Lockdown (5 page)

The dentist was white with dark hair and big eyes and this sincere look on his face. He asked me how often I brushed my teeth and I told him once a day.

“Why not twice a day?” he asked.

“I don’t know, man,” I said.

“It only takes an extra two minutes a day,” he said.

“Okay, I’ll try it,” I said.

He thanked me and told me it would be worth it. I had never seen anybody get into teeth before. But two minutes a day made sense.

At dinner one of the newbies sat across from me and Play. He was my height but wide and ugly. Sucker looked like King Kong with a nappy ’fro and a jumpsuit.

“Where y’all from?” he asked.

I didn’t say nothing and Play didn’t say nothing. The newbie started puffing up like he was mad and asked us again where we were from. We still didn’t say nothing, mostly just because he was a newbie, and he picked up his knife from the table and held it in his fist. That cracked me up a little because it was just a plastic-ass knife.

“I just came in from your mama’s house,” Play said. “She told me to tell you hello.”

The guy looked at us like he was ready to go off. Then he said that he was from the Duncan Avenue projects in Jersey City.

“We kill a guy just for smiling at us,” he said.

I got up and went to another table because I really didn’t want to fight the sucker. Play got up with me, and we sat with some white dudes from the Special Attention wing. Those were dudes who were all messed up and were in the special watch-these-guys-because-they-might-hurt-themselves area in the back of the classrooms. One guy we sat with didn’t look up from his tray. The other guy put his hands, palm down, over his plate like we were going to take his food.

Toon needed to be with these guys.

When we finished eating and Pugh lined us up to go back to our wing, King Kong came over and got behind me.

“Me and you got some business to take care of,” he growled at me.

I thought back on what Mr. Cintron had said. All these dudes in here had run stupid until they found the front door of some courthouse, and half of them were still running on empty.

“You think you can kick his ass?” Play asked me later.

“I don’t know if I can kick his ass,” I said. “But if the deal got to go down, I can sure make it a war he didn’t want to be in.”

Lights-out and I was lying in the dark thinking that King Kong was going to get both of us screwed up. I wondered if he knew it too.

So what happened is that Mr. Pugh brought me a candy bar and talked to me decent on the way to Evergreen. I don’t like people giving me nothing, but I took it and said I would eat it later.

“So, you looking forward to going home?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

I wasn’t sure. I knew I didn’t want to be in Progress anymore, but I wasn’t sure what home was going to mean. Just the way King Kong was messing with me, I knew the streets were waiting to mess with me. All my homies hanging out and dealing whatever they had were waiting, all the suckers leaning against the rail on the corner and looking to see who was weak
were waiting, and all the gangbangers with nothing to do but cook up some mad were waiting. Yeah, home.

The papers Mom had left were about some program that New York City was running. They said that anybody who was accepted for the program would be eligible for help in getting affordable housing and more money on their Family Cards. I knew it was all good on paper, but in real life it didn’t go nowhere. In a way all the programs were alike. If everything worked out perfectly, you should be doing okay. But the deal was that you were going back into the same hole you had slid down before. It was like Toon. His people talking about how he had messed up and how embarrassed they were and him sitting with his head down thinking that the best thing going for him was to get out and go back to the same family. I could see him wanting to stay at Progress.

It was raining when I got to Evergreen. I had gone to class from 8 to 8:30 and King Kong had sat behind me. He kept bumping the back of my chair. I felt like turning around and lighting him up, but I knew all I had to do was get into one more fight and my game would be over.

I was cleaning up some soup in the hallway that had been spilled by one of the residents when a real dark sister came over to me.

“What you doing, cute boy?” she asked.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“Nancy Opara from Nigeria,” she said. “I’m an exchange student and I work once in a while here for extra credit.”

“You don’t get paid?”

“I get extra credit from Saint Elizabeth’s,” she said. “Simi told me about you. She said you were nice.”

“I’m okay,” I said.

“I think I’m going to recommend you for mayor of New York City,” she said. “The city needs a nice young mayor.”

“I think that job would be too hard for me,” I said.

“All you got to do is to hire a lot of smart people to work under you,” she said. “You don’t have to know anything yourself.”

She was kidding around with me and I liked it. At Progress nobody kidded around with you. Even when you were talking to your friends it could change in a minute. You said the wrong thing and somebody would get mad and swing at you, or they were having a bad day and you didn’t know it, or their medication wasn’t working. You could never tell.

When I was collecting the garbage, the seniors looked at me careful but they didn’t say nothing. I figured in a couple of weeks they would start thinking of me as somebody who worked for Evergreen. That’s what I wanted to do, to fit in and be nobody special.

After I collected the garbage, I went in and
cleaned up Mr. Hooft’s room. He wasn’t there when I first started cleaning, but then he came in. He was slow getting up on his bed and I thought maybe he wasn’t feeling good.

“Good morning, sir,” I said.

