Do Not Pass Go, page 10
“Deet, could you come and give Grandpa a hand with the wood after school tomorrow?”
Deet didn’t answer for a minute. Was it supposed to be business as usual after all these weeks? Was Grandma going to pretend that it hadn’t happened, that there was no long silence from them?
“No, Grandma,” said Deet. “I go to see Dad after school.”
There was a silence, and his grandma said, “You go to the jail?”
“Yes.”
“I think that’s awful,” Grandma said, in a shocked kind of way. “What are your parents thinking of?”
“Lots of kids go there to see their moms and dads, Grandma. I’m not the only one. And lots of parents go to see their kids, too. Tell Grandpa I’m sorry I can’t help him, but Mom’s working now, and we’re really busy.”
When he hung up, Deet felt bad. He suddenly missed Grandma, her little soft face, her quiet ways. He hadn’t thought how hurt she must be to have her child go to jail. What did that feel like? Maybe as bad as having a dad go to jail.
Deet’s mom was sorting the bills into piles with yellow sticky notes on top. Pay all now, write a letter, pay a little.
Deet was finally cleared for his first contact visit. You weren’t allowed to have a contact visit until all the paperwork had been screened, to see if you were the kind of person who would try to smuggle something to the prisoner. Even if you were just a kid.
The prisoners were searched before they came in, and after the visit they were strip-searched. But still people smuggled in stuff, and sometimes they got caught, and sometimes they got away with it. Dad said it was silly making all that fuss about tobacco. Why didn’t they just let them have cigarettes, anyway?
The contact visit room was the room you could see through the window when you went into the regular visiting room. Here twenty prisoners could have visitors. Everyone had to sit on folding chairs placed just so, in view of the cameras. It looked like the kind of semicircle you made in school for music class, except that the director was a guard.
Deet lined up with the other men to be searched before they were allowed in. He had to take off his shoes and put his hands against the wall while the guard ran his hands up and down his body, patting here and there. The guard shook his shoes and looked them over carefully. The women were being searched behind the lockers. Then they let everybody into the room to wait for the prisoners to be admitted.
Lots of kids were there, running around the contact room. There was an older woman and two very ancient Indian or Eskimo women. There was Meghan and Ian and their grandmother, the fat girl with the baby, and Andy, and there was a black family who were the largest people Deet had ever seen. The woman, the man, and the old mother were all well over six feet tall and not skinny, but wrestler size.
The prisoners came into the room one by one, after their search, and went to sit with their visitors on the folding chairs. There was a lot of hugging and kissing, and noise. When Dad came in he gave Deet a quick hug, which was not the sort of thing that Dad did on a regular basis. Dad looked different up close and without the glass between them. Better, really.
A huge black man was the last one in, and he joyfully embraced everyone in the tall black family. He was bigger than any of his visitors. The four of them were overwhelming, and the most happy-go-lucky bunch you’d ever like to see.
When Della came in, the guard had to remind her and Andy that enough was enough as far as contact was concerned.
The man took his baby on his knee, and he and the fat girl watched him with delight. Meghan and Ian were talking to their mom ninety miles a minute. The grandma sat silent, her mouth in a straight line, her face cold.
Dad leaned closer to Deet. “See that big guy there? That’s Big Henry. He gave me a haircut yesterday. He’s here for murder.”
Deet tried not to stare at the big black guy and his jolly, laughing family. This was what a murderer looked like. This big guy, full of fun and life. He was going to be locked up, maybe forever.
“He killed his father. Said he was the meanest guy who’d ever lived, beat his mom up all the time, beat all the kids, and tried to do it when they were grown up as well. They’ll be sending him to a penitentiary here shortly, and he’s got a long time to do.” Dad was quiet a minute looking at Big Henry. “I was thinking, I lived my whole life without ever knowing anyone I thought should be dead.” Deet couldn’t think of anyone either.
