Jesus Land (26 page)

“What’s it for?” Tiffany asks Bruce, and he raises his eyebrows and presses his lips together in a “you’ll just have to wait and see” gesture. I spot David across the pen and we stare at each other.

Suddenly, the Dean of Students comes barreling through the throng, bare-chested in shorts and hiking boots and wearing orange gardening gloves. He trots to the pen, jumps over the twine, and beats his naked chest with the gloves.

There’s a commotion, and again the crowd parts. Boy 0— also bare-chested and wearing shorts and gloves—is thrust
forward by a male staffer. His face is red and his mouth raging and all manner of profanity spills from his lips, this time loud enough for everyone to hear.

“Fucking assholes! Fuck you! Fuck you all to Hell!”

The staffer shoves him over the twine and he stands opposite Ted cussing and hugging his bony little boy chest, both defiant teen and cowering child.

Ted walks to the middle of the ring and shouts over Boy 0’s profanity.

“Proverbs 23 tells us: ‘Refrain not from chastening a child; for if thou beat him with the rod, he shall not die. For thou shalt beat him with the rod, and shalt deliver his soul from Hell.’”

He turns to face Boy 0, who stops cursing to scowl at him.

“Andrew has refused to accept the staff’s authority, but he has accepted my invitation to a boxing match. May the best man win.”

Boy 0 spits in the dust.

This can’t be real
. I glance at Susan, but her sorrowful eyes are pinched shut. Across the pen, David lowers his eyes to the dirt at his feet. I look around the crowd. Some students watch the spectacle unfold with expressionless faces, and other focus their attention elsewhere—on the stalactite roots of the banyan tree, on the dirt under their nails, on the unknown country beyond the barbed wire fence.

Ted steps into the center of the ring and raises his garden gloves and Boy 0 raises his, but does not budge from his corner. Ted walks to him and towers over him, like an adult over a child, and Boy 0 sneers up him.

“Go on and hit me,” Ted says, taking a step back.

Boy 0 thrusts out a small fist that glances off Ted’s broad chest. Ted jogs half a step back, then swings his glove, hitting Boy 0 squarely in the jaw. The thud jerks his head sideways and I wince.

“Please, God,” Susan whimpers beside me, her eyes still pinched shut.

Boy 0 totters unsteadily on his feet, a smirk on his face. He refuses to give in, but I wish he would. He charges Ted and pummels his chest with the sides of his fists and Ted shakes his head and grins down at him in a “Can’t you do better than that?” way before stepping backward and swinging at his face again. Boy 0 crumples sideways to the ground and sits there.

Ted extends his orange glove to help him up, then punches him again, and this time Boy 0 collapses into the dust and stays there.

He lays on his back staring up at the vacant sky, his bony chest heaving up and down, a trickle of blood running from the corner of his mouth.

Ted pulls off his gloves and kneels beside him.

“Dear Lord,” he prays in a loud voice. “Please help Andrew accept this discipline. Help him become a true child of Christ.”

I don’t bend my head or close my eyes while Ted prays. I stare at him in shock.

Afterward, he dismisses us, and as we march back uphill, David’s house is ahead of mine and I keep focused on his narrow shoulders. Halfway to Starr, I look back at the boxing pen. Boy 0 is still stretched out on the ground, and Ted crouches over him, dabbing his face with a white cloth.

At Supper Time, Bruce sits at one end of the long wood table and RuthAnn at the other, in the father and mother places. Becky sits at Bruce’s right hand, and we girls are arranged according to rank, with me at RuthAnn’s side, and Carrie across from me.

RuthAnn has prepared meatloaf with catsup squirted on top, instant mashed potatoes and pan-fried carrots. After Bruce says Grace, he serves himself from the platters of food, which are then
passed down the table to RuthAnn, then back up the table to Becky, then back down the table to Carrie, who passes it to Tiffany, and so on, in descending order of rank. As I watch the food move back and forth across the table, my stomach growls audibly; the half sandwich I ate for lunch was reduced to acid hours ago.

By the time I’m handed the meatloaf, it’s been carved down to the burnt rump, but I dump it on my plate and chomp into it, savoring the salty rubber as if it were filet mignon.

“Excuse me!” Bruce yells down the table. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

I stop chewing and look up to find everyone staring at me. Bruce shakes his head with great disgust, as if he found my eating a repulsive activity. Must ask to eat. I consider spitting the meatloaf back onto my plate, but decide to swallow it instead. It gets stuck in my throat; I try to dislodge it by gulping cherry Kool-Aid.

“Excuse me!” Bruce yells.

“I’m sorry!” I gasp, once I’m able to speak.

“Pay attention, really think about what you’re doing!” he says.

“I said I’m sorry! May I please eat?”

He raises a forkful of carrots to his hairy mouth.

“Sorry’s not good enough,” he says, before eating the carrots.

He says no more. The food on my plate blurs into a brown mass. I curl my hands into fists under the table, pressing my nails into the half-moons I cut into my palms earlier. Water pools along my lower eyelids, and I tilt my head back so it won’t spill down my face.

For a long time, no one speaks and the only sound is the clink of metal against porcelain and the hiss of the gas lamps on either side of the room. I lower my head and stare out the patio window until the crimson puddle of sun oozes beneath the horizon, and then I stare at the reflection of the family of rejects eating in
their cement house. I wonder how Boy 0 is doing, and if he can eat with his wounded mouth.