He didn’t answer.

His room was clean to start with and I finished pretty quick. “You need me to do anything else?” I asked.

“What are you thinking?” he asked.

“I’m thinking you might want me to do something else and I can get it done,” I said.

“You don’t like me?”

“I guess you okay,” I said. In my head I was thinking,
No, I don’t like you.

He picked up his paper and started reading it, and I sat down on the chair in the corner. He looked over at me and asked me again what I was thinking.

“Why you got to know what I’m thinking?” I asked.

“You could be thinking of stealing something from me,” he said. “You see that soap dish in my locker? It’s solid silver. Go ahead, look at it.”

I looked in his locker, saw something shiny, and
picked it up. It was a soap dish, like he said, with a little scene on the top part. Some kind of birds under a tree.

“It’s nice,” I said, putting the dish back into his locker.

“So you’re thinking of stealing it?”

“Mr. Hooft, I didn’t even know you had the dish,” I said. “I was thinking of this guy who wants to pick a fight with me. He keeps messing with me, but I know I need to maintain my cool so I don’t get into trouble. I can control myself, so it’s okay. I don’t think about stealing or nothing like that, because that won’t get me anywhere.”

“He wants to fight you in jail?”

“Yeah.”

“That happened to me once,” he said. “You want to hear how it happened?”

“It ain’t the same because you weren’t in jail,” I said. “I’m in jail, and whatever you do against the rules gets you into trouble. It don’t matter who’s right and who’s wrong. You fight, you’re in trouble.”

“You don’t know nothing!” Mr. Hooft said. “When I was a boy, nine years old, my family lived in Java. You don’t know where that is because your
people don’t know anything, but it’s in Asia. Maybe two thousand miles from Japan—”

“How you know my people don’t know anything?” I asked.

“Why are you interrupting me?” Mr. Hooft asked.

“Why you can’t speak to me like I’m a man, same as you are?” I asked. “I’m not putting your people down.”

“The nurse said I don’t have to take nothing from you!” He was turning red. “One word from me and you are out of here!”

“Yeah, that’s all good, but you don’t need to be insulting me.”

“I can’t bother with you,” Mr. Hooft said. “I have to change my bandage.”

He had a bandage on the outside of his right leg up near his hip. He gave me a mean look and got up on the bed, took the tray of bandages from the white cabinet next to his bed, and lay on one side with his back toward me.

I sat down and watched him pull the old bandage off. It might have hurt him, but he didn’t say nothing. Then he just lay there for a while, breathing heavy.

His butt was hanging out but he really didn’t
have a butt, just a crack with a little flesh on it. Seeing his naked skin, I didn’t think he even looked real. More like a bad drawing or something. I had never seen many butts and I didn’t like seeing his.

What I thought I should do was just walk out of the room and come back when he was finished. Instead of that I watched as he tore open an envelope and took out a piece of gauze and tried to put it on his leg.

“You want me to do that?” I asked.

“You’re a nurse now?”

“I can move around better than you can,” I answered.

“Just put the gauze on and cover it with a piece of tape,” he said.

He had a hole in his leg. I didn’t want to look at it.

“I got to go talk to Simi,” I said.

“What do you have to say to her?” he was asking as I left the room.

I found Simi and told her what I had seen. “He got a hole in his leg about this big.” I made a circle with my fingers around the size of a quarter.

Simi led me back to Mr. Hooft’s room. He had covered himself up with the sheet and she threw it off and looked at the hole. Then she went out of the room.

I looked at Mr. Hooft and he wasn’t moving. I knew he wasn’t dead, but he was lying still. When Simi came back, she had a small tube of something.

“This is not going to hurt, Mr. Hoof,” she said, still leaving off the
t
from his name. “It’s just an antibiotic. I’m going to get Reese to change this bandage whenever he comes. I’ll change it the other days.”

She looked over at me and nodded for me to come watch.

What she did was to put some antibiotic on the
hole, then take out a piece of gauze, roll it carefully, and place it right over the hole. Then she pulled the hole together a little and taped it shut.

When she left, I sat back down again in the corner. I didn’t like seeing nobody messed around like that. Even though I wasn’t liking him, I didn’t want to see the hole in his leg.

“You want to hear what I was telling you that happened to me?” he asked.

“Go on,” I said.

“My family lived in Java. My country owned all of those little islands before the war. My father was a schoolteacher. Very tall. We’re a tall people. My mother was a seamstress at home, but when she married, she settled down to being a housewife.

“My father was offered the position of headmaster in a rural school outside of Surakarta. He planned to work there for two years as headmaster, and then return to Europe to teach. But then the war broke out. First it was the Germans and then the Japanese. Nobody thought it was going to last because nobody took the Japanese seriously. In December 1941, they attacked your country. Then in 1942, they overran Dutch Indonesia.

