A warm breeze stirred the big maple tree, which was half shaded by the house. He looked up at it, and saw that the top leaves glowed as if set afire.
He was still there on the porch a half hour later when the cruiser reappeared, this time pulling into the driveway. “Mr. Winter,” the blond officer said as he stepped out of the car, “We’re going to need you to come with us.”
“What the hell?” The handcuffs were icy, and far heavier than Anthony would have imagined, the weight and position pulling his shoulders back uncomfortably and straining the buttons of his white oxford shirt. Quickly, though, the officers escorted him outside and folded him into the backseat of the cruiser, and then his discomfort increased tenfold.
“The DA is issuing a warrant for your arrest.”
“What’s the charge?” Anthony said. The door thumped shut and the officers got into the front seats without answering. “This can’t be legal,” he told them through the vertical bars that separated the backseat from the front. No response. “And how about a seat belt?” he said as the car pulled away from the curb and a pair of curious neighbors watched them go.
There was nothing in the back of the patrol car except Anthony himself. No belts, no latches, no knobs, no handles, no mats on the floor. No way to brace himself, except awkwardly, with his elbows and feet. Bars on the door windows, bars dividing front from back. No way to get free or get out. “Can’t you tell me anything?”
The blond officer didn’t even turn around as he said, “The magistrate will spell it all out for you.” Then he closed a plastic panel that separated the front and back compartments even farther, presumably to mute the arrestee’s outraged, angry, or annoying outbursts, or to prevent being spat on.
“Magistrate?” Anthony said, raising his voice. What or who the hell was the magistrate? Wasn’t that a British term? Right, he thought—British, for basically a judge. He was going to see a judge? “What do you mean by magistrate?” he tried again. No answer. “Yo! Officer! Why am I going to see a judge?”
They continued to ignore him, and he was tempted to kick the seat, not that it was likely to do any good. “Fuck all,” he said, slumping down in the seat. A magistrate, okay, fine. Who would tell him what, exactly?
Arrested, shit. Arrested, and then what? If he was going to see a sort-of-judge, when was he supposed to get to talk to a lawyer? Did he even need a lawyer? This was all some kind of screwup in the first place, had to be, because how could sending some photos at the request of an over-sixteen-year-old girl be a crime?
The drive to wherever he was being taken seemed to last for hours as they moved through the stop-and-go flow of late afternoon Capital Boulevard traffic. His cellphone vibrated in his pocket. He twisted his arms around to his side, touched the edge of his pocket with his fingers, but couldn’t reach into it. Amelia. He was sure, or he wanted to be sure, that it was Amelia trying to call him, somehow, finally. Did she know he was going to be hauled in? Was she calling, thinking there was time to warn him?
Anthony had no idea where the police station was located, and was surprised when they wound their way into downtown Raleigh and then pulled into a parking garage that, after the brightness of the afternoon, was suffocatingly dark.
The rear door was opened, and he scooted out. “Where are we?”
“Jail.”
Anthony’s stomach lurched. “Come on, seriously?”
“What, you thought we were going to McDonald’s?” The dark-haired officer laughed at his own lousy joke, then left them, telling his partner, “Catch you after.”
“What about a lawyer? Don’t I get to talk to a lawyer?”
The blond officer nudged him toward a door. “We go that way,” he said, then put his hand on Anthony’s shoulder to show that Anthony should precede him. “The magistrate will instruct you,” he said.
He heard the officer announce them, presumably using the radio device he’d noticed was strapped to the fronts of the officers’ shirts, then the door opened with a resounding clatter. Anthony hesitated, then stepped inside; the door closed behind them with an even louder clank.
A short walk through the most featureless, colorless hallway he had ever seen led them to another secure door, which opened as if by magic and admitted them to a longer, more sickly looking version of the space they’d just been in. Jaundiced yellow-tan walls, floors, lights, and absolutely nothing on the walls, no pictures or posters or even windows to the outdoors, nothing, except for doorways now and then. And even the doors were yellow-tan, with small windows protected by yellow-tan crosshatched metal.
