Dirt Road Home (4 page)

“I don’t want your help.”

“Then they will keep coming after you. They will consider you an insult. A punching bag. Both sides will.”

“Why are you tellin’ me this?”

“It doesn’t matter why.”

“Well, I don’t want you steppin’ in.”

“Okay. You know where to find me if you change your mind.”

Paco turned slowly and walked out.

When I got back to my bunk, I saw that my locker was open. I picked through it and found my soap and stationery missing. A couple of boys from the Ministers’ end chuckled and I looked over at them. Preston wore a smug look on his face. I turned away, shut my locker, and crawled onto my bunk.

Dear Son,

I wrote you this letter right after you left today. I enjoyed our time fishing this morning. I wish it would have lasted longer. The clay pit is too quiet without you. Mr. Wellington says he is coming to see you later on. By the time this letter gets to you he will have already been there. Listen to him good and do what he says. I’ll come see you myself at the end of the week. I never knew it could be so hard to quit the bottle. But I’m going to hang in there. You hang in there too.

 

Love,

Dad

P.S.—figured you wanted her address, numbskull

I lay on my bunk waiting for the floorwalker to turn off the lights. The smell pierced my nose and I coughed against it and sat up, determined to find the source. Then I saw Caboose setting his shoes under the bed. And I saw his feet, plump and pale and peeling with athlete’s foot. I felt like I could see the stench rising off them like fumes off of hot asphalt. “Christ,” I mumbled.

Caboose cocked his eyes at me. I lay back down and breathed through my mouth.

“I guess I’ll try to get assigned to one of those other racks on Friday,” Leroy said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Lucky you.” But my careless words to Leroy weren’t at all what I felt. I didn’t want him to leave.

“I’m not as brave as you, Hal. I gotta go along with it all.”

“If you knew what I felt like inside, you wouldn’t think I was brave.”

“You really have a girlfriend?”

“I don’t know. I wrote her, but I haven’t gotten any letters back yet.”

“I wish I had somebody to write to,” he said.

“It makes a difference when you got people waitin’ on you. I got a daddy that needs me. Two dogs and a truck I been workin’ on that raises my neck hairs every time I get a gear.”

“You can drive?”

“Daddy lives in a trailer at the edge of this clay pit where he works. He let me horse around in the truck out there. We’d mud-ride and shoot guns and hang out. Yeah, I miss the hell out of it.”

“You got any other family?”

“My momma’s still around, but she don’t live with Daddy. She don’t wanna have nothin’ to do with either one of us.”

“My parents are in jail for sellin’ drugs. I stole a car last year.”

“I guess everybody in here did somethin’.”

“Preston says Jack killed a man.”

“And you believe that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Preston’s full of it. Jack didn’t kill no man.”

Neither of us said anything for a few minutes.

“Hal?”

“What?”

“You think if I wrote your girlfriend a letter she’d write me back?”

“You don’t even know her.”

“Is that stupid?”

“I guess not . . . If you want, you can . . . Somebody stole my soap and my writin’ stuff.”

“You can buy more at the canteen.”

“I wouldn’t give these people any money even if I did have some.”

“You can use some of
my
stationery.”

“You sure?”

Leroy nodded.

“Thanks. I wanna write my daddy.”

I heard Leroy get his paper and pen from his locker. Then I heard him scratching away for a while. Finally he tossed the sealed envelope up to me and I put it away to mail in the morning.

“Lights out!” the floorwalker shouted. Then the room went dark.

I was standing against the fence in the play yard when Mr. Pratt came over and said I had a visitor. I told Leroy I’d see him later and started toward the visitors’ room.

When I saw Daddy standing there in his dusty work clothes my throat knotted up and I almost cried. His face was bedsheet white. He was covered in beard stubble and his clothes hung off him like he’d lost ten pounds. I hugged him and he patted me on the back while I buried my face in his shoulder. I smelled the grease and oil that stained his clothes, his smell, and it made me even more homesick.

“Good to see you, son,” he said.

“I didn’t think you’d be here so soon,” I said into his shirt.

“Yeah, well, playin’ a little hooky today.”

I pulled away from him, took a chair, and sat across the table. “You don’t look too good,” I said.

