Lockdown (11 page)

Mr. Wilson was getting on everybody’s case on Monday during inspection. He was making sure all the beds were tight, and if they weren’t he just yanked them out and threw the bedding on the floor.

“Whose room is this?”

“That’s my room,” Play said.

“What’s this?”

“My toothbrush broke,” Play said. “No shit, it just broke, man.”

“I’m writing you up,” Mr. Wilson said.

“You can beat that,” Leon said. “Unless it got file marks on it.”

Play would have a hearing, but there was no way he was going to beat it. If your toothbrush broke,
you were supposed to turn it in for a new one right away. Or else they would say you were trying to make a shank.

I didn’t know when the detectives from the city were going to come, but I was glad when Mr. Wilson turned me over to Mr. Pugh to go to Evergreen.

Being cuffed in the back of the van was foul, but I felt free at Evergreen. The staff treated me good and I had thought about working in someplace like Evergreen, taking care of senior citizens. Mr. Hooft had talked to me about me being a baker. That was good too. I didn’t know anything about baking, but I thought I wouldn’t mind giving it a try.

Mr. Pugh had taken me into the lobby and was about to go when the receptionist called him back. She handed him an envelope.

“This is Mr. Anderson’s paycheck,” she said, looking from me to Mr. Pugh. “We don’t know how you handle it.”

“He gets paid?” Mr. Pugh asked.

“I get paid?” I asked.

“If you work here, you get paid,” the receptionist said. “We get paid once a month.”

“Okay, I’ll take it to the facility,” Mr. Pugh said.

“See how much it is,” I said.

“You probably won’t get any of this,” Mr. Pugh said, shoving the envelope into his jacket pocket. “You owe society—we don’t owe you.”

I was smiling when I went upstairs. I hadn’t even thought of myself as having a job or making money, but I guess I was. When I got to my floor, Simi was pushing a pail of water across the floor. It was a large aluminum pail and had wheels on it.

“You want me to take that?” I asked.

“Oh, you’re so big and strong!” she said. She felt the muscle in my arm and rolled her eyes.

A woman down the hall had died, and Simi had to clean out and disinfect the room. She said that was the policy. She said Mr. Hooft could wait if I wanted to help her.

We scrubbed every bit of the room with a brush and disinfectant, which she poured into the hot water. It stunk something terrible, and once or twice I thought I was going to throw up. We scrubbed and washed until eleven o’clock and then opened all the windows to let the room air out.

When I got to Mr. Hooft’s room, he was mad.

“So you come anytime you want to now?” he
said, looking away from me.

“You missed me, man?” I asked him. “I was helping Simi clean the room down the hall.”

“If the Japanese had captured you, they would have killed you right away,” he said. “They called us all criminals, but with you, they would have been right!”

“You know what I was wondering?” I sat in the corner chair. “I saw some pictures of people in a German prison camp and they were skinny as anything. What did you get to eat?”

He looked over at me for a second, then away. Then he must have remembered something, because he gave a little jump and started laughing.

“You know what rijsttafel is?” he asked.

“No.”

“It’s a big bowl of rice with lots of side dishes. You can have curried meats, or vegetables, sweet or not sweet, soups, whatever you want,” Mr. Hooft said. “But when the Japanese had us, they gave us strontstafel, little brown balls of rice mixed with cabbage. It was awful. We were always hungry, but no one died of hunger among the children or the women. Some of the men died from being worked so hard,
and some died from the beatings or if they got sick. Some just gave up.”

“It must have been rough,” I said.

“Life is rough,” Mr. Hooft said. “You didn’t know that?”

“I thought you had it easy after you got out, the way you were talking and everything, but you just made some of that up, right?”

“Everything in life is made up,” Mr. Hooft said. “You make up that you are happy. You make up that you are sad. You make up that you are in love. If you don’t make up your own life, who’s going to make it up for you? It’s bad enough when you die and everybody can make up their own stories about you.”

The doctor came in with Nancy Opara. He asked Mr. Hooft how he was doing.

“Why, do you need somebody to practice medicine on?” Mr. Hooft asked. “Maybe you have an extra needle you need to stick somewhere.”