“Go left here,” the officer said. Anthony turned left and walked through an open doorway, finding himself in a long box of a room that featured eight short metal benches bolted to a dirty, grayish tiled floor. At the front of the room were four crosshatched windows in a painted concrete wall, something like the teller windows in a seedy Roman arena he once visited with him mom and his uncle John, when he was fourteen. They’d been there to see some alt-rock band, but the band had failed to show. To make up for the disappointment, John had taken them to one of Trastevere’s ancient, amazing squares and said Anthony could have as many gelati as he wanted. He’d had three scoops of panna cotta, then struck up a rudimentary but entertaining conversation with two giggly Italian girls who’d mistaken him for a local.
This was definitely not that.
Anthony was directed to wait on a bench while the officer went to the one occupied window at the far left and handed some paperwork over to a clerk, a long-faced fat man with droopy eyelids. He listened for clues on what, exactly, he was being charged with, but the officer and the clerk talked football scores. Football! Who the hell cared whether East Carolina was having a better season than last year, or if the team’s starting quarterback had a shot at next year’s NFL draft?
Anthony let his head hang and felt the stretch in his neck. It was The System. He’d been swallowed up by The System and had become, in the time it took to crank the cuffs onto his wrists and put him in that cruiser, a nonentity. He, an actual person with an actual life, no longer existed. No one but these two football-obsessed men and the dark-haired cop had any idea where he was. Amelia, his mother, his grandmother, his friends, they were all in The World, totally ignorant of his sitting here being digested—slowly, so that the resulting agony was sure to leave an impression that he’d carry with him into the next world, whatever it might be.
“Now you,” the officer finally said, nodding to him as if the room was filled with prospective arrestees. “Approach the window and stand on the line.”
Anthony got up. The handcuffs were cutting into his wrists, and he needed to use the bathroom. “How long before I—”
“Stand on the line,” the officer repeated.
Anthony walked to the line, a three-foot-long battered strip of what appeared to be duct tape. “When do I get my phone call?”
The officer rolled his eyes and said nothing.
The fat man, wearing a grungy, grayish dress shirt—was this the magistrate?—sat behind the window at a gray metal desk, his eyes on the paper in front of him. “Verify your name, date of birth, and address.”
Anthony recited all. The man, still not looking at him, said, “Any distinguishing marks? Tattoos, piercings, scars, gold teeth?”
“No, not unless you count the—”
“Remain on the line and look into the camera until after the flash,” the man said, leaving Anthony to finish his statement silently, The birthmark on my hip. Anthony did as directed, looking up at the camera mounted just above the window. Mug shot, he realized, as the camera flashed. Then the police officer told him, “We’re going to exit the room,” and waited for Anthony to precede him again.
“Now go left,” the officer said, and they were back in the bland hallway. It smelled, oddly, of ozone and popcorn, and, now, of his own nervous sweat.
Next, they entered a much smaller room occupied by one wide desk, behind which was a man who looked to Anthony
like Ichabod Crane reincarnate. There were two short benches in front of the desk, one of which was occupied by a wiry black man whose neck and forearms were tattooed with elaborate scrollwork. A black-shirted guard with bulging biceps and pecs, and chains dangling from his belt, stood by while the arrestee was told to empty his pockets and surrender any and all accessories.
“This is where I leave you,” the blond officer told Anthony while he fitted a key into the handcuffs, releasing Anthony’s wrists at last.
Anthony let his arms relax to his sides, then slowly pulled them forward and upward, stretching his shoulder blades, one eye on the muscled guard in case the guy mistook his stretching as a grab for his holstered gun. He rubbed one wrist with his thumb and then did the other, trying to smooth out the red indentations as if doing so would erase the whole surreal experience. No such luck.
