Watcher

by Valerie Sherrard

  “Yes?” she said shyly, after a quick glance at us.

  “We’re looking for the owner,” I said. Tack confirmed this by smiling and nodding and smiling some more.

  “Yes. My aunt. You will wait one moment please.” She turned and went through a doorway into a back room. Tack let out a barely audible moan as she disappeared out of sight.

  “I am Dunja Jankovich.” The announcement came with the arrival of an older woman — the aunt, we presumed, although there was no resemblance that I could see. The young girl came back out behind her but didn’t look in our direction again. Instead, she bent down and began arranging pastries in the glass display cases.

  “We heard you might be looking for help,” I said.

  “You work in bakery before?” she demanded. Her eyes were narrowing, like she saw something sinister in us and thought maybe squinting would help her see it better.

  “Not exactly,” I said stupidly. I realized that sort of implied that we’d done something related to baking but there didn’t seem to be any way to correct that without sounding like an idiot.

  “You have résumé?” she asked next. Of course we didn’t, since the whole job search had started on impulse.

  “Uh, ma’am?” Tack said suddenly. “We thought maybe we could, uh, volunteer for a few weeks. If we learn good, you hire us.”

  “You work for nothing?” She grasped the idea pretty fast for someone whose English seemed a bit shaky.

  “Yeah, for free. So you can see if you want to hire us.” Tack offered a huge smile.

  “H’okay. You start on Saturday morning. Come early. Five o’clock. I see how it goes.”

  He told her we’d be there like she’d just hired him for a twenty-dollar-an-hour job. I was too stunned to say a word.

  We were out of earshot of the place before I found my voice.

  “What, exactly, did you think you were doing back there?”

  “What? With the volunteering?” Tack seemed genuinely puzzled.

  “Of course with the volunteering.”

  “Be a good chance for, you know, on-the-job-training,” he said without looking at me.

  “Might be, but that’s not why you decided to offer our services, is it, Tack?” I looked hard at him but he stayed focused on the sidewalk. “It’s because of the girl, isn’t it?”

  “C’mon, man. It ain’t that way,” he protested.

  “No? What way is it then? Tell me — exactly what was the force that drove you to tell Dunka that we — and by the way, I’m not doing it — would spend our Saturdays, starting at five in the morning, making cakes or whatever it is we’d be stuck doing?”

  “Dunja,” Tack said.

  “Huh?”

  “Dunja, not Dunka.”

  “Whatever.” It didn’t take much brainpower to see he was trying to avoid the real issue. Well, I wasn’t letting him off that easy.

  “Didn’t seem like a big deal,” Tack said at last. He looked embarrassed but his voice was defiant.

  I shook my head but I didn’t say anything else. I figured he’d got the message: he’d let his thinking get skewed by the girl and we both knew it. And, suddenly, I wasn’t mad anymore. There was no point in pushing it any further.

  We walked in silence for a ways, until I actually started feeling kind of sorry for coming down on Tack that way. I mean, it’s not like we’d signed a contract or anything.

  And I know what it’s like when you meet someone who really hits you hard like that. It throws your brain totally out of whack.

  I got thinking about that and had to admit there’d been a few occasions when I’d done really dumb things over girls myself. Not that we need to get into details.

  “Okay, I’ll go a couple of times, but that’s it,” I said after a while, like we were still right in the middle of talking about it. Pretty generous of me, I thought, letting Tack know that I understood and was, you know, there for him.

  “Cool,” he said, like he was granting me permission. No sign of appreciation.

  I let that go, too.

  There was a time when I let nothing go, but I’ve mellowed out a lot since I started looking at life differently. Basically, that goes back to the last time I went to court.

  The sentence — a year of supervised probation — had sounded like a joke to me. I figured: big deal. I’ll have to show up in some geek’s office once in a while and say that I’m staying out of trouble. So what?

  Of course, that was before I met Andrew Daniels.

  chapter seven

  He’d been in court the day I was sentenced, though I’d never have pegged him as a P.O. I’d noticed him earlier, sitting near the front, scribbling on a lined pad, and had figured him as a reporter having a slow day, or maybe a law student doing some kind of assignment.

  After my sentence was passed, I was told to have a seat until the recess and to see my probation officer, Mr. Daniels, at that time so he could have me sign some papers before I left. That was when he turned and caught my eye and made a gesture that told me he was the guy the judge was talking about. I think my mouth fell open.

  I’d had an idea in the back of my mind about what a P.O. would look like, and he definitely wasn’t it. He hardly seemed old enough, for one thing. I mean, most of the people he’d be dealing with had to be a lot older — and tougher — than him. I could just picture him telling some scarred and muscle-bound thug what to do. Someone like that could crush him with one finger.

  There was more than that, though. He looked so, I dunno, laid back and unconcerned. You’d think someone whose job was to try to get criminals to change their ways would be harsh and fierce — ready to come down hard and fast on anyone who messed up. Daniels had an air about him like he couldn’t care less who broke the law or how often.

