Kindness for Weakness Read online

  My heart thumps inside the cage of my chest. I try to focus, but it’s impossible. Because I’ve just been caught by the cops, and my messed-up, stupid life is over. In the distance, Louis’s car backs into a driveway and turns around. I watch the taillights fade as he turns a corner and disappears.

  12

  The cop pulls my arms behind my back and slams cuffs around my wrists. Metal strikes off the bony part, but I don’t say anything; I figure that getting arrested is supposed to hurt. The cop sits next to me panting, pointing at the bag.

  “What’s in it?” he says, reaching.

  I put my cheek down on the cold sidewalk and try to get my breathing under control. Don’t go to pieces, I tell myself.

  He takes out half a dozen envelopes, all filled with twenties, and three sealed mailers stuffed with drugs. The other cop pulls up in the black SUV and leaves it running. He gets out and puts me up against the side of the cruiser, spreading my legs by tapping the insides of my feet with his boots, and then patting me down. The one who chased me reads me my rights and then stuffs me into the backseat behind a Plexiglas shield. Parked on the side of the road, they ask me about a hundred questions designed to get me to rat on Louis.

  “Where’d you get the drugs?”

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  “What’s your name, kid?”

  “James.”

  “You should tell us, James. It’s better that way.”

  “I said I don’t know.” It’s like I’m some other person reading a script from a bad cop movie.

  “Tell us who you work for.”

  “No one. I go to high school.”

  “Don’t be a wiseass.”

  “I’m not. I was going to the creek to read a book. It’s in the bag. How many drug dealers read Jack London novels?” What’s ridiculous is that it’s half true. I am a terrible drug dealer, maybe the worst ever. And I do read books by the creek. It’d be funny if it wasn’t my life.

  Finally the two cops give up, cursing under their breath because they think I’m a smart-ass. The one cop puts the SUV in gear and drives away. Through the back window of the cruiser I watch the mist darken the street and sidewalk. I can see the color of the grass deepening, becoming impossibly green the way it does in early spring when you’ve almost stopped believing that things will ever grow again. Right now it looks like each individual blade has been painted, and I wonder who will notice these things when I’m gone. Who will watch the fishermen wade silently into the deep swirling trout pools? Who will see the little kids riding their Big Wheels and playing their wild games that make sense only to them? No one, I am sure, but so what? They are stupid things to spend time thinking about anyway. If I wasn’t such a loser, I would be doing more with my time, like going to parties, playing touch football in the school parking lot, or getting laid.

  I touch the Plexiglas divider and pull my finger away, leaving a smudge of a print, oily circles and whorls of my sorry-ass identity. I wonder where Louis is and if he’ll show up at the police station with a lawyer. There’s got to be something he can do.

  “Officer,” I say through the hole in the divider. “What’s going to happen to me?”

  The driver ignores me; his partner says, “What the hell do you think is going to happen? You’ll get booked and sent away for selling shit that ruins people’s lives.”

  “Maybe their lives were ruined already.” But I’m thinking about myself and not the people who buy Louis’s drugs. And I know these cops don’t care, because they’ve probably heard all kinds of sad stories, and it’s no excuse.

  “Shut up!” they both say.

  Somehow being sent away doesn’t sound so bad. Because when I really think about it, like when I’m lying on my mother’s couch trying to fall asleep, or wandering without anywhere to go, or poking through the fridge hoping that something good to eat will magically appear between the half-empty ketchup bottle and the carton of spoiled milk, staying seems impossible. Every day there is less of my mother. The only good things have been joking around with Earl, and morning root beer talks with Mr. Pfeffer. It’s not much of a life. Not really. So maybe I should go away.

  Back on Central Avenue, I catch a glimpse of Louis’s rusty car heading in the opposite direction. Leaving me. I tell myself it’s not him; it’s getting dark out, and there’s lots of rusty Civics in town. It could be anybody. But deep in my heart I know that it is him, and I don’t want to think about what it means.

