Goodhouse (7 page)

I didn't join the group. Instead, Davis marched me out of range of the floodlights, away from all the others. I began to get nervous. “Where are we going?” I asked.

“Shut up,” Davis said.

We passed a T-4 boxer with a boy inside. These were specially modified units, the backseat replaced with a black-painted wooden box that forced a boy to stay in a seated position, his head poking out of a small circular opening, his body encased in what became an oven during the day. It was a common punishment, and the boy inside had badly swollen lips. He tried to say something as we passed, but it sounded more like a grunt. A bottle of water had been set on top of the box, just a few inches from his face.

I looked down at my bound hands. A little dot of blood had crusted to my sleeve at the injection site. “You called me a Zero,” I said. “That's a bullshit rumor.”

“I like rumors,” Davis said. “They always have a little truth in them.”

I shook my head. “You haven't been out there,” I said. “You don't know what it's like—otherwise you'd never say that.”

“I know what it's like,” Davis said.

“You should hear the things people say about us,” I said.

“Like what?” he asked.

“That we should all be sent to an island somewhere so we can kill each other.”

And for some reason this made him laugh. “There's an idea,” he said.

We were practically off campus now, fast approaching the fence. It was making me panic. We were headed for the big field that separated the Goodhouse facility from the Mule Creek State Prison. At Goodhouse, our fences were a series of black poles, but the prison was different. It had more old-fashioned barriers, observation towers, and razor wire. The stretch of land dividing the two institutions was called the Exclusion Zone—and it encompassed a wide swath of grass and a small hill covered in some kind of leafy vine.

We approached the fence poles, and the hiss of the electricity was audible. The stench of burnt ozone grew stronger. Our chips should have sounded an alarm by now, and I was suddenly worried that Davis meant to shove me into the current. I stopped. “Whatever you're doing,” I said, “you don't have to. I have cash. I can pay you.”

“How much?” Davis asked.

“Twenty-seven credits,” I said.

It was a tiny amount, and Davis didn't bother to respond. He just walked to the fence and then stepped between two of the poles. The current was off. And this appeared true for several segments.

“You want to run?” he said. “Now's the time.”

The Exclusion Zone stretched away from campus—like a dark road disappearing into the distance. I felt the pull of the hills beyond—that fake freedom. But there was nowhere to go, and he knew it. I stepped between the poles. I followed him and he walked me closer to the leafy hill, and then I could see that it wasn't a hill at all but the foundation of some abandoned building. A little path led to a stairwell and a sunken door. “Come on,” Davis said.

“No,” I said. “I'm not going in there.” I slowed and started to back away. The basement door opened, and two men in brown uniforms jogged up the stairs. They had yellow patches on the sleeves of their shirts, something in the shape of an old-fashioned shield.

“I brought you a live one,” Davis called, and I realized they were Mule Creek guards, their thick black belts equipped with different sorts of weapons and restraints.

I turned and ran. The two men caught me easily, knocking me to the ground, using some kind of wooden baton. One of the men put me in a choke hold. He dragged me down the staircase and I clawed at his arm, which seemed as thick as a python. When they tried to open the basement door, I kicked the door closed. The man with his arm around my neck squeezed until I saw spots. The last memory I have is of looking up to see Davis leaning over a rusted metal railing, grinning down at me.

“Welcome,” he said, “to the island.”

 

FIVE

At Ione there were rumors about boys who disappeared, boys who were taken somewhere and never came back. We lived in fear of being sent to PCB, the Protective Confinement Block, with its dark, windowless rooms and solitary cells. No one graduated from PCB. There were stories about boys who found human bones in there—boys who'd pulled out loose teeth just to have something to toss and locate in the darkness. But worse, we were afraid of vanishing. Some roommates never showed up at lights-out. They were not listed as being in Confinement, not on a work detail, not transferred. They simply did not return from their day.

