Lockdown (9 page)

“No, man.”

“Well, he’s swearing to it, and some of the drugs that were involved have caused the death of an addict,” the white detective said.

“He said I did that two years ago?”

“I think he’s lying,” the black detective said. “He’s lying to save his ass.”

“He’s in jail, right?” I said.

“No, he’s on parole,” the white detective said. “He got some time off for cooperating in another case. But he got busted for distribution, and he said he got the drugs from you.”

“Two years ago?”

“He said you stashed them with your brother—”

“Willis.” The white detective opened up the folder. “Your brother is Willis Anderson?”

“Yeah, but—”

“Does he use drugs?”

“No,” I said.

“So if he’s got a stash, he must be selling the shit, right?”

“I don’t know what you talking about,” I said. “And I don’t want to answer any more questions.”

“This is what I was talking to you about,” the black detective said to the white guy. “He wants to lawyer up because he knows the deal.”

“There ain’t no deal,” I said. “And I don’t want to answer any more questions.”

“You know, Billy”—the white guy turned to the black detective—“you think Anderson here is willing to take the twenty years because he’s looking to beat a murder-one rap? I mean, it makes sense. With the twenty, he gets out in sixteen max; maybe he can manage an appeal or something and get out in ten. If they give him the full bid on murder one, he can get life without the possibility of parole. You think he’s just playing it smart?”

“I don’t know why he’s taking the twenty to cover for Booker, though,” the black guy said. Then he turned to me. “You and Booker real tight?”

“I don’t even know the sucker,” I said. “I just peeped his play around the neighborhood, that’s all.”

“Look, he doesn’t want to tell us if Booker was dealing drugs even if we can offer him a plea,” the white guy said. “We can offer him five and he’d be on the street in three. He’s got something to hide so he’s keeping mum. Isn’t that right?”

“Let’s not deal with him,” the black detective said. “He’d rather do the twenty calendars than talk to us. That’s the way these people are.”

“Okay, send him back to jail,” the white guy said. “We know where to find him, and when the trial comes up, we’ll tell them that he don’t want no deal. He wants the full twenty. How’s your daughter? Did she get to watch the game the other night?” They were headed toward the door.

“No, her mom made her do her homework, but I taped it for her,” the black guy said as he was leaving the room.

When I watched television, it never seemed real, because on television, people solved all their problems in, like, thirty minutes. The only thing that was going on in my life was whether the garbage was bad enough that I didn’t mind people seeing me cry.

I got to Progress and was put in detention because everybody was too busy to take me to group.

“Two years? They reaching all the way back two years?” Play asked me at supper.

“I told that to Wilson on the drive up here,” I said. “At first he didn’t say nothing, but then he said it was either about a homicide or they’re just fishing.”

“Fishing for what?”

“How I know? I haven’t heard anything from the guys on the block. I haven’t heard anything from the attorney who handled my case. I haven’t heard anything from anybody!”

“So who did you sell the pads to?” Play asked.

“I don’t even remember the dude’s name,” I said. That was a lie, but I remembered an old gangster used to sit on the stoop all the time saying you should never discuss your case with anybody in jail because they could be a snitch.

“I can’t figure it,” Play was saying.

I could figure it some. What I saw was people walking around and anytime they got some crap on their shoes, they needed to wipe it off. Somehow me and Play and Toon and even King Kong wasn’t nothing but the crap on their shoes.

After supper, Mr. Cintron pulled me aside and told me he still had faith in me. I didn’t believe him. I had messed up too many times. I knew the deal was that he wanted the work program to work. I could dig that. It would have been better if they had taken Play for the program or even Toon. I guessed that Toon was too young, and Play was at Progress for a violent crime.

I didn’t go to Evergreen for three days because
of an administrative inspection that was coming up. They were long days and I could feel myself getting depressed. It was like a dark cloud was creeping over me and I couldn’t do anything about it.

When I got to Evergreen, I was feeling a little better because at least time went faster when I was busy. Mr. Hooft was sitting in a chair in the corner waiting for me.

