Lockdown (10 page)

“So you got funded?”

“No, I did not get
funded
, Mr. Robinson,” Miss Rossetti said. “I am just doing the job that I am scheduled to do.”

“This is the second group meeting we’ve had this month,” Play went on.

“And with your kind permission, sir, we will continue,” Miss Rossetti said.

“Yes, ma’am.” Play was wearing a half smile like he owned it and slouching in his chair with his legs stretched out in front of him.

There was a new girl in the group, and she was fine as she wanted to be. She looked a little Spanish, with dark hair and eyes, but I wasn’t sure.

“In our last session we discussed what made us afraid,” Miss Rossetti said, looking around the room. “This time I want to know what each of you feels you can do to make someone else happy. And we’ll start with Mr. Robinson. I think your first name is…Eddie?”

“I let people I like call me Play.”

“What shall I call you?” Miss Rossetti asked.

“That all depends on how attracted to me you are,” Play said. “If you think me and you can be—”

“You can start, Mr. Robinson,” Miss Rossetti said, her voice rising. “What do you think you could do to make someone else happy?”

“I could make my parents happy if I got a good job,” Play said. “Maybe tighten up a gig with the post office. Nine to five. They would dig that big-time.”

“That’s a good observation,” Miss Rossetti said. “You show very good understanding of what someone else feels and thinks. How about you, Deepak? You want to run with the ball?”

“My parents would be happy if I became an engineer,” Toon said. “I wouldn’t be as good an engineer as my brother, but that would make them happy, I think.”

“Very good. Paola?” She was speaking to the new girl.

“My parents would be happy if I let my grandmother adopt my son,” Paola said. “If she adopted him legally, then she could get ADC and she would be eligible for Section Eight housing on her own. Plus, she could get some start-up money from Family Services to help her set up her own place. And they even speak Spanish down there.”

“You going to let her adopt your kid?” King Kong asked.

“Uh-uh.” Paola shook her head. “I only got a five-year bid, and if God is on my side, I can walk in three, maybe even two and a half. Then if I can find somebody to hook up with, I can get my son back if he’s in the foster system. But if the legal thing goes through with my grandmother, I can’t get him back because my moms is going to want to keep Abuela on welfare so she don’t have to support her.”

“That’s very technical, Paola,” Miss Rossetti said.

“Baby, you got to know the technical stuff to survive in New York,” Paola said. “The other thing I could do to make my parents happy is to marry some rich dude, but that ain’t hardly happening because
you got to be hooked up even to meet a rich dude.”

“You never know what love will produce,” Miss Rossetti said. “Mr. Right might just come along. You’re a very attractive young woman.”

“Honey, there’s so many women out there ready to satisfy any man who comes along that pretty ain’t hardly cutting it. Being smart isn’t enough, and being nice isn’t enough,” Paola said. “I’ve got a baby and a jail record. Don’t even talk to me about no Mr. Right.”

Miss Rossetti took a deep breath and smiled. She didn’t call King Kong’s name but she kind of gestured toward his dumb butt.

“What I would like to do to make somebody else happy is to have my own place, you know.” King Kong pulled at his crotch. “Right now—not right now but before I came up here—I was living in the shelter. Really, I was living in two shelters. Sometimes I stayed uptown with the folks, you know, on 126th Street. That was okay and I could deal with it. I was also spending some time downtown with the white folks because I thought that was interesting. I mean, downtown was where you had a whole different set of people—”

“But how would you make someone else happy, Mr. Sanders?”

“Well, you know, I’m thinking—if I had my own place, I could invite a girl up to the place and have some wine or something or maybe order out some fried chicken and have it up there or maybe even I could have my cousin drop by and check out my crib. Then he would see that I was doing okay and he could split and think maybe he would drop by again if he was in the neighborhood. He wouldn’t be falling out behind that scene but maybe it would give him something else to do and that would make him happy.”

