Lockdown

by Walter Dean Myers

  “So how does that make you feel?”

  “How does it make me feel? I feel like it’s just wrong, that’s all,” I said.

  “You want some coffee?”

  “I should take some,” I said. “But I don’t like it.”

  “You want to talk about what happened at the precinct yesterday?” he asked.

  “Nothing happened,” I said. “They said they were considering laying some new charges on me and I didn’t know what they were talking about. You know, I got busted two years ago for taking some prescription pads and—”

  “Stealing some prescription pads—”

  “Yeah, stealing some prescription pads,” I said. “Now they’re saying somebody took some drugs from the doctor’s office, too. I didn’t do that and I’ve never heard of anybody laying on charges for something that happened two years ago and it wasn’t homicide.”

  “The detectives called me after you left and said that you were considering copping a plea,” Mr. Cintron said. “They said you were facing twenty years and you were looking to cop to a lesser for three years.”

  “They might have said that, but I still don’t know what they’re talking about. They said that Little Freddy told them that I took the drugs from the doctor’s office and messed with them, and then I sold them and somebody died—”

  “That’s homicide. ‘Somebody died’ is automatically homicide until it gets to the D.A.’s office and he makes the final decision about what the charge is going to be.”

  “But I didn’t take any drugs out of the doctor’s office. I took the pads. The prescription pads were all I took. He had some money on the desk and I didn’t even take that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I was scared and wanted to get out of there. I know some guys get off breaking into people’s houses and offices and things, but I don’t,” I said. “Soon as I was inside his office, I was looking to snatch some pads and run.”

  “You knew where the pads were?”

  “Yeah, Freddy told me.”

  “What’s Freddy been doing this last year or so?” Mr. Cintron was putting more sugar in his coffee. “If I gave you the phone, could you find out what he was doing?”

  “I don’t know. I could ask my brother or maybe my friend, but I don’t want to get them involved in nothing.”

  “If you’re not involved in anything, and if you didn’t take the drugs like the city detectives are saying, how can you get somebody else involved?” Mr. Cintron asked.

  “Yo, I don’t mean any disrespect, sir, but how am I involved?” I asked. “Y’all took me down there and they questioned me and told me about the drugs and I didn’t know anything about them.”

  Mr. Cintron pushed the phone toward me. “Call your brother,” he said.

  “I don’t know if I should,” I said.

  “It’s unofficial, just between you and me,” Mr. Cintron said.

  I picked up the phone and dialed home. I was hoping that Mom or Icy answered.

  “The Andersons!” Icy.

  “Hey, baby girl, how you doing?”

  “Reese, how you doing?” she asked. “You coming home?”

  “No, not yet,” I said. “Say, Icy, is Willis home?”

  “You don’t want to talk to me?”

  “I do, but this is about some business,” I said. “I’ll call you Sunday if I can borrow some money.”

  Mr. Cintron nodded to me.

  “Willis isn’t home,” she said. “Just me. What time are you going to call Sunday?”

  “If I call at eight in the morning will that be too early?”

  “No, I’ll be up,” Icy said. “And you’d better call. What did you want Willis for?”

  “I wanted to know—I wanted to know if he’s heard anything about Freddy,” I said.

  “Freddy Booker, that light-skinned boy that was in your case?”

  “Yeah, just tell Willis—”

  “He got arrested.”

  “Willis?”

  “No, that Freddy. I don’t know why he got arrested. Probably drugs, because that’s what he does. He’s pretty much messed up,” Icy said. “You want me to ask around?”

  “No!” I heard myself holler into the phone. “Look, Icy, don’t say nothing to anybody. I’ll call you Sunday, okay?”

  “Eight o’clock.”

  It took me a minute to come down off the phone call and tell Mr. Cintron I didn’t really know what Freddy was doing. “I know he got arrested but I don’t know what he was doing.”

  “Why are you upset?” Mr. Cintron asked.

  “That was my baby sister on the phone,” I said. “I don’t like her knowing who got arrested and who using drugs and everything. You know, she should just be going to school.”

  “If Freddy got arrested, he’s probably looking to bring as many people into the case as he can,” Mr. Cintron said.

  “Why would he want to bring me into it?” I asked. “I didn’t do anything to him. Even when our case went down, he was the one who turned me in. I didn’t snitch him out.”

  “He sounds like a career thug,” Mr. Cintron said. “And there are two good reasons to bring you into the case. If you did anything, or if he can pin something on you, he can cooperate with the prosecution and hope to get a lighter sentence. If you didn’t do anything and went on trial with him and you looked innocent, then maybe the jury would let him slide because the overall case was weak. Remember what I told you about those crabs?”

  “You think that shit is correct?” I asked.

  “No, but I think it’s the life you’re in when you walk through some of the doors you’ve been walking through,” he said. He stood up.

  “You going to loan me the money to call Icy on Sunday?”

  He looked at his calendar. “I’ll be in Sunday morning for about an hour,” he said. “You get your breakfast Sunday morning and I’ll have Pugh or whoever’s on let you eat it in here and make the phone call. Okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “And try not to get into a fight with anybody between now and then.”

  CHAPTER 26

  “So you got funded?”

