The Jodi Picoult Collection #3

by Jodi Picoult

  The girl opens her eyes, grins, and glances down between her legs. “No wonder you can’t get a date, T-Bone, if that’s the closest you can get.”

  The other bikers all start laughing, and one of them extricates the girl from the darts. She walks toward me, and holds out her hand to help me to my feet. “I’m sorry. I thought they were hurting you,” I say.

  “Them?” She glances over her shoulder, at the bikers who have gone back to their arm-wrestling and their drinks. “They’re pussycats. Come on, then. Heroes drink on the house.” She ducks beneath the counter and pulls the tap, filling up a long glass of beer for me; I realize that she is the bartender.

  She asks me what I’m doing here, and I tell her about my car. I say that I am missing my final. “Ever wonder why it’s called that?” she says. “It’s not like everything stops when you’re done with it.”

  I don’t tell Eric how I found myself watching a shaft of sunlight play Elise’s skin like the bow of a violin; how she could talk to one biker about basketball stats and make change for another and smile for me at the same time. I don’t tell him how she made fun of me for nursing my beer, and then shared it with me. I don’t tell him how she locked up early; how I drew the patterns of molecules for her on cocktail napkins, then between the stars, and finally on the flat of her bare back.

  I don’t tell Eric that until I met Elise, I had never stayed awake till dawn just to watch the sky burn a hole through the night, that I took my first go-kart ride on a track beside her. I don’t tell him that she led me through graveyards to lay down flowers for people she had never known. I don’t tell him how she would decorate the inside of my car with rose petals for me to find when I came out of class. That she would call me up to ask me what color I would be, if I were a color, because she was so completely purple and she wanted to know if we’d match. That she was like no one I’d ever met, that when I moved inside the kaleidoscope heart of her, I saw how dreary my life had been.

  I don’t tell Eric this, because it’s all I have left of that girl. “What happened?” he asks.

  “She drove me home from the bar,” I say simply. “A month later I found out she was pregnant.” She’d used words like should and too soon and career and abortion. I had looked right at her and asked her if she wanted to get married instead.

  “What made you get divorced?”

  There were a whole string of things, if I want to be honest about it. And yes, there was a trigger. But I should have known that someone who was such a child herself would not feel comfortable taking care of one. I should have been more supportive after our son was stillborn, instead of clutching Beth like a shield to ward off the grief. But most of all, I should have admitted to myself far earlier that the things I loved about Elise, the impulsiveness and the craziness and the spur-of-the-moment outlook, were not really part of her personality, but a product of the alcohol. That when she didn’t drink, she was so insecure that nothing I said or did was enough to convince her that I loved her.

  Eric nods; he has been there himself—on both ends of the equation. You cannot depend on an alcoholic, so you learn to live for the moments when they are present. You tell yourself you’ll leave, but then they do something wonderful that reels you back: host a picnic on the living room floor in January; find the face of Jesus in a pancake; celebrate the cat’s birthday by inviting all the other neighborhood cats for tuna. You use all the good times to paint over the bad, and pretend you can no longer see the grain of the wood that she’s made of. You watch her wade through sobriety and secretly wish she would drink, because that is when she turns into the person you love; and then you cannot figure out who you hate more: yourself for thinking this, or her for reading your mind.

  Eric stares at me, putting together everything I’ve said so far. “You loved her. You still love her.”

  “I never stopped,” I admit.

  “Then you didn’t take Delia because you hated Elise,” Eric says slowly.

  “No,” I sigh. “I took Dee so that she wouldn’t.”

  * * *

  Broadway Gangsters, West Side City Crips, Duppa Villa, Wedgewood Chicanos, 40 Ounce Posse. Wetback Power Second Avenue, Eastside Phoeniquera, Hispanics Causing Panic, Hoover 59. Brown Pride, Vista King Trojans, Grape Street 103, Dope Man Association. Sex Jerks, Rollin’ Sixties, Mini Park, Park South. Pico Nuevo, Dog Town, Golden Gate, Mountain Top Criminal. Chocolate City, Clavalito Park, Insane Born Gangster, Vista Bloods, Casa Trece. There are three hundred street gangs in the Phoenix area; these are just a few represented at Madison Street Jail.

