Lockdown (12 page)

The word was out that Toon got a release date.

“Yo, Toon, what’s the first thing you’re going to do when you get home?” I asked him. Me and Play had sat with him off to the side of the rec room.

“Maybe I’ll try to memorize one book in school,” Toon said, pushing his glasses up on his nose. “I think if I memorize one whole book then I can just work on the other ones and get better grades.”

“Hey, I might try that too,” Play said.

“You going back to school?” I asked.

“I got to unless I go into one of those special programs they have in the Bronx,” Play said. “I got to get either my GED or diploma if I want to go to college one day.”

“I would like to get into a good high school,” Toon said.

“You will,” I said. “You’re smart enough.”

“Brothers always says that,” Toon said. He looked down but I saw he was smiling.

Eight thirty was lights-out, but I didn’t mind. I was tired anyway.

When I woke up, it was three seventeen in the morning. There was some scuffling in the hallway and I kept real still to hear what was going on, but I couldn’t tell. I thought I heard Mr. Wilson’s voice. Then everything was quiet.

I remembered the dream I had been having. Icy was a movie star and I was a photographer taking her picture. She was walking on that red carpet in front of a light blue board—maybe sky blue—and she was with Paris Hilton, Mariah Carey, and Alicia Keys. Then Bow Wow got into the dream and he was escorting her and all the while I was snapping pictures like a professional. Every once in a while she would look over at me and give me a big smile and I was snapping perfect pictures and she was looking better than all the other women there. It was a boss dream.

Six thirty formation. Mr. Cintron had us.

“You guys have problems, you need to come to a staff member and talk about it,” he said. “I realize that’s not always easy, but you need to give it a try. Last night we had to transfer Trevedi to the L wing. I hope we don’t have to transfer anybody else. Anderson, you see me after breakfast.”

I didn’t know why they had to transfer Toon to the L wing, but it usually meant that he had went off or something.

At breakfast, Leon said that Toon had tried to hang himself.

“Didn’t he get a date?” Play asked me.

“Yeah.” I remembered Toon in the visiting room with his parents yelling at him and then him saying how he was never as good as his brother. Toon knew about home.

Mr. Cintron didn’t look too anxious when he told me to see him after breakfast, and when I went to his office, his secretary didn’t say anything, so I thought it wasn’t about the detectives. I sat there for five minutes on the wooden bench before he called her and told her to send me in.

“Okay, Reese, so you’ve got seventy-two dollars in your account now,” he said. “You made minimum
wage, which added up to a hundred thirty-four dollars, but they took out taxes, and we’re charging you for transportation to and from the senior citizens’ home.”

“You’re charging me for Mr. Pugh driving me back and forth?” I asked.

“Yeah, and you’re lucky, because we’re only charging you per mile and not for his time, or you wouldn’t be getting anything,” he said. “You can use the money to make phone calls and to spend four dollars a week at the commissary. Do you understand that?”

“Yeah.”

“If you abuse the money in any way, I’ll just take it all as a fine, do you understand that?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s it,” he said. “Go to your first class.”

“How’s Toon?” I asked.

“Toon?”

“Trevedi.”

“He’ll live,” Mr. Cintron said. “He’s a little depressed, but he’ll get over it.”

“Can I ask another question?”

“About Trevedi?”

“About those detectives,” I said. “They said on the
phone they were coming up yesterday.”

“They’ve dropped it,” Mr. Cintron said.

“Just like that?” My voice went way up and I felt weak all over. My brain went black—nothing was in it for a few seconds. I wanted to cry and not cry at the same time. “Just like that? They just
dropped
it?”

“You were pretty worried, weren’t you?”

“They were talking about three years or twenty years and I didn’t know—I didn’t know what to do,” I said. “Sometimes I was thinking about pleading not guilty because I didn’t do anything, but I didn’t want to risk no twenty bid.”

“Sit down, Anderson,” Mr. Cintron said. “Look, if you run across the street in the middle of the day dodging traffic, you might get hit by a truck or a bus and get seriously hurt or killed; but if you make it to the other side, you’re home free, out of danger. But if you commit a crime, a felony…you pick up a gun or a knife and do some serious harm or commit an aggravated felony, you put yourself at risk for the rest of your life. Anytime something happens near you, they’re going to be looking in your direction to see if you had anything to do with it.

“And if you hang with people who put themselves
at risk, you’re going the same route. It’s like running with a pack of starving dogs. The only thing you’re going to know about them is that if they think you’re weak, they’ll eat you in a heartbeat.”

