In the Spider's Web

by Jerome Gold

  I liked having a gang kid on my caseload again. Gangsters responded to structure and predictability and it was easy for me to provide those. Their experience of violence was similar to mine. They spent their lives engaged in a kind of low-intensity warfare, which was something I knew something about. I knew the sensations of violence, the taste of it in my mouth, its rippling on the skin of my arms, the lightness of it in my hands, the sudden acuity in sight and hearing that accompanied it, the power of it. But I knew, too, that the power you felt in the midst of doing it was ephemeral. It lasted for a moment, but the cost of it afterward could be unsupportable. That was one reason to do drugs or to drink: to be able to bear the knowledge of yourself. I knew all this, and knowing it, I could try to guide these kids away from it. Lately I’d felt I had been drifting. I’d found myself in places where I had to operate on intuition rather than experience. I was not accustomed to feeling love and I thought it was affecting my judgment, though I could not say exactly how.

  While watching TV in the living room, Peter Kasser was punched in the back of the head by Daniel Bragg. Daniel had been encouraged to hit Peter by Trace Austin and Charles Burns. Trace was BGD; Charles was a Crip.

  During the investigation, a couple of boys said Peter talked smack too much. He had called one of them a “slob,” a pejorative for Bloods, and another a “fork,” one for BGD. Others besides Trace and Charles and Daniel had wanted to see Peter hit. The gang kids would have left well enough alone between themselves, at least while they were locked up together, but Peter kept trying to rile them.

  Now, after Daniel’s punching him, he wanted to stay in his room as much as he could. In his room, he said, nobody talked smack to him.

  I had taken comp time to make up for a day’s refresher training on how to manage kids who did not want to do what you wanted them to do. I was eating breakfast when Dick called. Clara had just told him that they would be transferring Caitlin and Sonia to Serpent tomorrow morning.

  “Oh, shit,” I said.

  Dick asked if I wanted to tell Caitlin myself.

  “No. I need to pull myself together before I talk to her.”

  I called her that night. She was all packed, she said. Her room was bare. She’d been crying all day. She asked if I had cried. She knew she would not sleep tonight. She said that after she and Sonia had been told to pack, Clara had called back and said Sonia would not be going. Sonia was mad.

  Clara showed up at our staff meeting. She asked if we were angry with her for having moved Caitlin.

  Yes, we are, Jan said.

  Layton said it was best, when transferring a kid who has been with us for a long time, to give her a week or two of transition during which she can eat some of her meals at her new cottage, attend some treatment groups, and begin to get to know the staff and residents.

  Dick said Clara told him she would come by to talk with the girls yesterday, but she had not.

  Clara said an emergency had come up. She was on campus until six-thirty, but had been unable to get away.

  And unable to call them, Dick said.

  And unable to call them, Clara agreed, pretending not to have caught the sarcasm. She apologized for not giving Caitlin more time to prepare, but said she wanted to move her before school started, and she had a bed for her now.

  Jan said we had to move on, and referred to the written agenda she had distributed before Clara came in. But Clara said she wanted to go back to Caitlin. She said that she had not actually told staff yesterday to get Caitlin ready to transfer, but had asked for staff’s opinion on moving Caitlin. Since nobody objected, she assumed it was okay.

  Dick, who had taken the call, didn’t say anything, but stared at her as though curious about what she would say next.

  Charlie Patterson, one of the morning staff, said it was a matter of miscommunication then.

  I said, “Let’s not whitewash this. It wasn’t a matter of miscommunication. You called on a day when Caitlin’s staff was gone, the cottage director was at her doctor’s, and the supervisor was in training. There was no one here to voice an opinion. Do you want our forgiveness? Is that why you’re bringing this up?”

  Clara said again that it had been up to Wolf staff to object. And again she said she needed to fill the bed and wouldn’t have another one for some time.

  After she left, Jan thanked me for speaking out and said she had been afraid that if she started talking, she wouldn’t be able to stop. “And where did that idea about forgiveness come from? I think you’re onto something.”

