Phoenix Island (2 page)

Carl shook his head.

“I’ve read your records, son. It took me a good portion of yesterday evening. I must say, to employ Chief Watkins’s terminology, that I found your history rather idiosyncratic.”

They looked at each other for a second, and the judge said, “Carl, you’ve been in eighteen different placements in the last four years, and that’s not counting short stays like the place where you got that jumpsuit you’re wearing. Eighteen. A dozen and a half foster homes, group homes, and juvenile detention facilities in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Ohio, and”—he glanced down at the papers—“Idaho. How was Idaho?”

“Cold, sir.”

“Cold, yes. I’d imagine. You’ve accumulated one of the longest rap sheets I’ve ever seen for a juvenile, and you’ve only just turned sixteen. And yet something stands out to me. They’re all, every last one of them, the same charge—assault—each stemming from the same sort of situation that brought you before me. Someone gave someone else a hard time, and you took it upon yourself to teach him a lesson. Good God, son, I lost track of how many people you have assaulted. And it’s not just other children. Oh no. You’ve punched foster parents and teachers and mall security and even a police officer. A police officer? Son, don’t you have a brain?”

Carl looked down. “He had some skateboarder up against the
monkey bars, and he kept yelling at the kid and slamming him into the bars, so—”

“Stop,” the judge said. “There is no
so
when you don’t like something a police officer is doing. You had no role in that situation. You’re lucky he didn’t shoot you. I would have shot you. Chief, wouldn’t you have shot him?”

“Hands like that? Yeah, I’d have shot him.”

Carl wished these two would drop the cutesy act and get down to business. The longer he sat here, the more it felt like disaster brewing.

The judge said, “I don’t know whose decision it was to move you all the way down here to North Carolina and drop you into Jessup High, but I intend to find out, and I further intend to have his hide nailed to my shed by sundown.” He glanced at Velma, and she nodded and made a note on a clipboard. “You are a rare person, Carl Freeman. Other than fighting, your record is absolutely spotless. No theft, no drugs, no underage drinking. If it weren’t for the fighting, you’d look like a candidate for the glee club.”

Carl had heard all of this before. “I don’t look for trouble. . . . If they would just stop.”

The judge tented his fingers and narrowed his eyes. “Very interesting, Carl. Very interesting, indeed. You said it again.
They
. Do you feel these people—Brad, the policeman in Ohio—are all in on this together? Part of some club or something?”

“I’m not crazy.”

The judge tapped the stack of papers before him. “Your record implies otherwise, I’m afraid. Either you are insane or, at the very least,
downright
idiosyncratic. It’s like you have a superhero complex or something. Mild-mannered schoolboy by day, raging lunatic by night.”

Heat rose through Carl’s chest and into his face, and his knuckles began to ache again. Why didn’t anybody understand? “If I don’t stop them, nobody will. Not the kids, not the teachers, nobody. Everybody just sits back and watches. The kids pretend they think it’s funny, because they’re too scared to say anything, and the teachers pretend they don’t see it because they’re too lazy to do anything. What am I supposed to do?”

“Lower your voice,” Chief Watkins said. He was still leaned back with his big forearms crossed over his chest, but his eyes bore hard into Carl’s.

The judge patted the air. “That’s okay, Chief. I’m glad the boy’s letting his hair down.” Then, to Carl, he said, “Now, these boys you attacked, Brad Templeton and the others, they’re well-known in the community. Put on car washes, sell candy bars door-to-door, you might know the type. Their mothers and fathers, I see them at the Elks Club on Friday evenings. In the fall, we show up a bit later on Friday nights. See, football is quite popular here in our little corner of the world. Disturbingly so, in fact. It approaches religion at times. You can see the sort of trouble you’ve caused me?”

Carl nodded, thinking,
Here it comes. The jabbing’s over; here comes the KO punch.

The judge continued. “Jessup’s football season is over before it even got going. The boys with broken noses will be okay, but the ones with busted ribs and wired jaws are out for the season. There are on that team other kids, good kids counting on football scholarships. Who will even scout a team with the record Jessup’s going to have this year? No one, that’s who. So these boys, instead of going on to college, they’ll just mow lawns and load cases of beer into people’s trunks for the rest of their lives.” The judge stared directly into Carl’s eyes, and for the first time, Carl saw anger there. “These are the real victims of your crime. They might not even know it, but I know it, and you know it, and their parents know it. The town is screaming for your blood, son. They’d like to string you up on the fifty-yard line and then feed what’s left to the pigs.”

“I’m sorry about those other kids.” Carl lowered his head. He
was
sorry. They had never crossed his mind. Worse still, he wasn’t sure he could have stopped himself even if they had.

“I believe you are—sorry about them, I mean—but what interests me is, are you sorry about the other boys, too, the ones you hurt?”

Carl remembered the deep green mountainside beyond the cafeteria windows, rags of fog lifting away like departing ghosts. A strange world far from home, everything darkness and void. Remembered the boys, their cruelty, their laughter when he’d told them to stop. Remembered
the fight, all of them coming at him, and then . . . kids on the floor, bleeding, Carl turning himself in.

He raised his eyes and shook his head.

The judge’s mouth went thin. “I didn’t think so. While I commend your honesty, I must publicly acknowledge that a criminal who shows no remorse for his crimes is, of course, a criminal likely to perpetrate those same crimes in the future. With those hands of yours, I could charge you with assault with a deadly weapon. Eight counts. Forget the juvenile detention center. Chief Watkins would drive you straight to the state penitentiary, where you could serve out a sentence of, oh, a decade or two, right alongside full-grown men. Does that sound good to you?”

“No, sir.”

