In the Spider's Web

Home > Other > In the Spider's Web > Page 11
In the Spider's Web Page 11

by Jerome Gold


  Jan said, too, that Clara thought we did too many treatment groups here in Wolf.

  “Does that mean she wants us to be more punitive?” Bernie asked.

  “That could be,” Jan said. “We had been talking about Michael, and you know how she feels about him.”

  “Look at Frank,” Maggie said.

  Frank was asleep in his chair, his head easing forward, then snapping back; falling forward, snapping back.

  We started laughing. Frank opened his eyes. “What’s up? Did somebody say something?”

  We laughed all the harder.

  After supper we had to lock down the cottage to search for a missing spork. At eight o’clock Frank said he had to leave. Bernie had been working since eight in the morning and got angry, but Frank left anyway. Bernie covered the rest of Frank’s shift so I could give out meds. He left at nine.

  Peter Kasser: “No matter how many times you blow your nose, you still can’t get it clean.” He was talking about people who snorted cocaine, but it sounded funny, his saying it that way, as though a dirty nose were a kind of divine retribution.

  Caitlin told me that one of her mother’s boyfriends raped her when she was eight. She wanted to see him punished so that he did not hurt other children, she said. She talked, too, about her mother’s beating her when she was in middle school because she had made an error during a volleyball game. She said that as far back as she could remember, her mother beat her. Although her nightmares usually involved her being threatened or killed by someone she did not know, or by Jonas, her most recent nightmare was of being beaten by her mother.

  We are making progress, I told myself.

  When I called CPS, I got a series of computer menus. Finally a voice said I would be called back within forty-eight hours.

  Eight days later I had not been called so I sent an email to CPS’ regional director. Somebody St. Laurent called me. CPS had not received anything from me until this morning’s email. I described how, when I called, I had been given a menu and selected a number, which led to another menu which led to another and then finally a recorded voice.

  St. Laurent said I should have gotten a live voice, but if I was told someone would get back to me within forty-eight hours, then someone should have.

  I agreed: that’s what should have happened.

  She took the information on Caitlin by phone. I told her, too, of Caitlin’s reporting that her mother had beaten her. The mother was doing life without parole, I said, so she would be easy to find, but I didn’t know what more could be done to her.

  “Such tragic lives,” St. Laurent said. I had heard one of our psychiatrists say the same thing. St. Laurent said she would put the information on the beating down even if nothing could be done.

  In the afternoon I was getting my posters and handouts together to go down to the classroom to set up for Aggression Replacement Training. The kids were locked down. The news on TV showed footage of a contract worker in Iraq, apparently taken shortly before his captors killed him. I stood by the staff desk with Bernie and Layton. The expression on Layton’s face—I had not seen it there before. It showed the kind of horror that comes with an appreciation of what people are capable of when they organize themselves for murder. Bernie kept saying, “Did they behead him?” and I kept saying, “They said they’re not going to show it.”

  A few minutes later I took the kids in my class down to the classroom. There, in role play, one of the boys revealed that he’d had a phone call from his mother this morning—his brother had been shot. The boy didn’t know what he was feeling, he said. He couldn’t think.

  First swearing me to secrecy, Caitlin told me that Tessa had told her, “Girl, you look so good! If I was still chasing women, I’d rip your clothes off.”

  Caitlin was pleased that both boys—a boy at school had told her she was sexy—and girls were attracted to her.

  She told me of a dream in which she was with Bernie and they went to the house of a friend of his. There, his friend dragged his wife’s body out of another room. Her lower half was covered by something black, possibly a garbage bag. She had been slashed and shot and pieces of her body were missing. Bernie’s friend asked him and Caitlin to help him dispose of it.

  Then Bernie disappeared from the dream and Caitlin backed away from the guy until a wall stopped her. “I can’t do this,” she said. The guy, Bernie’s friend, threatened to rape and kill her, telling her she would help him or he would kill her too. Here she woke up.