“But those two detectives…” I looked around the room. My feeling of relief was turning to being mad. “They were acting like they had a done deal. I think they were ready to burn me, man.”

“They’re human too,” Mr. Cintron said. “And if they thought they were right, well, yeah, you’re going to feel the heat. And this guy you were involved with—”

“Freddy.”

“He doesn’t care anything about you,” Mr. Cintron said. “He’d put you in jail for twenty years to get a week off his time. That’s the way these guys operate. You got to remember that this is the world you walked into when you opened the door back then.”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll let you know how Trevedi is,” Mr. Cintron said, standing. “Maybe you can even go talk to him. It might do him some good.”

“So I’m going to be having my hearing this afternoon,” I said. Mr. Cintron had given me permission to visit Toon, and I was sitting on the chair at the end of his bed. “If everything works out, I’ll be getting my date.”

“I hope it works out for you,” Toon said.

“Where does your family live?”

“In Brooklyn,” Toon answered. “Do you know where Clinton Avenue is?”

“I don’t know anything about Brooklyn,” I said. “But I was thinking, maybe when we get out, we can hook up and hang out sometimes. That cool with you?”

“That’s very cool with me.”

“One of the problems of going back into the world is that it’s the same world you were dealing with when you got into trouble,” I said. “So it’s going to be just as hard to deal with as it was then, but if you round up some homeboys on your side, it’ll be easier.”

“Or a brother,” Toon said.

“Or a brother,” I said, standing. “And I can’t have my brother hurting himself. You know what I mean?”

Toon put his head down and his hands in his lap. I sat on the bed next to him and put my arm around him for a minute.

I was worried that Toon wasn’t going to be all right. I thought he was going to go home with his parents and have them yell at him and go on about how he wasn’t as good as his brother. That was crap.

“Be strong, man,” I said as I left Toon’s room. Mr. Wilson locked the door behind me, and I turned away from the window because I didn’t want to see Toon sitting on his bed alone.

I was pretty sure my hearing was locked. Mr. Cintron told me he would be on the panel, and I knew he was in my corner. All I needed was to keep
my mind correct and focused on what I needed to let them know.

Mr. Pugh was with me and talking stupid stuff about how it had been when he was a kid. I couldn’t even imagine a bigheaded, bald dude like him being a kid.

“We didn’t have none of the stuff you kids got now,” he said. “We didn’t have cell phones, iPods, nothing like that. My big brother got a computer in 1982. It had sixty-four K memory. I got a goldfish with more memory than that now.”

“I didn’t know you had a brother,” I said. “What’s he doing now?”

“Nothing.” Mr. Pugh gave me his “shut up” look and I shut up.

The clock on the administration office wall said twenty past one when the two people on the panel and Mr. Cintron came back from lunch. I had been sitting in the office from five minutes to one and was getting a little nervous. They walked by me and it was a quarter to two before they called me in.

They had turned the table so that the long side was facing the door, and I sat in the middle across from Mr. Cintron, an older black dude with silver-
white hair, and a really thin white woman who kept messing with the papers in front of her.

Mr. Pugh had come in with me and he sat in the corner.

“Maurice, as you know, I’m Frank Cintron,” Mr. Cintron said. “This is Miss Carla Evans and Mr. Alan Shaw.”

“How do you do?” I said.

They both nodded.

“Panel, this is Maurice Anderson,” Mr. Cintron said, looking at me. “He was arrested for stealing prescription pads from a neighborhood physician and selling the pads to a known drug dealer. He pled guilty and was sentenced to a total of thirty-eight months which, under the good time standard, makes him eligible for release after thirty months, two weeks—”

“That would be eighty percent of his sentence?” the black guy asked.

“Yes. He’s served twenty-six months, twenty-two at Progress, and his petition today is for an early release, which would reduce his effective time served by four months.”

“Mr. Anderson, can you tell us in your own words why you deserve to be rewarded with an early release?” the white woman asked.

“I don’t intend to get into any more trouble,” I said. “I made a mistake but I’ve learned my lesson and I plan to do the right thing and avoid the kinds of people I was dealing with before.”

“What lesson did you learn?” the black guy asked.

“Crime doesn’t pay,” I said.

“If it did pay, would you commit more crimes?”

“No, ma’am.”

“So what are you going to be doing that’s different than what you were supposed to be doing before you came to Progress?” Miss Evans asked.

“Work hard in school and maybe get a part-time job after school,” I said.

“Why didn’t you do that before?” the black guy asked.

“I didn’t know I was supposed to have a strategy to deal with my situation,” I said. “I was just, like, drifting from day to day. Now I know I need a plan to take care of business.”

