I hated the idea of three more years, because it was already making my stomach turn. I didn’t see what else I could do. I couldn’t take a chance on a twenty bid.
“Where are you, Reese?” Simi’s voice startled me. “Boy, you looked like you were a million miles away!”
“Just thinking,” I said.
“You come up with something good?” she asked, hands on her hips.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Life goes on, honey,” she said. “Sometimes it seems hard, but you have your whole life ahead of you. Don’t forget that. Now come on downstairs with me, because the woman in three eighteen is complaining that I didn’t sweep her floor and is threatening to write to the president.”
CHAPTER 31
We cleaned 318 with the woman standing in the doorway complaining the whole time. Then I went back to Mr. Hooft’s room and he told me how mean the doctor had been to him.
“All doctors like to hurt people,” he whispered to me. “They just pretend to help you!”
“That’s not true,” I said. “They don’t want to hurt people.”
“Come over here,” he said. “Sit next to me.”
I was surprised, but I sat on the bed next to him. He put his hand on mine. “You should always try to be a good boy,” he said. “It’s better that way. Then you won’t be in jail. You going to try?”
“I’ll try,” I said.
He motioned for me to go away and I went and sat in the chair. I felt a little funny, but really glad because I knew he was trying to be my friend. Like Toon was trying, and it was hard for all of them. And for me.
Mr. Pugh was talking to Father Santora in the lobby when I went down at four.
“Everybody likes Reese,” the priest was saying. “He’s a fine young man and a good worker.”
“Okay, so maybe I won’t shoot him on the way back to the facility,” Mr. Pugh said.
Father Santora laughed and the receptionist laughed, but I didn’t think it was all that funny.
Mr. Pugh sat me up in the front of the van and cuffed me to the grating that separated the cab from the back.
“You think I might overpower you and escape?” I asked.
“I used to play right tackle for Mississippi,” he said. “I could crush your black ass with one hand and eat a sandwich with the other hand.”
He acted kind of pissed off and I didn’t say anything else. I was glad to sit in front instead of bouncing around in the rear. We drove through the city and I could see dudes just strolling and taking care of their business and it reminded me again of how much I wanted to be free.
“You like Spanish girls?” Mr. Pugh asked me as we passed a crowd of kids.
“I like all girls,” I said.
“I never hear you guys talking about girls,” he said. “If I was locked up, I’d be thinking about girls all the time.”
“If you were locked up, you’d be thinking about getting free all the time,” I said. “You can’t be in jail and think like you’re out in the world.”
“So I hear you’re in trouble again,” he said.
“They’re talking about some charge I don’t know anything about,” I said. “They said I stole some drugs from the doctor’s office two years ago and gave them to the guy who was arrested the same time I was. He messed with the drugs and somebody died or something, and they want to run a homicide charge on me.”
“You do what they said?”
“No, but it don’t matter,” I said. “When I was on trial before, I looked over at the jury and they looked at me, and I could tell they were going to toast me. I go to trial again, the same thing is going to happen. The detectives said that they might give me a chance to cop to a lesser and pull a three instead of a twenty.”
“Oh, yeah?” Mr. Pugh looked at me. “That’s a good break for you, huh?”
“I don’t know, I guess.”
“What you going to plead guilty to?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “They didn’t tell me yet.”
Some brothers walked in front of the van and stopped in the middle of the street. One was on his cell phone. Mr. Pugh hit his horn and one of the brothers grabbed his crotch with one hand and gave Mr. Pugh the finger with the other.
Mr. Pugh hit his horn again and the brother came over to the driver’s side. Mr. Pugh pulled his gun and held it on his lap.
“Yo, bitch!” The black guy reached in and grabbed Mr. Pugh by the collar.
Mr. Pugh grabbed the guy’s wrist and put the gun right under his chin. “Is your mama in heaven, boy?” he asked. “And do you want to go see her? Is that why you need to mess with a cop this afternoon?”
“Hey, I’m just playing, officer.”
Two of the other dudes came over and started cursing but backed off when they saw Mr. Pugh’s gun.
“Now, I got to get the criminal with me back to jail,” Mr. Pugh said. “But I got room in the back if you need a lift.”
“No, man, I’m good,” the brother said.
Mr. Pugh let him go and the guy backed away. Mr. Pugh put the gun back in his holster as we moved off.
“You know how much I love that?” he asked.
“Yeah, I got an idea,” I said.
We drove for ten more minutes before he said anything else, but he kept looking at me like he wanted to say something. I hoped he wasn’t going off or something. When he did speak, I didn’t know what he was talking about.
“You know what my daddy used to say?” he asked. “He used to say that the snake that’s gonna kill you is probably wearing your damned shirt.”
I waited for him to say something else, but he didn’t.
We didn’t talk anymore until we got to Progress and he was uncuffing me.
“Why did you say a snake was going to be wearing your shirt?” I asked him.
“I didn’t say it,” Mr. Pugh said. “That was what my daddy used to say. He meant that if somebody was going to mess you up, it was probably going to be you.”
