Take Me There (4 page)

My uncle Mitch has a saying, “Cozy up to the things that scare you. Snuggle up next to ’em and then bite off their damn heads.” Uncle Mitch has a lot of sayings, most of which can’t be repeated in civilized company. You have to sift through a lot of junk, but occasionally there’s a gem of wisdom in the trash heap.

I took that one to heart and started cozying up to books. No one would think of accusing a guy of being illiterate when he’s got himself a book of poetry. The reading glasses were another trick. I didn’t need them, but they came in handy whenever somebody asked me to read something. I would just say I couldn’t find my glasses.

“Do ‘The Stolen Child’ on page twenty-two,” Mom told me.

I turned to page twenty-two, though I knew the poem by heart. I had for years. Mom never read me Dr. Seuss or
Hop on Pop
. When I was little she read me Yeats, Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Robert Frost, over and over. So many times their words burned paths through my memory. We’d sit on the threadbare sofa of whatever dive we were living in, listening to the police sirens going by every few minutes. Mom always said we’d be rich as long as we had poetry.

“The key is in Yeats,” she said. Mom told me that whenever she got drunk. I had no idea what it was supposed to mean. “Fourteen, thirty-eight, twenty-two. Remember those numbers.” They were
her three favorite poems; the pages were dog-eared with their numbers circled. She patted my hand and nodded her head to emphasize the point, as if this information might save my life someday.

“Okay, Ma,” I told her, and then pretended to read from the book, about the fairies of Sleuth Wood who stole children away:

“Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.”

Mom squeezed my hand. “You’re a good boy, Dylan. I know you’ve gotten into some trouble, but you have a good heart.”

I closed the book and stood up. I couldn’t listen to her talk about my “good heart” when she didn’t know half the things I’d done. “You sleep now,” I told her.

She nodded, and I turned the television on to the Shopping Network, Mom’s favorite channel. Then I walked back into the kitchen. Saw the bottle of Crown Royal. Got real thirsty all of a sudden. Decided to pour the whiskey down the drain before it did any more damage.

There was a room at the end of the hallway that used to belong to me and Wade, but while we were in juvie it got taken over with Mom’s boxes. When we came back home, we found she had moved all our stuff to the garage, which we had to convert into our current bedroom. I stepped inside the box room, Mom’s shrine to order and organization. Testimony to her belief that life could be managed if things were only kept in their proper places.

On the right were all the boxes for the things Mom had
ordered from the Shopping Network—the slicer, the dicer, the blender, the indoor grill, even the fake fur coat, which didn’t get much use in Southern California. If and when we moved again, everything would go back into its original container. There were even a few things, like the do-it-yourself car-waxing kit and the fondue machine, that Mom had never opened.

On the left side of the room were stacks of white file boxes, each one labeled with a thick black marker:
RECEIPTS
,
TAX RETURNS
,
BABY PICTURES
, etc.

I hate to admit it, but I liked the box room. Sometimes I would go in there and stand in the middle of the room, just looking at the words on the white boxes. I guess it made me feel good because I could read them. They didn’t jump around, fighting with each other for space, like words on a page did.

I grabbed a box marked
DYLAN
from the top of one of the white rows, set it on the floor, and opened it. Inside were old art projects, report cards from a dozen different schools, a pair of booties, and, at the bottom, something I had hidden.

A map of Texas.

I opened the map, and the lines and words instantly started dancing. I tried to focus until I found Quincy in the bottom right-hand section. Wade had circled the name of the town for me in red ink one afternoon—when I couldn’t find my glasses. Then I called information and got the number for my grandmother, Levida Dawson, and had Wade write it on the map so I wouldn’t lose it.

Hadn’t worked up the nerve to call her yet.

Maybe one day I would just go there and get some answers.

One day I was going to find out what had happened to make everything turn out so wrong.

THE ROAD TO HUNTSVILLE
by D.J. Dawson
University of Texas Press

Prologue

My name is D.J. Dawson—inmate #892. My home is a ten-by-six-foot cell at the Polunsky Unit just outside of Livingston, Texas. There is one metal bunk with a two-inch mattress in this cage I call my home. One stainless-steel sink and a stainless-steel toilet. A small table stacked with books, an electric typewriter, and a small transistor radio.

