Kindness for Weakness

by Shawn Goodman

  40

  Instead of passing by my desk during mail call, Pike drops a letter in front of me. A real letter! It’s from Mr. Pfeffer. I can’t believe he wrote back. I read it several times, and then ask Mr. Eboue for a piece of tape to put it up on my bedroom wall. It says:

  Dear James,

  I am so sorry to hear that you are locked up. There are many things that I wish to tell you, chief among them that you are a kind, intelligent, and terrific kid. I believe you’ll get out of that place and return to Dunkirk High, where we will toast the occasion with cream soda. (I have changed from root beer in the interest of variety.) You will graduate, and you will make a nice life for yourself. If you can’t see this due to your present circumstances, then you must trust me; I know how the story ends, and it’s a good ending.

  Your friend Samson sounds like a solid man. Stick with him, if you can. I hope you are able to continue to read and write. Remember, voice and perspective! I took the liberty of calling the Morton facility, and was told that only immediate family members may visit. They also told me that I cannot send books, which sounds like a terribly fascist policy, if you ask me. But I will reply promptly to every letter you write. Stay well, and take care of yourself.

  Your friend,

  Stephen Pfeffer

  P.S. Did you finish The Sea Wolf? Find anything good within the pages of the story?

  41

  Response calls ring out on the intercom whenever there’s a fight or a restraint. “Team A report to the cafeteria! Team A report to the cafeteria!” The fight could be for something as simple as one kid brushing against another kid’s desk in class. The owner of the desk might suck his teeth and return to his work, but later, when no one is looking, words will be exchanged.

  “You got a fucking problem, son?” one kid will say.

  “Don’t call me son, bitch.”

  The two will stare at each other, puffed-up chests and beating hearts almost touching like opposing forces in perfect but delicate balance. And something will spark, a movement, the twitch of an eye, and then blows will rain down. They will come out of nowhere, loose and wild arms looping in exaggerated arcs. Cracks and soft meaty thumps will filter through the noise of other kids shouting “Get him!” and “Kick his motherfucking ass!” For a moment, the fight will seem unstoppable, the momentum of violence too great for anyone to halt. But the guards always appear in a solid mass of gray uniforms, big men with radios and cuffs and their practiced “physical restraint procedure.” The fighting boys’ arms will be pinned behind their backs. Levered hip tosses will put them on their faces. The body weight of one or two men will be applied until, either from chest compression or forced submission, the struggle ends.

  But today’s crisis is something bigger.

  “All available staff report to the clinic!” Mr. Pike’s radio says. “All available staff, go to the clinic immediately!”

  The guards look at each other expectantly. Crupier whispers, “Rivera?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe,” Pike says.

  Crupier smiles, excited about the possibility of getting to tangle with the almost famous boxer. He holsters his radio and takes off running, out the door and down the hallway. I watch him join up with a pack of other guards as they hustle toward the clinic.

  Mr. Pike looks more irritable than usual, maybe because he’s stuck behind on the unit. He will miss the action and have to hear from Horvath and Crupier and the others about how they dropped the great Moses Rivera. He clears his throat and says, “Listen up, ladies. We’re on shutdown. So get in your rooms and don’t ask no questions, ’cause I don’t know what’s going on. Now! Move it!”

  Some of the boys grumble and suck their teeth, but we go, and the heavy steel doors lock behind us.

  I talk to Freddie through the vent for a while, but he doesn’t know anything, either.

  “Better not be nothing too bad,” he says. “ ’Cause I got my stage, and the last thing I need is some drama to make everyone in here crazy.”

  I lie down on top of my bed, waiting. I hear the faraway warble of a siren, and if Double X’s stories are true, Moses is wreaking havoc on the guards. Secretly I hope he kicks Horvath’s ass.

  The siren is definitely getting louder, so I put my face against the window and watch the parking lot. A police car and an ambulance pull up. I see a couple of paramedic guys coming through the electric gate, and then, minutes later, they’re wheeling somebody out on a hospital gurney. They put the gurney into the back of the ambulance and drive away. Gone.

  “You see that?” I ask the heater.

