“Hell, no,” said Lattimer.
“Warden Colvin said we might get puppies,” said Ben.
“For real?” said Chris. He missed Darby.
“I saw Colvin today and he said we might. Every unit could have their own.”
“We could have us a pit,” said Luther. “Or a rot with a head big as a horse. Five would have a fierce-ass dog.”
“Nah,” said Ben. “It wouldn’t be a dog we’d use to fight. It would be like a pet.”
“Ya’ll ain’t getting no kind of dog,” said Lattimer. “Some of these boys in here, they’d torture those poor animals. And a lot of you are allergic to dogs and don’t even know it. You’d be surprised how many.”
“ ’Nother words, your people gonna try to stop it,” said Ali, looking hard at Lattimer.
“They’d be right to stop it. It’s not in my contract to pick up dog shit.”
“It’s not about dog shit,” said Ali. “It’s about keeping us low. Any time the superintendent try to do somethin nice for us, the guard union blocks him.”
“That’s not true.”
“Sure it is. You know it, too.”
“You’re a smart young man,” said Lattimer. “So I’m gonna tell you something, because I believe you can understand it. This ain’t no country club out here. Y’all are here for a reason. You’ve done wrong and now you here to learn and be reformed. You know what re-formed means? It means you were one thing, and then you get formed into something new. What the superintendent don’t seem to understand is, you boys need to learn consequences, not get rewarded for what you done. And that means you don’t get served ice cream sundaes after dinner or get to talk to fine young women during your reading class. And you sure don’t get the right to have no pets. You see your way out of here? You can eat all the ice cream and have all the women and dogs you want. That’s what law-abiding citizens get to do. But you ain’t that. Not yet. You got to earn that.”
A crashing sound came from the media room, and all turned their heads. Lawrence Newhouse was cursing, and struggling from the sound of it, and though they did not say it, the boys assumed his conflict was with the big guard, Scott. And then Lawrence came airborne out of the media room, with Scott moving strong toward him, and Lawrence was falling, and before he hit the ground Scott had grabbed his shirt and lifted him back up to give him more of what he’d already had. Scott threw him against a wall of shellacked cinder block. His face hit it pretty hard. Scott put Lawrence’s right arm behind his back and twisted it up, getting control of the young man.
“Boy, you just had to get on my last nerve,” said Scott, and he began to push Lawrence out toward the cells.
Most of the boys had lowered their eyes. None of them liked Lawrence, but when the guards won, it was like they had been robbed of a piece of their manhood, too.
As Lawrence passed he looked at Ali, who had not looked away, and said, “What the fuck you staring at, Holly?”
Ali said nothing. Lawrence spit a mouthful of blood in the direction of Ali and Chris. Scott hustled him down the hall.
“Bughouse always be tweakin,” said Luther Moore.
“That boy just angry,” said Lattimer.
Ben Braswell looked at Chris. “You think we might get a puppy, man?”
“We might,” said Chris, though he knew Ali was correct. The guards’ arm of the FOP union, which tended to fight any reforms the superintendent proposed, would find a way to stop the boys from having pets.
“You got a dog at home, right?” said Ben.
“Yeah,” said Chris.
“You’re lucky, ” said Ben. Chris could feel Ali’s knowing stare but did not look his way.
“Time for y’all to get to your bedrooms,” said Lattimer.
The boys got up from their seats without objection and headed to their cells.
As they walked, they could hear the old man still speaking to them, giving them his parting words of inspiration. “Another good day for you fellas. Another day closer to your goal. You get right with God, you gonna get right with yourselves.”
The boys went down the narrow hall, where Lattimer would wait until they entered their six-by-nine spaces, then use his Joliet key to lock the steel doors behind them. From his own cell, Lawrence Newhouse was alternately screaming and laughing. His anguished wail echoed in the hall.
“Ain’t no God in here,” said Ali.
Chris walked into his cell.
The next day, while Chris and Ali were walking in the hall between classes, Ali took a fist in the back of the head, for no apparent reason, from a boy named Maximus Dukes. Ali tripped and fell to the floor, severing the bridge of his glasses. Without even thinking of himself, Chris was on Maximus, throwing him up against the wall and delivering several body blows and one solid uppercut to the jaw before Maximus could return fire. He was a big boy and Chris’s rain had not hurt him, and he came back strong. Chris took a glancing temple shot and one deep right to the solar plexus that blew half the wind out of him, but he kept his feet, and several more punches were thrown before the guards charged in and stopped the fight. It had been meaningless, and there was no rancor between any of them again. Because neither Chris nor Maximus had gone down, their reps had been elevated. The fight cost Chris his Level 5, but he would achieve it at a later date.
Of the many things Chris learned at Pine Ridge, one would be embedded in his mind for years after his release: When you or one of your own is attacked, retaliation is mandatory, no matter the consequences or repercussions. It has to be on.
The guards had seen Maximus blind-punch Ali. Wasn’t any need for Chris to step in. But it wouldn’t have been as satisfying to see the guards strong-arm Maximus and lead him down the hall. When Chris swung on the boy, his blood got up in a righteous way, and he felt like a man. He wished his father had been there to see that he’d stood tall.
EIGHT
For security reasons, doors had been removed in the bathroom stalls, so the boys voided their bowels in full view of the other inmates. It was something Chris had to get used to quickly. Let it bother you, you’d have to hold your shits till you got back in your cell. That wasn’t natural, and no one liked to stink up their rooms.
On the same level of indignity was the morning ritual of group showers. There were no privacy curtains or barriers of any kind, and if someone was modest or ashamed, he had to get over it, that is if he wanted to be clean. The open area was meant to discourage violence, and perhaps it had been a wise idea, as there were rarely serious altercations in the showers. The best Chris could say about the experience was that it was fast. If you lingered in the shower more than a little bit, the tepid water would go cold.
Chris and the other boys did not worry about nonconsensual homosexuality in the showers or anywhere else inside the walls. It was the most dreaded aspect of prison for a boy on the outside looking in, but the truth was, oral and anal rape were extremely rare at Pine Ridge. The boys in juvenile had not yet gone to that level of degradation that occurred in adult male prisons. There were scattered consensual homosexual relations here, but, somewhat surprisingly, it was not an issue of derision among the boys who were straight. They knew who among them had gone that way, but didn’t berate them to their faces or, for the most part, behind their backs. Those boys were just as tough as the other boys, and no one was going out of their way to find a fight.
What took away their dignity was the presence of the guards, who watched the boys shower though a Plexiglas window. The fact that they, fully clothed and outfitted with security gear, could stare at the inmates, naked and completely vulnerable, seemed wrong. Thing of it was, you didn’t know what they were thinking while they were looking at you. Chris was reminded of that one summer when his mother had persuaded his father to vacation with a wealthy neighborhood family, the Rubinos, who had invited them to their house on Martha’s Vineyard. The house was steps away from a nude beach, and from the start, even though the Flynns had been assured that they did not have to “participate,” his father had been annoyed. Many families went naked, including their prepubescent sons and daughters, and there were also grown men on the same beach, naked and alone, and