  Without a pause, she started talking about the murder. People don’t believe how much she’s paid for what she did, she said. He was already dead when she stabbed him: there would have been blood on the knife when she withdrew it if he had been alive, and there wasn’t. She was downstairs when Jonas came in the door and Kelly hit him. “Have you ever heard the sound an aluminum bat makes when it hits a person?”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s not a pretty sound.” She was staring at the floor, or at her shoes. Something. She looked a dozen years older than she was. “It’s not a pretty sound.”

  She heard Jonas yell: “What the fuck’s going on? Who are you?”

  She heard Kelly’s bat. Plink! Then, Plink! Plink! Plink! These must have been Lucas’ and Walter’s bats.

  Jewell started crying. Her entire body was shaking and Linda was trying to hold her still.

  When Caitlin went upstairs, Jonas was dead.

  “Have you ever seen somebody with their brains out of their head?”

  “Yes.”

  “It was like a little door there in the back of his head. You could see all the layers of skin and bone, the way it opened up. I wanted to kill myself. I was going to stab myself. I put the point of the knife here”—just below her breastbone—“and I started to push, but I couldn’t do it. I thought that Jewell might need me, so I didn’t do it. I didn’t kill myself.”

  Linda came upstairs and told her to go up to Jonas’ bedroom and get a blanket to wrap the body in. Kelly and Caitlin put the body in a metal drum they found behind the house, scrunching its legs up to make it fit, and put the drum in the back of the pick-up. They drove off in the truck to dump the body. Caitlin was afraid that it would come back to life and kill her; she and Kelly held hands because they were so scared.

  When they returned to the house, Linda told her she could have Jonas’ bedroom for herself; she wouldn’t have to share it with anybody. But Caitlin didn’t want to be, couldn’t be, in that room.

  They stayed in that house for a week, until the day before they were arrested.

  “I’m going to have bad dreams tonight,” she said. “I know I will. My meds aren’t working anymore.”

  I wrote in the log that she could have her light on until she fell asleep.

  “I’ve done the same thing you did,” I said. “Not in the same way, but the same thing.”

  “I know.”

  “How do you know?”

  “You couldn’t understand what I did, how I felt, how I feel, unless you had done it too.”

  Did I say this to her? Was this part of our conversation? Did she say this to me? Did I make it up? From whose need—hers or mine?

  What was I to make of what she told me? There were inconsistencies between what she said this time and what she’d said before. Had she been upstairs or downstairs when Kelly hit Jonas? Maybe I had misunderstood—had she actually said where she had been? Or maybe her memory had changed. She said she hadn’t killed herself out of concern for Jewell, but the first time she told me about pressing the knife to her skin, she said she’d been afraid to die.

  But, really, what did it matter? If she needed to manufacture a fiction, let her do it. What was the harm now? The man was dead, her mother was put away, and so was she.

  But she wasn’t making up stories. She was trying to come to terms with something that was anything but fiction. I didn’t want to talk to the psych team about this. I didn’t want to hear any more platitudes about trauma.

 
The next day Caitlin said she’d had another dream. In this one, she killed someone who now came back to kill her. She didn’t know who he was. It wasn’t Jonas. She didn’t remember the details.

  At the psych meeting I told Dr. Bergeron about Caitlin’s dreams. He was her psychiatrist now. He said he would come down to the cottage after lunch. Visiting Caitlin would justify his getting out of the health center. Hearing him say this, the other psychiatrists laughed.

  They talked in the craft room. When Caitlin came out, I could see on her face that she was thinking about something and I asked her if she was okay. She said yes, but she wanted to go to her room. After I locked her in, Bergeron asked if I had a few minutes and we went into the staff office. He said he’d gotten more aggressive with Caitlin about acknowledging her emotions. He told her they were finding their way into her dreams because she wasn’t dealing with them in her conscious life. He had told her this before, but now he emphasized it. He said to me that it might be a good thing that she was dealing with her feelings of guilt in her dreams; at least she was dealing with them.

