by Will Hobbs
By mid-June a lot of the greens served in the cafeteria were coming out of the garden: lettuce, spinach, parsley, Swiss chard, onions, and radishes. Soon, snow peas and green beans followed, cucumbers and three different kinds of squash.
By early July there was hardly anyone from the science class working in the garden anymore, just Rick and a few others. The desert’s midsummer sun was brutal.
But the garden was a safe place for Rick to hang out. The trick was water, drinking gallons of water. He especially liked to see the melons and the pumpkins growing—things that were going to be huge when they finally ripened.
Come late July he was picking the first tomatoes—large, flavorful tomatoes that the cafeteria was serving in thick slices as a side dish. They always went fast. Rick and the few other kids still working in the garden were getting nicknames like the Green Giant, Mr. Tomatohead, Farmerdude, nicknames it was easy to live with. Rick could tell that the fresh food was making his loner status a little more acceptable.
The end, in late August, came with no warning. Overnight the garden had been ripped out back to bare soil. The maintenance men had done it. Too many kids had lost interest, they claimed. There’d never been a garden at Blue Canyon before, and they weren’t going to let the maintenance of one get added to their job description.
Rick had expected a big reaction, maybe even a riot. Nothing happened, nothing at all. There was plenty of bad feeling over it, but bad feeling was nothing new. Blue Canyon was a place where kids expressed themselves by mashing moldy oranges into the radiators. The garden had been too good to be true. The real world didn’t have gardens and fresh food. The loss of the garden was just one more thing to shrug off.
A month later Rick still hadn’t shrugged it off. Mr. B. had advised him to, but he couldn’t. There were some things that shouldn’t be forgiven and forgotten. Like being led into this place in leg restraints and handcuffs. There were some people who shouldn’t be forgiven. Like his parents, like the Honorable Samuel L. Bendix.
Rick realized he’d gone on longer than usual with his reading warm-up. He turned to “Escape from the Maze” and read from the point where the greatest inventor of all time, Daedalus, was fashioning wings for himself and his son, Icarus, so they could fly out of the elaborate puzzle they were imprisoned in.
The wings worked all too well. Once they’d left their island prison behind, Icarus became intoxicated with the sensation of flight and started outflying the birds.
Suddenly Rick recalled that he’d heard this story before. His grandmother had read him a version of it when he was little.
He knew all about the intoxication of flight from way back, from a dream that had come almost nightly. In the dream he always had a miraculous, inexplicable power inside himself: he could actually fly. In the dream all he had to do was spread his arms and he’d begin to levitate higher and higher until he was hovering above the earth. Then he was not only hovering but actually flying above the fields and the treetops and the towns, weightless and peaceful and free.
Dream-flying had been his own great escape—he’d figured that out—a childish fantasy that had been gradually dying over the years and was nearly dead. He couldn’t remember having had the flying dream a single time at Blue Canyon.
Rick remembered how Icarus’ escape was going to end but he kept reading anyway. Ignoring his father’s calls from below, Icarus flew higher and higher until the sun melted the wax holding the invention together, and the boy fell into the sea.
Now Rick realized why he found the story of Icarus so appealing. His own life was a puzzle riddled with dead ends. His own life was a maze.
“From the expression on your face,” Mr. B. said from his desk, “you’re enjoying that book.”
Almost always they talked about what Rick was reading. “Yeah,” he said, “I kind of like it.”
“So, what do you think of Greek mythology?”
“I can relate to it.”
“How so?”
“Things just happen to people for no good reason. Because some god or other gets ticked at them.”
“That’s the way the ancient Greeks looked at the world, Rick, but we’re not ancient Greeks. Americans believe you make your own luck, you know.”
Rick didn’t really believe it. He was thinking about Killian and wondering about himself. “I suppose.”
“Hang in there, Rick. Your break will come. And when it does, you have to be willing to go for it. To see your break for what it is and dare to ride it with all that you’ve got. Hey, it sure is hot in here, isn’t it?”
