“Theresa.”
Wanda hardly felt older than these boys, but here was a difference: she would never have called a friend’s mother by her first name.
As they approached Boise, Winston gave Wanda a brief description of what had happened. They had gotten stoned with some friends on the Boise strip on a Friday night, and their good time had gotten a bit out of hand. Wanda listened, but not closely. How much of these details would Gary have told to his real mother? She didn’t want to over-prepare, especially since, although Winston hadn’t put it into words, it seemed her job would be to sit and contritely accept whatever punishment the judge handed down.
They took the City Center exit, and Wanda felt a thrill that overcame both the craving and the nervousness. Even though she was grown-up and had been to Portland, it still excited her to see the tops of Boise’s two tall buildings peep over the horizon. The highway was landscaped here on the entrance to downtown, with red lava rocks and spider-shaped juniper bushes that seemed never to grow from year to year.
“Okay, Wanda, are you ready?” Winston asked when they reached the courthouse.
Wanda pulled the hat onto her head and opened the door. The dress was too long, and as she climbed out of the car, she stepped on the skirt. She bent over to brush dust off the hem and put her hand to the car for balance, the very moment Winston was closing her door. He reached out to stop it from slamming, but only managed to slow it. The door banged Wanda’s thumb and bounced back open. Wanda yelped.
“Oh my God,” Winston said. “Are you all right?”
She stood upright, and a stoic look came over her face. She held her thumb in her other hand. Winston took this bundle in his own two hands and squeezed. His eyes were desperate and penitent. Wanda clung to her role; it helped with the pain. “I’m okay,” she said.
Winston slowly opened his hands and cupped Wanda’s fist like a captured butterfly. Then Wanda opened her hand. It wasn’t so bad—just a little smear of blood and a mark that looked like a smudge of blue ink.
“It’s fine,” she said. And it was. She was a mother now.
She turned to Gary, and took from him the wad of tissues he had found in the car. “Thank you, Gary,” she said.
They entered the courthouse. The woman at the front desk looked up their names (“Theresa Wojciechowski,” Wanda said with an emphatic nod, then she spelled out the last name fluently as if she were singing the alphabet) and gave them a card with their assigned courtroom number. “Now, you just go right on up there, have a seat and wait to be called, ’K?” the woman squeaked in the over-enunciated voice women use with children. Did she talk like this to the hardened criminals who came through here?
Wanda led the boys up the wide limestone staircase, found the courtroom, and quietly went in. It was two o’clock; right on time. They sat in the back row and waited. Wanda held a tissue around her thumb in such a way that it was almost unnoticeable.
To her surprise, the judge was not an old man with white hair. He was a Mexican, and only perhaps in his early forties. He did, though, wear the kind of reading glasses she expected judges to wear, low on his nose. He had no accent. A judge! thought Wanda. He must be the most powerful Mexican in Idaho.
The judge heard one case after another, all men, all drunk drivers. Sometimes the arresting officer was in court to report the details of the case but, more often, the clerk read aloud from an officer’s statement. The sad men told their lies, gave their excuses, and made their apologies. The judge nodded patiently and unbelievingly, then elevated his eyebrows and handed down harsh sentences as casually as a doctor writing a prescription. The men reacted by dropping their heads, stunned. When he permanently revoked a repeat-offender’s license, the bent old man whimpered, “How’m I gonna git home?” This was the one moment the judge’s temper flared: “You’re going to have to start thinking about how you’re going to get anywhere, sir, because you’re not driving.” The old man was shaking visibly as he walked down the aisle and out the door.
Wanda was a bit disappointed. There was no gavel to slam, and none of the offenders took the witness stand. They just sat at the long table in front. She had been hoping to take the stand, like the mothers of murdered children did on L.A. Law. On the other hand, it would be good to sit with the table blocking the horrible dress from the judge’s view.
After an hour, Wanda’s attention began to wander. From her place between the boys she imagined she could feel warmth from Winston’s shoulder. She resisted the temptation to look over at him. She wished that he was again desperate and apologetic, squeezing her hands in his. Wanda lay her hand, with its thumb wrapped and dully throbbing, on the bench next to his. She knew he would never hold her hand, but she wanted it to be there, available, even for an unintentional brushing, a spark.
