleeping in the gym because the prison was designed for a hundred people and there were a hundred and fifty there now. So where were all their visitors?

Everything was so different from the way he'd imagined it that Deet felt confused.

Nobody looked the way Deet thought they would, full of meanness or tragedy. It wasn't like a big drama, it was like normal life, except there was a guard who didn't look anything but a little bored. The only really out-of-the-ordinary thing was the woman behind the registration desk. He'd been disappointed a lot of times in his life when something wasn't the way he thought it would be. Like the circus, which had turned out to be a tawdry affair, the costumes dirty, the acrobats and clowns tired and strained. But this was the first time he'd expected something to be terrible and it was just ordinary.

They entered a long, narrow room made of cement blocks, like the rest of the jail. A long, smeared steel counter divided the room, and a sheet of glass divided one side of the counter from the other. A row of metal stools were bolted to the floor every two feet, and for each stool there was a phone with a long, coiled cord. Deet took the first stool against the wall, but Andy leaned back on his stool and called to him.

“That's the phone that's broken.” Deet nodded thanks and moved to a stool in between the old
couple and Andy. The glass dividing the counter was smeared and smudged, the floor was littered with bits of tissue and candy wrappers, and under the long glass people had scratched the usual obscenities into the metal frame around the window.

Deet felt uncomfortable that the old couple could see those words.

The metal door on the other side of the glass wall opened suddenly, and a guard let a prisoner into the room. He picked up the phone opposite the old couple and began to talk.

Deet had never seen a prisoner before, and he couldn't help looking from under his eyebrows. He was startlingly handsome, like someone in a movie, and his black hair was as noticeably neat and silken as the hair of the old couple. He looked as if he might be part Eskimo, but the old couple obviously weren't. Maybe his mother or father was Eskimo and these were his grandparents.

You couldn't hear through the glass, but the old woman began to explain why they'd come today instead of some other day, so he must have said something
about being surprised to see them. Deet felt embarrassed, listening to a private conversation in such a tight space.