He sighed and looked around while he waited for his turn to cough everything up. The walls here were papered with fliers advising that certain dangerous items were sometimes easily concealed, or that innocuous-looking things could be used as weapons. Be on Your Guard! one sign warned, in towering mimeographed letters, circa 1980. Was this sign supposed to be for Anthony’s safety?—suppose the tattooed guy was in for violent assault, or murder, and might lash out if he got the chance. That was more comforting than thinking the sign was for the guy whose job it was to pat down the newly arrested, as the guard was now doing to the tattooed man. Pretty scary to think the guards needed reminders. Wasn’t knowing what to look for the thing they were trained to do? The thing they did multiple times every single day?
Ichabod Crane turned his attention to Anthony, repeating verbatim the directions he’d given the tattooed man, never once looking Anthony in the eye. Anthony emptied his pockets of what little he carried with him: phone, wallet, and the half-dollar-sized pewter charm Amelia had given him last Valentine’s Day. The center of the disc had been punched out in the shape of a heart. She wore that heart on a long leather string around her neck.
Amelia. What was she going through at home?
He emptied his wallet: license, student ID, condom—how incriminating was that?—ticket stub from the Rialto theatre, fourteen dollars cash, a receipt from Taco Bell. Feeling exposed and absurd, he unbuckled his belt and yanked it from his waist, then leaned down to untie and unlace his shoes. What, did they think that he, a guy who had done nothing except snap a few naked pictures and share them with his steady girlfriend, was going to suddenly become murderous and try to strangle the other inmates with shoestrings? Or maybe it was that the other prisoners would attack him for the laces, then use them on the guards. Actually, he thought, they probably worried about people—what was the term from the cop shows? Perps?—they probably worried about perps becoming suicidal after extended exposure to the pervasive yellow-tan, fluorescent-lighted environment, and hanging themselves with their belts. How did these people stand this environment all day, every day?
His belongings were inventoried onto a typed list, then zipped into a canvas bag.
“Review this,” Crane said, handing him the list.
Anthony looked it over. “Fine,” he said. He slid it back to the man.
The guard barked, “Stand facing the wall.” Anthony stood. “Arms up, spread your legs.”
Anthony closed his eyes while the guard patted him down, armpits to ankles, crotch to ankles, waist, thighs, ass to ankles. He wanted to say, You forgot my ears, nose, and throat, but kept it to himself in case the guard took him seriously.
“Now here.” He was led to a machine for fingerprinting. The guard told him to relax his arm, then put his hand and fingers through a series of ink-free, computerized scans—probably sending out all his info to every state and to the Feds, probably Interpol too, because he was, after all, an accused criminal and you couldn’t be too careful in these post–9/11 days.
They left that room and continued down the hallway, Anthony shuffling so that he wouldn’t walk out of his shoes. Now he could hear men’s voices, some screaming in anger, others loud with laughter. Then, the closed-in smell of the hallways and rooms he’d been in gave way to the rank odors of locked-up unwashed humans and stale food. They reached an intersection, where Anthony could now see where the sounds and smells were coming from; here, to his right, his left, and along the hall where it widened and continued ahead of him, were the cells.
He’d expected bars. Instead, there were rooms: some cubicle-sized, others larger—the larger ones holding groups of men, he saw as he passed. Each had a door with a barred window, and then a large barred window beside the door. He kept shuffling forward, waiting for the guard to direct him to whichever of these was going to be his temporary home. There had to be toilets in these rooms, though he wondered if, under these conditions, he’d be capable of using one.
“Hey!”
Anthony jumped at the sound of a short, hairy man pounding the glass of a cell window at his immediate left. “Gringo! Hey! Take his keys, get me out of here, take his keys!”
“Keep walking,” the guard said tonelessly.
As Anthony neared the end of the hall with still no direction to stop, he slowed and looked over his shoulder. The guard pointed to a door just ahead, on the wall in front of him. Anthony went that way.
Inside the doorway was a smaller version of the first room. There was only one Plexiglas teller window here, in which there was a single, golf-ball-sized hole. “Stand on the line,” the guard said.