“Hey, I’ve got a new room,” said Dad. “They moved me out of that cell this morning and I’m in the wing now. It’s a lot better. Only two of us to a room, and there’s a big dayroom in the center where we can watch TV and stuff.”
“Who’s in the room with you?” asked Deet.
“He’s okay,” said Dad. “Interesting to talk to. He robbed a bank.”
Deet could picture a guy with a ski mask and a bag full of money, waving a gun around. He couldn’t help but smile, but Dad didn’t notice.
“I’m going to get a job in the laundry on Monday. Ronny works there. He put in a good word for me. He says it’s not a bad job and it’ll make the time pass a lot faster, especially with Ronny there. He’s always up to something, got something funny going on. He keeps everybody laughing. Only fifty cents an hour, but every little bit helps.”
“That’s good,” said Deet. He frowned, imagining Dad bending over a tub of soapsuds, scrubbing a uniform. Of course that was silly: They’d have washing machines and dryers, wouldn’t they?
“Mom brought your report card in for me to see yesterday. The guard even let her bring it into the contact room.”
Deet smiled.
“I thought maybe your grades would go down, after all that’s been going on. All the work you’ve been doing at home. That’s really good, Deet. I would have felt pretty bad to be the cause of your grades slipping.”
A pang of guilt assailed Deet. Actually, he had put a lot less effort into all his work, except for Mr. Hodges’s class. Sometimes he didn’t even pay much attention in class. He had been very surprised to find that he could get the same grades by doing much less work with much less effort. Maybe he’d been overdoing it all these years.
“I finished that last book you sent me, that one about the guy with a retarded brother, Of Mice and Men. My roommate is reading it now. I knew it was going to end up sad, but I just couldn’t stop reading it.”
“He wrote a lot of good things,” said Deet. “Steinbeck. I could get some more by him.”
“My roommate has read a lot,” said Dad. “He’s a real smart guy, educated. He’s already sentenced, waiting to be sent to a federal prison.”
“What’d they give him?” asked Deet.
“Ten years,” Dad said.
Nelly ate lunch with Deet every day in the cafeteria, and they sat way in the back. And sometimes now Sheena ate with them too, when she didn’t have a music lesson.
Nelly didn’t ask questions. It seemed to Deet that any other kid would have asked something, how long does he have to stay in there, or something. Deet knew that Nelly really liked Dad, liked to hang around when Dad and Nelly’s father were fixing a truck in the yard, something Deet didn’t really enjoy at all. But Nelly didn’t ask anything.
Ever since they’d been in kindergarten, Nelly had done all the talking. Deet had been quiet all his life, hadn’t had much to say to anyone, really, but now he felt like he owed Nelly something.
So one day while they were eating lunch, Deet said, out of nowhere, “Dad’s got a job in the laundry now. You know what they pay them? Fifty cents an hour.” Nelly gave Deet a startled look, but he didn’t say anything, just kept working on his sandwich, which he was having a hard time keeping together, because the part with the lettuce kept slithering away from the part with the tomatoes. “I wish Mom would just give me peanut butter,” he grumbled.
Once he started talking about jail, Deet didn’t want to stop. He told Nelly about the guy who just wanted a house and a dog, and the bank robber who liked Steinbeck, and all about Ronny.
“Nothing’s like you think it’s going to be in jail. There’s a guy who’s a murderer, and he’s so nice and jolly he could play Santa Claus. He cuts the guys’ hair.” Nelly looked fascinated and didn’t interrupt, he just nodded. Nelly had a very understanding nod, Deet thought.
When Deet went to visit Dad that day after school, there was a prison van with steel grids behind the driver’s seat parked by the front door. The guards were letting the prisoners out, and Deet’s stomach went cold when he saw that one of them was Dad. He was handcuffed and there were chains on his leg. He was chained to another prisoner, and they had to sort of shuffle together to get up the stairs and into the jail. Dad didn’t see him.