“Very good,” Miss Rossetti said. “What I particularly like is that none of your answers are egocentric. They all consider other people. How about you, Mr. Anderson?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “You know, you talking about what we would do and what we would say and whatnot, but if I said I would run around the park and jump up and dance and that would make my moms happy, what would you say? You would say that you can’t do that because you locked up in here. If I said I would go over to Riverside Park and play two-
on-two basketball against those white boys that come over to the park on weekends—they can play some ball—you would say that I can’t do that because I’m in jail.”

“That’s right, but there are things—”

“Yo, let me run it, Miss Rossetti. Okay?”

“Go ahead.”

“Okay, what I’m saying is that this isn’t my world you’re talking about. I can dig what you’re saying about going with somebody else’s feelings and what they’re thinking instead of just dealing with what’s on your mind. But I know there’s a curtain that divides your world from mine.”

“Because you’re black, you mean?”

“You sure jumped on that in a heartbeat,” Kat said.

“Kat, I’m trying to figure out where Mr. Anderson is going, that’s all,” Miss Rossetti said.

“It ain’t just about black and white,” I said. “I got this friend of mine who’s white. So, he was in a war and he got captured. Nothing he could do except what they told him. Then the war was over and his family didn’t do nothing for him. Then he got old and ended up in a nursing home.”

“How old is your friend?” Miss Rossetti asked.

“About seventy-six, maybe seventy-seven,” I said.

“He wasn’t in no war because you can’t be in a war if you that old,” King Kong said.

“The guy he’s talking about wasn’t always that old,” Leon said. “My grandfather was in a war back in the day when they was fighting the Vietnams. There’s always a war going on.”

“Mr. Anderson?”

“Yeah, well, him getting caught up in a war meant that he couldn’t do what he thought was right,” I said. “And then he came out the war and he wasn’t getting on too tough, and then he got old and, like, feeble. At first he told me he was kicking it big-time, being a hero to his family and getting presents and visits and stuff all the time, but then, when the hammer fell, I found out that he was just scraping by.”

“He was fronting and grunting,” Kat said.

“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t have his head together,” I said. “I think he had his head together but it didn’t make any difference. He couldn’t make anybody else happy, and he couldn’t make himself happy.”

“Why did you become his friend?” Toon asked.

“That doesn’t make any difference,” I said.

“It makes a difference to me,” Toon said.

“That’s because you and Toon sweet on each other,” King Kong said.

“Me and your mama sweet on each other, too,” I said. “But the ASPCA don’t like me messing with her.”

“That’s enough!” Miss Rossetti’s voice rose to the ceiling.

Mr. Pugh had been sitting across from us playing solitaire on the computer, but soon as he heard Miss Rossetti’s voice, he jumped up and started toward us. King Kong stood and took a step toward me but then turned and looked at Mr. Pugh and sat down again.

Yeah. Both of us knew he didn’t want any more of me.

Miss Rossetti held her hand up to keep Mr. Pugh back and things got real quiet.

Mr. Pugh had about four different faces. He had his normal face which was like maybe he was lost. He had a smiling face, which was like maybe he was lost but he didn’t care. He had his mad face, which looked like he wanted to kill you, and then he had
this face that kind of darkened with his eyes darting around, like, “Hey, please give me a half of an excuse to turn your ass inside out.” When he got that face on, I didn’t even look at him, just down at the floor.

“Okay, so Mr. Anderson’s friend was making up parts of his life,” Miss Rossetti said as she sat back down. “Is that all bad?”

“If you got a police record it’s not bad,” Leon said. “Because the truth isn’t going to help you in the real world.”

“I don’t recommend lying,” Miss Rossetti started, “but I do understand your point. Mr. Anderson, can you think of anything that would make somebody else happy?”

“No, but I need to because I’m going to call my sister Sunday and I really would like to say something to her to make her happy. She hates me being in jail and I hate being here away from her. So I would like to think of something to say to her that would—but I can’t tell her no lies.”

“She’s only nine, right?” Play asked.

