Jesus Land

by Julia Scheeres

  The Dominican woman from this morning shuffles into the courtyard carrying a glass pitcher of red liquid. Strawberry pop? Cherry juice? Raspberry? She refills glasses at the staff table and ice cubes tumble from the pitcher along with the sparkling red cascade. I swallow dryly. The staff are the only ones demonstrating proper behavior at this picnic, chatting and laughing as if this were a church social and not some hell devised for teenagers.

  At my feet, the ants have swarmed over the cockroach. I’m about to crush them as well when a body rises from a far table and turns in my direction. David. We stare at each other for a sour second before he walks to the staff table and bends to talk to someone I can’t see. A moment later, Debbie is marching toward me, a napkin tucked into the collar of her blouse like a bib. Boy 0 jumps to his feet.

  “Debbie! Over here, Debbie, over here!” he yells. She pays him no mind, and comes to a halt before me, her left sandal falling squarely on the insect sacrifice. She swallows before speaking.

  “Yes, Julia?”

  I clear my throat, look down at her sandal, and croak out the words. “May I enter the patio, please?”

  “Yes, you may.”

  She follows me to the girls’ table, where I stand behind the sole empty place setting.

  “May I sit down, please?”

  “Yes.”

  “May I begin eating, please?”

  “Yes.”

  There are five girls at the table, all about my age. No one says hello or looks at me, but I’m not much for pleasantries at the moment anyway. The cheerleader sits across from me; she gazes at a space just over my hat, nibbling the sandwich she holds in both hands.

  There’s orange liquid in a cup by my paper plate and a basket with bread in it at the far end of the table.

  “Will someone pass me the food, please?” I ask.

  When the basket reaches me, it contains the smashed remains of half a sandwich—egg spilling from white bread. It looks like someone punched it; I can see the knuckle marks clearly. I glance around.

  “Are there any more of these?”

  “Nope,” says the cheerleader, still gazing over my head. She looks like the girl in the Sea Breeze commercial, all clear skin and white teeth perfection, and this makes me hate her all the more.

  I shove the basket away and take a drink of Tang.

  “They’ll dock your points if you don’t eat it,” says the girl sitting next to the cheerleader. She’s wearing a pink T-shirt with “Praise Jesus!” on the front, and is shredding a napkin and watching the pieces fall like snowflakes onto her plate.

  “But it’s been smashed!”

  She shrugs and a small smile flashes over her face and I realize that my food was ruined on purpose, for their entertainment.

  The girl sitting next to me pushes an orange wedge toward my plate.

  “You can eat this if you so desire,” she says in a soft Southern twang. She lifts her sorrowful brown eyes to mine. “Being as I’m not all that hungry anyway.”

  “Susan, you know you’re not supposed to . . .” the cheerleader says before lifting her head and breaking into a smile-forthe-camera grin. Hands clamp down on my shoulders, and I jump and turn around. A bearded man with a protruding belly stands behind me.

  “Howdy, I’m Bruce, the Starr housefather,” the man says, his hands still on my shoulders. “How are you liking Escuela so far, eh?”

  Oh yeah, he’s Canadian.

  “Everything’s great,” I respond, knowing this is the only acceptable answer.

  “That’s what we like to hear!”

  He digs his fingers into my shoulders in a painful massage, and I arch my back away from his belly.

  “Everyone been properly introduced?”

  “Been” he pronounces like “bean.”

  “We were just getting acquainted,” says a girl with bad acne at the end of the table. She waves at me, and a rainbow of jelly bracelets ripples down her arm. “Hi, I’m Carrie, Starr high ranker.”

  The girls go round the table stating their name and rank and how long they’ve been in The Program. The cheerleader’s name is Tiffany (of course), and the sorrowful girl sitting next to me is Susan; she was the lowest-ranking girl before my arrival. They’ve all been here under eight months, except for Carrie, who’s been here two years. (Two years!)

  “If you need anything, please don’t hesitate to ask,” Tiffany gushes with her fake smile. I glare at her.

  Bruce bounces on his toes and his belly jostles my spine.

  “Okay, we’ll see you up at the house,” he says. His footsteps recede, then return, and my hat is lifted from my head.