Because the maintenance men, Rick was tempted to say, have been stealing the brand-new air conditioners so they can resell them. They replace them with reconditioned ones that don’t work nearly as well.
He held back. He’d already told his social worker, who’d then gotten fired. He’d made an enormous mistake, especially in telling him he’d seen cash changing hands between a maintenance man and a guard. The guards were being bribed to look the other way, he’d figured out, but corruption in a place like this was no surprise. He’d only ratted on them because he was still so bitter about the garden.
“Yep,” Rick said. “It sure is hot.” He left the library without saying good-bye to Mr. B.
“See ya soon,” they said to each other. But they wouldn’t.
3
In the cafeteria line for the evening meal, Killian ghosted up to him and whispered, “Your name is on the cigarettes.”
Rick had just reached for a fork and a spoon—there weren’t knives—and placed them on his tray. He turned toward the voice. Killian was scuttling away like a crab. Rick looked around quickly, his heart in his throat.
A tray bumped him in the small of his back. “Keep moving, Tomatohead.”
He didn’t think anyone around him had heard what Killian had whispered. But what did that matter? There were others in this cafeteria, right now, who were eyeing him like hyenas. He would never know who they were.
Your name is on the cigarettes.
Killian wasn’t one of them, he knew. Killian was just a fly on the wall.
Your name is on the cigarettes. Everybody knew what that meant. One of the guards was offering two or three kids—seventeen-year-olds, probably—a pack of cigarettes each to beat him to within an inch of his life.
Officially the guards couldn’t lay a hand on kids unless it was to restrain them. But when they wanted to hurt somebody it was easily done. Cigarettes were outlawed at Blue Canyon. When kids said, “I’d kill for a cigarette,” some of them weren’t using a figure of speech.
Rick proceeded mechanically down the cafeteria line, not seeing, not hearing. Floyd, one of the kids working behind the counter, speared a slab of roast beef and made a joke about it being a piece of retread, but Rick didn’t hear. He steered toward the table that looked the most open.
When would it come? He hunched over his food, put his hands up to the sides of his head as if he were already warding off the blows.
They wouldn’t risk injuring themselves or leaving incriminating marks on their hands. They would use chair legs. All his weight training wouldn’t help him, not in a situation like this.
It was only a matter of time until they caught him alone. He’d have to go to the bathroom. He might be sent to the basement to fetch something for someone. There were plenty of ways it could happen, plenty of places.
The guard in that area would take a walk. “Never heard a thing,” he’d insist afterward.
Run, he told himself. That’s all you can do now. You can’t make it to the end of your sentence. Six weeks is forever. The first beating won’t be the last. They’ll kill you dead.
Run.
He hadn’t eaten a bit. He slipped the fork and the spoon into the pocket of his jeans. Bent at right angles, he’d heard, they made hooks that made it easier to pull yourself over the fence.
Everybody knew how high the fence was. People took its measure every day: sixteen feet, counting three par
allel strands of barbed wire on top that leaned in toward the compound.
Kids had escaped while he’d been there, one over the fence and three through the gate. One pretended he was a visitor walking out after lunch. The kid simply waved with supreme confidence and walked on through. Two others, a month apart, rushed the gate while it was open. The gate closed electronically and not very fast.
It was rare, though, for kids ever to get close enough to the gate to rush it. That wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. It had to be the fence. People said that you used your jacket to cover the barbed wire, to help you get over the top.
It had to be tonight. The beating would probably come tomorrow.
It was deadly ironic, his name being on the cigarettes. Cigarettes had killed his grandmother. She’d told him when she was dying that it was the cigarettes.
Now it was safest to sit in the TV room, in the very middle of the pack. He was afraid of the edges. Hours went by, and he never got up to go to the bathroom. What programs came on, he couldn’t have said.