“Yeah.”

“Tell her you’ll buy her a bracelet when you get
out,” he said. “Girls like jewelry and she’ll like it because you bought it for her.”

“Is she smart?” Kat asked.

“She’s my sister, ain’t she?” I said.

“Yo, bro, we’re not in Harvard,” Kat said. “This is jail.”

Everybody cracked on that.

“Yeah, she’s real smart,” I said.

“I agree with Little Ears,” Paola said. “She can even imagine the bracelet or look for a nice one in the stores.”

“Little Ears?” Play was touching his ears.

“Maybe you could write a book about her life,” Toon said. “I think she would like that very much.”

“Yeah, that’s good thinking,” I said. “She’d like that.”

Toon smiled.

The group thing ended and we went straight to dinner. I was hungry as anything but they had cabbage, some kind of chopped-up ham, and scrambled eggs. I ate the cabbage and the eggs and left the ham. For dessert they had the same old, same old ice cream, but this time they had potato chips instead of pound cake. Lame for days.

“When I get out of here, all I’m going to eat for the next five years is steak,” Play said.

“How come you didn’t say nothing when that girl called you Little Ears?” I asked him.

Play just grinned. “I think she’s trying to get with me. I hope she makes it.”

Saturday morning I got a call from the precinct. Detective Rhodes asked me if I had made my mind up yet.

“About what?”

“Do the math,” he said. “Twenty years or three. Which do you want?”

“I got to think about it,” I said.

“You got to
think
about it?” He sounded surprised. “We’ll pick you up Monday. You got forty-eight hours to decide where you’re going to spend the rest of your life. You’d better think hard, my man.”

The phone clicked off.

My stomach began to cramp and I just wanted to puke. When Mr. Pugh took our group to breakfast,
I joined the sick line. What I wished, what I really wished, was that I was getting the drugs that some of the kids at Progress got every day. Play told me that those drugs helped them get through the day. God knew I was needing something to get me through.

Saturday was forever long. Sadness was like sucking on me and taking the life out of my body. I felt so weak, I was having trouble standing up. There was no way I could make twenty calendars. I’d be thirty-five when I got out—if I got out. I’d probably meet some freak like King Kong or Cobo in jail and get killed. On the other hand, I didn’t want to cop to a three bid, either. Any way I looked at the situation, it was foul.

My mind went back to the doctor’s office. I didn’t remember taking anything but the prescription pads. It was a storefront office with the entrance on Frederick Douglass Boulevard. There was one of those decals from a security service in the window plus a gate that came down over the door. In the alley, which you could get through from a building on 147th Street, there was a back door that just had one lock on it. There was a decal on that, too. Earlier I had gone past the place with Freddy and sat
outside while he went in. When Freddy came out, he showed me the prescription pad with the numbers printed on it.

“That’s his official New York State number,” he said. “He put the pad back in his upper right-hand drawer.”

That night I took a jimmy bar to the alley, found the door, and waited for a while until I was pretty sure that everything was clear. The doctor wasn’t American and didn’t live in the nabe, so I knew he wouldn’t be there.

Three minutes. That’s what I had given myself to get in, find the pads, and get out. By the time the alarm went off and the police arrived and looked at the front door, it would be at least five or seven minutes, I figured. Then they might just split because they would think it was a false alarm. It would take them at least five minutes if they checked the back door, and I’d be in the wind.

I said a quick prayer before I went after the door. I popped the door real quick and I was in. Soon as I got the door closed, I looked around and saw that I was in the doctor’s back room. I tried his desk and it was open. The first pads I looked at didn’t have the
numbers Freddy had shown me, but the next three did. I snatched them, put them in my pocket, and was thinking about looking for some more when I thought I heard something out front. I panicked and got up out of there. There had been a few bills on the desk, but I didn’t even stop for them. I knew I didn’t pick up any drugs and I knew that all I gave to Freddy were the prescription pads.