I thought back to what we had been talking about before the brother came over to the car. Mr. Pugh had asked me what I was going to plead guilty to and I said I didn’t know. I wondered if he was saying I shouldn’t plead guilty to nothing. When he was patting me down, I wanted to ask him, but he finished real quick and was walking away before I got my thoughts together.
I was scared that the two detectives from Harlem would be waiting for me, but I didn’t see them when I hit the corridor. Everybody was lining up for dinner and it was Play, instead of one of the regular guards, taking us into the dining room. Me and him sat together after we got our food, and I asked him if he had seen the detectives that afternoon.
“Yeah, they were looking for you, man,” he said. “One of them had a ball and chain to tie around your ankle and the other one had one of those black-and-white-striped prison suits for you to wear.”
“That’s supposed to be funny, huh?”
“They know where you are,” Play said. “If they wanted to come and get you, they wouldn’t be riding all the way up here. They probably would have had Mr. Pugh just drop you off at Alcatraz or wherever.”
“Alcatraz is in California,” I said.
“Then they could fly you in one of those prison planes,” Play said. “Remember that picture with Nicolas Cage?”
“Yeah.”
I told him I remembered the picture, but that didn’t stop Play from telling me the whole story again.
While Play talked, I was wondering about what Mr. Pugh had said and what he meant. I didn’t want to catch a twenty bid, but I knew I couldn’t tell what was going to happen if I went on trial.
The food didn’t go down and I asked the cook for two apples when I turned my tray in.
“No,” he said.
“I can’t eat now,” I said. “My stomach is upset.”
“No.”
I would have loved to punch him right in his greasy face.
What I told myself was that the detectives wouldn’
t come after six, but I kept looking at the door anyway. Every time it opened, my heart jumped a little.
CHAPTER 32
The word was out that Toon got a release date.
“Yo, Toon, what’s the first thing you’re going to do when you get home?” I asked him. Me and Play had sat with him off to the side of the rec room.
“Maybe I’ll try to memorize one book in school,” Toon said, pushing his glasses up on his nose. “I think if I memorize one whole book then I can just work on the other ones and get better grades.”
“Hey, I might try that too,” Play said.
“You going back to school?” I asked.
“I got to unless I go into one of those special programs they have in the Bronx,” Play said. “I got to get either my GED or diploma if I want to go to college one day.”
“I would like to get into a good high school,” Toon said.
“You will,” I said. “You’re smart enough.”
“Brothers always says that,” Toon said. He looked down but I saw he was smiling.
Eight thirty was lights-out, but I didn’t mind. I was tired anyway.
When I woke up, it was three seventeen in the morning. There was some scuffling in the hallway and I kept real still to hear what was going on, but I couldn’t tell. I thought I heard Mr. Wilson’s voice. Then everything was quiet.
I remembered the dream I had been having. Icy was a movie star and I was a photographer taking her picture. She was walking on that red carpet in front of a light blue board—maybe sky blue—and she was with Paris Hilton, Mariah Carey, and Alicia Keys. Then Bow Wow got into the dream and he was escorting her and all the while I was snapping pictures like a professional. Every once in a while she would look over at me and give me a big smile and I was snapping perfect pictures and she was looking better than all the other women there. It was a boss dream.
Six thirty formation. Mr. Cintron had us.
“You guys have problems, you need to come to a staff member and talk about it,” he said. “I realize that’s not always easy, but you need to give it a try. Last night we had to transfer Trevedi to the L wing. I hope we don’t have to transfer anybody else. Anderson, you see me after breakfast.”
I didn’t know why they had to transfer Toon to the L wing, but it usually meant that he had went off or something.
At breakfast, Leon said that Toon had tried to hang himself.
“Didn’t he get a date?” Play asked me.
“Yeah.” I remembered Toon in the visiting room with his parents yelling at him and then him saying how he was never as good as his brother. Toon knew about home.
Mr. Cintron didn’t look too anxious when he told me to see him after breakfast, and when I went to his office, his secretary didn’t say anything, so I thought it wasn’t about the detectives. I sat there for five minutes on the wooden bench before he called her and told her to send me in.
“Okay, Reese, so you’ve got seventy-two dollars in your account now,” he said. “You made minimum wage, which added up to a hundred thirty-four dollars, but they took out taxes, and we’re charging you for transportation to and from the senior citizens’ home.”
“You’re charging me for Mr. Pugh driving me back and forth?” I asked.
“Yeah, and you’re lucky, because we’re only charging you per mile and not for his time, or you wouldn’t be getting anything,” he said. “You can use the money to make phone calls and to spend four dollars a week at the commissary. Do you understand that?”
“Yeah.”
“If you abuse the money in any way, I’ll just take it all as a fine, do you understand that?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s it,” he said. “Go to your first class.”
“How’s Toon?” I asked.
“Toon?”
“Trevedi.”
“He’ll live,” Mr. Cintron said. “He’s a little depressed, but he’ll get over it.”
