The Knife and the Butterfly
Page 8
In the old days, we took care of Regina and taught her everything, even how to tie her shoes. And now she didn’t even want to talk to us. Maybe I should have been glad that she had a new life away from us so we couldn’t mess things up for her. It wasn’t like me and Eddie were Boy Scouts. But I couldn’t help wishing she missed us just a little.
CHAPTER 27: NOW
I’m sick of trying to get my brain to play that day at the park. The trying keeps taking me places I don’t want to go. I feel like giving up on remembering because it’s too damn hard, but there’s no way I can handle Pakmin right until I know what’s behind me. What I did or didn’t do. Right now I can’t even remember enough to work up a good lie.
Who knows, maybe they even gave us some drug to make us forget so that they can tell us whatever they want. Like the opposite of truth serum.
But I can’t think that way. Job #1: remembering. Who’s the patron saint of things you forgot? Ma used to sing us some song with the names of saints in it. There’s a patron for everything, she said. For TV repairmen and orphans and people with broken hearts, for dogs and cats, for people who sleep on park benches, for lost causes. Me, I’m my own fucking lost cause.
A name finally pops into my head: San Antonio. Ma telling me and Eddie when we lost our remote-control race car, hacemos una oración a San Antonio. A prayer to San Antonio for a lost thing.
Close enough. I imagine that my missing memory is a lost thing. I picture it as a cardboard box, the kind you get in first grade to hold your pencils and crayons. The box is in a big room filled with junk, but I know it’s in there somewhere. Show me where it is, I think, please show me where it is. Dear San Antonio. Please. Amen. I almost laugh out loud, that’s how bad my prayer sucks. But it’s been about a million years since I prayed. Shit, it’s been a while since I talked to anybody but Gabe and Pakmin. After Tigs disappeared, the only time I say anything is to ask the new arrivals about Eddie.
Maybe I’ll try the prayer again, but I don’t need nobody looking at me. I spread my blanket out so it hangs from the top of the mattress down to the floor, and then I think small and pull myself under the cot. The concrete floor smells of sour piss and sweat. For a second I’m back on the Southwest Side running down an alley, the high of canning mixing with the fear of getting caught. Then I’m here again, and all I see is the wobbly weave of the blanket. The sounds of the cell block filter in to me. Instead of praying, I end up listening to the shifting of mattresses, the clearing of throats, the bouncing of springs that means somebody’s jacking off.
“Come get your lunch, son,” Gabe calls to me. I open my eyes and see his white pants legs and black shoes through the fabric of the blanket. I roll out from under my cot, feeling like an idiot. But Gabe doesn’t say anything about me sleeping on the floor, just stands there with his mystery-man smile. It’s creepy at first, but almost nice once you get used to it.
Usually Gabe just leaves the food, but if he wants to talk to me, I’d better get my ass up and take advantage. Today he’s holding the tray all funny. Instead of holding onto the sides like normal, he has his hand underneath it like a waiter. When I reach over for it, he uses his free hand to pull my right hand to the underside of the tray. “There you go,” he says. His eyes lock with mine, and I feel a hard metal coil against my fingers. “Until tomorrow morning,” he says.
“Thanks, Gabe,” I say. I give him a nod to show him how much I mean it.
Once he’s gone and I’m sure the hall is empty, I slide Lexi’s notebook out from under the tray. I fire a thank-you in San Antonio’s direction just to be on the safe side, but I’m not dumb enough to believe that prayers work this fast. I’m pretty sure this is all Gabe.
Even though I don’t feel like eating, I choke down my sloppy joe and the apple so that nothing will seem weird. Then I lie down on the cot, pull the blanket over my head, and start reading. I figure I’ve got at least an hour before rec.
Get this, Gray Suit says I should keep a journal. First he brought out this sunflowered piece of shit with a yellow ribbon to tie it shut. No way was I gonna touch that. I told him to give it to his grandma or shove it up his ass.
When he came back with this one, I took it just to shut him up. But if I write in here, it’s because I want to.
