Dirt Road Home (9 page)

The floorwalker was gone. I lay on my bed and took deep breaths and replayed what had happened in the basement. But the whole scene was a blue, flickering nightmare that made no sense.

Later on, the floorwalker returned and the boys began filing in. The Ministers each had to pass by me to get to their end of the room. I didn’t look at them, but I could feel their stares. Then I turned over and looked down at Paco’s bunk. He was undressing at the foot of it. Just when I thought he wasn’t going to acknowledge me, he turned his head and nodded and went back to what he was doing.

Caboose came in a few minutes later and rolled into his bed, the mattress springs creaking. I cocked my eyes at him but he paid me no attention.

That night no one came to talk to me. No one called me names. No one moved around much at all. I’d never seen the place so quiet.

“Where’s number eighty-six?” I heard the floorwalker yell. That was Jack’s number. No one spoke up.

“Where is eighty-six!” he yelled again.

Silence.

The floorwalker marched out of the room. A moment later I heard the guards rushing down the hall, locking the place down.

Next morning. I got in line for the showers. No one was speaking. I kept my eyes down and went through the routine of washing myself and returning to my bunk to get dressed. As I pulled on my jumpsuit, I noticed that Caboose was still in bed. His eyes were open and he seemed to be studying the underside of the top bunk. It was far past time for all the boys to be up and done with showers.

While I was making my bed, Mr. Pratt entered at the far end of the bunk room. He came our way, making his usual inspection walk. When he got to Caboose’s bed, he stopped.

“On your feet, seventy-two!”

I continued making the bed, watching them in my periphery. Caboose didn’t move. Mr. Pratt took a step toward him. “Christ,” he said. I turned and saw him pull the radio from his belt. “John,” he said, “I need a couple of guys to help me get seventy-two to the infirmary. We’re in the bunk room. Hurry up.”

I looked at Caboose’s bed. I’d been on the other side of him earlier and hadn’t noticed the blood staining his bedsheet and the entire side of his shirt.

We were all sent to breakfast early. When I was walking in the hall, I saw two guards rushing past with a stretcher. I turned and looked back at Paco. He studied me and made no expression.

I went to no-man’s-land alone with my food. Leroy came first. He sat beside me and began eating without a word. Then the rest of them came, one by one. Until the entire table was filled with silent Ministers bent over their trays. At one point I looked up and glanced over my shoulder. Preston was the only one left. He kept his head down and ate alone.

“You’re the leader now, Hal,” Leroy said.

I didn’t answer him.

When the buzzer sounded I took my tray and returned it. I headed for the recess yard and sensed them behind me. I stepped out into the sunlight and kept on until I was halfway to the fence. I saw the Hounds filing off toward their court on the right. When I stopped, the rest of the Ministers stopped. I turned and faced them. “That fence over there is my fence,” I said. “Anybody that follows me is goin’ to the boiler room.”

“You don’t have to stand by the fence anymore, Hal,” Leroy said. “You can stay with us.”

I ignored him. “Where’s Preston?”

“He said he won’t join us,” one of the boys said.

“Go get the key to the boiler room from him. Put it under my pillow when we go back in. I keep it now.”

“Then what should we do about him?”

“I figure he’s got three places to go and he’s gonna get his ass kicked in two of ’em. What you do with him is up to you.”

Leroy looked at me with confusion. “What about us, Hal?”

“I don’t know, Leroy. You guys figure it out without me.”

I turned and left them.

I leaned against the fence and slid down it. I drew my knees up and studied the yard. The Ministers stood idle, talking among themselves, watching the Hounds. Preston appeared and stood near the entrance door next to Mr. Pratt.

I began to take the pieces of my situation and place them together. Caboose was the mysterious person in the boiler room. He did something to Jack and now both of them were hurt. I didn’t know if Jack had been found. I didn’t know if Paco was involved, but now he was the recognized leader of the entire yard and I felt safe for the time being. At least until Jack could tell everyone what had really happened.
If
he could tell them.

Paco came strolling toward me with the rest of the Hounds watching. He stood over me for a moment and then slid down the fence beside me.