  “No, I did not get funded, Mr. Robinson,” Miss Rossetti said. “I am just doing the job that I am scheduled to do.”

  “This is the second group meeting we’ve had this month,” Play went on.

  “And with your kind permission, sir, we will continue,” Miss Rossetti said.

  “Yes, ma’am.” Play was wearing a half smile like he owned it and slouching in his chair with his legs stretched out in front of him.

  There was a new girl in the group, and she was fine as she wanted to be. She looked a little Spanish, with dark hair and eyes, but I wasn’t sure.

  “In our last session we discussed what made us afraid,” Miss Rossetti said, looking around the room. “This time I want to know what each of you feels you can do to make someone else happy. And we’ll start with Mr. Robinson. I think your first name is…Eddie?”

  “I let people I like call me Play.”

  “What shall I call you?” Miss Rossetti asked.

  “That all depends on how attracted to me you are,” Play said. “If you think me and you can be—”

  “You can start, Mr. Robinson,” Miss Rossetti said, her voice rising. “What do you think you could do to make someone else happy?”

  “I could make my parents happy if I got a good job,” Play said. “Maybe tighten up a gig with the post office. Nine to five. They would dig that big-time.”

  “That’s a good observation,” Miss Rossetti said. “You show very good understanding of what someone else feels and thinks. How about you, Deepak? You want to run with the ball?”

  “My parents would be happy if I became an engineer,” Toon said. “I wouldn’t be as good an engineer as my brother, but that would make them happy, I think.”

  “Very good. Paola?” She was speaking to the new girl.

  “My parents would be happy if I let my grandmother adopt my son,�
� Paola said. “If she adopted him legally, then she could get ADC and she would be eligible for Section Eight housing on her own. Plus, she could get some start-up money from Family Services to help her set up her own place. And they even speak Spanish down there.”

  “You going to let her adopt your kid?” King Kong asked.

  “Uh-uh.” Paola shook her head. “I only got a five-year bid, and if God is on my side, I can walk in three, maybe even two and a half. Then if I can find somebody to hook up with, I can get my son back if he’s in the foster system. But if the legal thing goes through with my grandmother, I can’t get him back because my moms is going to want to keep Abuela on welfare so she don’t have to support her.”

  “That’s very technical, Paola,” Miss Rossetti said.

  “Baby, you got to know the technical stuff to survive in New York,” Paola said. “The other thing I could do to make my parents happy is to marry some rich dude, but that ain’t hardly happening because you got to be hooked up even to meet a rich dude.”

  “You never know what love will produce,” Miss Rossetti said. “Mr. Right might just come along. You’re a very attractive young woman.”

  “Honey, there’s so many women out there ready to satisfy any man who comes along that pretty ain’t hardly cutting it. Being smart isn’t enough, and being nice isn’t enough,” Paola said. “I’ve got a baby and a jail record. Don’t even talk to me about no Mr. Right.”

  Miss Rossetti took a deep breath and smiled. She didn’t call King Kong’s name but she kind of gestured toward his dumb butt.

  “What I would like to do to make somebody else happy is to have my own place, you know.” King Kong pulled at his crotch. “Right now—not right now but before I came up here—I was living in the shelter. Really, I was living in two shelters. Sometimes I stayed uptown with the folks, you know, on 126th Street. That was okay and I could deal with it. I was also spending some time downtown with the white folks because I thought that was interesting. I mean, downtown was where you had a whole different set of people—”

  “But how would you make someone else happy, Mr. Sanders?”

  “Well, you know, I’m thinking—if I had my own place, I could invite a girl up to the place and have some wine or something or maybe order out some fried chicken and have it up there or maybe even I could have my cousin drop by and check out my crib. Then he would see that I was doing okay and he could split and think maybe he would drop by again if he was in the neighborhood. He wouldn’t be falling out behind that scene but maybe it would give him something else to do and that would make him happy.”

  “Very good,” Miss Rossetti said. “What I particularly like is that none of your answers are egocentric. They all consider other people. How about you, Mr. Anderson?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “You know, you talking about what we would do and what we would say and whatnot, but if I said I would run around the park and jump up and dance and that would make my moms happy, what would you say? You would say that you can’t do that because you locked up in here. If I said I would go over to Riverside Park and play two-on-two basketball against those white boys that come over to the park on weekends—they can play some ball—you would say that I can’t do that because I’m in jail.”

  “That’s right, but there are things—”

  “Yo, let me run it, Miss Rossetti. Okay?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Okay, what I’m saying is that this isn’t my world you’re talking about. I can dig what you’re saying about going with somebody else’s feelings and what they’re thinking instead of just dealing with what’s on your mind. But I know there’s a curtain that divides your world from mine.”

  “Because you’re black, you mean?”

  “You sure jumped on that in a heartbeat,” Kat said.

  “Kat, I’m trying to figure out where Mr. Anderson is going, that’s all,” Miss Rossetti said.

  “It ain’t just about black and white,” I said. “I got this friend of mine who’s white. So, he was in a war and he got captured. Nothing he could do except what they told him. Then the war was over and his family didn’t do nothing for him. Then he got old and ended up in a nursing home.”