  “Yeah,” says Freddie.

  I spend the next hour pacing and doing push-ups, because I’m sure something really bad has happened; the only question is if it’s a kid or a staff member. I go to the heater to ask Freddie what he thinks, but mostly I am freaking out and need someone to talk to. Freddie says he feels it, too, the weird tension in the air, like something terrible has happened, or is happening.

  “Could be a riot,” Freddie says.

  “How do you know?” I say.

  “Last time I was here, two boys faked a fight to distract the guards. Then the others who was in on it fucked up someone else. They punched him in the face so many times that he got knocked out and had a broken cheekbone.”

  “Why did they do it?”

  “ ’Cause he squealed on another kid, that’s why. Don’t do that. No matter what.”

  He takes my silence to mean that I’m not convinced. “I ain’t lying,” he says. “Only thing lower than S.O.’s is kids who rat out other kids.” S.O. stands for “sex offender,” which is what the guards call kids who have molested other kids.

  At nine o’clock we’re let out of our bedrooms one by one to use the toilet and get ready for bed.

  “What about showers?” Levon says.

  I expect Pike to bark or shout, but all he says is “Tomorrow” in a voice so quiet and sad that I have to look twice to make sure it’s him. He doesn’t even bitch when it takes us twice as long as it should to wash up. Back in my room I sit all night by my door, looking out the small rectangular window. Pike is at his station in a plastic chair with his elbows on his knees, rocking gently back and forth. Aside from picking up the phone a couple of times, he doesn’t get out of the chair. I pass this information to Freddie, who isn’t able to see from the angle of his door window.

  “Keep watching,” he says. “Something bad is going down, and I wanna know what it is.”

  “I’ll watch,” I say, knowing full well that neither of us will sleep a wink tonight.

  At midnight Crupier, Pike, and Mr. Eboue burst into the staff office. They are talking and gesturing wildly, but I can’t hear what they’re saying because the door connecting the office to the unit floor is closed. I’m not sure, but it looks like Crupier is crying. His face is red, and he keeps swiping at his eyes. Mr. Eboue puts a hand on his shoulder, but Crupier pulls away and shoves open the door to the main hallway.

  When I tell Freddie, he says, “Shit. Somebody dead.”

  42

  The remaining guards stay in the staff office, talking through the rest of the night. At wake-up, all three of them, Pike, Horvath, and Eboue, unlock our rooms and gather us in the dayroom.

  Mr. E says, “How many of you remember Oskar? Raise your hands.”

  It’s all of us except for Kyle, who arrived after Tony left. Kyle’s from Syracuse and has the worst acne I’ve ever seen. He’s quiet but supposedly shot another kid in a robbery.

  “I’m sorry to tell you this, but Oskar passed away last night.”

  There’s a moment of dull faces and silence.

  “Where was he?” Wilfred asks.

  “Right here,” says Mr. Pike. “At Morton. He got back from the hospital last week.”

  “How’d he die?” says Levon.

  “Suicide,” says Mr. Eboue. “He hanged himself. That’s private information, but I’m telling you this because you knew him, and because you’ll hear
about it anyway. You deserve to know right away, and to hear it from one of us.”

  The rest of the morning is quiet and serious, but the other guys eat everything on their plates at breakfast: chocolate chip muffins, small boxes of Frosted Flakes cereal, and Eggo waffles with butter and syrup. Freddie, who has the strangest eating habits of anyone on the unit, sprinkles his waffles with a fried egg and Frosted Flakes. Then he rolls it and stuffs the thing into his mouth. Levon, who is surprisingly proper about table manners and the overall cleanliness of the unit, shakes his head in disgust.

  I peel back the foil on two small syrup packages and drip the syrup into each individual square of my Eggos. But when I’m done, I can’t eat, because I’ve got this image stuck in my head of Oskar hanging in his room from a shoelace or a bedsheet. In my head, I see his body slowly twisting around. When he turns enough to face me, I look right into those big vacant eyes. And what’s really freaky is that I can’t tell if he’s dead, because it’s the same expression he had the last time I saw him in the gym, just after he sank that shot with the basketball.

