Phoenix Island (8 page)

He shook out his arms and shut his locker. He couldn’t take another minute swimming in old pain. Next, he’d start remembering his mother’s sickness, her fight with cancer, everything. . . .

To the back bay, then. Time to lose himself in a mindless round of Ninja. All enthusiasm had left him, but he had to try. He secured his lock, took another deep breath, and that’s when they slammed him up against the locker and then threw him onto his bed.

It happened so quickly, Carl had no chance to react. A dozen hands pinned him facedown to the bed. They pushed his face into the pillow,
then turned it to the side so he could see Davis leaned back against the locker, staring at him, arms folded across his chest.

Davis nodded, and Carl felt something slide into his ear canal. As the point of it pressed into the softness of his inner ear, Carl felt a chill, knowing.

A pencil.

One tap, and he’d be deaf. One shove, he’d be dead.

D
AVIS’S EYES LOOKED ALMOST BORED.
“No running away this time, Hollywood.”

Carl glared at him. He kept his head very still. The pencil filled his ear, its point pressing against something soft and sensitive but not doing any real damage yet. “What do you want?”

“A couple of fine ladies and a bag of weed.”

One of the guys holding him laughed. Then a few of the others did, too.

Carl waited.

Davis said, “We’re sick of guard duty. So, for starters, you’re going to make it so we don’t have to do that anymore.”

“Can’t. Drill sergeant said everybody has to have guard duty.”

“You don’t have it.”

“I can’t. I’m the book man.”

“Well, you better work it out. I don’t care how. I just know we’re not covering any more guard duties. You say anything to the drill sergeants, you’re dead. You understand?”

Carl understood, all right. This was their first move. If he gave in, it would be one thing after another. “Forget it.”

Davis scowled. “Maybe you got a hearing problem. Ty, clean out his ear wax for him.”

The wood moved in Carl’s ear, sending waves of panic and rage through him. “Let me up.”

Davis laughed.

“Yo!” A deep voice thundered. “What are you doing?”

Davis stood up straight. The pencil slid out of Carl’s ear. Hands came away from his temple and jaw, and he turned his head to see Campbell.

“Just having a little fun with Hollywood,” one of the gang guys said.

Campbell didn’t even look at the kid who’d spoken. He kept staring at Davis. “You ruin free time, the platoon will tear you to pieces.”

Carl could feel the grips on him loosening. He wanted to jump up and start swinging, but Campbell’s cool made him hold back.

Davis grinned wider. “Easy, big man. We’re almost done here. Tell you what. You head down the hall, we’ll be out of here in two minutes. You won’t have guard duty no more, you feel me?”

“I’m not going anywhere until you let him up. This is my platoon. I didn’t ask for it, but they gave it to me. I got one month left in this place, and I’m not going to let you mess it up for me. You walk away, this never happened. You push, and I will break all your ribs. I promise.”

Davis laughed. “I see how it is . . . Brother. Boss man, huh?”

Campbell looked at the others. “Let him up. Now.”

A couple of the hands came away from Carl’s legs. The other guys looked at Davis. He nodded. They let go of Carl.

Carl jumped to his feet.

Campbell’s eyes flashed a warning.

“This ain’t over,” Davis said, walking past Campbell. The others followed.

Campbell watched them go. Then he turned toward Carl, shaking his head. “Man, I hate gangbangers.”

“Thanks,” Carl said.

Campbell shook his head again. “I knew this was going to happen. Now we got to watch each other’s back all the time. Can you fight?”

Carl nodded. He hadn’t told anyone about boxing. In his experience, if it got out you were a boxer, somebody always wanted to try you.

“Look,” Campbell said, “I’m serious. Can you fight? For real?”

“I can fight.”

DAYS PASSED.

Carl and Campbell stayed close. The Davis thing didn’t go away, but it quieted down.

In the meantime, life got better. Davis still glared, Parker still barked, and training still drove them into the ground, but it was good, having Campbell and Ross to talk to.