After a while, RuthAnn brings a bowl of orange slices to the table and these are passed around. When the bowl is empty, Bruce clears his throat.

“Julia, you may now eat.”

I pick up my fork to swallow my food, but I can no longer taste it.

After Bed Time, I lay awake for hours doing calculations on my foam pad. With the right combination of superior housework, grades, and attitude, I figure I can get through all the levels and leave of here in six months.

I just have to playact, same as David and I did as little kids in the basement with our dress-up clothes. He’d pretend to be a Texas cowboy, and I’d pretend to be an evil witch. Now we just have to playact the part of repentant teenagers.

When I get out, I’ll go live with Deb and find another job as a busgirl. I’ll save up money to buy a junker and drive down to Florida, where I’ll rent an apartment on the sand and wait for David to join me. Unless, of course, he gets out first, in which case I’d join him. I’ll work my way up to a waitressing position and go to college at night.

I imagine the two of us living in our beach apartment, dunking each other in the warm waves and going for long bike rides on the boardwalk.
We’ll be fine after all, David, we will
. My thoughts start to wink out like a stuttering television screen when I’m brought back to consciousness by a hiccuping sound.

I squint at the gray lumps in the bunk beds around me, but none move. The noise continues, rising and becoming more ragged, until it reaches a full-blown howl of rage and misery. I stuff my fingers in my ears, but it’s too loud to block out.

“Shut up!” someone screams.

“Let the rest of us sleep!” someone else yells.

The howling weakens, then stops, and the bunk shakes beneath me. I peer over the side, and in the dirty moonlight shining through the tiny window, make out Susan lying on her back with both hands clamped over her mouth.

“You okay?” I whisper.

She unclamps one of her hands to give me the thumbs-up sign, then clamps it over her mouth again.

I roll on my back and try to conjure up the beach and the waves and the cozy apartment, but they are gone to me.
Someday, David.
I listen to the sighs and moans and rustlings around me and close my eyes.

“Dear Lord,” I pray. “Please help us get there.”

There came a day when David denied his skin color.

We were in trouble for kicking a basketball into the television set and shattering the screen, and as usual, David got the brunt of the punishment: He was spanked while I was scolded.

Afterward, we commiserated over a pile of marbles under the ping-pong table. David squatted on his heels, his butt too sore to sit on, and I felt guilt at our unequal punishments.

I was still trying to understand the reason for it. I thought maybe Mother was harder on him because she didn’t want him to grow up to be one of those black people on the six o’clock news, the ones who wore orange jumpsuits and handcuffs. The ones who stole and killed and sold drugs. They were the only other black people we knew of.

“I know why you always get spanked,” I told David that day under the ping-pong table. “It’s because you’re black.”

He picked up a big marble and dropped it on the pile, knocking the gleaming circles across the carpet.

“No, I’m not,” he said quietly.

I looked at him.

“What?”

“I’m not black,” he said, louder.

Upstairs, Mother was banging pans, making supper.

“Of course you are!” I said.

He shook his head.

“No, I’m not.”

“You’re blacker than the place the sun don’t shine,” I said, parroting a phrase I’d heard flung at David on the schoolyard. I had no idea what it meant, but I knew it was bad and instantly regretted saying it.

“Shut up!” he screamed.

Mother opened the basement door.

“What’s going on down there?” she yelled down the stairs.

David glared at me before crawling out from beneath the ping-pong table and running to his room.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered a moment later at his unyielding room door.

In the milky predawn, the Third World roosters start croaking as if someone were choking the new day from them and I wake with a shudder. A heaviness presses down on my chest like a boot. This place isn’t some conjured-up nightmare that fades with the morning light, but it is real, and it is an island, and it is inescapable.

I wonder if David is awake, and whether he’s thinking of me right now as I think of him. If we concentrated hard enough, I wonder if we could learn to communicate by brainwaves alone.

David, someday we’ll laugh about all this in Florida.

A distant alarm clock sounds and a moment later Becky unlocks her door and shuffles into the dormitory. She ignites the gas lamp—
whoomph
—and the room is washed in dreary light.

“Six o’clock,” she calls. “Everybody up.”

There’s a collective groan as bodies tumble from bunks and thrust themselves into clothing. The two highest rankers enter the bathroom to do their toiletry while everyone else starts
their Room Job. I watch Susan crease her sheets into precise forty-five-degree angles at the corners of her foam pad and try to imitate her. This is my first day on points, and I must score high.

After five minutes, Becky yells “Time!” and the next two highest rankers enter the bathroom. As Susan stands at the dresser straightening her bottles of perfumes and potions, I’m still struggling to fit the sheets over the floppy foam pad.

When it’s our turn to wash up, Becky gives me permission to enter the bathroom and stands in the doorway as Susan and I sit on the two exposed toilets and urinate with our eyes fixed on the floor in front of us. The small room has twin sinks, twin toilets and twin shower spigots, everything out in the open like in jail. I need to relieve my bowels, but refuse to do so with an audience.

“Remember to put your t.p. in the wastebasket,” Becky tells me as I wipe myself.

After we scrub our faces with cold water and comb our hair, we drape our towels on the rungs at the end of our bunk, making sure they’re perfectly centered with aligned edges, before proceeding to wipe down every surface in our space with bleach-soaked rags.