Do Not Pass Go (13 page)

He wished he could be invisible.

When she had signed in, she turned and saw Deet. She came to the bench and looked down at him. Andy gave her a friendly greeting, so Deet knew he'd seen her visiting before.

“Hi. I guess I won't ask you what you're doing here. I read about your dad in the paper. At least I thought it must be your father. Not too many people have that name. My brother is here. My folks won't come to see him, so I try to come whenever I can.”

Deet thought for a minute how he'd almost convinced himself that hardly anyone at school knew. And here were Sheena and Dennis in one week. Then he remembered how he was going to ask questions when he couldn't think of anything to say, but he couldn't
think of any questions to ask that wouldn't be rude.
(What did your brother do?)

He was relieved when Rhonda darted out of the office in her suit. “You can go in now,” she said. There was no guard with a wand this time.

The old black man took the stool next to Deet. “Here she come,” he chortled to Deet, as a merry-looking girl with honey-colored skin peeked in the window to the visiting room. The old man looked pleased. “Don't never learn, that girl. Busted her parole, I don't know how many times.”

The guard, a woman, let the girl in, and she bounced to the stool, casting impudent looks at her father.

“Don't be sweetie-pieing me,” he complained. “I'm tired as can be of your foolishment.”

Deet couldn't hear what the girl said, but she wasn't afraid of him, that was for sure, and the old man was having a hard time keeping from laughing.

“Don't give me none of your sass,” he said to her.

Deet wanted to tell Dad about the petition he'd seen at the CD store, ask him what he thought about it. But he thought it might be kind of dumb to ask a person in
Dad's position what he thought about jailing people for drugs, so he didn't say anything.

Sheena was talking doggedly to her brother, who was not in a very good mood. He looked down at the steel counter the whole time and never looked into Sheena's face. She looked over and caught Deet's eye, smiled sadly, and looked back at her downcast brother.

Deet had never seen this woman guard who was letting the prisoners in. She was short and stocky and she looked angry. She was very young, but she didn't smile at anyone.

“What's
she
like, Dad?”

Dad made a face. “She's scared to death of everyone. She never turns her back on anyone, never relaxes. She scares
me
. Being scared makes people more dangerous than anything. Just like dogs, or bears.”

Deet asked Dad about the food, and about what he was reading, and what was new with the other guys in his cell. It was a good trick, asking questions. It filled in all the blank spaces.

Every day Dad had a new story to tell Deet. Sometimes they were funny stories, like the time
Ronny Joseph smuggled oranges out of the dining hall and back to their room. But most of the time they were sad, things people had told him when they were tired of reading and were just shooting the bull.

Sheena got up and put her phone on its hook. Her brother turned his back on her and walked to the door to wait for the guard to open it.

“See you at school tomorrow,” she said. She pushed the button and waited for the clunk to signal that it had been unlocked.

“You know her?” asked Dad.

“She's at school with me,” said Deet. “Her mom and dad won't visit her brother.”

“Like me,” said Dad.

That night Deet sat down to answer Mr. Hodges about the food in jail. He thought for a minute about what to write at the top of the page, and then he just wrote “JAIL” in capital letters.

The food in jail is mostly cheap, that's the really important thing. Instead of bacon, they have
turkey bacon. And turkey hot dogs, turkey burgers, turkey sausage, and turkey loaf. My dad says for sure he'll never eat turkey again. The inmates work in the kitchen and do the cooking, so it's not exactly home cooking. Dad says a lot of guys gain weight because they don't get any exercise and because the food is so fattening. He's getting skinnier.

My dad said he used to think that people went to jail because they were bad. But he said now he doesn't see how some people can keep from going to jail, given what they've had to put up with, what kind of childhoods they had. Some of them have been in dozens of foster homes, and that's where people are supposed to take extra good care of you to make up for what happened with your parents. He's heard lots of bad stories about foster homes. Well, it's not always like that. Some people who get in trouble come from good homes, but a lot of things can happen to you, like hanging out with the wrong people, or maybe you get to be an addict in a really easy way, you don't think you will but
before you know it you can't live without whatever it is you're addicted to, liquor or different drugs, and then you don't know how to stop. They have classes in there for drugs and alcohol too. My dad has to go to these before he gets out.

And you can see why people want to steal things. You know you'll never have a car like that, or even a car, period, because you didn't finish school. You know you won't have fancy clothes, or the stuff you see on television, so you take it. It's beginning to look to me as if the world isn't fair. Not even a little bit.

When Deet got that homework back, Mr. Hodges had written a quotation at the bottom of the page.

Poverty and violence, a family life devoid of warmth or order make an education impossible and sociopathy inevitable. Children so cheated, so deprived, cannot rise above the deprivation and will fill our jails. But who are the criminals?

—E. G. WOOD

On the next Sunday, one of her
days off, Mom was all business. She had a pile of bills and a yellow pad and pencil in front of her on the table. She was trying to figure out what to pay and what not to pay, and how to pay the lawyer.

Sally had taken the girls ice-skating. She was doing the kind of weekend running around that Deet's mom used to do with the girls before she had to go to work.

Deet had spread the newspaper out over one end of the table and was going over it very carefully, the way he did every day.

First he'd turn to the police reports and then to the court judgments. Now he knew people by name who were in jail, and he wanted to know whether or not they were convicted and what their sentence was.