There’s nothing else to do anyway. So far my day is eat, shit, and sleep. That and cross my fingers that Meemaw and Shauna will get me out fast.
The thing is, I’m in here, but I don’t even know what exactly went down.
See, I like my life a whole lot better if I’m on a little something to soften the edges. My favorites are Xannies. They mess me up good.
One time Cartoon told me that I let him and Slots touch my tits when I was tripping. “Bullshit,” I said, “in your dreams.” My boys call me a tease, but the truth is that I don’t like being touched. That’s for reasons I don’t feel like writing about. So I thought for sure Cartoon was lying, so I punched him hard in the gut.
Then he leaned over and whispered something about the scar. It’s on my left tit, from an open-heart surgery when I was a baby. And I never talk about it. It’s something he’d only know about if he’d seen it.
Anyway, me and Cartoon are pretty tight. He calls me before something goes down. Then sometimes he turns around and acts like a pussy. Tells me to beat it, says there’s no bitches allowed.
“What about you, faggot?” I say, and play it off. But it hurts me when he says shit like that. Makes me feel like somehow he doesn’t really think I’m down. Like I’ve always got to be proving myself to him, and he’s supposed to be my friend.
Meemaw came today, but Shauna still hasn’t shown her ugly face. Meemaw says to be patient, but she doesn’t know when I’m going to be getting out of here. She asked me if I wanted her to pray with me like she always does when I’m in trouble. I didn’t, but I said okay because I know it’s what she wanted to hear.
Here’s how being in here is like living with Shauna:
#1 – It’s only temporary.
#2 – The walls are blank.
#3 – I’m lonely.
#4 – I’m bored.
#5 – There’s shit to eat.
#6 – Shauna’s not around.
I could add a lot more to this list, but I’m already feeling mega pissed at Shauna. Yeah, so I call my mom by her first name. So it’s kind of disrespectful, so what? She hasn’t done a whole lot to earn my respect. Some role model. Always telling me to do the right thing, whatever that is, when she can’t keep her own life straight. No way I can take her serious.
Like when she says that I need to work on my attitude, I just roll my eyes real big at her and say, “What attitude, Shauna?”
That pisses her off, and she throws the remote down. I just smile and go, “Easy there. Looks like you’ve got some attitude too.”
Sometimes that gets her laughing, and the lecture’s over. But lots of times we just fight. Like last week she asked me, did I skip summer school today? Which of course I did, but no way was I going to admit it. I just walked out of the kitchen and headed for my bedroom.
Then she shouted after me about getting the call from the school. Goddamn attendance office.
I fought back fast. “Who you gonna believe? Your own daughter or some goddamn secretary?”
Then she came into my room talking about responsibility. Blah, blah, blah. Her voice goes all whiny when she says this kind of crap. The funniest is when she starts in about trust. It’s all total bullshit.
I don’t care if she wants to talk about this shit, but she has to be ready to feel it where it hurts. Like when I remind her that she’s the one who got fired off of three jobs for coming in drunk. She starts to cry, and her mascara globs up in the wrinkles around her eyes. God, she’s pathetic.
I show no mercy, just go in for the kill. I tell her that the mistakes started with her. We’d both be better off if she’d just gotten an abortion. Had me vacuumed out. But she didn’t. So I tell her to stop trying to ruin my
life now. Then I grab Theo’s leash and he comes running. A second later we’re out the door and out of her reach.
I toss down the notebook. Is this a fucking joke? Theo’s a damn dog. Shit. The way she was talking about him with her mom before, I had him pegged for some kind of family, a brother or some primo at least. So much for that.
I don’t get how some people are about dogs, acting like they matter so much. Whenever Pops saw dogs nosing around the trash at the Bel-Lindo, he’d give them a good kick in the ribs. Regina didn’t like that, but we just told her those were mean dogs, not like the ones on TV. Me, I can’t see how anybody could have a dog unless they was rich. Why waste good food on a mutt? But you see it all the time, especially with white people. It’s like they think having a dog makes you a good person. I’m not buying it. Having a dog is just having a dog.