  The cop turns off Central and drives slowly, past one of the nice houses on Fairview with the playing kids. Only, the kids aren’t playing anymore; they are standing on the sidewalk watching us. I raise my hand in a feeble kind of a wave, which they don’t return, probably because the windows are blacked out and they can’t see me.

  13

  At the police station more cops take my picture and type stuff into a computer. They work mechanically without energy or emotion, reading standard questions from a clipboard. Then, in a file room, a heavy guy with thick black hair and too much cologne presses the thumb and fingers of my right hand onto a black ink pad. Even his eyebrows are impossibly thick and black, and they move around when he concentrates. He takes a white note card, rolls each finger of my hand in a little box.

  When he’s done, he puts the cards in a file with my name on it. “You’re in the system now,” he says, as though this should mean something to me.

  “I think I’m already in the system. I was in trouble before. A misdemeanor.”

  “Good for you.” He takes a cloth and dips it in rubbing alcohol. “For your hands.”

  The small room is filled with the sound of his breathing and the smell of his cologne. It smells good, and the words Old Spice pop into my head, but I don’t know if that’s what it is. Maybe I saw a commercial for it. Maybe it’s what fathers are supposed to put on before they head off to work. He looks like a father. I know he doesn’t like me, but maybe he’s good to his own kid. Maybe there are lots of good fathers out there, and Louis and I just got shortchanged. Maybe it could have been different for us, if ours had stayed. Fuck it, I think. I don’t need a father anyway.

  The guy hands me off to a female cop, who calls home. Ron picks up on the fifth ring and shouts, “What? Who?” The cop has to hold the phone away from her ear. I can picture Ron sweaty and shirtless, unshaven, pacing the small living room where I sleep, holding a cigarette in one hand, the telephone in the other. I can almost smell the smoke and bad breath coming through the phone’s mouthpiece. I hear him tell the cop that my mother doesn’t want to talk to me, which I know is a lie. The lady hangs up and asks if I want her to call anyone else.

  “No,” I say, even though I do want to talk to Louis and ask him where the hell he is, and why he left me. Is he getting a lawyer? Is he picking up Mom? He’s the one who could tell me what to do. He would tell me how to handle myself, what I should and shouldn’t say. But I am afraid that he won’t answer his phone. Or worse, he will say, “Sorry, bro. You’re on your own now. Don’t tell them shit about me. I don’t exist to you anymore.”

  And I don’t think I could handle that. It’s such an awful thought that I decide to put it out of my mind and never think of it again. I go so far as to imagine an old-fashioned safe, the square heavy kind that they used to have in movies. I put the bad thought inside (written on an imaginary piece of paper: Louis left you … again!) and slam the door shut. I spin the dial and lock the memory up for a long time.

  I sit down on a hard wooden chair next to a couple of other kids in an otherwise empty room. One of the kids is crying, but when he sees me looking at him, he says, “The fuck are you looking at?”

  I say nothing because I don’t care about anyone else right now. He can curse or threaten me all he wants. I don’t give a damn.

  He says, “I’m talking to you, bitch!”

  I turn away, and after a moment, he goes back to crying. A man with a badge pinned to the pocket of his suit jacket comes in and touches the cursing kid on
the shoulder. “Tough or sensitive, Neil. Pick one and stick with it.” The kid grumbles and looks down at his feet. He wipes at his eyes with the back of his hand.

  “James,” the guy says. “Come with me.”

  I follow him upstairs to a crowded office with brown metal desks and piles of manila folders overstuffed with papers. He takes one off the pile and says, “Only one prior? Trespassing on school property?”

  I nod. “I didn’t do anything wrong. I was just hanging out after school was closed.”

  “So how do you go from that to a goodie bag full of meth and twenty-dollar bills?”

  “I don’t know.” And it’s true, I don’t.

  “You’re a shitty liar, James, and an even worse drug dealer. I heard you made Officer Slater go for a run today. Is that true?”

