Take Me There (12 page)

I picked up the pages and looked them over. I knew I’d never fill them out. He wasn’t going to be able to help me. “Thank you for your time,” I said.

I threw the pages in the trash on the way out.

On the drive from Mr. Grey’s office to Hermosa Beach, I had to admit to myself that the only way I would be able to see my father was if I violated my probation and drove to Texas without permission.

I was not inclined to put myself in jeopardy for a man who had never done anything for me. I had too much to lose. By the time I arrived at Jess’s house, I had convinced myself that seeing my father didn’t matter. What would be the point anyway? He would be dead and gone in a few days. So much the better for me. Maybe then I could finally let go of my past and start over.

I showered at Jess’s house. It was weird, being naked in her bathroom, knowing she was on the other side of the door. When I was done, I put on a pair of khaki shorts and a short-sleeved polo shirt from the sack Jess had given me. “Who are you pretending to be?” I asked the respectable-looking guy in the mirror. I didn’t recognize him, but I sort of liked him.

Half an hour later I was walking down the street with Jess, enjoying how every guy who passed us looked at her in admiration and then me in envy.
I could learn to get used to this,
I told myself, and stood a little taller.

“Karaoke!” I pointed to a storefront across the street. “Come on.” I was so excited that I started trying to cross in the middle of traffic.

“No,” she said, pulling me back onto the sidewalk and heading off in the opposite direction.

“Jess, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I just don’t sing much anymore.”

“Aren’t you still in chorus?”

“I gave it up my junior year.”

“You’re kidding me, right?”

She gave me a sideways glance and picked up her pace. “To get into a decent university you have to have four years of math, four years of science, four years of language arts, a foreign language, history, government, econ. I don’t have time for singing anymore.”

“Don’t you need extracurriculars?

“I’m in the debate club, and I do DECA.”

“What about your voice?”

“Who cares about my voice? There are more important things going on in the world. I want to make a difference. I’m going to law school. I want to become a public defender.”

I couldn’t believe she’d give up singing to work with scumbags like me. “By the time a guy ends up in front of the judge, it’s too late to make a difference.”

“It’s never too late to make a difference,” she said.

We had arrived back at the beach and we stood there, staring out at the vastness of the ocean. I don’t know why, but it made me think of possibility. Maybe she was right. Maybe it wasn’t too late.

“All I’m saying is that with your music you could have an influence on people before they end up in trouble.”

“Yeah, right,” Jess said, laughing.

“What’s so funny?”

“After
West Side Story
, my mother thought maybe I should work with a talent agent. I signed with a guy in Beverly Hills,
and within two weeks he had gotten me my first job singing on television.”

“Wow.”

“In a chicken suit.” Jess started to sing, “Come on down to Yummy Buckets… . Try our tasty chicken nuggets.”

“That was you? You were the dancing chicken that came on after the late-night news?”

“I confess.”

“I loved that song.”

“Yeah, very funny. I had to wear that stupid chicken suit for hours. That’s what show business is really like. I used to think that words and music could change the world, but look at the people who have made it. You see their faces all over the tabloids talking about their latest stint in rehab. I’m not like that.”

I brushed a strand of hair from her face. “No, you’re not like that. You really could change the world.”

Something shifted then. I wasn’t sure what, but Jess stared up into my eyes long and hard, like she was looking for something she hadn’t even realized she’d lost. Then she cupped my face in her hands. “It’s amazing.”

“What?”

“Your eyes are so clear. I think I can actually see my reflection.”

“Look closer,” I told her.

She edged toward me. I leaned toward her.

“Closer.”

She stepped up on her tiptoes, her lips so close to mine I could feel her breathe.

“Closer …”

She covered my lips with hers, pulled me close, and kissed
me like I’d never been kissed before. It was warm and wet and wonderful.

It was better than sex. It was like sinking into a crystal clear sea and coming out new. She opened her mouth to let me in and in that moment, my heart imploded and nothing else mattered.

“R
ISE AND SHINE,” A VOICE BELLOWS, AND I OPENu MY
eyes to come face-to-face with Levida’s pig, Charlotte. Levida is standing behind the pig, holding a basket and a pitchfork.

