Authors: Richard Ford
“Yes,” I said. “I want to.” I didn’t want to get handed over to the juvenile authorities, but there wasn’t any choice. We couldn’t
not
go to see them. “What’ll we do after we see them?” I wanted Berner to be assured we’d get away.
“We’ll go have lunch at the Rainbow Hotel,” she said, “and invite all our friends and have a big party.”
Berner never told jokes—something our father said was like our mother. She didn’t have a funny bone was what he said. But saying we’d go to the Rainbow Hotel and invite our friends made me think maybe she’d been telling jokes all the time, and no one knew it. Nothing about Berner was simple. She turned at the window, folded her arms and looked at me, staring hard at my forehead the way she did when she wanted me to know I wasn’t very smart. Then she smiled. “I don’t know what we’re going to do,” she said. “Whatever children do whose parents are in jail. Wait for something bad to happen.”
“I hope nothing does,” I said.
“You don’t have to go looking for it,” Berner said. “It finds you where you’re hiding.”
It’s possible some people are born knowing things. Berner had figured out already that everything that had happened in the last day and night had happened to us—not just to our parents. I should’ve known that. I was so much younger than she was, even though our ages were the same. Over the years, I would never know the world as well as she did—which is good in many ways. But, in many other ways, it’s not at all.
T
HE JAIL WAS IN THE REAR OF THE CASCADE COUNTY
Courthouse, on Second Avenue North. We’d driven past it two days before with our father. I’d ridden my bicycle by it on the way to the hobby shop. It was a large, three-story stone building with a wide lawn and concrete front steps, a flagpole, and the number 1903 chiseled into the stones above the entrance. Old oak trees shaded the grass. On the high roof was a statue of a woman holding a scale—which I knew had to do with justice. When you passed the courthouse you’d sometimes see sheriff’s cars, and deputies escorting people wearing handcuffs into and out of the building.
Berner and I made a complete tour around the block before we went in. We wanted to determine if we could see cell windows from the street, which we couldn’t. When we walked into the echoing lobby, right in front of us was a sign that said
JAIL IN BASEMENT—NO SMOKING
. No one else was in the lobby. We went down a flight of shadowy steps to a metal door that had
JAIL
painted on it in red. This door we went through, and beyond it was a hall that ended at a lighted office behind a glass window. A deputy in a uniform sat at a desk behind the window, reading a magazine. Behind him—this was unexpected—you could see right to a barred door beyond which was a concrete corridor where jail cells lined one side. Opposite the cells was a long wall with barred windows at the top that let in pale light that looked cool and pleasant, although it was obviously a bad place to be. Our parents would be in there.
When Berner and I had walked from our house across the Central Avenue Bridge, past the Milwaukee Road depot, into the downtown and over to the jail, the morning had been bright and warm with the same high fluffy western clouds that flattened over the mountains, heading east to the plains. The river had smelled sweet in the heated morning breeze. Once again, people were canoeing on it, the last of the summer. We’d brought two paper sacks with toiletries we’d decided our parents would need in jail. My father’s safety razor. A bar of soap. A tube of toothpaste and a toothbrush, a tube of Barbasol, the bottle of Wildroot, a comb and a hairbrush. Berner had brought things for our mother.
As we crossed the Missouri there was plenty of Monday morning traffic. Twice I thought a car passed that had some boy I knew from school inside it. Berner and I wouldn’t have stood out—two kids walking across the bridge, carrying paper sacks. Invisible people. Again, though, if I’d thought someone recognized me and had an idea I was going to the jail to visit my parents who were locked up, it would’ve been too much for me. I might’ve jumped in the river and drowned myself.
The deputy behind the glass was a big smiling man with carefully parted short black hair, who seemed glad to see us. Berner told him—through the speak-hole—who we were and that we thought our parents were locked up in there, and we’d like to visit them. This made the deputy smile even more broadly. He left his desk and came around through a metal door beside his window and into the room where we were—it was just the end of the hall and had plastic chairs bolted to the floor, which was painted brown. It smelled like piney disinfectant, plus something sweet like bubblegum. The jail was a place you smelled more than anything else.
