by Carolee Dean
“What?” Spider said.
“Dylan knows he’s dead if he talks. Let him go. They got our backs.”
Spider loosed his grip on my throat and stormed out of the garage. “Go chill outside with Spider,” Eight Ball told Ajax and Two Tone. They glared at him but did what he said. Ajax turned and gave me a look of warning before heading out.
“Go find somethin’ to tear apart,” Eight Ball ordered Wade. My friend looked at me and shook his head, as if to say, I warned you . Then he disappeared out the back door that Kip and Nathan had exited.
Eight Ball looked around at the shop. “This ain’t just about rattin’ or not rattin’. You got skills,” he said. “I ’preciate you wantin’ to go legit. Was a time I thought about doin’ the same.” He glanced out the window at his little brother. Then he locked his eyes on mine. “But the world ain’t arranged that way. They say they want you to be different. But nobody gets out of the hood alive. Guys like us got two choices. Kill or be killed. You kick around my offer. It be the best one you ever gonna get. Think about it real hard.”
He left, and I looked down at my tightened fist to realize I was still clutching the wrench. I thought about Eight Ball’s words and wondered if they were true. Once you stepped a foot on the wrong path, was there no going back? Had the story of my life already been written? And if it had, then how would it end?
THE ROAD TO HUNTSVILLE
by D.J. Dawson
No story of my life would be complete without an explanation of small-town Texas football. In Quincy the whole town revolved around high school football. We knew other things were happening in the world, but come Friday night, they just weren’t important.
On Friday nights in Quincy the stores closed their doors and hung up signs that said the owners had gone to the game. Afterward you could get anything you wanted—sex, drugs, booze. A boy could become a god, even if his father was a simple pig farmer.
Or so he was led to believe. And this belief was a dangerous thing, because there was a larger world out there. A world that had never heard of Quincy, Texas.
But there was one teacher who wouldn’t make allowances. Her name was Betsy Jones, and she was a brand-new English literature graduate from the big city of Dallas who didn’t understand the Quincy Code.
She and I and Coach Rogers, who also doubled as the school principal and the superintendent, sat down for a powwow after my first failed vocabulary test. Miss Jones suggested I stay after school for tutoring. Rogers reminded her of my all-consuming workout schedule and suggested it might be more effective if she modified her tests.
Miss Jones reminded him that her job was to educate me, and that she wouldn’t be doing me any favors by letting me slip by. She said that my ability to read and write would long outlive my ability to play football.
She said she knew I could do the work if I only applied myself.
But she was wrong.
I was a high school senior, and I could pick up almost any book in the library and read it out loud, but if you asked me the simplest question about what I had read, I couldn’t answer it.
There was nothing afternoon tutoring was going to solve.
I made it through most of that semester by cheating, lying, and keeping enough of my afternoon appointments with Miss Jones to get her off my back.
Until the week of the state championship.
On Monday she gave a pop quiz. On Tuesday she told me I had failed and that according to league rules I couldn’t play in the big game. She said she understood how upset I was, but now I had to take her seriously and one day I would thank her.
I went to Coach Rogers in desperation and asked him what could be done.
By Wednesday morning we had a new instructor for senior English. Miss Jones and her stack of pop quizzes just went away.
That Saturday the Quincy Eagles won the state championship against the Doonville Bobcats. A scout from the University of Texas offered me a scholarship to play ball for the Longhorns.
I’d like to say that if I had known how soon my glory days of football would end, I would have made different choices, I would have traded the state championship for the chance at a real education. On the other hand, knowing how people grapple for what little happiness they can find, remembering what it felt like to bask in those stadium lights, I’m pretty sure I would have done things just the same.
8
WHEN WE GET TO THE MOUNTAIN TOWN OF FLAGSTAFF, there are pine trees lining both sides of the highway. A big change from the desert we crossed just last night.
“Grand Canyon, next three exits,” Wade says, referring to the map. “It’s only ninety miles to the north. We could be there in an hour and a half or less, depending on the roads.”
“It’s out of the way,” I say.
“We don’t have to stay long. I just wanna look at it.”
“That’s an extra three hours drive time, plus looking time.”
“Five minutes. I just wanna be able to say I saw it.”
“Wade, please.”
He folds the map so hard it rips at one of the creases. “It’s one of them seven natural wonders of the world. When are we ever gonna get another chance to see somethin’ like that?”
“Wade, we’re not on vacation.”
“You think they’re gonna come lookin’ for us at the Grand Canyon?”
“Wade!” I say. “We killed somebody last night.”
“No,” he says quietly. “You killed somebody last night.” He shoves the map into the glove box and stares out the window in silence.
THE ROAD
Life isn’t a destination.
It’s a journey.
But you gotta be
heading somewhere
or you’re just a mouse
going round.
Even if
the place you wind up
isn’t the place
you were bound.
9
IT WAS THREE O’CLOCK ON MONDAY, TIME FOR ME TO LEAVE and go see my tutor. Working on my GED was a condition of my probation.