  “Nice topper!”

  I turn to see him yanking my new safari hat over his thick curls; he bends the brim over one eye and juts out his hip like a fashion model. All the girls laugh politely except for Susan, who looks at me with her sorrowful eyes. Bruce struts back to the staff table swaying his hips like a faggot, my hat crunched on his head.

  I glance at my watch—it’s 12:26, four minutes to the next class—and stuff the sandwich into my mouth, trying not to gag on the snotty texture.

  A teacher blows a whistle, and kids stream across the courtyard into the classrooms. Alone at the picnic table, I search for an adult who will notice me and grant me permission to move, but none of them pay attention to me. My eyes fall on Boy 0, who’s slumped at the bottom of his doorway, rocking and raking his fingernails over the bare flesh of his forearm, over and over.

  There’s a soft tap on my back, and I turn. It’s Susan. She brushes back my hair with her hand and bends to whisper in my ear: “This place is Hell.”

  I see David several times in the courtyard between classes, and because we’re not allowed to communicate, we just stare at each other. All I can do is drink in the concern stamped on his face, which makes me feel a little bit better and a little bit worse.

  When I need to use the toilet, the English teacher follows me to the bathroom and stands on the other side of the stall, tapping her sandal on the cement floor as I piss. They must fear that given half a chance, newcomers will either make a break for it or bash their heads against a wall. Both options have crossed my mind.

  During the last class of the day, P.E., we play soccer on a flattish part of the hillside next to the entrance gate. As we run over the curved field, the Dominican guard sits in the shade of an enormous banyan tree near the gate, mopping his face with a rag as the German shepherd pants at his feet.

  My jeans are pasted to my legs with sweat and it’s hard to move. There are far too many players on the field and no way to get near the ball. After a while, I stop running and let the game swarm past me. I look around for Boy 0 but don’t see him.

  David throws me stern glances as he sprints by me, trying to get me moving, but the whole setup is too retarded. Everyone claps whenever a goal is made, no matter which team makes it, and when the ball lands in a thicket, everyone jogs in place or does jumping jacks while it’s fished out. What’s wrong with these kids? The object of the game doesn’t appear to be winning, but to “be a good sport” and to stay in perpetual motion. The P.E. teacher—a tall man in shorts—frowns at me and scribbles in one of those notepads all the staffers carry around with them, along with the referee whistles that dangle from their necks. No doubt he’s scrutinizing my performance. What bull crap. David pleads at me with his eyes, but I shake my head at him. Am I the only one who realizes how asinine this all is?

  At the end of the hour, the P.E. teacher blows his whistle one last time and we sort ourselves by house and rank and trudge up the steep cement drive to our residences. I lag behind my housemates, stopping several times to catch my breath.

  “You’d best not be poky,” Susan tells me, but I can’t help it, I’m out of shape. Six months of junk food and little exercise have taken their toll.

  At Starr, the after-school hours are chopped into Housework Time, Supper Time, Homework Time, Free Time, Bed Time. Too much Time.

  My housework co
nsists of “mowing” the grass around Starr with a machete, Becky, the Starr Group Leader, tells me.

  Becky’s from Rhode Island, pencil thin, and a recent graduate of some junior college in the East. She talks even queerer than the Canadian housefather, and she’s an American. She tells me that she lives in a locked room next to the upstairs dormitory, and that it’s her job to watch me in the bathroom.

  She gives me a quick lesson on how to use the machete, squatting on the ground with the handle of the machete in one hand and the tops of the weeds in the other.

  “Pretend you’re scalping the earth, Juliar,” she says, swiping the sharp blade against the base of the grass.

  But I have nothing against the earth, only against certain people treading its surface. When Becky hands me the machete, I try to think of someone I’d like to scalp, but there are too many of them—my mind skips from Jerome, to my parents, to the cop who arrested me, to the social workers, to the Economics teacher, to the cheerleader, to the housefather—before settling on a generic anger at the world in general. I chop the grass-hair with such vehemence that Becky compliments me on my skill.

  As I weed whack, she stands behind me and tells me how she came to Escuela Caribe.

