Do Not Pass Go, page 9
After they were on the bus, Nelly and Deet in their usual front seat behind Mindy, Nelly looked a question at him and Deet said, “His brother’s in jail. With Dad.”
“No kidding,” said Nelly.
“There are a lot of surprises in this world,” said Deet.
When Deet got his homework back on Thursday he flipped quickly through the pages to see what Mr. Hodges had to say about cooking and housework. He’d written:
Some people don’t even like to eat, you know. That’s because they were raised by the food nazis. Those are the ones who make kids eat everything on their plate, even if they’re not hungry or don’t like it. The ones who make them try everything. The ones who take it as a personal insult if you say you don’t like artichokes or anchovies or almonds. The food nazis are everywhere, feeling righteous, making little kids’ meals a battleground and a misery!
Deet wondered if Mr. Hodges was talking about himself, and if that was why he was so skinny.
And under that Mr. Hodges had written:
What does your dad say about the food in jail?
When I worked there it was awful.
Why hadn’t he thought to ask Dad about the food? What did they eat in jail?
When Deet was waiting for the bus home, sometimes he went into a store that sold used CDs, mostly to stay warm, but also because he liked it there.
The guys who owned it were cool. Young guys, kind of far out, earrings and ponytails and T-shirts with social comments like “What if they gave a war and nobody came?” and “I feel like a fugitive from the law of averages.” There was a poster by the door that showed a sleek black leopard, and in the cartoon balloon coming out of its mouth were the words: “Animals are not fabric. Wear your own damn skin.”
One of guys had a great big yellow dog that greeted you when you came in. They treated that dog as if they felt the dog had dignity and rights and was a creature with his own life and plans and needs. The dog was their equal, and there was nothing patronizing about their behavior toward him. Deet liked that.
The guys interested him because they were always putting out petitions and collecting money for causes—the environment, animal rights, equal pay for women, the food bank. Deet had never been around people who were thinking about stuff like that. He wished he could work up the courage to talk to them.
One night there was a blue clipboard on the counter with a list of people’s signatures, and a ballpoint pen was tied to the clip. It was a petition to legalize marijuana. Deet stopped and stared at it.
The bus pulled up by the door, and Deet ran outside to catch it. He was thinking about the petition so hard that he barely remembered to give the driver his ticket to punch.
He’d always thought of laws as just being there, never changing. Not open to discussion, petitions. But what if there were no laws against drugs? What if drugs were like alcohol? Or cigarettes? Legal at a certain age. Who decides things like what’s right and wrong?
Dad said that nearly everyone in jail was there for drugs. If drugs were legal, most of the people wouldn’t be there. What was the use of going to jail, anyway? Did it do any good, even if you were a mugger or something? What if you had to work for the poor or the old, instead of going to jail? What if you just had to pay back the money you stole, or whatever you did?
Grandpa said Dad was going to hell for using drugs. Well, what if drugs weren’t against the law? Would the rules for hell change? There used to be a law against alcohol. Grandpa drank sometimes, schnapps and brandy and beer. Would you go to hell back then, during Prohibition, for drinking, but not now when the law said it was okay? (Deet thought hell was just a silly idea anyway, like the bogeyman, supposed to make you scared to do things, but he thought that people who did believe in it should at least have logical rules for hell.)
The next day Deet was at the jail before anyone else, so he went to the bulletin board to study the monthly menu he’d seen there. Each meal was huge, and the total of calories per day was listed as four thousand. Wasn’t that way too many calories? The menu was overloaded with turkey. There was turkey bacon, turkey sausage, turkey hot dogs, turkey roll, turkey burgers, and turkey patties. What the heck was turkey bacon? And in the old days they used to give prisoners just bread and water.
Deet knew now that the woman at the registration desk was named Rhonda. She was wearing a sort of man’s outfit today. A gray man’s suit and a man’s tie. It looked okay, but it was kind of weird that she had so many styles. What did her closet look like? It must look like a costume store. How did she decide every day who she was going to be?
It seemed to Deet as if a person’s clothes should be sort of the same all the time, as if they were telling you with their clothes who they were. Like the kids at school. This one wore only the latest stuff: I’m in. I’m on the cutting edge. This teacher with the long hair and long skirts said, I’m into whole wheat and women’s rights and environmental issues. The girls who wore really outrageous stuff to get attention were saying, Look at me. Deet’s clothes said, Don’t look at me.
Andy was there again, and so was the fat girl with the baby. An old black man Deet had never seen before came in. A big, beefy man with a shirt and tie passed through the gate with a large Bible tucked under his arm. In his pudgy hand he had a pass Rhonda had given him, and he waved it at the guard on the other side of the door. Deet wondered what this man told the prisoners he visited about hell.
Deet sat on the bench and listened to Andy, who told Deet all about his job at the parts place. His car was giving him problems, and some days it was hard to get here to the jail to visit, but if he didn’t come his Della thought right away that he was fooling around on her, had another girlfriend.
“People get really jealous in here, you know? If she tries to call me and the line is busy, I catch holy hell trying to explain who I was talking to.”
Deet wondered if Dad would get jealous. No. Couldn’t happen. Neither of his folks were the jealous type.