  “It just popped out of my mouth before I even knew I thought it. But I agree. I think it’s true, or she wouldn’t have ignored it.”

  When I got off shift, I went over to Serpent. Tears came into Caitlin’s eyes when she saw me.

  “You’re making me cry,” she said.

  “No I’m not.”

  “Yes you are.”

  She had spent the day organizing her room. She didn’t know who her staff would be. She thought it would be either Doug or Karin. Karin had only one kid on her caseload and Doug would be losing one to parole on Monday. (So much for Clara’s claiming that there would not be another bed available.)

  Caitlin had gone to the gym and played basketball—three Serpent girls against three Fox boys. It was the first time she had played on a wood floor in three and a half years. Her conversation kept returning to the forty-five minutes or so that she had been at the gym. That was good. Good for her.

  THIRTEEN

  Peter was taken down by Bernie and Layton when he refused to go into his room. His refusal was a performance for the other kids in his zone who were already in their rooms.

  It began when he was humiliated by a teacher who told him in front of the other kids that he should have learned to read cursive in the third grade. It got worse when he got stuck on a math test, staying with a problem he simply couldn’t get. The teacher—the same one—kept telling him to go on to the next problem, but he couldn’t. He got only two of thirty problems right: having run out of time, he randomly filled in the bubbles on the other twenty-eight.

  He was not informed until after lunch that he could not return to school in the afternoon because he had not followed the teacher’s directions. He had been looking forward to P.E. This was when he refused to go to his room.

  Three days later, Ernest, a new staff, told Peter to go to his room. He cursed Ernest violently and got four hours off program. I asked him why he was targeting staff. He said it was to earn respect from the other kids. He lost respect when Daniel stole on him and he needed to get it back. He took the view that targeting people who were safe to target would earn him respect; he knew staff wouldn’t hurt him. He said he wouldn’t target me.

  Peter was taken down again, this time in the classroom, by Dick, Charlie, and me. The teacher had told him to go up to the cottage on a time-out and that he would not be punished if he went up without creating a problem, but he worked himself up and reached over to press Dick’s body alarm, saying, “Do what you gotta do.”

  Dick moved to take him down but missed his footing and Peter broke loose. Dick tackled him, bringing him to the floor. When Charlie and I ran down, kids were streaming out of the classroom into the rec yard. Inside, Peter was trying to twist loose; Dick had his arms wrapped around his legs. Peter’s back was turned to me and I dropped on him, chest to back, to force the air out of him, and I heard him grunt. I inflated my lungs and lay against him so that there would be continuous resistance against his taking in air. He was still struggling. I placed my left forearm on the back of his neck and I worked his right arm so that I was able to immobilize it with a wristlock. Suddenly his breath went out of him and he lay without moving. His neck and face were a deep red. I eased the pressure on his neck, but he started squirming and I pressed my forearm down again.

  Security arrived and picked their way through the jumble of desks and chairs that surrounded us. Dick got up first. Then Charlie. He had been somewhere behind me, helping Dick o
r doing something else, I didn’t know what. The fingers of my right hand had cramped and I had to straighten them with the fingers of my left hand. Then I got up. Peter lay still until he was handcuffed. He allowed Security to raise him first to his knees, then to his feet without resisting them.

  That evening Peter apologized to me for making me take him down; he didn’t know I had already come in to work.

  “You’re a little difficult to control. You know that,” I said.

  “I’m big.” He laughed. He was still exhilarated.

  “You’re big,” I agreed. “But it seems to me that you’re not trying to hurt us. You may want to hurt yourself, but you don’t seem to have anything against staff.”

  He said nothing.

  “Why did you stop when you did? When we were on the floor, you just suddenly stopped moving.”

  “I fought as long as I could, but I suddenly got really tired, so I quit.”

  “You didn’t fight, Peter. You resisted us, and made it hard for us to restrain you, but you weren’t fighting. Not that I want you to fight. I don’t.”

