Dirt Road Home Page 3

  There was one more way onto the yard. A door opened from the office area of the main building. Mr. Pratt stepped out of this door and closed it behind him. He stood against the wall of the building and folded his arms and scanned the grounds.

  I crossed between the basketball courts and went to the far fence, just down from Caboose. I leaned against it and turned and watched. After a minute, Leroy walked up to me.

  “Preston tell you to keep buggin’ me about the Ministers’ gang?” I said.

  “No,” he said.

  I frowned at him.

  Leroy continued. “He says he knew you before.”

  “I’ve seen a few guys here I knew before.”

  “He says you were the toughest boy at the place.”

  I didn’t answer him. I watched a basketball roll across the yard onto the Ministers’ court. A chubby Hound from Paco’s group chased after it. Before he could get to it, one of Jack’s Ministers picked it up. Then the Hound and the Minister were in a face-off. I saw their mouths moving but I couldn’t hear what they were saying. I glanced at Mr. Pratt just in time to see him look away.

  “Somethin’s about to go down,” I said.

  The Hound slapped the ball out of the Minister’s hand and bent down to get it. The Minister kneed the boy in the stomach and the Hound collapsed, holding himself. The basketballs at Paco’s end of the yard were dropped and his boys started walking across the yard. Paco stepped away from the fence and straightened up and watched. Jack waved his hand and ushered the Ministers to meet them.

  “What’s the guard’s problem?” I asked Leroy.

  “I don’t know.”

  Mr. Pratt was watching closely now, but he made no move to interfere. The gangs were now only a few yards apart and still closing on each other.

  “He gonna let ’em all go at each other?”

  Leroy started to answer me, but suddenly Mr. Pratt uncrossed his arms and took a few steps forward. “Hey!” he yelled.

  Now the two groups were face-to-face. Mr. Pratt began walking toward them.

  “Paco’s bunch doesn’t look that scared to me,” I said.

  Leroy didn’t answer me. I looked over at Caboose. He was still leaning against the fence, watching his shoes like he didn’t know anything had happened. Mr. Pratt stepped between the gangs and eyeballed them back to their sides of the yard. Then he pulled out a notepad and jotted something down.

  * * *

  I didn’t go to the rec room that evening. I lay on my bunk listening to the floorwalker tap a pencil against the wall. Sometimes I would look over at him, trying to find some sign of compassion, but his pink pig face was unreadable. He always stared at nothing and seemed to think nothing.

  The boys burst through the doors at seven-thirty and both ends of the room were suddenly filled with talking and joking. I stared at the ceiling and waited for lights-out. Then that awful smell of roadkill settled over me and I flipped and pressed my face into my pillow.

  “Lights out!” yelled the floorwalker.

  I heard the boys leap into their bunks and go quiet. I stayed like I was, breathing through the pillow fabric. It wasn’t until the wailing started again that I sat up and looked down at the dark shape that was Leroy.

  “What is it?” I whispered.

  “Seg,” he said. “Solitary.”

  “Who?”

  “Quiet down there!” the floorwalker boomed.

  6

  Leroy took a bite of a Baby Ruth bar during breakfast and slid it back into his pocket.

  “Where’d you get that?” I asked.

  “Canteen yesterday. You didn’t buy anything?”

  “I don’t need any zoo zoos and wham whams.”

  “I’ll give you some money if you need some.”

  “I told you I don’t need anything.”

  He hung his head. “I’m just tryin’ to help.”

  “Well, don’t.”

  Preston came up to me during recess on Wednesday. “You made up your mind yet?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who?”

  “Nobody.”

  “We’re gonna leave you alone for the rest of the week. After that, you got no friends.”

  “I don’t want friends in here.”

  “You have to pick,” he said.

  “I don’t have to do a damn thing.”

  “I’ll tell Jack you said that.”

  I put my hands in my pockets and looked at the ground and didn’t respond.

  “Wuss,” he said.

  I felt my temper flare. I clenched my fists inside my pockets and eyeballed the tips of his shoes. After a moment he turned and walked away.

  Later that afternoon Paco’s recruiter approached me again.

  “You goin’ Ministers?”

  “Tell Paco I ain’t goin’ nothin’. I’m mindin’ my own business right here against this fence.”

  “You can’t do that, man.”

  I didn’t answer him.

  “You don’t know how this place works. You should listen to us.”

  “I’m listenin’ to you. I just don’t want any of it.”

  I got my first letter during mail call that afternoon. It was from Daddy. I stuffed it into my pocket and saved it for later. I wanted his voice to be the last thing in my head when I went to sleep.

  After supper I stepped into the washroom in the hall. It was smaller than the shower room, with just two urinals, two commodes, and four sinks. I splashed water on my face and took deep breaths. I heard the door open and watched in the mirror as Paco walked behind me to the urinal. Fear surged up into my throat.

  Paco spoke in calm, precise English. “Going nothing, you say . . . Interesting.”

  “I just wanna be left alone.”

  Paco chuckled. “There are two places where they will come for you. The first is the yard. The second is in here. This is where there is no guard. No floorwalker. The boys call it the confessional. If they want to hurt you bad, they will do it in here. If they want to do more than that, there is one more place. But this last place is by appointment only.”

  I swallowed, grabbed a paper towel, and dried my face while keeping an eye on his back. He zipped up, turned, and stepped sideways to lean against the wall. He looked at me in the mirror.

  “You think you can do this, but you cannot,” Paco said.

  I stared at the sink.

  “Jack’s boys will come after you. Eventually my boys will too, but Jack’s will come first. There is nothing you can do in no-man’s-land to avoid it. You are just an open target. You have to choose your friends.”

  I didn’t respond.

  “With me, I don’t care if you choose my side or not. I’ve got all the people I need and Jack knows it. But I will make it easier for you. I will decide. You see, when Jack’s boys come after you, I’ll have my boys step in. After that, you might as well consider yourself a pledge of our gang. You will be in debt to my boys. That is how it will work.”

  “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.

  7

  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.”

  8

  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.”