I think about Lexi on the street with her pinche dog crapping in the neighbor’s bushes and I feel a little better, so I go back to reading.
Here’s my day so far. I woke up at the butt crack of dawn because some ho down the hall was screaming bloody murder. I tried to go back to sleep once the guards hauled her ass off. No dice. 5:00 a.m. and awake like a fuckin’ farmer.
No lights in the cells till 7:00, so I had two hours to kill. I thought about Cartoon for a while, but that made me sad because I haven’t heard a word from him.
I looked around the cell for something that I could mess with, and finally I found these bolts holding the toilet to the floor. I worked on one of them forever and got it twisted out. Then I spent the next hour using it to scratch my name into the wall right below the sink. I did it like Slots showed me one time when I went canning with him:
That’s what Slots called me. Sexi Lexi. He even canned that onto the back of the Quik Stop when he was tagging it up. Sexi Lexi. Homeboy just wanted to get into my pants. But I still liked it. Slots and Cartoon are tight with each other, but whenever Slots comes around me, Cartoon gets all edgy. That makes it more fun for me. I like them both, but Cartoon’s cuter.
It’s my fourth day in here. I finally got to go outside for exercise. Hot and sticky as a giant’s pussy out there, but at least it wasn’t the cell. My little pocket of paradise seriously stinks. Can’t even get away from my own farts.
Everything they serve at meals here is in lumps. Brown lump = meat loaf. White lump = potatoes. Green lump = spinach. Puke-colored lump = applesauce. I’m going to die if I have to keep eating powdered eggs and rubbery hamburgers. I want a Snickers bar, Lay’s potato chips, tater tots. Chicken strips and French-cut green beans with lots of salt and baked potatoes with butter and cheese and bacon. Chocolate milk with cereal and Meemaw’s bakery cinnamon rolls for breakfast. Anything that tastes.
Theo’s dead. Theo’s dead because of me.
I’ve been living with it for two days now, but I keep seeing Theo’s dopey big head, his tongue all hanging out, the floppy ears. I want to be mad at him. Why didn’t you bite them, you stupid mutt? You’ve seen pit bulls on the block before, you know how it’s done. But also I know that Theo was super old and not very smart at all. He needed protection.
I want to push my mom up against a wall and say, “Shauna, you idiot, why didn’t you check on him? Why’d you leave him out there to get cut? Why didn’t you take him for a normal goddamn walk?”
But most of all I want to kick Gray Suit in the balls for showing me the picture. So what if I said I wanted to see it? He should have known that it would mess me up.
I knew something went down when he came in calling me “Alexis.” And sure enough, he goes and tells me that even though they set bail, my defense team wants me to stay in custody for my safety. I told him right where he could put that shit idea. For my safety?! I’m not fuckin’ scared. And I told him so.
Then he dropped the bomb about “danger to my family,” which shut me up fast. I asked him about Meemaw, then Shauna. In that order. I needed to know. I even said “please,” trying not to be a bitch about it for once.
Gray Suit pulled out this photograph, held it facedown against his notepad. He looked like he was ready to shit a brick. Then he told me about Theo.
I told him to let me see the picture, that I had to see it. And I swore to myself that I was not gonna cry in front of him.
For a long time he just stared at the Kodak stamp on the back of the picture, didn’t say anything. Finally he flipped it over, but he still kept half of it covered with his notepad.
The part that I could see showed the fence behind our duplex. There was a message spray-painted on it in dripping black letters: 187 DIE BITCH 187. I knew that Gray Suit was hiding the part of the picture that had my dog in it because I could see the tip of Theo’s tail.
I told him I wanted to see the whole picture.
He asked if I was sure and looked right at me for the first time I can remember.
When he uncovered the whole picture, there was Theo. If I only looked at his face, it was easy to pretend he was just lying in the backyard taking a nap. But then I saw the dark red mess spilling out of him and mixing with dirt. It looked like somebody unzipped his belly. There was a big knife still stuck in him, and I thought I was going to be sick.
