Good Behavior Page 14

  Maize walked over to me and said, “Put that goddamn cigarette out. This is a school. What the hell’s the matter with you?”

  I took one last hit, dropped it onto the floor, and ground it out beneath my boot.

  “All right, let’s go,” he said, and we walked out the side door. On the way to the cruiser, which was parked in front of the building, he asked, “You don’t have any guns or knives on you, do you?”

  “No,” I said. He handcuffed me and put me in the backseat. We drove back to the high school and I waited locked up in the car while everyone filled out the necessary reports. Meanwhile kids who knew me passed by the car looking in at me. I smiled at them, showed my handcuffs.

  When Maize got back in the car, he said, “Well, I’m charging you with aggravated arson. Aggravated because you could’ve hurt a lot of people in there.” He pulled out of the school parking lot.

  “So what happens now?” I asked.

  “You’re going to the detention center for now, and after that I don’t know.”

  You hear rumors all your life about the JDC—juvenile detention center—and you don’t like what you hear, but when a kid is sent there you suddenly have a whole new kind of respect for them. Now I was that kid. Of course I was scared, but in some way I was also proud, like I was graduating.

  The JDC is a miniature prison about ten minutes north of Mercantile on Route 33. There is one central building, which houses the offices, the cafeteria, and the gymnasium. Shooting off from this building are two wings—one for the boys and one for the girls. The offices are nice: clean, well kept, modern. The cafeteria has sparkling orange plastic tables and chairs; the gymnasium has a polished wood floor and the walls are so spotless you can almost see your reflection.

  The wings, on the other hand, are a different story. The group showers are unpainted cinder block covered with mold. The fixtures are rusty. The floor is slick with dirt and shit. The cells are like dungeons. They were painted once, but now they’re smeared with human grease, and the windows are so dirty that barely any light gets through. The screens are caked with black film. The beds are slabs of concrete, each with a cracked plastic mattress and one blanket. The plastic scratches your skin. One yellow lightbulb is up in a mesh cage near the ceiling in the farthest corner of the cell.

  I got there during dinner. After being processed and strip-searched, I was let into the cafeteria. I walked in and looked around. What a bunch of losers. Then I heard, “Nate! Hey, Nate!” It was Rich Bass.

  Callander had called Bass’s PO after all. I took my tray to his table and sat down. “Dude,” he said, “what the fuck are you doing here?”

  “Right after you left, man, I set the office on fire.”

  He was impressed. Everyone was. You set your school on fire and you’ve instantly earned the respect of every juvenile delinquent in the state. We ate our fried chicken. Rich insisted that he hadn’t done anything wrong, that he’d been set up. The other guys told us we’d get years. They said we’d be taken to court for arraignment in the morning, but neither of us would be released. I was worried. “Arson?” they said. “You’re fucked, man.”

  After dinner we played rummy. My parents came to visit me and, alone with them in a small holding room, I broke down. They asked me why I had done it. I told them I had no idea, that I wished I hadn’t, that now everything was ruined. Mom held me. They didn’t say much.

  Soon it was time for bed. As we entered the wing, the guards made us line up and strip down to nothing. We were each handed a pair of gym shorts before being locked in our cells. I lay on my bunk, curled up against the wall. My cellmate, a kid who had stolen a car in Detroit and made it all the way to Mercantile on his way to who knows where, talked to his partner through a screen in the wall.

  I cried. I clenched my hand over my mouth and nose to keep from making noise, but I’m sure the others could hear me. I fell asleep.

  Next morning our cell door was thrown open at five thirty. The guards yelled, “Get up!” We lined up in the hallway and handed in our gym shorts. Then into the shower—ten boys at a time. Freezing water, no soap. I’m disoriented. Guards yelling, “Hurry the fuck up, ladies. We don’t have all day.” As we exit the shower we’re handed a washcloth.

  We had breakfast, which wasn’t bad. Scrambled eggs and bacon and white toast. After that, we played some more rummy.

  Soon it was time to go to court. It was Rich and me and another kid we didn’t know. The three of us sat in the back of a sheriff’s deputy’s cruiser, and the whole way this kid we didn’t know kept saying, “Goddamn, I’m going home. You guys are fucked. Don’t even think you’re going home ’cause you’re not. You with your fucking aggravated arson charge, and you with your probation violation. No, you guys are gonna rot in that prison. I’m getting laid tonight. Think about that.”

  Well, that prick was sent back to JDC and his court date was set for two months away. Rich and I were both given house arrest until our own court dates.

  My mom and dad were there. So was Joan. We all went out for lunch afterward and everyone talked about the weather and whatever movies might have been coming out. I had just officially become part of the system.

  My mom and I attended an informal hearing in the office of the superintendent. We’d checked out the GED program at an adult-learning center in Beckettstown and found that I could go there, get my GED, and be done with school forever. But we needed the school to sign off. We sat at a big table with Callander and the super and a couple of secretaries. The super asked me, “What do you think you’ll do if we let you come back to school?”

  “Exactly what I did last time,” I said.

  Callander stifled a laugh and shook his head.

  They signed the papers, and I was officially withdrawn from high school.

