Dirt Road Home

by Watt Key

  In the end, the guards stood in the settling dust. A few boys lay around them, moaning and curled into fetal positions.

  “What the hell is this place?” I mumbled.

  But Paco heard me. “It is home sweet home, my friend.”

  19

  Once, when I was ten years old, Daddy lifted me out of bed before sunrise. Even though I was already tall for my age, it was no problem for him to carry me to the truck with my chin on his shoulder and my eyes closed. This was nothing unusual. It was late fall, hunting season, and he’d taken me to the woods with him since I was four.

  He placed me on the passenger seat and shut the door. I pulled up my knees and leaned against the window. The rumble and workingman smell of his old truck, the one we still had at the clay pit, always comforted me. As we moved into the night I fell back into a slumber made deeper by his presence and the fact that I was included.

  Some time later I woke to sunrise bleeding into the treetops. The truck was parked in the woods at the edge of a pond and I was alone. At first I was disoriented, then I vaguely remembered him placing me on the seat earlier.

  I found him sitting on the bank of the pond, untangling a trotline from where it was wrapped messily around a block of wood. Beside him was a paper cup with hooks in it. On the other side of him was a bottle of whiskey. He always had whiskey and tobacco with him. It was part of his smell.

  I sat next to him and rubbed my eyes and yawned. His hands continued to work at the tangle. Then I looked across the pond. “Where are we, Daddy?”

  “One of Uncle Tom’s lakes,” he said without looking up.

  Uncle Tom was Daddy’s brother. He owned a pole mill in Livingston. He was rich, but never acted like it except on Christmas when he gave me nice presents.

  I watched Daddy’s fingers working at the knots. “Where’s the bait?” I asked him.

  “In the truck bed.”

  I got up and walked to the truck. I found a carton of chicken livers and started back. Before I reached him, he suddenly hurled the trotline into the brush.

  “Forget it!” he said. “Stupid fish. What’s the use!”

  I stopped and watched his back. It wasn’t like him to lose his temper. He turned and looked at me and I could see that he’d been crying. I’d never seen him cry before and it made me uncomfortable. “Just come here,” he said calmly.

  I went and stood next to him.

  “Put it down. Sit down here.”

  I sat next to him while he unscrewed the top to his whiskey and took a drink. Then he set it to the side and put his arm around me and pulled me close. “We don’t ever catch anything anyway, do we?”

  I shook my head. We sat there for what seemed like a long time, staring across the still pond, watching the gum leaves drift down and settle around us. Crows called in the distance, and ever since then their sound taps a lonely place in me.

  Daddy eventually pulled his arm away and reached for the whiskey. I stood and went to get the trotline. I sat down and worked at it while he drank. Eventually I freed the knots and brought it back to him. He pushed himself up and we spent the next hour baiting and stringing hooks across the pond. Then he got his .22 rifle from the truck and I followed him into the woods.

  That morning we bagged a few squirrels and cleaned them at the truck. Then we drove to a country store nearby and bought souse and white bread and potato chips and chocolate milk and returned with it. We made sandwiches on the tailgate as the cool afternoon breezes lifted the hair on my head. Then we took a nap under a hickory tree. Late that afternoon we pulled in the trotline. There were no fish on it and every hook was still baited.

  Just after sunset we packed our gear. Daddy took the last sip of his whiskey and threw the bottle into the truck bed and got behind the wheel. “Maybe next time,” I said. Because that’s what he always told me. And I smiled and watched his face.

  He didn’t answer me. He put the truck in gear and pulled away. After a few minutes he talked to me while he watched the road ahead. “I’m gonna drop you off at the house. I’m not gonna be stayin’ at home anymore.”

  That day was the last time I remember being a happy boy.

  Momma didn’t want him. After he moved out of the house, he lived in a motel room for a while. Then he got the job at the clay pit about an hour away in Union. He tried to see me as much as he could on weekends, but Momma made it hard for him. She’d always have some excuse about things I had to do for school and such. But I wasn’t doing anything. I was just waiting for my daddy. I just wanted him to come get me.

  I got where I hated her and everything about where I lived. It wasn’t long before I started skipping school. I’d get off the bus and hide under somebody’s car in the parking lot. After classes started, I’d run off in the woods to a little farm pond about a quarter mile away and lie there and toss rocks in it and listen to the crows. Then I’d walk home as it got dark. The school would have already called, and she’d be pretty worked up by the time I walked through the door. For a while she took a switch to me. Then one day I realized I was bigger than she was, and I turned around and took the switch out of her hand and broke it and threw it to the ground. I told her if she ever switched me again I’d switch her back.

  Then I let an older kid talk me into stealing bicycles for him. He’d pay me ten dollars a bike and that was more money than I’d seen. I’d walk into town at night and take them out of people’s yards and bring them to an old barn in back of the kid’s parents’ house. I figured he sold them. I didn’t care. It was a way for me to make money and get back at the world all at once.