Then there was Octavia. More and more frequently, the girls trained with the boys, and Carl saw a lot of her. Whenever they could, they ran together and ate together. Whenever they were away from the drill sergeants, they made each other laugh. The more Carl got to know her, the more he liked her. She wasn’t just pretty. She was tough and smart. Funny, too. Like this one time, when they were sitting around between activities, she rolled up a piece of paper, stuck it in her ear, and just sat there, all nonchalant, saying, “What?” when he grinned at her, and then, when he said something, she went, “I’m sorry. I can’t hear you. I’ve got some paper stuck in my ear.” She was cool. And the more time they spent together, the clearer it was that she liked him, too.

They talked about their lives—not just the tragedies and triumphs, but the little, stupid things that made up so much of a person’s story. She told him about the time her father had set a Havahart trap, hoping to catch the squirrels who’d been decimating his apple trees, and how he’d shouted, “Mother-of-pearl!” when he’d gone outside the next morning and found a big possum crammed into the little wire cage. “I’ll never forget it as long as I live,” she said, laughing so hard that tears ran from her eyes. “It’s the only time I’ve ever heard someone shout ‘Mother-of-pearl!’ ” Carl told her how one of his old teachers back in the Pocket would give everybody worksheets and then spend the whole period sniffing the spines of old books stacked on his desk. Then she talked about her cat, Tinker Bell, who would wait for her at the bus stop each day after school and walk her home. He talked about how some nights his dad would peel a raw potato and slice it up, and they’d stand there in the kitchen and eat it, salting each slice and laughing at the loud crunching. And she told him about her grandmother, who had lived in the Bolivian Andes, and who had visited each summer, and how the old woman would dump potatoes in the backyard and then take off her shoes and
socks. “That’s how she peeled them,” she said. “She walked all over them with her bare feet.”

They laughed a lot.

One day, the drill sergeants told them to bring pencils and marched them to the “classroom”—a bunch of folding chairs under a simple pavilion—where the cadre distributed clipboards and paper, and First Sergeant Oteka said, “Today, you will learn rudimentary first aid. Pencils out, orphans. I expect extensive notes. There will be quizzes.”

Octavia patted her pockets, checked the floor around her seat, and moaned quietly.

“You okay?” Carl whispered.

She looked at him with panic in her eyes. “I can’t find my pencil. Oteka’s going to kill me.”

Carl handed her his and raised his hand.

“Mr. Freeman,” Oteka said. “Please save your questions until I have covered material about which you might ask them.”

Chuckles rippled through the seats.

“First Sergeant, I can’t find my pencil.”

Oteka said nothing to Carl but turned her head so that he could see the rows of scars on that side of her face. “Drill Sergeant Parker, one of your orphans is unprepared for today’s instruction. Please correct this.”

“Yes, First Sergeant.” Parker came off the column, face red, eyes flaring. He yanked Carl from his chair and dragged him to the back of the pavilion, where he pushed him up against a post and grabbed him by the front of the shirt. “Jacking with me again, huh?” He struggled to keep his voice low enough not to disrupt the class, and this forced restraint only seemed to make him angrier. He shoved Carl to the ground. “Front.”

Carl started pushing.

Parker crouched down and smiled, his eyes still smoldering with rage. The guy was probably on steroids, Carl figured, all those muscles and temper tantrums.

“Just a few days, Hollywood,” Parker said, “and I’m going to fix your wagon once and for all.”

Carl pushed, wondering what Parker meant by
fix your wagon
. A
threat, sure, but a threat of what, exactly? Not that he would show it, but the
once and for all
part bothered him even more. Was Parker trying to get Carl kicked off the island? Trying to get him sent back to North Carolina, to prison?

Parker smoked him, front-back-go, for several minutes, then said, “Here’s a pencil.” And Parker drove a pencil into Carl’s thigh, burying the point.

Carl jerked a little with the shock and pain of it, but he remained at attention and didn’t make a sound until he said, “Yes, Drill Sergeant.”