The corrections guard released his choke hold on me and I sank to the ground, unsteady and confused. I was briefly in a small room, like a waiting area. Other guards were there, too, and then a man grabbed my shirt and dragged me through a warren of little hallways dotted with doors—each with a hand-painted number on the front. Everything reeked of urine and mildew, and one wall had a green slimy substance growing around a pipe. The walls were a tapestry of graffiti, some of it done with real aerosol paint, but most rendered in marker or chiseled out of the concrete itself. I heard people in the other rooms. One was chanting a song I didn't recognize. Somewhere two people were having a muffled argument.

The guard opened a door marked 25 and pushed me inside. The lock clicked into place behind me. There were two mattresses in a pile and a closet without a door. Peeling linoleum tiles checkered the floor, and a toilet jutted out of a wall that was partially torn open, revealing the plumbing. The room smelled of mold. I got to my feet. I told myself this wasn't too awful. At least I had my clothes.

Somebody shoved me from behind, and I only had time enough to register a blur of movement before I hit the ground. A foot kicked me twice in the ribs. “Don't get up,” the voice said. I rolled over, scooting across the disgusting floor on my back, trying to get as far away as I could. The man who stood there was bigger than I was, taller but not much older. Tattoos covered his arms—a tangle of birds in bright grays and blues. His thick hair was much longer than Goodhouse regulation and he was wearing an orange jumpsuit with the words
MULE CREEK CORRECTIONS
printed on the front. Here was the embodiment of all our worst impulses, I realized. Here was our wrong-thinking self—personified and unredeemed. We were never supposed to be in the same room with these people.

“Damn,” he said. “You must be in some serious trouble. What'd you do?”

“Stole a barrette,” I said.

“For real?”

“Accidentally,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “I do a lot of stuff accidentally.”

I coughed, tasted bile in my mouth, and spit onto the floor, trying to rid myself of the flavor. The young man was watching, his head cocked to one side. His voice, when he spoke, was a quiet deadpan.

“You're a real hardened motherfucker,” he said, and for some reason this made me laugh. “My name's Tuck,” he said. I told him I was James, but he wanted to know what my real name was. “The one you were born with,” he said.

“Don't know.” I shrugged. I got to my feet. “Just a name.”

“You should find it out and get that slave name out of your mind. What are you doing with a girl's hair clip, anyway?”

“I was out on a Community Day,” I said, “to learn about civilian life.”

Tuck circled me, and I turned to keep him in sight. He had a fluid walk and a way of leaning his head back as if he didn't believe what he was seeing. “You must be so screwed up,” he finally said. “We talk about how you all are being groomed to be serial killers, all next-door-neighbor-nice and then,
bam
. I heard about one of you who got put in here and he tried to get his cellmate to do breathing exercises, make them both feel all
right-thinking.
”

I leaned against the wall, then stepped away, feeling the damp.

“So, how's it working out,” Tuck said, “all that brainwashing? You feeling pretty good?”

“I do know a great breathing exercise,” I said, and felt a rush of joy. Not since La Pine, I realized, had I been able to speak so freely. It made me like Tuck—and then a sudden fear caused me to check the ceiling. This might be a trick. I instinctively searched for a camera, looking toward the uppermost corners, where they were usually mounted. Tuck followed my gaze.

“There's no surveillance in the rooms themselves,” he said. “And we have to get those off.” He nodded to the plastic cuff that cinched my wrists together. He told me to try and pull my hands as far apart as they would go. It wasn't far.

He dug through his pockets and produced a lighter. “Hold them out.”

I realized he was going to try and melt the plastic wire. “No way,” I said.

“Trust me. This is necessary.” He clicked the lighter and a flame appeared atop the plastic cylinder. “You don't want to be caught in here with your hands bound.”

“You can't melt it,” I said.

“I can weaken it,” he said. “And then you can snap it.”

I tried to hold still, but the flame burned my wrists and the room filled with the awful reek of smoking hair. I jerked away.

“No,” Tuck said. “You really do want this.”

“Why? What happens?”

“It's always different,” he said. “Usually they turn off the lights and try and flush us out into the main area. Just stick close.”