  I wasn’t into the bike-stealing business long before the older kid got caught and turned me in. My mother was already fed up with me, and my reputation with the truancy officer didn’t help my case. They sent me off to the Pinson Boys’ Home.

  Pinson was just a place where I could be mad and mean and get away with it. The oldest boys were almost fourteen, but I was already as big as all of them. And it didn’t take much to set me off. I ruled that place. Nobody messed with me. Not until Moon Blake came along.

  One night I was in the rec room and saw on television where they’d caught a ten-year-old kid that had been raised in the woods by his father. He was like an Indian. His dad kept him in a dugout way back in the forest where they hid out from everybody. The kid had never even met anybody but his dad and some storekeeper they went and saw a couple of times a year.

  They bring him to Pinson and he’s lying in his bunk with the covers pulled up over him like a trapped animal. I decided I’d go ahead and let him know who was in charge. He would’ve kicked my ass right then and there if one of the guards hadn’t pulled him off me.

  I went after him again a couple of days later and that time he did kick my ass. Laid me right out with a punch to the balls. I think back on that now and realize it was the best punch in the balls I ever got. I needed it. And I see this kid that’s gone through more than I could even imagine and he’s not about to let any of us get him down. Moon Blake taught me that no matter what life deals you or what you deal yourself, you can’t stop trying. He showed me raw heart and courage. And even though he was a head shorter than me, I looked small next to him.

  The day after our fight Moon came up and talked to me like we’d been friends forever. He wanted me to bust out of the boys’ home with him. He had it all planned out like it was the simplest thing ever. And by that time, I would have followed him anywhere.

  We escaped from Pinson, and for a while I had my life back. During the days we were on the lam, the world I’d given up on suddenly came out from behind the clouds. Eventually both of us ended up with Daddy and lived with him in the clay pit. The law finally caught us again, but it was all worth it. Those days with Daddy made me feel like a normal kid again.

  I was eventually sent on to Hellenweiler. Before I left, Daddy and I made promises to go straight—him with the whiskey and me with the trouble. I knew it was going to be hard, but I never imagined it would be l
ike this.

  20

  After the gang fight, Hellenweiler seemed like a different place. Everyone kept to themselves. Except for the wrist scars and neck crosses, it would have been hard to tell the difference between Ministers and Hounds. Paco and I were the only boys without some sort of bandage. The infirmary was so full that some of the residents had to recover in their bunks.

  Something told me that I should get rid of the key—drop it down the shower drain or bury it in the yard—but I didn’t. I took it from beneath my pillow and hid it in my stationery kit. Keeping control of it gave me a small sense of security.

  For a while, it was like Paco had lost interest in being a Hound. He still sat at their table and I still sat alone in no-man’s-land, but he didn’t pay attention to his gang and they seemed too beat down to care. Out on the play yard, it was never long before he strolled over and leaned against the fence next to me and started his strange talks.

  “Do you remember me telling you of my friend whose father was a forester?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He told me something else that I think about. He said that his father believes that trees can communicate with each other.”

  “Aww, come on.”

  “Listen to me. He said there was a grove of the same species of tree and a certain type of ant was eating the leaves from these trees. Let’s say this grove was a circle and that the ants were eating on the middle trees. Over time, the trees on the outside of the circle developed a poison in their sap that the ants did not like. They changed their sap. How could they have known to do this?”

  “I don’t know. But I’ll bet you have an idea about it.”

  Paco stared over the play yard and didn’t answer me right away. Finally he said, “Yes. This place is poison.”

  I traced my finger across the dust and some time passed where we didn’t speak. Then I said, “How’d you get here, Paco?”

  He smiled to himself. “What have they told you?”

  “Nothin’. I’ve never heard anything about it.”

  “That’s unfortunate,” Paco said. “I will need to ask one of the Hounds to remind me of what lie I told when I first came here. You see, the truth is not such a good thing in this place. Why did they send you here?”

  “Stealin’ bikes. Threatenin’ my momma.”

  “Wrong answer, my friend. That answer serves you no purpose. Perhaps you are forgetting about the poor old man that you robbed and beat within one inch of his life before you took the bike.”

  “Maybe I should just shut up like Caboose.”

  Paco nodded. “Perhaps.”

  “So you won’t tell me?” I said.

  “It wouldn’t matter. I am no longer the person I was. Now I am whatever they say I am. Whatever has been made of me.”

  “Somehow you got smart. That came from somewhere.”

  After a while he said, “I want to see the trees again.”

  “There’s some across that mud field. Turn around and look at those.”

  “I want to smell them up close. I want to stand in their shade and hear the rustle of leaves. I want to pick an insect from the bark and let it crawl on my finger.”

  “I think you’re crackin’ up.”

  Paco shook his head in disagreement. “I could have been a forester.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Seventeen,” he said.

  “You’ll be out soon.”

  “Yes,” he sighed. “I will. But you see what they have made of me. I am a gang leader. I am a bulldog. My only friends would be my enemies if they had the chance. That is what I know now. That is what they have taught me here.”

  “You’re what you wanna be. You’re what you always were.”

