Do Not Pass Go, page 6
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.
They were a nice little couple, the kind who’d live in those houses on the hill. Were they ashamed to be coming here? What did their prisoner do? What was his crime? Their talk was as polite and deliberate as if they were talking over coffee at the kitchen table, not as if they were in a place with bars and locks and guards.
There were two windows on either side of the steel door on the far wall, and Deet could see disorderly lines of prisoners in the same blue suits passing by, looking curiously into the visiting room.
Deet searched their faces to see what could have brought them to jail, but they were so ordinary. Where were the perverts, the steely-eyed hoodlums, the disgusting underbelly of society? They were prisoners, in jail, but they looked like anyone else you might see in the streets. Some were laughing and calling out to each other, just like kids passing from class to class in the halls at school. It was hard to believe the lack of drama in jail. Two prisoners went past the windows dressed in orange suits.
Deet turned to Andy. “Why do some of them have orange suits?”
“That’s what you got to wear when you’re in seg. Segregation. Means you’re being punished for something, like if you got a write-up for something. If you’re really, really dangerous you have to wear red.”
The guard let in another prisoner, a pretty girl with long orange hair. Her prison uniform was bright yellow. Deet felt a moment of shock and hoped his face hadn’t shown it. Somehow he hadn’t thought about women going to jail.
She picked up the phone and leaned her face close to the glass to talk to Andy. She was chattering fast, and Andy was just nodding and saying “uh-huh” once in a while. Andy called her Della.
The door clanged open again and a young guy bounced up to the stool opposite the fat girl and the baby, full of good humor.
“Say hi to Daddy,” she said, holding the baby up close to the glass. She waved the baby’s hand for him.
There was lots of chatter in the room now, so Deet didn’t feel like an eavesdropper anymore. The guard popped his head in again and saw Deet sitting without anyone opposite him. He picked up the phone and gestured to Deet to do the same. The phone was so black and greasy-looking, Deet was almost reluctant to pick it up.
The guard’s name was on the identification badge clipped to his pocket. TOBOLOWSKY. Mr. Tobolowsky. You probably had to call a guard “mister.” He was a thin, slope-shouldered little man with a mild face, so small the big bundle of keys at his hip looked as if it might unbalance him. His name was too big for him as well.
“Who are you visiting?” the guard asked.
“Charley Aafedt,” said Deet. Deet felt like Mom had. He’d hated to say Dad’s name out loud.
“I’ll go get him. Maybe he didn’t hear his visitor page,” the guard said. He smiled at Deet in a friendly way and left the visiting room. Deet scowled at the metal counter. He thought he would rather have one of those mean-looking guards he had seen when he came in than this guard. It confused him to find a guard so likable.
In a few minutes the door opened and Dad came in. Behind him Mr. Tobolowsky threw Deet a stiff-handed, cheery salute and slammed the door shut again.
ELEVEN
Dad stood by the door for a moment, as if he wasn’t sure whether he should come into the room or not. He looked shocked to see Deet. Mom must not have told him Deet was coming.
Dad looked very different. Bad. Something about the color of his skin, and the dark places under his eyes. Deet had forgotten how Dad walked, a sort of tipping-forward walk, toed in a little. He had forgotten the way he shook his head back to get his hair out of his eyes.
He sat on the stool opposite Deet and picked up the phone. Dad didn’t say anything for a minute. He looked down at his hands spread limply on the counter, and Deet could see he was trying to get himself under control.
“You don’t look like you got much sleep,” said Deet.
Dad shook his head. “Hard to sleep in here.” Dad rubbed his free hand over his hair and stared at the grimy steel counter on his side of the glass.
“I can’t believe I let you in for this. I can’t believe my kid has to visit me in jail.”
Deet was quiet for a minute, listening to the fat girl and the baby, the murmur of the old couple asking what sounded like polite questions, and Andy talking to his girlfriend, telling her the troubles he was having with his car. Ordinary conversations. Nobody was having a hard time like he and Dad were.
Dad still didn’t look up. “She said she wasn’t going to let you come.”
“She doesn’t think it’s so bad here now. Not as bad as she thought at first.”
Dad looked up at that, startled, and gave a little snort.
Deet thought it might be better to change the subject.
“The girls are fine,” he said, though Dad hadn’t asked how they were. “It’s a pain in the butt to get them ready for school. I’m glad I don’t have to do it anymore.” He mimicked their voices and waggled his head. “This shirt is the wrong color. I don’t like this peanut butter. I need money for the book fair.” Stupid. He shouldn’t have mentioned money.
Dad smiled sadly.
“And I’m learning to cook,” said Deet.
He was having trouble finding things to talk about. Dad didn’t want to hear him rattling on about stuff like this.
Dad had on the blue prison uniform, a short-sleeved cotton top with a V-neck and baggy blue cotton pants. The uniform looked more like pajamas than regular clothes. The T-shirt underneath was supposed to be white but it was bluish, like it had been dyed in the wash. And dumb-looking canvas slip-ons, the kind tourists wore in the summer.
Those shoes really bothered Deet, they were so lame. It was like Dad wasn’t a man anymore with those shoes on. Dad had worn just boots all his life, leather work boots.
There was something about the whole uniform that was humiliating. Powerless. Deet had never thought about clothes before, but he could see now that they made a difference.
“I’ll bet you hate those shoes,” said Deet.
Dad threw him a grateful look. “You got that right.” He looked with disgust at his feet. “These are prison shoes. You can wear your own shoes if you order them through the commissary. You can’t bring any in because they think you’ll smuggle drugs in in the heels or something, so you have to order them. Smuggling is the big threat in here.”
“You going to order some?”
“No,” Dad said curtly. “I’m not spending any money while I’m in here. I guess I wouldn’t be here if I’d learned not to buy things I didn’t need.”
The fat girl’s baby was screaming with delight, smacking his little palms against the glass, while his dad on the other side of the glass smacked back. He looked as delighted as the baby did. The girl was having a hard time holding the phone as the baby lurched forward more and more recklessly to pound the glass.
It was getting a lot louder in there, and hotter, almost steamy. The old couple were still talking quietly and courteously to their prisoner, but Andy was talking louder and louder to be heard above the noise of the baby. His girlfriend, or whatever she was, Della, was standing up while she was talking, restless, twirling the phone cord and looking over her shoulder at the prisoners passing by in the hall outside the visiting room.
Suddenly she dropped the phone and darted to the window to pound on it as a group of women prisoners passed by. She shouted something at them. Deet could almost hear her through the glass, she was so loud. Then the girl gestured urgently to the guard watching the women pass, and he came to the door and opened it. The guard waited for her impatiently while she ran to the phone again and explained something to Andy. Then she bounded out to join the other girls, and the door shut behind her.
Deet looked at Andy with surprise. Andy shook his head.
“I took my lunch hour two hours late so I could come see her, and she wants to go play volleyball with the girls.” He said the last few words in a little high, mincy voice. He twirled the stool around and stood up. “See ya,” he said to Deet cheerfully, and nodded to Deet’s father. He went to the door and pushed the signal button. He waited a minute until the locks clunked, then he opened the door and left the room.
Deet turned back to his father. The baby was still making a lot of noise, so he didn’t feel too uncomfortable asking the question he couldn’t hold back.
“What did she do?” he asked.
Dad shrugged an I don’t know. Then he leaned so close to the glass that the mouthpiece of the phone bonked against it. He made a sort of tent over the mouthpiece with his hand so he couldn’t be overheard on his side of the glass.
“Most of the women in here are here for drugs or drunk driving, shoplifting, bad checks.” He stopped to think a minute. “Or domestic abuse.”
