Critical Injuries (15 page)

To go wandering. To go shoplifting. To hang out. Roddy shrugged.

“Because it seemed easier than doing the work, right?”

“Not so boring.” Stan Snell leaned forward.

“Well, I don't know about boring, but here's how it works here and wherever you go from here. Assuming you're found guilty. If you don't mind, we'll just assume that for our own planning purposes.” Found? Roddy
was
guilty. He didn't see much way around that.

“So as you already know it's up at six. Breakfast. Exercise. Then you'll be starting classes or maybe job-training sessions for three or four hours a day. Including weekends. Eventually you'll also take a turn at some of the jobs around the place, like in the kitchen, whatever, another three or four hours a day. There'll be counselling sessions, therapy, whatever you want to call it, but I don't know how regular or soon that'll be, or whether it'll be just you and a counsellor of some sort and how much will be group work, that depends on a lot of things. Dinner, then you get maybe a couple of hours to watch TV, play pool, whatever. By eight-thirty you're back in the cell. You're supposed to spend the time till the eleven o'clock shutdown doing homework and studying. The idea, you understand, is that you need hard work and routine and discipline. Given what happened,” and he looked down again at the file, “you might be around for a while. But that'll give you the chance to figure out what you want to do when you get out, so hopefully you don't wind up back in.”

Oh. Roddy hadn't thought of that: the possibility of committing further crimes. He hadn't got that far into the future. It's not like he's got some desire to hurt people. He couldn't imagine actually wanting to do something like what he did, actually setting out to do it. Or setting out to do something and having that happen and not caring one way or another. He couldn't imagine that.

But it probably happens to people. They get hard. They don't care. In real jail, there'd be more real tough guys, probably, more guys hunkered down into true crimes.

Like attempted murder, armed robbery? He was forgetting again.

“These,” and Stan Snell stacked up handfuls of paper, pushed them into an enormous brown envelope, “are aptitude and intelligence and personality tests. You can fill them out over the next week. Give us some idea what you're like, what you might be good at. They're to be returned to me before your next court appearance. Ask any guard for a pen. You'll have to give it back, and only use it under supervision.” So that it wouldn't become a weapon, Roddy supposed, against himself or anyone else. “And watch your step. There's no screwing around here. Step out of line, there are penalties. If you do step out of line, you'll find out what the penalties are. Any questions?”

Not that Roddy could think of, not right that second.

“Jack?” Stan looked up at the guard in the doorway. “You can take the young man back to the rec hall now. Show him what's what down there.”

Roddy could guess. It would be like starting school: when he was seven and just moved to town, except then he already knew Mike, which was enough to begin with. His grandmother said the first day, “You'd be wise to watch for a while, see what people are like, not be too eager right off the bat. You'll make better friends in the long run.” Being tough and sort of angry-looking wasn't what she meant, but the point was to be what she called
standoffish
. “You might look standoffish,” she advised, “but that's all right, too.”

So what should a standoffish Rod do, in the doorway of a rec hall with a couple of TVs at different ends of the room, big but mounted high up, out of reach and with mesh guards built out around the screens, and a pool table, and shuffleboard, and a whole bunch of wood tables and chairs with magazines and cards and a big battered-looking bookcase thing with some paperbacks and videos, and a couple of sofas and a few easy chairs and two guards and a bunch of guys more or less his own age?

A standoffish Rod would lean casually against a wall. He'd survey, narrow-eyed, what everybody was doing. He'd have his arms folded over his chest. He wouldn't show by even a flicker that he was worried about accidentally sitting in somebody's place, or getting in somebody's way, or drawing the wrong somebody's attention. It's the first moments that count.

He wouldn't plan to make any friends; maybe not ever. The idea of Mike, pictures of the two of them hanging out, Mike standing on a sidewalk, head back and laughing and laughing with that full big roar he got after his voice changed — a moment from a whole long time of knowing each other. Funny how what should be a lot of flowing and particular memories came down to a few pictures; that kept giving Roddy a kind of electric shock in his head every time.

People disappear, that's all. They just go. Pictures didn't mean shit, people just go.

There was only so long he could stay leaning, standoffish Rod, against a wall, arms folded, looking around the room narrow-eyed, assessing, with any luck, menacing. He felt dizzy, that first time, pushing off from the wall. Like he was seeing the room up close and far away at the same time, like it was real and sharp as a razor, and also all flattened onto a screen.

Was he crazy?

That might account for that moment in Goldie's. Maybe only a crazy guy would let everything get so far out of hand, not on purpose, totally unintended, but there it was, that undoable moment.

He rolled slightly on his feet, swaggering somewhat, he hoped, trying for an impression of being ready to spring. It was hard to tell if anybody was noticing. He expected they were. It's automatic, pretty much, sizing up a stranger coming into a group. Something like smell, there were signals. His ought to be dangerous but not quite cocky. Someone prepared to be cool, but not necessarily.

As long as he didn't look like some asshole who'd left himself glued too long to a wall.

Guards in this place don't generally look very interested or alert, although he has decided they probably are, and that bored, faraway expression is probably as cultivated as his own swagger. The guards here wear navy blue pants and shirts, and wide black belts with different things hanging off them, like flashlights, that don't make much sense unless they're more for hitting people than throwing light. The guards look, for the most part, not only uninterested but like people called in to fix particular things, like the plumbing. People with narrow interests, in keeping the peace, more or less; a goal not unimportant to Roddy as well.