I look around. Realize I’m in Levida’s barn. Know I’ve been dreaming again of the room with the cuckoo clock and the blue curtains.

“If you’re gonna stay with me, you boys will have to earn your keep,” Levida says, prodding Wade with a pitchfork and dropping the basket on the ground. I sit up and rub my aching ribs.

My grandmother lets Charlotte sleep in the house. That stupid pig has her own bedroom, while Wade and I are relegated to the barn. Levida gave us sleeping bags to spread across the hay, but it was too hot to sleep inside them.

I look at my watch. Only six o’clock and already so humid I can feel the sweat beading on my forehead.

Levida stands with her hands on her hips, surveying the barn. “We’ll start with those stalls,” she says, pointing to what I
can only imagine used to be pigsties. From what she told us last night, the only pig she has left is Charlotte. Levida started selling off the land when my grandfather died. From the looks of the barn, she’s been taking it apart piece by piece as well. Several of the outer boards are missing, and all the doors are gone.

Levida grabs a sledgehammer and starts hammering away at the old pigsties. “Been wantin’ to tear down this old barn for a long time. Now I got the manpower to do it.”

“Lev—Gram …” I’m not sure what to call her. “Ma’am, with all due respect, I didn’t come all this way to tear down your barn. I came to see my father.” I tense reflexively as I prepare to dodge the sledgehammer, but Levida sets it down and stares at me as cool as a cucumber.

“Well, seein’ as how your car is sittin’ in my ditch with two flat tires, you might be needin’ to borrow my pickup truck.”

“I hadn’t thought of that.”

“So you might try to be a little more amenable to helpin’ out around here. Besides, it’s Sunday. You ain’t goin’ nowhere until after church.”

“Church?” Wade says, perking up, though I know he doesn’t have a religious bone in his body.

“I figure you boys can get in a good two to three hours of demolition before you have to get cleaned up for Sunday services. Oh, and let me know if you find anythin’ interestin’.”

“Like what?” I ask. I can’t imagine finding anything of interest if I searched the entire county.

“There’s biscuits in the basket for your breakfast and some old clothes that belonged to your father in the box,” she says as she kicks a box left beside my sleeping bag. “Come on, Charlotte.”

Charlotte grunts at Baby Face, who cowers in fear of the massive pork chop and tries to hide under my legs.

Wade and I spend the morning tearing apart the stalls in the barn and stacking the old boards outside. Then we get ready for church.

I sort through the box of clothes my father left behind. Old jeans, some dress pants, T-shirts, dress shirts, and even a pair of brown cowboy boots at the bottom. I try on some pants and a shirt and realize my father is much larger than I am. The shoulders hit me halfway down the arm and all the pants sag around my waist, the way I used to wear them when I was a wannabe gangbanger. I have to cinch them up with a belt to look anywhere near respectable. Wade tries on a pair of dress pants and leaves them to sag around his scrawny waist. I toss him a belt. “Better cinch those up if you want to make a good impression on the preacher’s daughter.”

It’s weird, wearing my father’s stuff. Even weirder than wearing the clothes Jess gave me. It’s like D.J. Dawson is suddenly standing somewhere behind me, but every time I try to get a good look at him, he slips away.

It’s while we’re having punch and cookies in the church foyer and waiting for the eleven o’clock service to begin that I realize where all the pieces of Levida’s barn have gone. They’re hanging for sale in the church thrift shop with Bible verses painted on them.

Dorie intercepts Wade at the coffee urn, and before the morning is over he has fallen in love and gotten saved, in that order.

Levida plays the church organ like a bat out of hell. She looks like one too, in her flowing black dress, swaying violently
to the music and working the pedals with both legs. Her hands are so gnarled and arthritic, I don’t know how she does it, but she manages to play all morning without missing a beat.

I have never been a religious person, but as I sit there in the sweltering heat of the Texas Hill Country, watching Wade get dunked in a baptistery below a crude wooden cross that looks suspiciously similar to an old barn door, and listening to Pastor Bob talk about mercy and redemption, I am filled with hope. Not the kind of expectation that comes from knowing you can pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, but the trust that comes from utter failure, from knowing you are pathetic and small and you’ve got no place to look but up.