“I didn’t think you could be seen with me,” I said.

“But we are equals now,” he said. “We are two generals at a meeting.”

“I don’t have an army.”

“So you say. But it doesn’t matter. You have earned your respect. For the time being, you are untouchable.”

I looked at him. I could tell. “You know what happened down there, don’t you?”

“That doesn’t matter either.”

“So what’s next?”

“Today we sit here on the hill and watch. Like good generals.”

“Watch what?”

Paco gazed across the yard. Finally he said, “I had a friend on the outside. His father was a forester. One day he told me a story of how a big storm came through the woods and a violent wind tossed the tall pines back and forth all night. The next month, they found beetles in these trees that had always been healthy. You see, the timber was hurt. As you know, the inside of a tree is made of rings, each ring representing one year of growth. All of the tossing back and forth tore the bond between these rings in a process called delamination. The beetles are able to eat into a delaminated tree much easier. But the question was this: How did the beetles know the trees were wounded when they could not see the wounds?”

“I don’t know, Paco.”

“It is very interesting. You see, trees, like every animal, give off heat when they are sick. Just like you grow hot with fever. Lions can sense this in sick animals and they choose them to prey upon. The beetles sensed this as well.”

“What do sick trees have to do with anything?”

Paco still stared across the yard. “Look at the Ministers. They are sick. And the dogs are sniffing them.”

I studied the play yard, taking in both sides. I noticed there was a subtle tension building. The Ministers stood loose and idle on their basketball court. The Hounds were gathered in a tight group, talking among themselves and sneaking glances at their enemy.

“We are about to see something here,” Paco said. “Something that has not been seen since Caboose took the fence a year ago.”

“Caboose?”

He put his finger to his lips. “Watch,” he said.

Mr. Pratt knew what was about to happen. There was no way he couldn’t have seen it coming. But he turned his back and stepped inside the main building. When the door shut behind him, the group of huddled Hounds came apart and made a line, shoulder to shoulder. My eyes snapped over to the Ministers. Only one or two of them were watching the scene unfold, and even those seemed puzzled.

“They don’t even know,” I said.

“Lambs,” Paco replied.

The Hounds began walking, the outside boys going a little faster so that a half circle was formed. Most of their prey would fall like fish into the center of the net and the strays would be caught by the wingmen. The arc made half the distance before the Ministers’ expressions turned to looks of alarm. And the Hounds seemed to know it was time.

They didn’t utter a sound as they rushed forward. All I heard was the dull digging of their rubber soles in the dry dust and the screaming of the Ministers. It was a blur of chaos and confusion as the Hounds descended on their cowering prey. My overall impression was of scar-banded wrists rising and falling in the midst of a dust storm. I watched with my mouth open and Paco silent beside me.

It seemed like the attack lasted for ten minutes but it was probably no more than two before Mr. Pratt swung open the door to the main building. He watched the scene patiently, tapping a nightstick against his palm. Finally he stepped down onto the yard. Behind him came three more guards, each of them with his own club. The men approached and entered the tangle of screaming boys. Then I saw their sticks rising and falling and caught glimpses of their faces, jaws clenched and eyes narrowed at the pleasure of what they dealt. I heard grunts of pain and more yelling. Boys began scattering in all directions. A few of them came against the fence not far from us and collapsed, their clothes torn and their faces covered in blood and dirt.

In the end, the guards stood in the settling dust. A few boys lay around them, moaning and curled into fetal positions.

“What the hell is this place?” I mumbled.

But Paco heard me. “It is home sweet home, my friend.”

Once, when I was ten years old, Daddy lifted me out of bed before sunrise. Even though I was already tall for my age, it was no problem for him to carry me to the truck with my chin on his shoulder and my eyes closed. This was nothing unusual. It was late fall, hunting season, and he’d taken me to the woods with him since I was four.

He placed me on the passenger seat and shut the door. I pulled up my knees and leaned against the window. The rumble and workingman smell of his old truck, the one we still had at the clay pit, always comforted me. As we moved into the night I fell back into a slumber made deeper by his presence and the fact that I was included.