“Can I ask another question?”
“About Trevedi?”
“About those detectives,” I said. “They said on the phone they were coming up yesterday.”
“They’ve dropped it,” Mr. Cintron said.
“Just like that?” My voice went way up and I felt weak all over. My brain went black—nothing was in it for a few seconds. I wanted to cry and not cry at the same time. “Just like that? They just dropped it?”
“You were pretty worried, weren’t you?”
“They were talking about three years or twenty years and I didn’t know—I didn’t know what to do,” I said. “Sometimes I was thinking about pleading not guilty because I didn’t do anything, but I didn’t want to risk no twenty bid.”
“Sit down, Anderson,” Mr. Cintron said. “Look, if you run across the street in the middle of the day dodging traffic, you might get hit by a truck or a bus and get seriously hurt or killed; but if you make it to the other side, you’re home free, out of danger. But if you commit a crime, a felony…you pick up a gun or a knife and do some serious harm or commit an aggravated felony, you put yourself at risk for the rest of your life. Anytime something happens near you, they’re going to be looking in your direction to see if you had anything to do with it.
“And if you hang with people who put themselves at risk, you’re going the same route. It’s like running with a pack of starving dogs. The only thing you’re going to know about them is that if they think you’re weak, they’ll eat you in a heartbeat.”
“But those two detectives…” I looked around the room. My feeling of relief was turning to being mad. “They were acting like they had a done deal. I think they were ready to burn me, man.”
“They’re human too,” Mr. Cintron said. “And if they thought they were right, well, yeah, you’re going to feel the heat. And this guy you were involved with—”
“Freddy.”
“He doesn’t care anything about you,” Mr. Cintron said. “He’d put you in jail for twenty years to get a week off his time. That’s the way these guys operate. You got to remember that this is the world you walked into when you opened the door back then.”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll let you know how Trevedi is,” Mr. Cintron said, standing. “Maybe you can even go talk to him. It might do him some good.”
CHAPTER 33
“So I’m going to be having my hearing this afternoon,” I said. Mr. Cintron had given me permission to visit Toon, and I was sitting on the chair at the end of his bed. “If everything works out, I’ll be getting my date.”
“I hope it works out for you,” Toon said.
“Where does your family live?”
“In Brooklyn,” Toon answered. “Do you know where Clinton Avenue is?”
“I don’t know anything about Brooklyn,” I said. “But I was thinking, maybe when we get out, we can hook up and hang out sometimes. That cool with you?”
“That’s very cool with me.”
“One of the problems of going back into the world is that it’s the same world you were dealing with when you got into trouble,” I said. “So it’s going to be just as hard to deal with as it was then, but if you round up some homeboys on your side, it’ll be easier.”
“Or a brother,” Toon said.
“Or a brother,” I said, standing. “And I can’t have my brother hurting himself. You know what I mean?”
Toon put his head down and his hands in his lap. I sat on the bed next to him and put my arm around him for a minute.
I was worried that Toon wasn’t going to be all right. I thought he was going to go home with his parents and have them yell at him and go on about how he wasn’t as good as his brother. That was crap.
“Be strong, man,” I said as I left Toon’s room. Mr. Wilson locked the door behind me, and I turned away from the window because I didn’t want to see Toon sitting on his bed alone.
I was pretty sure my hearing was locked. Mr. Cintron told me he would be on the panel, and I knew he was in my corner. All I needed was to keep
my mind correct and focused on what I needed to let them know.
Mr. Pugh was with me and talking stupid stuff about how it had been when he was a kid. I couldn’t even imagine a bigheaded, bald dude like him being a kid.
“We didn’t have none of the stuff you kids got now,” he said. “We didn’t have cell phones, iPods, nothing like that. My big brother got a computer in 1982. It had sixty-four K memory. I got a goldfish with more memory than that now.”
“I didn’t know you had a brother,” I said. “What’s he doing now?”
“Nothing.” Mr. Pugh gave me his “shut up” look and I shut up.
The clock on the administration office wall said twenty past one when the two people on the panel and Mr. Cintron came back from lunch. I had been sitting in the office from five minutes to one and was getting a little nervous. They walked by me and it was a quarter to two before they called me in.
They had turned the table so that the long side was facing the door, and I sat in the middle across from Mr. Cintron, an older black dude with silver-white hair, and a really thin white woman who kept messing with the papers in front of her.
Mr. Pugh had come in with me and he sat in the corner.
“Maurice, as you know, I’m Frank Cintron,” Mr. Cintron said. “This is Miss Carla Evans and Mr. Alan Shaw.”
“How do you do?” I said.
They both nodded.
“Panel, this is Maurice Anderson,” Mr. Cintron said, looking at me. “He was arrested for stealing prescription pads from a neighborhood physician and selling the pads to a known drug dealer. He pled guilty and was sentenced to a total of thirty-eight months which, under the good time standard, makes him eligible for release after thirty months, two weeks—”
“That would be eighty percent of his sentence?” the black guy asked.
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