The deputy said he needed to see what was in our “pokes,” which was a word my father sometimes used. We showed him our sacks. He laughed and said it was nice of us to bring these articles, but our parents didn’t need them and jail rules forbid gifts. He’d keep them and we could take them back home. He was a heavy, moon-faced man who filled out his brown uniform. He had a severe dipping limp that made him have to reach and touch his leg above his knee at every step. Each time he did it his leg made a soft, metal click sound. I assumed his leg was wood. A wound from the war. I knew about that. He could only be a sheriff if he agreed to be the jailer. I believed we might see Bishop and the other, red-faced policeman who’d arrested our parents, that they’d recognize us and talk to us. But they weren’t in sight, which made the experience of being there even stranger.
Once the jailer—who didn’t tell us his name—had taken our sacks and made us pull out our pockets and show inside our shoes, he went back in his office and came out with a big metal key. With another smaller key, he unlocked the door he’d come out of and that had
CELL BLOCK
written on it and led us back through. Beyond the metal door the floor was painted pale yellow and felt much harder and colder through my shoes than our floor at home. My shoe soles seemed to stick to it. This was how anyone locked up inside felt—that jail existed for the opposite reason from why your home existed.
While we were walking to the jail, Berner and I had talked about what we would say to our parents. But once we were inside, and the barred door behind the deputy’s desk was unlocked using the big metal key, we didn’t talk. Berner cleared her throat several times and licked her lips. She was wishing, I thought, that she hadn’t come.
Beyond the first barred door was a space just big enough for the three of us to stand in, then another barred door, which made breaking out impossible. Inside, it smelled like the same piney disinfectant but with food odors and maybe urine, like the boys’ room in school. The door-opening noise echoed off the concrete. A black hose lay coiled below a faucet on the long wall, and the floor, which wasn’t painted there, was damp and shiny.
No one was visible down the row of cells. A man’s voice—not my father’s—was speaking on a telephone somewhere. Outside the high barred windows across from the cells, a basketball was being dribbled and feet were scuffling. Someone—a man—laughed, and the ball bounced off a metal backboard just like in the park where Rudy and I had played earlier in the summer. Except for the watery green light filtering from outside, the only light came from bulbs high in the concrete ceiling and protected by wire baskets that barely let any light reach the floor. It was like a shadowy cave to be there. I thought it was exhilarating, although the feeling was lessened by our parents being inside.
“Not many guests with us, today,” the crippled deputy said as he let us through the second barred door and locked it back. He wasn’t wearing a pistol. “They check out early on Monday. They’ve had enough of our hospitality. We generally see them again, though.” He was cheerful. A tiny red transistor radio had been propped up on his desk, and I could hear Elvis Presley singing at a low volume. “We’re paying special attention to your mom in here,” the deputy said. “Your dad, of course, he’s a real pistol.” He began leading us down the concrete corridor, which shone in the green light and shadows. The first cells we passed were empty and dark. “We don’t expect to have your folks in here with us too long,” he said, his leg clicking and being hauled along. He was wearing a hearing aid that filled his left ear. “They’re off to North Dakota Wednesday or Thursday.”
Then unexpectedly we were in front of an occupied cell, and there our father was, seated in the partial dark on a metal cot with a bare mattress that had its white ticking falling out in wads on the concrete. Something made me think he’d cut it open himself.
“You two kids shouldn’t be here,” our father said loudly, as if he knew we were coming. He stood up off his cot. I couldn’t see him very well—his face, especially—though I saw him lick his lips as if they were dry. His eyes were wider open than usual. Berner had kept on walking and hadn’t seen him. But when she heard his voice she said, “Oh, I’m sorry,” and stopped and she saw him, too.
