Do Not Pass Go (10 page)

Deet was imagining this jail cell like one of those old war movies, where there's one soldier of every race and religion in the squadron, so at the end all the guys can be brothers.

“And then there's Ronny Joseph. He's about as old as me, but he's been in jail most of his life. Started when he was twelve and in juvenile detention. That sounds really bad, doesn't it? But I think he's the nicest guy I ever met.”

Dad switched the phone to the other ear, and Deet did the same. His ear felt hot and red, as if he'd been pushing hard on the phone receiver.

“They let us go out for half an hour to walk around the gym at night. Just walk. We can't play in there or anything because they're so overcrowded they have prisoners sleeping in there, mattresses all around the walls. Ronny was walking around with me in the gym last night, telling me about his life. He's part Alaskan Indian, but he wasn't raised here. His mom took him to California when he was a baby. She left him and he was raised in foster homes there, one worse than the other. One jail sentence after another. He said this time was different, though. He has a little girl now, and he wants to make a good life from now on. No drugs, no alcohol. He wants her to have a good family like he never had. I know he'll do it too. Ronny has this sympathy for everyone in here, no matter what they've done. Understanding.”

Deet had never seen Dad look so intense, so concerned. “I know I had it pretty easy all my life. I mean Grandpa was tough to get along with and all, but you
wouldn't believe what kind of life these guys had when they were little. I can't even tell you all of it. I'd be sick telling you the things they've had done to them. And sometimes when they're telling this stuff they cry, just like they were still little kids.”

Dad shook his head slowly. “I never knew stuff like that went on. I've really been sheltered, and that's the truth. I see how easy I had it. Just having fresh air and being outdoors all my life, that's more than most of these guys had. They treat me like I'm a kid, in a way, because I've never been in jail before, never did drugs before, and they say they know I'll never come back over and over like they did. And they don't feel jealous of me, like you'd think, they just wish me well. You wouldn't think you'd meet people like that in jail, would you?”

Dad had entered a whole new world, a world they never knew existed, and he was finding it very interesting. It was making him think new things, look at his life in a different way. That was not something any of them had expected to happen when Dad went to jail.

Deet wished he could see Ronny Joseph. And the rest of the guys in Dad's cell.

When he was on the bus going home, Deet thought about all the things that Dad had told him, and it occurred to him: Dad had been talking like people in a book.

On Deet's next visit the woman
at the desk was wearing tights with thick fluorescent green ankle socks and Nike trainers. A long T-shirt hung almost to her knees, and she had a sweatband on, as if she was going to go out running at any minute. Her clothes were bold and startling, but she herself seemed nervous, as if she didn't want to be noticed. It was really odd.

Andy was there again, but the other visitors Deet hadn't seen before.

One of them was a pleasant-looking young woman with a girl a little younger than P. J.

“When can Daddy come home? What's Daddy doing in here? Why can't he come with us?” she asked her mom, twisting around one of the uprights that formed the entranceway to the visiting room.

Deet thought the mother might be embarrassed to have her little girl ask something like that in public, but the mother answered cheerfully, didn't try to hush the little girl or speak softly herself.

“Well, you know when you do something wrong, you have a time-out? Well, Daddy did something wrong and he's having a time-out.”

The little girl nodded gravely and went on twisting herself around the pole.

Andy smiled. He bent over and whispered in Deet's ear, “Good explanation.”

There were lots of kids visiting that day. A tightlipped, gray-haired woman had brought two kids, about eight and ten, Deet guessed. The kids looked at home in the waiting room, as if they'd been visiting the jail for a long time.

The oldest, a boy, sat down beside Deet and looked at him with frank curiosity. “Who are you visiting?” he asked Deet.

“My dad.”

The boy nodded. “We're visiting my mom. She was arrested for embezzling.”

“Oh,” said Deet, feeling a little shocked. Embezzling sounded like a pretty sophisticated crime. Sort of premeditated. Now it was his turn to tell what Dad was in for. Why couldn't he be as up-front as this kid? Why couldn't he just say,
Oh, bummer, embezzling. My dad was busted for drugs. My dad was arrested with methamphetamines. My dad
… Forget it. He couldn't say
anything
like that, so he asked, “Will she be here long?”

“Two more months. Embezzlement is a white-collar crime and it has a presumptive sentence.”

Deet tried to look as if he knew what the boy was talking about.

“That's my grandma, and that's my sister Meghan.”

“What's
your
name?” asked Deet, for something to say.

“Ian Foster Carmichael,” the boy said, chin up and eyes bright. Having a mom in jail hadn't damaged
his
self-image, Deet thought. Meghan looked like Jam—long, wispy blond hair, brown eyes, fidgety. In her hair was a purple plastic barrette that she'd obviously been adjusting herself, because it was crooked and the hair was bunched up under it. Deet wished the grandma
would unclasp it, brush down Meghan's hair, and put it back in right.

The last visitor to come in was a tall, wild-haired black woman with a little boy, maybe two years old, on her hip. After she'd taken off his snowsuit, he was all over the waiting room, his mom loping after him, calling out commands he ignored. “Michael, sit your sorry ass down in this chair!”

He was so fast and his mom was so gangly that Deet felt himself laughing, for the first time since Dad had been sent to jail.

Andy picked up the little boy so she could sign in, throwing him high in the air over his head, making him shriek with laughter. Andy was the kind of person who saw what was needed and did it.

Deet could see it was going to be really noisy today, locked in that little room with all those kids. That was good, because the more noise there was, the less uncomfortable he felt.