There is one window, three feet wide and six inches tall, but I can’t see outside unless I stand on my bunk, and even then all I get is a view of the guard tower.

I spend twenty-three hours a day in this cell. I eat in this cell, sleep in this cell, shave in this cell, and crap in this cell. I get one hour a day of solitary recreation in a concrete yard surrounded by chain-link fence. I am not allowed to mix with the general prison population. I am not allowed a television or computer or e-mail.

Reading about how I live, you might assume I am some kind of psychopath, the sort of beast that must be locked away from society. But the truth is that I’m not that different from you. Not very different at all.

And that should scare the hell out of you.

I AM DREAMING
.

It’s the same old nightmare.

I try to force myself awake, but I can’t.

Something moves me forward, toward the sound of screaming.

I hear fireworks and think it is the Fourth of July, but then I remember it’s the middle of winter.

I reach a room with blue curtains, swaying in the breeze coming through a broken window.

The sound of ticking draws my attention to a clock above a door. The ticking gets louder, like the countdown of seconds until a bomb will detonate. Then a door on the clock flies open and a bird bursts through, squawking and screeching. The cackling of the bird mixes with the screams in the room until all I can do is cover my ears and close my eyes while I pray for it to stop.

I sit up, covered in sweat. Look around. Try to get my bearings.

I’m in the Mustang. Wade and Baby Face are curled up together in the backseat.

Look out the front window at a gas pump.

Remember we pulled into a truck stop outside of Kingman.

The memories of last night come back to me.

I think of Jess waiting for me.

No! Stop! She’s better off without me, and I have to keep my head together so we can get to Texas. I must find my father. That’s all I can think about right now.

I fill up the car, and then I get back on the highway heading east.

Craggy mountains ahead as far as the eye can see.

Before long the highway splits so that the westbound lanes are a good thirty yards away, across a field of juniper and turpentine weed.

No buildings but an occasional mobile home.

No cops. Nobody chasing us.

I let myself breathe and read the signs as I pass.

SPEED LIMIT 75

WATCH FOR ROCKS

NEXT SERVICES 22 MILES

DEER FARM 43 MILES

WATCH FOR ELK

They make me think of my mother’s box room. There is distance between the signs, and I find them easy to read. The
pleasure and pride I feel surprises me. Not like California, where words lurch out at you from billboards, flashing neon signs, and passing commuter buses. Out here there is enough space between the words.

Words are like people, I think. Put too many of them too close together and they cause trouble.

“Grand Canyon National Park—a hundred and three miles,” says Wade, waking up and pointing to a sign. “I never seen the Grand Canyon. We gonna go?” he asks, and I realize this is the first time he’s ever been out of Southern California.

“We’ll see,” I say, not wanting to disappoint him so early in the day.

All I can think about now is finding my father. I will see him and talk to him and know what kind of man he is. Then I will know if badness is in my blood, or if, by some miracle, it is something I can outrun.

J
ESS HAD SAID SHE’D BE BRINGING HER CAR IN EARLY ON
Monday, so I got to work by seven. By the time seven forty-five came around I was edgy. At eight o’clock she still hadn’t showed up, and I was a lunatic. By eight fifteen I was wishing I still kept a bottle of Jack Daniels in the trunk of the Mustang.

“Somebody piss on your parade?” Nathan asked me when I jumped down his throat for asking me to hand him a lug wrench.

I told him where he could put the lug wrench.

At nine fifteen Gomez left to go to the salvage yard. He spent every Monday there, looking for cars he could buy cheap, fix up, and turn for a profit. Five minutes after he left, I was surprised to see Baby Face looking out the front of the garage and growling. A hopped-up Prelude Si was parking, and a black van pulled in behind it. My grip around the wrench tightened when I saw who got out of the car.

Eight Ball.