“Or I could hand you over to Windy Pines. They’d put you in a padded cell and drug you up so heavily you wouldn’t be able to tie your own shoes. Do you like the sound of that?”

“No, sir.”

“The trouble is, I have to live with whatever decision I make here today, and despite your singular idiosyncrasy, I believe you have the potential to become a good man someday. Your father was killed in the line of duty?”

“He died as a result of wounds sustained in the line of duty.” If it sounded like a line Carl had said before, it was. Many times.

The judge sighed. “Carl, it is my belief that you are at the present time, regardless of your potential, incapable of controlling your temper should the aforementioned situation arise again.”

Carl nodded.

“Judges in the past have taken every approach, from absolute leniency to draconian severity. Nothing has worked. And yet, you have within you this potential. Even your criminal acts have a certain nobility about them, as if you ascribe to a higher code than the rest of humanity. But make no mistake; they are crimes. In light of these factors—the nature and number of your crimes, your seeming inability to control your temper, and the positive potential I see in every other aspect of your character and behavior—I hereby sentence you to Phoenix Island, a military-style boot camp, the term of confinement to begin immediately
and to end at the date of your eighteenth birthday, at which point in time you will either return to North Carolina to serve out the remainder of your sentence, a term of six months to three years, at the state penitentiary, or you will earn placement through Phoenix Island, at which time this court will declare your debt paid in full and will furthermore expunge your juvenile record.”

Carl swallowed with difficulty. Jail or freedom. Nothing in between.

“There is no parole from Phoenix Island. It is a terminal facility, meaning you will remain there until you are legally an adult. Fail to learn from this opportunity, and I predict you will spend the rest of your life in and out of prison. If, however, you make the most out of this situation, and you learn to give others a second chance, just as I have given you here today, you will be able to lead a good life as a productive member of our society. You get control of that temper of yours, and I think you’d make one hell of a cop.”

“Thank you, sir.”

The judge looked Carl dead in the eyes. “There will come a day, son, when you will need to determine exactly who it is you intend to be.”

“Yes, sir.”

The judge finished his coffee, set the empty cup on Carl’s file, and turned to the others. “Questions?”

Ms. Snyder asked for the location and visiting hours.

Yeah, right,
Carl thought. If there were two things you learned as an orphan, they were endings and beginnings. Mr. and Mrs. Rhoades were no more likely to visit than were Carl’s dead parents.

The judge closed the matter. “I’m afraid that’s confidential, Ms. Snyder, and irrelevant, as well. Phoenix Island allows no contact with the outside world.”

T
HE PLANE SHUDDERED,
angling downward, and Carl thrilled at the sight: an island covered in thick jungle, except at the center, where three peaks of raw stone rose sharply through the forest canopy. As the plane descended, he spotted a few clusters of buildings and thin roads running between them, but what really held his attention was the long sweep of sandy beach, nearly white against the deep, sparkling blue of the ocean.

Phoenix Island at last. A new start. His chance at a future.

He looked forward to getting off the plane and stretching his legs. He hoped the staff would let them swim later. He’d never been in the ocean, and he imagined what it would feel like, diving into the waves after the long, hot trip. Would it burn his eyes, opening them in the salt water?

The plane dropped, shuddering, toward a landing strip near the beach, touched down, and taxied to a stop next to a wide, paved area very black in the midday sun, the air over it wavy with heat. Nearby, beside a clump of sagging palm trees, a cluster of low block buildings squatted in the sand, looking as sturdy and businesslike as doorstops.

Out of the nearest building emerged men dressed like soldiers. They pushed a set of metal stairs toward the plane.

“Janice,” the small kid with a big nose said, “cancel my afternoon appointments. I’ll be at the sauna.” The loudmouth hadn’t stopped cracking lame jokes during the whole flight. Some of the others cussed at him, their faces as hard and scarred as Carl’s knuckles.

One of passengers reached across the aisle and cuffed the small kid, and when his head jerked forward, mean laughter filled the back of the plane.

Carl tensed, the dull throb starting as his hands tightened into fists.

Rubbing the back of his head, the kid turned to Carl. “Some turbulence on this flight, huh? I’m never flying this airline again.”

Carl didn’t smile, didn’t scowl, just turned away, telling himself,
Mind your own business. It’s not your fight
. This was the end of the road, everything on the line. He couldn’t throw away his future to protect someone who insisted on cracking suicidally bad jokes.

Something clunked against the fuselage. A moment later, the hatch opened, and a tall, muscular man wearing a Smokey the Bear hat swaggered aboard and glared at them.

All fifty-some passengers fell silent.

The man snapped one thick arm to the side and pointed down the stairs. “Off the plane, brig rats! Move! Move! Move!”

Carl jumped up, clutching his duffel bag to his chest, and squeezed into the flood of kids, which spilled out of the plane, down the metal stairs, and into a tropical wall of wet heat.

“What is your problem, brig rats? You will conduct yourselves in an orderly manner and in good speed, and you will line up in four ranks, at attention—and if I hear
anybody
talking, I’m going to smoke him until there’s nothing left to blow away in the wind! Now move!”

Down on the tarmac, soldiers yelled and scowled and pointed, all of them jacked up like professional football players, muscles upon muscles, veins popping along their necks and biceps and foreheads. They dressed identically: camouflage pants tucked into shiny black combat boots and black tank tops so tight Carl could see six-packs through the fabric. A few wore wide-brimmed drill sergeant hats. They stomped and shouted until the kids formed four long rows on the pavement.

Stay cool,
Carl thought.
Stay in the middle. Stay out of sight.

Overhead, the sun burned even hotter than it had during the long bus trip through Texas and the mainland of Mexico before they’d boarded the plane. The air smelled of ocean salt and marshy decay.