  He would be leaving next month for a university position, he said. I congratulated him and asked him to find a good replacement for himself, if he could; Caitlin was very fond of him. He said he would make his recommendation to Dr. Williams after he saw who was coming in with the next batch of fellows.

  Caitlin had two nightmares within a few days, but while she had been frightened, she had not been killed in either of them. She was trying to express her emotions more when she was awake, she said.

  I went to listen to Johnny Wren talk about his poetry and read from one of his books at a bookstore in Seattle. He had served twenty years in prison, he said. He was famous now and had won prizes for his writing and he mesmerized the audience with the strength of his personality and his stories of prison violence. He was a performer who channeled his rage into his performance. But he seemed also to be filled with wonder that he had survived so many of the world’s cruelties, or perhaps that he had survived himself. He told how once, in a gang fight, he had gotten his enemy down and was ready to stab him. In the middle of his telling, his left hand in the air, holding an invisible knife just so, the invisible blade coming out of the pocket made by his thumb against the side of his hand, I anticipated that he was going to say where or how he was going to cut the other man, but he stopped himself and instead said only that he did not stab him. The audience was composed almost entirely of academics and I was certain he wanted to spare them the image that had sprung into his mind. What was it? From the way he held the invisible knife and the position of his right hand, his enemy’s throat may have been exposed. Or he may have straddled his enemy from behind and was about to cut into his throat from the side and then slice out, away from the man’s body and his own, severing the arteries and the larynx, the way commandos are taught to do, the way I was taught to do. He said what stopped him were Emily Dickinson and Pablo Neruda, lines from their poems suddenly recalled, telling him that if he killed someone he would be forsaking his humanity. “They told me that if I killed him, I would be an animal.” I did not believe him. I did not believe he saw lines from the poems of Emily Dickinson and Pablo Neruda. I believed that he remembered whom he was talking to. I believed he remembered that he was here to perform. He let the man live, Johnny Wren said.

  After the questions from the audience, I walked through the store. At the poetry section, I started to ask for something at the information desk and suddenly I choked and began to cry. I had no idea what was happening. I left the desk and walked to the bathroom and locked myself in a stall. For a moment, I thought I was all right except for a burning in my chest and throat, but then the sobs came pounding out of me in something like reversed swallows and beat against the metal partitions until I thought everybody in the store must be able to hear them. And then they were gone. As quickly as they had come, they had gone.

  I returned to the information desk but the clerk was frightened and I left the store without speaking.

  Caitlin said Sonia and some of the other girls were excluding her. She knew this happened whenever new girls moved into the cottage, but she was tired of it.

  After supper she sat down next to me in the living room, more for company than conversation. Soon Sonia came over and began to talk to me. It was obvious that she wanted to talk to Caitlin, but couldn’t scale the wall Caitlin had put up. Finally Sonia showed her some photos her grandmother had brought her and the two girls left me to huddle over the pictures at a table in the dining room.

  I got a call from Michael Reichert’s mother. She had just spoken with Michael’s father who told her there was an article about the Jonas murder in a men’s magazine and that both Caitlin and Sonia were mentioned by name. I had not heard of the magazine, nor had Bernie or Dick.

  The next day I found it at a Safeway. It was a kind of downscale Cosmopolitan, but for the young male market. There was a semi-clothed female centerfold and also a beefcake feature. The article about the murder was based on an interview with Kelly Parrish. He said he had been seduced by Caitlin with her mother’s connivance, then told by Linda that if he wanted to continue sleeping with Caitlin he would have to help them kill Jerry Jonas. Linda also promised to buy him a car when it was over, and threatened to kill him if he did not help them, he said. There was a photo of Caitlin in an orange jumpsuit that must have been taken when she was in detention. Kelly’s depiction of what the kids did after the killing did not match Caitlin’s.

