by Joan Barfoot
Big, gloomy portraits, probably dead judges, hung on the walls. All men. Roddy wondered if he’d do better with a woman judge, somebody who looked like his grandmother, say. But a woman judge would most likely look like the woman in the doorway of Goldie’s. She wouldn’t like him at all. A man might understand more how something can go accidentally wrong in just a couple of seconds. At least how something can happen that wasn’t ever intended.
And that he was sorry. Which ought to count?
Anyway, nothing counted and there wasn’t even a judge, just some guy who’s a justice of the peace, and it wasn’t a totally real court, just one for remands and, for some people, bail. His dad and his grandmother were in the second row, staring at him. They looked like they’d been up all night, kind of loose and grey in the skin. Maybe they sat in the kitchen wondering over and over where they went wrong. Roddy would have liked to be able to tell them they didn’t go wrong, but also that everything did. “What the fuck,” he and Mike used to say, meaning, what did it matter what they did, good or bad or anything in between? In a huge world with too many possibilities and in a little place with hardly any, What the fuck made them potentially invisible, insubstantial, and free.
They were wrong, and it has come down to Roddy, and what the fuck doesn’t apply.
Everything in court went really fast, case after case, guy after guy, boom-boom, break-and-enter, assault, driving drunk. When it was Roddy’s turn a clerk or somebody read the charges — attempted murder, armed robbery — and his lawyer sighed and said, “We understand these are serious allegations, but my client has never been in trouble before with the law. He’s only seventeen, and his family is willing to guarantee his next court appearance and his good behaviour in the meantime, with whatever stipulations the court cares to apply, if bail were granted.”
For an instant, Roddy wanted to add his own voice. He wanted to promise he would honest to God never even leave his own room again, if he could just go home now. Nobody would have to worry about him going outside, never mind going wrong. But of course he didn’t speak up. Of course he couldn’t go home. He didn’t belong there.
“Bail denied,” the justice of the peace said crisply, and set the next court date for a week away. So that was that. Just as well. He did want to tell his grandmother and his dad something, though. All he could think of to do from across the room was wink at them, which was stupid, probably looked like he didn’t know what he’d done. He guessed he was somebody who did important things wrong. He wondered if maybe everybody wished he was dead, that he never was born, that that wouldn’t have been any great loss.
Maybe one of the kids of that woman he shot, Ed Conrad said she has two, both grown up, will shoot him down in the courtroom next time. People sometimes do that sort of thing; he’s seen it on TV. It’d be fast and unexpected, and he’d be out of all this without hardly noticing.
It took all Roddy’s courage to ask Ed Conrad, “The woman?” All he knew, really, was that she was alive; because of the attempted murder, not murder, charge.
The lawyer sighed. He sighs a lot, in Roddy’s brief experience of him. “She’ll be in hospital a while, that’s for sure. Did you know she’s paralyzed? Pretty unlucky shot, if you ask me, for a guy who says he doesn’t know how to use a gun.” Paralyzed. Shit. The information almost drowned out the contempt in Ed Conrad’s tone. Even his own lawyer was disgusted by him. Imagine her family.
Imagine his own.
He did that? Having never done anything big or important before in his life, he caused that? Lots of times when he was young, he used to imagine being somebody else, or at least doing things that didn’t crop up in the life of somebody like him. He’d pictured circumstances, like Mike or maybe some littler kid drowning, where he would be a hero, jumping into the water — raging, rocky — and hauling the person to shore. He would be a picture-in-the-paper sort of hero, somebody who’d done something memorable, notable, large. Now he is somebody else. He has done something memorable, notable, large. His photograph has maybe even been in the newspaper, he doesn’t know how that sort of thing works. This isn’t what he intended, never what he meant.
The day here starts with a loud wake-up buzzer that scratches through speakers in the corridor ceilings. So far, Roddy’s already been awake, all three mornings. There’s lots of shouting, swearing, a racket of guys getting up. Everybody’s supposed to make their own beds and get dressed and more or less tidied up. Everybody wears brown jumpsuits. Roddy’s not built for jumpsuits. Some guys fill them out, and look tough, but his hangs off his bones.
They have about twenty minutes to do all that after the buzzer goes. Then the cell doors unlock and they form a line in the corridor and get herded, at least that’s what it feels like, down to the cafeteria, where they line up for cereal or scrambled egg lumps, toast, milk, and juice. Like school, only without choices. That’s a thing about being here: not having choices, hardly any at all.
What Roddy thinks the people who run the place should do at the start of the day if they really want to make guys feel bad about the trouble they’re in, is make them stay in bed for a while after the buzzer goes. Everybody’d have to lie there looking at the bleak, stupid hours ahead, and it would make at least some of them feel bleak and stupid themselves. Which would be pretty good punishment. But maybe whoever organizes the schedule figures the night hours are better for that, and that’s true, too: every night so far Roddy’s lain awake for a long time turning and thrashing as if a new position could magically alter events. If one kind of pain could kill another kind, he would slam his head into walls.
