The Dirt Chronicles

by Kristyn Dunnion

  “There be no singing, no whistling, no humming. None of that in here, you feel me? Unless you a bull or a punk.”

  I shrug.

  “Corner man say you the youngest felon on the range. That’s why they stick you with just me, not three up like the others.” He points across the way. I see two guys in the bunks and one lying on a blue mat on the floor. “Uh huh. Corner man say you waitin’ on remand.”

  Leroy jumps down from the bed. He is older and darker and shorter than me. More solid, lots of muscle packed in tight. Probably got twenty, maybe twenty-five pounds on me. His orange jumpsuit is undone to his waist with the long sleeves tied around his middle. He passes a big hand over his shaved head. “You speak English?”

  I nod. Truth is, I don’t know what to expect. This cell is smaller than juvie. In Goderich we had units; we had space to move around. Same with all those group homes.

  “You want trouble?”

  I shake my head.

  “Good. You got people?”

  I look down at my jail shoes—blue sneakers with flat white soles, no laces. Even a piece of string is a weapon in here. Ma hasn’t returned my message, let alone come down.

  “You got a suit?”

  I clear my throat. “Legal aid.” My voice cracks. I haven’t used it in a while.

  “Ah, shit. What the charge?”

  I raise my eyebrow. I’m not exactly sure. Breaking probation, definitely. Public drunkenness, probably. Might have had some dirt on me when they got me—not much, though. Possession, maybe, but not trafficking.

  “They put you in here with me; that mean you done somethin’ real bad. You ain’t going nowhere, no time soon.”

  “You said they put me here cuz I’m young.” I look at him hard. I don’t know if he’s messing with me.

  Leroy points. “Don’t dis me. You new, so I cut you some slack. But don’t you go dissin’ me.”

  I suck my teeth.

  He paces between the bunk beds and the urinal, three steps one way, three steps back. “Maybe corner man put you here cuz he owe me. Maybe he knows I like a young man.”

  I blink. Don’t know if I heard it right.

  “Nice ink,” he says, nodding at my tats, which peek out at the cuffs and collar. “You know, you good lookin’. ’Cept for those teeth—and that stink.” Leroy points to the bunk bed. “I’m on top, case girlfriend didn’t notice.”

  “Don’t call me that.” I brace myself. The smell of the antiseptic pucks they drop in the urinal mixed with piss and all that bad air—a stable of men, snorting and stamping like horses—it’s choking me. The paint-chipped, graffiti-covered walls are closing in. Rest in Pieces it says in black marker, right above the bed. My muscles tense.

  “Relax. I’m just playin’ witchoo, Beige. But I do like me a tall boy.” Leroy smiles and pouts his full lips. He looks me up and down. I swallow hard. A guy in the cell across the hall catcalls.

  I know how it works in juvie; jail can’t be too different. You get or you get got. You slam the first motherfucker who messes with you, else they all be tapping your business and pushing you around. I learned that when I was nine years old in foster, and nothing nobody says will ever change my mind on that.

  “My name is fucking Eddie.” I feel the burn at the back of my throat, the tightness in my belly.

  “Okay. But you askin’ for a whole lotta trouble.”

  I lunge. My fist sends him flying to the wall behind. His head hits, bounces off it. Sounds bad. I’m on him like skin before he recovers, nailing him in the gut and in the kidneys when he twists away from me. He presses his face against the cold wall. I clock another, but he pushes off the wall like a jungle cat. He springs high and catches me hard in the face. I fall back against the metal bunk. He lands a couple to my ribs. I’m stuck. My jumpsuit’s caught on the metal bed frame and he bats my head like it’s a ball of yarn. The cloth tears free. I pop him right in the face, bang his mouth up good. He spits blood on the floor over by the urinal and laughs. I exhale. I’ll fucking stomp him. I throw a couple more hard ones, catch a couple right back. Guys in the next cells bang on the bars and cheer for Leroy. There’s no bulls coming to split us up. In juvie, this shit would be done by now. Screws would jump in for sure.

  Leroy puts up his hand and shrinks from me. “Hold up. You skinny but you can hit, I get it.” He’s bending down. Looks like he’s folding, which surprises me. We’re both breathing hard.

