The Twelve-Fingered Boy (7 page)

Might as well be my day off—I can't compete with ice cream and the cold stuff anyway. It's a losing proposition.

Jack's bleary in the morning, wiping his eyes. I take my turn in the bathroom, run a hot shower, brush my teeth. On the line of my jaw is a pimple, a big nasty whitehead. Strange how popping it pleases me.

Sitting on his bed, Jack just looks around, blinking like he still can't believe he's in here, in the pokey, locked up with desperate and hardened juveniles thirsting for his blood. Yeah, right.

Maybe he's just not a morning guy. I hear him tossing and turning and calling out at night. He shakes my bunk when he sobs. Poor little dude.

Booth calls for headcount, and the wards clash and chatter, whooping and hollering and setting up basketball games for the free time we have in the yard today. Saturday is free day, and everyone is happy.

Except Jack. Jack's never happy. He just pretends he is.

“Jack. Come on, buddy, headcount.”

I step out onto the walkway with a towel around my waist. There's more hooting and hollering, and someone whistles at me. I blow a kiss.

Jack comes to the walkway and assumes his position beside the door. We wait as Booth checks us off, and then we return to the semi-privacy of the cell. Jack lies back down on the bed. Sometimes in the morning, I'll find him under the bed, like it's a little fort and he's hiding. But in the day he's usually normal. Pretty normal. Okay, apparently normal.

I'm starting to worry about him.

“Listen, we got a free day. Why're you moping? I'm off work, no classes, extra-long yard time, the commissary is running, and the TVs will be on.”

Jack's silent for a long while. Then he says, “The man is coming back today.”

“Quincrux?”

“Yeah.”

“Not today,” I say. “It's Saturday.”

Jack gives a little laugh. “So? Some folks work on Saturday, too. And Booth told me visitors come on Saturday.”

This is true, and I tell Jack so. I never have visitors, but I see them when they get the tour. They're smiling but not enjoying themselves, seeing where their sons or brothers live, incarcerado.

“What's up with that guy? He's a perv or something.”

I told Jack I had eavesdropped on his conversation with Quincrux. He nodded and smiled one of the few genuine smiles I'd ever gotten from him. Like he was touched I was looking out for him.

“All those weird questions…” Jack waves an absurdly over-fingered hand. “But he said he'll be coming back with a ‘colleague.' I didn't like how that sounded.”

To tell you the truth, I didn't either. I didn't like how any of Quincrux's talk sounded. When I think of Quincrux—his quiet, dead voice, his somber suit and briefcase, his bored, careless eyes—I feel cold and terrified. More terrified than when I thought I might bleed out and die.

I think about Quincrux a bit. I hold in my mind the jawbreaker that seemed to fend him off, to keep him out.

Jack stands, walks past the desk to the dresser and back. As he does I realize he hasn't ever settled in here. I've got posters plastering the walls. Dallas Cowboys and Razorback pennants. An 8x10 of Vig we took at the strip mall's Glamour Shots when he was a baby. Stacks of novels sent by the do-gooders at the sheriff's department outreach: King, Hemingway, Shelley, Howard. Hell, even Shakespeare. I'm not an idiot. I like to read. It makes the outside closer, the walls thinner. After a week, Jack's got his orange jumpers in a drawer, but no pictures of family, no posters of bands, no books, no magazines. And that reminds me that Quincrux left him a gift but I've never seen it. I never thought to ask.

“What was it Quincrux gave you? The gift that says something about you. And him.”

Jack pulls a comic from underneath his mattress. “This. I meant to show you.”

It's an X-Men comic. A big-breasted super-mutant with fiery eyes glares at me. Weird. She's hot but angry. What could make her so angry?

“I don't get it. What's he trying to say?”

Jack hesitates. He throws the comic onto the bed, then goes over to the desk and sits at the chair.

“I don't know.” He sighs and looks down at his hands in his lap. “That I'm a mutant.”

I laugh. “Naw. That's—I don't know—silly.”

He looks at the door, making sure no one can see, and holds up his hand, fingers splayed.

“Not so silly.”

“But it's just…” I stop and think a bit. I need to say this right. “My cousin is double-jointed. A kid I knew in school could add any two numbers in her head like lightning. You could just call 'em out, and she'd answer. You'd have to get a calculator to check, but she was always right. Another kid could play any instrument he could touch, like he'd been playing it all his life.” This last one I saw on television, but I don't tell Jack that. “So I don't think having extra fingers makes you—”

“A mutant?” Jack shakes his head and sighs again. “It does make me different.” He's not looking at me. He's got that far-off, thousand-mile stare. I worry that sometime the little dude won't be able to get back from wherever it is he goes when he gets that way.

“Hey, man. We're all different.” That's what your momma believes. That we can all grow up to be president or millionaires and everyone is a little Van Gogh and there's never been another like us. But most kids in the general pop could be clones, all pressed out from the same mold, they're so damned homogeneous. Maybe I just think so because I don't know them well enough. But, I swear, all I have to get to know is one. But maybe Jack really is different.

“Let me buy you some ice cream, Jack, me boy. I'm flush this week and got a sweet tooth.”

He laughs. “Awesome. I don't have any money.”