  “Juliar, I was driving my cah home from a church potty, when I had the idear that Gawd was cahlling me,” she says, fanning herself with a straw hat. “On that dawk road, Gawd tawked to me, just as He did to Paul on the road to Damascus. He told me to come heah to minista to the girls and precious unborn babies.”

  I want to ask her if she drank booze at this potty and if Gawd’s voice sounded like it does in movies, as if it were booming down from a megaphone in the sky. And what do unborn babies have to do with reform school?

  But I know it’s better to keep my thoughts to myself, so I bite my lip and hack grass. After a while, Becky goes to lean against the shady wall of the house and watches me from afar. By the time the five o’clock whistle blows, my palms are blistered but I’ve cut only a tiny patch in the huge swath of field grass surrounding the house.

  “You will improve,” Becky says, and I don’t know if I’m meant to take her words as encouragement or a threat.

  After Housework Time ends at five, we’re summoned to a “special function.” We walk down the cement driveway ordered by rank and join the crowd of boys gathered by the banyan tree. A makeshift pen, constructed from metal stakes and twine, has been erected in the dust.

  “What’s it for?” Tiffany asks Bruce, and he raises his eyebrows and presses his lips together in a “you’ll just have to wait and see” gesture. I spot David across the pen and we stare at each other.

  Suddenly, the Dean of Students comes barreling through the throng, bare-chested in shorts and hiking boots and wearing orange gardening gloves. He trots to the pen, jumps over the twine, and beats his naked chest with the gloves.

  There’s a commotion, and again the crowd parts. Boy 0— also bare-chested and wearing shorts and gloves—is thrust forward by a male staffer. His face is red and his mouth raging and all manner of profanity spills from his lips, this time loud enough for everyone to hear.

  “Fucking assholes! Fuck you! Fuck you all to Hell!”

  The staffer shoves him over the twine and he stands opposite Ted cussing and hugging his bony little boy chest, both defiant teen and cowering child.

  Ted walks to the middle of the ring and shouts over Boy 0’s profanity.

  “Proverbs 23 tells us: ‘Refrain not from chastening a child; for if thou beat him with the rod, he shall not die. For thou shalt beat him with the rod, and shalt deliver his soul from Hell.’”

  He turns to face Boy 0, who stops cursing to scowl at him.

  “Andrew has refused to accept the staff’s authority, but he has accepted my invitation to a boxing match. May the best man win.”

  Boy 0 spits in the dust.

  This can’t be real. I glance at Susan, but her sorrowful eyes are pinched shut. Across the pen, David lowers his eyes to the dirt at his feet. I look around the crowd. Some students watch the spectacle unfold with expressionless faces, and other focus their attention elsewhere—on the stalactite roots of the banyan tree, on the dirt under their nails, on the unknown country beyond the barbed wire fence.

  Ted steps into the center of the ring and raises his garden gloves and Boy 0 raises his, but does not budge from his corner. Ted walks to him and towers over him, like an adult over a child, and Boy 0 sneers up him.

  “Go on and hit me,” Ted says, taking a step back.

  Boy 0 thrusts out a small fist that glances off Ted’s broad chest. Ted jogs half a step back, then swings his glove, hitting Boy 0 squarely in the jaw. The thud jerks his head sideways and I wince.

  “Please, God,” Susan whimpers beside me, her eyes still pinched shut.

  Boy 0 totters unsteadily on his feet, a smirk on his face. He refuses to give in, but I wish he would. He charges Ted and pummels his chest with the sides of his fists and Ted shakes his head and grins down at him in a “Can’t you do better than that?” way before stepping backward and swinging at his face again. Boy 0 crumples sideways to the ground and sits there.

  Ted extends his orange glove to help him up, then punches him again, and this time Boy 0 collapses into the dust and stays there.

  He lays on his back staring up at the vacant sky, his bony chest heaving up and down, a trickle of blood running from the corner of his mouth.

  Ted pulls off his gloves and kneels beside him.

  “Dear Lord,” he prays in a loud voice. “Please help Andrew accept this discipline. Help him become a true child of Christ.”