Eight Ball got his name and his tattoo—the number eight
inked on the back of his shining head—after beating a rival gang member to death with a pool cue. The guy had killed Eight Ball’s older brother, Nine Iron, the former leader of the Baker Street Butchers.

After he beat the guy’s face to a pulp, Eight Ball put his body on the pool table, tied his arms and legs together behind his back, and shoved an eight ball in his mouth so he’d look like a stuffed pig when his homies found him.

Eight Ball had been the leader of the BSB ever since.

His younger brother, Two Tone, got out of the Prelude, and two guys named Ajax and Spider got out of the van. Eight Ball looked around the exterior of the shop, checking things out—he was always checking things out. Then he walked through the front lobby and into the back of the shop.

“How did they know we were here?” I asked Wade. I didn’t even carry a cell phone anymore. That’s how paranoid I was that they would find us. I hadn’t seen them since that night they brought in the car from the hit-and-run.

“How would I know?” Wade answered, a little too defensively.

“Gomez won’t like this,” Kip whispered behind me. “If he sees them here …”

“He won’t see them here.” Eight Ball would have been watching the shop. He had to know the old man’s routine.

My whole body tensed as Eight Ball walked over and stood in front of the Range Rover. He folded his arms across his massive chest and stood there staring at me. He was wearing a satin tank top, satin workout pants, and more gold chains than I could count. Two Tone, his shadow, took the same pose.

“Break yo’self,” Eight Ball told Kip and Nathan.

“What?” said Kip.

“Take a walk,” Ajax translated.

Ajax and Spider, the only white guys in the BSB, wore nothing on their upper bodies but shirts of spider web tattoos. A web meant you’d been involved in a plot to kill somebody. Kip and Nathan took one look at their body art and disappeared out the back door.

The really creepy thing about Ajax and Spider was that when they covered up their tattoos, they looked almost respectable. They knew how to dress so they could mix in with a crowd and pick up unsuspecting beach girls—their favorite pastime.

Wade slouched his shoulders and started bopping his head, trying to look like a homie but resembling a plastic Chihuahua on a dashboard. “Wassup, bro?” he said to Eight Ball.

“Ain’t nobody told you to talk,” Eight Ball said. Then he turned to me. “Thought you might cruise by the hood when you got out.”

“We’re on probation.”

“So’s half the set. You been out for a while.”

“Three months,” I admitted.

“Some reason you been keepin’ your distance?”

“Wade and I did our time. We didn’t rat.” We had stuck to our lame story about finding Ellen Carter’s car on the side of the road, even after the DA showed us pictures of the old woman in a coma and I started making bargains with God. Even when she died and the lawyers threatened to charge us with accessory to murder. Wade and I had alibis for the night she got run over, so all we served was eight months in juvie for possession of a stolen vehicle.

Ellen Carter had been an innocent little old lady who ran a
florist shop in El Segundo. Not the type of person you’d expect to jump out in front of a twenty-year-old Honda Civic, waving her arms to try to stop a bunch of gangbangers from stealing her car.

Eight Ball kept staring at me. I didn’t understand. We weren’t members of the gang, just associates. Associates came and went as the gang found them useful.

“We did our time,” I repeated.

“Anybody ask you ’bout doin’ your time?” yelled Two Tone, puffing out his scrawny chest and trying to sound like his brother.

“Don’t act the man, Two Tone,” Eight Ball reprimanded him. A smile flickered across Ajax’s face, and Two Tone looked at the floor of the garage, trying to hide his embarrassment. Two Tone should have been second in command, but Eight Ball wouldn’t allow it. After watching his older brother die, he refused to let the younger one do anything even slightly dangerous. And so Two Tone was left painting stolen cars, making fake IDs, and performing other meaningless jobs.

“Wade and Dylan, they been down for the crew,” said Eight Ball. “They kept their lips sewed. We ’preciate that, ’specially Ajax, since he be the one who ran down the old lady.” Eight Ball threw Ajax a look of disapproval. Eight Ball was dangerous, but he had a code, and I was pretty sure it didn’t include killing defenseless old women.