  This impression wasn’t altered by my first encounter, which lasted as long as it took for him to say, “Sign here,” on my order, pass me an appointment card, and tell me he’d see me the next week.

  “Oh, and let me know if you can’t make it,” he added in a tone that clearly said it didn’t particularly matter to him one way or the other.

  My appointment was scheduled for the next Tuesday, right after school. I got there a few minutes late and the secretary told me to go right in.

  Daniels glanced up from his computer when I reached his office and stopped in the doorway. He nodded toward a pair of chairs facing the desk where he sat, and at the same time he swung the monitor up and out of the way. As I slid into the chair closest to the door, I saw that there was a file on his desk. My name was typed on an orange tag in one corner.

  “Okay, Porter,” he said, “this is our first meeting, so I’m basically going to tell you the way things work. You check in with me once a week — and we might get that down to a couple of times a month — for the next year, or until you get into more trouble. When that happens, you go back to court, and if there are changes to your sentence, we take it from there. Sometimes the next step is some kind of custody — open or even closed, sometimes you get another break and stay with the supervised probation program.”

  “You sound like it’s a sure thing … that I’m going to get into trouble again,” I said.

  “Yeah, so?”

  “Well, I’m not.”

  “Sure, okay.” He leaned back in his chair and looked at me, bending his arms and clasping his hands behind his head at the same time.

  “I’m not,” I repeated. His attitude really bugged me.

  “Yeah? So, what’s different then?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You look like you’re probably a stoner. You ditch a lot of school. I was just curious. What is it that’s going to change the course you’re on?”

  “I’m not a stoner,” I said. I was angry.

  “Right. You just smoke dope on the weekends, and sometimes through the week. Maybe during school hours once in a while, but not enough for it to be a problem.”

  My mouth had gone dry listening
to him. How did he know this stuff? It was so dead on that I was getting half spooked.

  “Look, none of that makes any difference to me,” he said. “Just keep your appointments. That’s all I expect.”

  It sounded like he was telling me we were done, which was another shock. I’d gone there wondering if there was some excuse I could make to leave if it dragged on for more than half an hour. Instead, it looked like he was dismissing me after less than five minutes.

  “Okay,” he said, flipping open a book. “Let’s see, next Wednesday. Four o’clock. Any reason that’s not good for you?”

  I told him there wasn’t. He scribbled the time and date on a card and passed it over the desk. I wasn’t even at the doorway before he’d gone back to whatever he’d been doing on the computer when I got there.

  I was furious when I left. Who did this guy think he was, acting like he knew all about me? The bit about what would happen when (not if) I got into more trouble fed my anger.

  But, then, I told myself there was no sense in getting all bent out of shape over it. If I had to put up with the jerk for the next year, it would be in my own best watcher interest to stay cool. On the plus side, it looked like he wouldn’t be wasting much of my time.

  My next three meetings with Daniels went pretty smoothly. In and out, really. He’d ask how things were going and I’d say they were going okay. Then he’d add, like an afterthought, “No problems?” and I’d say “Nope,” and that would pretty much be it.

  But then there was a problem.

  Word got out that one of the kids at school — Ghazi Havira, was going to have the house to himself for the weekend, while his parents were away. It meant a party — no way around it, though Ghazi himself didn’t seem too enthusiastic about the idea. We might have made it hard for him to say no. I heard Johnny Dunlop make some crazy promise that everyone would help clean up, and that Ghazi’s parents wouldn’t even be able to tell anyone had been there. Like that had ever happened in the history of teenage parties.

  The poor guy finally agreed to it when he was assured there would just be a few people coming over. You know the rest. By the time I got there things were just heating up and the place already looked like a war zone — assuming the other side was winning.

  Ghazi had, as usually happens, reached a place well past caring somewhere along the line. He was drowning out what was going on around him with an interesting combination of rum and wine — a glass in each hand. When someone tripped and crashed through a glass end table, he looked over with barely focused eyes and shrugged.

  I might have felt bad for him but I was pretty wasted myself and that would have bummed me out, so when the broken table turned from an accident into a free-for-all smash-fest, I just rode the wave. It kind of blurs at that point — I’d had a few drinks after smoking a thumbnail-sized piece of hash — but I vaguely remember stomping on a couple of statue-type ornaments that were on the floor. I can’t swear to it, but I’m pretty sure they were already broken.

  You have to realize that at this point everyone was laughing and smashing things. Well, almost everyone. I noticed that Ghazi had stopped looking dazed and started crying, huddled in a heap along one wall. Both of his drinks were long gone, the glasses part of the growing debris.

  And then, as suddenly as it started, it was over. The last couple of morons to keep it up were quickly frozen out by the spreading shock and horror. For a minute or two no one looked at anyone. Then the exodus started.

  I’d been travelling by myself that night and it didn’t take me long to get out of there. I mean, I felt bad for Ghazi, sure, but there was nothing I could do about it.

  He wasn’t at school on Monday. Probably his parents weren’t finished yelling yet. Tuesday he was back and I have to admit I felt a surge of relief when I saw him in the hallway. In a situation like that, you never know — a person could do something really stupid.