  His face went from happiness when I told him he made things hard for us to something like worry when I said he hadn’t really fought.

  “All the times your father beat you—did you ever hit him back?”

  “No. It wouldn’t have done any good. You’ve never seen my father. He’s big. I mean big. I’m big, but I’m not nearly as big as he is. His arms here”—he touched his forearm—“are as big as my legs.” He put his hand on his thigh. “But I wouldn’t cry, not after I got older. I’d curse him, but I knew it didn’t matter, because he was going to hit me until he got tired. Or until I could get out of the house. Sometimes I got away from him and got out of the house. Sometimes I’d try to piss him off even more because I knew he couldn’t hurt me. He wanted to. He tried to. But I learned how not to feel pain. So I knew it didn’t matter what he did, because I wasn’t going to feel it. But I was already pretty old when I learned that. I was already twelve.”

  “How did you learn not to feel pain? What do you do not to feel it?”

  “How did I learn? I don’t know how I learned. Just by getting hit enough times, I guess. What I do is I pump myself up. I tell myself this suckah ain’t got nothin’, he can’t hurt me, he can’t make me quit, he can’t do shit.”

  “Even while he’s hurting you.”

  “But I don’t feel it. When I’m mad I don’t feel nothin’. I can take anything when I’m mad, it don’t bother me. I mean it might bother me, but it don’t hurt.”

  Years ago, we had a kid who didn’t like me. He stared at me, often with hatred, but shifted his eyes when I caught him at it. Finally I asked him if I reminded him of someone. It was just a guess. He said I looked like the man who had kidnapped him, and I had the same laugh. Now I said to Peter, “You don’t like Bernie. Does he look like your father?”

  “No. Wait.” He was silent again. “He does kind of look like him. I hadn’t noticed it before you said so.”

  “I’m not saying he does. I haven’t met your father. I’m asking you if he does.”

  “I know. But he does. Kind of. He’s not as big as my dad, but he looks kind of like him. The way he stands when he’s—no! It’s the way he looks at you, like he’s going to say something mean.”

  “I’ve never heard him say anything mean to a kid.”

  “I know that! It’s just the way he looks at you. I’m just sayin’…”

  Peter was taken down again, by Bernie and Casey, an intermittent who often worked with us. Bernie had told him he could get off Tables if he sat quietly until seven-thirty, then went out on the back porch to talk with Casey while Frank monitored the floor. At seven-thirty Frank refused to let Peter off Tables, telling him he knew nothing about his arrangement with Bernie. Peter asked him to check with Bernie, but Frank refused. Peter began arguing with Frank, swearing at him, and drew the attention of Casey and Bernie who came inside and told him to head down to his room. Peter stood up, swearing at them now, and said they’d have to take him. Casey slammed him to the floor, hard, and then he and Bernie took him to the quiet room. After they left him, he sat in a corner and cried. Bernie watched him for a while, then went away.

  A few minutes later he came back and went in the quiet room and sat down beside Peter. Peter said he didn’t know what it was about him, but he reminded him of his dad. Bernie assured him that he cared about him or he wouldn’t be sitting there talking with him, and Peter began to cry again.

  The state Supreme Court decided not to hear Caitlin’s appeal. She seemed reconciled to spending her youth in prison.

  I saw her Thursday night after I got off shift. She made tea and we talked for an hour in the living room after the other girls were locked down. An intermittent named Farleigh was working in her cottage. He kept interrupting us to ask Caitlin questions about herself, then telling her about himself. He was thirty, intended never to marry, felt his life was just beginning. He had worked in a mental hospital for children for several years and was in graduate school in psychology now. He gave his history as if by rote, as if he had memorized a list of the things he was going to say and the order in which he would say them.

  He asked Caitlin how long she thought she should be in prison in order to remake her life so that she wouldn’t want to re-offend.

  She misunderstood him. She said, “Ten or twelve years,” thinking he had asked how much time she thought she should serve in order to atone for her offense.

  I said, “You don’t think you’d ever want to commit another murder, do you?”