  “Aagh,” I yell. I want to lay into him again, punch all this hate out of me, but he backs into the corner with the miserable urinal. I can’t fight him like that. Fucking pussy.

  “Okay, tall boy. Eddie. You made your point. I be done teasing you. Peace.” He stretches his hand out to shake.

  I turn away to the foot end of the bunk bed near the cell door I just came in. I breathe slow, let the rage drain away. Blood stops pounding in my ears; I can hear all the other jail sounds starting up again. Men yell at Leroy for cutting short. Nobody roots for me. It’s not a death match. It’s about rank. I take small steps, shift my weight from one foot to the other, like I’m walking it off, only I’m not going anywhere. There’s no place to go. I lean on the bars and peer down the hall. Bull’s still way down there, reading his magazine. I shake out my legs, feel the bruises heat up on me. My head throbs from his hits. Finally, I walk over to Leroy.

  “Alright, man.” I reach for his large tattooed hand. I don’t even see it coming. His kick is lightning. It’s deadly, aimed right for my balls. The room spins, I gag, and I go down.

  Leroy straddles me while I moan and curse. He’s got me pinned good. My hands cup my sac. He’s sitting right on top of the whole works. “You got to learn the rules. When I say you stink, that mean you hit the showers. You mind your bizness here, show some respect. You ain’t got colours. That mean you ain’t got friends. You feel me?” Men’s voices roar; men bang the cell bars, all the way down the hall. “I got friends. That’s how you get by around here, girlfriend.”

  I say, “What the—”

  He slams my head into the cement floor. Lights out.

  I dream of Ray-Ray. He’s standing on the roof of Ma’s trailer, looking out at the tobacco fields. The sun’s going down fast, like in a sped-up film. Colours change all around. The dark rises up, making his long white hair and the blue of his jeans pop. “Ray-Ray, man, talk to me,” I say. But he won’t. He’s got his back turned. “Please.” I’m sad in the dream, all alone. When he finally twists, his green face is rotted out. There are worms in his stinking skin. He’s some kind of zombie.

  I open my eyes. Leroy’s heavy man smell is all over me. I can taste it. I’m tucked into bed. Bottom bunk. My head kills. Like someone took a bat to it. The fluorescent lights stab at my eyes. I raise an arm to shield them. I feel lower with my other hand; my swollen nuts ache real bad, but at least I still got my jumpsuit on. Day one and I’m already sick of this place.

  “You feeling okay, girlfriend Eddie?” Leroy is pissing at the urinal. He looks at me over his shoulder. He’s got a shiner coming on and his lip is busted.

  There’s a sad pit in my gut, a dark hole left from that dream. This is what you get for wanting someone, for giving a shit, I think. Fucking Ray-Ray.

  “Watch your aim,” I say.

  “How’s your balls? They still warm?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Ha ha,” he says. “You clocked me good, so don’t feel bad. Fucking split this shit up.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Hell, yeah,” he says, zipping up and turning around. “Look at me. Look what you did to my pretty face.” He smiles. He’s got gold caps on a few of his teeth. “Got a bump on the back of my head bigger than your knob, too.” He laughs. “So come on, tell me how bad your nuts ache.”

  “Lots.” I sit up slowly, clutching my business. I swing my legs slowly over the side of the bed. “Ugh. You smash my head around?”

  “Hell, yeah. Cops probably did on your way down, too.”

  “Don’t rememb
er. Think I got concussed.” It’d explain the weird dreams, for one.

  “It called neuromuscular incapacitation.” The big words roll off his tongue in a sing-song voice.

  “Huh?”

  “You got tased, Eddie friend. Corner man heard.”

  “Really?” My mind’s a swamp. Pictures come in batches, but they don’t make sense. The party. Cops. Ray-Ray—pushing him out the window, making sure he’d get away. Then I was falling, flopping, banging off the floor. Tased.

  “You didn’t say you was in for murder.”

  I look at him. “What?” My mouth dries out.

  “No wonder you here with me. You best get cozy. And you best get a more expensive suit, else you be locked up with the Feds ’til you an old man.”

  “Some kid got shot at the party I was at. I didn’t even see it. Cops took me out.” I shake my head. This does not add up.

