The Laws of Our Fathers

by Scott Turow

  Bug was the best. She was so sweet. That was just the word for her was sweet. And shy. She got so she could barely stand to let those huge eyes of hers get near yours, that had to be why they called her Bug, those eyes. It drove Nile crazy when she did that, like she wasn't even fifteen but seven.

  'Do you suppose you'd say you were my girl?' he asked this morning, when they were doing the package.

  'Not to none of them, I wouldn't. No how.'

  'Would you say it to me?'

  And she got that look. She batted him on the arm. 'You psychin,' she said.

  'No, I'm not. I think you 're my girl, man. That's what I think.'

  'Well, you gone think what you think, then. Ain you? Ain gone matter none what I say.' And she skirted away from him, the way she did usually. Not in person. But like her spirit. It was like a ghost. Something you couldn't catch. A part of her was shy. Or hidden. Or something. He didn't have the words. He was inside Department 2 now and he sighed aloud thinking of her.

  'What's got you down, men?' asked Runculez, the guard at the desk.

  'I'm not down,' said Nile. 'I'm up. I'm happy.' He lifted his arms to show he was free. Then he smiled stupidly. 'Henry Downs,' he said, and the guard shouted. 'Downs!' Two tiers up you could hear them shouting 'Downs!'

  'You got the Henry Downs,' said Runculez. They both laughed so that it actually seemed funny.

  'Interview room,' said Nile.

  'Got some lawyers in there, men. How bout the cafeteria? We don' start in with lunch till e-leben.'

  'Got to have an interview room, man. Bureau regs. Got to read the rules of the road in a one-on-one interview room.' Ordell had told him to say that. And he told Core that was strictly crazy. Who'd believe that? Who'd believe there was a rule so dumb? 'Shit,' said Ordell in reply. 'Where you been?'

  The Mexican guard shook his head, but he was smiling. They all liked Nile. He was easy. Runculez spoke to another uniform a few feet away.

  'Go tell that PD down there we got to hab that room, men. Tell her go by the cafeteria.'

  The PD came out with her briefcase in a minute. The guard went to explain, but she was cool. She was done anyway.

  The interview room was a little cinder-block square with a folding table and those old-fashioned plastic bucket chairs. Graffitied gang signs on one of them had been scoured off with steel wool, leaving a spot where most of the color was gone from the plastic. A blast of overhead fluorescence interrupted the usual jailhouse gloom and leaked into the hall through a narrow plate-glass panel in the door meant to allow observation by patrolling guards.

  Bolt arrived in cuffs and leg irons, accompanied by two solemn correctional officers. Here in the jail, half the guards had something going with one gang or another and they'd kid around a lot, especially with a Top Rank Saint like Bolt, downtalk him or make jokes about the weather. But Bolt presented himself as above that. Hard case. In seg. There was a chain around his belt that attached the manacles and ankle irons. As the correctional officers closed the door, Bolt took a seat. Nile immediately wandered to the near corner, where he could not be seen from the viewing panel, and began speaking.

  'Now I gotta give you this pre-probationary briefing thing, Henry, okay? I want you to understand the rules of the road, once you get out of here. You've done eighteen months here, DOC, jail time. You have another year's probation. Okay?'

  Sly Bolt was a cousin of Hardcore's. He wore a beard and he was tremendous across the shoulders and belly. Somewhere, Nile had heard he had played good b-ball in school, but it was hard to believe looking at him now. He had the mass of a boulder and an ill-mannered glower.

  'Now, I know we've gone over this three times already, but you sign the form today. That's a contract, man, me and you. You keep this contract, you 're on the street. You break it, you 're not just back here, you 're at the Yard in a blink, okay? Are you listening, Henry?'

  As Nile spoke, he'd opened his belt. He stuck his hand under the elastic of his briefs and reached behind him and tore the line of tape off. He had shaved his ass. Bug had done it actually, one morning about three weeks ago. God, they both thought that was funny. Fun, he thought and reached back for the package. It was a rubber, tied off at the end, so it was about four inches long. Core made jokes about white guys. Nile just reached back to the crack in his butt and drew the condom out and held it close to himself as he approached Bolt and dropped it on the table.

  'Now I'm going through this one by one. Okay? No guns. I don't care what you call it. "Gat." ' 'Strap.'' ' 'T-9. "Any firearm, you 're back inside.'

