Edge of the Heat 5 (7 page)

Emma’s face contorted with dismay and Jerry had to look away from her. He examined the carpet near his couch, found nothing exciting, and pushed on.

“Eventually it got so bad that he would sit in a chair all day long and not even get up to go to the bathroom or get himself food. My mother became his caregiver. She was very strong for a long time. Physically and emotionally strong. But when I was 14, she left for work one day and just didn’t come home. I talked to her friends at work and she had been seeing another man for about a year. One friend knew the guys name and where he lived so I took the bus and went to see the boyfriend, and he had run out on his rent and taken off at the same time as my mom. I never heard another thing from her.

No one really knew how bad things were in my house. We didn’t have the money to take my dad to a doctor or have someone come in to take care of him. So I did it. He got a disability check every month and that’s what we lived on. I just didn’t go back to school and instead I stayed home, taking care of my dad. I figured out how to pay the bills, I forged his signature and everything. We lived like that for 2 years. I kept hoping my mom would come home. But one day I woke up and I knew she wasn’t going to. I knew that was it. This was my life now. After that day I thought long and hard about calling someone. The police, the hospital, someone. But I was scared. Where would I go if they came and took him and put him in a home? Into foster care? Into an orphanage? We didn’t have any family close by. None that I had ever met. So I didn’t call anyone. But I did start leaving the house during the day. I would just walk and walk for miles.”

Emma interrupted him. “Jerry, what about your sister?”

“She’s my half-sister. Mom and dad split up for a bit just before the accident. Dad managed to get his ex-girlfriend pregnant. She never lived at our house. I didn’t really connect with her till we were adults.” Jerry wondered at the shame he felt while he told Emma this. Was he ashamed of his father? Or at himself? Didn’t he have enough going on already? He didn’t need to feel bad about this too. He marked it as inconsequential and kept talking.

“I was tall already and probably could pass for older than 16, so I never got any flack from the cops for truancy. But then I met Rodney. He was a gang member but I didn’t know it at the time. Emotionally and socially, I think my growth had kind of stalled when my mom left. So I was a 14 year old in a 16 year olds body. And I thought Rodney was fascinating. He was strong and cool and he didn’t take any shit from anyone. And I owed him from day one. The day I met him, I was walking to the grocery store to buy groceries, and a gang of teenagers started picking on me for no reason. They were walking behind me stepping on the backs of my shoes and laughing when my foot came out. There were 6 or 7 of them and I was getting scared. There were businesses and cars on the street but I still didn’t know if anyone would help me if they just knocked me down and beat me up. That kind of thing happens quickly. When I had been in school it happened all the time. After I got rolled twice I learned to never walk anywhere by myself.

So Rodney is just coming out of a shop and he sees what they are doing to me and he gets between me and them and calls them out on it. I thought that was crazy. He was just one guy, and there were 6 of them. So one guy shoves him, and he pulls out a gun and points it at him. They scattered. Rodney put it back under his shirt like nothing had happened and asked if I was OK. And from that moment on I did anything Rodney wanted. I don’t like to think about that time, and I really don’t want to talk about it, but I will say that I almost ended up in Rodney’s gang. I got arrested only the one time. For assault. That was initiation into the gang - you had to assault a rival gang member.

The guy I assaulted almost died. I hit him over the head with a steel bar from behind and when he fell on the ground I kicked him in the head three times. He started seizing. He hadn’t said a word or made a noise. He probably never even knew what happened. I remember standing over him and thinking he was going to die and never feeling so helpless in all my life. Rodney had sent me out to do it myself. I was supposed to jump the guy and beat him and once he was unconscious or dead I was supposed to run. But I didn’t run. I stayed, even when I heard the sirens. When his eyes rolled back in his head I sat down on the ground and rocked him and screamed I was sorry, like my apology would make him stop shaking. I remember thinking I should stick something in his mouth so he wouldn’t swallow his tongue and then thinking no I shouldn’t because that was stupid and just wishing the ground would open up and swallow me whole, even if it meant I was going to hell. I told God or the devil, whichever one would do it, to take my life and give it to that kid.”

