The Way Home Page 7

“Anyway. All this talk about the future? It doesn’t mean nothin to me. I mean, I’m in here. This is what I got to deal with now.” Chris swept his arm around the room as if he were showing his father something grand. He pushed his chair back and stood away from the table. “Thanks for coming by. Tell Mom I was askin about her, hear?”

  Flynn put his hand on his son’s forearm and held him a bit too hard. He knew that he should tell Chris he loved him and that now was the time. He tried to say the words but he could not.

  “Sir?” said the guard on duty. “There’s no physical contact allowed.”

  Chris pulled his arm free. He stared at his father for a moment, then made a chin motion to the guard, who let him out the door of the visitation room. Flynn watched his son walk back into jail.

  * * *

  THE BOYS were sitting around in the common room on a cold night in early spring, cracking on one another, talking random shit, and killing time until lights-out. None of them were anxious to go to their cells, where a few would study, fewer would read books for pleasure, many others would masturbate, and most would simply go to sleep as their bodies wound down and the shield they felt they had to carry fell away. Though cell time was the one truly quiet, introspective time of their day, it was also the loneliest, and the most difficult to face.

  Ali Carter and Chris Flynn were seated on the couch, and Ben Braswell was in the fake-leather chair with the rivets in the arms. Luther Moore and Lonnie Wilson were playing Ping-Pong. Lattimer, the old graybeard guard they called Shawshank, was in a hard-back chair too small for him. The boys liked him well enough for what he was, but they would not defer to him and give up a seat more suited to his age, size, and authority.

  They could hear Lawrence Newhouse in the media room, arguing with a boy, trying to get time on the computer, an old, slow machine with a blinking cursor that sat next to a dot matrix printer. Lawrence’s tone was becoming more threatening by the sentence, but Lattimer was not moving from his chair.

  “You better get in there, Shawshank,” said Luther. “Lawrence sound like he ready to blow.”

  “Scott’s in there,” said Lattimer. Scott Stewart, a fellow guard, was built like a Minotaur. “He can handle it.”

  “Scott’s swole,” said Ben.

  “They need to get Bughouse out this unit,” said Ali. “Put him in Unit Twelve.”

  “He ain’t that kind of bad,” said Lattimer. “Lawrence just be talkin, mostly.”

  “Either get him out or put me somewhere else,” said Ali. “ ’Cause I cannot stand to be around that fool anymore.”

  “Won’t be long till you’re gone anyway, young man,” said Lattimer, trying to make eye contact with Ali. “Stay focused on those books and walk that straight line. You keep doing what you been doing, you’ll be all right.”

  “They can put me somewhere else,” said Lonnie Wilson, laying down his paddle, signaling to Luther that their game of table tennis was done. Both of them came to join the group but remained standing, as no one was about to move over and make room for them to sit.

  “Where you want to go?” said Ben.

  “Unit Six,” said Lonnie, running a hand across the crotch of his khakis. “What you think?”

  Lattimer rolled his eyes. Unit 6 was the girls’ building, out in the woods somewhere, out of sight from the boys’ camp. It was on Pine Ridge acreage, surrounded by its own razor wire–topped fence. The conversation was about to go where it usually went this time of night.

  “Boy,” said Lonnie, “I would punish the shit out them girls in Unit Six. I would be like a bull in one of them Chinese shops.”

  “Don’t be runnin your fingers through their hair, though,” said Luther.

  “I know it,” said Lonnie.

  “They put razor blades in their braids!” said Luther.

  “You don’t know nothin, Luther,” said Ali.

  “I know enough not to touch their braids.”

  “It’s a lot of gray girls they got out there, too,” said Lonnie.

  “White Boy would like it out in Unit Six,” said Luther, and Chris felt warmth in his face.

  “Them pale skins are runaways and hos, mostly,” said Lonnie. “But I got love for all the girls. I don’t care what they did to get locked up or what color their skin is. Shoot, I’ll even get with a Mexican. They pink to me, too.”

  “What about, like, Asia girls?” said Luther.

  “’Specially them. I’m all about equal opportunity.”