I was innocent, but it didn’t matter if the police said I was guilty. Soon as the jury looked over and saw you sitting at the defendant’s table, they figured you must have done something.

Sunday. Mr. Cintron called and said he wasn’t coming in after all, but he told Mr. Wilson to let me take my breakfast into the administration office so I could use the phone.

“Hey, Icy, what’s up?”

“I’m up, Willis is in bed, Mommy’s in bed, and Sheba is up.” Icy’s speech was clear and precise. “Ask me who Sheba is.”

“Okay, who’s Sheba?”

“The woman who owns the bodega on the corner gave her to me,” Icy said. “She’s smoky gray with a small white spot on her chest. She doesn’t say meow yet. She just kinda squeaks.”

“A kitten. How old is she?”

“The woman said she’s six weeks old but I took her to school and my teacher said she’s closer to four weeks.”

“You have to take good care of her,” I said.

“I will. You want to know what I found out about Freddy?”

“Didn’t I tell you…” The girl was getting me upset but I didn’t want to yell at her. “Icy, didn’t I tell you not to be checking out those thugs?”

“Okay, so I won’t tell you what I found out,” Icy said. “Even though it’s kind of interesting.”

“You know if I could get to you, I’d have to give you a punch in the nose, right?”

“So what do you plan to do today?” she asked.

“Probably play some ball, watch some television, check out the planes passing by,” I said. “I like to watch the planes flying overhead and wondering where they’re going. Other than that, I’m just killing time.”

“You ought to catch a bird and raise it,” Icy said. “I saw a movie—”

“The Birdman of Alcatraz,”
I said. “We saw that in here about two months ago and everybody was glad they weren’t in no Alcatraz. If I do something long
term, it won’t be raising birds for your cat to kill.”

“It’s beneath Sheba’s dignity to kill birds,” Icy said.

“If I get that much time on my hands, maybe I’ll write a book about you.”

“And we can get Spike Lee to do the movie,” Icy said. “And I’ll get a real cute baby to play me just born and then I’ll play myself when I get older and I’ll have Evan Ross play my boyfriend. Then when they have the Oscars, I’ll wear an eggshell-white gown covered with white lace.”

“Whoa…you got your acceptance speech all figured out yet?” I asked.

“No, but I will by next Sunday,” she said. “Can you call me every Sunday?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “But I’ll try.”

“You still don’t want to hear about Freddy?”

“What about him?”

“Well, his cousin’s best friend is in my best friend’s class, and she told her that Freddy got arrested because he sold some dope to a white girl—a rich white girl—and she died.”

“Get out of here!”

“They arrested Freddy, his half-brother, his uncle,
and some West Indian guy who was just over at their house having lunch,” Icy said. “His cousin’s best friend said that they can’t prove it, but they’re arresting everybody they can until they get the right evidence.”

“Yeah, yeah, that’s interesting. Okay, but don’t be asking anybody any more questions,” I said. “Can you make me a promise not to do that?”

“Okay.”

“Yo, Icy, don’t have me sitting up here in this place worried about you, okay?”

“Okay, I won’t,” she said. “You want to say hello to Sheba?”

“She near the phone?”

There was a moment of silence and then Icy said, “Now.”

“Hello, Sheba.”

“She heard you,” Icy said. “You have to put her into the book. I don’t know if I’m taking her to the Oscars, but you can put her in someplace. I don’t really know if I want to go into acting first or college first. I probably won’t be able to go to college.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Icy said. “Not a lot of people from our block go to college.”

“You’re going,” I said. “I’ll pay for it.”

“You will?”

“What school you want to go to?”

Mr. Wilson looked in and motioned for me to cut the phone.

“Look, I’m going to try to call you next Sunday,” I said. “You take care of yourself and remember that promise you made me.”

“I love you, Reese,” Icy said.

“I love you, too, Icy,” I answered. “I love you, too.”

“Princeton.”

“What?”

“Princeton is the school I want to go to,” Icy said.

“You got it,” I said. “Princeton.”