When it was time to go into the visiting room there was a different routine. A guard stood in front of the archway before they went in and waved a wandlike thing
over them, up and down on both sides, to check for metal or something.

This guard was tall and must have been an athlete, because he had the most perfect build Deet had ever seen outside of the movies. He was triangle-shaped, like a GI Joe doll. He had a lighthearted way of dealing with everyone. Kind eyes. Deet was afraid he was staring at him as he watched him run the wand over everyone, making it funny. Deet had never thought there would be nice guards, and here was another besides Mr. Tobolowsky.

Dad looked worse than ever. His skin was stretched tight across his cheekbones, his nose seemed sharper, and his eyes were pinched-looking or something.

Deet took the stool against the wall, which he thought might not be so noisy. When Dad picked up the phone, Deet said, “They searched us this time with a metal detector thing.”

“Yeah, last night they had a big fight in here, on the visitors' side. Two women got into it, and one of them had a pocketknife. I think they both came to see the same guy.” Dad smiled.

Good thing Mom didn't know about that, or she might not have let him come.

“There was a fight in our cell last night too,” Dad said.

“Wow,” said Deet, thinking about how small the cell was, wondering how they'd found room to fight.

“We got two new guys in there, and they got into it. Over a
towel
, if you can believe it. I thought I'd seen fights before, but I never saw anything like this. Worse than anything I ever saw in the movies. Ronny got right in there and broke it up, talking fast, and he got them calmed down. But not before there was blood everywhere. The smell of blood and sweat in that little room—I thought I was going to be sick.

“Then the guards came and they made us all get out of the cell and go to the gym because they had to clean the blood up. They worry about AIDS anytime there's blood. We didn't get to sleep until after midnight.”

This was the kind of thing Deet had thought about when Dad first went in. Violence. And here he'd just begun to think that jail was not so bad, and that all the inmates were easygoing.

“What happens to guys who fight?”

“They put them in seg for a while. They have a hearing to see whose fault it was. I saw both of them today and they were wearing orange suits.” He shook his head. “To tell you the truth, I think something was wrong with that one guy. He didn't look like he was all there. Ronny says they get a lot of crazies in here, you know.”

“What would they put someone like that in jail for? Don't they put them in a hospital or something if they're crazy?”

“No,” said Dad. “There are lots of guys in here who need a psychiatrist more than they need to be locked up. Doesn't make any difference to the law
why
you did something.”

Michael was all over the visiting room, tugging at Deet's shirt, wanting to get up, running from family to family, trying to get someone to play with him. And Michael's mom was darting here and there with the phone in one hand, trying to rein him in. His dad was tall too, and he was getting a kick out of Michael's antics.

Andy was arguing with his girlfriend about an apartment she wanted to rent when she got out. She was
wearing a lot of makeup and had spent a lot of time on her curly red hair.

Meghan and Ian were taking turns on the phone, talking to their mother, who looked just like anyone you'd see in a store—a bank clerk, a saleswoman. Their grandmother leaned against the back wall, maybe waiting for her turn on the phone, looking pretty sour. Deet wondered if she was mad at her daughter for getting thrown in jail. Looked like it.

“I sent you some books today. Mom mailed them this morning,” said Deet.

Dad nodded his thanks. “Send me some of my old motorcycle magazines, will you?” he asked. “For Ronny.”

“Sure,” said Deet. He felt pleased to be doing something for Ronny. He liked hearing about Ronny more than anyone else Dad talked about. “What about sending you some cassette tapes or CDs?”

“They stopped letting guys listen to music before I got here. Too much stuff gets smuggled in with cassette tapes, I guess. And some part of the cassette player was being used to make illegal tattooing needles.”

Deet didn't know what to make of that. “CD players, too?”

“Yeah, them too.” Dad shook his head. “It's kind of interesting, the things people can come up with in here to relieve the boredom. You have to hand it to them, it's kind of ingenious. They shut the hobby shop down yesterday too. No funding. They used to have classes and stuff for the prisoners, but those are all shut down too.”

“In all the prison movies you can go to school in jail and get a degree and everything.”

Dad rolled his eyes. “Not here.”

Dad was quiet for a minute, watching Michael zoom around the visiting room. Deet wondered if he was thinking about P. J. and Jam when they were that age.

“We got another new guy in the cell today. He's had a lot of trouble. He says all he wants out of life now is to have a house and a dog. He says he's too old to get married or have kids, but he'll be happy if he can have his own house. And a dog. Doesn't seem like much to ask for out of life, does it?”

Deet could see an old guy sitting on the steps of a small white house, a shaggy old dog by his knee, both
of them looking at the sunset. Deet felt sad thinking about someone who dreamed about the ordinary things everyone took for granted, as if they were unbelievably precious.

They talked about the truck, which would be impounded until Dad was sentenced, and about the guys at the shop. Willie and Dan had come to visit him. Dan said it was no problem to just carry him on the payroll so the insurance would still be valid. He said he didn't need to hire anyone to take Charley's place. Everyone had said they'd work a little longer every day to make up for it. Charley wouldn't be in jail long enough to worry about it, Dan said. It already seemed like a very long time to Deet.

Michael's mom had had enough of trying to nail him down, and she grabbed him up and headed for the button by the door. Michael's dad lounged over to the door, making conversation with the rest of the prisoners behind the glass, joking about his son, it looked like. They all laughed.

Andy slid off his stool and blew a kiss to Delia. “Well, I got to get back to work,” he said. She wiggled her
fingers good-bye and flounced to the door to wait for a guard to let her out. Ian and Meghan's grandmother was talking to her daughter now, speaking quietly, reluctantly. Deet was sure she didn't want to be there.