Winston inspired in Wanda a quiet, blinking respect. He seemed to confront and move people aside as easily as someone flips through garments in a closet—as if he owned them. She had met him at the apartment of Gideon, a pot dealer who lived in her complex. Who was this good-looking kid sitting on the floor, smoking pot, and playing a race-car game on Atari? He seemed completely at ease with Gideon’s friends, some of whom had done time. He called them douche bags when their cars tumbled and burned. Then he looked at his watch and said, “Shit, I’ve got to get home.” He didn’t say it, but it was dinnertime. He leaped up, paid Gideon for a bag of pot, which he threw in his gym bag, then left, having failed to notice Wanda.
“Who’s Junior?” Wanda asked Gideon.
Gideon screwed his face up and smiled with his rotten teeth. “Some rich kid. Why you want to know?”
Wanda slugged him in the arm. There was something perverted about Gideon. Wanda had always wondered if he had bent over for the men in prison.
The clerk called them. “Gary Waj . . . Waj-check—?”
“Wojciechowski!” Wanda sprang up and dragged Gary forward. Before sitting, she smoothed her dress and registered on her face a look of humility and perseverance.
A few moments passed as the Mexican judge read some papers. Then he looked up. “Is Officer Smith here?”
“Here, Your Honor.” A policeman rose from his seat and came up to occupy a spot at the other table.
Then the judge looked over his glasses at Wanda and Gary. “Forgive me. Could you tell me how to pronounce your last name again?”
Gary inhaled to answer, but Wanda cut him off. “Wojciechowski, Your Honor. I’m Theresa, and this is my son, Gary. It’s a Polack name, Your Honor. My husband is a Polack.”
Everyone laughed, even the policeman. Wanda glanced around the room quickly and tried to smile. What had she said?
The judge stiffened for a second, then he relaxed, took off his glasses, and folded them. He allowed this moment of levity before getting down to business. “Thank you. Tim, why don’t you give us your report? No need to stand.”
“Well, Your Honor, about eleven p.m., Friday, September fifth, we got some calls about kids raising hell on the strip, turning over garbage cans, a coupla car windows smashed. Officer Reade and I was standing on the corner of Ninth and Idaho, and we hear a disturbance mid-block. A business owner, Mr. Merrick of the pharmacy down there, was arguing with a buncha kids, knocked over the city trash outside his store. Some of the kids run off, but Officer Reade and I apprehended two of ’em: one’s this young man, the other was over eighteen. There was no blood alcohol level. We ticketed the boys and let ’em go.”
“Thank you.”
Gary, now under the judge’s unbroken attention, looked down at his hands, which were twisting and knotting, his fingers bright red.
“Young man?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did you overturn a city waste receptacle?”
Wanda detected the slightest smile behind the judge’s stern expression.
“No, sir.”
“It’s customary to address a judge as ‘Your Honor.’ ”
“Excuse me, Your Honor.”
“Would
you mind telling me who did upset the receptacle?”
“This kid Carl.”
The judge looked away impatiently, then quickly back to Gary. “And did you or this kid Carl or any other member of your party overturn any other waste receptacle or break any car windows or damage any other property that night?”
“No, Your Honor.”
“Do you mind looking at me when you answer?”
“Sorry, Your Honor.”
The judge eased himself back into his chair. “Tim,” he said without looking away from Gary, “I don’t know if I believe this young man.”
The officer smiled and looked down.
“Your Honor, might I say something?” Wanda said.
The judge looked a little wary. “Yes, Mrs. Wojciechowski.”
“I would never dream of interrupting the proceedings, it’s just that we’ve played out this scene in our living room about a hundred times over the past two weeks, and I thought I’d save you some time. Gary swears up and down he didn’t do it, and so does Winston, Gary’s friend, the over-eighteen kid. Well, there’s been days when we’ve believed them and days when we didn’t. Finally one night, after praying and thinking it over, things became perfectly clear to me. I turned to my Lawrence and I said, ‘Honey, whether he did it or didn’t, the punishment’s the same. Whether he overturned one receptacle or he smashed them car windows too, I want to soundly punish Gary in a way he won’t forget.’ Lawrence agreed with me, Your Honor.