“Jesus died in your place,” the preacher says, after Wade comes up out of the water. “He was put to death like a common criminal to save your eternal soul.” I look at my cross tattoo and a disturbing thought comes to me—I have permanently inscribed my hand with a symbol of execution.

I make another bargain with God. If you will get me out of the trouble I’m in, I’ll never get off track again.

There is a potluck after church, fifty different varieties of food spread out on tables in the church basement, the only semi-cool place in the building.

“You’re D.J. Dawson’s kid, aren’t you?” I hear, just as I finish my fried chicken and zucchini bread. I look up to see Red, the boy from the drugstore, standing in front of me with a paper plate full of roast beef and potato salad, his fists clenched so tightly around the rim he’s bending the thing in half. “Aren’t you?” he says again, making no attempt to hide the hostility in his voice.

I don’t know if he’s figured this out on his own or if the church gossip mill has provided him with the information, but there is no use denying it. “Yeah. I’m D.J. Dawson’s kid.”

He starts to shake, and I see he’s fighting hard to contain his rage. “Then you better watch your ass.” He turns and walks away.

I don’t head out for Huntsville until nearly two. My clothes are in the wash, so I’ve sorted through all my father’s old stuff, wondering what a guy should wear when he’s visiting somebody on death row. I keep on the pants I wore to church but exchange the plaid shirt for a short-sleeved white dress shirt and tie. I eventually give up on the tie because I can’t figure out how it works.

I ask Wade to go with me, to help me find the prison, but he won’t because he’s afraid he won’t make it back in time for evening church at six o’clock.

“Plus, Dorie’s dad holds a class for new converts at five,” he tells me.

I can’t imagine there are a lot of new converts in a town this size, but I let it pass.

It’s surprisingly easy for me to find Huntsville, even though the road I’m traveling changes numbers three times before I get there. It’s almost easier
not
having Wade navigate. The gears on Levida’s old pickup truck grind every time I shift, and the suspension needs to be tightened. I’ll give the truck a tune-up when I get back to Levida’s place.

The town of Huntsville surprises me. I don’t know what I was expecting. Some big industrialized city with factories and lots of barbed wire, maybe. What I find instead is a sleepy
college town with green hills and pine trees, on the edge of a national forest. There’s a town square surrounded by brick buildings. There’s even an old opera house. It feels homey in a strange way.

I stop a kid on a bicycle and ask him where to find the prison.

“Which one?” he replies.

“What do you mean, which one?”

“There’s nine prisons in and around Huntsville,” he tells me, as if this is something I should already know.

“Nine prisons.” I let what he’s saying settle over me.

“That’s the Walls right there,” he says, pointing to a towering redbrick building down the street. Something about the brick fortress sends a chill down my back in spite of the heat.

“Thanks.”

“That’s where they kill ’em,” says the boy.

“Kill who?”

“The guys on death row. Every couple o’ weeks or so they send one up. Streets fill with reporters and TV cameras. My dad says the lights around town used to flash when they used Old Sparky. Now they just put ’em to sleep quiet-like with an injection.”

“Thanks,” I say, rolling up my window, eager to end the conversation and be on my way.

I drive right up to the front of the building. Redbrick walls flanking it on either side tower thirty feet or more above me.

I remember juvie and how when the door slid shut and locked behind me, I knew I was a prisoner. I wonder if the law is looking for me now. Consider that once I walk into that building, they might not let me back out.

I get out of the truck reluctantly. See a huge old-fashioned clock right above the front door, as if to remind all who enter here of the importance of time, or maybe that they are about to lose it.

I walk up the porch steps with their shiny brass rails to a double glass door bearing the state seal of Texas. Take a deep breath and go inside. Find myself in a small foyer. There is a wood-paneled wall on the right and a counter on the left about chest high, with a sliding window opening into a room filled with weapons and restraints. I hear voices talking over a police radio inside the room and see a woman, dressed in a gray uniform.