Robert wished he could hear that interrogation.
Holt returned alone. He stood in the ISS room doorway. “Your mother is declining to leave work to pick you up. She says she has a night-school class, and that you’d benefit from a night in custody anyway.”
“In custody?”
“In a jail cell.”
Robert laughed. “Seriously? She wants me to spend the night in jail?”
“I don’t think there’s anything funny about this.”
“I don’t, either, man,” Robert said, though he laughed again.
He’d call her bluff.
They passed soccer practice, guys’ and girls’, on their way to Holt’s car. Robert got ready to wave, or bow, something smart-ass to show that none of this mattered, but the kids didn’t look up from their shooting drills and wind sprints.
Holt pointed to the backseat. Robert ducked and slid in. He leaned forward to get a better look at the dashboard computer. The center console, lodged between the two front seats, bloomed with red switches and knobs. Still, the whole operation must not be that hard to figure out. His father had done it. Drunk.
Holt climbed in, started the car, and Seattle’s classic rock station burst from the speakers. Holt lunged to turn the song down, but not before Robert recognized it. The one about the bad moon, the guy warning everybody to stay home.
They passed the airfields. No one was landing or taking off, so Robert watched Holt drive, disappointed that he didn’t make use of the console gadgets.
“What do you have to do to be a cop?” Robert asked.
Holt raised his eyebrows. “You want to be a police officer?”
Robert shrugged. “Maybe. Or join the army. The air force.”
“The biggest thing for you is to keep a very clean record from here on out.” Holt glanced at him in the mirror. “Exceptionally clean, in your case. Do more community service than the school requires. Get very good grades.”
“Well, getting suspended is going to screw me there.”
“I spent some time in the army, myself,” Holt continued. “You know, I got into a bit of trouble when I was your age, too. I grew up in a small town. Not the most exciting place to be, just like here, and bored kids get up to all kinds of things. Military straightened me right out. The structure can be good for a guy like you.”
Robert fiddled with the silver door lock, imagined himself combat-rolling onto the road. The door wouldn’t budge. “Were you in Desert Storm?”
Holt shook his head. “I didn’t see combat.”
They rode without speaking. Static burst over the radio.
Robert turned from the window, bored. Same view he saw from the bus every morning. He asked, “Do you have kids?”
“No. A few nieces and nephews.” Holt paused. “You’ve made a big mistake here, young man, but you can still get back on the right path. You’re young. You don’t have to repeat another person’s mistakes. You start making the right choices and sky’s the limit for a kid like you.”
Robert nodded, but didn’t speak again. Another person’s mistakes. His mom’s, obviously. Holt seemed to get it.
Ten minutes later, they pulled into the station. Robin’s-egg-blue paint peeled off the cinder-block walls. The shining linoleum floor reflected back the cell bars’ grid. A bed topped with a thin mattress and flattened pillow stretched across the far wall. Toilet paper unspooled next to the stainless steel toilet.
Holt read Robert his rights and recorded his prints, staining his fingers an inky black. Then Holt posed Robert in front of a white wall to snap his mug shot.
“What do I do?” Robert asked. He thought of his school pictures, how the photographers would line him up on the red X and have him tilt his head just so. Deb hadn’t bought a package since elementary school, so Robert usually crossed his eyes or stuck out his tongue.
“Just stand there,” Holt answered. Robert grinned broadly. The camera’s flash momentarily blinded him. Then Holt steered him by the elbow to the precinct’s holding cell.
“You’re lucky it’s empty.” Holt jingled a heavy key ring. “Wouldn’t want a roommate.”
The cell door clattered. Holt locked it and walked away.
Robert paced the length of the cell, then the width, his heels tracking his toes. About six by eight. He looped the perimeter a second time to check his measurements.
He drummed on the bars, tried slipping an arm outside. He poked his elbow through the lattice. He stuck his foot out, tapped the floor outside, stepped back into the cell.
“And that’s what it’s all about,” Robert sang, and laughed with no one. He plopped down on the bed and studied the dark whorls of his fingerprints.