“And what’s your plan?” the woman asked.

“Just keep to myself,” I said. I felt like I was floating and she was looking at me funny.

“So you’re promising to do better, but isn’t the truth of the matter that you want to get out and so naturally you would make the kinds of promises that
would get you out?” the woman asked. “What would be the difference if we were here the day after you were arrested? Wouldn’t you have promised not to do it again if we let you go?”

“Yeah.”

“What have you learned here at Progress that might help you turn your life around?” Mr. Cintron asked.

Mr. Cintron was opening the door for me and I was going blank. I looked at him and couldn’t think straight, but I knew I had to say something.

“You know, everybody’s got to survive,” I said. “And if you don’t think about how you’re going to make it, then you just go with whatever is around you. I know I have to invent something, look around and figure out some way to survive that’s not going to get me killed or get me back in the jail system. I think I can find something, because in my heart I know what I want and what I don’t want. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life being locked up or ducking and hiding.”

“And you didn’t know that before you started stealing—what was it?” The black guy started going through the file.

“Prescription pads,” I said.

“You didn’t know that then?”

“I knew I didn’t want to be locked up,” I said. “I knew that part of it, but what I didn’t know was that you needed a strategy for your life. In here, I see people working their shows and trying to get over the best way they can. One guy I work with at Evergreen—”

“Maurice is part of our work program,” Mr. Cintron said.

“He was a prisoner in a Japanese war camp and he was telling me how he survived,” I said. “How he figured out how to live through the war and stuff. You know, some people didn’t make it, and—”

“What is your plan to ‘make it’?” the black man asked.

“I don’t have a big plan,” I said. “I’m fifteen and I got to go to school, but I’ll do my best in school and I’ll just live at home and do what I can to stay out of trouble. I know that I might not become great or anything like that, but if something bad does happen to me, I don’t want to be the one to make it happen.”

“Are you sorry for the crime you committed?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Because you made yourself part of the problem in your community,” she said. “Didn’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And what’s different now, Mr. Anderson?” she asked.

“What I want to do is to help my little sister go to college,” I said. “I think if I keep my mind on that, just focus in on it, I can keep myself straight.”

“You were living at home with your parents?” the black guy asked.

“Fairly dysfunctional situation,” Mr. Cintron said. “Mother has a history of drug abuse.”

“You saw that abuse at home and you still got involved with illegal drugs?” the black guy asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Has anyone in your family been to college?” Mr. Cintron asked.

“No, sir, that’s one of the reasons I want to help Icy go to college.”

“Icy?” The black guy took off his glasses. “Your sister’s name is Icy?”

“It’s really Isis, like the Egyptian goddess,” I said. “But we call her Icy.”

I was told to wait outside, and Mr. Pugh went with me.

“You did real good,” he said. “You don’t look that
smart, but you had some good things to say. You see Mr. Cintron nodding his head? He’s going to vote for you.”

“I hope so.”

I wasn’t sure. I had come up with some answers, but they didn’t seem all that good to me. It was like they were asking me stuff that only had one right answer, and then when I gave them that right answer they were saying it was the same old stuff. I wanted them to know that I knew it was the same old stuff too. I was going back to the same old block, the same old family, the same old neighborhood. Everybody on the block who was messing with drugs or selling drugs had seen what I had seen. And a lot of them were going to be getting abused, too.

I had told them about Mr. Hooft’s being in the children’s camp and figuring out a way to survive by thinking about that flower. I wanted to tell them more about how Mr. Hooft and a lot of people really have to struggle just to make it from day to day. And even though we can lay out all the right answers, it doesn’t always help. Maybe I should have told them about Icy’s ideas, about dreaming up your future and then trying to make it happen.

The buzzer went off and the secretary motioned for me and Mr. Pugh to go back in.

Mr. Pugh took his place in the corner and I sat down in front of the desk.

“Mr. Anderson, it’s the view of this panel that although you have shown some insight into your problems, you have also shown some behavior which indicates a lack of control,” the woman said. “You’ve had several fights despite the special attention you’ve been given and the privilege of participating in the work program.

“We hope over the next four months you continue gaining a knowledge of what you have to do once you’re released and bring that knowledge to bear in avoiding future involvement with the justice system,” she went on. “We think your attitude and behavior are headed in the right direction, but at this time they are not worthy of being rewarded.

“I think it’s commendable that Mr. Cintron has cast a dissenting vote,” she said. “It shows that in his eyes, you have made considerable improvement. But, as the record clearly shows, you still have problems. Do you have anything you would like to put on the record at this time?”

“No, ma’am.”