  “How old is your friend?” Miss Rossetti asked.

  “About seventy-six, maybe seventy-seven,” I said.

  “He wasn’t in no war because you can’t be in a war if you that old,” King Kong said.

  “The guy he’s talking about wasn’t always that old,” Leon said. “My grandfather was in a war back in the day when they was fighting the Vietnams. There’s always a war going on.”

  “Mr. Anderson?”

  “Yeah, well, him getting caught up in a war meant that he couldn’t do what he thought was right,” I said. “And then he came out the war and he wasn’t getting on too tough, and then he got old and, like, feeble. At first he told me he was kicking it big-time, being a hero to his family and getting presents and visits and stuff all the time, but then, when the hammer fell, I found out that he was just scraping by.”

  “He was fronting and grunting,” Kat said.

  “Yeah, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t have his head together,” I said. “I think he had his head together but it didn’t make any difference. He couldn’t make anybody else happy, and he couldn’t make himself happy.”

  “Why did you become his friend?” Toon asked.

  “That doesn’t make any difference,” I said.

  “It makes a difference to me,” Toon said.

  “That’s because you and Toon sweet on each other,” King Kong said.

  “Me and your mama sweet on each other, too,” I said. “But the ASPCA don’t like me messing with her.”

  “That’s enough!” Miss Rossetti’s voice rose to the ceiling.

  Mr. Pugh had been sitting across from us playing solitaire on the computer, but soon as he heard Miss Rossetti’s voice, he jumped up and started toward us. King Kong stood and took a step toward me but then turned and looked at Mr. Pugh and sat down again.

  Yeah. Both of us knew he didn’t want any more of me.

  Miss Rossetti held her hand up to keep Mr. Pugh back and things got real quiet.

  Mr. Pugh had about four different faces. He had his normal face which was like maybe he was lost. He had a smiling face, which was like maybe he was lost but he didn’t care. He had his mad face, which looked like he wanted to kill you, and then he had this face that kind of darkened with his eyes darting around, like, “Hey, please give me a half of an excuse to turn your ass inside out.” When he got that face on, I didn’t even look at him, just down at the floor.

  “Okay, so Mr. Anderson’s friend was making up parts of his life,” Miss Rossetti said as she sat back down. “Is that all bad?”

  “If you got a police record it’s not bad,” Leon said. “Because the truth isn’t going to help you in the real world.”

  “I don’t recommend lying,” Miss Rossetti started, “but I do understand your point. Mr. Anderson, can you think of anything that would make somebody else happy?”

  “No, but I need to because I’m going to call my sister Sunday and I really would like to say something to her to make her happy. She hates me being in jail and I hate being here away from her. So I would like to think of something to say to her that would—but I can’t tell her no lies.”

  “She’s only nine, right?” Play asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Tell her you’ll buy her a bracelet when you get out,” he said. “Girls like jewelry and she’ll like it because you bought it for her.”

  “Is she smart?” Kat asked.

  “She’s my sister, ain’t she?” I said.

  “Yo, bro, we’re not in Harvard,” Kat said. “This is jail.”

  Everybody cracked on that.

  “Yeah, she’s real smart,” I said.

  “I agree with Little Ears,” Paola said. “She can even imagine the bracelet or look for a nice one in the stores.”

  “Li
ttle Ears?” Play was touching his ears.

  “Maybe you could write a book about her life,” Toon said. “I think she would like that very much.”

  “Yeah, that’s good thinking,” I said. “She’d like that.”

  Toon smiled.

  The group thing ended and we went straight to dinner. I was hungry as anything but they had cabbage, some kind of chopped-up ham, and scrambled eggs. I ate the cabbage and the eggs and left the ham. For dessert they had the same old, same old ice cream, but this time they had potato chips instead of pound cake. Lame for days.

  “When I get out of here, all I’m going to eat for the next five years is steak,” Play said.

  “How come you didn’t say nothing when that girl called you Little Ears?” I asked him.

  Play just grinned. “I think she’s trying to get with me. I hope she makes it.”

  CHAPTER 27

  Saturday morning I got a call from the precinct. Detective Rhodes asked me if I had made my mind up yet.

  “About what?”

  “Do the math,” he said. “Twenty years or three. Which do you want?”

  “I got to think about it,” I said.

  “You got to think about it?” He sounded surprised. “We’ll pick you up Monday. You got forty-eight hours to decide where you’re going to spend the rest of your life. You’d better think hard, my man.”

  The phone clicked off.

  My stomach began to cramp and I just wanted to puke. When Mr. Pugh took our group to breakfast, I joined the sick line. What I wished, what I really wished, was that I was getting the drugs that some of the kids at Progress got every day. Play told me that those drugs helped them get through the day. God knew I was needing something to get me through.

  Saturday was forever long. Sadness was like sucking on me and taking the life out of my body. I felt so weak, I was having trouble standing up. There was no way I could make twenty calendars. I’d be thirty-five when I got out—if I got out. I’d probably meet some freak like King Kong or Cobo in jail and get killed. On the other hand, I didn’t want to cop to a three bid, either. Any way I looked at the situation, it was foul.