  I put my head in my hands. Even as a drug dealer I am a fuckup.

  “He wasn’t after you, you know. He called out to tell you your shoe was untied. Why’d you run?”

  “I don’t know. I panicked.”

  “What would your brother, Louis, think about that? He wouldn’t make such a stupid mistake.”

  “You know my brother?”

  “Sure, I do. And I know you’ve been delivering for him.”

  “I haven’t.”

  “Then, have fun in jail while Louis drives around in his super cool Bronco picking up sixteen-year-old girls at the bowling alley. What year is that truck, a seventy-one?”

  “Seventy-three,” I say.

  “Right. Let me ask you something, James.”

  I do my best not to listen, because I know what he’s going to ask me, and I don’t want to hear it. He doesn’t understand that I am trying to cover for my brother even though I’m scared to do it. I want to stand on my own legs. I’ll bet this guy has never read The Sea Wolf. And he’s certainly never been scared. Why would he be? He’s got a gun and a badge. He’s an adult.

  “Would your tough-guy brother do the same for you?”

  “Yes.” But I know it’s not true, and this fills me with sadness and shame, though I don’t know why it should. I cover my eyes with the palms of my hands, trying to block out the image of my brother driving away, the red of his taillights bleeding through.

  “Then where is he? All he has to do is walk in here, and I’ll cut you loose. I don’t even want you, James. You’re a little fish. You’re not worth my time.”

  The detective guy puts his feet up on the cluttered desk and laces his hands behind his head. “I have a boy about your age. He got in trouble once. Stole a car with his idiot friends and crashed it. All of them drunk, too. I wanted to kill him, if you want to know the truth.”

  I pull my hands away from my face.

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing!” He stares at me like I’m nobody, like I’m only the thinnest, faintest image of a dumb kid. “Because I looked out for him. I helped him get out of trouble. Because that’s what families do.”

  “Oh.”

  “So who’s looking out for you, James?”

  I turn to stone. I am listening, and I hear the words, but I don’t want to think about their meaning. I see Ron with his black cracked teeth and the sour acrid smell you can only get from blowing mom’s rent money on a three-day meth binge. He and his sweaty tweaker friends are partying in the living room while my mother sits at the kitchen table, vacant, as though the smoke leaking from her cigarette is the last part of her that really matters or cares, and there’s nothing she or anyone else can do to stop it from dissipating, because, after all, it’s only smoke. And I can see Louis, too, driving around with a bruised eye and his arm in a sling, wondering how he’s going to pay off those guys and get his precious truck back. Like he cares more about the Bronco than me.

  “I guess I have to look out for myself,” I say.

  “Do that by telling me what I want to know. That’s how you look out for yourself.”

  “I can’t. I’m sorry.” And I really am, too, because I believe this guy when he says he doesn’t want me. Even though I don’t know his name or anything about him, I believe him. But, still, I can’t do it. I can’t rat out my brother.

  He shakes his head in disgust. “Christ,” he says. “How fucking stupid can you be? You didn’t even know what you were selling, did you?”

  I shake my head.

  “Then I’m sorry, too. You’ll spend the night here and see a judge first thing in the morning.” He stands and stretches. “It’s a shame you have to go down for someone else. You don’t seem like such a bad kid.”

  14

  The juvenile detention part of the county courthouse is on the third floor. It’s an old brick and stone building downtown, just a few blocks from the lake. The main hallway is covered in wavy, chipped plaster that shows a dozen shades of blue, white, and off-white from decades of repainting. It smells like paint fumes and disinfectant.

  After a dinner of hot dogs and macaroni and cheese (served on a cardboard tray with a flimsy plastic spork), I sleep fitfully in a small cell with bare pockmarked walls. Someone has connected the pocks with lines of permanent marker that outline a giant “Fuk You!” In the morning I wake with a start on my tiny cot, disoriented, thinking that I’m still at home on my mother’s couch. Slowly I remember where I am and what has happened—making deliveries for Louis, the pretty waitress at Rusty’s, getting busted.