“Don’t be so mean, old man!” Nancy said. “The doctor just has to check you out.”

“I would rather be mean than be an African!” Mr. Hooft said.

“Yes, darling.” Nancy started to close the door,
then pointed at me and motioned for me to leave.

“Come back later, Reese, and help me count my fingers and toes so these thieves can’t get them,” Mr. Hooft said. “You’re the only one I can trust in here.”

“Yes, sir.”

Simi was in the hallway and asked if I wanted to go to the cafeteria. I said yes, and we went up and she bought two orange sodas. She’d started to tell me about her grandson when her pager went off.

“My husband. I know what he wants. He works in a restaurant in New Rochelle and he’s going to try to convince me that whatever they’re having there on special he should bring home for us to eat tonight. What a cheap man. I’m going to go get my cell phone and call him.”

Simi left, and I watched as two women in wheelchairs came off the elevator and rolled up to the counter.

Sitting alone in the cafeteria, watching some of the residents getting their lunch on the far side of the room, I felt a sadness come over me. It was like a window had opened and a bad wind was pouring in from the outside. This was what I wanted, to
be alone and not having someone watching me or locking a door behind me or cuffing me to a wall. I didn’t want to have to fight anyone or watch my back every minute of the day. But that wasn’t what my life had become. I wanted to be alone, but everyone I came into contact with had something over me, able to put me in detention or in juvy for more years.

My mind went back to the call from the detectives. I wondered if they were going to come pick me up this evening. I imagined them in their car driving along the highway, talking about what they did over the weekend, listening to the news. I knew I hadn’t done what they were saying, but it really didn’t matter. Some girl had died and they were making sure that somebody was going to pay for her death.

On the street, before I got arrested, I was Maurice Anderson. I wasn’t living no big-time life, but I was me. Now I wasn’t me but what I had done. The rules were different for a felon.

Three years or twenty years, the detective had said. What kind of choice was that? Just thinking about twenty years was like dying. Mr. Pugh had once said that I should get down on my knees and thank God I was in a juvenile facility.

“This is paradise,” he had said.

It wasn’t no paradise. There were rolls of barbed wire along the fences, doors that slammed shut behind you, and doors that were locked in front of you. And guards. I imagined them going home every day to their families. Maybe they talked about Progress. Maybe they just showered and tried to get the stink of us off their bodies. I don’t know.

Twenty years had to be dying, had to be hell. Being in a prison with grown men, with gangs, and knowing that the whole world thought you were garbage.

Three years was the good thing they were offering. All I had to do was say yes and move my head away from going home. Just stop looking out the window wishing I could take a walk without thinking about where I was going and start thinking about how I was going to manage to keep myself in one piece for three more years.

Crying wanted to come. In a way it was like Reese was dead and it was me, whoever I was, whatever I was, grieving over him. Maybe I should get a tattoo, R.I.P. on my chest, so whenever I looked in the mirror I could see it.

I started thinking about my case again. When I
first got arrested, I thought maybe I would walk. Then I saw the list of charges and I thought it was a joke. Nobody was laughing. If Freddy and his people all testified that I gave him drugs, I was dead meat.

And what I didn’t want to think about, the thing that was like chewing on my insides, was what I would do if I did get out. They’d probably put me in some wack school where you didn’t learn nothing and just sat in class all day wondering where you were going to get some pocket money. They said that most of the people from ’round my way who go to jail once, go back again. Maybe even when they were out, there wasn’t nothing there for them but a road back.

“Everything in life is made up,” Mr. Hooft had said.

I wanted to make up a life. I could imagine myself walking down the street holding my head up high like I wasn’t concerned about anything. I tried dreaming up a nine-to-five deal making maybe six or seven hundred bucks a week. But every time I started imagining what I might be doing, the detective’s voice kept coming through.

“We’ll be up there Monday to bring you back to the city,” he had said.

I thought I could get up and just walk down the stairs and out into the street. What would happen? Someone would miss me and the police would start looking for me. Where would I go? What would I do?