Just a second before the automatic timer shut the entrance door, a girl rushed in, practically running.
Deet froze on the bench. Sheena Daily. She went to his school, but he almost hadn’t recognized her, because it was so wrong to see her in a place like this. One year they’d been in the same classroom, maybe when they were in the third grade. She’d had long braids and glasses so thick that her long eyelashes mashed up against the lenses. She didn’t wear glasses anymore, and her hair was cut short like a boy’s.
He wished he could be invisible.
When she had signed in, she turned and saw Deet. She came to the bench and looked down at him. Andy gave her a friendly greeting, so Deet knew he’d seen her visiting before.
“Hi. I guess I won’t ask you what you’re doing here. I read about your dad in the paper. At least I thought it must be your father. Not too many people have that name. My brother is here. My folks won’t come to see him, so I try to come whenever I can.”
Deet thought for a minute how he’d almost convinced himself that hardly anyone at school knew. And here were Sheena and Dennis in one week. Then he remembered how he was going to ask questions when he couldn’t think of anything to say, but he couldn’t think of any questions to ask that wouldn’t be rude. (What did your brother do?)
He was relieved when Rhonda darted out of the office in her suit. “You can go in now,” she said. There was no guard with a wand this time.
The old black man took the stool next to Deet. “Here she come,” he chortled to Deet, as a merry-looking girl with honey-colored skin peeked in the window to the visiting room. The old man looked pleased. “Don’t never learn, that girl. Busted her parole, I don’t know how many times.”
The guard, a woman, let the girl in, and she bounced to the stool, casting impudent looks at her father.
“Don’t be sweetie-pieing me,” he complained. “I’m tired as can be of your foolishment.”
Deet couldn’t hear what the girl said, but she wasn’t afraid of him, that was for sure, and the old man was having a hard time keeping from laughing.
“Don’t give me none of your sass,” he said to her.
Deet wanted to tell Dad about the petition he’d seen at the CD store, ask him what he thought about it. But he thought it might be kind of dumb to ask a person in Dad’s position what he thought about jailing people for drugs, so he didn’t say anything.
Sheena was talking doggedly to her brother, who was not in a very good mood. He looked down at the steel counter the whole time and never looked into Sheena’s face. She looked over and caught Deet’s eye, smiled sadly, and looked back at her downcast brother.
Deet had never seen this woman guard who was letting the prisoners in. She was short and stocky and she looked angry. She was very young, but she didn’t smile at anyone.
“What’s she like, Dad?”
Dad made a face. “She’s scared to death of everyone. She never turns her back on anyone, never relaxes. She scares me. Being scared makes people more dangerous than anything. Just like dogs, or bears.”
Deet asked Dad about the food, and about what he was reading, and what was new with the other guys in his cell. It was a good trick, asking questions. It filled in all the blank spaces.
Every day Dad had a new story to tell Deet. Sometimes they were funny stories, like the time Ronny Joseph smuggled oranges out of the dining hall and back to their room. But most of the time they were sad, things people had told him when they were tired of reading and were just shooting the bull.
Sheena got up and put her phone on its hook. Her brother turned his back on her and walked to the door to wait for the guard to open it.
“See you at school tomorrow,” she said. She pushed the button and waited for the clunk to signal that it had been unlocked.
“You know her?” asked Dad.
“She’s at school with me,” said Deet. “Her mom and dad won’t visit her brother.”
“Like me,” said Dad.
That night Deet sat down to answer Mr. Hodges about the food in jail. He thought for a minute about what to write at the top of the page, and then he just wrote “JAIL” in capital letters.
The food in jail is mostly cheap, that’s the really important thing. Instead of bacon, they have turkey bacon. And turkey hot dogs, turkey burgers, turkey sausage, and turkey loaf. My dad says for sure he’ll never eat turkey again. The inmates work in the kitchen and do the cooking, so it’s not exactly home cooking. Dad says a lot of guys gain weight because they don’t get any exercise and because the food is so fattening. He’s getting skinnier.
My dad said he used to think that people went to jail because they were bad. But he said now he doesn’t see how some people can keep from going to jail, given what they’ve had to put up with, what kind of childhoods they had. Some of them have been in dozens of foster homes, and that’s where people are supposed to take extra good care of you to make up for what happened with your parents. He’s heard lots of bad stories about foster homes. Well, it’s not always like that. Some people who get in trouble come from good homes, but a lot of things can happen to you, like hanging out with the wrong people, or maybe you get to be an addict in a really easy way, you don’t think you will but before you know it you can’t live without whatever it is you’re addicted to, liquor or different drugs, and then you don’t know how to stop. They have classes in there for drugs and alcohol too. My dad has to go to these before he gets out.
And you can see why people want to steal things. You know you’ll never have a car like that, or even a car, period, because you didn’t finish school. You know you won’t have fancy clothes, or the stuff you see on television, so you take it. It’s beginning to look to me as if the world isn’t fair. Not even a little bit.
When Deet got that homework back, Mr. Hodges had written a quotation at the bottom of the page.