  I tried to say hi to him in the hall but he turned his head and kept walking. I didn’t blame him. Not then.

  But Thursday that week, when I had my appointment with Andrew Daniels, that changed.

  We went through the usual small talk, I answered his questions like I always did, and then he asked me, for the second time, “No problems? Nothing?”

  A bad feeling started up in me, but I kept my chin level, looked him right in the eye and said, “Nope. Everything’s cool.”

  Except, apparently, he’d heard otherwise.

  chapter eight

  “So, then, you didn’t take part in trashing someone’s house on the weekend?”

  You’d think someone asking a question like that would have a bit of “pounce” in their voice, but not Daniels. His tone was as even and casual as always. If anything, he sounded a bit bored.

  “Oh, well, if you mean what happened at Havira’s place, I wasn’t really involved in that.”

  “But you were there?”

  “Uh, for a few minutes. I just stopped by ... looking for someone. Things had gotten pretty crazy, so I left.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I couldn’t tell if he believed me or not but I figured chances were good that he didn’t. He just sat and looked at me, like he was waiting. I, on the other hand, tried to figure out how he knew about the party in the first place, and exactly what he might have heard about me.

  “I suppose you’re wondering,” he said, like he was reading my mind, “how I heard about this party, or the fact that you were there.”

  “Not really,” I lied.

  “No? Well, then, I won’t waste your time with the details,” he said. He leaned forward and started to scribble something on a notepad in front of him. A desk calendar blocked my view but I was curious (okay, and nervous) to see what he was writing, so I shifted sideways like I was stretching, and strained to see it.

  Daniels flipped the pad over just as I got the first words in sight. “So,” he said, “that’s it? You’ve got nothing else to say about this? Because, kid, other people are saying plenty.”

  “About me?” I could hardly believe it. I had no enemies; there was no reason anyone would want to pin this thing on me.

  “Funny thing about that,” he said. “It just happens that, of everyone at that party, you’re the one who has a record. Is that pretty common knowledge among your friends?”

  “I guess.”

  “So, Porter, you can see what happened. Kid’s parents come home and find the place destroyed — and I guess it was bad all right. The only thing he can do is try to shift the blame off himself. Only, if I’m guessing right, he probably doesn’t even know how it all happened. So he does the only thing he can do — he names anyone he can think of who already has a bad reputation.”

  “I don’t have a bad reputation,” I said, thinking of some of the kids I know who go around wrecking things for something to do. I was nothing like them.

  “You have a criminal record, cat,” he said. “Which is why I ended up getting a call from the homeowners on Monday. That was the day after they called the police, by the way. You can bet everything you own that your name was mentioned in that report, too.”

  For the first time since I’d been sentenced, I felt scared. Daniels had already told me I could be looking at custody time if I messed up again. Only, I knew I really didn’t deserve the blame for the Havira’s place. And I sure didn’t want to end up in some detention centre with a bunch of older guys who thought they had something to prove.

  Daniels was sitting there, quiet, watching me … waiting.

  “Look,” I said, “I swear, what happened at that party wasn’t my fault. I was just there, man. Someone fell on the end table and it broke and then the whole place just went crazy. I might have, you know, stepped on some watcher broken glass or something, but I didn’t start anything and I didn’t bust anything up myself.”

  “What were you doing there in the first place?”

  “Huh?”

  “You were stoned, or drunk, or both. Either before you went or after yo
u got there, right?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “This is exactly why I give all you punks the same spiel when you come in. It’s never a matter of if you’re going to screw up. It’s a matter of when. Because you keep getting high, you keep ditching school, you keep doing all the stupid, punk things that landed you in court in the first place.”

  I said nothing.

  “If you weren’t a doper, you wouldn’t even have been at that party, would you?”

  “No,” I said. Oddly, a feeling of relief settled on me in admitting it.

  “If I asked you what you were going to do with your life, you’d probably tell me finish school, get a decent job, buy a car and a house … stuff like that, am I right?”

  “I guess.”

  “Except, none of that is going to happen for you. You’ll drop out, get into more serious crimes and end up in and out of prison for the next twenty or thirty years. And none of that is what you want, but it’ll happen sure as I’m sitting here.”

  “Well, isn’t your job, I mean, aren’t you supposed to help me?” I asked, angry.

  “How? How am I supposed to help you?”

  “You know, help me stay out of trouble.”

  “Why? Are you mentally deficient or something? Are you telling me that you don’t know exactly what you need to do?”

  I felt warmth crawling up my neck and onto my face, and I knew I was turning red.

  “You don’t already know that you need to quit using dope and stay in school?”

  “I guess,” I said.

  “So, if you know it, and you’re not doing it, I guess you want the life I just described. And, kid, you’re well on your way. This new charge is going to get you off the streets, put you somewhere that you’ll really get an education, and I don’t mean academic.”

  “But I didn’t do it,” I said. My throat felt like it was trying to close up on me.