  Crips dominate the Phoenix area; Bloods rule Tucson. Crips wear blue and call Bloods “slobs” as a sign of disrespect; they don’t write the letters CK in succession, because that stands for “crip killer,” and will spell a word blacc or slicc instead. A Blood wears red and calls Crips “crabs”; he will cross out all c’s in his writing to show disrespect.

  Members of two different Crip gangs who meet on the street will try to kill each other. In prison, they join in solidarity against the Bloods.

  There is only one way to get a Crip and a Blood to stop fighting: Put them in front of an Aryan Brotherhood member and they will suddenly be on the same side.

  * * *

  Long before I get out of Disc Seg, there are rumors. About Sticks, returning to the maximum security pod and talking of retribution. About Blue Loc, who has become my staunch supporter. Watching me take the blame for something one of the blacks did has, apparently, set me squarely in their esteem.

  When I am moved back down to maximum security, Concise is lying on his bunk, reading. “Wuzz crackalackin’?” he says, a homeboy greeting that could mean anything. He doesn’t really speak until the detention officer leaves. “They treat you all right up on three?”

  I start to make up my bed with sheets and a blanket. “Yeah. I got the cell with the Jacuzzi and the wine cellar.”

  “Damn, they always give that one to the white boys,” he jokes. “Andrew,” he says, the first time he has ever used my name. “What you did . . .”

  I fold up my towel. “It was nothing.”

  He stands up, reaches out slowly, and clasps my hand. “You took the fall for me. That was somethin’.”

  Embarrassed, I break away. “Well, it’s over and done with.”

  “No it ain’t,” Concise says. “Sticks is gonna beat a lesson into you in the rec yard. He been plannin’ it for days now.”

  I try not to let on how much this terrifies me. If Sticks nearly beat me to death as an afterthought on the first night I was in jail, what might he do with preparation?

  “Can I ask you somethin’?” Concise says. “Why’d you do it?”

  Because looking out for yourself sometimes isn’t about you at all. Because contrary to what inmates seem to think, situations are never black or white. But I just shake my head, unsure of how to put this into words.

  Concise leans down and pulls out a box beneath the lower bunk; it is filled with an arsenal of makeshift weapons. “Yeah,” he says. “I hear you.”

  * * *

  The morning of the fight, Concise shaves my head. All the inmates involved do, because it makes it harder for the DOs to sort out the participants afterward. The disposable razor leaves patches of hair, so I look like I have been attacked by a cat. I glance at Concise’s smooth, dark skin. “Well,” I say. “I’m going out on a limb, here, but I think the guards might be able to tell me apart from the rest of the Crips.”

  There will be thirty men in the rec yard at once: ten Mexicans, nine blacks, and ten whites, and me. For the past week, a steady stream of smuggling has enabled Concise to build up a weapon supply. We have stayed up late to fashion them: clubs, rolled out of National Geographics and secured with the tape the kitchen uses to mark a special dietary meal; saps, a sock filled with two bars of soap or, in one case, a padlock nipped from an ankle chain, which can be swung at an enemy. We have broken out the single-edge razor blades we are given every morning, reset them
in the pliant plastic of a melted toothbrush. We have fashioned shanks from the stainless-steel frames around the mirrors in our cell, from pieces of chain-link fence, from the metal stays in knee braces, even from a toilet-bowl brush, all filed to a deadly point along the cement floor at night. The handles are wrapped with strips ripped from bedsheets and towels, tied tight with the white cotton string from laundry bundles: You can grip the weapon more firmly, and you are less likely to be cut as your hand slips up the blade.

  My own weapon has been specially made by Concise. Having pulled the metal tip off a number two pencil, he’s inserted a sharpened staple to the eraser end, and placed a fan of cigarette batting in the other side. The dart, jammed into the hollow tube of a Bic pen, can be blown into the eye of an enemy at close range.

  It is amazing to me, as we line up for rec, that the DOs do not realize what is going on. Everyone has a weapon packed somewhere under their stripes. Once we get to the yard, we congregate in larger groups than normal—no one wants to be separated from his allies. No one touches the basketball.

