Lean on Pete (22 page)

I sat out on the sidewalk and waited but they didn’t come back. When night came I went to the university and went inside one of the buildings and hid underneath a stairwell and ate the last of my food. It was pretty boring in there but it felt safe. When I woke up it was the next morning and I went to the bathroom that had the shower and I sat under the hot water for a long time.

That day I went to the library and looked around. I read magazines and newspapers and talked for a long time with an old man who only had one arm and lived in an abandoned railcar with his brother. When the library closed I went back to the Cabana Motel but the truck was still gone so I went back to the river and slept in the bushes.

The next day I went to a thrift store and took a pair of underwear, a couple shirts, and a blanket and ran out the door with them. No one followed me but I jogged for almost a mile before I stopped. I made my way back to the park and spread out the blanket and lay down and fell asleep. When I woke it was late afternoon. I hid the blanket and my extra clothes in the bushes and followed the river maybe two miles past the city until I came to another park. There was no one there, nothing except an old Cadillac sitting on the far side of a gravel lot in the shade. Huge trees lined the park and there was green grass and picnic tables and a nice area to get into the river. I sat down there. It got hot out and after a while I went swimming. I hid my clothes near the bank and swam in my underwear.

That afternoon I fell asleep on the grass. I was woken up sometime later by the sound of the Cadillac honking its horn. I sat up and looked over but I couldn’t see it very well. The honking wouldn’t stop so I went over to it.

The car was a two door and it was green and dusty and had a dent on the right side that ran from the front tire all the way to the trunk. The dent was rusted out and one of the headlights was busted. The car sat underneath an old cottonwood tree.

The horn stopped as I got near it.

“Are you okay?” I yelled.

“No,” a man’s voice said.

I walked to the driver’s side and the window rolled down. Inside was a man who had long greasy brown hair and wore a jacket and had a blue tarp wrapped around himself. He was older, middle-aged. His neck had bruises on it and his hands were pale and there were scabs along them. The car was full of trash and clothes and newspapers. There was no place to sit.

“I’m stuck,” he said. He was missing some teeth and there was dried snot around his nose.

“The door won’t open?” I asked.

“The door opens but I’m stuck between the steering wheel and the seat.”

“Do you want me to call the police?”

“No,” he said.

“What if we took some of the stuff out so you could move the seat back. Would that work?”

The man looked at me. You could tell he was worried.

“The seat moves back and forward by a switch. That’s what got me stuck. I tried to move it back but it wouldn’t go so I moved it forward hoping it would break something free. It went forward alright but now it won’t even go back even a little. I’m stuck and it hurts.”

“The seat’s probably just caught on something,” I said. “We could try moving a few things out.”

“Okay,” he said.

He unlocked the passenger side door but it made him nervous to do so. When I opened it I could barely see him there was so much stuff in there. It was stacked up past the dash and left him barely enough room to sit.

I moved piles of clothes and records and trash off the front seat and it all smelled horrible. I took it all outside and set it on the hood. It took me a while but I got the front seat cleared so it would fold forward. I could finally see him sitting there, the steering wheel pressed into his legs and stomach. I looked down and saw he’d peed himself. He had on tan pants and they were wet and stained.

There was an empty grocery sack and I filled it with fast-food bags and newspapers and empty soda cans. When it was full I walked over to a park trash can and emptied it. When I got back the man was shaking.

“What are you doing?” he said in a broken sort of way.

“I’m getting rid of the trash. Some of it really smells, some of the stuff in here is rotten.”

“Don’t,” he begged.

“I won’t throw anything good out,” I said. He just sat there upset. He began rocking his head back and forth, but I kept moving things. I cleared the backseat and then the floor behind the front seat. I found two dead mice and a stack of moldy baby clothes and a broken wooden hanger jammed in the seat track, blocking it from moving. I put it all in the paper sack and dumped it in the trash.

He started the car and moved the seat back. It hurt him a bit, but he was finally free. He opened the door and got out.

He was short and the parka he wore was a heavy winter coat that came down to his knees. The blue tarp wrapped around him was old and worn. He went to the hood and found a pair of pants and underwear and hurried towards the park outhouse.

When he came back he began frantically putting his things back in the car, then got in the driver’s side and locked the doors.

“Thank you,” he said and then he rolled up the windows. He gave me the thumbs up sign. His face relaxed and you could tell he felt better.

I stood there for a bit, but he didn’t say anything more so I walked back to the river. It was late afternoon by then but it was still warm out so I went swimming again. Sometime after that the man drove up near where I was and asked me if I was hungry and I told him I was and he drove off. He came back after a while and began honking his horn. I walked up to him and he handed me a bag of food from Wendy’s. I thanked him and then after that he just rolled the window back up and drove away and I never saw him again.

Inside the bag were two cheeseburgers, a large fry, a salad, and a Coke. I ate the salad, fries, and one of the burgers and saved the other. No one else showed up there that day so I decided I’d spend the night there. I went to the trash can and got part of a newspaper and gathered wood and started a fire in the barbecue pit.

When it got dark I let the fire die so no one would see it and tried to sleep. I was tired but I just lay there most of the night awake.

The next morning I walked back to the city. There were a few restaurants downtown that had outside seating near the sidewalk. I picked one and stood next to a parked car and when a table got up I’d walk over and see if they had left anything and if they did I’d grab it. I ate alright that way for a couple days until a waiter yelled at me and I started running and I wasn’t looking and I knocked into an old man who was holding hands with a kid. I knocked him over and he fell to the ground. I stopped and looked at his old body lying there, and you could tell he was hurt. He was dressed up and the kid with him was dressed up too, and I knew I’d ruined whatever they were doing. I started running again and went back to the river and hid in the bushes for the rest of that day. I felt horrible about myself and decided then that I’d get out of Boise and try to hitchhike to Wyoming that night.

