Vic is all alone in his little apartment over the restaurant, doing the crossword.
I’m taking the gifted and talented test. Three minutes before time is up, I’m not even halfway into the first section.
My mother sips beer at the kitchen table, staring into nothingness.
Marcy cruises Facebook in a daze.
Mack and me are up on the roof, inside the hutch. We’re lying back on his sleeping bag, looking through the hatchway for satellites. The sun rises, peaks, falls. I want him to kiss me, to crush me, but he won’t even look at me. I ask him if he wants me to give him a blow job, and he rolls away. I’m alone now. The shadows swell across the hutch walls like fastgrowing bruises.
The shadows are long on the visiting room floor. The room is empty. “Miss?” I’m sweating. I’m looking at the wall clock. I’m seeing the time. Still, I ask, “How long was I asleep?”
“You have to leave now. The hours are over. You have to get that last bus. Call ahead next time, okay? Give him some time to get ready.”
“Ready for what?”
“Call first. You’ll see.”
I hurry from the parking lot, out onto the avenue. The bus is anywhere but here. The cabs are gone with the visiting hours. So be it. I start walking.
Ka-klick ka-klick
, my spikes—Ma’s—nail the pavement. I’m tripping all over myself in these cheap heels. The toilet paper jammed into the toes is flat now, and you can see the shoes are two sizes too big. I look like an idiot, and I am. I’m a fool. Weeds creep tall through fractured sidewalks. No one plays ball or jumps rope or rides a bicycle or even strolls. The streets are barren up here, except for a stray dog that reminds me less of Boo and more of the one that bit me. It’s tracking me. I cut through an industrial park where sad-eyed men whistle at me from their tractor-trailers and double-flash their high beams.
(Wednesday, July 29, afternoon)
MACK:
I almost go down to see her. Twice. To tell her to go away. To be mean to her. To make her hate me.
I can’t.
I can’t do anything but hunker in my cot and remember . . .
. . . the Freefall.
We kiss just as we start to drop. She squeezes my hand so hard she’s going to break bones. It hurts something beautiful. She’s screaming and laughing, her eyes shut hard. But I can’t close my eyes to blink even. I can’t stop looking at her like this. Her hair flying, coppery bands. It was dark chestnut when I met her back in June, but it’s lightened the littlest bit in all the sun we’ve been having. I’m turned inside out after telling her my secret. But she’ll never tell.
The Freefall whooshes to an almost stop. We slow sink the rest of the way, maybe another twenty feet. She puts her hands inside my shirt and draws little circles into my ribs with her fingertips. I can’t stop looking at this beautiful girl. Her mom made us wear sunblock, and it smells like oranges.
We float toward where we have to get off the ride. The sun flickers between the stanchions. When she gets out of the car, the sun is low on her, and her shadow is long. Just one of those days, you’re lucky if you get five of them in your life: middle of July but low 70s, feels cooler with the north wind being so dry. Way up there an airplane glints. She takes my hand, and we stitch fingers and she kisses me . . .
The kid in the next cot pukes on himself. The stink is worse in the heat. Has to be a hundred ten in here. I’m greasy. I wake humped up and hard and to the sound of the fellas laughing at me. Somebody throws a cup of piss at me and runs off, and that just makes me miss her so bad.
There’s a million reasons I love her, but they all come down to one: She was good, and she let me be around her, and when I was with her, I was good too.
Come chow time, I’m eating by myself at a table not too far from the guards. That kid who was falling out of his chair, he comes up to me. “Anybody sitting here?”
“You see anybody sitting there?” I push my grub around with my spoon. You better turn it in after chow or you get sent to solitary. I wouldn’t mind. It would be quiet.
Dude sits. “Hot out.” He’s got a bruise at his eye and a split lip.
“Fell down, huh?”
“Don’t hurt much.”
“I bet.” I almost ask him what he did to land here, but then I don’t want to know. This is dumb, but in my mind I have it that he’s the good brother of that Bible story.
“Name’s Boston.”
“Mack.”
We eat for a good while, just spoons clinking on our plates, and then I say, “Why they call you Boston? On account you hate the Yankees, right?”
“I’m from Boston.”
I poke at my peas. “Boston a nice city?”
“Haven’t been in a while. Moved when I was a kid. But yeah, it was nice.”
“I never been to Vermont.”
“Boston is in Massachusetts.”
“Like I said.”
“Huh?”
“Ain’t Massachusetts part of Vermont?” Back to saying
ain’t
. No reason to keep trying to better the way I talk now.
“Massachusetts is part of Massachusetts,” he says.
“You sure?”
“Sorry.”
I know I’m right, but I let it go. No need to embarrass the poor kid. “Nothing to be sorry about.”
After a while he says, “They got good pizza in Boston. They put pineapple on it over there.”
“I’m still eating here. You trying to make me sick?”
“You got to try it. Serious. Off the hook.”
“That’s like putting apples on a pizza.”
“I don’t think I would like that,” he says.
“That’s what I’m saying.”
That short guard with the mustache, he’s watching me again. I make slit eyes at him, and this time he doesn’t look away. He nods once, like hey, and now I look away.
They let us outside the tent for an hour to get the breeze that’s not here. Some play hoop in the half-light of the dome’s shadow. I follow the jets into the airport and try not to think about it all. Her. Boo. Larry. I’m getting less mad at him each day that slows by, and more mad at me. He must’ve had the sadness in him too, to do what he did. Where does that come from, what we did?