Deet closed his eyes and pressed his forehead against the walls of the prison and waited until he could get himself together.
It was easy to get caught up in the stories, the normalcy of prison, the people and their lives, and then you saw something like this that made you remember what jail was all about.
SIXTEEN
After Deet had put the girls to bed that night, and had done the dishes and lunches, he went to his room to do his homework.
First he went over the budget he and Mom had worked out. The lawyer had agreed to let Mom make smaller payments, so Deet could change the figures in the Outgo column.
Now that they were concentrating on it, they could find lots of ways to make ends meet. After he’d cleaned out the cupboards, he had figured out that they could skip a week’s shopping if he’d fix meals from food that was already in the house and not buy something new. There were boxes of instant meals long forgotten in the backs of the cupboards, noodles with something sauce, Chinese dinners. And there was still some hamburger in the freezer.
There were a lot of things you could make with hamburger, which was about all they could afford in the way of meat. Sally had given him a recipe for meat loaf, which he’d made tonight. Meat loaf, he was surprised to discover, was just meatballs made bigger. Or meatballs were meat loaf made smaller.
Actually, the more he got into this cooking thing, the more he could see that there were only so many basic things to eat. You just arranged them a little differently to get a different result. Like a taco was just a hamburger, really, it was just that the bread was different, and the meat was crumbled up.
Deet did his other homework before he got out his quotations notebook. He’d found a good quotation that morning and he knew he’d have a lot to write.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
In the morning before school I read the newspaper now, anything that has to do with jails or crimes, or anything like that. I never even noticed stuff like that before my dad went to jail.
—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
There was an article about how the state legislature wanted to make prisons rougher. Prisoners should have no frills—no television, no educational classes, and most of all, no lobster. The article said that prisoners got a lot of steak and seafood and all kinds of fancy food. How does stuff like that get in the newspapers? I know there aren’t any education classes, and there’s no music allowed except radio, and most of all, there isn’t any lobster or steak. Just turkey.
In the paper there are always letters to the editor from people who are upset because someone didn’t get a hard enough sentence at his trial. Or someone who thinks the death penalty is not too much for this crime or that. There are a lot of people like that. That’s what Nietzsche called a powerful impulse to punish.
Even kids have a powerful impulse to punish. When someone gets in trouble at school, there are always kids who hope they get the book thrown at them. Once when we were talking about having a kind of student court, the principal said it wouldn’t work because kids were always twice as hard on other kids than the teachers would be. What’s that all about?
Or what about that trial of that guy that blew up that big building, and after, they interviewed people on the radio and TV, and all of them just wanted the guy to fry.
Nobody said, Well, I feel sorry for him. Maybe he was crazy, or maybe he had a terrible life. Nobody thought about what it was like to be the guy. Or his family. It was just kill, kill, kill. Aren’t you always supposed to look at both sides of something?
Maybe most people aren’t that nice.
The next day at school Deet was reading when Sheena came to sit with him in the cafeteria at lunch.
“Where’s Nelly?” she asked.
“He stayed home because his mom was sick. He asked me to get his math assignment.”
“My brother had his trial yesterday,” Sheena said.
Deet’s eyes narrowed. The word “trial” was terrifying.
“What happened?”
“He was convicted,” she said. “There was never any question about it. He did what they said he did. He robbed someone’s house.”
“Jeez,” said Deet, shocked. “What made him want to do that?” It wasn’t as if Sheena’s brother had been raised poor, or was a foster child, or abused, like the people Dad talked about. He’d grown up in one of those houses on the ridge.
Sheena just shook her head. “Maybe he wanted to get back at our folks.”
Deet looked startled.
“What do you mean?”
Sheena looked at him for a minute, considering. “I don’t know how to describe my folks.” She ran her fingers over the pile of books she’d put on the table. “They’re cold,” she said finally.