It seemed obvious Jess wasn’t bringing in her car, but I still had a hard time leaving. Part of me was relieved she hadn’t come. I didn’t know how to talk to a girl like Jess, and I would only embarrass myself by trying.
Part of me would have done anything to see her again.
I finally packed up, dropped Wade and Baby Face at home, and drove to the community center in north Downey where I was supposed to meet Miss Lane, my reading teacher. It had taken all my nerve to admit to Mr. Grey, my probation officer, that I’d never pass my GED if I couldn’t read the test. He was the one who set me up with Miss Lane. Nobody else knew. I told Gomez I had to do community service work on Monday afternoons, and I told Wade I had a girl.
I sat at a little table across from Miss Lane with the copy of Poetry Through the Ages that Mom had given me on my sixteenth birthday, which I had spent in juvie.
Miss Lane and I had started with the alphabet, but that wasn’t my problem. I understood letters and sounds and I could decipher most words. It was just that when too many of them got together, they started dancing across the page, and when they broke the rules they were supposed to follow, which it seemed they did most of the time, I got completely lost.
I liked poetry, though. More space between the words.
Miss Lane knew I’d memorized poems from my book, so we’d started using those. She made me a special bookmark with a window cut in the middle. That way I could only see a couple of words at a time and they would stay in their places. I was working on “The Stolen Child” and doing a piss-poor job of it.
“‘Come away, O human child!/ To the’—”
“One word at a time,” she reminded me. I hadn’t really been looking, just rattling the verses off from memory. “Look at the first word. Just the first word. C-O-M-E, what does that spell?”
“Come away.”
“You’re not looking.”
I snapped the book shut and slid
it across the table. Then I crossed my arms and slumped in my chair like I used to do in school when I wanted the teachers to leave me alone. “This is stupid. We both got better ways to spend our time.”
“Have you written any more poetry?”
“I don’t write .”
“Have you created any more poetry?”
I shrugged.
“Poetry started as an oral art, you know. Lots of poets never wrote down their verses. Homer created entire epics all in his head.”
“I’m no Homer.”
“Give me your notebook and I’ll write down your new poem.” She studied me and smiled. God, she was pretty—and persistent. “I know you have something new. I can see it in your eyes.”
“It’s personal.”
“Excellent! That’s the best kind.” She reached across the table and grabbed the notebook from in front of me. It was a beautiful leather-bound journal with my name embossed in gold. The first nice thing I bought myself after I got my job with Mr. Gomez, to celebrate my new direction in life and the fact that Wade and I had survived eight months in juvie.
Miss Lane opened to an empty page. “Go on, tell me.”
“It’s embarrassing.”
She held a pen toward me. “Fine, then you write it.”
“I can’t!”
“You mean you won’t.”
I could feel my face burning in anger. I remembered a bright red F– I got on a language arts assignment in sixth grade, the red writing all over the paper, and the boy who snatched it off my desk and waved it around the class, laughing, for everyone to see.
He wasn’t laughing after I broke his nose.
Miss Lane thumbed through the twenty or so poems written in her hand. I’d come with at least one a week for the past three months. Mostly short, rhymey, and sappy, but I was proud of them.
“You haven’t written anything,” she said. “That was your homework assignment. One line. That was all I asked.”
The leather journal was beautiful and perfect. There wasn’t a single word in my handwriting. It wasn’t right putting my chicken scratch next to her well-formed letters.
“I got it at home,” I lied.
“Fine. Bring it next week. But this is the last thing I’m writing for you. From now on you do it yourself.” She sat with pen poised.
“Whatever,” I said, but she’d won again, so I figured the sooner I got it over with, the better. “I know a girl with sea green eyes. She melts the sun, swallows the sky, then breathes out stars to kiss the night so guys like me will have some light.”
I felt like an idiot sitting there reciting a poem about one girl to another one. Besides, what had sounded clever in my head sounded stupid coming out of my mouth.
“Is there more?”
I took a deep breath and continued. “She doesn’t know the things I’ve done, the places that I’ve been. But if a girl like that could love me …”
Miss Lane kept writing, and then looked up. I felt naked all of a sudden. The kind of naked you feel when you’re showering in gym class and all the guys around you seem to have more equipment than you do. I wished I’d never bought the stupid notebook. Wished I didn’t have words dancing around in my head, banging on my skull, looking for a way out.
“That’s all,” I lied.
“No, it’s not. Don’t be afraid to say how you feel, Dylan. Holding things inside is what gets people into trouble.”
My mind flashed back to when I was a little kid and I wasn’t allowed to talk about my father. When the pressure built too much, I’d start tearing things up. Like the time I was eight and stuck a firecracker inside the neck of my neighbor’s Baywatch Barbie just so I could watch its head blow off. I thought about how words were building up inside of me the same way. How badly I needed to see what was in my head on the page, even if I could barely read it.
Maybe Miss Lane was right. I took a deep breath and continued. “She doesn’t know the things I’ve done, the places that I’ve been. But if a girl like that could love me, I might be clean again.”