Jerry almost whispered the last sentence. He’d never told anyone this story. In fact, when his sentencing was over he purposely never even thought about it again. Thinking about it hurt. Speaking it out loud, he was discovering, was agony. He saw Emma try to stand up, try to come to him. Craig took her hand and pulled her gently back. Good. He didn’t want to be comforted right now. He wasn’t done.

“So when the cops got there they put me in handcuffs. I watched the Paramedics take care of the kid. I still felt like I wanted to die, but I also remember thinking that I wanted to be one of those ambulance guys. They came in and fixed whatever could be fixed. They were heroes. I decided right there, that if my life were to go on, I’d have to be a hero, not a villain.”

Emma nodded as Jerry talked. That part made total sense to her.

“The cops processed me and then took me to a juvenile holding facility. Basically a jail for boys. I had to tell them about my dad so someone would go take care of him. They put him in a state facility that night. Kind of a jail for old people, except he wasn’t old.

I didn’t have anyone to call and I didn’t have anywhere to go, and so I stayed right in Straw Blossom - is that a stupid fucking name for a juvenile detention center or what? - for a month, until my sentencing. I was terrified. The word in the facility was assault as a gang member or initiation into a gang was the hot new crime to crack down on. The other boys were telling me that it almost always got charged as an adult, and it usually carried a 2 year minimum sentence. One red-headed boy nicknamed Rock who had Tourettes’s syndrome told me his brother had gotten 15 years, no chance of parole, for assault that ended up with the victim dying 2 weeks later. And his brother was only 15. I didn’t know if I should believe any of it, but I did.

On the date of my sentencing I remember walking into the courtroom and feeling horrified because my father was sitting there in a wheelchair. My counselor in Suck Bottom - that’s what me and the other kids used to call it, we couldn’t bring ourselves to say Straw Blossom - had contacted the home he was in and arranged for him to be brought to the sentencing.

So I walk in, handcuffed and in an orange suit with SB on the front, and my dad is sitting in a wheelchair right next to my counselor. I hadn’t seen him since I left the house a month before to go walking. He looked right at me, and he almost looked like he knew what was going on, and who I was. But that didn’t make me feel good. It made me feel awful. Like I was all he had in the world, and look what I go and do. Some stupid shit that got me arrested and now he has to be in a home.

The only time I’d ever felt worse in my life was when I had that kid in my arms, shaking all over the place, slobber coming out his mouth, and blood from the back of his head leaking out on my shoes.

So then the judge gets me up in front of him and he wants me to tell him how I got there. So I told him about meeting Rodney and almost getting into the gang. And my counselor stands up and says ‘wait, that’s not how you got here. Tell him about what happened to your dad and then when your mom left.’

So I have to explain to this stuffy guy I don’t even know everything that’s happened to me since I was 6 years old, in the hopes that he will take pity on me and not throw me in jail. In real jail. I was only 16, about to turn 17, but you know America’s justice system. We like to charge anybody and everybody as an adult, even 12 year olds, if the crime is bad enough.

The judge listens to my story and never says a peep till the end. Then he says ‘Son, do you know what happened to that boy you assaulted?’ and I say ‘no’ and the judge says ‘he’s dead.’

And I about fall over on my fucking head. I’m not kidding. My legs just wouldn’t hold me anymore. I kind of crumpled to the ground. I was screaming ‘dead dead dead dead dead’ over and over again inside my head. I felt like I was going to rupture my brain or something. I’d killed somebody. You couldn’t take that back. You couldn’t atone for that. No matter what, he’d always be dead.

But then the judge keeps talking. He says ‘he spent 2 weeks in the hospital recovering from the hit on the head you gave him, and then he went straight to jail, because he had a warrant. While he was there, he attempted to escape and he was shot by the guards.’ I didn’t know it at the time, but the boy was 19, had been a gang member since 12, and his warrant was for rape. Not that I think that justifies anything, but it was something the counselor made sure to tell me after my sentencing.

Like turning off a faucet, my mind shuts up and stops screaming at me. I hadn’t killed him after all. All of a sudden I didn’t understand why the judge was even telling me this. I felt almost relieved of most of my guilt, because one minute I’m thinking I killed him, and the next I find out I didn’t, not at all. So I’m on my knees, and I push to my feet. I’m waiting for the judge to say something else, and I hear my dad’s voice behind me. He hadn’t said much at all since my mom left. In two years, I think I’d heard him say maybe 50 words.