  “Well, pigs be saying you shot the boy. Little Frenchie from out east. And the news saying that kid died last night in the hospital. So now, pigs be saying you a murderer. You feel me?”

  My stomach lurches. I almost heave the grey porridge from breakfast right up on the cell floor. I lay down on my cot and cover my face with my hands. Questions ricochet around my aching head. A picture comes into my head of that wiry little French kid—Digit from New Brunswick—the metal head from the Factory squat. Him, dead? Impossible.

  I remember sitting in cuffs for so long: the lineup, the strip search, the coveralls. Being brought to this cell and all the bullshit with Leroy. Before that, there was the joke of bail court, my pussy lawyer fucking shit up and getting me sent here for who knows how long. Other lawyers got their kids out with promises from parents or social workers, court dates pending. My guy was not so good. He said, “Complications. You win some, you lose some.” Stupid fuck.

  Before that was the 14-Division tank for a day and a half, me with all the winos and wife beaters, a few crust punks with priors, most of the other party kids having been let go with a warning. The clean sparkly ones got phone calls, got picked up, got grounded. The ones caught holding or who had a record or whatnot, we stayed in the pen all weekend and went to bail court Monday morning. We got slapped over to legal aid.

  Gossip about a kid in hospital, about a shooting, about the suspect already in custody; that made the rounds fast enough. A shooting at the squat, now that was news.

  The fucking Factory party.

  When me and Ray-Ray got there, the place was already packed. I didn’t know most of those kids, Ray-Ray neither. We didn’t even really want to be there—me cuz I been trying to quit the drugs and Ray-Ray on account of his stutter. We stuck with our own kind, squat kids and crust punks, some from the drop-in. At one point, the clean kids outnumbered the crusts and some minor shit went down—drinks were drunk, drugs and wallets disappeared. The hustle don’t ever leave the hustler. There was the cake and the butcher’s blade—puny compared to what I use at the slaughterhouse. Digit was laughing, standing beside me, eating chocolate icing right off the knife. I remember seeing those cops and pushing Ray-Ray to the open window, so he’d get out safe. His long white hair got lit up by headlights when he went through. I stared after him: the back of his Iron Maiden shirt, his beautiful ass in those tight jeans, the red of his Converse sneakers on the window ledge before he jumped out. I was thinking, at least my boy is safe. I was pretty fucked up. I remember going down hard. That’s about it. I sure don’t remember no gun.

  Who the hell would be packing at the Factory squat?

  In the Don, my dreams stay messed up. Ray-Ray is there, soft and sweet in his body. His wet mouth finds me night after night and I wake, the sheet sticking to my belly and chest. Sex finds me even when the rest of the dream goes wrong. One night he smiles and kisses me, but his soft hair falls out in clumps, filling my hands. Another night his face is blank. He wants to tell me something, but I can’t hear on account of him having no mouth. I say, “Ray-Ray, speak up, man,” but he can’t. An invisible wall keeps us apart. I panic. Then he grows a mouth, like it’s painted on, and it opens right up. He screams, calls me a no-good, calls me a worthless ugly bitch, a fucking moron. I’m crying, “Don’t be that way,” but he gets even meaner. I’m like a little kid. I just want him to like me, but he don’t.

  I wake from that one in a sweat. Fuck, he sounded like my ma—with her hateful screeching. I’d probably cry if I knew how. I think on how I used to bug her about my dad, about wanting to meet him. Wanting to know the dark side of me. She’d say, “You’ll meet him soon enough at this rate. In Penetang, doing life at Oak Ridge forensics.”

  The fluorescents buzz, cell doors clang, the intercom bell blasts. I been here over a week—no visitors, not even the lawyer, no calls, no nothing to take my mind off it, neither. I got a bad taste in my mouth and a worse feeling in my gut.

  Fuck Ray-Ray. He’s out there doing who-knows-what, and I’m in lock up. Still in that bottom bunk.

  Leroy’s large hand drops down from the top bunk. He pretends to knock. “You feeling bad, Eddie? You need to get high?”