When he launched himself into the rec hall the first time, there were two guards, one to the right of the doorway, the other over by the high-up meshed windows across the room. Between them: three guys shooting pool, a couple of others at one of the tables shooting the shit, a couple watching junk afternoon TV, four playing cards, looked like poker. One sitting in an easy chair with a pad of lined paper on his lap, writing. Recounting some crime, a confession, making notes for his trial? For all Roddy knew, the guy was writing a poem about sunsets or something; because you just couldn't tell by looking at people what they were likely to do.

There was one pacer, a guy walking the room, half the room, back and forth, frowning. Big eyebrows. Big all over, but mainly what Roddy noticed was thick eyebrows hanging heavy over little blue eyes. He looked too stupid, with those tiny eyes, dense eyebrows, for planned cruelties or organized meanness, but ready for random ones.

Roddy set out to cross the room, making for the window side, so that he could tell himself that he'd made that start, had become a registered presence and could go on, slowly, from there. The big-eyebrowed guy had other ideas. He shifted in the midst of his back-and-forth, sidestepped to put himself in Roddy's path, no way around without chickening out, or so Roddy saw it. “Larry,” the guy said, his name, Roddy supposed. “Gimme your smokes.”

Okay, Roddy understood the moment. “No.” Larry crowded so close they were almost touching chests. “Back off, asshole,” Roddy felt he must add. He kept his eyes narrowed and his feet planted wide, tried to keep Sean Penn in his mind's eye like a map.

The guy, Larry, nodded slowly. He looked like he was trying to think. When he opened his mouth, Roddy thought he could as easily have been going to say, “You're dead meat,” instead of what he did say, which was “You better not be holding out on me.” The point was, he backed off. He sidestepped away again, back to his pacing. This was good, and a relief, but also shook Roddy's confidence about whether he had any talent at all for assessing what someone might do.

“Rod,” he said to Larry's back, and wondered if that sounded uncool or in any way fucked up and desperate.

That was three days ago, when he actually was uncool, fucked up, and desperate. Now he has his footing, more or less. He can be herded into this rec hall and go to the pool table and pick up a cue and look around questioningly, and somebody will join him. He can slump in a chair and watch a dumb talk show for an hour without being disturbed, or he can say, or nod as somebody else says, “What shit, eh?” Easy moments, if not friendly ones. All he wants is to survive. Any particular attention, he hopes, will go elsewhere, be somebody else's bad luck.

Mike maybe feels something like that. If Mike's even close to being the person Roddy imagined, he'll be suffering too, in his different way. Still, people can get used to things awfully fast; like Roddy himself, getting used to this place, that it has requirements and rhythms and customs and in that way is like outside life, only tighter and more enclosed. There are things that get done in certain orders and ways, and it's kind of relaxing that there are some assumptions, it's sort of a comfort.

So he is startled by an unexpected tap on the shoulder, whips around fast in his chair, jumping slightly, ready for — what? Not ready, only startled. So he's not as relaxed as he thought.

It's a guard standing behind him, saying, “Follow me,” and when Roddy stands, taking his arm. “Let's go.”

“Where?” As if there's a choice; as if this was an invitation he could decline if where they were going didn't appeal. Anyway, there's no answer. The guards, mainly, aren't so much unfriendly as not interested, at least the ones on the day shifts, who are older than the night staff and so are more accustomed to bad boys and sad stories. This one steers him down the long corridor towards the front of the building, where the offices are, but he's not going to see Stan Snell this time, but is suddenly turned towards the right and into a small room where, already sitting beside each other, with a desk between them and the doorway, are his grandmother and his father.

There should be some kind of warning.

For sure he figured they'd come whenever they were allowed to, but he thought he'd have notice. He also figured he wouldn't have to see them so close and directly, because they'd be getting together in a big busy room, full of the buzz of families, and might even be separated by metal and glass, like in movies. Not that they'd be just across a little room, just them, and no place to look and only their own sounds to hear.

He keeps standing. They're both looking up him, but sort of flatly. Hard to read. His dad's wearing a suit, like he's going to church. Roddy's grandmother is also dressed up, in a plain navy dress she hardly ever wears and a white necklace and white clip-on earrings. Roddy feels exposed in his jumpsuit, and as if he's made a mistake about the formality of the occasion.

He's surprised how fat his grandmother is, sort of pathetic in this fluorescent light. It's like she's somebody new, a stranger, and her bulk kind of falls over the sides of the chair, but she's empty-looking at the same time. “Well, son,” his dad begins. He never calls Roddy
son
, not for ages. Otherwise his tone's as flat as his expression. “Quite a mess.”

Roddy has nothing to add to that. His grandmother does, though. “Why?” she says. Her plump hands are set flat on the table, fingers like hot dogs, or sausages. The two of them, really, her and his dad, they look lost here: the pair of them swamped and bowled over by life.

Oh, Roddy is angry. He looks away from them, off towards the corner, so they don't see his rage. Everything in this place is grey-painted, or green. Colours supposed to douse flames, maybe.

This is what he was trying to get away from. Exactly this. Away, he could have made himself up without contagion from best dark suit, best navy dress, rippling flesh, disappointment. All that. Look what they've done. “Get that look off your face,” his dad says. Now his dad has an expression, and it's anger, too. His voice is shaking with it. “Don't you dare go glaring like that after what you've done. What the hell did you think you were doing?”

“Getting away,” Roddy blurts. It just comes out, and then what he didn't mean to say comes out, too: “From you.” His grandmother's face goes crumbly, like pastry.

“What did we do so wrong? What didn't we do for you?” she asks, so softly and sadly it's hard to hear, even in this small room. “What did you want we didn't give you?” But those are such loser questions. He can't answer questions like that. He won't.

“Speak up,” says his dad. “What the hell got into you? Do you have any idea what you've done? And I don't mean just to yourself, which is bad enough, you've ruined your life, you know, stupid kid.”