  In a single motion, Bolt had the rubber in his lap, beneath the table, the chain that ran from his cuffs barely clinking on the table top. Nile kept talking. Once he had his trousers hitched, he stood with his back against the glass panel in the door. No leaving the state without court approval, he said. No felonies or misdemeanors. Bolt would go back in, even for DUI.

  'And no gang association,' Nile said. ‘I know they 're your homies. But you see them, you better go the other way. I catch you out there with those guys, then it's back inside. No way around it. If you're straight, I'm straight. You understand?'

  Beneath the table, Bolt pumped his hands around the condom like it was a bat handle, gradually thinning and extending it. Then he suddenly reared his head back, lifted his chained hands, and dropped the rubber straight down his throat. Gone. Like stories June told about college dudes eating goldfish. Bolt, rarely happy, smiled as Nile spoke.

  'You understand me, Henry?' Nile asked again. 'I don't want any b.s. about you didn 't hear this part or that part. This is serious shit I'm talking here.'

  'Mmm-hmm,' said Bolt, both hands on his stomach. His eyes were closed. He was concentrating to make sure he kept it down. If that balloon -that's what Ordell called the rubbers, the balloons - if that balloon broke in Bolt's gut, full of straight stuff, pure white, they couldn 't get him to emergency fast enough. He'd be dead. He wouldn't call for a doctor either. Bolt was Top Rank, bar none for his. He'd just smile. They all laughed about it. 'Fuck man, that'd be motherfuckin kickin, man. That'd be a rush. Whoo-ee.'

  Whooee, thought Nile. From inside his jumpsuit, Bolt took a wad of bills, loot he 'd collected in here for the dope. Nile couldn't believe there was cash in here, but anything small enough to pass between hands - pills, razor blades, currency - made its way inside if it was useful. On a chair, there was a blue plastic bag, the delivery sleeve from a local paper one of the guards must have been reading. Nile put the bills in there and just stuffed all of it down his trousers. No one searched him on the way out.

  He kept speaking the same way ten more minutes, then stepped outside to let the COs know they could take Bolt back. He was led off with his ankle irons clanking. Bolt didn't bother with even a backward look at Nile. In his cell, he'd take a box of Ex-Lax and wait.

  Nile dropped dope with somebody new each week. A few whispered, 'You all right, man, you okay.' Nile represented to them by hand: B, S, D, b, 4, me. It was a quick code, sign language, concluding with his index finger jabbed like a dagger toward his heart. They were startled by that, a white guy down for his. Fuck you doin? their looks would say, and inevitably his head rang in a customary instant of shame. Question of his life. People always acted like he was strange. He wouldn't drive his car in the rain. That was one thing people thought was strange. Not that he wouldn't travel. But he thought the rain was bad for the finish. And he got all weird around strangers, not looking people in the eye, but lots of people were like that. Michael was the same. But around Core, around Bug, it was different. I got carried away, he wanted to explain to the Saints who'd give him that look. Ijust got carried away. I'm in love, he'd say. I love being in love. He thought about Bug as he came back into the jail corridor.

  How this started, bringing shit into the jail, was strange - Eddgar's fault, Nile would say, though how much could you fade that way? He'd fucked up, too. He had got himself in a bad place with Hardcore, straight off. Nile knew that. Ordell was
powerful. Right from the giddyap, Nile felt his strength, this vitality that reached through Core, like the force of nature that drove through a plant from root to leaf. He almost said to Eddgar half a dozen times, 'This guy, Ordell, Hardcore, he reminds me of you.'

  He wrote his reports about Core each month, and somehow he started letting Hardcore tell him what to say. Sitting in Nile's cubicle down at Probation in the Central Courthouse, Core would whisper so his raspy voice would not carry beyond the rimpled plastic partitions. 'What-all you scribblin bout me?' Core would clown around, laughing, reaching for the sheet, and finally Nile let him turn it over, like what's the dif, no secrets here. Hardcore read, scratching his long evil fingernails through his scraggly goatee. 'Don't be sayin that, man, don't be gone on bout what a loose-motherfucker I is, you be worryin bout my gangbangin.'

  'No, what should I say?'

  'You know, bro. Be cool. Put down I got me a good job and shit.' 'What job is that, man?'

  'Commu 'ty organizin.' He laughed, because Nile had mentioned Eddgar. Eddgar was already in a heat. This is an opportunity, Nile, he'd say, this is a tremendous opportunity. 'Say I'm like doin that commun 'ty organizin shit.'