“I just trusted the government too much. That’s my big problem,” he said, as if he’d been saying this before to someone else. He didn’t move closer to the bars. I didn’t know what he meant. His face contained a worried, exhausted expression, and he looked thinner, though it had only been a day since we were all at home. His eyes were reddened and darting around the way they did when he was trying to find someone to please. His voice sounded more southern than it had. “I never gave a thought to killing anyone, if there was ever a consideration about that,” he said. “Though I could’ve.” He looked at us, then sat back down on his cot and lightly jammed his fists together between his knees, as if he was exhibiting patience. He was dressed as he’d been when the police came. Jeans and his white shirt. His snakeskin belt had been taken away and so had his boots. He was just in his dirty sock feet. His hair wasn’t combed and he hadn’t shaved and his skin looked gray—exactly like his picture in the newspaper.
A feeling of calm came over me then. Not what you’d expect. I felt safe with him where he was. I intended to ask him about the money. Where it came from.
“We brought you toilet articles, but they won’t let us give them to you,” Berner said in an awkward, higher-pitched voice than usual. She had her hands behind her. She didn’t want to touch the bars.
“I already have a toilet in here.” Our father looked to the side of where he sat, at a lid-less commode, which was foul looking and smelling. He rubbed one wrist, then rubbed his other one and licked his lips again as if he didn’t know he was doing it. He rubbed his cheeks with his palms and squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them.
“When are they going to let you out?” I said. I was thinking Berner had said they were liars and could now remember other things. North Dakota. His blue flight suit.
“What is it, son?” He smiled a weak smile up at me.
“When are they going to let you come home?” I said loudly.
“Probably someday,” he said. He didn’t seem interested in it. He rubbed his hand through his hair the way he’d done Saturday in the car. “Don’t get all bothered around about this. Aren’t you about ready to go to school?”
“Yes, we are,” I said. It was if he was under the impression he’d been in jail longer than he had. He’d known before when our school was starting.
“Did you and Berner play chess together?” He hadn’t spoken to her yet.
“Where’s Mother?” she said abruptly. We’d thought they’d be in the same jail cell. Then she said, “Did you rob a bank?”
“She’s somewhere in here.” Our father motioned his thumb toward his cell wall, as if our mother was behind it. “She’s not speaking to me,” he said. “I don’t blame her.” He shook his head. “I didn’t hold up my end very well. I hope this isn’t anything that seems ordinary to you two.” He didn’t answer Berner’s question about robbing a bank. I wanted him to, because I remembered him saying, years before, “I could give it a try.”
“It doesn’t,” Berner said.
He smiled at us out of the shadowy light. You’d think if you visited your father in jail you’d have many things to say to him. Berner had planned to ask if they needed anything, and if we should call someone, and who that would be. His family? A lawyer? Our mother’s school? Almost all the ways I expected to feel weren’t the ways I felt. Jail put a stop to everything—which was what it was intended to do.
“We oughta step on down and see your mother now,” the deputy said behind us. His radio was still playing at the end of the row of cells. He saw we didn’t have more to say and didn’t want to embarrass anyone. Someone had begun talking outside the high barred windows. The basketball bounced once and stopped. “There’s that satellite wa-a-a-y, way up there,” a man’s voice said. “Who said?” someone answered. Then the ball bounced again.
“Jail’s not a place for you children to come,” our father said again, looking up at us in a way that seemed worried. A vein in his forehead was visible.
“That’s right,” the deputy put in. “But they love you.”
“I know they do. I love them,” he said, as if we weren’t there.
“Do you want us to call someone?” Berner said.
My father shook his head. “Let’s wait on that,” he said. “I’m talking to a lawyer. We have to go to North Dakota pretty soon.”
Berner didn’t say anything and neither did I. I still had his high school ring on my thumb. I put that hand behind me, so we wouldn’t talk about it.
“I wish I had some ways to make you children happy now.” Our father clasped his hands together and squeezed them. “What good can I do in here?”
“They know that, Bev,” the deputy said. I should’ve asked about the money right then, but I forgot.
A telephone rang, its shrill noise echoed down the row of cells. Berner and I stood there a few more seconds. We didn’t know what else we were supposed to say. We were just supposed to come.
The deputy put a hand on my arm and his other one on Berner’s and moved us away from where we were standing. He knew how everything worked.
“Good-bye,” Berner said.
“All right,” my father said. He did not stand up.