“We heard rumors and more rumors and I was afraid, but Mama kept telling me that everything would be all right. Then one day some Japanese soldiers showed up in our garden. There they were, sitting in our garden with their long rifles, and we were having breakfast inside. They came and took Papa away and searched the house. We had nothing in the house except books and papers. Then they left. Three days later they came again and took Mama and my sister and me to a camp. We stayed in that camp for months, and it was terrible. There wasn’t enough food and we were all living one on top of the other one.”

Mr. Hooft was turning in his bed and winced when he got around on his bad leg.

“You want me to call Simi again?” I asked.

He shifted onto his back and waved his hand in the air.

“But then one day they came and got all the boys and took us to a different camp. There were people crying and screaming and women fighting to hang on to their boys. You know why? You don’t know why. Because there was talk of some of the men being killed. They said that the Japanese soldiers shot
some of the men, and some they made them kneel on the ground and then cut their heads off.”

“I don’t believe that,” I said.

“Why?” Mr. Hooft asked. “Why don’t you believe it?”

“I never heard of it before,” I said.

“Do you know about the Dutch East Indies?” he asked.

“No.”

“Do you know about Martin Luther?”

“Yeah, Martin Luther King,” I said. “He made that ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.”

“No,” Mr. Hooft said. “Your black Martin Luther King was named after Martin Luther—a German—who lived many years ago and who was also a religious leader. You don’t know anything. That’s why you’re in jail.”

“Fuck you.”

“So when they rounded up the boys and took us to another camp, we were all terrified. The Japanese soldiers were very scary because they had dark skins—not as dark as you—and they were short. They were no bigger than we were, and we were only boys.

“But they swaggered around and they had guns. And anything you did they would punish you. Sometimes the punishment would only be a slap. Sometimes they would tie you to a fence and beat you with whips. Sometimes they would take boys away and we wouldn’t see them again.”

“They cut their heads off?”

“I don’t think so. There were even stories that some of the youngest boys were taken to Japan,” Mr. Hooft said. “But I know we never saw them again. Anyway, there was one boy in the camp I was taken to who seemed to hate everyone, but especially me. It was as if he had the soul of the devil.

“I was thin and not used to having to defend myself. When he found me—that’s the way I thought it was, him finding me—it was as if he had found an answer to all of his problems. He would torment me day and night. We were given a ration of boiled barley every morning, and he would come and take mine. The other boys would see him coming and eat as quickly as possible, but I would be so petrified I would just sit and tremble.”

“He punked you out,” I said. “You were too scared to deal.”

“I don’t know exactly what you are saying,” Mr. Hooft said. “What I know is that I was afraid of the Japanese. If we had a fight, I knew the Japanese would take us away and punish us. They would beat us up and maybe even kill us, and he knew it too.”

“He knew that?”

“Of course he knew it,” Mr. Hooft said. “He saw what the rest of us saw. But for some reason he lived on the very edge all the time.”

“So what happened?”

“So after a while, maybe ten months to a year after the Japanese took over the island, and all the boys and some of the older men were in this one camp, we settled into a routine. Every morning we would have to go up the road—maybe two miles to where the men were working—and we would sit outside the gates until the guards led the men away on work details. Then we would have to go into the camp and find the dead bodies and load them onto trucks.”

“The dead bodies?”

“Men died from being weak, from disease, from whatever,” Mr. Hooft said. “At the time I didn’t know what dying was about. But I didn’t want to touch the
bodies. When someone died, they tied them in cloth and put them in baskets. Then we had to lift the baskets onto the trucks. If you got the legs it wasn’t too bad, because the legs weren’t too heavy. The legs went up first, and then the boy carrying that end would run around and help push the basket onto the truck. But it was from the other end that the liquids came out. That was terrible, because it stunk and it would get on you and you would smell terrible all day. That’s what dying meant to me, the smell. This boy, he wouldn’t push the basket with the others, and then maybe the whole basket would fall on you.

“One day he and I were pushing a basket onto a truck and he moved away. I struggled as much as I could but then it fell back on me and I was on the ground and trying to catch my breath. He was a boy like me, but when he came over, he looked gigantic. His face was wide and big and he was kicking me like he had so much hate for me. His hate scared me more than the pain from his foot. I was lying on the ground. Did I fight back? I don’t know. I knew it was hopeless, that we were fighting against different demons. Two guards came up and started kicking
me and they knocked him down. He was bleeding and he wouldn’t get up, and they kept beating him and beating him. Later that day me and another boy had to carry him in a basket for the next morning’s crew.”

“That really happened?” I asked.

“It happened,” Mr. Hooft said. When he said it his voice changed, got very high and very soft, almost like a kid’s voice. I wanted to look at his face, but he was half turned away and I could only see the thin outline of his cheek and his right eye. “It happened.”

When Mr. Pugh came and got me, he asked me how I liked my vacation. I thought about telling him what Mr. Hooft had told me, but I didn’t think he would have understood it.