  “Stay cool,” Concise whispers to me. My heart is as thick as a sponge, and sweat breaks out behind my ears, in the cool crevice where my hair once was.

  I do not see it coming, the sap that sings like a hummingbird and whacks me on my left temple. As I fall I am vaguely aware of the rush of bodies that push past me, the overgrown jungle of their feet. The officer’s voice is high as a child’s. Multiple inmates involved in a fight on the rec yard. Backup needed immediately.

  The window of the multipurpose room, which overlooks the rec yard, is suddenly full of faces pressed to the glass. Guards stream through the adjacent door, trying to pull apart the blacks and browns and whites whose limbs are knotted together. Violence up close has a smell, like coppered blood and charcoal burning. I inch backward, shaking fiercely.

  An opening in the wall of flesh spits a body into the space beside me. Sticks lifts his face and his eyes light up.

  The strangest details register: the locker-room smell of the pavement underneath me; the cut on Sticks’s shoulder that is shaped like Florida; the way he has lost one shoe. My legs tremble as I back away from him. My hand curls around the blow dart.

  When he smiles at me, his teeth are covered in blood. “Nigger-lover,” he says, and he holds up a zip gun in his left hand.

  I know what it is, because Concise had wanted to make one, but couldn’t get a bullet smuggled in in time. You grind off the top and bottom of an asthma inhaler, and then tear the thin metal open. Flatten it; roll it around a pencil to make a tube that fits a .22-caliber shell like a sheath. Wrap it in cloth, and enclose it in one hand; in your other, hold the firing pin—anything that can hit the rim of the bullet’s casing when you smack one hand against the other. It is deadly accurate at a five-foot range.

  I watch Sticks take a bent piece of metal—a handcuff key, I realize—and position it in his right hand. He spreads his fists apart.

  In slow motion I lift the tube of the Bic pen and seal my mouth over one end. The blow dart flies at Sticks, the staple embedding deep in his right eye.

  He rolls away, screaming; and with trembling hands I stuff the Bic pen tube down a drainage gate. The DOs begin to loose pepper spray that blinds me. When I hear something skitter by my ear, I try to look at it, but my eyes are the raw red of grief. I learn it by feel, the cool metal point of a miniature missile. Without hesitation, I grab the bullet Sticks has dropped.

  “Easy, now,” a voice says behind me. A detention officer helps me to my feet. “I saw you field the first blow. You all right?”

  Somewhere between the moment I entered this rec yard, and the moment I will leave it, I have turned myself into a person I vaguely recognize. Somebody desperate. Somebody capable of acts I never imagined, until driven to commit them. Somebody I was twenty-eight years ago.

  Another life in the day of a man.

  I nod at the officer and bring my hand to my mouth, pretending to wipe off saliva. Then, untucking the bullet from the pouch of my cheek, I swallow.

  V

  The leaves of memory seemed to make

  A mournful rustling in the dark.

  —Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “The Fire of Drift-wood”

  Delia

  Ruthann tells Sophie that when she was a child, Hopi girls would wear their hair in whorls, intricately twisted buns above each ear. She parts Sophie’s hair, ropes each side, and coils it tight. “There,” she announces. “You look just like a kuwányauma.”

  “What’s that?” Sophie asks.

  “A butterfly, showing beautiful wings.” She wraps a shawl over Sophie’s shoulders, and winds two Ace bandages up her legs: makeshift moccasins. “Excellent,” she says. “You’re ready.”

  Today she is taking us to the Heard Museum in Phoenix, where a festival is taking place. She has packed the car full of old board games and broken watches, pens that need refills, vases with chips and cracks. If you have nothing to do, she told us, I could use some staff.

  An hour later, Sophie and I stand in the grassy bowl outside the museum, surrounded by a collection of Ruthann’s junk while she wanders through the crowd in her Barbie trench coat, flashing potential customers. People sit in folding chairs and on blankets, drinking bottled water and eating fry bread that costs four dollars. At the bottom of the outdoor pavilion is a circle, where a small canopy shades a phalanx of men bent over an enormous drum. Their voices vine together and climb into the sky.