  After breakfast Wilfred asks if we’re going to have a funeral.

  “No funeral here,” Mr. Pike says. “His family will have one for him.”

  Already Wilfred’s hand is stretching up to the ceiling, ready for the next question.

  “What?” Pike says, getting a little pissed off. Strangely, his irritability is comforting, as though things might be returning to normal.

  “Then how are we s’posed to say goodbye?”

  Pike sighs. “I don’t know, Wilfred. Maybe ask the chaplain if you go to church this Sunday.”

  “Okay,” Wilfred says, apparently satisfied.

  The whole question of a funeral makes me think of the scene in The Sea Wolf when Wolf Larsen’s first mate drinks himself to death. After cursing and kicking the dead body (for leaving the ship shorthanded at the beginning of a voyage), the Wolf orders the corpse to be sewn up in some scrap canvas along with a sack of coal (for weight, to pull the body down to the bottom of the sea). Nobody on board the Ghost has a Bible, so the Wolf says:

  “I only remember one part of the service, … and that is, ‘And the body shall be cast into the sea.’ So cast it in.”

  And then Van Weyden says, “The cruelty of the sea, its relentlessness and awfulness, rushed upon me. Life had become cheap and tawdry, a beastly and inarticulate thing, a soulless stirring of the ooze and slime.”

  That’s how it feels right now. Oskar’s dead, and all that’s left is a pile of kids’ books. Cheap and tawdry. I don’t know what we could do to make it seem better. Maybe have a service. We should at least try.

  Later, I see people from the state walking around the facility to investigate. They wear suits, with ID badges hanging around their necks, and they smile politely. In class Ms. Bonetta tries to talk to us about Oskar. She says that every suicide is preventable, if only we can notice the signs. But then she gets too teary to continue and excuses herself. Pike takes over and puts on a video of The Outsiders, which is an old movie that I think is based on a book. It’s really good, and soon I’m happy to be lost in the struggles of Ponyboy and Johnny, instead of thinking about Oskar and my own problems. But then the two boys rescue some kids from a burning church, and Johnny gets his back broken by a giant timber. He’s taken to a hospital and declared a hero, but then he dies! I wasn’t expecting him to die, and maybe it’s because of what just happened to Oskar, but I feel like I’m going to freak out.

  “Sit down, James,” Mr. Pike shouts.

  I find myself standing up at my desk, breathing fast, eyes stinging with the beginnings of tears. Because of what just happened to Johnny, and how unfair it is. I sit down, but I really want to cry out, or scream, or hit something. I don’t understand why he had to die. Is it because he was kind and tried to help those kids? Is that the message? It must be, because at the end of the movie this guy, Dally, who’s a friend of Ponyboy’s, says, “You’d better wise up, Pony … you get tough like me and you don’t get hurt. You look out for yourself and nothin’ can touch you.…”

  It’s a really intense, crazy scene, and you just know Dally’s going to do something really stupid because he can’t accept that someone as nice and good as Johnny can die. And sure enough, in one of the final scenes, he points an empty gun at the cops. I forgot about the other boys in the room with me, and now they’re all shouting out at the cops.

  “Don’t shoot!” says Wilfred. “He’s just bugging out ’cause his friend died!”

  “He ain’t got no bullets!” says Double X.

  But the cops don’t listen. And in a way, Dally is committing suicide—because he knew this was going to happen. He wanted it. All of which makes me think again about Oskar. He wanted to die, too, and I didn’t even really know him. I don’t think anybody did. How are you supposed to know someone who stares at his hands all day, and cracks his head open on a concrete wall? I think the other boys are just as confused, because, with the exception of a few meaningless comments like, “Damn!” and “That sucks,” they, too, have had nothing to say about Oskar’s death.

  I should probably feel something more about his death, but I don’t. It’s messed up that he killed himself, and it’s messed up that the guards broke Bobby’s arm. And it’s not right, either, that we have to spend months in a place where no one is getting any better. No one is learning anything, as far as I can see. In some ways, it seems like people are getting worse. Am I? I don’t think so, but who knows.