He noticed which judges gave the most lenient
sentences and which the harshest. He knew all the judges by name. There could be a lot of difference between one judge and another. He hoped Dad would come up before the mellowest one of all. It was Johnson you wanted to stay away from. Andy said he was mean as spit.

He skimmed over the headlines of each article, seeing if there was anything to do with the drug laws, the prison system, or local police business. He read the report of a trial in the States where this judge had thrown the book at a guy he said didn't show remorse. The guy had said he was innocent, so how could he show remorse for something he didn't do? How illogical could you get?

And what would it be like to be innocent and have nobody believe you? It was one thing to go to jail for something you did do, but something else to go to jail for something you didn't do. Like those guys you'd read about in the paper who got out of jail after seventeen years when somebody else admit to the crime. Or they did a DNA test or something.

Once Deet had thought that what happened to Dad
was the worst thing that could ever happen. Now he knew that there were worse things. Much worse.

Mom sighed. “I just don't know where to start.”

Deet folded up the paper neatly and put it in the section of the woodbox he'd made for paper.

He looked at her curiously. Here was Mom, ditzy little Mom, with a calculator and a yellow pad, looking efficient. She was like a whole new person.

Deet had often wished he could take care of the family bills and organize them into a sensible format, and here was his chance.

He pulled the pad toward him and drew a line down the middle of the page. At the top of one side he wrote “Income.” They wrote down what Deet's mom could expect to make in a month, tips and all, and then he wrote “Outgo” on the other side. They wrote down the monthly payment to the lawyer. That was first, because what would happen to Dad if his lawyer wouldn't work because he hadn't been paid?

They were lucky that they didn't have to pay any rent or house payment, because Deet's dad had built
their house. So there was food, and electricity, and fuel oil, and the phone bill, the newspaper, and gas for the car. And there was a payment for a car they didn't even have any more, that red Corvette, and there was a lot of money they had to pay on that stupid charge card. And miscellaneous. There was a lot of that. Mom chewed on the end of her pen and wrote down “stamps” and “clothes” under miscellaneous. Then she added “beauty parlor” and “medicine.” Every time she thought she was finished she thought of another miscellaneous. “Oh, cleaning supplies,” she said. She wrote it down. “That
must
be everything now.”

Mom added up each column on the little calculator, her tongue sticking out like P. J.'s when she was printing something. When they added it up, the Outgo was bigger than the Income.

Mom folded her lips together and squinted helplessly at the figures. At last she said, “Sally said I could write to the credit card company and they'd cut the payments down.”

“Wow. That's good,” said Deet.

“If I hadn't found a job I could get unemployment,
and Dad could get a free lawyer. Isn't that the strangest thing you ever heard?” She leaned back and took a deep breath. Well, they'd just cut all the extras. She wouldn't go to the beauty parlor, and she'd trim the girls' hair herself. She shot a look over at Deet's hair but shook her head. “No. You'd better go to the barber. Your kind of hair is too hard to cut.” Deet was relieved. He remembered the haircuts Mom had given him when he was little. They were pretty weird.

They agreed that they could cut the food bill down by doing without fresh fruit and vegetables and fresh milk. Powdered milk would do it. And now that the worst cold weather was over, they could turn off the furnace and use the woodstove. There was a lot of wood stacked up in the yard. When they'd cut out beauty parlor and fuel oil and a lot of the grocery money, the columns matched and there was even a little left over.

Mom thought a minute and said, “I'll ask the lawyer if he'll let me make smaller payments.”

She looked up suddenly. “Grandma called this morning. She asked you to call back.”

Deet searched her face. “Did she say anything about Dad? What does she want?”

“Nothing. She didn't say anything. Just said for you to call. Probably has chores for you.”

Deet started to write the budget over again on a clean sheet of paper.

“Dad said there are a lot of people in there who have parents who won't have anything to do with them. Sheena's mom and dad won't go see her brother. There's this one woman who was embezzling from somewhere and her mother brings her kids to visit, but the grandma doesn't say much. She looks mad all the time.”

Mom laughed. “I've seen them.”

“And then there's this old black guy, who looks at his daughter like she was the moon and the stars. Did you ever see him? People sure take trouble in different ways.”

Deet frowned at the phone. “Well, I'd better get it over with.”

He dialed Grandma's number. “This is Deet,” he said when she answered.

“Deet, could you come and give Grandpa a hand with the wood after school tomorrow?”

Deet didn't answer for a minute. Was it supposed to be business as usual after all these weeks? Was Grandma going to pretend that it hadn't happened, that there was no long silence from them?

“No, Grandma,” said Deet. “I go to see Dad after school.”

There was a silence, and his grandma said, “You go to the
jail?
”

“Yes.”

“I think that's awful,” Grandma said, in a shocked kind of way. “What are your parents thinking of?”

“Lots of kids go there to see their moms and dads, Grandma. I'm not the only one. And lots of parents go to see their kids, too. Tell Grandpa I'm sorry I can't help him, but Mom's working now, and we're really busy.”

When he hung up, Deet felt bad. He suddenly missed Grandma, her little soft face, her quiet ways. He hadn't thought how hurt she must be to have her child go to jail. What did that feel like? Maybe as bad as having a dad go to jail.

Deet's mom was sorting the bills into piles with
yellow sticky notes on top. Pay all now, write a letter, pay a little.

Deet was finally cleared for his first contact visit. You weren't allowed to have a contact visit until all the paperwork had been screened, to see if you were the kind of person who would try to smuggle something to the prisoner. Even if you were just a kid.