Jack said, “I never saw you before.”
Across the room, a massive boy had lifted himself off one of the blue couches and was now standing at attention. He too wore a white turtleneck sweater and a military nameplate. His hands wandered nervously from his sides to his belt, into the pockets of his blue jeans, back to his sides. He was at least six-three and seemed to weigh nearly three hundred pounds. Acne burned across his cheeks and forehead. This, clearly, was Bast.
“Well, perhaps it will come to me later,” Sunlight Gardener said. “Heck, come up here and help our new arrivals at the desk, will you?”
Bast lumbered forward, scowling. He made a point of coming up very close to Wolf before he sidestepped past him, scowling more fiercely all the while—if Wolf had opened his eyes, which he did not, he would have seen no more than the ravaged moonscape of Bast’s forehead and the mean small eyes, like a bear’s eyes, bulging up at him from beneath crusty brows. Bast switched his gaze to Jack, muttered, “C’mon,” and flapped a hand toward the desk.
“Registration, then take them up to the laundry for clothes,” Gardener said in a flat voice. He smiled with chromelike brilliance at Jack. “Jack Parker,” he said softly. “I wonder who you really are, Jack Parker. Bast, make sure everything is out of his pockets.”
Bast grinned.
Sunlight Gardener drifted across the room toward an obviously impatient Franky Williams and languidly withdrew a long leather wallet from his jacket’s inside pocket. Jack saw him begin to count money out into the policeman’s hands.
“Pay attention, snotface,” said the boy behind the desk, and Jack snapped around to face him. The boy was playing with a pencil, the smirk on his face an utterly inadequate disguise for what seemed to Jack’s keyed-up perceptions his characteristic anger—a rage that bubbled far down within him, eternally stoked. “Can he write?”
“Jeez, I don’t think so,” Jack said.
“Then you’ll have to sign in for him.” Singer shoved two legal-sized sheets of paper at him. “Print on the top line, write on the bottom one. Where the X’s are.” He fell back into his chair, raising the pencil to his lips, and slumped eloquently into its corner. Jack supposed that was a trick learned from the very Reverend Sunlight Gardener.
JACK PARKER, he printed, and scrawled something like that at the bottom of the sheet. PHILIP JACK WOLF. Another scrawl, even less like his real handwriting.
“Now you’re wards of the State of Indiana, and that’s what you’ll be for the next thirty days, unless you decide to stay longer.” Singer twitched the papers back toward himself. “You’ll be—”
“Decide?” Jack asked. “What do you mean, decide?”
A trifle of red grew smooth beneath Singer’s cheeks. He jerked his head to one side and seemed to smile. “I guess you don’t know that over sixty percent of our kids are here voluntarily. It’s possible, yeah. You could decide to stay here.”
Jack tried to keep his face expressionless.
Singer’s mouth twitched violently, as if a fishhook had snagged it. “This is a pretty good place, and if I ever hear you ranking it I’ll pound the shit out of you—it’s the best place you’ve ever been in, I’m sure. I’ll tell you another thing: you got no choice. You have to respect the Sunlight Home. You understand?”
Jack nodded his head.
“How about him? Does he?”
Jack looked up at Wolf, who was blinking slowly and breathing through his mouth.
“I think so.”
“All right. The two of you will be bunkmates. The day starts at five in the morning, when we have chapel. Fieldwork until seven, then breakfast in the dining hall. Back to the field until noon, when we get lunch plus Bible readings—everybody gets a crack at this, so you better start thinking about what you’ll read. None of that sexy stuff from the Song of Songs, either, unless you want to find out what discipline means. More work after lunch.”
He looked sharply up at Jack. “Hey, don’t think that you work for nothing at the Sunlight Home. Part of our arrangement with the state is that everybody gets a fair hourly wage, which is set against the cost of keeping you here—clothes and food, electricity, heating, stuff like that. You are credited fifty cents an hour. That means that you earn five dollars a day for the hours you put in—thirty dollars a week. Sundays are spent in the Sunlight Chapel, except for the hour when we actually put on the
The red smoothed itself out under the surface of his skin again, and Jack nodded in recognition, being more or less obliged to.
“If you turn out right and if you can talk like a human being, which most people can’t, then you might get a shot at OS—Outside Staff. We’ve got two squads of OS, one that works the streets, selling hymn sheets and flowers and Reverend Gardener’s pamphlets, and the other one on duty at the airport. Anyhow, we got thirty days to turn you two scumbags around and make you see how dirty and filthy and diseased your crummy lives were before you came here, and this is where we start, right now exactly.”
Singer stood up, his face the color of a blazing autumn leaf, and delicately set the tips of his fingers atop his desk. “Empty your pockets. Right now.”
“Right here and now,” Wolf mumbled, as if by rote.
“TURN EM OUT!” Singer shouted. “I WANT TO SEE IT ALL!”
Bast stepped up beside Wolf. Reverend Gardener, having seen Franky Williams to his car, drifted expressively into Jack’s vicinity.
“Personal possessions tend to tie our boys too much to the past, we’ve found,” Gardener purred to Jack. “Destructive. We find this a very helpful tool.”
“EMPTY YOUR POCKETS!” Singer bawled, now nearly in a straightforward rage.