Some time later I woke to sunrise bleeding into the treetops. The truck was parked in the woods at the edge of a pond and I was alone. At first I was disoriented, then I vaguely remembered him placing me on the seat earlier.

I found him sitting on the bank of the pond, untangling a trotline from where it was wrapped messily around a block of wood. Beside him was a paper cup with hooks in it. On the other side of him was a bottle of whiskey. He always had whiskey and tobacco with him. It was part of his smell.

I sat next to him and rubbed my eyes and yawned. His hands continued to work at the tangle. Then I looked across the pond. “Where are we, Daddy?”

“One of Uncle Tom’s lakes,” he said without looking up.

Uncle Tom was Daddy’s brother. He owned a pole mill in Livingston. He was rich, but never acted like it except on Christmas when he gave me nice presents.

I watched Daddy’s fingers working at the knots. “Where’s the bait?” I asked him.

“In the truck bed.”

I got up and walked to the truck. I found a carton of chicken livers and started back. Before I reached him, he suddenly hurled the trotline into the brush.

“Forget it!” he said. “Stupid fish. What’s the use!”

I stopped and watched his back. It wasn’t like him to lose his temper. He turned and looked at me and I could see that he’d been crying. I’d never seen him cry before and it made me uncomfortable. “Just come here,” he said calmly.

I went and stood next to him.

“Put it down. Sit down here.”

I sat next to him while he unscrewed the top to his whiskey and took a drink. Then he set it to the side and put his arm around me and pulled me close. “We don’t ever catch anything anyway, do we?”

I shook my head. We sat there for what seemed like a long time, staring across the still pond, watching the gum leaves drift down and settle around us. Crows called in the distance, and ever since then their sound taps a lonely place in me.

Daddy eventually pulled his arm away and reached for the whiskey. I stood and went to get the trotline. I sat down and worked at it while he drank. Eventually I freed
the knots and brought it back to him. He pushed himself up and we spent the next hour baiting and stringing hooks across the pond. Then he got his .22 rifle from the truck and I followed him into the woods.

That morning we bagged a few squirrels and cleaned them at the truck. Then we drove to a country store nearby and bought souse and white bread and potato chips and chocolate milk and returned with it. We made sandwiches on the tailgate as the cool afternoon breezes lifted the hair on my head. Then we took a nap under a hickory tree. Late that afternoon we pulled in the trotline. There were no fish on it and every hook was still baited.

Just after sunset we packed our gear. Daddy took the last sip of his whiskey and threw the bottle into the truck bed and got behind the wheel. “Maybe next time,” I said. Because that’s what he always told me. And I smiled and watched his face.

He didn’t answer me. He put the truck in gear and pulled away. After a few minutes he talked to me while he watched the road ahead. “I’m gonna drop you off at the house. I’m not gonna be stayin’ at home anymore.”

That day was the last time I remember being a happy boy.

Momma didn’t want him. After he moved out of the house, he lived in a motel room for a while. Then he got the job at the clay pit about an hour away in Union. He tried to see me as much as he could on weekends, but Momma made it hard for him. She’d always have some excuse about things I had to do for school and such. But I wasn’t doing
anything. I was just waiting for my daddy. I just wanted him to come get me.

I got where I hated her and everything about where I lived. It wasn’t long before I started skipping school. I’d get off the bus and hide under somebody’s car in the parking lot. After classes started, I’d run off in the woods to a little farm pond about a quarter mile away and lie there and toss rocks in it and listen to the crows. Then I’d walk home as it got dark. The school would have already called, and she’d be pretty worked up by the time I walked through the door. For a while she took a switch to me. Then one day I realized I was bigger than she was, and I turned around and took the switch out of her hand and broke it and threw it to the ground. I told her if she ever switched me again I’d switch her back.

Then I let an older kid talk me into stealing bicycles for him. He’d pay me ten dollars a bike and that was more money than I’d seen. I’d walk into town at night and take them out of people’s yards and bring them to an old barn in back of the kid’s parents’ house. I figured he sold them. I didn’t care. It was a way for me to make money and get back at the world all at once.