“It wasn’t you, was it?” He was kind of half shouting at me, and his voice, which wasn’t too strong from jump street, cracked when he spoke.

“What wasn’t me?” I asked.

“Somebody messed my bed up!” he said, jabbing a finger in the direction of his bed. “You going to clean it?”

“Yeah.”

Somebody had moved their bowels in his bed, and I had an idea of who it was. I took the sheet and folded it up quick, pulled the pillow out of the pillow case and put the stinky sheet inside, and headed for the laundry room. Simi was in the hallway.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Mr. Hooft’s bed got messed up,” I said.

“Usually he blames me for it,” she said, taking the bundle from me. “Get some clean linen from the nurse at the station desk. And don’t forget to see if his pad is wet.”

“I was wondering if it was you,” I said.

She hit me lightly on the back of the head.

I got clean linen, returned to Mr. Hooft’s room, and checked the pad in the middle of the bed. It was dry, but I turned it over anyway.

“They let anybody walk into this place,” he said.

“You been outside today?” I asked. “The weather is real nice.”

“They don’t let me go outside,” he answered. “They think I’m going to get a bus and go to California.”

“You ever been to California?”

Before he could answer, a guy came into the room. I thought he was a doctor because he was wearing a suit. He didn’t say nothing but just stood in the doorway and pointed at me.

“This is Reese,” Mr. Hooft said. “He’s a criminal. He killed maybe three or four people—I don’t know—he won’t tell me how many. They let him come to keep the old people in line.”

“I’m John Hooft,” the man said. “If anything
is missing from my grandfather’s room, I’ll get it back.”

“Nothing missing from here,” I said. “I just come over—”

“I don’t have any time today, Grandpa,” the man said, putting his hands in his pockets. “I have to get over to the dealership and straighten some people out. Clara called. She wants to know if you got the check she sent.”

“They told me they received a check,” Mr. Hooft said quietly.

“Okay, it was for twenty-five dollars, and I’ll ask at the office when I come back next week to make sure that every penny of it is spent on you.”

“Okay, John.” Mr. Hooft nodded as he spoke. His voice seemed to be getting weaker.

John turned and looked me up and down, like he was measuring me. I had seen the look a hundred times, guys thinking they can kick your ass and letting you know it. Then he turned back to Mr. Hooft.

“So I’ll tell Clara that everything is fine?”

“Everything is fine,” Mr. Hooft said. “Sure. How are her children?”

“I guess they’re okay,” John said. “She’s always whining about them. If she calls you, tell her I came to see you. And if you have any problems, tell her and she can tell me. You understand that?”

“Yes, sure,” Mr. Hooft said.

John went over and put his face near his grandfather and gave him a half of a kiss on the cheek. Then he turned on one heel and walked out of the room.

“Busy man,” Mr. Hooft said after he was gone. “He’s got two minutes to spare on a sunny day, one minute if there’s a cloud in the sky.”

“He acts like a tough guy,” I said.

“Tough? What does he know about being tough? What do you know about being tough?” Mr. Hooft asked. “Does swinging your fist make you tough? Does hitting a man make you tough? Do you think you would hit—what’s his name? That little Negro who looks like a bull—Mike Tyson? Would you hit him? Would you?”

“No.”

“Because he would kill you! Am I right?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, sonny, Reese—which is no name for a boy,
but your people make up names—you should try being old. Because old is tough and you don’t swing at being old because old always kills you. So what do you think of that?”

“Well…”

“He’s going to go home and call everybody and say…and say that he came and he visited me even though…even though he didn’t have a lot of time….” Mr. Hooft was crying.

“Yo, man, you need some water or something?” I asked.

“In five years, maybe I’ve had three visits, maybe four visits,” he said. “They celebrate their heritage. They go back to the Netherlands and they weren’t born there. They are no more Dutch than you are. But they can’t come to see me and I was born there.”

Mr. Hooft’s eyes seemed different. They were darker when he cried, almost like a bird’s eyes. I wanted to go over and put my arm around him or something, but I didn’t. I did think about beating up his grandson. He was looking me up and down, but I wondered how he would have felt if I had landed some thunder upside his head.