Through a haze of fear and paranoia, he was trying to think. He was clutching at straws. Some of the kids in his unit had messed with the metal grate over the slot where the air conditioner was missing. Within the last few days they’d loosened the masonry screws from the outside. “Keeping their options open,” as they’d put it. Rick himself had never thought about escaping. Now he had to hope that the maintenance men hadn’t discovered that the grate was loose and reattached it.
At 9:30 P.M. the TV was killed as usual. Hyperalert, he filed into his unit with the others. At 10:30 Northcut called roll. Then lights out. He got under the sheet with his clothes on, tennis shoes too. It didn’t seem as though Northcut had been watching him especially. Did Northcut know that the name of one of his kids was on the cigarettes? Maybe, maybe not.
Rick lay on his back with one hand up to his face as if to ward off a blow. He could hear the second hand on his watch ticking, ticking. Every few minutes he looked at the time. He was wishing that he’d played it all differently. Now was when he needed the protection of a great big kid, an older kid, a mean, crazy guy that nobody would mess with even for cigarettes.
Half an hour after midnight it was deathly quiet at last. Though the night was warm, he slipped on his heavy flannel shirt. He reached under the bed for his red jacket. From under his pillow he took out the fork and the spoon. He bent them carefully at right angles to make grips the width of his hand.
He couldn’t stand the tension any longer. Go!
Northcut was dozing at his desk as usual. Rick went past the bathroom to the far end of the unit. Gently, he tried the bottom of the grate. It gave. Tentatively, he pushed it out. The top held but the bottom was free.
Inch by inch, feet first, he climbed out and dropped to the ground. He paused to tie the jacket loosely at his neck.
Looking all around, he crossed the bare patch where the garden used to be, then the threadbare lawn all the way to the fence. With his hooks, he began to pull himself up.
In half a minute he was high on the fence. He dropped the fork and the spoon. Now came the most difficult part, dealing with the wire. With his heart thundering, he hung on with his left hand while he loosened the jacket and placed it as best he could over the barbed wire.
Right leg up, right hand up. He took a deep breath, then made his move, kicking out from the fence and swinging his right leg higher still while clawing with his hands.
Push down, vault the rest of the way up and over.
He felt a sudden pain at his cheekbone as he clawed for a grip in the chain links on the opposite side. He’d snagged his cheek on the wire, but he was over. That was the main thing. He tore his jacket free and lowered himself quickly down the other side. At last he felt the ground under his feet. Now what?
Run.
Run where?
He had no idea.
4
He ran stumbling toward the lights of the interstate. The night was dark, lit only occasionally by the sweep of distant headlights. Behind him the horizon glowed with the greens, yellows, and reds of the neon aurora of Las Vegas.
He reached the on-ramp where a frontage road joined the highway, and he waited. Only three cars in twenty minutes, and they passed him by. Then he heard the chopping of the police helicopter from the direction of Blue Canyon. Northcut had made his middle-of-the-night bed check.
Now Rick could see the helicopter’s beam swathing the flats and the arroyos he’d crossed. Just as he was about to bolt for the culvert that ran under the highway, a Nissan Pathfinder with Utah plates stopped for him.
Finally some luck.
The driver seemed very melancholy and possibly drunk. He accepted “up the road” as Rick’s destination.
Rick kept his fingers pressed to his wound. It had bled only a little, and he’d blotted it with his red jacket as he ran. The man had seen the wound but hadn’t asked about it.
In an hour or so Rick saw the WELCOME TO UTAH sign. The next sign posted the distance to Salt Lake City, 304 miles. He didn’t know a thing about Utah, but he had the sudden premonition that he’d better get off the main highway at the next exit.
He walked miles in the dark down the side road. In the middle of the night there was virtually no traffic. Finally a shiny new Dodge Ram pickup with Colorado plates slowed to take a look at him.
The driver was around fifty, with a gray felt cowboy hat and a silver mustache. Rick guessed the man was returning home to Colorado. He was distinguished-looking, like Rick’s image of a cattle rancher. The man asked where he was going. Rick’s old smile came back to him—“a golden piece of the sun,” his grandmother used to call it. “Denver,” he answered, because it was the only place in Colorado he could think of. “My mother lives in Denver,” he added, because he could see this man expected a story.