  “Oh no! No!”

  “He asked you how much time you think you should serve in order not to re-offend.”

  “Oh. I would never re-offend. I would never do what I did again.”

  As I was getting ready to leave, Farleigh said he thought it was terrible that such an intelligent girl who wanted so badly to do well should be locked up for so long. I had the sense that he was saying what he thought he should say, and that Caitlin was, for him, a curiosity, possibly a research subject. She did not say anything, but pretended not to have heard him. Hugging me goodnight, she said, “You’d better not die until I’m out.”

  I chastised Peter for getting into a face-off with Daniel.

  “What am I supposed to do when he says he’s going to bomb on me? Let him punk me?”

  He had tried to avoid trouble with Daniel by letting Daniel think he was afraid of him, but that only encouraged Daniel to try to punk him again. Now when Daniel tried to punk him, he stood up to him.

  “Daniel doesn’t really want to fight me. If he wanted to fight, he could have hit me by now. He’s had the chance. He just wants to act hard in front of Charles and Trace and them, and he does it when staff is around because he knows staff will stop it if something happens.” Still, he always knew where Daniel was because Daniel hit him from behind once, Peter said.

  Maggie said that when Frank left on Saturday, he said he felt he was the only one who had done any work today. Maggie was dumbfounded. She told Layton who burst out laughing.

  One of Caitlin’s teachers gave her a book on life science to study because she needed to pass a science exam in order to graduate, even though the school did not offer a science class. But she wasn’t reading it. “Sonia can learn from a book, but I can’t.” Her case manager wanted her to “observe and describe”—an exercise from Dialectical Behavior Therapy—but “I don’t want to observe and describe.” Ed Horgan told her she should read her bible, but “I don’t want to read the bible.” She said she wanted to come back to Wolf.

  “Why?”

  “I miss the staff at Wolf.”

  “Would it be worth it to you to move back if you had to give up basketball? You’re a starter on both the girls’ and boys’ teams, right? You couldn’t play if you were in Wolf.”

  “Uh huh.” I could barely hear her.

  “Uh huh you understand what I’m saying, or uh huh it would be worth it to y
ou to come back?”

  “Both.”

  All of this was about Sonia’s impending transfer to Serpent. Caitlin had done well there and had gained some confidence in herself by being away from Sonia. She had attained the highest level Serpent offered. In athletics, she was the cottage leader. But now she and Sonia would be together again and Sonia would draw some of the other girls to herself and isolate Caitlin from them.

  Caitlin said, “I’ll have to stick to my values”—another DBT-ism—“and not allow myself to be pulled into Sonia’s dramas.” They were indoctrinating her well. Serpent had gone over to DBT entirely, but Wolf was still resisting.

  “Couldn’t you apply for a transfer here?” Caitlin asked.

  “I wouldn’t do well here, sweetie.”

  “Why not? I think you would do well—”

  “Staff here… Let me think how to say this.”

  “Just say it.”

  “Okay. There’s one or two staff in your cottage that I have no respect for, and I wouldn’t want to work with them. I have nothing against Karin, or some of the others, but there’s one or two I don’t like.”

  “One or two?”

  “I’ll just let it go at that.”

  “They couldn’t be as bad as Frank.”

  “No, but I work with Frank only a couple of hours a week. He comes in early now and leaves early, so I hardly see him.”

  “You’re lucky.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Uh huh you understand what I’m saying, or uh huh you agree?”

  “Both.”

  Jan asked me if I’d been going over to Serpent to see Caitlin on Thursday nights. Yes, I’d been doing it after I got off shift. Caitlin’s staff had approved it.

  Jan looked at me oddly.

  “Well, Serpent’s cottage director says keeping Caitlin up till eleven or eleven-thirty is too late. It’s past her bedtime. And, frankly, I agree.”

  “You make it sound as if she just found out I was visiting Caitlin. She’s known all along. I asked Karin to get Jenny’s okay before we made the arrangement. And Jenny was there a couple of times when I went over.”