Tired. Tired and sad. It was better to get mad at somebody and fight than just to feel so tired and sad all the time. The idea came to me, came like I should have known it all the time, that tired and sad was how I always felt. I knew I had to get to someplace else, someplace where I wasn’t tired and I wasn’t beat down and sad.

Miss Rossetti and people like her didn’t seem sad, but they didn’t have my life, not knowing what was going down next or what was going to be shaking when you went home, or the mirrors where you look in them and don’t see nothing you like.

I could walk out and let the cops come and get me. Maybe I would pull my hand out my pocket real fast and they would think I had a gun. Maybe that would be better than twenty years. Or maybe the same.

Icy didn’t deal with stuff the way I did. She was all about what was going to go down and wasn’t tied down to what had already happened. That’s what I would have liked to have. Put Progress out of my head forever and move on like nothing had happened. No break-in, no getting arrested, no sitting in the courtroom listening to people talk about how much of my life they were going to take away, no crying in the van up to the facility.

Before I got to Progress, I didn’t know time had a weight to it. My sentence was already too heavy to carry around all the time and I was praying for a release date. I couldn’t wrap my head around getting out from under three more years. That was
just too much of a load.

I thought about detention. I had dealt with it even though some dudes cracked up from being by themselves all the time. Maybe I could learn to deal with three more years. Then, when I got out, I’d move to another city. Maybe in the South, because I had never been there. I’d do any kind of work, sweep floors or mop and live in a small room, and I’d send any money I’d make to Icy so she could go to college. In three years, Icy would be twelve. I’d work until she was eighteen to help pay for her education. Then, if I kicked off, she could make up good stories about me.

I hated the idea of three more years, because it was already making my stomach turn. I didn’t see what else I could do. I couldn’t take a chance on a twenty bid.

“Where are you, Reese?” Simi’s voice startled me. “Boy, you looked like you were a million miles away!”

“Just thinking,” I said.

“You come up with something good?” she asked, hands on her hips.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Life goes on, honey,” she said. “Sometimes it seems hard, but you have your whole life ahead of you. Don’t forget that. Now come on downstairs with me, because the woman in three eighteen is complaining that I didn’t sweep her floor and is threatening to write to the president.”

We cleaned 318 with the woman standing in the doorway complaining the whole time. Then I went back to Mr. Hooft’s room and he told me how mean the doctor had been to him.

“All doctors like to hurt people,” he whispered to me. “They just pretend to help you!”

“That’s not true,” I said. “They don’t want to hurt people.”

“Come over here,” he said. “Sit next to me.”

I was surprised, but I sat on the bed next to him. He put his hand on mine. “You should always try to be a good boy,” he said. “It’s better that way. Then you won’t be in jail. You going to try?”

“I’ll try,” I said.

He motioned for me to go away and I went and
sat in the chair. I felt a little funny, but really glad because I knew he was trying to be my friend. Like Toon was trying, and it was hard for all of them. And for me.

Mr. Pugh was talking to Father Santora in the lobby when I went down at four.

“Everybody likes Reese,” the priest was saying. “He’s a fine young man and a good worker.”

“Okay, so maybe I won’t shoot him on the way back to the facility,” Mr. Pugh said.

Father Santora laughed and the receptionist laughed, but I didn’t think it was all that funny.

Mr. Pugh sat me up in the front of the van and cuffed me to the grating that separated the cab from the back.

“You think I might overpower you and escape?” I asked.

“I used to play right tackle for Mississippi,” he said. “I could crush your black ass with one hand and eat a sandwich with the other hand.”

He acted kind of pissed off and I didn’t say anything else. I was glad to sit in front instead of bouncing around in the rear. We drove through the city and I could see dudes just strolling and taking care of their business and it reminded me again of how
much I wanted to be free.

“You like Spanish girls?” Mr. Pugh asked me as we passed a crowd of kids.

“I like all girls,” I said.

“I never hear you guys talking about girls,” he said. “If I was locked up, I’d be thinking about girls all the time.”

“If you were locked up, you’d be thinking about getting free all the time,” I said. “You can’t be in jail and think like you’re out in the world.”

“So I hear you’re in trouble again,” he said.