  He had. Oh well. When Nile went out to the IV Tower for the home visits, Ordell was always there to greet him, standing on the street, waving his arm around in huge swooping gestures, making fun of somebody, probably both of them.

  'Park right here, thass good, thass good.' He saved the best spot for blocks for Nile. Hardcore put on a good show. His artillery, his musclemen were all stuffed in one black Lincoln half a block down. There was nobody around to wait on Hardcore, just a few neighborhood kids - 'shorties' - he couldn't keep away, and this skinny little smooth-skinned girl, Lovinia, who carried messages. 'Go tell Bolt, done said get wit it,' Core said to her one day.

  'What's that about?' Nile asked.

  'Oh, that.' Hardcore laughed. His mouth was wide and on one side he had several teeth crowned in gold. He never answered. He had the decency not to lie. Of course, each time Nile came he saw more. The guns were out, the Tec-9s and AK-47s. The pagers. Kids running and flying whenever Hardcore walked around. 'You the man,' Hardcore would tell Nile. 'You the man, you tell me when I'm bustin on folks or somethin, you say. ' 'Be done, man,'' I gone quit. This here is jus some bidness, man, got to have some bidness.'

  'You oughta listen to my father. You oughta talk to him,' Nile said. Why would he say that? Especially when, most days, the last thing in the world he wanted to do himself was talk to Eddgar? Kind of swap, Nile supposed. You talk to him, then I don't have

  to.

  Eddgar always had projects for Nile. In college, when Nile was sort of cutting up, doing ts and blues a lot and watching a shitload of MTV, Nile had his favorite job: he was a messenger. The whole shot, the whole thing, Nile loved it. He had the bike, the tights, the optic safety vests, the weak little Styrofoam crash helmet. He went around ripped half the time, with his Walkman blasting, and a walkie-talkie on his waist turned up full volume. He couldn't really hear it, but it vibrated when Jack started yelling in dispatch. That job was the tits. What Nile liked best was the way you were in the scene and not. All these characters are ricocheting off the walls, like man, where's the messenger? Jesus, where's the messenger? And you bop in there - Okay, here's the messenger, take a pill.

  Eddgar hated that job. Nile could just tell Eddgar was waiting him out. He was waiting for Nile to see the job was frostbite city in the winter and stroke city in July. What jacked Eddgar was not so much that Nile was a flunky but that he liked it. Maybe that was part of why it was a great job. Then the second summer Nile was getting fucking prickly heat between his legs from the bicycle seat, and he said something about how they ought to have a union, all the messengers. Eddgar got very intense. He must have asked Nile sixty times if he talked to anybody else, until Nile spent hours wondering what kind of embolism he'd had to even say something like that out loud to Eddgar. Nile quit the job soon after that. He went back to Kindle Community College, he took social-work courses like Eddgar was always saying. It was just easier that way.

  Now and then, Core would go off to do his business. He'd put his hand on Nile's shoulder. 'You cool, man. You okay. Back atcha.' Usually he left Nile on one of those broken benches behind T-4, the IV Tower, facing a sealed-off portion called The Chute, or The Shoot; nobody ever spelled it, so you never knew. It was fenced on one side and bounded by the bricks of the IV Tower on the other. This was the domain of the T-4 Rollers, Core's set. They were all kickin here, wallbanging, drinking Eight Ball, shooting dice. Nile sat and watched, with Core's blessings, but it was as if he wasn't there, some white nothing, no more noticeable than the lid from a paper cup amid the trash moldering at the buildingsides. He saw shit, though. One afternoon, late, Gorgo, a long raw-boned cavalryman, pulled his '86 Blazer with deep-dish tires right up on the walk, N.W.A. blastin through the open windows. Gorgoflew out, G-down, black T-shirt trailing, hard-leg jeans sagging. For reasons Nile could not understand, the Saints around knew he'd been rippin.

  'Yo, Saint, 't's 'up?' they all demanded.

  Gorgo indulged a moment of macho bashfulness. 'Ainnothang.' But soon he was persuaded to share his exploits. 'Just jacked some lames for ten large.'

  'In you ride?' There were a lot of shorties - Unborns and Tiny Gangsters - around now, listening, inquiring. They were incredulous that Gorgo had pulled the stickup in his own truck. It would make him identifiable, open to reprisal.

  'Yay, foo', I ain hidin from no Goobers. Name is Gorgo.'