  [ FORTY-FIVE ]

  Evans came to take me to the shower, and while we rode down in the elevator, he asked me how many days I had left.

  “A hundred and eight days,” I said.

  “So is that it for you?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “This all the time you’re ever gonna do? This one year?”

  “I hope.”

  “Where you gonna be next year?”

  “I don’t know, man.”

  Evans said, “Look at all these fucking guys in this jail. Where do you think they’ll be in a year? How about all those kids you shared a cell with? Where do you think they’ll be?”

  “Prison, probably.”

  “I see you reading all the time. You gonna go to school?”

  “I think about it.”

  He nodded. “Do more than think about it, man. Otherwise …” He looked around, kind of shrugged. “You know what I mean?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I do.”

  It wasn’t long after this conversation with Evans that a bunch of guards ran past Dicky and me on our way down to rec. They all had their rubber gloves on. They lined up and rushed into a cell block.

  Josh was with us. He said, “Just stand here. Hold on.”

  Dicky and I watched. There was yelling and screaming, scuffling, and one of the inmates was dragged out, restrained, and taken to a private cell.

  Later, Josh told us somebody in the cell block had raped another inmate. They found a rag with blood and shit on it in the guy’s cell.

  Down in the rec yard, I said to Dicky, “You’re wrong about me, man.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m fucking done with crime.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “You’ll be back here within a year. I guarantee it.”

  I thought about what Evans had said, and I thought about the rag with the blood and shit on it. I thought about going to college, and I thought about writing and publishing books of my poetry, about attending poetry readings, and living on my own.

  I wanted to live. I wanted to drink coffee in a Paris café. I wanted to wander the streets of New York Cit
y and have a smoke while watching the tugs float up the East River, maybe write a poem about the Brooklyn skyline.

  “Bullshit,” I said. “I’m gonna roam the world and write poems, fuck crazy little artist girls in Paris, smoke pot with geniuses, and become a great painter.”

  “You think?”

  “I don’t even need to be in Paris, man. I can fuck artist girls anywhere. I could probably find an artist girl in Brickville if I looked hard enough. That’s not the point. The point is that the world has a hell of a lot more to it now than it did before. I had a little fucking mind before. That’s not the case now. I can do anything, anywhere. That’s the point. It’s possible to live a good, rich life.”

  “Of course it’s possible.” He looked at me like I had just announced I had discovered the alphabet.

  “No, you don’t understand, man. A year ago I wanted my ex-girlfriend to get pregnant so that I could get a factory job and drink beer in a crappy little apartment, play my guitar a little bit, and go on that way, day in and day out, for the rest of my fucking life. For a little while, I wanted that. Then I wanted to die—I just wanted to kill a bunch of people first. Crime like I saw it was a roundabout form of suicide, man. I just didn’t know about everything else. I didn’t know about being intellectually engaged with life.”

  “Sounds to me like you didn’t know much.”

  I glared at him. “At least I didn’t kill my fucking grandmother.”

  “She wasn’t my grandmother.”

  “You want me to break your nose, cocksucker?”

  “Hey, whatever, man.” And he grabbed the basketball and threw it as hard as he could at the wall.

  [ FORTY-SIX ]

  Joan was at my house every day while I was under house arrest. We spent a lot of time in the carport smoking and making out and talking about what the future looked like, about us getting jobs and getting married and living together.

  There was one night when I suspect the Charinton-administered chemicals had completely depleted themselves from my system, or maybe it was just the shock of finding myself in this new position—kicked out of school, under house arrest, facing possible jail time in a juvenile prison—and I became quiet.

  She asked me what was wrong.

  “I don’t know. I just feel like there’s nothing left sometimes, like I’m just completely empty.”

  She rubbed my back and said, “They’ve broken your spirit.”

  I walked away from her, turned around, and said, “What the fuck does that mean? They haven’t fucking broken me!”

  “I hope not,” she said. “They break everyone eventually.”

  “Are you broken?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “I think I’ve been broken for a long time.”

  We were sitting out in front of my house. Joan was sitting on the stoop with her guitar, practicing “Fade to Black,” Metallica, and I was leaning against the fender of Dad’s car, smoking, watching her.

  She said, “I can’t do this fucking part. You remember how it goes? Right after the beginning?”

  I took the guitar from her and ran through the first part of the song.

  “Right there,” she said.

  I slowed down. “See, it’s down here, and then there.” I slowly played the part and gave her the guitar back.

  She played it through, then looked up at me and smiled.

  “That’s fucking awesome,” I said.

  “I love you,” she said.

  “I love you too.”

  I smiled. I did—I loved the hell out of her. I looked around. I looked up the street toward the center of town, and then back down the street toward the bridge. It all felt right. It felt perfect. I told her.

  “It feels like this is the way it’s always going to be.”

  “Do you want it to be?” she asked.

  “Yeah. I do.”

  “Then it will be.”

  Later we exchanged rings, our engagement rings, and then she gave me that cheap gold necklace. I wore it every day.

  She said something like, “Now our souls are bound together, for life and death.” And that’s what I wanted. That’s what I thought she wanted too.