  “If they got to squat to pee, you gonna take the opportunity,” said Luther, and he and Lonnie Wilson smiled and dapped each other up.

  “Do they let those girls have dogs out there, Shawshank?” said Ben.

  “Hell, no,” said Lattimer.

  “Warden Colvin said we might get puppies,” said Ben.

  “For real?” said Chris. He missed Darby.

  “I saw Colvin today and he said we might. Every unit could have their own.”

  “We could have us a pit,” said Luther. “Or a rot with a head big as a horse. Five would have a fierce-ass dog.”

  “Nah,” said Ben. “It wouldn’t be a dog we’d use to fight. It would be like a pet.”

  “Ya’ll ain’t getting no kind of dog,” said Lattimer. “Some of these boys in here, they’d torture those poor animals. And a lot of you are allergic to dogs and don’t even know it. You’d be surprised how many.”

  “ ’Nother words, your people gonna try to stop it,” said Ali, looking hard at Lattimer.

  “They’d be right to stop it. It’s not in my contract to pick up dog shit.”

  “It’s not about dog shit,” said Ali. “It’s about keeping us low. Any time the superintendent try to do somethin nice for us, the guard union blocks him.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Sure it is. You know it, too.”

  “You’re a smart young man,” said Lattimer. “So I’m gonna tell you something, because I believe you can understand it. This ain’t no country club out here. Y’all are here for a reason. You’ve done wrong and now you here to learn and be reformed. You know what re-formed means? It means you were one thing, and then you get formed into something new. What the superintendent don’t seem to understand is, you boys need to learn consequences, not get rewarded for what you done. And that means you don’t get served ice cream sundaes after dinner or get to talk to fine young women during your reading class. And you sure don’t get the right to have no pets. You see your way out of here? You can eat all the ice cream and have all the women and dogs you want. That’s what law-abiding citizens get to do. But you ain’t that. Not yet. You got to earn that.”

  A crashing sound came from the media room, and all turned their heads. Lawrence Newhouse was cursing, and struggling from the sound of it, and though they did not say it, the boys assumed his conflict was with the big guard, Scott. And then Lawrence came airborne out of the media room, with Scott moving strong toward him, and Lawrence was falling, and before he hit the ground Scott had grabbed his shirt and lifted him back up to give him more of what he’d already had. Scott threw him against a wall of shellacked cinder block. His face hit it pretty hard. Scott put Lawrence’s right arm behind his back and twisted it up, getting control of the young man.

  “Boy, you just had to get on my last nerve,” said Scott, and he began to push Lawrence out toward the cells.

  Most of the boys had lowered their eyes. None of them liked Lawrence, but when the guards won, it was like they had been robbed of a piece of their manhood, too.

  As Lawrence passed he looked at Ali, who had not looked away, and said, “What the fuck you staring at, Holly?”

  Ali said nothing. Lawrence spit a mouthful of blood in the direction of Ali and Chris. Scott hustled him down the hall.

  “Bughouse always be tweakin,” said Luther Moore.

  “That boy just angry,” said Lattimer.

  Ben Braswell looked at Chris. “You think we might get a puppy, man?”

  “We might,” said
Chris, though he knew Ali was correct. The guards’ arm of the FOP union, which tended to fight any reforms the superintendent proposed, would find a way to stop the boys from having pets.

  “You got a dog at home, right?” said Ben.

  “Yeah,” said Chris.

  “You’re lucky,” said Ben. Chris could feel Ali’s knowing stare but did not look his way.

  “Time for y’all to get to your bedrooms,” said Lattimer.

  The boys got up from their seats without objection and headed to their cells.

  As they walked, they could hear the old man still speaking to them, giving them his parting words of inspiration. “Another good day for you fellas. Another day closer to your goal. You get right with God, you gonna get right with yourselves.”

  The boys went down the narrow hall, where Lattimer would wait until they entered their six-by-nine spaces, then use his Joliet key to lock the steel doors behind them. From his own cell, Lawrence Newhouse was alternately screaming and laughing. His anguished wail echoed in the hall.

  “Ain’t no God in here,” said Ali.

  Chris walked into his cell.

