But something’s changed, okay? His face goes slack like he’s seven beers deep, but of course he hasn’t been drinking anything.
“Dad,” I say, “stay with me.”
But he doesn’t.
30
DEAN, 2009
County Correctional Facility, Oregon
In here after the sentencing and you’d think it’s all ass-rape and gang shanks, but for real it’s the quiet that’s violent. Most minutes in jail is like this:
And in between get the light-blue-and-white walls and that’s it. County Corrections, light blue and white, light blue and white. The two colors that’s everything in here. Underneath the light blue and white I can see the writing we all put on the walls while we’re dying, while we’re hurting ourselves in here, because that’s what you really do in jail, hurt yourself, and even when they paint over ’um, the words sawed in with the shaved side of a spoon we palm out the dining area, we just do it again, all the crazy coming out of someone’s skull while they sit and shrink against the thin mattress, and some of it’s garbage like Yabba dabba doo and some of it’s for real like God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water but fire next time.
You cannot keep ’um down, the good or the bad, either way they come up still through all the layers of paint people put on.
The room is five steps from the door to bunks and it’s four from wall to wall and in between get the cold steel no-lid toilet and the cold steel barrel of a sink and all in the air get the cold steel stab of my memories. Get my bunk, it’s too short but it’s the top, a plank built straight into the wall and turned sideways so my feet touch one wall and my head touches the other, and above and to my side there’s just this thin block of a window.
First day in, they had us all in stalls and bending over, the officers like, I wanna see the top of your mouth from behind, boy, and we turned and bent and bent and spread our ass cheeks cold. They was looking for drugs and checked us for everything else, toes and feet and fingers and teeth. When it was done we got in our scrubs, light blue with the pink sleeves, thin and fuzzy, and our haole-style bad sandals like we’re in a old-folks’ home. After getting in my new uniform I came into my room and it was empty and I was thinking it would be an easy one eighty days until they brought Matty right behind me. I’d been in the room maybe two minutes and there he was, carrying his sheet to wrap the mattress, curly blond-boy hair all blown out like he just woke up. He had cankles all chipped with scars and way-freckled arms with stretch marks and a rounded back like maybe he’d been strong at something once but he’d sort of forgot about it. Here he comes escorted to the room. I was all keyed up and ready for throw and thinking about all the movies I seen. Specially the prison scenes.
The fuck you looking at, I said.
Matty stopped. Right at that door. The guards in their tree-green uniforms stacked behind him, saying, Keep moving, keep moving, and saying to me, Stand down if you don’t want to go into iso. And Matty stopped and grinned at me. But it wasn’t evil. It was fully chill and wrinkled and he said, Boy, don’t give me none of that gangsta rap shit. Like you’re Fifty Cent up in this motherfucker.
And he was right. And I laughed.
Me and Matty don’t talk much. When we’re in the room we’re both up in our bunks and reading, or doing push-ups on the floor, where the cold on the concrete comes up your hands into your arm muscles, or else we’re taking turns shitting on the toilet while we try not for look at each other.
Watch out, Matty said one time, way in the deep black of lights-out, while he rustled to his feet and headed for the toilet, tonight was taco night.
One hundred and eighty days minus time served. That’s what I made. Arrested on February 26 and arraigned the day after just like that. I thought there was, like, you go to the police station and then you get released and come back for a court date, but—between the forced entry and the car theft and the buds on the counter?—I wasn’t going nowhere. April 15 is this morning, and so I get one hundred thirty-two to go. That’s the best I ever been at math right there, look at me subtract. You get good at all kinds of things in here.
February 26, after I got Kaui out the car and drove straight to the Sheriff like I was gonna deliver something. Sheriff and then his backup coming after, both in their tight lumpy black coats walking slowly around my driver and passenger sides, blue and red lights from their cars flashing in my eyes. The crunchy wind coming through their radios and them talking down into their coats while they walked the car, looking in at me. I just kept my hands up on the wheel and tried for breathe slow. I remembered every story I heard about how not to get shot.
Me and Kaui didn’t have no time for talk. We could have run again, yeah, ditch the car and go for the streets. But I dunno, it’s just I reached a point where I was like, Fuck that, I’m not gonna run away anymore. Me and her had been talking, before, about Noa, the sharks, what he’d felt and what we’d felt, and whether some of what he was, if it was in us, too. Like maybe just because he was gone, everything didn’t have to be over. But you look at her and what she’s been doing, and you look at me and what I done?
Easy answer. I did what we all needed.
Kaui saw the whole thing happening and I felt bad for her, but this way was the only way. She got all this shit she learned in school, about how to build things. How to make things. Wasn’t right for her to be the other things, the police and the pakalolo and the stealing, the running.
I swear. Me and those cops. That was the worst part, the waiting after they stopped me. Had the feeling they could do whatever they wanted and wouldn’t nobody stop ’um. I just watched while they was checking out the car. I could tell Sheriff was figuring out the car was stolen, he’d written a bunch in his book and pinched the radio clipped to his shoulder. I still had on Noa’s sweatpants that I couldn’t barely keep at my ass, they were so small. The seams all cutting and biting into me.
Sheriff made a motion, like, roll down the window. I did.
He was all, You just keep those hands on the wheel.
I am, I said.
Where’s the sister? Sheriff asked.
She was fighting me the whole time, I said. Had to get her ass out the car. I dunno where she gone.
He was all, I thought this was going to end okay when I let you go.
Yeah, well, I said, you don’t know me.
* * *
THERE’S AN EDGE on the side of the sink in this cell. I read somewhere that when Muay Thai fighters is training, they roll and tap sticks on their shinbones to kill the nerves, make the bones strong and so they can’t feel pain. How nothing hurts after. So when I walk back the three and a half steps from the door to the bunks I swing my shin into the edge of the sink. Just a light tap. Killing those nerves. Three and a half steps, tap. Three and a half steps, tap. The first times I’m shinning the sink like that, I feel the tap all the way up to my teeth, this confetti pop of pain like I’m seeing my veins all red in my head, needles on my bone. But then after I do it enough (three steps, tap, three steps, tap) the pain dulls down.
“Ayo, ayo,” Matty says from his bunk. “Rocky.” His voice all smooth and even. He could be a radio announcer. “Howbout you knock off that training until the morning. It’s dark o’clock up in this bitch.”