  I don’t bend my head or close my eyes while Ted prays. I stare at him in shock.

  Afterward, he dismisses us, and as we march back uphill, David’s house is ahead of mine and I keep focused on his narrow shoulders. Halfway to Starr, I look back at the boxing pen. Boy 0 is still stretched out on the ground, and Ted crouches over him, dabbing his face with a white cloth.

  At Supper Time, Bruce sits at one end of the long wood table and RuthAnn at the other, in the father and mother places. Becky sits at Bruce’s right hand, and we girls are arranged according to rank, with me at RuthAnn’s side, and Carrie across from me.

  RuthAnn has prepared meatloaf with catsup squirted on top, instant mashed potatoes and pan-fried carrots. After Bruce says Grace, he serves himself from the platters of food, which are then passed down the table to RuthAnn, then back up the table to Becky, then back down the table to Carrie, who passes it to Tiffany, and so on, in descending order of rank. As I watch the food move back and forth across the table, my stomach growls audibly; the half sandwich I ate for lunch was reduced to acid hours ago.

  By the time I’m handed the meatloaf, it’s been carved down to the burnt rump, but I dump it on my plate and chomp into it, savoring the salty rubber as if it were filet mignon.

  “Excuse me!” Bruce yells down the table. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

  I stop chewing and look up to find everyone staring at me. Bruce shakes his head with great disgust, as if he found my eating a repulsive activity. Must ask to eat. I consider spitting the meatloaf back onto my plate, but decide to swallow it instead. It gets stuck in my throat; I try to dislodge it by gulping cherry Kool-Aid.

  “Excuse me!” Bruce yells.

  “I’m sorry!” I gasp, once I’m able to speak.

  “Pay attention, really think about what you’re doing!” he says.

  “I said I’m sorry! May I please eat?”

  He raises a forkful of carrots to his hairy mouth.

  “Sorry’s not good enough,” he says, before eating the carrots.

  He says no more. The food on my plate blurs into a brown mass. I curl my hands into fists under the table, pressing my nails into the half-moons I cut into my palms earlier. Water pools along my lower eyelids, and I tilt my head back so it won’t spill down my face.

  For a long time, no one speaks and the only sound is the clink of metal against
porcelain and the hiss of the gas lamps on either side of the room. I lower my head and stare out the patio window until the crimson puddle of sun oozes beneath the horizon, and then I stare at the reflection of the family of rejects eating in their cement house. I wonder how Boy 0 is doing, and if he can eat with his wounded mouth.

  After a while, RuthAnn brings a bowl of orange slices to the table and these are passed around. When the bowl is empty, Bruce clears his throat.

  “Julia, you may now eat.”

  I pick up my fork to swallow my food, but I can no longer taste it.

  After Bed Time, I lay awake for hours doing calculations on my foam pad. With the right combination of superior housework, grades, and attitude, I figure I can get through all the levels and leave of here in six months.

  I just have to playact, same as David and I did as little kids in the basement with our dress-up clothes. He’d pretend to be a Texas cowboy, and I’d pretend to be an evil witch. Now we just have to playact the part of repentant teenagers.

  When I get out, I’ll go live with Deb and find another job as a busgirl. I’ll save up money to buy a junker and drive down to Florida, where I’ll rent an apartment on the sand and wait for David to join me. Unless, of course, he gets out first, in which case I’d join him. I’ll work my way up to a waitressing position and go to college at night.

  I imagine the two of us living in our beach apartment, dunking each other in the warm waves and going for long bike rides on the boardwalk. We’ll be fine after all, David, we will. My thoughts start to wink out like a stuttering television screen when I’m brought back to consciousness by a hiccuping sound.

  I squint at the gray lumps in the bunk beds around me, but none move. The noise continues, rising and becoming more ragged, until it reaches a full-blown howl of rage and misery. I stuff my fingers in my ears, but it’s too loud to block out.

  “Shut up!” someone screams.

  “Let the rest of us sleep!” someone else yells.

  The howling weakens, then stops, and the bunk shakes beneath me. I peer over the side, and in the dirty moonlight shining through the tiny window, make out Susan lying on her back with both hands clamped over her mouth.