A fly buzzed into the cell, flitted around his head, flew out and down the corridor. Robert took a dime from his pocket and flung it through the bars. It hit the floor and spun, colliding with the wall and finally falling. He wished he’d tried to skip it like a stone across a creek and wanted the coin back so intensely for a moment he thought he might cry.
He tried to hurry the minutes with a nap. He’d wake up and it’d be time to go. But the bars tattooed the backs of his eyelids, a million repeating squares. The matrix dizzied him; he anchored one foot on the floor and still his stomach didn’t settle.
Robert imagined his father lumbering around a cell this small. Bumping into the walls, his feet hanging over the bed’s edge. His voice booming down the corridor, bouncing back to him. The old man had to have been six two? Maybe even six three, six four. Robert knew it was childish, but he couldn’t help but picture his dad like Paul Bunyan, arms wide as redwoods bursting from a flannel shirt. Robert Senior would have hated being caged like this even more than his son did.
Good thing they’d never caught him.
How had Robert Senior gotten away? He must have outrun those cops, and the cops gave up, simple as that. By now, he could have a whole new name, a whole new life set up for himself. Maybe his dad was like a spy with a briefcase full of disguises.
Robert should knot some toilet paper around his neck and scare the shit out of his mother when she showed up. Robert could hold his breath long enough to mottle his face, let his tongue loll out.
He rolled from the bed and stood on tiptoe to see out the slim window. Sky sliced by more bars.
Outside, an engine backfired. A dog barked, endlessly.
Suddenly Robert leaped back from the window. He wrapped his hands around the cell bars and shook them. He could swear the cell was shrinking, that if he were to pace around it again, he’d count five steps where he’d just measured six. His clammy hands left damp blotches on the iron.
He couldn’t spend the night here. He’d lose it.
He walked the perimeter of the cell again. Still six by eight. Of course. He did it three more times, counting like the numbers were a protective spell.
He realized his bedroom wasn’t actually much bigger than a jail cell. That the trailer was pretty much four or five holding cells that had stretched a few feet, like the walls couldn’t wait to get away from each other, and sprouted closets and a bathroom like tumors.
Sometime after the iron-slashed sun had slid down the sky and disappeared into the trees, Deb came to spring him. Already swathed in her post-work leggings, hoodie, and ponytail, makeup scrubbed off, she looked perhaps more like his sister than his mother. A notebook stuck out of her purse.
Holt accompanied her to the cell.
Robert pretended his legs were as leaden as bars and refrained from charging toward the door. “I thought you were going to make me stay.”
“Maybe I should.”
“Maybe I want to.”
“Get up now.”
Robert took his time, stretching his arms above his head and strolling intentionally out of the cell. He scooped up his escapee dime and pocketed it.
He waited while his mom and the sheriff reviewed some paperwork. Deb signed page after page, quickly enough that Robert knew she wasn’t reading the fine print. He would
n’t have, either. When they were finished, Robert stood and saluted Holt. “Till we meet again.”
“Hopefully we won’t,” Holt answered.
Robert laughed. “It’s a small island. A small, boring island.”
“Let’s go,” Deb snapped.
In the car, she said, “The school’s going to expel you. The principal says you’re done there. You realize that, don’t you? You and that Kovach kid. Whose mother blames me for this, by the way. I’ve had to deal with her all afternoon, too. With all these people calling me at dispatch, you’re lucky I didn’t get fired.”
Expel him? His mom had filled the prescriptions, and Joey had been the one trying to sell the drugs. The translucent bottles had been in his possession for less than twenty-four hours, and now he was going to get kicked out of school?
“This is such bullshit,” Robert said bitterly.
“You know what’s bullshit, Robert? Working my ass off every day to try to give you some kind of future, and you throwing it away. Like it’s nothing.” Deb shook her head. “Unbelievable.”