“Heck, I'll even throw in a burger, son.”

We hit the commissary and eat the breakfast of champions: cheeseburgers, cheesy fries con jalapeños, and icy sodas, followed by orange Push-Ups. The Commons is a madhouse—the D-Wing cadre howling and throwing paper at the TV showing ESPN, and the C-Wing brutes glowering and gloating on the opposite side. Whoever holds the remote is king.

We head out to the yard, stomachs burbling.

Casimir Pulaski Detention Center is in the shape of a large X. A, B, C, and D wings form the arms of the cross, with Admin and classrooms and offices in the center, where the arms meet. The yard, a wide expanse of grass and basketball courts and bleachers lining a half-size football field, is one of the biggest differences between juvie and a penitentiary yard. The yard is lush, well-kept, and filled with balls and laughter and boys running about, acting like idiots, which is exactly the way boys are supposed to act.

Even I know that.

The illusion of a playground is broken only by the bulls. No Booth today. But Red Wolf, Wilkins, Peters, Blanchard, and Diegal lurk about, hands on billy clubs and pepper spray. We call the guards the League of Jerkwads. It's pretty obvious they want a general pop fight, but fights just don't happen that often ever since Big Paulie got shipped to the Farm.

All except Red Wolf. He doesn't want fights. He wants followers.

Red Wolf has a group of titty-babies on the smaller court, trying to teach them tribal dances. He ain't a real Indian, despite the fact he's holding court in full tribal garb, feathers and leathers and tomahawk and everything. He's a self-proclaimed phony Indian, which shouldn't make sense, but it does. He's bald, rail-thin, and polite to ward and guard alike. It's hard to tell how old he is.

I like him. He ain't Booth. He rolled up on me once, early in my career, when he was just dressed as a guard and not in some Indian costume. He's faster than he looks. He nabbed the sack with the sweets I was handing off, popped it open, then handed it over to the mark. He sniffed. “Ephemeral, boys. But your body is your body. You can pump all the junk in it you want.”

In the yard, he moves through some prancing, horselike steps. The wards with him follow slowly, clumsily. They look at us, terrified, as we pass. Red Wolf waves at us and beckons, but I say to Jack, “Ignore him. He's trying to get them to transcend or find their totem animal or nonsense like that. He wants them to fly or something.”

“Sounds fun.”

Jack marches off toward the court and Red Wolf.

“It not just your spirit, boys,” Red Wolf says when we get close. “It's how your spirit is connected to your body and not connected to your body. We're all chained to our bodies, chained to the earth, incarcerado.”

He turns to face the boys. He's in full Indian regalia: eagle feathers, leather with tassels, turquoise stuff I can't even recognize. But his baldness throws off the effect. He looks like a white man in a costume.

“I hear you boys say that, talking to each other. Incarcerado. Being locked up. But it doesn't mean that at all. You know what it means?”

The titty-babies look around sheepishly—at Red Wolf, at Jack, at me, then at themselves.

Jack says, “Meat? Like carne asada? Like … um … your body.”

“No. But it's interesting you'd say that. You're locked into your own personal meat prison, when your spirit wants to fly. What's your name, son?”

“Jack. Jack Graves.”

Part of me feels relieved not to be the object of a bull's attention. I'm glad Booth is gone and it's a Saturday and I'm not holding and there's nothing to worry about. Part of me is maybe just a bit jealous of the attention Red Wolf is giving Jack. But then I think of Quincrux and … well … then I'm cool with not getting all the attention.

Red Wolf turns to the other wards gathered on the basketball court. The sounds of basketballs dribbling, grunts, and catcalls from the other court fall away, and Red Wolf is there, in the center of it all, talking.

“They can lock up your body, but they can never lock up your spirit.” He walks over to Raphael Santos, a meek little dude from two doors down on B Wing, and puts a finger on Raphael's chest. Red Wolf taps once, to make his point. “They can control your body.” He raises his finger to Raphael's head and lightly, gently, puts his fingertip right in the center of Raphael's forehead. “They can't touch what's in here. Nothing can. What's in there can soar. Can rise up and shuck off this body, shuck off this detention center, and join with other spirits. It can ascend.”

Red Wolf stops and bows his head. I want to laugh, it's such an obvious bit of theatrics. Red Wolf snaps back to us, turns around, doing the whole group eye-contact bit they must teach in church or college or wherever he learned it, and then claps his hands.

“This is the Ghost Dance. It's the dance that at one time all American Indian nations practiced, and it was inspired by an eclipse of the sun. It's the harbinger of the cleansing of the world.” Red Wolf takes a prancing step, like a horse stomping, repeats it with the same foot, and then repeats the cycle with his other foot. He dances in a circle.

“Come on, boys. It's not hard. And when you do it, it separates your ghost, your spirit, from your body. Your body is incarcerado. But your spirit is free to roam. Roam now.”

I look at Jack. He takes a step, then another with the same foot. And then we're all doing it, stomping around in circles on a basketball court in a kids' jailhouse named after a Pollock. If that isn't spirit-lifting, I don't know what is.

Jack's laughing now, an unreserved laugh that rises up toward the heavens, and I realize just how much he'd like to be freed from his body.