So he’s not surprised when other people take to violence. Nothing real big, not so far as he’s seen, anyway, because there’s always guards around, but little flashes: a couple of guys sort of stumbling hard into somebody else; the occasional jostling of pool cues in the rec hall; muttered threats in the shower stalls. The chemicals of anger are breathable, smellable. Being here must be how it is for a wild animal: wary, hyper-alert to small shiftings of grass and scents. Rabbits he’s flushed. Moles and groundhogs tunnelling for shelter underfoot. Toads and insects blending cautiously into the background. Out there it’s not anger, though, not rage turned inside out, it’s survival.
It’s survival here, too, probably, in a different way. Still, Roddy may not be burly, but he has words to back him up: attempted murder, armed robbery. Even here, those are major words. He tries to keep in mind Sean Penn, somebody like that, some small guy playing a prisoner. A certain swagger is called for, although not so much he looks like a challenge. He has also renamed himself Rod. This is no place for some kid called Roddy. It seems like a Rod really could be an attempted murderer, an armed robber. Rod might, actually, be who Roddy now is, or at least who he’s becoming.
After that quick court appearance the first day — it couldn’t have taken more than five minutes, although the travelling and waiting took a lot longer — he got brought back here to the detention centre. Then a guard told him he had an appointment with some guy called a counsellor, and took him off to one of the offices at the front. The guy had a file in front of him and a stack of printed papers and forms. He looked up and said, “Hi Roddy, I’m Stan Snell, we’ll be working together to figure some things out for you, make some plans.”
“Rod,” he corrected, for the first time.
“Okay, whatever.” Older guy, mid-thirties maybe, how big a deal could he be, a shit job, working here? Not that it mattered what he was like, except for being a stranger with Roddy’s life in his hands.
This guy wanted them to make plans? The idea of plans hadn’t crossed Roddy’s mind. He hadn’t thought of doing anything in particular, just of being someplace: here, then someplace else.
“You’ve been remanded a week, I see.” News, Roddy saw, travelled fast. “I’ve already got some of your school records, so we can see where you’re at, since you’ll be taking clas
ses wherever you go from here.” He could get Roddy’s school records? And wasn’t this summer holidays? “And we’ll want to talk about any particular interests or skills you have, because there’s also possibilities like woodworking, mechanics, computers, cooking, that sort of thing. Because,” and he leaned forward, looking earnest and boring right down to his short sandy hair and the dark blue tie knotted tight against the light blue shirt collar, “you obviously need a goal, or you wouldn’t have wound up here. You need to want to be something. That’s how you stay out of trouble. It’s drifting around, no real focus, that got you here, I figure.”
Roddy couldn’t say what got him here. A disaster, mainly.
“So is there anything in particular you want to be? Some ambition? A wish, or a hope?”
Besides not being in jail, or an armed robber, an attempted murderer, Roddy guessed he meant. “I don’t know,” he said. He really didn’t know. It’d seemed there were years and years before he had to think about being something, even though of course he also knew there were not. By seventeen, his dad already had a full-time job.
The idea of wanting something, and then actually being it, was strange. As far as he could tell, his mother was the only one in the family who had a big achievable goal and, tipping herself off a bridge, got what she intended.
“Because now’s the time,” Stan Snell went on. “I know it probably doesn’t feel like it, but this can actually be a good opportunity to get on the right track.” He opened a file. “I see you were suspended a couple of times and missed a lot of classes the past couple of years. Otherwise you weren’t doing too badly; not failing anything, anyway. So obviously you’re not stupid.” For some reason Roddy was pleased to hear that. “So why were you skipping?”
To go wandering. To go shoplifting. To hang out. Roddy shrugged.
“Because it seemed easier than doing the work, right?”
“Not so boring.” Stan Snell leaned forward.
“Well, I don’t know about boring, but here’s how it works here and wherever you go from here. Assuming you’re found guilty. If you don’t mind, we’ll just assume that for our own planning purposes.” Found? Roddy was guilty. He didn’t see much way around that.
“So as you already know it’s up at six. Breakfast. Exercise. Then you’ll be starting classes or maybe job-training sessions for three or four hours a day. Including weekends. Eventually you’ll also take a turn at some of the jobs around the place, like in the kitchen, whatever, another three or four hours a day. There’ll be counselling sessions, therapy, whatever you want to call it, but I don’t know how regular or soon that’ll be, or whether it’ll be just you and a counsellor of some sort and how much will be group work, that depends on a lot of things. Dinner, then you get maybe a couple of hours to watch TV, play pool, whatever. By eight-thirty you’re back in the cell. You’re supposed to spend the time till the eleven o’clock shutdown doing homework and studying. The idea, you understand, is that you need hard work and routine and discipline. Given what happened,” and he looked down again at the file, “you might be around for a while. But that’ll give you the chance to figure out what you want to do when you get out, so hopefully you don’t wind up back in.”
Oh. Roddy hadn’t thought of that: the possibility of committing further crimes. He hadn’t got that far into the future. It’s not like he’s got some desire to hurt people. He couldn’t imagine actually wanting to do something like what he did, actually setting out to do it. Or setting out to do something and having that happen and not caring one way or another. He couldn’t imagine that.