  “No.” I been more or less clean for four months. Other than beers and a little something extra at that party. Been going to work right on time, paying the rent, meeting the probation officer, eating up whatever Ray-Ray made for supper each night, playing with Big Fat Rat Catcher. Behaving—just like a good man should. Even thinking about doing the effing GED, get my grade twelve after all. Now what for?

  Leroy swings down to the floor. He leans his face into the bottom bunk. “Eddie,” he says, like he’s already made up his mind. “I’m gonna set you up like you never been. Take your mind off things. You’ll thank me.” He drops a small foil package on my chest. “Shit is good,” he says. “This shit is real good.”

  I hold the packet in my hand. I shake it back and forth. When even the pillow over my head can’t muffle the constant noise from down the hall, I say, Fuck it. And I take a closer look at what Leroy gave me.

  “Let’s think about your future, Edward.”

  I cringed.

  She really pronounced the “k” in think. That was the social services lady at the youth detention centre in Goderich, the blonde one with the streaks and the bright pink lips. I was getting processed on my last day, getting ready to leave that place for good. You always had to meet with one of those ladies on the way in and on the way out. If they liked you, sometimes one of them would meet you half way through the sentence; sometimes she’d get special clearance to take you down by the lake for a sandwich or fries, leave the joint to go talk about your life plans out at the beach. Maybe they’d put you in a support group or a class or something. I never got that with any of them, especially not this blonde. Man, she hated me. I could smell it on her.

  “You won’t be coming back to this detention centre again, Edward.”

  “Eddie,” I said.

  She blinked. “You’ll be too old, for one thing.” She smiled and I could see the lipstick smeared on her front teeth. It looked pretty crazy, like a kid scribbled over top of them with a fat pink marker.

  “Your life could continue to be a series of bad choices that lead to terrible consequences—no diploma, no job, no money. Drugs, drinking, crime. Boys like you become men like that. They don’t usually live long.” She smiled tightly, this time no teeth at all. She leaned forward, over the stack of files on her big desk. She had pretty big boobs and they were getting closer to my face.

  I sat rigid, arms crossed. I stared her down.

  “Or you might start making some smart choices instead. You turn eighteen in a couple of months; your record will be wiped clean in time, if you stay out of trouble. You could finish high school, get a job.” She stood up and walked around the cramped office.

  Now I could read the Keys for Success poster that was on the wall behind her chair. It had a bunch of keys on a chain and each one had a word written on it.

  “You might change things around for yourself. Make your mother proud.”


  I pushed back, scraping my chair on the scuffed tile floor. “Miss, don’t talk about my mother.”

  “Sore point, I see.” She walked back toward her desk so she could look me in the face. “Your mother struggled to do right by you, even when that meant giving you to other families so you would have more structure and opportunities than she could give you herself, Edward.”

  “It’s Eddie.” I clenched my teeth.

  “You know, you’ve had a lot more chances than many kids get.” She crossed her arms, too.

  At what? I thought. Sucking foster cock?

  “You might leave this self-destructive path you’re on and still become a useful member of society.” Her words were hopeful, but her face and her voice and, most of all, her eyes, were not. “You don’t have to turn out like your father.”

  Right then I wanted to become anyone at all, anyone who would not have to listen to her bullshit, that is. She moved directly behind me, but I refused to twist in my chair. She’d have to preach to the back of my head. I stared at the stupid poster. The keys for success were: Self-esteem, Confidence, Honesty, and Courage.

  “What’s it going to be, Edward?” She was clicking her pen right behind my head.

  As if it was that simple. You wake up and say, I’m going to be a fireman or whatever, and fuck this shit of a life you’ve got dragging you down.

  “Well?”

  I didn’t answer. My thirty minutes were almost up. She got paid whether or not I talked, and there was a long line of kids waiting out there on the range.

  She threw the pen on her desk—that surprised me. She stomped back to her chair and tossed my big file at me: pages and pages of shit talk by other people just like her, fosters and shrinks and screws. Some paper fell on the floor around me, some landed in my lap. Words jumped out at me from all over the papers: defiant, delusional, hyperactive, violent. There were long science words: schizo-something, psychotic, paranoid. You name it, someone said it about me.

  “What’s ‘developmentally delayed’?” I asked. “You mean retarded? Someone thinks I’m retarded?” I sucked my teeth. As if.