Parker yanked the pencil out of Carl’s leg and held it in front of his face. The sharpened part was all red. “Don’t forget your pencil, now.”

When Carl returned to his seat, he hid the wound with his clipboard. Octavia gave him a small, sad smile and squeezed his arm. Later, as they were lining up for chow, she gave him his pencil back . . . and with it, a note. She kept her hand on his for a second longer than necessary. “Thanks, Carl. You shouldn’t have done it, but thanks. You really saved me back there.”

“No problem,” he said. “Um, am I supposed to read this now or later?”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. Then she glanced at a pair of sergeants near the steaming serving dishes. “Actually, wait a bit.”

Later, hidden away in the bathroom, he opened the note and smiled.

Dear Carl,

Thanks so, so, so much (times a million) for what you did! It was sweet. If we weren’t here, I would take you out for ice cream or to the movies or something to thank you. But I guess if we weren’t here, I wouldn’t have needed your pencil, right? Oh well. I’d still ask you out.

Octavia

xoxoxo

Carl hadn’t felt such a rush of happiness since he won his first national championship, all those years ago.

THAT NIGHT,
Carl, Campbell, and Ross sat just inside the darkened bay, polishing their boots by the light from the hallway. It was after lights-out, so the three main bays were dark, and two guys were already on guard duty. Most of the platoon was boot polishing down at the back bay, which also stayed lit. The only other guy in this bay was Medicaid, who sat a couple of bunks in, muttering to himself. Extra boots sat beside his bed. Someone—maybe Davis and his crew, maybe Decker and his thugs—had undoubtedly forced the polish work on him, but Carl just pushed it out of his mind. It drove him nuts, but he couldn’t get involved.

“I am sick of this place,” Ross said. “I’m so sore my hair hurts.”

“Little exercise will do you good,” Campbell said. “Pack some muscle on those scrawny arms of yours.”

Feigning shock, Ross said, “Scrawny? You call this scrawny?” He peeled back one sleeve and flexed. “Boom!”

Campbell chuckled. “Man, your arms look like spaghetti noodles.”

“Forget muscle,” Carl said. “This exercise is making us better people, remember?”

“It’s so stupid,” Ross said, and shook his fists overhead. “Military-style reform. They actually think that forcing us to shave our heads, polish boots, and exercise twenty-five hours a day is going to turn us into model citizens. It’s crazy. The other day, I got stuck behind Decker and his toadies in chow line. The tall one, he starts talking about killing his neighbors’ cats—a bunch of them—how he did it, everything. It was horrible. But these guys, they bust up laughing, like it’s the funniest thing they’ve ever heard. Can you imagine? I’m sorry, but there’s only one way to reform a kitten killer: firing squad.”

“Don’t give Parker any ideas,” Carl said, rubbing absently at the pencil wound in his thigh. Ross was right—all this gung ho boot camp nonsense was stupid—but there were worse punishments than playing soldier.

“All I know,” Campbell said, “is my eighteenth birthday arrives exactly twenty-one days from tomorrow. I’ll be on the next boat out of here.”

“Can’t blame you,” Carl said. He couldn’t imagine someone actually opting to stay after their eighteenth birthday, but he supposed some did. Some like Parker.

Ross’s boot brush fell to the tiles with a clatter. “You’re leaving us? That’s horrible. That means they’ll assign a new platoon guide, and everything will change, and then—”

“Look,” Campbell said, “I feel for you, but I got the whole world waiting on me. Girls, parties, music . . . you remember music?”

“I’ll pay you to stay,” Ross said.

Campbell laughed. “How much?”

Ross pulled out the empty pockets of his pants and grinned. “All I’ve got.”

“Just what I thought.”

“Carl will chip in, too. Right?”

Carl nodded, smiling. “All I got.” He didn’t like it any better than Ross did, but there was no point in going to pieces. Things would get rough when Campbell left, but Carl was happy for him.

“I already got my GED,” Campbell said. “Second I walk out of here, the judge wipes my record clean. Go to community college, get this whole incarceration thing way behind me.”