  'Fat,' these kids all said. But they were flying in a minute. Two Goobers rolled down in different cars, shooting between the buildings from the avenue a hundred yards away. For an instant, as the birds rose, as the kids shouted 'Incomin' and 'Dustin' and dashed for cover, Nile was by himself on the bench, stumped by the resonating sound, which in the open air was somewhat less dramatic than he would have imagined. Eventually, he heard Gorgo screaming, 'Getyo 'self down!' War! he thought, huddled behind the bench. Insane, he thought. The gunfire lasted only a few minutes. From high above, up in T-4, he heard the answering shots as the cars out on Grace Street roared off.

  'Ain gone light up no one from so far. Punk asses!' Gesturing in defiance at the departing cars, Gorgo strode back and forth across the bench in splendid white hightops with fancy laces. He was thumping his chest, rallying his fist, screaming. His satin jacket flew around him and a solid gold .45, four inches across with a diamond in the barrel, swung from his neck. On the bench, one corner was newly splintered by gunfire. He looked below to explain to Nile. 'They-all just trippin. Now they gone tell they homes how they ripped the Sissies, but I got all they loot.' Gorgo reached into a bulging pocket and pulled out the bills which he had taken at gunpoint from the Gangster Outlaws. His smile disclosed that he was missing a front tooth. 'It's on now,' he said, meaning there would be shooting for weeks afterwards, which there was. Gorgo was sixteen, seventeen, by Nile's estimate, and crazy. His Tec-9 had come from somewhere and he wore it upside down, slung from the shoulder, like a soldier in a war flick. They said he would kill anyone. The crazy life! That's what they called it, the bangers. The crazy life. Nile loved it. These kids were ex-treme.

  War, Nile thought for days afterwards. When he was little, a shorty whizzing in his bed every night, war was what terrified him. There was a war out there which he somehow envisioned: artillery fire and the smoke of bombs, the percussive flashes of light and magnesium flares, the sick odors of smoke trailing on the air. War would take him, break his tiny body. War could not be held at bay, could not be kept outside the door. Eddgar wanted war. And Nile was terrified. And now here, amid the guns, these brave warriors, Nile was thinking, Yeah. He was thinking, Cool. It was way weird. But still. So cool for Gorgo to be standing there pounding his chest, like, 'I don't care, live or die, I don't care, I'm here screamin.' Nothing made any more sense than that. No future. That's what Gorgo was screaming, No! to the future. For him it did not even exis
t. Cool, Nile thought for days. Cool.

  After Nile nearly got snuffed that day, Hardcore had Lovinia look after him when Core went off to do his stuff. She was like Hardcore's secretary is what you'd say. Carrying messages. Keeping things straight. She was just so cute and shy. Nile always talked to her, tried at least. At first he could barely get her to say her name. She had one of those dos, a lot of straighteners and stuff, the front plastered out into bangs that looked like sheet metal, and the back formed into a high roll with a little white bow. They'd sit there on one of those broken benches in front of the IV Tower like two frogs on a stone. Not a damn thing to say. This was one of the things in life Nile was purely worst at, making conversation. With girls, he was a lost cause. But even on the job he was like constipated. Some POs were pretty good with clients. Ninety-nine percent of these kids didn't want to tell you shit to start, afraid you 'd jam them with it later, knowing they couldn't make themselves sound right anyway. With Nile, they all sat there, chewing gum, or looking at their fingers, slouched over in the chair, sort of tip-tapping their Nikes and hoping to figure out what little they had to do to get it over with. Nile kept the radio on, just so the silence wasn 't so bad. He'd read questions off the form. Health? School? Have you looked for work? 'Talk sports. Ask them about the Traps, the Hands. Ask them about songs on the radio.' There was all kinds of advice. None of it did Nile much good. With Bug, he was stuck with the dumb and obvious.

  'School?' he asked. 'You go to school?'

  'Nn-uh, not hardly. I don't dis my teachers none. Some fool be crackin up, I turn round and tell him, ' 'Shut yo mouth, punk, we all learnin somethin here.'' But you know, I get tired with it, man. Cause they all the time just tryin to turn me out. On account there all them Goobers round.' He didn't understand what Bug meant. 'You know, they in my face, man, bout how I can't bring no strap with me to school.' A gun, she meant. 'Now I don 'thave no weight, how I gone get one block from that school without my ass gone be smoked? All them Goobers waitin for me. On account of my big brother Clyde?'