“Soberin’ up ain’t nothin’ you wanna try. I can hardly get through the day. I got all kinds of things I do to keep my mind off it.”

He reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a handful of folded pop-tops and showed them to me. “Been makin’ these Jimmy Carter teeth.”

He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a wad of wet thread. “Been chewin’ on this stuff and tyin’ knots
with my tongue. Then I go through about five bags of Red Man a day. If all that don’t work, I start cussin’ out the dogs.”

“Damn, Daddy.”

“Yeah. I guess I’ve been wired to the stuff for too long. Gotta get reprogrammed.”

“You got your pants cinched up like a laundry sack.”

“Hell, I know. I been through worse.”

“Like what?”

“Well, I ain’t really. I just said that.”

“I got your letter yesterday,” I said. “I was gonna write you tonight.”

“I imagine you’ve been pretty tied up gettin’ used to things around here.”

“This place is bad, Daddy. I’m tryin’ to stay out of trouble. I’m doin’ what I can.”

“You just lay low. Make sure you let the guards know you ain’t gonna do nothin’ but time while you’re here.”

“The guards aren’t real friendly. All the boys are ganged up on each other wantin’ me to take sides.”

“You don’t get involved in any of that. Those boys decide to get into trouble, they’re gonna take you down with ’em.”

“I know.”

“You’re just as bad as the people you run with.”

“They make it sound like there’s not much way for a guy like me to stay out of it.”

“You don’t listen to ’em. You listen to your gut, boy. You got the right instincts. They want you to think you need protection, but gangs get revenge. All that leads to is more revenge and violence.”

“You better not miss any of those AA meetin’s.”

“Shoot, I’m at the front door handin’ out flyers. They’re gonna make me president if I don’t watch out.”

I smiled. “You better ease up or Momma’s gonna come back on you.”

“Gonna give me nightmares, boy.”

“She know I’m here?”

Daddy suddenly looked serious. “You think it’d matter?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“You want me to tell her?”

“No. I don’t guess it’d do any of us good.”

“She’s your momma, now. What I feel about her don’t have nothin’ to do with how you gotta feel.”

“She never did nothin’ but yell at me and you both.”

“Even that didn’t do any good, did it?”

“I wanted to be back with you,” I said. “She knew it too.”

His eyes began to tear up. He wiped them with the back of his hand.

“Fat old nag,” I said.

“Easy, now. Boy, you do as I say, not as I do.”

“She’s the one got me into all this.”

“You got yourself into it and you know it. She didn’t teach you how to steal and skip out on your schoolin’ and smart-mouth her like you did.”

“I know.”

Daddy kept staring at me.

“What? I said I know.”

“Good. But all that’s behind us. I’m gonna go ahead and leave you now before I start gettin’ sappy. You stay here and take it like a man.”

“Okay, Daddy.”

“I’m proud of you, son.”

It really got inside me when he said that. It always had, and I wished I knew of a way to tell him how much.

“I’m proud of you too, Daddy.”

“What you think they’ll do to me tomorrow?” Leroy asked me before lights-out.

“I don’t know. Put that cross on you, at least.”

“You think I’m doin’ the right thing?”

“I don’t know that either.”

“I don’t see how I have a choice. They said if I back out, they’ll break my legs.”

“They can’t do that.”

“That’s what they said.”

“Who said?”

“Preston.”

“I told you not to listen to him.”

“They said I can’t be your friend anymore.”

I turned over and looked down at him. “Hell, Leroy! What you want me to tell you! Why don’t you stop puttin’ all this on me? I ain’t the one leavin’.”

“I want you to tell me I’ll be okay.”

“I guess you will if you don’t mind crosses burned into your neck.”

He kept staring at me.

I lay down again. “You’ll be okay,” I sighed. “Now leave me alone.”

Leroy followed me to breakfast on Friday.

“You smell me back there?” I said.

“What?”

“When do we get more soap?”

“Sunday.”

We grabbed our food and walked past Caboose to take our final meal together in no-man’s-land. For a few minutes neither of us said anything. I felt sorry for him.

“It can’t be that bad if Preston made it through,” I said.

“You know I prob’ly won’t have any say in things for a while.”

“You do what you gotta do over there. I’ll take care of myself.”

“You mail that letter to your friend?”