  I try to pace back and forth between the “Fuk You!” wall and the cell’s door, but there’s not enough space; three strides and I’m at the other side. Eventually the memories find their way in, and I sit on my cot leaning against the wall. I think back a couple weeks to a rare morning when Ron was out of the apartment and my mother wasn’t sleeping off a hangover. She shuffled silently through the kitchen with her head down, ashamed of the welts and bruises dusted over with makeup. She scooped coffee grounds into the machine and then placed her thin hand over mine, letting it rest for a moment, as if to say through a single cold touch, “I love you, but I’m not strong enough to fix this.”

  I wish I had said something to her, something simple and half true like, “I love you, too, Mom. I understand, and it’s okay.” But I didn’t say anything, because I don’t understand. And it’s not okay. Not really. So I did the only thing that made sense at the time: I pulled back my hand and walked away.

  A knock on my door tells me that it’s breakfast.

  I sit at a table with Neil, the cursing/crying kid from the lobby. We each get two little kid-sized boxes of Corn Flakes, with milk and orange juice, and a paper plate of congealed scrambled eggs. Even though it looks awful, I’m starving, and happy to have something to eat.

  “Sorry I was in your grill yesterday,” Neil says, apparently no longer angry or tearful. He tugs at the collar of his shirt and scans the room nervously. “I hate this fucking place. I need a cigarette.”

  Neil shovels eggs while he talks. He seems calm, almost relaxed. “You going to residential?”

  “I have no idea,” I say.

  “I been everywhere,” he says with pride. “Morton’s the worst. Don’t get sent to Morton; they beat the living shit out of you there.”

  “For real?”

  “It’s true. My friend Octavio got his jaw busted by the guards on his first day. They fucked him up as soon as he walked in the front door.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. ’Cause they can.”

  A guard brings us a garbage can and motions for us to dump our trays. When we’re done, I shake hands with Neil and wish him good luck.

  “Good luck to you, too, man,” he says. “Watch yourself and don’t trust no one.”

  15

  I follow a guard downstairs to one of the courtrooms, where I stand before a gray-haired judge who looks tired and mildly disgusted, like he might have eaten some of my eggs. He glares over the rims of his glasses and says, “Criminal possession of a controlled substance with intent to distribute. Young man, are you aware of the seriousness of your charges?”

/>   “Say, ‘Yes, Your Honor,’ ” whispers a guy in a gray suit who says he’s my court-appointed lawyer. I look at his average face and his average haircut, and I know that in a few minutes I won’t be able to remember what he looks like. How can he be my lawyer when he doesn’t even know my name? I don’t know his name, either. “Go on, say it.”

  “Yes, Your Honor.”

  The judge considers this for a moment as he shuffles the papers in front of him. “The defendant is remanded to the custody of the Division of Youth Services for a period of twelve months. Next!”

  “Twelve months?” I say to my nameless lawyer, who is already packing up his things.

  “Yes. Good luck.”

  I’ve never heard of the Division of Youth Services before, but I’m pretty sure I can’t do that amount of time. The eggs from breakfast rise in my throat, but I force them back down, telling myself to breathe and not lose my head. At least it’s not adult prison or that place Neil talked about. Milton, I think. So I’m grateful for that. And maybe there’s a way to get out early, if you behave and work hard. I resolve to work very hard.

  As if on cue, a guard with a tattoo of a baby’s foot on his neck shackles my wrists and ankles. He’s a powerfully built guy whose muscle is turning to fat. His name badge says MR. HORVATH.

  He grips my upper arm too hard and shoves me down the hall toward the parking lot, where a big black van awaits with the state emblem painted in yellow on the door. “Transport rules,” he says. “One: hands at your sides at all times. Two: I’m in charge of the music, so don’t even think about asking. And three: keep your mouth shut. It’s a long trip, and I don’t want to hear any shit from you.”