His voice sounded shaky and weak, like he was 80 years old, but it was my dad, I would recognize the voice anywhere. ‘Judge’ he says, ‘he’s a good boy. He takes good care of me. It ain’t fair that he’s gotta.’  I’m still staring at the judge, but now I can feel tears spilling out of my eyes. My dad hasn’t even acted like he recognized me for over a year. And here he is trying to testify on my behalf in court. It was the last time I ever heard him speak.”

Jerry stopped talking and held his almost-empty beer bottle to his forehead. His cheeks burned. He wasn’t sure if it was shame or sadness or something else, but he wasn’t sure if it mattered either. He was almost done though. He looked forward to repacking this little piece of history back into the vault in the very back of his mind and throwing away the key for good.

“I look up at the judge and I know he’s made a decision. I can see it on his face. I was prepared for a year in juvenile detention at a minimum, and terrified that I’d actually end up with 5 years in a real prison. So you can imagine my surprise when the judge announces I’m getting 5 years of probation and that’s it. But, in order to give me the 5 years, it means I was sentenced as an adult. And he says that if I ever step even one toe out of line, he’ll make sure that the next time I get slammed with the maximum penalty the law will allow.

I remember dropping my eyes and almost drowning in the feeling of relief. It was huge! Like nothing I’d ever experienced. I felt light as a feather. Like everything from then on was going to be OK, no matter what. Of course it didn’t work out like that - it never does. But my counselor had managed to track down my Dad’s sister and we both went to live with her. I’d never met her because her and my dad had a big falling out when they were in their early 20s. It had something to do with when my grandparents died without a will and my Aunt Betty went through the house and took everything that was worth any money and sold it. Well, I don’t know if Aunt Betty was trying to make up for that or what, but she was always good to me and my dad. She took over taking care of him and she helped me get my GED and then when I said I wanted to go to Paramedic school she looked up how to get me in and helped me apply for state grants to pay for it. I got approved easy since my dad was disabled.”

Jerry stopped talking. His eyes suddenly felt like lead weights. If he didn’t fall into bed soon, he was going to sleep right here in the chair. He winked heavily at Emma, so she knew he was OK.

“And that’s it really. I was arrested at 16 for assault and charged as an adult.”

Emma got up and came around the coffee table, sitting directly next to Jerry. She wrapped her arms around him and buried her head in his shoulder. Jerry knew she was probably crying for him. Shedding tears he wouldn’t. He put his right arm around her and held her, feeling a strange mixture of lightness and heaviness.

He looked at Craig and raised his eyebrows.

Craig shifted positions. “I don’t think it will matter,” he finally said. “It was what, 15 years ago? And you didn’t ever get mixed back up in a gang. You made a mistake, you paid your dues, and now this is something totally different. And from what it sounds like, you didn’t even harass Detective Gagne - you just annoyed him. I’m betting the right judge will throw it out completely.”

Jerry nodded thoughtfully. He felt some relief at this.

Emma picked her head up and looked at him. Her red-rimmed eyes told him he was right about the crying. “Jerry, does Sara look like your mom?”

Jerry reacted as if she’d poked two fingers at his eyes. “What?”

“You know me, I like to play analyst, and I just find it really strange that you’ve fallen so completely for this Sara, when you’ve never seemed to care if most women stayed or went. If they were around, great. If they weren’t, that was fine too.”

Jerry’s face tightened. He pulled his hand back from Emma and rubbed his neck with it. Images flashed in his mind. Dark hair, dark eyes. A smirk. A laugh. “No. She doesn’t.”

Emma frowned and shuffled her feet on the carpet. “Does she remind you-”

Jerry raised a hand and cut her off. “No. No, and no. She doesn’t look like my mom, she doesn’t act like my mom and I am not having some crazy mommy issues.”

Emma flinched and pulled back. Jerry sighed and pulled her into an embrace. “Look Em, I’m sorry, I’m just tired.”