  Many of the onlookers are white, but more are Native American. They wear everything from traditional costumes to jeans and American flag T-shirts. Some of the men wear their hair in braids and ponytails, and everyone seems to be smiling. Several other girls have hair wound to the sides like Sophie.

  Suddenly a dancer steps into the center of the circle. “Ladies and gentlemen,” the emcee announces, “let’s welcome Derek Deer, from Sipaulovi in Hopiland.”

  The boy cannot be more than sixteen. When he walks, the bells on his costume jingle. He has a rainbow of fringe across his shoulder blades and down his arms, and he has tied a leather band around his forehead with a matching rainbow disk in the center. He wears biking shorts under his loincloth.

  The boy sets five hoops on the ground, each about two feet wide. As the drummers start throbbing out their song, he begins to move. He taps forward twice with his right foot, then his left, and in the instant it takes to blink he kicks up the first hoop and holds it in his hand.

  He does the same with the other four hoops, and then begins to make them extensions of his body. He steps through two and lines the remaining three up in a vertical line, then snaps the top ones open and shut in a massive jaw. Still moving his feet, he dances out of the hoops and fans all five across the breadth of his shoulders to turn himself into an eagle. He morphs from a rodeo horse to a serpent to a butterfly. Then he twists the hoops together, an Atlas building his burden, and spins this three-dimensional sphere out into the center of the performance ring. As the drummers cry, he dances a final circle and falls down to one knee.

  It is like nothing I have ever seen. “Ruthann,” I say, as she steps up beside me, clapping, “that was amazing. That was—”

  “Let’s go see him.” She pecks her way between the people on the grass, until we are standing behind the drummer’s pavilion. The boy is sweating profusely and eating a PowerBar. Up close I can see that the rainbow colors of his costume are hand-sewn ribbons. Ruthann boldly picks at the boy’s sleeve. “Look at these; one thread away from falling off,” she tsks. “Your mother ought to learn how to sew.”

  The boy looks up over his shoulder and grins. “My aunt could probably fix them,” he says, “but she’s too busy being a business-woman to pay attention to the likes of me.” He enfolds Ruthann in an embrace. “Or maybe you brought your needle and thread?”

  I wonder why she hasn’t mentioned that the dancer is her nephew. Ruthann holds him at arm’s length. “You are turning into your father’s double,” she pronounc
es, and this makes a smile split the boy’s face. “Derek, this is Sophie and Delia, ikwaatsi.”

  I shake his hand. “You were awfully good.”

  Sophie bends down toward the hoop and tries to kick at it with her foot. It jumps a few inches, and Derek laughs. “Wow, look, a groupie.”

  “You could do worse,” Ruthann says.

  “So, how are you doing, Auntie?” he asks. “Mom said . . . she told me that you went to the Indian Health Service.”

  Something shutters across Ruthann’s face that is gone almost as quickly as I notice it. “Why are we talking about me? Tell me whether I should bet on you winning.”

  “I don’t even know if I’ll place this year,” Derek replies. “I didn’t have a lot of time to practice, what with everything that happened.”

  Ruthann nudges his shoulder, and then points to the sky. In an otherwise perfectly clear blue day, a stunted rain cloud hovers. “I think your father’s come to make sure you finish well.”

  Derek looks up at the cloud. “Maybe so.”

  He bends down to give Sophie a lesson on how to lift up a hoop with one’s foot, while Ruthann explains that her brother-in-law, Derek’s father, was one of the first casualties in the war with Iraq. In keeping with Hopi tradition, his body was to be sent back for burial by the fourth day. But the helicopter carrying his remains was shot down, and so he didn’t arrive until six days after his death. The family did their best—yucca soap was used to wash his hair, his mouth was filled with food to keep him satisfied, his possessions were placed in the grave—but it was done two days too late, and they worried that he might not make it to his destination.

  “We spent hours waiting,” Ruthann tells me. “And then, just before it got dark, it rained. Not all over, but on my sister’s house, and on her fields, and in front of the building where my brother-in-law had gone and enlisted. That’s how we knew he’d made it to the next world.”

  I look up at the cloud she believes is her brother-in-law. “What about the ones who don’t make it?”