  “That is where you are wrong, my friend.”

  I waited for him to continue, but he didn’t. He looked at his knees and thumped an ant from his jumpsuit.

  “Who hurt Chase?” I finally asked.

  “Do you know the Hound with all the ink?”

  “Yeah, Tattoo?”

  “His name is Carter Santos. He loves nothing more than an excuse to hurt people.”

  “I found that out in the confessional.”

  “There are boys in here like Tattoo and Jack. They are not made into violent people so much as they were born violent. It is genetic. You will often find that their fathers are the same way. Most people will say they are the most difficult to judge. I disagree. If you understand them, they are manageable. You see, they believe everyone must think the way they do. They believe they are the rule more than the exception. So you let them think that you are like them. And they will leave you alone. Behind that violence is always a seed of cowardice. They are all cowards.”

  “But not Caboose?”

  Paco looked at me. “I will tell you about Caboose. And you will learn what you have failed to see about this place.”

  21

  Paco slid down the fence and sat. I did the same and waited for him to tell his story.

  “When I arrived here,” Paco began, “Caboose was the leader of the Ministers. He was the one person no one touched. The Hounds were nothing but quivering cur dogs against the fence. It did not take me long to learn how the system works in this place. I saw an opportunity and picked my side wisely and took my fight. It was not difficult. The Hounds were weak and broken-spirited. I put a rock in my fist and walked up to their leader and hit him in the face with it until he fell to the ground and spit his teeth into the dirt. I have not been in a fight since. The Hounds regained their spirit when they saw what I had done to their leader. They straightened their backs and raised their voices and began to challenge the Ministers. I was ignorant and I enjoyed this.”

  “Did you think you could outfight Caboose?”

  “Personally?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Perhaps. I was foolish enough. But it didn’t matter. I was a general, you see. I had no concerns.”

  “He could tear your arms off.”

  “You should listen to the rest of the story.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Go on.”

  “So the Hounds became bold and agitated the Ministers. Day after day, the tension built. Then, one day, the Hounds attacked. It started much like what you witnessed a few days ago—silence and then the disappearance of the guard and then a rush. The dust rose in the yard and boys beat on one another. This went on until the guards came with their clubs. The boys are so worked up that they continue to fight and do not notice the guards. Perhaps even if they did notice they do not believe what is about to happen.”

  “So the guards attacked?”

  “Yes. The clubs are rising and falling and the boys are screaming and crawling away. Soon it is over, and the guards have just about everyone that can walk or crawl up against the fence. But there are several boys lying on the ground. One of them is not moving. This is Marty. This is Caboose’s younger brother.”

  “His younger brother?”

  “Yes. Marty had come to Hellenweiler just before me.”

  “What did Caboose do?”

  “He is kneeling beside his brother, screaming at him to get up, but it is the screaming of a person who already knows what he asks is impossible. And then I hear Mr. Pratt ask Caboose to move to the fence. And, you see, Mr. Pratt does this like a whisper to a roaring lion. And he only says this once. Of course Caboose does not leave his brother. And this is what they want, you see. Like me, he had been a spectator and they had no excuse to beat him. But now he does not hear them. So the guards close in and I hear the clubs hitting his back like punches to a side of beef. Slowly, after many blows, Caboose becomes silent. But he remains there like a cow gone to his knees. Then, after many more blows, he rolls over and falls across his brother.”

  “That’s crazy,” I said.

  “They took them away. Two weeks later, only Caboose returns. He walks into the yard and crosses to this fence where you and I are sitting now.”

  “The guards killed his little brother?�
�

  “Yes, my friend. Now you know about Caboose. And now you know what it is you have failed to realize. You see, it is not the Hounds and the Ministers you should be afraid of. They are simply cowards at their little games. They have no real power. It is the people who make them what they are. It is the adults here. Mr. Fraley and his guards.”

  “Paco, how can they do this? Why don’t the guards stop the fights?”

  “As long as we fight, we are considered to be violent juveniles, not fit to leave this place. They take notes. They record it all. They allow little skirmishes to take place here and there. Occasionally they let the gangs go at each other to perpetuate the tension. Fatten the reports. That is what Mr. Fraley wants. He feels his duty as a public servant is to keep the stray dogs off the streets.”

  “How can he just cover all this up?”

  “He walks a very fine line with this policy, my friend. It is a complicated situation. You see, too many injuries and the home is suspect. So they must be careful about who they send to the hospital and what they report.”

  “But Chase went. And I guess Jack and Caboose went.”

  “Yes. I suppose they can get away with a few. That is expected in this place that encourages violence. Unpreventable. But they must be careful.”

  “Isn’t there at least one honest guard in this place?”

  “What is honest? We choose to fight each other. There are many ways they can interpret this.”

  “Is Jack dead?”

  “No.”

  “How do you know.”

  “Because I know.”

  “He’ll be back, won’t he?”

  “Probably. He is not capable of staying out of trouble. He is a true violent criminal. But I suppose his lawyers will get him out for a while when he whimpers to his father that he has been abused.”