Anthony took his spot on another battered tape line, and the man behind the glass began speaking. Anthony caught the word “magistrate,” and “serious sexual offense,” and “… corrupting young girls?” but couldn’t hear clearly. He stepped closer to the glass and leaned toward it.
The presumed magistrate jerked backward and shouted, “Get the fuck away from that window!”
“Stay on the line!” the guard said, yanking Anthony’s shoulder.
“Jesus!” Anthony nearly toppled backward. He was horrified to feel tears threatening. “Sorry! I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear him.” His heart pounded his ribs as if it, like he, wanted out, wanted to run fast and far and never look back.
The magistrate scowled and continued, louder this time, “As you have no priors, I’m going to waive your bail, on your promise to stay away from Ms. Wilkes and report to the court as directed.” He didn’t wait for Anthony to promise before passing some rolled sheets of paper through the hole and nodding his dismissal to the guard.
“Let’s go,” the guard said, handing the papers to Anthony.
They left the room and entered a short hallway, then went to a door that clattered open the way the first had done. Anthony shuffled forward, the guard stepped into the chamber beside him, then the door closed behind them with a bang. The guard handed him the bag with his belongings. “You can have these back,” he said, and as soon as Anthony had fished out the contents and put his phone and wallet back into his pockets, the door in front of him opened onto a small stoop and an empty parking lot.
The guard said, “Sayonara,” and motioned Anthony forward, outside into the harsh circle of a glaring sodium light, and then the door clanked closed behind him.
Anthony stood there stunned, shoelaces and belt dangling from his hands, his bladder now painfully full. That was it? A mug shot, fingerprinting, a lecture from a crazed man, and now out on the street? He was free to go?
It took a minute for his comprehension to catch up to his experience. The magistrate had said no bail, okay, right, good. The papers—he squinted at the top one, scanned it; it appeared to be his arrest warrant—maybe the papers would help him get straight with this. His offense was listed as something called DISSEM MTRL/PERFORM HARMFL MIN. What the hell was that supposed to mean? He read it again but the jumble of abbreviations remained unclear. In the box below this was THE STATE OF NORTH CAROLINA VS. and then his name and address and phone number, his race, his sex, his birth date, his driver’s license number. He read this several times and thought,
Seriously? The State versus him? Despite the document in his hands and despite the experience he’d just endured, he was having trouble believing that after the police had taken Amelia’s statement and his own, after they knew she’d invited him to send her the photos, they’d decided that he’d committed a crime against her. Her name was listed below his info, at the bottom in a box that asked for the “Names & Addresses Of Witnesses (Including Counties & Telephone Nos.).” Only her name appeared.
The rest of the form consisted primarily of a large white box in which his “offense(s)” was described in embarrassing detail—and in a box at the left, he saw he was said to be “In Violation Of G.S. 14-190.15.”
Maybe all this was just a technicality, something along the lines of a convenience store selling cigarettes to someone under eighteen. At the far left bottom of the page, a box was marked, showing that his was a Misdemeanor Offense Which Requires Fingerprinting Per Fingerprint Plan—and what was up with the capitalizing-every-word thing, anyway? Could a friggin’ form sound more self-important?
A misdemeanor—that was good. Still, the whole thing was bogus. What he’d done—whatever the abbreviations meant, exactly—was “HARMFL,” right. Then teachers ought to get arrested for taking students to art museums where they’d see sculptures of naked adults. His mother should be arrested for letting him page through her coffee-table books on Renaissance art—and imprisoned for life for taking him to the Louvre when he was only fifteen. He folded the warrant, and the other form—a CONDITIONS OF RELEASE AND RELEASE ORDER—into a tight square and pushed it into his pocket.
The night air was damp, cold on his bare arms, and he shivered as he slipped his belt back into its loops and then stepped farther into the shadows to relieve himself. This, he thought as he stood close to the building feeling shameful and desperate, must be how the homeless felt. Through volunteering for Habitat, he knew guys who’d suffered a lot more than one aberrant evening out in the cold, peeing furtively against a fence or wall or tree; he tried to consider himself lucky.
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