  THE NEXT day, while Chris and Ali were walking in the hall between classes, Ali took a fist in the back of the head, for no apparent reason, from a boy named Maximus Dukes. Ali tripped and fell to the floor, severing the bridge of his glasses. Without even thinking of himself, Chris was on Maximus, throwing him up against the wall and delivering several body blows and one solid uppercut to the jaw before Maximus could return fire. He was a big boy and Chris’s rain had not hurt him, and he came back strong. Chris took a glancing temple shot and one deep right to the solar plexus that blew half the wind out of him, but he kept his feet, and several more punches were thrown before the guards charged in and stopped the fight. It had been meaningless, and there was no rancor between any of them again. Because neither Chris nor Maximus had gone down, their reps had been elevated. The fight cost Chris his Level 5, but he would achieve it at a later date.

  Of the many things Chris learned at Pine Ridge, one would be embedded in his mind for years after his release: When you or one of your own is attacked, retaliation is mandatory, no matter the consequences or repercussions. It has to be on.

  The guards had seen Maximus blind-punch Ali. Wasn’t any need for Chris to step in. But it wouldn’t have been as satisfying to see the guards strong-arm Maximus and lead him down the hall. When Chris swung on the boy, his blood got up in a righteous way, and he felt like a man. He wished his father had been there to see that he’d stood tall.

  EIGHT

  FOR SECURITY reasons, doors had been removed in the bathroom stalls, so the boys voided their bowels in full view of the other inmates. It was something Chris had to get used to quickly. Let it bother you, you’d have to hold your shits till you got back in your cell. That wasn’t natural, and no one liked to stink up their rooms.

  On the same level of indignity was the morning ritual of group showers. There were no privacy curtains or barriers of any kind, and if someone was modest or ashamed, he had to get over it, that is if he wanted to be clean. The open area was meant to discourage violence, and perhaps it had been a wise idea, as there were rarely serious altercations in the showers. The best Chris could say about the experience was that it was fast. If you lingered in the shower more than a little bit, the tepid water would go cold.

  Chris and the other boys did not worry about nonconsensual homosexuality in the showers or anywhere else inside the walls. It was the most dreaded aspect of prison for a boy on the outside looking in, but the truth was, oral and anal rape were extremely rare at Pine Ridge. The boys in juvenile had not yet gone to that level of degradation that occurred in adult male prisons. There were scattered consensual homosexual relations here, but, somewhat surprisingly, it was not an issue of derision among the boys who were straight. They knew who among them had gone that way, but didn’t berate them to their faces or, for the most part, behind their backs. Those boys were just as tough as the other boys, and no one was going out of their way to find a fight.

  What took away their dignity was the presence of the guards, who watched the boys shower though a Plexiglas window. The fact that they, fully clothed and outfitted with security gear, could stare at the inmates, naked and completely vulnerable, seemed wrong. Thing of it was, you didn’t know what they were thinking while they were looking at you. Chris was reminded of that one summer when his mother had persuaded his father to vacation with a wealthy neighborhood family, the Rubinos, who had invited them to their house on Martha’s Vineyard. The house was steps away from a nude beach, and from the start, even though the Flynns had been assured that they did not have to “participate,” his father had been annoyed. Many families went naked, including their prepubescent sons and daughters, and there were also grown men on the same beach, naked and alone, and Thomas Flynn said, “Why would a father let his little boy or girl go nude in front of those men? You don’t know what’s going on behind their sun-glasses.” Amanda had said, “Don’t be rude, honey; we’re guests here,” and his dad muttered something about “bored rich people” and left it at that. That was their first and last vacation with the Rubinos. Years later, when Steve Rubino cashed out of his law firm and left his wife and kids for a twenty-two-year-old GW student, Thomas Flynn said, “You know what Rubino was doing up on that beach? He was shopping. I told you that guy wasn’t right.”

  Chris smiled, thinking of his old man. They had a word for the way he was. Crum-something. Always complaining but doing it in a funny way.

  “What you grinnin on, White Boy?” said Lawrence Newhouse, standing beside Chris in the shower.

  Chris shrugged, giving Lawrence nothing.