I began walking towards the highway, but I was already hungry and knew I’d need food and water while I waited out a ride. Near the outside of town I found a mini-mart on the corner of a pretty quiet street and went in. There were two customers. One was a middle-aged man looking at the beer cooler and the other was a woman buying cigarettes. It took me until the woman was gone to find the canned foods. I grabbed a can of soup and a can of chili and a gallon of water. The clerk was an Asian man. When he rang up for the man buying beer I went for the door, but when I did another man came from behind the counter and grabbed me by the shirt. I hadn’t seen him and he was strong and he didn’t let go. He took the water and the two cans from my hand.

“I already paid,” I said.

“You didn’t pay,” he said with a thick foreign accent. “We have tape. You gonna pay now?”

“I don’t have any money,” I said.

“You don’t have any money?”

I shook my head and I knew just looking at him that I was going to get it.

He kept hold of me until the man who was buying beer left, then he said something to the cashier in a language I didn’t understand. The man behind the register got up and went to the front door, locked it and turned around the sign to read closed. Another man came from a back room carrying a baseball bat, and they took me to their office.

I sat in a chair. The guy behind the register went back out front but the other two stayed and watched me. Maybe an hour passed when two police officers came and the store owners told them what had happened. The whole time they were all looking at me.

“What’s your name?” a woman officer finally said to me. She had short blonde hair that was cut like a man’s and it looked like she lifted weights.

“Del,” I said.

“Del what?” she asked.

“Del Montgomery.”

She wrote it down in her book.

“Do you have any ID, Del?”

“No,” I said.

“How old are you?”

“Fifteen.”

“Where do you live?” the other officer said. He was bald and short and heavy. He had a big moustache and his face was tan except around his eyes, where they were white.

“I’ve been sleeping by the river.”

“By the river?” the woman officer said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Where did you live before that?” the other officer asked.

“All around.”

“You don’t have any family.”

“No,” I said.

“Where do you go to school?” the woman officer said.

“I don’t go to school.”

“At some point you must have.”

“Not really,” I said.

The man officer asked the store owner what I tried to steal and he showed them.

“Why were you stealing the cans?”

“I haven’t eaten since yesterday,” I said.

He nodded, then told me to stand up.

I did and he handcuffed me. We went through the store and to their police car and they put me in the backseat and drove to the main city jail. It was a big old place and I got so nervous I thought I’d start bawling but I didn’t. They got me out of the car and took me in and sat me down in a chair in a room by myself. I was there for a long while, then the woman cop came back and sat down in a chair across from me.

“Del, we’re going to take you to Ada County Juvenile Detention Center. If you give us more information we can help you, but until then, and since you say you’re only fifteen, that’s where you’re going.”

She told me to stand up, then took me back to the police car and they drove me to the juvenile center. It was the middle of the night when we got there so I couldn’t see much except that it was a big tan concrete building.

The woman cop led me into a room and took my handcuffs off. I sat on a bench seat and she left and I never saw her again. After a while another officer came and took me to a room where they took my picture and fingerprinted me. The officer asked me my name and where I was from. I said I was from Los Angeles, California and that my name was Del Montgomery. He took me into another room and told me to get completely undressed. So I did and I stood there like that and he looked through my clothes and put them in a sack. He gave me a towel and a set of issued clothes and pointed to a room where I was supposed to take a shower. I put the towel around me and went in there and cleaned up. I dressed in the underwear, socks, blue pants, and green T-shirt. He gave me tennis shoes, then led me to a cell that had a green mattress, a pillow, a blanket, and sheets. On a small table there was a paper cup, a cup of toothpaste, a comb, a small bar of soap, and a handbook with the rules of the place. I went in there and sat on the mattress and the officer left.

I made the bed and lay down. As uneasy as it was, it was nice to sleep in a place where I knew it was alright to sleep. It was sometime later when another man woke me up and led me to an office where a big man with gray hair and a gray beard sat behind a desk.

“My name is Harvey,” he said and put out his hand and I shook it.

“You were caught shoplifting, is that correct?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Why were you shoplifting?”

“I was hungry.”

“It says you stole two cans of soup.”

“A can of soup, a can of chili, and a gallon of water.”

“Where were you going to cook them?”

“I wasn’t. I eat them cold.”

“It says you don’t have any family?”

“No,” I said.

“Everybody’s got somebody.”

“I’m not sure I do,” I said.

“Have you ever been in lockup before?”

“No.”

“Where did you go to school.”

“A lot of places.”

“Name one.”

“I went to elementary school in Los Angeles but I can’t remember what it was called.”

The man sighed.

I tried not to look at him but I knew he was staring at me.

“What’s your mother’s name.”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you have a mother?”

“Sort of,” I said.

“If you aren’t honest I can’t do a thing to help you,” the man said and leaned back in his chair. He was frustrated with me. He asked me a few more questions, then ended the meeting and I was put back in my room. I was let out again for dinner. I stood in line with other kids, but I didn’t say anything to any of them and they didn’t say anything to me. I got a tray of food, went back to a table, and ate. It was meatloaf and mashed potatoes and cooked carrots and a roll. I ate the whole thing and then went back to my cell.

The next morning I ate breakfast and was told to take another shower. I did and then I was taken to a juvenile magistrate. She was a fat old lady who wore glasses and had a big mole on her chin and she asked me the same questions the other guy did. If I did drugs, where I slept, what I ate. She asked me if I liked sleeping by the river, and if I had any friends that slept there too. What states I’d lived in, how I got from one place to the next. She asked me what my favorite subject was in school, and if I was abused by my parents. She asked the same questions over and over. She’d change them around a little to confuse me, and it went on but I liked her alright. When it was over I was sent back to my room.