“Don’t sit on my bed,” Mr. Hooft spoke softly.

“Excuse me?”

“Don’t sit on my bed,” he said. “That’s how it gets messed up.”

I cleaned his room real good. Before I left, I let him put his arm around my shoulder so he could get up on the bed. He was wearing a hospital gown and I could see his legs. They were thin and white and wrinkly.

I got the top of the bed up a little for him and started to bring the bottom up too, but he wanted his legs straight.

“Sometimes they cramp up if I have them bent,” he said. “Then I have to straighten them out really slow.”

I sat in the corner thinking about his grandson. I thought that maybe Mr. Hooft didn’t have a lot of interesting things to say to him.

“You know, I don’t get many visits, either,” I said.

“Well, you have to remember”—Mr. Hooft was smiling—“you’re not too good-looking.”

“When you…when you were in that children’s camp,” I asked him, “did you ever think about just starting a fight with one of the guards and, you know, getting it over with?”

Mr. Hooft turned to me, looked in my face for a long moment, and then turned toward the window. “We lived nine to a hut,” he said. “There was never enough to eat, never enough hope to spread around to nine boys. Sometimes I wished it would just end. But I didn’t want to be shot or die by violence. I didn’t have that kind of courage. But then one day I saw, behind the huts, in a corner, some flowers. Jasmine. You know jasmine?”

“No.”

“Beautiful flower. It was closed tight during the day, but at night it opened up and somehow I thought that flower was like me. Afraid to speak when I was around the guards, always scared that I would do something wrong and they would hurt me. But at night I would lie on my cot, and I would dream about other things. About our home in Java, about my mother. And when I took my mind away from how miserable I felt, things became better for me. I would be out in the fields digging a ditch or piling up rocks around the wells—the Japanese had us doing that a lot—but I would think about that flower and I would worry about it and be anxious for it to be all right when I returned to the hut. It
wasn’t much, but it was better than stewing in my own juices.”

All the time he was talking to me he was looking out of the window. From where he was, I knew, he couldn’t see much. The sky was gray and there were clouds in the distance. After a while, I could see that he had fallen asleep. I stayed in the corner. Simi brought me some magazines to read and I leafed through them until it was time to go.

On the way back to Progress, I kept thinking of Mr. Hooft as a kid digging a ditch with a guard watching him. I could imagine how scared he was. I was feeling sorry for him being scared back then, even if it had happened a long time ago.

Mr. Hooft’s life was harder than I had thought it was. All the time he was talking about how much he had done in his life, it was all a front. A lot of people seemed to be making up their lives, and I guessed if you didn’t have anything else really going on, it was the thing to do. But it was sad.

Mr. Cintron called me to the office and pointed toward a chair. He took a sip of his coffee, made a little face, and then leaned back in his chair.

“You hear there was a fight in the corridor yesterday afternoon?” he asked.

“Nobody told me,” I said. I was surprised, because usually Play clues me in on all the happenings.

“Diego punched Leon Muñoz in the back of the head,” Mr. Cintron said.

“And Leon is supposed to be his boy, too,” I said. “Diego is just foul.”

“So how does that make you feel?”

“How does it make me feel? I feel like it’s just wrong, that’s all,” I said.

“You want some coffee?”

“I should take some,” I said. “But I don’t like it.”

“You want to talk about what happened at the precinct yesterday?” he asked.

“Nothing happened,” I said. “They said they were considering laying some new charges on me and I didn’t know what they were talking about. You know, I got busted two years ago for taking some prescription pads and—”

“Stealing
some prescription pads—”

“Yeah, stealing some prescription pads,” I said. “Now they’re saying somebody took some drugs from the doctor’s office, too. I didn’t do that and I’ve never heard of anybody laying on charges for something that happened two years ago and it wasn’t homicide.”

“The detectives called me after you left and said that you were considering copping a plea,” Mr. Cintron said. “They said you were facing twenty years and you were looking to cop to a lesser for three years.”