  “Thinkin about your home?” said Lawrence. “Bet you got a nice one. A real nice family, too.”

  Chris recognized the mention of his family as some kind of threat, but it had no weight or meaning. For a moment, but only for a moment, he thought, Bughouse is right. But to let himself dwell on what he’d had, and on his mistakes, was not productive. He was here now, and it didn’t matter where he’d come from; he was the same as everyone else inside Pine Ridge. Locked up and low.

  “Why you never speak to me, man?” said Lawrence. “You too good?”

  Chris did not answer. He stepped out of the spray and reached for a towel smelling of body odor that hung on a plastic knob.

  “We gonna talk, Christina,” said Lawrence.

  Chris dried himself off and walked away.

  A MAN who had done time at Lorton, and who had written poetry there and eventually a series of popular street-lit message novels aimed at juveniles, came to speak to the inmates of Pine Ridge late in April. The residents of Unit 5, wearing maroon, and Unit 8, wearing gray, were ushered into the auditorium, having walked from the school building through a cold rain. Many of them were soaked and shivering as they sat in their too-small chairs and half-listened to the speaker, who started his talk with the usual I-came-from-the-same-streets-as-you, I-made-it-and-you-can-too platitudes that went through them faster than the greasy Chinese food they used to eat in the neighborhoods they’d come up in.

  Ali Carter and Chris Flynn sat in the row of chairs farthest back in the room. Ali was wearing his glasses, a piece of surgical tape holding them together at the bridge, and a kufi skull cap, finely knitted. The cap was allowed for religious reasons, despite the facility’s no-hat policy. Ali had confessed to Chris that he had been named by his mother after the boxer and held no Muslim beliefs. He wore the skull cap just to mess with the guards, who didn’t like the boys asserting their individuality, and to take a minor victory where he could.

  “When I wrote Payback Time,” said the writer, whose nom de plume was J. Paul Sampson, “I was thinking of young men just like you. Because I was once where you are now, and I understand that revenge is a natural impulse. I understand that you think it’s going to make you feel good.”

  “Not as good as gettin a nut,” said Lonnie Wilson fr
om somewhere in the crowd, and a few of the boys laughed.

  J. Paul Sampson, immaculate in a custom-tailored suit, plowed on. “But revenge, my young brothers, is a dead-end street.”

  Ben Braswell was a row ahead, seated among gray shirts. He was listening to the book writer and nodding his head. In the front row sat Lawrence Newhouse, defiantly slumped in his chair, arms crossed. A half-dozen guards, including Lattimer, and a few teachers, including the school’s earnest, bearded young English teacher, Mr. McNamara, were standing around the perimeter.

  “Where I was,” said J. Paul Sampson, “in lockup? It was full of men who felt they’d been disrespected, and because of that, they acted on impulse and got violent. With the passage of time, as the years went by in prison, they couldn’t even tell you why they’d killed. Because what they did was unreasonable. You know what that means, don’t you, gentlemen? There was no reason.”

  In one of the rows ahead, a young man in a gray polo shirt had turned his chair slightly so that he could look to the back of the room. His gaze was focused steadily on Ali.

  “Why’s that dude eye-fuckin you?” said Chris, keeping his voice low.

  “Calvin Cooke,” said Ali, leaning in close to Chris. “Boy’s from Langdon Park, over there off Rhode Island Avenue. It’s a Northeast-Southeast thing. I guess he feel the need to stare.”

  “So?”

  “He just bein unreasonable,” said Ali with a small smile.

  Ali often got singled out for intimidation because of his short stature and, due to his eyeglasses, his studious appearance. Some called him Urkel as he passed. The ones who said nothing had taken note of his big chest.

  “I’m here to tell you that the life I have now is better than the one I had,” said J. Paul Sampson. “I made a choice when I got out of prison, and I’m a successful and productive member of society today. You can make the same kind of choice.”

  Luther raised his hand. “Do you get paid?”

  J. Paul Sampson chuckled nervously. “Yes, of course.”

  “Do you get pussy?” said another boy, and the auditorium erupted with laughter. A guard pulled that boy roughly out of his chair and led him from the room.