I looked at my hands, rough and grease-stained, and knew Jess would never see me as anyone but the guy who fixed her car. Even so, every time I thought of her it seemed like the black stain covering my soul was fading.
When I looked up, Miss Lane was staring at me.
She pulled a thin paperback book out of her briefcase and slid it across the table to me. “It’s called Black Mesa Poems , and it’s by a poet from New Mexico named Jimmy Santiago Baca. He taught himself to read in prison.”
“How?” I couldn’t imagine anyone teaching himself to read, much less in prison.
“I don’t know. I guess his passion finally outweighed his fear,” she told me, and then she was gone, leaving me sitting alone with my journal and a book of poems I couldn’t read.
THE ROAD TO HUNTSVILLE
by D.J. Dawson
When you are locked alone in a cell twenty-three hours a day with no television or computer, there isn’t much to do to pass the time.
An inmate comes by with a cart full of books every Tuesday, and for the first year, I just watched him pass. The second year I started checking out books. The third year, I actually started reading them, mostly crime novels and adventure stories, even a few trashy romance novels. The fourth year they started making sense. The fifth year I got interested in nonfiction. The sixth year I tackled The Autobiography of Malcolm X. By the end of my seventh year I had read everything in the prison library and started making requests for books to be brought in from outside.
The eighth year I started writing.
One of the first things I wrote was a letter of apology to my old English teacher, Betsy Jones. I asked my lawyer to try to find out where she was so I could send it. As it turned out, she wasn’t hard to locate. She’d been appointed as the director of special programs for the Texas Education Agency.
She got my letter and surprised me by writing back. We started corresponding, and one day she asked if she could come to the prison for a visit. I was more than a little nervous, since I figured I was the one responsible for her losing her job back in Quincy, but she seemed to have done okay for herself despite that setback, so I agreed and told the warden to have her name added to my visitation list.
At that time, the only person who ever visited me was my lawyer, Buster Cartwright. The prospect of getting out of my cell, even for an extra hour or two, thrilled me. I can have visitors Mondays through Fridays and after five on Saturdays, but I’m not allowed any physical contact. I am separated from those who come to see me by a window of glass, and we must speak over a telephone to be able to hear each other.
Betsy Jones-McGinnis (she was married with two children by then) arrived on a Tuesday morning, and we talked for nearly two hours. I told her everything that had happened to me after I left Quincy High School, including the spinal injury I got while playing for the Texas Longhorns that ended my football career. How I’d lost my scholarship and flunked out of school. I was surprised how easy it was to talk to her, and also amazed by how good it felt to tell my story to someone besides my lawyer.
Betsy returned the following Tuesday and the one after that. She came every Tuesday for a full year. Somewhere along the way she encouraged me to start putting my story down on paper. She proofread my work and taught me the grammar rules I was just beginning to understand.
On one Tuesday visit Betsy leaned toward me, and even though a thick sheet of glass separated us, I could feel the heat of her eyes burning a hole through me. “Did you know that seventy-five to eighty percent of juvenile offenders can’t read at grade level?”
“Really?” This was news to me.
“Your world becomes a much smaller place if you can’t read. You have far fewer options. It’s not the only factor, but it’s a big one. If they want to know how big to build a prison, all they have to do is look at the illiteracy statistics.”
It took a minute for her words to sink in, and once I understood, my entire bod
y began to shake uncontrollably. “They knew I was coming.”
“You or someone like you.”
“You knew it too, all those years ago, back in Quincy. That’s why you tried to help me. Because you knew I was coming here.”
“Here or someplace like here.”
I had never asked for help because I felt ashamed and alone. Suddenly I realized there were thousands just like me. “Why don’t people know this? Why doesn’t someone tell them?”
“Why don’t you?”
It was then that I understood what I had to do. I had to find a way to warn you.
They have built you a house of steel, and they are waiting.
10
THE NEXT DAY GOMEZ WAS YELLING AT WADE AGAIN because the owner of a Tahoe had come in complaining that his oil drain plug hadn’t been put in right and oil had leaked all over the floor of his garage.
I was working on a diesel extended cab. I hate diesel engines. The grease works itself into your hands worse than anything and won’t come out, even if you scrub it and scrub it. I was in the back, trying to clean up, when Kip stuck his head into the bathroom.
“Looks like that Beemer’s back.”
I dropped the soap container and ran out to the lobby, where Mr. Gomez was writing up a ticket for Jess. She was wearing a cotton sundress. Her hair was pulled up in a ponytail, making her long neck and bare, bronzed shoulders look even more beautiful than the day before. Even the dark circles under her eyes couldn’t lessen her beauty. They worried me, though.
Jess was with two girls dripping in gold jewelry and wearing miniskirts with tank tops that said THE JAVA HUT in glittery letters. They flashed their fake fingernails, trying to look classy, in contrast to Jess, who was classy without trying. They glanced around the shop in disgust, as if afraid something might jump out at them and soil their expensive shoes.
“We’ll try to get to it today, but we’re kind of backed up,” Gomez told Jess. “Give us a call around four and we’ll let you know where we’re at.”