Two kids shuffle past, big one in front, little in back to hold up big’s jeans, because we aren’t allowed to wear belts. They’re out of the glare now, the two, and I see the little kid in back is Boston. The big boy is Blue. I angle over. “You ain’t got to hold up his pants,” I say.
“Yeah he do,” Blue says.
I pull Boston away. His hand leaves Blue’s pants, and they fall. Everybody laughs all screechy. Except for Boston and Blue. Except for me.
The hissing.
Blue’s boys circle up on me and Boston. This other dude pinches Boston’s cheek. “Look at that peach fuzz on him. Mold on fruit. Head looks like left-back melon.”
“Hands behind your backs,” comes deep and easy from behind me. The mustached guard points one index finger at Blue, the other at me. “Put ten feet between you.”
Blue nods in my direction. “Punk made me drop my pants.”
“You were playing slave master,” guard says. He points that Blue and his posse should peel off left.
Boston breathes like he’s got the asthma. I nudge him and we split to the right.
“Hold up,” guard says. Then, to Boston: “You all right?” Boston chews his lips.
I catch myself imitating his posture, slumped shoulders, wilted spine. I been him, hitched up onto some bruiser’s pants and towed around like all God’s lameness.
“Son, you don’t have to hold up anybody’s pants but your own,” guard says. “Don’t do it anymore. I’ll put in a word with the tent guards, make sure you’re all right. Go wait by the desk, watch TV with the nice lady guard there. I’ll be in shortly. Go on inside now. It’ll be all right.”
Boston and me head for the right-side entrance till I hear, “You,
wait
.” Good dog training voice on him, this guard.
“What is your interest in that boy?”
“I got no interest in him,” I say.
“You’re watching out for him. I see you.”
“That’s a crime?”
“Hey, look me in the eye. Now, why are you looking after that kid?”
I shrug. “Guess he needs looking after.”
The guard nods. He frowns, squints. “You know what’s going to happen to you if you keep playing defender? You let me worry about Boston there. No harm will come to him while I’m around.”
“And when you ain’t?”
Guard nods. “Look, watch out for yourself. No need to go looking for trouble.”
“Not looking for anything at all.”
“You’re looking to get yourself a buck-fifty or worse if you keep messing with that crew,” guard says. “For your information, a buck-fifty is—”
“A hundrit fifty stitch cut or in other words, half a smiley.” Hun
drit
. Sound like my old man. “Look, man, this ain’t my first bid, all right? I ain’t afraid of
nobody
.”
“You should be. You know who your biggest enemy is? You.” He jerks his chin like I should move along now, and I do.
With school out, the tent TVs run all day into night, different channels and loud. I head to chapel. Guard escorts me down the long hall, past the men’s jail. Dark green jumpers, they wear. Violent offenders. Those boys got no problem tuning you up. I’ll be with them soon, when I turn eighteen. Hopefully I’ll be dead by then.
Nice and quiet in the chapel. You can sleep pretty good for an hour or so without anybody messing with you. Regular old room with one-piece chairs and a sagging shelf on the front wall where they hang a cross or don’t, depending on which religion is using the room. “God comes to people in different ways,” the chapel trusty says with a smile.
“Yeah huh? Sometimes he don’t come at all.”
(Two days later, Friday, July 31, morning of the fiftieth day . . . )
The third time I go to chapel, Boston tags along. “Mind?”
“If you got to pray, you got to pray,” I say.
He does, boy. Knows all the prayers by heart. Holy roller. Sings fine too.
“You got a gift there,” I say.
“We all do.”
“Sure,” I say.
“When I’m singing, I feel everything is right.”
“I used to forget all the bad stuff when I was with my dogs sometimes. Training them. I don’t know why.”
“You don’t need to know why,” he says. “You just got to know training dogs is your gift.”
“I never went to school for it or anything.”
“Don’t matter. Just trying to do it. That’s all that matters.”
“Boston, man? You’re a little crazy.”
“You know that song ‘Amazing Grace’?”
“My moms told me a slave trader wrote that one.”
“Nah, serious?” he says. “I guess it don’t matter anyhow.”
“Sure it matters.”
“Did he quit trading and ask God’s forgiveness before he died? Because that’s what the song is about. You can do bad stuff, but if you’re sorry, you’re square with God.”
“Nah, nah, man. You can’t take back the bad stuff just because you don’t want to go to hell.”
“You can’t take it back, and you still owe your debt to folks you wronged, and you pay it with a full heart, but being sorry for it helps you pay back that debt. I learned that in Bible study.”
“I’m not one for churching music anyhow,” I say.
“I’m-a teach it to you.”
“Nah, it’s all right.”
But he’s already into the singing of it. Long, slow notes.
That night, after lights-out, I play the song in my mind to block out the snickering from the dudes around me, and I dream of Céce and Boo . . .
We’re at the west side shore with Boo at sunset. An old man and old lady are scanning the low-tide silt with their electric wands. “They’re always here,” I say.
“That’s us in sixty years,” she says.
“Fine by me.” I scratch Boo’s neck, and she buries her head under my arm.
(The next afternoon, Saturday, August 1, the fifty-first day . . .)
I’m just getting to know him, and Boston gets released, of course. He gives me a paper scrap with his number on it. “That’s my moms’s house. For when you get out. You can come live with us. She’s a little mean, but she cooks pretty good.”
“I’m not getting out anytime soon, man.”