Jesus Land (21 page)

I listened to Van Halen’s “Running with the Devil” on my Walkman as I rode through the streets of Lafayette on my bike, rewinding the cassette tape again and again.

It was the soundtrack of my rebellion. That was me, running with the devil. Doing bad things and liking it.

It was bliss for several weeks, until Mother called. She was crying on the phone, hiccuping with emotion. “You killed my baby,” she kept repeating. It took me a while to figure out that her “baby” was our dog, Lecka. I had unchained her the previous night and taken her to Scott’s house to play with her, but she ran away before I could take her back, and sometime during the night, she was run over in front of his driveway. His father had called Mother with the news.

“I loved that dog,” my mother wailed on the phone. “And you killed her.”

I hung up the phone on her—and—snapped. It wasn’t just being responsible for Lecka’s dying that set me off. It was my mother calling Lecka her “baby,” and saying she loved her, and it was the emotion in her voice. It was my mother—who had never in my seventeen years told me that she loved me—getting all lathered up over the dog.

A few hours later, I was arrested.

I’d gone riding, racing down random streets on my bike, fleeing the conversation. I was shaking and sweating and not thinking. I just wanted to move, and move fast. I veered into a parking lot near campus and charged up the ramps until I could no longer pedal, then walked my bike past the rows of cars, peering into their windows.

There was a car with dozens of cassettes spilled onto the floor, and it was unlocked, so I sat in the driver’s seat and looked at them. I was just doing things. Staying busy. My mind was blank.

Two police cars blocked the garage exit on my way out; someone had reported a break-in. When they asked me if I’d entered a car, I told the truth and let them search my backpack. I didn’t take anything. But they arrested me anyway—cramming my ten-speed into the trunk of a patrol car—for breaking curfew. It was past midnight, and I was a minor.

At the police station, they stuck me in a small room with a metal table and chair chained to the cement floor. I howled at my reflection in the mirrored window until my eyes ached from crying, then slumped to the floor with my arms cradling my head. I was in jail, I was a criminal, I was following Jerome’s footsteps. Things would never be the same.

An hour later, the door opened and a cop walked in with my father. They sat on the metal chairs and the cop motioned for me to join them. When I slid into a chair, my dad wouldn’t look at me.

“Your father’s here to take you home,” the cop said.

I looked at my father, at the hostility churning beneath his surface, at his hair twisted out of place by sleep. I was afraid to be alone with him.

“I don’t want to go home,” I told the cop.

The cop said I had no choice. It was either go home or go to jail. I couldn’t be out there on my own, he said, someone had to answer for me.

“I’ll take jail,” I told him.

He made me repeat myself three times, then he scratched his head and turned to my father, who hadn’t opened his mouth, hadn’t tried to convince me otherwise, wouldn’t look at me, before sighing and writing something on a police document.

Dad left the room without a backward glance, and I was escorted to juvenile hall. What happened afterward I’d seen in movies—the stripping and being hosed down with soapy water by the large, mean-looking female guard (
“Turn around,” “Bend over,” “Spread your legs”
), the donning of the too-big orange jumpsuit. These things happened to the Julia who ran with the Devil, not to the Julia who attended Lafayette Christian.

Now I’m in Juvi, and a judge will decide my fate, just like with Jerome.

The fat girl beside me sneezes and I look up.

“How long do they keep people in here before their hearing?” I ask the table.

No one responds. They keep shoving donuts into their mouth holes. I turn to the fat girl beside me.

“Do you know?”

She lifts her hand and points at a sign over the window.
NO TALKING
. A guard appears in the doorway.

“Toilet time!” she says, and I take a second bite of donut— as the other inmates form a line at the door.

“This ain’t no vacation resort, LJ887,” the guard growls, and it takes me a second to realize she’s talking to me.

We follow her single file to a bathroom, where there’s a row of toilets on one wall, and a row of sinks on the other. The kid marches to the farthest toilet, yanks down her jumpsuit—she doesn’t even wear a bra yet—and starts to pee, her arms crossed over her skinny naked chest. I pick a spot in the middle of the toilet row and keep my eyes fastened on the gray tile floor in front of me, trying to ignore the farting and tinkling and odors around me. When we finish, we wash our hands and faces in the sinks and use paper towels to dry off.

“Cell time!”

Single file back to our cages. Lie down on the metal shelf, doze, snap awake, look for patterns in the dried paint dribbles on the vomit-colored wall, wonder how it will all end. Alarm at noon, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, toilet. Alarm at six, eat-pee-shower.

Repeat for five days.

The Tippecanoe County Courthouse is the prettiest building in Lafayette and also one of the oldest, a hundred-year-old neoclassical wonder with a large central dome and a 3,000-pound bell
that can be heard for twelve miles. The county’s only execution took place on the southwest lawn in 1856, when three men were hanged for murder and riots broke out as hundreds of spectators fought for a view.

I learned these details during a seventh-grade field trip at Lafayette Christian, and remembered them every Sunday as we drove by the courthouse on our way to church.