  We were together for four months, but I can’t say with any certainty that I ever knew exactly what she was thinking, what she was planning, whether what she was telling me was real or fiction.

  Dad sold Joan a little Dodge Omni for five hundred bucks, but she could only give him fifty dollars down and twenty bucks a week. It was a decent little car, a standard, and she couldn’t drive a standard, but she could learn. So we went out for a driving lesson. Dad was in the front with Joan; Jim and I were in the back. We lurched and ground for an hour, and by the time Dad, out of utter exasperation, declared her capable, the clutch was practically destroyed. Dad even warned her that now she’d have to buy a clutch within six months. But she got the hang of it soon enough, and we drove that Omni everywhere.

  Things started going downhill, though. I could sense a distance growing. Joan had things on her mind. She started talking about her dad, about all the shit she’d been through in her life, and at first she told me some pretty horrible things. She said she hated her dad. I pressed her on it. “Why do you hate him so much?”

  “Same reason I hate all the others.”

  “All the others, who?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  Then things really began to crumble, and for no apparent reason.

  We were sitting out in the Omni down the street from my house when she told me she had to get away for a while. She wanted to drive out to Utah to see her dad.

  “Why the fuck would you want to see your dad?” I asked. “You hate him, don’t you?”

  “No,” she said, “he’s all right.”

  I told her I didn’t want her to go because she wouldn’t come back. She promised that she’d come back. I got out and slammed the door. “Fine, fucking leave then,” I said, and kicked the fender, denting it.

  I walked into the house and slammed the door.

  “What’s wrong?” Dad asked.

  “Joan’s leaving. She’s going to Utah.”

  “She’s not taking that car!” he said. He ran out, ran up to the car, reached in, and snagged the keys. She still owed him hundreds of dollars, and they hadn’t transferred the title. She got out and threw a fit.

  “Give me the keys!” she yelled.

  “Like hell!” Dad said. “I’ll give you your money back, but you’re not getting these fucking keys.”

  “That’s my car!”

  Dad turned and went toward the house.

  “Kiss my ass,” he said. He went inside.

  I stood staring at her. I loved her. I truly loved her, and I didn’t want her to leave. She started walking, and I followed, fairly far behind her. She walked all over town, down the tracks, up by the ice cream shop, past the little grocery store where I was caught stealing cigarettes the first time I tried, long before I became any good at it, uptown, past the video store, the furniture store, the post office, the pizza shop, and the bank. I followed her, never closing the distance, remaining about fifty yards behind her. I knew she would leave me, that this was the end. I cried as I followed her.

  About a week later Joan said her dad was coming to visit. It was the Fourth of July and he wanted to see family in the area. I didn’t see Joan much while her dad was there. On the morning he was supposed to leave, his car pulled up in front of my house. It was loaded with all of Joan’s things.

  On the sidewalk in front of my house, I stood facing Joan. She was crying.

  She said, “I’m just going for a little while. I’ll be back soon.”

  I said, “I doubt that.”

  “Why would you doubt that?”

  I shrugged.

  She hugged me and got my neck wet with tears. Then she backed off.

  “I love you,” she said.

  “I love you too.”

  She got into the car, and they drove away.

  I thi
nk I was in some kind of shock. I didn’t feel anything that day.

  [ FORTY-SEVEN ]

  Sentencing day in Paradise County Superior Court. When I walked into the courtroom with Kline, my mom stood and came over to us. She told Kline, “I’m going to hug my son.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am. I can’t let you touch him.”

  She ignored him, put her arms around me, and held me. I wanted to cry. My dad and brother were seated near the front. They waved.

  My public defender and the prosecutor had already worked out a plea bargain. If the judge accepted it, I’d get a year, basically, and since I had already served nine months, I’d be out in three months. My public defender had warned me that he might not accept it, and that he might very well send me to prison. Even if he accepted the plea bargain, I’d still have three months left to serve, and I could still go to prison for those three months. There was a possibility that I could stay in the county jail, but it wasn’t guaranteed.

  The victim, the guy at the truck stop who worked the register, sat in the front row. He glared at me. At one point the prosecutor asked him what kind of sentence he thought I should get. He said, “Five straight years.”

  When the judge heard this, he said, “You know, I have a daughter who’s going to school up north. Last spring I bought her a new car, and just a few months ago it was broken into. The window was smashed, the stereo was stolen, and I’ll tell you, if the perpetrators of that crime were to come before me, I would no doubt want to sentence them to twenty years of hard labor. But that’s not right. I’m angry and I’m hurt because the victim was a family member and the property damaged was something I myself purchased. Now, I’ve gone over to that jailhouse and I’ve had them lock me into a cell just to see what it was like. Those cells are about six by nine feet, and when you sit down on the bunk all you see is that wall staring right at you and nothing else. It’s not a pleasant experience.”

  My God, I thought. This might go okay.

  The judge went on. “Mr. Henry has spent the last nine months in such a cell, and because he’s not yet eighteen, he’s basically spent the last nine months in solitary confinement—he hasn’t had a television to watch like the other inmates, and except for brief periods of time, he hasn’t had any cellmates. So you can imagine how it is not to have any human contact for such a long time.”