“Why did you have them? Were you going to sell them?” Robert meant to yell it, to shake the truck windows with the truth. Instead he mumbled his questions, strangled the words as they croaked from his throat.
Deb snorted. “Yeah, I was going to sell them. We chop them up and snort them at dispatch. It’s a hell of a time.”
“Why’d you have them, then?”
Her answer was quick. “I filled them each month for a little while, whether you were taking them or not, in case we lost our insurance, and then suddenly, you needed them.”
He practically whispered. “Are you telling the truth?”
Deb drove through two lights in silence. Finally she sighed. “Yes. I’m telling the truth.”
He watched her white knuckles as she turned onto their street, trembling at the edge of her sweatshirt’s cuff, and knew she wasn’t. Not completely, anyway.
They didn’t speak for the next two days.
* * *
Of course she’d lied to her son. If Deb had copped to taking Robert’s Adderall, wouldn’t that basically grant him permission to foul up his brain with any pill or powder or potion he could scrounge up?
She’d been the one to answer the calls of a dozen other mothers whose kids had sniffed gasoline or slurped bottles of NyQuil. Once Deb had even sent an ambulance to a house where three kids were puking their guts out after smoking nutmeg.
She would not give Robert an excuse for acting like a fool.
Interview with Mira Wohl, Willamette University cafeteria, October 2, 2010
From Flight Risk: The Robert Jackson Kelley Story
“I saw a picture of his mom in my uncle’s yearbook, and she was, like, really pretty when she went here, had all kinds of boyfriends, but you see her now, she just looks old. Tired, like she’s always hungover. If you go by the dispatch center, you’ll see all those women huddled together on their cigarette breaks, puffin’ as quick as they can. She’s the blonde, the short one, always bundled up, arms wrapped around herself like she’s freezin’ cold. You see her at the supermarket, the gas station, the bank, but she doesn’t give more than a quick nod, if that. I swear, it’s like she hates us for being young and not being stuck here.
“She didn’t need to put up that Beware of Dog sign. Her face said it all.”
NOVEMBER 2009
At the expulsion hearing, his mother cried like they were at a wake. Sobs tore from her throat and wracked her body. She coughed thickly. Members of the school board whispered to each other, then tried not to look, as she honked her nose into a thin, holey tissue. Robert left a seat between them, more angry than embarrassed. What did she have to be so distraught about? He was the one on trial. He tried to capture his shaking knee in his palm and refused to look at her.
Principal Simena wore a skirt and blazer. She patted Deb on the shoulder. She leaned down so that their foreheads almost touched, and she whispered and Robert’s mother nodded, and then they stood up and walked out, Simena’s arm around Deb’s jean jacket–clad shoulders. Great. Maybe they’d become best friends and ride horses together.
The principal could probably smell beer on Deb’s breath. She’d gulped several before they’d left for the meeting, while she tore through Robert’s closet, searching for a collared shirt. She’d found one balled up on the floor and then burned her fingertip on the steaming iron.
“Get off the goddamn game!” Deb had howled, kicking a loose sneaker across the trailer, her finger wrapped in a wet paper towel. The tattered shoe sailed over Robert’s head. He’d been standing at the computer, maneuvering his plane through crowded Atlantic airspace.
“Mom, you’re going to make me crash,” Robert complained.
“Get dressed!”
“You’ve been saying for days that I’m getting expelled! What does it matter what I wear? Why are we even going?”
“That’s it!” Deb stomped to the computer and yanked the plug from the wall. The screen flickered and darkened. “You’re done with this game! You need to go out and get yourself a job! Or I’m going to make you work at the stables. Shovel horse shit all day long and you’ll see how easy you really have it.” She wrestled the cord free from the computer, wound it up, and stomped away again.
He ended up wearing the collared shirt, wrinkled.
And that was before the board voted to expel him, unanimously.