  What’s most surprising to me about Oskar’s death is how upset the guards appear. From the day-to-day stuff, you’d think that most of them hate us. Except for Samson and Eboue, they call us names and tell us that we’re never going to amount to anything. They laugh at us and humiliate us practically every day.

  But now they seem somber and thoughtful, like it’s a huge tragedy and every one of our miserable lives is precious. Even Horvath has been quiet and sad-looking. He’s got dark circles under his eyes, and greasy stuck-down hair, like he’s been up for days without showering. He still sucks coffee from his giant beer keg of a thermos, but there are no bags of fast food from McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Wendy’s, or Subway. He hasn’t even joked around with the other guards, his typical mean remarks replaced by grunts and a far-off stare.

  Crupier hasn’t returned to work, and I heard that he was the one who had to cut Oskar down. Apparently Oskar had ripped out a cord or piece of piping from the side of a mattress and strung himself up with it from a light fixture in the ceiling.

  At lights-out, I can’t sleep. I do a hundred push-ups and squats at a time, but after, I still see Oskar turning around and around on his mattress cord, his rhyming picture books scattered on the floor beneath him. I pull out The Sea Wolf and read the part about the burial at sea, which gives me an idea. I call out to Freddie through the heater vent. “I want to do a funeral service for Oskar.”

  Freddie says, “Okay. Just tell me what to do.”

  “Repeat after me. ‘And the body shall be cast into the sea.’ ”

  He says, “And the body shall be cast into the sea.”

  “I’m sorry you died, Oskar,” I say. “I didn’t know you, but I hope you find peace.”

  “Amen,” says Freddie.

  I continue reading out loud:

  “ ‘They elevated the end of the hatch-cover with pitiful haste, and, like a dog flung overside, the dead man slid feet first into the sea. The coal at his feet dragged him down. He was gone … the dead man, dying obscenely, buried sordidly, and sinking down, down … And this strange vessel, with its terrible men, pressed under by wind and sea and ever leaping up and out, was heading away into the south-west, into the great and lonely Pacific expanse.’ ”

  43

  Dear Mr. Pfeffer,

  Thank you for writing back to me. I really appreciate it, because no one else writes, and also because you are someone I respect. You’ve taught me a lot through the books you’ve given me, even if it’s ha
rd to show what I’ve learned in real life. I think the reason for this is because Morton is a bad place where everyone is stressed and on each other’s last nerve. One boy got his arm broken by the guards for nothing. Another boy killed himself. I hardly knew him, but I think he was crazy. His name was Oskar.

  Another reason why it’s hard to show what I’ve learned is because I am about as out of place here as Van Weyden was on the Ghost. All of the boys are tough and ready to fight. And there’s a guard, Horvath, who’s like Wolf Larsen, except not as smart.

  There are so many parallels (between my life right now and that book) that it seems too much for coincidence, like you gave it to me to prepare. I know that’s not possible, but I won’t deny that I skipped ahead to the end. I figured that if Van Weyden made it, if he was able to stand up to Wolf Larsen and live, then I’d be okay, too. But then I learned that almost everyone on the ship dies! And Van Weyden survives only because Wolf Larsen has a stroke, which seems too convenient, like Jack London didn’t end it the way it’s really supposed to, with one of them killing the other. And this (realizing how it should end) worries me, especially if Horvath is my Wolf Larsen. What a twisted thought! I hope to God it’s not true.

  Anyway, it’s my new favorite book, and I’m pretty sure I’ve found one of the secrets you mentioned. It’s in an exchange between Van Weyden and Wolf Larsen on page 177:

  Van Weyden: “You will observe there,” I said, “a slight trembling. It is because I am afraid, the flesh is afraid; and I am afraid in my mind because I do not wish to die. But my spirit masters the trembling flesh and the qualms of the mind. I am more than brave. I am courageous. Your flesh is not afraid. You are not afraid. On the one hand, it costs you nothing to encounter danger; on the other hand, it even gives you delight. You enjoy it. You may be unafraid, Mr. Larsen, but you must grant that the bravery is mine.”