I wanted to press him for answers, but I was having a hard time holding still. We worked on the cuff for several minutes, until I was sweating with pain. The insides of my wrists were starting to bubble. I pulled hard. Then I squatted down and used my knees to push my arms apart, and that seemed to do it. The cuff stretched enough to wiggle one hand out and then the other. I sat on one of the pallets, which was a mistake. It smelled like a dead animal and released a cloud of fleas. Somewhere in another room a boy started yelling. The words were indistinct. I licked the blisters on my wrists and then blew on them. It helped.

“So, what'd you learn,” Tuck asked, “about civilian life?”

I shrugged. “I worked. I chopped up this tree, but they acted like I was there to rob them.” I thought of the money with a pang. It brought me up short. I
had
robbed them. “What's it really like out there?” I asked. “What's a day like?” But Tuck seemed both amused and mystified by my curiosity. “We just don't get to talk much,” I said. “And you have to be careful. People try to get you to say wrong-thinking stuff so they can report you. Not your friends, but, you know.”

“You snitch in here,” he said, “we kill you.”

I tried to explain. “At my old school we had a group. Four of us. We never reported each other—or actually, we had to a few times a month or else they'd have split us up. But it was always arranged ahead of time—who would get tagged for what—and it was always small stuff. We actually worked out profiles like personal problems. I was supposed to have a problem with swearing.” I paused. I hadn't said any of my friends' names out loud since the fire. And I found I didn't really want to conjure them. “Another one of us was supposed to be prone to taking the cafeteria spoons back to his room. Just stupid stuff. Not real wrong-thinking, nothing that got you too many days in the field.”

“You have no idea how crazy that sounds,” he said. “I hope my brother isn't as screwed up as that.” Tuck kicked at some trash on the floor. He seemed to be lost in a memory. “You ever see a little kid who looks like me on campus, you say hello.”

“I'll keep an eye out for him,” I said, lifting my chin slightly. But the gesture wasn't truly my own. I was imitating Tuck—stealing his mannerisms, adopting the cadence of his speech. I'd felt this before, the ability to impersonate, to become like the people near me—and I wondered if this was what I'd really learned at Goodhouse, the art of appearing to be something I wasn't.

“What time was it when you came in?” Tuck asked.

“Don't know,” I said. “After lights-out.”

“Which is?”

“Ten.”

He stood up and ran his fingers over a piece of molding around the ceiling of the room. He pulled a piece of lathe out from the hole around the toilet. But the wood was brittle and snapped in half, and he threw the pieces away. “Shit,” he said. “It's getting to be that time and we've got nothing.” He tore several strips of cloth from the mattress covering, revealing the stained cotton pad underneath. “Here.” He handed me two pieces of fabric. I watched the way he wrapped the cloth around his wrist and knuckles and I tried to do the same. I stared at the birds on his arms. Some of them had their mouths open as if they were calling to each other. Some of them looked startled. “Just fight hard,” he said. “If you get into the lighted area, you'll see the guards. Don't pay any attention, even if they say they'll let you out. They won't. Just swing until you can't. You know, they place bets. If you do well, somebody will probably lose a lot of money,” he said. “There's always that.”

I persisted in asking questions, but he cut me off. “I don't know any more,” he said. “I'll help you if I can, but I won't go out of my way. That's not how it works. What did they train you for, anyway?” he asked. “They do that, right? Give you a job skill.”

I gave up trying to wrap the cloth around my wrist and just covered my knuckles. I wasn't a good fighter, and the strips of rag seemed almost laughable. “I sing,” I said.

Tuck stared at me. “Everybody sings,” he said.

“Yeah, but that was my skill,” I said. “What they chose for me.” Tuck told me I was useless. “But that was the best part,” I said. I blew on my wrists. “Learning to do something useless felt like they let me out,” I said. “For a while, anyway.”

“That's just how they keep you busy,” Tuck said. “Give you a little taste of something you want.”