But it probably happens to people. They get hard. They don’t care. In real jail, there’d be more real tough guys, probably, more guys hunkered down into true crimes.
Like attempted murder, armed robbery? He was forgetting again.
“These,” and Stan Snell stacked up handfuls of paper, pushed them into an enormous brown envelope, “are aptitude and intelligence and personality tests. You can fill them out over the next week. Give us some idea what you’re like, what you might be good at. They’re to be returned to me before your next court appearance. Ask any guard for a pen. You’ll have to give it back, and only use it under supervision.” So that it wouldn’t become a weapon, Roddy supposed, against himself or anyone else. “And watch your step. There’s no screwing around here. Step out of line, there are penalties. If you do step out of line, you’ll find out what the penalties are. Any questions?”
Not that Roddy could think of, not right that second.
“Jack?” Stan looked up at the guard in the doorway. “You can take the young man back to the rec hall now. Show him what’s what down there.”
Roddy could guess. It would be like starting school: when he was seven and just moved to town, except then he already knew Mike, which was enough to begin with. His grandmother said the first day, “You’d be wise to watch for a while, see what people are like, not be too eager right off the bat. You’ll make better friends in the long run.” Being tough and sort of angry-looking wasn’t what she meant, but the point was to be what she called standoffish. “You might look standoffish,” she advised, “but that’s all right, too.”
So what should a standoffish Rod do, in the doorway of a rec hall with a couple of TVs at different ends of the room, big but mounted high up, out of reach and with mesh guards built out around the screens, and a pool table, and shuffleboard, and a whole bunch of wood tables and chairs with magazines and cards and a big battered-looking bookcase thing with some paperbacks and videos, and a couple of sofas and a few easy chairs and two guards and a bunch of guys more or less his own age?
A standoffish Rod would lean casually against a wall. He’d survey, narrow-eyed, what everybody was doing. He’d have his arms folded over his chest. He wouldn’t show by even a flicker that he was worried about accidentally sitting in somebody’s place, or getting in somebody’s way, or drawing the wrong somebody’s attention. It’s the first moments that count.
He wouldn’t plan to make any friends; maybe not ever. The idea of Mike, pictures of the two of them hanging out, Mike standing on a sidewalk, head back and laughing and laughing with that full big roar he got after his voice changed — a moment from a whole long time of knowing each other. Funny how what should be a lot of flowing and particular memories came down to a few pictures; that kept giving Roddy a kind of electric shock in his head every time.
People disappear, that’s all. They just go. Pictures didn’t mean shit, people just go.
There was only so long he could stay leaning, standoffish Rod, against a wall, arms folded, looking around the room narrow-eyed, assessing, with any luck, menacing. He felt dizzy, that first time, pushing off from the wall. Like he was seeing the room up close and far away at the same time, like it was real and sharp as a razor, and also all flattened onto a screen.
Was he crazy?
That might account for that moment in Goldie’s. Maybe only a crazy guy would let everything get so far out of hand, not on purpose, totally unintended, but there it was, that undoable moment.
He rolled slightly on his feet, swaggering somewhat, he hoped, trying for an impression of being ready to spring. It was hard to tell if anybody was noticing. He expected they were. It’s automatic, pretty much, sizing up a stranger coming into a group. Something like smell, there were signals. His ought to be dangerous but not quite cocky. Someone prepared to be cool, but not necessarily.
As long as he didn’t look like some asshole who’d left himself glued too long to a wall.
Guards in this place don’t generally look very interested or alert, although he has decided they probably are, and that bored, faraway expression is probably as cultivated as his own swagger. The guards here wear navy blue pants and shirts, and wide black belts with different things hanging off them, like flashlights, that don’t make much sense unless they’re more for hitting peopl
e than throwing light. The guards look, for the most part, not only uninterested but like people called in to fix particular things, like the plumbing. People with narrow interests, in keeping the peace, more or less; a goal not unimportant to Roddy as well.
When he launched himself into the rec hall the first time, there were two guards, one to the right of the doorway, the other over by the high-up meshed windows across the room. Between them: three guys shooting pool, a couple of others at one of the tables shooting the shit, a couple watching junk afternoon TV, four playing cards, looked like poker. One sitting in an easy chair with a pad of lined paper on his lap, writing. Recounting some crime, a confession, making notes for his trial? For all Roddy knew, the guy was writing a poem about sunsets or something; because you just couldn’t tell by looking at people what they were likely to do.
There was one pacer, a guy walking the room, half the room, back and forth, frowning. Big eyebrows. Big all over, but mainly what Roddy noticed was thick eyebrows hanging heavy over little blue eyes. He looked too stupid, with those tiny eyes, dense eyebrows, for planned cruelties or organized meanness, but ready for random ones.
Roddy set out to cross the room, making for the window side, so that he could tell himself that he’d made that start, had become a registered presence and could go on, slowly, from there. The big-eyebrowed guy had other ideas. He shifted in the midst of his back-and-forth, sidestepped to put himself in Roddy’s path, no way around without chickening out, or so Roddy saw it. “Larry,” the guy said, his name, Roddy supposed. “Gimme your smokes.”