“No bag?” the man asked a little suspiciously.
As convincingly as possible Rick replied, “Had it stolen.”
“Sorry to hear that,” the driver said as he leaned across and opened the passenger door.
The driver shifted quickly through the gears, up to the speed limit. “How’d you get the cut?”
“The guy who stole my bag did it.”
“Better get that sewed up…. I heard that if you wait past twenty-four hours you’ll have a scar for life.”
“Well, I have to get to my mother’s.”
“Does she know you’re hitchhiking?”
“She doesn’t even know I’m coming. I haven’t seen her in a long time.”
Whenever he had to invent parent stories, it hurt. Rick turned his head away from the driver, pretended to sleep. Panic rolled over him like a tidal wave. He’d done it now. What would they do to him when they caught him? What would Judge Bendix do? Double his time? What would the guards and the kids do to him when they put him back in Blue Canyon? Why hadn’t he been smart enough or brave enough to stay put and take his beating?
At last his weariness overcame his dread, and he drifted into a half sleep. He was vaguely aware of a stop for gas, of the man setting a box of chocolate donuts between them, and the sun coming up. His cheek throbbed all the while. He fell into a deeper sleep and didn’t wake for hours. When he woke finally and checked his watch it was one in the afternoon.
“You slept like a mummy,” the driver told him.
Rick took a donut. “I felt like one.”
The man heard the news coming on and turned the radio up. It was a Las Vegas station, which made Rick nervous. The news was fading in and out; the truck was nearly out of range. At the end of the news it said that a fourteen-year-old male had escaped from the Blue Canyon Youth Detention Center. Rick’s name was too garbled to hear, but you could make out some of his description: “…brown eyes, dark hair, five foot eight, one hundred and forty-five pounds…not considered dangerous…don’t take any chances—notify the police.”
The man with the cowboy hat looked over at Rick, especially at the cut. A little nervously he
joked, “That you?”
“Nope,” Rick told him.
For fifty miles or so, Rick thought the driver had believed him. But then, with his tank still half full, the man made a gas stop at a tiny desert town called Hanksville, Utah. Without anything being said, Rick had the feeling that the ride was over.
The man from Colorado was apologetic. “I don’t know if that’s you they’re looking for, but I can’t take the chance. You seem like a nice enough kid to me. If what you told me was true—about having your stuff stolen—you should call the police. They’ll see you get to your mom’s.”
Rick went around the side of the station to the men’s room. The knob turned, but the door wouldn’t open, even with a push. As he turned away, he caught a glimpse of the front end of a Humvee sticking out from behind the station.
He’d read all about them in magazines, these overbuilt all-terrain vehicles. They were originally developed for the military, and they could rumble over anything in their way. This one, painted in camouflage grays, yellows, and reds like the colors of the surrounding hills, looked old enough and beat up enough to be actual military surplus. Now and then he’d seen newer models on the highway, though he’d never had the chance to inspect one up close.
As he turned the corner to take a look, there was a quick movement in the shade under the Humvee. A dog, suddenly aware of him, lifted its large head and jowls, bared its teeth, and growled horribly—a rust-colored pit bull. Rick took a step back.
In an instant the dog exploded snarling and barking from under the vehicle and raced at him.
Rick crouched and raised his hands to protect his throat; that’s all he was going to be able to do. At the last second the pit bull pulled up short, yet it kept lunging at him while bristling, snapping, growling.
“Jasper!” a voice rasped. “Hold, hold!”
Fingers like claws at the back of Rick’s neck dragged him backward. Over his shoulder he saw the grease-stained hand and the angry, angular face of the man in coveralls who ran the gas station. He looked near sixty, with close-cropped gray hair and a chin sharp as a shovel. His face was tinged red by spidery blood vessels just below the surface.