“Yeah, I mailed it. Maybe she’ll write you back. At least one of us’ll get a letter from her.”

Somebody yelled at us from Jack’s gang. “How you feelin’, Leroy!”

They laughed. Leroy turned and raised his chin at them. He looked back over my shoulder toward Paco’s gang. “Paco’s lookin’ at me,” he said. “Why’s he lookin’ at me like that?”

“I don’t know. How come you think I’m supposed to know everything?”

“Say goodbye to Helpless Hal for us, Leroy!” Preston yelled. The boys laughed again.

“Hey!” the guard called out. “Cool it.”

I looked over at Caboose. He had his head down, ignoring it all. I went back to my breakfast.

“Don’t worry about it,” Leroy said.

“I ain’t worried,” I said. But it was a lie.

When the buzzer sounded, Leroy told me bye and I nodded to him. He went ahead of me to the tray return and then on to his classroom.

When class was out for lunch I walked into the mess room and saw that Caboose was the only person in no-man’s-land. I looked at Jack’s group and Leroy was sitting beside Preston, looking down and listening to him.

I ate alone, not looking at anyone. I wanted to get my food down and get back to my classroom.

Caboose and I took our places against the fence after school. He got the corner of no-man’s-land and I got the middle. I looked at the ground most of the time, and occasionally at Caboose. Sometimes at Jack’s gang, trying to sort Leroy from the crowd.

We had about fifteen minutes left when I saw Leroy walking toward me. He came up and stood before me without saying anything.

“What’s up?” I finally said.

He didn’t reply. There was something in his face that I hadn’t seen since the first day. He was scared. I looked at his hands and they were shaking.

“What’s wrong?” I said.

He shook his head.

“What’d they do to you?”

“I’m supposed to hit you,” he said.

“What?”

“I’m supposed to hit you.”

I straightened against the fence. “That’s your initiation?”

He nodded.

“Hit me or kick my ass?”

“Kick your ass.”

I looked over his shoulder at Preston. He watched like a smiling hyena. Jack leaned against the fence studying me, his mouth twitching in a way that made me sick. Then I realized the whole Minister gang was watching. I glanced at Caboose and he was watching. Everyone except Mr. Pratt. I turned back to Leroy and took a deep breath. “And you think you need to go through with it?”

“I won’t hit you hard. Just act like it hurts.”

“You better hit me hard if you wanna get that cross.”

“You can fight back. They didn’t say I had to win.”

“I won’t fight back, Leroy. Even if I did, I don’t stand a chance against you. You better go on and hit me before they catch on to what you’re doin’.”

“You fight me!” he demanded.

I shook my head. “This is gonna be all you, man.”

He drew back and hit me in the ribs. I grunted and leaned over and grabbed my side.

“Hit me!” he said.

I straightened up and looked him in the eyes. “You better do more than that,” I said.

He punched me hard in the stomach. I doubled over and went to my knees.

“Knee him in the face!” somebody yelled.

“Hey!” I heard Mr. Pratt yell.

“Hurry up,” I mumbled. “They’re—”

He hit me across the face and I fell sideways. I rolled over and looked at him. Tears were coming down his face. “Kick me,” I said.

He shook his head.

“Get it over with,” I said.

He set his jaw and drew his leg back and kicked me in the stomach. I closed my eyes and puked on the ground and rolled over and hugged my knees to my chest. I turned my cheek to the dirt and opened my eyes again. Mr. Pratt was wrestling Leroy’s hands behind his back while Leroy watched me. I heard the cheering of Jack’s gang in the distance.

“I guess you made it, Leroy,” I mumbled.

Another guard came and stood over me. He didn’t seem very concerned. “You wanna go to the infirmary?” he asked me.

I shook my head.

“Can you get up?”

“I can in a minute . . . I just need to lay here and get my breath.”

The guard walked off and stopped for a moment to write in his notepad. I glanced back at Caboose. He was staring at his feet again.

When the buzzer clawed at my ears I was still lying
there. I heard the boys rushing out of the yard. After a minute I saw Caboose’s shoes pass close by my face. I stayed there until everyone was gone. Then I pulled myself up the fence and wiped my nose with the collar of my jumpsuit. It came away bloody.