JOHNNY
In my cell at the Polk County Juvenile Detention Center, I relived many times what I had done to get there. The night I burned down Odom’s Hardware, I was carrying a rock and a whiskey bottle stuffed with a gas-soaked rag in a duffel bag I stole from Bobby Lawson, the fumes traveling with me through the dark. In front of the store, I stood before the dirty plate-glass window and tested the rock’s weight for a moment before launching it through the stenciled letters of my last name. There was a satisfying shattering sound, a spray of shards that glinted in the streetlight. Somewhere distant, a dog began to bark. I waited for an alarm to go off or someone to come into the street or a car to cruise by but there was only silence. I pulled the bottle from under my arm and reached for the silver lighter in my pocket. When I lit the rag, the flame was sudden and hot. I lobbed it through the hole I had smashed and stood there waiting. For what seemed like hours, there was only a faint orange glow. I stepped closer to the window and saw a line of flame dancing across one floor plank. I watched hypnotized as another branched off and then another. After a while, I could smell the fire. Smoke began to rise, thick and black, behind the broken window. I was too tired to wait and see what happened. I turned and walked off, down deserted streets and back through the woods to the Lawsons’.
A few days later, crossing the parking lot of the detention center handcuffed, I still wasn’t sorry for what I had done. If I thought of my mama’s face when she saw Hollis Odom at the co-op, or of his voice calling her a whore, or of those two years we spent suffering on the mountain over the wrong he must have done for the sight of him to have driven her out of her mind, I wanted to burn the place down all over again. That building was the representation of everything I had wanted to destroy since our mama took herself away from us. But when I saw my cell, a closet-sized room with chips and gouges gone from its dreary beige cinder blocks, a metal toilet and a bunk with a thin mattress bolted to the wall, I almost went mad like she did. I thought I wouldn’t make it four days locked up, much less four years. I worried if Laura would be told where I was. I needed her to know, but I made it clear that I didn’t want to see her. Not in that place.
I seldom looked at the other boys there. I can’t remember their faces, even though I sat with them on crowded benches for hours in the classroom. I only had to fight once, when a boy tripped over my foot and rounded on me with his fists. I aimed for his throat with the sharpened pencil I was holding and missed, skidding it along the hard ridge of his jaw to tear through the soft pink meat of his earlobe. I spent two days on lockdown and after that I was left mostly alone. I kept my head down and did as I was told, the way I had learned at the children’s home. I saw what happened to some of the others who made trouble, the boy whose eardrum was busted when a guard kicked him in the head, the one whose nose was broken when he was slammed against the wall, the one I heard crying when they came after lights out to beat him with their sticks. There was only the library for escape, and my poetry books from the woods. I read them over and over. But it was my notebook that saved me. When my thoughts of home and freedom were too much, I emptied them onto the pages, containing them like poison. They did no good inside my head, memories of Laura and my mama and the mountain. It was better to hide them under my mattress, to sleep on top of them as my mama had done, keeping a piece of her old life to take out and examine from time to time. That part of her I understood.
I wrote the ink out of hundreds of pens, a callus forming on the middle finger of my right hand. Sometimes rubbing the callus while I sat trapped in the classroom was enough to settle me. By the end of my time at Polk County I had filled stacks of notebooks, most of them thrown out so they could never be read. I was glad to see them go. I might have burned them if I had been allowed to strike a match. It was a way of purging that the others didn’t have. Fights broke out over nothing among them. The detention center was old and not big enough to house forty of us, a tall fortress of dirty white brick with banks of dark windows behind chain link and razor wire. Even the basketball court was claustrophobic, enclosed on three sides by the building’s outer walls. In all weather but hard rain we went outside in the afternoons, a guard leaning in the door keeping watch. That’s where I first noticed the one who didn’t seem to belong there.
The basketball goal was a netless rim with a flaking backboard, rotten and graying in the shadow of the building. The boys dribbled and shot the ball, chuffing and grunting as brown birds hopped on the pavement around their feet. One afternoon I noticed a boy trying to catch one, stalking it along the edge of the court. I understood his need to hold a bird. I stood against the wall admiring his stealth. He had a harelip and a lumpy skull under dirt-colored bristles of hair. His orange jumpsuit hung on the broomstick of his body, arms and legs poking out of its folds. I’d seen him hunched over his lunch tray as the others slapped the back of his head. There were rumors about what he had done. Some said he had raped a little girl, some said murdered. He didn’t look capable of either.
At the start of winter I saw him sitting on a slat bench patterned with crystals of frost, snow flurries blowing over the pavement. He was talking to a boy who stood a head taller than the rest of us, with pockmarked skin and an undershot jaw. When he strode among the others with his hands in loose fists, they dropped their heads and gave him room. It seemed unlikely that he would befriend the harelip. I stood as close to them as I could without being noticed, hands numb in the pockets of my jumpsuit. After a while, the tall boy bent and untied his shoes. They looked brand-new, stark white in the gunmetal light. Then the harelip slipped out of his own, the shabby color of dirty mop strings. Even from a few yards away, I saw how the rubber sole was coming loose. They made the switch, the harelip tying on the new shoes as the tall boy, wide shoulders bent, wedged his feet into the old ones. Later, when the tall boy had taken the basketball to shoot, the others keeping a respectful distance, I approached the harelip for the first time. I stood over him, my shadow falling across the bench where he sat. He looked up and waited for me to speak. My voice, when it came, was rusty. I had seldom used it there.
“How did you do that?” I asked.
“What,” the harelip said, “you can talk?” His own speech was strange and nasal, the repaired cleft of his lip like a razor slash.
“Why did you trade shoes?”
The ugliness of his smile startled me. “His was better than mine.”
I studied him. Up close, his eyes were glittering slits.
“His mama lives down at the end of my road.”
“So?”
“So I know his family.” He glanced over at the boys playing basketball. The snow had begun to flurry faster, dotting the bristles of his hair and the shoulders of his jumpsuit. “I’m getting out of here next week. I told him I’d kill his little sister.”
My fists clenched inside my pockets. “Why would he believe that?”
The boy flashed his ugly smile again. “He knows what I’m in here for.”
“You killed a little girl?”
“Naw. I just burnt some of her hair off. But I would have if she hadn’t squealed that way. It made the neighbor man come out of his house.”
I stared at him, speechless. After a while, he turned to watch one of the brown birds pecking at a crack in the pavement, as if he had forgotten I was standing there.
That night I lay looking at the shine of the metal toilet in the dark, thinking not of the harelip but of the tall boy. I decided it was his blood that had made him weak in that moment on the bench. His love for his sister had given the harelip power over him, and maybe I was no different. It was my kin that had landed me where I was. If I hadn’t cared what Hollis Odom did to my mama, I wouldn’t have burned down his store and he could never have had me locked up. But I couldn’t take hearing my mama disparaged, as much as it felt like I hated her. I couldn’t let him get by with ruining her the way he had. He was the reason for what happened to us on the mountain and the reason I was in a cell. He had seen to it that I was put away for a long time. But my own moment of weakness had passed. I would be smarter when I finally got out of Polk County, more in control of myself. I wouldn’t give Hollis Odom power over me. I hadn’t forgotten that day in the hardware store, the panic in his eyes and the feel of his throat in my hands. I kept all of it with me. I grew even more determined to know about my father because Hollis Odom didn’t want me to. As soon as I got out, I would go back to Millertown, maybe to my grandfather’s house this time. I would only have to look up his name in a phone book to know his address. I would only have to call and hang up to find out if he was still alive.