Joey Kovach’s mom wore a blazer, too, and black pants. And Joey’s collared shirt was straight and spotless. And he got expelled, too, right after Robert. Robert was surprised by how quickly it all went down; he’d expected more of a courtroom scenario, with questions and arguing and maybe even a chance to talk himself. Instead his name was called and they didn’t even mention what he’d done, just that Simena and Barry were recommending him for “placement” until the beginning of the next school year, whatever that meant. He caught one important word: “residential.” After that, he couldn’t listen; he was too busy picturing the county holding cell and himself locked inside it, clad in a striped jumpsuit.
Not that Deb was in the room to hear the verdict. Robert sat by himself for another hour, as the board tackled the budgets and building reports, until Simena tapped him on the shoulder and told him to meet his mother in the lobby.
He passed two older people, concerned citizens, no doubt, and a science teacher he’d had in middle school, and was almost out the door when he saw Holt sitting in the back row, in uniform.
“Hey!” Robert said. He saluted sharply. The science teacher turned. Robert lowered his voice. “Hey. You got any other clothes?”
He wondered if Holt attended all the school board meetings, to keep up on the local scene, or if he’d specifically wanted to see what would happen with Robert. The sheriff didn’t lift his eyes from the board member, ignoring Robert as determinedly as Robert had been stonewalling his mother.
“Let’s go,” Simena whispered, hurrying him along.
“Till we meet again!” Robert crowed.
Deb wasn’t in the lobby, either; she’d already gone to the car. Robert didn’t tell his mom about Joey’s clothes and how little it all mattered. And he didn’t ask for the computer cord.
* * *
Robert signed a diversion agreement, whatever that meant, to dodge a drug charge. He pretended to read through the document, but he focused on one stipulation only: he’d be unable to take his driver’s test for another year. He hadn’t been able to take drivers’ ed; his mother thought it was a waste of money, since she always had the truck and Robert would rarely be able to practice. Still, that punishment stung more than any other. They might as well string the island with barbed wire.
Without his flight simulator, Robert was restless. The school district had ten days to set up his alternative placement. The residential school. He was starting to wish they’d hurry up.
He flicked through the twenty channels they got without satellite TV and only found soap operas an
d daytime talk shows. A grainy show where a man followed people around in a van to see if they were cheating on their wives or husbands. Arguments about paternity featured heavily in all three. Cooking shows.
One day Robert was inspired to make an omelet. He cracked four eggs against the counter. He smacked one too hard and wiped up the drippy mess with a paper towel. He mixed the eggs together with some milk and poured it into a scratched frying pan. The batter hissed and bubbled. Robert couldn’t find a spatula so he hovered at the ready with a fork, waiting to flip the eggs over so they folded into a tasty envelope. He tapped the fork against the counter, against the steel sink. Yellow liquid still pooled at the pan’s center. He turned the heat up as high as it would go to speed things up.
Then he heard Hulk barking, and realized that he’d forgotten his dog outside. He left the stove to let him back in, and even the fork still in his hand didn’t help him remember the eggs cooking on the stove when he saw a flash of brown at the edge of the evergreens. Twigs snapped and the brush shook. Too big to be a squirrel or a rabbit. A bobcat?
Robert strode closer, but whatever it was had disappeared.
Had they ever caught that bear? A whole family could live back there by now. How big would a bear cub be? Bigger than Hulk, surely.
He waited, watching the woods, trying to detect movement. He held Hulk back by the collar. The dog’s ears stuck straight up. Birds tweeted, unseen.
Then Robert smelled smoke. The front door slammed behind him just as the smoke detector blared to life.
The eggs had burned into a charred blob. He ran water in the pan and left it steaming in the sink, blackened bits of egg swirling down the drain.
When Deb got home, he begged her for the computer power cord. “I’m so bored. Can I have it just for a day?”
“I threw it out,” she replied. She sniffed. “Why does it smell like something burning in here?”
“You threw it out?” Robert moaned. He tugged at his hair and kicked the kitchen table.
The next day she left a list of chores on the counter, written on the back of a grocery store receipt. Vacuum whole house. Do dishes. Give Hulk a bath. Dust whole house.
Flight Risk Page 7