Poverty and violence, a family life devoid of warmth or order make an education impossible and sociopathy inevitable. Children so cheated, so deprived, cannot rise above the deprivation and will fill our jails. But who are the criminals?
—E. G. WOOD
FIFTEEN
On the next Sunday, one of her days off, Mom was all business. She had a pile of bills and a yellow pad and pencil in front of her on the table. She was trying to figure out what to pay and what not to pay, and how to pay the lawyer.
Sally had taken the girls ice-skating. She was doing the kind of weekend running around that Deet’s mom used to do with the girls before she had to go to work.
Deet had spread the newspaper out over one end of the table and was going over it very carefully, the way he did every day.
First he’d turn to the police reports and then to the court judgments. Now he knew people by name who were in jail, and he wanted to know whether or not they were convicted and what their sentence was.
He noticed which judges gave the most lenient sentences and which the harshest. He knew all the judges by name. There could be a lot of difference between one judge and another. He hoped Dad would come up before the mellowest one of all. It was Johnson you wanted to stay away from. Andy said he was mean as spit.
He skimmed over the headlines of each article, seeing if there was anything to do with the drug laws, the prison system, or local police business. He read the report of a trial in the States where this judge had thrown the book at a guy he said didn’t show remorse. The guy had said he was innocent, so how could he show remorse for something he didn’t do? How illogical could you get?
And what would it be like to be innocent and have nobody believe you? It was one thing to go to jail for something you did do, but something else to go to jail for something you didn’t do. Like those guys you’d read about in the paper who got out of jail after seventeen years when somebody else admit to the crime. Or they did a DNA test or something.
Once Deet had thought that what happened to Dad was the worst thing that could ever happen. Now he knew that there were worse things. Much worse.
Mom sighed. “I just don’t know where to start.”
Deet folded up the paper neatly and put it in the section of the woodbox he’d made for paper.
He looked at her curiously. Here was Mom, ditzy little Mom, with a calculator and a yellow pad, looking efficient. She was like a whole new person.
Deet had often wished he could take care of the family bills and organize them into a sensible format, and here was his chance.
He pulled the pad toward him and drew a line down the middle of the page. At the top of one side he wrote “Income.” They wrote down what Deet’s mom could expect to make in a month, tips and all, and then he wrote “Outgo” on the other side. They wrote down the monthly payment to the lawyer. That was first, because what would happen to Dad if his lawyer wouldn’t work because he hadn’t been paid?
They were lucky that they didn’t have to pay any rent or house payment, because Deet’s dad had built their house. So there was food, and electricity, and fuel oil, and the phone bill, the newspaper, and gas for the car. And there was a payment for a car they didn’t even have any more, that red Corvette, and there was a lot of money they had to pay on that stupid charge card. And miscellaneous. There was a lot of that. Mom chewed on the end of her pen and wrote down “stamps” and “clothes” under miscellaneous. Then she added “beauty parlor” and “medicine.” Every time she thought she was finished she thought of another miscellaneous. “Oh, cleaning supplies,” she said. She wrote it down. “That must be everything now.”
Mom added up each column on the little calculator, her tongue sticking out like P. J.’s when she was printing something. When they added it up, the Outgo was bigger than the Income.
Mom folded her lips together and squinted helplessly at the figures. At last she said, “Sally said I could write to the credit card company and they’d cut the payments down.”
“Wow. That’s good,” said Deet.
“If I hadn’t found a job I could get unemployment, and Dad could get a free lawyer. Isn’t that the strangest thing you ever heard?” She leaned back and took a deep breath. Well, they’d just cut all the extras. She wouldn’t go to the beauty parlor, and she’d trim the girls’ hair herself. She shot a look over at Deet’s hair but shook her head. “No. You’d better go to the barber. Your kind of hair is too hard to cut.” Deet was relieved. He remembered the haircuts Mom had given him when he was little. They were pretty weird.
They agreed that they could cut the food bill down by doing without fresh fruit and vegetables and fresh milk. Powdered milk would do it. And now that the worst cold weather was over, they could turn off the furnace and use the woodstove. There was a lot of wood stacked up in the yard. When they’d cut out beauty parlor and fuel oil and a lot of the grocery money, the columns matched and there was even a little left over.
Mom thought a minute and said, “I’ll ask the lawyer if he’ll let me make smaller payments.”
She looked up suddenly. “Grandma called this morning. She asked you to call back.”
Deet searched her face. “Did she say anything about Dad? What does she want?”
“Nothing. She didn’t say anything. Just said for you to call. Probably has chores for you.”
Deet started to write the budget over again on a clean sheet of paper.
“Dad said there are a lot of people in there who have parents who won’t have anything to do with them. Sheena’s mom and dad won’t go see her brother. There’s this one woman who was embezzling from somewhere and her mother brings her kids to visit, but the grandma doesn’t say much. She looks mad all the time.”
Mom laughed. “I’ve seen them.”
“And then there’s this old black guy, who looks at his daughter like she was the moon and the stars. Did you ever see him? People sure take trouble in different ways.”
Deet frowned at the phone. “Well, I’d better get it over with.”
He dialed Grandma’s number. “This is Deet,” he said when she answered.