  I showed the article to Dick. I told him I was going to have to show it to Caitlin; I didn’t want her to be blindsided by hearing about it from someone else later. I suggested that he and I talk to the girls about it. Dick said he didn’t want to give them the article itself, but, instead, tell them about it. I said if we did that, they’d ask to see it anyway, and if we refused to show it to them, they’d think it was worse than it was. Dick said he’d have to think more about it. He said he’d let me know when he came back from his weekend.

  Frank was at the computer in the staff office, but Jan was not in, so Dick and I used her office. I told Caitlin and Sonia about the magazine article and then handed it to them. After they read it, they were silent.

  “He’s a liar,” Sonia said finally.

  Caitlin’s eyes were red.

  Sonia rushed over to her and they began to cry. “I’m sorry,” Caitlin said. “I’m so sorry.”

  Dick looked grim. I wiped my eyes. I didn’t think the girls noticed, but Dick may have.

  We sat with the girls until they had finished crying and we were convinced they would not break down again. I said Dick and I had to get back on the floor and we all left the office.

  I was in the staff office a few minutes later when Sonia asked if she could talk to me. She was worried about Caitlin’s apologizing to her, she said. She didn’t hold it against Caitlin for involving her; it was Linda who manipulated her into helping to kill Jonas, not Caitlin.

  That night after most of the kids were locked in and, of the staff, only Maggie and I remained, Caitlin asked to talk with me. In the office, she seemed not to have anything to say, but sat in Jan’s chair and spun around as though she were a kid on a counter stool. I stood up and she stood up too and put her arms around me and said, “I love you, grandpa.” She and Sonia had taken to calling me “grandpa.” They called Layton “dad” and Jan “mom.” I said, “I love you too, sweetheart.”

  She said she knew she would not always have me to rely on.

  In our staff meeting, Jan said Clara had requested approval from the Department of Corrections to transfer Caitlin to Serpent Cottage in September so she could begin the school year on upper campus. Caitlin did not know this.

  Somebody said I would be moving to Serpent with Caitlin.

  “No,” I said.

  Somebody else said that as soon as Caitlin transferred, I would give my two-weeks notice.

  “He’d better not,” Jan said.

  Caitlin asked if I still
intended to quit after she transferred. We had talked before about the possibility of her transferring to Serpent in the spring when, by DOC rules, she would have served enough time in maximum security to warrant the move. But I thought it was strange that she would mention it again so soon after staff had talked about it. I wondered if Clara had said something to her. Clara was known to promise kids things that she would not deliver.

  I said yes, but I’d wait a few months, until after she had settled in. I told her to put me on her visitors list after I left.

  She had two nightmares on a single night. In one, she was killed and Layton and I, though we did not kill her, disposed of her body. In the second one, Layton and I were shot to death by someone she didn’t know.

  Clara attended our staff meeting. She said Caitlin could be transferred at any time.

  I got a new kid on my caseload: Daniel Bragg. He was the cousin of Martin Lyons, a boy I had had seven or eight years before. Martin had been heavily invested in the Black Gangster Disciples then. Not any more, Daniel said. Now he was a Crip. There weren’t any Disciples in the town they lived in now, or if there were, they were old.

  Daniel knew Willie Bolles too. They were not cousins, though Willie and Martin were. When I worked in Swan Cottage, Willie and Martin were there together.

  “Willie isn’t doing too well,” Daniel said. He said it two or three times during the hour I talked with him. “He does a lot of ice.” Ice was meth. Daniel said this two or three times also—“Willie does a lot of ice.”

  I remembered Willie as a kid whose only relief from his mother’s beatings was when she was in prison or he was. Willie didn’t want to leave us. He wanted to spend the rest of his life here.

  Martin told me once that he thought Willie had a chance to turn his life around, because he wanted to. Martin said he himself didn’t want to do anything different. He liked gangbanging and he liked doing crimes. If he did turn himself around, he said, it would be to please his mother. When I talked with Daniel’s father, he said Martin’s mother had been addicted to crack even in those days.

 

‹ Prev