“See, Gary’s always been a sweet, gentle boy who minds his manners. That’s the type of boy I raised. Not some ruffian who barrels down the street in Boise raising Ned. The biggest animals on earth, Your Honor, whales, eat the smallest, little bitty shrimp. I will not let my Gary become some monster that eats and destroys without thinking. I’ve seen it happen to other men. They hurt and kill and damage property, then go on their way without looking back. I’d rather Gary be a shrimp who fights fair. The meek shall inherit the earth, that’s what I’ve always taught him.”
The craving in Wanda’s heart and the pain in her thumb throbbed in unison now and overcame her. She choked back tears and lifted the tissue to her face, until she realized it was speckled with blood. She wiped her eyes with her other hand. Gary placed his hand on her shoulder.
“I’m sorry, Your Honor. I’m almost done. Gary won’t tell us the names of those other boys. Says he just met them that night. Carl. I don’t know no Carl. Well, whoever it was, Gary won’t be seeing them for quite some time. Gary’s been grounded since that night, and will be for the next two months. He lost his car privileges except to and from school. He does his homework, spends some family time, then goes to his room.
“We, as a family, volunteer every Saturday at the Mennonite soup kitchen. Have for years. Lawrence and I decided Gary should work there Sundays after church as well, and go to the Wednesday administrative meetings. Sure, he griped at first, but he’s done real good. He’ll keep on after his punishment’s over.”
Wanda allowed herself a glance at Gary, whose jaw hung open like a broken drawer.
“Your Honor, my friends think me and Lawrence are being too hard on Gary. I tell them that if I have any power at all as his mother, Gary will never darken the door of a courtroom again. He will never damage another person’s property. He will never harm a person littler than himself.”
Now Wanda broke down and hid her face against Gary’s shoulder. Then she lifted herself. “Thank you, Your Honor.”
The judge sat for a long time, holding the tip of his reading glasses in his teeth. A fear gripped Wanda’s heart. What if he put down the glasses and said, “Miss, you don’t seem old enough to be this young man’s mother”? Instead he put them on again, leaned forward, and wrote some words on the forms. Then he stacked them and pushed them away.
“In cases like these,” he said, “I usually levy a fine and require that the offender spend some time in community service. However, I would guess that you, Mrs. Wojciechowski, and your husband would be burdened with the fine, and not your son. I certainly don’t want to punish you when you appear to be raising the boy right. And as far as community service, you’ve already got him involved in projects more worthwhile than painting hydrants. So,” he turned to Gary, “young man, I have two requirements of you. Are you listening?”
“Yes, Your Honor.”
“One, honor your mother, just as it says in the Bible.”
Gary nodded.
“And, two, tell that Polack he’s a lucky man.”
BACK IN EULA, Winston’s sister, Liz, walked back and forth in front of the high school entrance, her thumbs hooked into the front pockets of her jeans. She was waiting for Winston, and had been for a half-hour. Her car was in the shop, and he was her ride home. All her friends had left already, and his car wasn’t where he had parked it that morning. Maybe he had gone to McDonald’s for lunch, and parked it somewhere else when he returned, or maybe he and Jay had decided to cut school. He was such a show-off, sweet when they were alone, braiding her hair as they watched TV, then disowning her when the guys showed up. She’d give him five more minutes, then call her mom from the pay phone.
Liz and Winston were easily identifiable as twins, but their sharp features, so delicate they could have been sculpted with a toothpick, made the boy somewhat elfish and the girl simply beautiful. And while Winston’s hair was plain brown, Liz’s was chestnut with strands of real red. Faint freckles splattered her cheeks and forehead like dried rust water on a window.
A Maverick pulled up in front of her, driven by Jay. He hoisted himself up to sit in the car window so he could talk to her over the roof of the car.
“Hey, Liz.”
“Hey, Jay. Have you seen Winston?”
“I was going to ask you the same thing.”
“Great,” she said, looking down at the toe of her sneaker, which was grinding into the concrete sidewalk as if Liz were crushing an insect.
“Do you need a ride?”
“Yeah.”
“Hop in.”
They drove out of the parking lot, past the cow field, onto the road that headed out toward Lake Overlook. Eula Schools had been built on the eastern edge of town in the late 1950s, since it was in that direction (toward the interstate and Boise) that the town was predicted to expand. But instead, the town had stretched south toward Lake Overlook, where the rich people lived, and north toward the sugar factory, where poor people worked, leaving Eula Schools still on the edge of town. There was a field next to the high school parking lot that contained what may have been the most abused cows in Idaho. They had been chased, ridden, pelted with rocks, and, once, spray-painted and herded by kids from a rival high school onto the Eula High football field during a game.