Gray Suit’s voice seemed far away, and it faded in and out like a radio in a car whose antenna got jacked. Saying shit about the safest thing, about my protection, about a police watch for Meemaw, about the time before the trial.
But none of that matters, because Theo’s dead. I know that no matter how I spin it, this one’s all on me. I might’ve done other bad shit that I can’t write about here, but Theo didn’t do nothing. He was just a dumbass dog with a sweet heart. This one’s all on me, and it sucks.
I didn’t know that I was crying until just now when I messed up the ink in here with my stupid tears.
If this is how she gets over her dog getting cut up, what would she do if one of the punks in her kiddie gang got offed? Would it be enough to make her lie? To make her pin it on one of us, no matter who did it? She might get a break from her own charges for revealing information, and until I remember something, I can’t prove she’s lying. But all this takes me back to the question of why she’s locked up in the first place. What have they got on her? She’s been sticking her fingers in somebody’s business if she’s getting threats like that thing with her dog.
I need to keep reading, but my eyes are already tired. I take a few turns around my cell, probably looking like a dog in a cage. Then I dive back into the notebook.
Gray Suit just brought me my new schedule. Like he’s some kind of school counselor. He’s been fighting with the boss of the place over whether I should be eating in the cafeteria with what he calls the youth offenders. The people in charge don’t want to give me special treatment. Gray Suit said he made them because I’m being kept here for my protection. He said it isn’t safe for me to be around everybody else. They’re a threat to me, he said. No way to know until it’s too late who’s representing who.
I told him I could take care of my own damn self, don’t care what gang a bitch is in; she won’t mess with me. He looked like he was going to cough up a hairball and said no, the worst thing possible would be for me to get into an altercation with someone here.
So here’s the deal:
ALEXIS ALLEN SCHEDULE
All programming subject to change and cancellation.
7:00 a.m. – breakfast in unit
9:00 a.m. – supervised group therapy
12:00 p.m. – lunch in unit
1:00 p.m. – supervised recreational time in TV room
2:00 p.m. – one-on-one therapy
4:00 p.m. – supervised recreational time in gym/courtyard
6:00 p.m. – dinner in unit
There ought to be a Xanax and cookie happy hour where Cartoon comes to visit me. I want him to tell me what him and the boys have been up to. I want to know what they’re going to do about Theo.
Gray Suit must have said that I needed someone tough for therapy because the
y stuck me with some dyke. Janet. She started out all, “this is going to be different, I’m here to help,” but as soon as I pushed her buttons a little, you could tell that she didn’t want to be there any more than I did.
A lot of things about Shauna piss me off. There’s one thing that’s worse than the rest, though. My friends think she’s hot. How embarrassing is that? One time one of Cartoon’s friends wrapped his arm around my shoulder and said, would I mind if he did my mom just once to see what it was like? Pissed me off for a whole day.
Shauna runs around in leggings and little shorts and a shitload of makeup. She even has a stupid sweatshirt with PINK printed across the front just like the skinny girls at my school. Who does she think she is? She chooses not to accept that you can’t dress like that when you’re forty.
I need out of this place. I’m hungry for a crazy night with my homies, at least with my boy Cartoon. He always makes me laugh and forget what shit life is. And he’s always got a good supply of bars.
When I’m just sitting in here, if I close my eyes, I can almost feel a bar of Xanax in my hand. Once I could have sworn I even broke a block off. I was just dying to put it in my mouth and feel the world go soft and me get invincible. But when I opened my eyes I was just holding onto the corner of my notebook.
Today when I got back to my cell after outdoor rec there was a Bible on my bed, the one Meemaw sent for me when she came last, I guess. It was a real nice hardback, but they cut off the front and back covers.
So far I’ve just held it in my lap and traced the words “Holy Bible” on the first page. She said there was a note in it for me. I’m afraid that if I read what she wrote, I’ll start crying again. Since I saw Meemaw, being here seems way too real, and I can’t stand it. I wish I could go home and listen to my music and hug Theo and feel him lick my ear and even have a conversation with Shauna that maybe doesn’t end in shouting if she doesn’t act like such a bitch.