“They’re talking about some charge I don’t know anything about,” I said. “They said I stole some drugs from the doctor’s office two years ago and gave them to the guy who was arrested the same time I was. He messed with the drugs and somebody died or something, and they want to run a homicide charge on me.”

“You do what they said?”

“No, but it don’t matter,” I said. “When I was on trial before, I looked over at the jury and they looked at me, and I could tell they were going to toast me. I go to trial again, the same thing is going to happen. The detectives said that they might give me a chance to cop to a lesser and pull
a three instead of a twenty.”

“Oh, yeah?” Mr. Pugh looked at me. “That’s a good break for you, huh?”

“I don’t know, I guess.”

“What you going to plead guilty to?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “They didn’t tell me yet.”

Some brothers walked in front of the van and stopped in the middle of the street. One was on his cell phone. Mr. Pugh hit his horn and one of the brothers grabbed his crotch with one hand and gave Mr. Pugh the finger with the other.

Mr. Pugh hit his horn again and the brother came over to the driver’s side. Mr. Pugh pulled his gun and held it on his lap.

“Yo, bitch!” The black guy reached in and grabbed Mr. Pugh by the collar.

Mr. Pugh grabbed the guy’s wrist and put the gun right under his chin. “Is your mama in heaven, boy?” he asked. “And do you want to go see her? Is that why you need to mess with a cop this afternoon?”

“Hey, I’m just playing, officer.”

Two of the other dudes came over and started cursing but backed off when they saw Mr. Pugh’s gun.

“Now, I got to get the criminal with me back to
jail,” Mr. Pugh said. “But I got room in the back if you need a lift.”

“No, man, I’m good,” the brother said.

Mr. Pugh let him go and the guy backed away. Mr. Pugh put the gun back in his holster as we moved off.

“You know how much I love that?” he asked.

“Yeah, I got an idea,” I said.

We drove for ten more minutes before he said anything else, but he kept looking at me like he wanted to say something. I hoped he wasn’t going off or something. When he did speak, I didn’t know what he was talking about.

“You know what my daddy used to say?” he asked. “He used to say that the snake that’s gonna kill you is probably wearing your damned shirt.”

I waited for him to say something else, but he didn’t.

We didn’t talk anymore until we got to Progress and he was uncuffing me.

“Why did you say a snake was going to be wearing your shirt?” I asked him.

“I didn’t say it,” Mr. Pugh said. “That was what my daddy used to say. He meant that if somebody
was going to mess you up, it was probably going to be you.”

I thought back to what we had been talking about before the brother came over to the car. Mr. Pugh had asked me what I was going to plead guilty to and I said I didn’t know. I wondered if he was saying I shouldn’t plead guilty to nothing. When he was patting me down, I wanted to ask him, but he finished real quick and was walking away before I got my thoughts together.

I was scared that the two detectives from Harlem would be waiting for me, but I didn’t see them when I hit the corridor. Everybody was lining up for dinner and it was Play, instead of one of the regular guards, taking us into the dining room. Me and him sat together after we got our food, and I asked him if he had seen the detectives that afternoon.

“Yeah, they were looking for you, man,” he said. “One of them had a ball and chain to tie around your ankle and the other one had one of those black-and-white-striped prison suits for you to wear.”

“That’s supposed to be funny, huh?”

“They know where you are,” Play said. “If they wanted to come and get you, they wouldn’t be riding
all the way up here. They probably would have had Mr. Pugh just drop you off at Alcatraz or wherever.”

“Alcatraz is in California,” I said.

“Then they could fly you in one of those prison planes,” Play said. “Remember that picture with Nicolas Cage?”

“Yeah.”

I told him I remembered the picture, but that didn’t stop Play from telling me the whole story again.

While Play talked, I was wondering about what Mr. Pugh had said and what he meant. I didn’t want to catch a twenty bid, but I knew I couldn’t tell what was going to happen if I went on trial.

The food didn’t go down and I asked the cook for two apples when I turned my tray in.

“No,” he said.

“I can’t eat now,” I said. “My stomach is upset.”

“No.”

I would have loved to punch him right in his greasy face.

What I told myself was that the detectives wouldn’t come after six, but I kept looking at the door anyway. Every time it opened, my heart jumped a little.