“So, how have you been?” Jay asked.
“Fine, you?”
“Fine.”
“You’re living at your mom’s, right?” Liz asked.
“Yep.”
“How’s that?”
“Oh, excellent. We get along great. She lets me do whatever I want. It really feels more like living on my own than anything.” Liz had never heard such wild insistence in Jay’s voice. He must have heard it too, for when she glanced at him, he jutted his chin up and turned briefly to watch a passing car. Then he added, “I still go to the Van Bekes’ a lot.”
“Sounds good,” said Liz. She had only asked to be polite. She didn’t really care.
They crested a hill and Lake Overlook lay sparkling before them.
“Wonder what happened to Winston,” said Jay.
“Yeah. I figured he was with you and the guys.”
“Why?” Jay asked.
“Why?”
“We’re not, like, married.”
“Okay,” Liz said with a whatever-you-say laugh.
“No, really,” said Jay. “I actually feel like we’re kinda, I don’t know, growing apart. I’m feeling more . . . serious these days. Maybe it’s moving out of Carl and Janet’s, or maybe it’s being a senior
. Don’t tell him I said that.”
“I won’t,” Liz said, then added, turning toward him and nodding condescendingly, “We don’t really talk.” They had reached the Padgetts’. “Thanks for the ride,” Liz said. She leaped out of the car and ran up the lawn.
Jay pulled away and left the subdivision. He drove calmly until he reached the open road. Then, as if his fist had been set on a spring, it shot out and struck the dashboard. When he withdrew it, there was a crack running between the two air-conditioning vents. A drop of blood collected on his knuckle and fell, but his face never changed.
IN THE WEEK since Mr. Peterson had announced the science fair, Gene and Enrique had failed to agree on a project. Enrique had come up with dozens of ideas that had provoked little or no response from Gene. Now, as they zigzagged down the sidewalk from the bus stop, Gene taking care to keep awnings and tree branches between him and the sky, Enrique tried again: “Gene, I know you don’t want to do erosion, but it could be really neat. We could make a landscape out of dirt with little miniature trees and stuff. And we could have a fan blow it. We could show how the soil holds together when there’s roots in it. What do you think?” With this, Enrique stepped forward slightly, and bent to be in Gene’s line of vision.
“Erosion is boring,” said Gene.
“I know erosion is boring,” said Enrique, “but a model of erosion with a fan blowing dust around is neat.”
“It would be boring because erosion is boring. A model of something boring is boring. A model of something neat is neat.”
“Well, then, what is neat, Gene?” Enrique’s voice rose into a whine. “I come up with these ideas, and you shoot them down, but you don’t come up with any yourself. We only have a few days left. If we don’t come up with something we both like, I’m just going to do it on my own.”
They circled the car-wash parking lot and stepped through the tear in the chain-link fence to enter the trailer park. On Meadowlark and Goldfinch Lanes, the deepest corner of the trailer park away from the boulevard, bushes huddled against trailers, carports extending toward the lane like hands offered in greeting, frilly curtains hung in the windows, lawn statues and pinwheels peeped from flower beds, and an American flag hung from a pole that rose at an angle from one vinyl-sided garret. This was the quiet, respectable part of the trailer park, to which the long-term residents had migrated. The front spokes of the star-shaped trailer park—the only part visible to passing cars—was the rowdier neighborhood. For the more-or-less transient residents of these lanes, Robin and Sparrow, nothing seemed to stick to its intended purpose: cookouts became brawls; refrigerators died, moved outside, and became anchors for clotheslines; a broken-down, doorless car became a pirate ship for the children, complete with a Jolly Roger hanging from the antenna. The trailers here exposed the jacks and stilts and wood blocks that held them up off the ground, while on Meadowlark and Goldfinch Lanes, vinyl skirts modestly covered these underpinnings. It was to avoid walking down Robin or Sparrow that the boys’ mothers encouraged them to enter the trailer park the back way, through the hole in the fence.
Lake Overturn Page 6