And now here I am walking up the Indiana limestone steps in a fluorescent orange jumper and wrist bracelets, wedged between two police officers. Passersby crane their necks at me, and there’s a group of school kids, fourth grade, fifth, and one points and then they all turn and stare, gawky-mouthed and googly-eyed at the scary criminal. The social reject. The bad person. I hang my head so my hair falls over my face— curtaining myself off—and stumble on a step. The cops tighten their grip.

They uncuff me in the middle of an airy chamber, where my parents stand against one wall and my big sister Debra stands against the other. She runs over and throws her arms around me, and although my hands are free, I am unable to return her embrace. Things are being done to me, and I can’t do anything back. All I can do is wait for the outcome.

The four of us sit on a wooden bench outside a courtroom waiting for my name to be called. Across from us, there’s a mural of white men on horseback shooting unarmed Indians on foot in the Battle of Tippecanoe, and I contemplate this while my family squabbles over my lost virtue.

Mother: “You gave her that
Glamour
subscription. You planted the seeds of wickedness in her.”

Father: “You have no business being here, you’re a poor influence.”

Debra, in a trembling voice: “I’m here to support her, and I’m staying.”

In the courtroom, I stand before the judge—dressed in a preacher robe, high up in her pulpit—and tell her the same thing I told the cop: I don’t want to go home.

And like the cop, she gives me two choices: I can declare myself an emancipated minor or I can go to Escuela Caribe. I fix my eyes on the small circle of sunlight pouring through the window above the judge’s head and think of David, as I’ve done often during the last five days.

“I want us to be family again,” he wrote in his last letter, which Mother forwarded to me at Dan’s. David had written me every week, always repeating the same things: “I want to come home.” “I want us all to get along.” “I want us to be happy.”

I’ve heard him say these sorts of things his entire life. Maybe he holds the idea of family in such high esteem because he’s always been the outsider, struggling to belong. The black boy in the basement.

He doesn’t yet know that his Brady Bunch dream will never come true. A few days after he left, Mother cleared out the boys’ room. I came home from school one afternoon and found her with rubber gloves and Lysol, scrubbing the walls.

“Who knows what went on in here,” she’d said, pointing to a dark spot on the carpet. “Those boys were worse than monkeys.”

“David’s stuff!” I’d shouted when I opened his closet and found it empty. “Where is it?”

“He doesn’t live here anymore,” she’d said. “Neither of them do.”

I grabbed the back of David’s desk chair to keep from falling down.

“You can’t do this to him!” I said.

She’d responded by plunging her scrub brush into the steaming pail and scouring away the remaining traces of his existence. And what power did I have to stop her, to prevent anything from happening? Bad things happen to you, and you can’t do anything to stop them.

They didn’t tell David that he was never coming home; the school staff thought such news would affect his progress in “The Program,” of which he’d written very little, beyond calling it difficult.

And so to each of his letters asking if our parents had mentioned when he was coming home, I’d reply, “I don’t know—ask them,” to which he’d write back, “They won’t tell me.”

We’re both homeless now.

“. . . reached a decision in consideration of all this, young lady?” the judge asks, peering down from her pulpit.

“Yes.”

“The Court did not hear the answer,” the judge says. “Speak up, please.”

“I said, I’ll go. I’ll go to the Dominican Republic.”

I will go to David and be family to him. I can’t live with my parents. I don’t love Scott. I can’t support myself.

I have nowhere to go but to David. We’ll become close again, like we were when we were little, before everything got in the way.

I follow the other passengers through a maze of roped-off lanes. We’re headed toward a row of men in tan suits who sit at metal desks along the far wall. A
DUANA
-C
USTOMS
, says a sign over their heads.

A long cement barricade divides the low-ceilinged room in half; on the other side of it, brown faces yell staccato greetings in Spanish to the people around me, who shout back. Some passengers are already on the other side, folding themselves into welcoming arms, getting kissed and fussed over. This is their country. Their home.

I feel white, alone, exposed.

As the crowd jostles me forward, a large piece of cardboard is boosted into the air:
JULIA SCHEERES
, it says. Beneath it stand the only other white people in the terminal, a tall man with sandy hair and a fat woman wearing a lime green pantsuit. They frown in my direction. Bodies bump past me as I stop and look
around. The room has two openings: the door to the runway that I just walked through, and a large glass entrance on the other side of the barricade; the red tail lights of idling cars glimmer beyond it. The runway door is wide open. I could sprint through it into the darkness and be free.

Free to do what
?

When I turn back around, the white people are standing directly opposite me across the barricade. The man shakes my name violently and the woman shoots her hand into the air as if she wanted to answer a question. I give them a limp wave and catch up to the receding line of passengers as they follow my progress footstep by footstep on the other side of the barricade.

At the line of desks, an official smoking a cigar stamps my passport and jerks his thumb toward a narrow hallway behind him. The white people are waiting there for me, my name still thrust in the air. I saunter over and point at it.

“That’s me.”

The woman grabs my hand and squeezes it.

“I’m Debbie, the Assistant Director of Education at Escuela Caribe,” she says with a lisp. The man leans the sign against his leg and cranks my hand up and down.

“I’m Ron, a teacher.”

Debbie peels her lips back in a wide grin; she’s got a gap between her front teeth that’s big enough to jab a pencil through.

“Are you ready to begin your incredible journey?” she asks in a rah-rah voice.

I shrug and look at the cement floor.