Deet looked at her, trying to understand what the word meant when you were talking about people. He wasn’t sure he’d ever known anyone who could be called cold.
“What do you mean, exactly?” he said.
“Oh, you know. Like they’ll pretend to be interested, but it’s fake, and they don’t want to even make you believe it. They belittle you somehow. They have voices that never get excited. And their faces are like that. Always the same. I don’t think they like kids at all.”
Grandpa was like that, thought Deet. Except he didn’t even pretend to be interested. Mom and Dad, he guessed, must be the opposite of cold. Warm. Alive and loud and funny.
“Do you get along with them?” he asked.
“Not really. But I don’t say anything. I just do what they say. I know I’ll be grown up in a few years. But Billy would fight them all the way. He called them hypocrites.”
Deet scowled, trying to imagine Sheena’s life.
“What are your folks like?” she asked.
Deet could see one of those Christmas pictures Dad took every year. A little out of focus, but nice just the same. He looked at the table before he answered, afraid he was going to say something stupid.
“I used to think they were like kids, kind of disorganized and all. Well, they are like that. But they’re good-natured. And happy. And they really like kids.”
Sheena looked at him sadly. “I thought so,” she said. “Your dad looks so kind.” Deet noticed that Sheena’s face was smooth and calm, but she hardly ever smiled. Her smile was a widening of the eyes, a tightening around the forehead. Maybe she’d better learn to smile before it was too late.
“How much time did they give him?”
“You have to wait for the sentencing to know that. He’ll be sentenced in a month or two.”
“Oh, yeah,” said Deet. “I forgot. That’s a long time to wait to see what’s going to happen to you.”
He had a sudden suspicion. “You didn’t go to the trial, did you?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I took the day off from school.”
Deet felt ashamed. Sheena was the bravest person he’d ever known. He’d been afraid to go to the jail. He’d never be able to go to Dad’s trial.
Deet crumpled up his napkin and thrust it into the paper bag. “What was it like?” he asked, finally.
“They brought him in in handcuffs. And shackles. On his legs.”
Deet looked at his bag. “I saw Dad like that too. They were taking him out of the prison van.” He tried to get that picture out of his mind as soon as it popped in. “Did your folks—”
“No,” Sheena interrupted. “They would never. The worst part was when the lawyer and the judge talked about him as if he was this low, disgusting person. I felt like jumping up and saying, You don’t even know him. You don’t know how funny and good he can be. You don’t know what he was like before.”
She looked at Deet with such sorrow that his throat ached.
She stood up and gathered her books together. “See you later,” she said.
That afternoon, when he and Sheena were waiting for Rhonda to let them in, they watched two little kids playing jail. “I’m having a contact visit,” said one, and the other searched her all over just like a guard.
“Little kids,” said Sheena. “Nothing bothers them. Like kids you see on TV, like in a war zone. Playing around all those tanks and things. Soldiers with guns.”
“My sisters,” said Deet. “They didn’t miss a beat. They miss my dad, but they didn’t go into overdrive or anything. All the little kids who come in here to visit are like that. I guess you have to be as old as us to be ashamed.” He thought a minute. Of course it helped that no one at school had ever said anything to the girls—little kids probably wouldn’t know anything, anyway—and because P. J. and Jam still bought the story about the headlight.
Deet pointed out the old black man who always laughed and joked with his daughter.
“I like his face,” said Deet. “George Orwell said at fifty you have the face you deserve.” Sheena gave him a look, so he told her about Mr. Hodges’s class and the quotations. He showed her his quotations notebook.
Sheena flipped through the pages and finally looked up. “This is so great,” she said. “Can I take this and read it?” He looked at her, startled, and she said quickly, “Well, maybe it’s too personal. I understand.”
“No,” said Deet. “No. I’d like to have you read it. Mr. Hodges writes a lot of neat stuff. He used to work in this jail.”
“You write about jail?”
“Well, yeah. It’s kind of on my mind right now.”