“They might have said that, but I still don’t know what they’re talking about. They said that Little Freddy told them that I took the drugs from the doctor’s office and messed with them, and then I sold them and somebody died—”

“That’s homicide. ‘Somebody died’ is automatically homicide until it gets to the D.A.’s office and he makes the final decision about what the charge is going to be.”

“But I didn’t take any drugs out of the doctor’s office. I took the pads. The prescription pads were all I took. He had some money on the desk and I didn’t even take that.”

“Why not?”

“Because I was scared and wanted to get out of there. I know some guys get off breaking into people’s houses and offices and things, but I don’t,” I said. “Soon as I was inside his office, I was looking to snatch some pads and run.”

“You knew where the pads were?”

“Yeah, Freddy told me.”

“What’s Freddy been doing this last year or so?” Mr. Cintron was putting more sugar in his coffee. “If I gave you the phone, could you find out what he was doing?”

“I don’t know. I could ask my brother or maybe my friend, but I don’t want to get them involved in nothing.”

“If you’re not involved in anything, and if you
didn’t take the drugs like the city detectives are saying, how can you get somebody else involved?” Mr. Cintron asked.

“Yo, I don’t mean any disrespect, sir, but how am I involved?” I asked. “Y’all took me down there and they questioned me and told me about the drugs and I didn’t know anything about them.”

Mr. Cintron pushed the phone toward me. “Call your brother,” he said.

“I don’t know if I should,” I said.

“It’s unofficial, just between you and me,” Mr. Cintron said.

I picked up the phone and dialed home. I was hoping that Mom or Icy answered.

“The Andersons!” Icy.

“Hey, baby girl, how you doing?”

“Reese, how you doing?” she asked. “You coming home?”

“No, not yet,” I said. “Say, Icy, is Willis home?”

“You don’t want to talk to me?”

“I do, but this is about some business,” I said. “I’ll call you Sunday if I can borrow some money.”

Mr. Cintron nodded to me.

“Willis isn’t home,” she said. “Just me. What time
are you going to call Sunday?”

“If I call at eight in the morning will that be too early?”

“No, I’ll be up,” Icy said. “And you’d better call. What did you want Willis for?”

“I wanted to know—I wanted to know if he’s heard anything about Freddy,” I said.

“Freddy Booker, that light-skinned boy that was in your case?”

“Yeah, just tell Willis—”

“He got arrested.”

“Willis?”

“No, that Freddy. I don’t know why he got arrested. Probably drugs, because that’s what he does. He’s pretty much messed up,” Icy said. “You want me to ask around?”

“No!” I heard myself holler into the phone. “Look, Icy, don’t say nothing to anybody. I’ll call you Sunday, okay?”

“Eight o’clock.”

It took me a minute to come down off the phone call and tell Mr. Cintron I didn’t really know what Freddy was doing. “I know he got arrested but I don’t know what he was doing.”

“Why are you upset?” Mr. Cintron asked.

“That was my baby sister on the phone,” I said. “I don’t like her knowing who got arrested and who using drugs and everything. You know, she should just be going to school.”

“If Freddy got arrested, he’s probably looking to bring as many people into the case as he can,” Mr. Cintron said.

“Why would he want to bring me into it?” I asked. “I didn’t do anything to him. Even when our case went down, he was the one who turned me in. I didn’t snitch him out.”

“He sounds like a career thug,” Mr. Cintron said. “And there are two good reasons to bring you into the case. If you did anything, or if he can pin something on you, he can cooperate with the prosecution and hope to get a lighter sentence. If you didn’t do anything and went on trial with him and you looked innocent, then maybe the jury would let him slide because the overall case was weak. Remember what I told you about those crabs?”

“You think that shit is correct?” I asked.

“No, but I think it’s the life you’re in when you walk through some of the doors you’ve been walking
through,” he said. He stood up.

“You going to loan me the money to call Icy on Sunday?”

He looked at his calendar. “I’ll be in Sunday morning for about an hour,” he said. “You get your breakfast Sunday morning and I’ll have Pugh or whoever’s on let you eat it in here and make the phone call. Okay?”

“Yes.”

“And try not to get into a fight with anybody between now and then.”