The man with the shotgun stood there watching this. Then when it was done he finally seemed to notice me. I was crouching against the far wall. He looked at me for a while, not moving.
“You’re just a goddamned boy,” he said.
I didn’t know if that meant I was off the hook. Then, as if to answer that very question, he breached the shotgun and rummaged around in his pocket with his left hand. I pushed off the wall and came right at him, with as much force as I could gather.
He tried to swing the butt of the shotgun, but because it was breached he didn’t have any leverage or any reach with it. At the last moment I ducked down and hit him low, taking out both knees. I tried to keep rolling through him, even as he grabbed at me with his free hand and tried to pin me with his legs.
I kicked at him until eventually I struggled free. Then I was on my feet and running down the hallway, imagining him grabbing for the shells and reloading. Down the stairs, on the edge of falling with every step. A great pool of blood at the bottom, the Ox’s torn-apart body in the middle of it. Then another mind-shattering blast, ripping through the chandelier and raining down glass all around me.
I was through the open door. Into the cold air. That’s when something came swinging at me from out of view. The arm of the other gray-jacketed man, hitting me across the neck like a branch from one of those trees I could see in the distance.
I was on the ground now. Looking up at the sky, which seemed to be spinning counterclockwise. It made me think back to the only other time in my life I had been captured like this. Only I had no reason to fear for my life then. I had no reason to wonder if they’d stand me up against a wall and rip me apart with a shotgun.
I felt myself being turned over, the handcuffs being slapped tight on my wrists.
“We’ve got you now,” a voice said. “You ain’t going nowhere.”
Seven
Michigan
1996 to 1999
There was an antique store a few blocks down from the liquor store. They had a few old locks there, and the old man who owned the place seemed to already know about me, so I didn’t have to break him in with the whole pantomime routine. I found the locks, some with keys, some without, took them all to the counter, and the owner looked them over and charged me five dollars total.
I took the locks apart and put them back together again. I practiced using my makeshift tools to open them. I had four picks now, and two tension bars, all of them just thin strips of metal I had filed down into different sizes, all of them stuck into rubber erasers that I could use as handles. I was learning by trial and error, and it didn’t take me long to figure out it was all a matter of touch. How much tension you put on the lock, and how you lift each tumbler, one by one, until the whole thing turns free.
I got damned good at it. I really did. That was my summer. Me and a pile of rusty old scrap metal.
Then the day came. The Wednesday after Labor Day. They were just about to start fixing up the high school around then, so you’re going to have to trust me to paint the right picture here. Start with a main building that hadn’t been touched in forty or fifty years. Tired gray bricks, windows that were too few and too small. Surround the whole thing with concrete and fencing and tall light poles. Then spread a dozen trailers all over the place, as if dropped at random. Those were the temporary classrooms to handle the overflow of students.
Or let me put it another way. The day I came to this prison I’m sitting in right now, the day I stepped out of the Corrections Department van and took my place in line at the processing center-I was ready for it. I was ready because I had been through something pretty similar once before. The way it looked that day, the soul-crushing grayness of the place. Above everything else, the way my stomach turned inside out at the thought of spending so much time there, unable to leave.
Yeah, I’d been there. All on that Wednesday after Labor Day, when I stepped off the bus and took my place as a member of the incoming freshman class at Milford High School.
The first thing I noticed was the noise. After those five years at the institute, to suddenly find myself surrounded by over two thousand kids with healthy, normal voices. That main hallway was as loud as a jet engine, everyone talking and shouting on that first day of school, some of the boys chasing each other, pushing each other into the lockers, aiming sharp-knuckled punches at each other’s shoulders. I felt like I was walking into an insane asylum.
There were a lot of other new freshmen, of course. Most of them probably looked as overwhelmed as I was, and probably didn’t say much more than I did, either. Even so, it didn’t take long for me to stand out. Every class I was in, the teacher would make a big deal about introducing me and telling everyone else about my “unique circumstances.” The “challenge” I was bravely facing. Everybody welcome Mike, eh? Just don’t expect him to say thank you in return. Ha ha.
I’m not sure how I got through that first day. It’s all a blur now, looking back on it. I didn’t eat lunch, I remember that much. I kept walking through the hallways, eventually finding myself back at my locker. I felt utterly lost and alone as I stood there, just spinning the dial on my locker, over and over.
The next morning, as I was getting ready to go back to that school again, I admit it… I started thinking about suicide. I rode on the bus in my own little cocoon of silence among the roar of the other kids.
The next day, when I got home I actually started looking around to see if I could find any pills. Uncle Lito had his own bathroom. I usually didn’t have any reason to go in there, but that evening, while he was minding the store, I took inventory of his medicine cabinet. There was aspirin and cough syrup and hangover medicine and jock-itch cream and a thousand other things, but nothing strong enough to do what I had in mind.
I wasn’t driving yet, but still, I thought maybe I could take his car, get up some speed, and then aim right for a tree. Or hell, for those concrete embankments under the railroad bridge. Talk about a proven death trap. My biggest worry about that was that I wouldn’t get the car going fast enough, or that I’d hit something else first and end up just wounded and fucked up and in huge trouble but still very much alive.
What a cheerful turn my little story has taken here, I know, but this was pretty much a running theme for that whole first semester at the high school. Nobody talked to me. I mean nobody. As that first semester went on, it got colder, and darker. I was getting up at six in the morning, in total darkness, to catch the bus at six forty to get to school by seven fifteen, not just going to this place I hated so much, but doing it before the sun even started thinking about coming up.
It makes my heart ache, just thinking back on that time in my life. How lonely I was. How out of place I felt every single minute of every day.
When I went back to school for the second semester, there were new classrooms to find, a new set of kids to get used to me sitting in the back of the room, never making a sound. And right off the bat, a new class for me. Freshman art, or, excuse me, Art Foundations. The teacher was a man named Mr. Martie. He was younger than most of the other teachers in the school. He had a beard and permanently red eyes, and he spent most of that first class mumbling to himself about the size, shape, and color of his headache.
“Let’s not get too excited on the first day, eh?” He walked among the art tables, ripping off sheets of drawing paper from a large pad. When he came to me, he ripped off a sheet and I got maybe eighty percent of it, most of one corner still on the pad. “Just draw something today. I don’t care what.”
He passed by me, not giving me a second look. Not pausing to single me out like most of the other teachers did. So he had that going for him already. With any luck, this would be one class where I could really disappear into the wallpaper.