Jesus Land (22 page)

“I s’pose.”

“Alrighty then!” Debbie gushes. “Let’s get your bags, and we’re off!”

Ron strides to an overflowing trash can and throws my name on top of the heap, then punches it down repeatedly until it sinks from view; he walks back, slapping his hands together and grinning as if he’d accomplished some great feat.

We walk down the hallway into a large crowded room. Here, a man with a rifle guards a jumble of suitcases dumped in the middle of the room. He slings his rifle over his back and examines first my ticket stub, then my face. I smile at him nervously, and he steps aside. Ron helps me extract my bags from the pile.

“Now on to Customs,” Debbie says. “Didn’t bring any illegal contraband, did you?”

I look at her, preparing to smile, but she’s not joking.

“No,” I tell her. “I didn’t.”

We join a line snaking toward a row of conference tables where more uniformed men pick through the guts of splayed luggage. As Debbie and Ron stand a few feet away, the official frisking my belongings—a pimply-faced boy a few years older than me—scoops up a pair of my white cotton panties with SCHEERES scrawled on the waistband in Mother’s handwriting and squeezes them, slowly winking at me. I look away, my cheeks burning.

When he’s done fingering my underthings, the official dismisses me with a backward slash of his hand. Debbie rushes over. She picks up my toiletry bag and peers into it, shaking it around.

“Medications aren’t allowed,” she says, slipping a small bottle of aspirin into her purse. “Didn’t you read the orientation packet?”

I hate her already.

She turns without waiting for my answer and leads the way down another hallway—Ron carrying one of my suitcases, me dragging the other—and we step through a door into an unlit parking lot. The hot air is sticky with moisture, and the full moon glances dully off parked cars.

Halfway across the parking lot, a gang of beggar kids appears, swarming around us and tugging at our clothes and the suitcases with tiny hands.

“Me help! Me help!”

Debbie barks at them in Spanish, and a girl in a tattered pink dress turns to her and sticks out her tongue before prancing off. I smirk; my sentiments exactly.

We stop beside a white van with “New Horizons Youth Ministries, Inc.” on the sides and Ron digs in his pocket for the keys. A breeze churns through the yellow flowering bushes beside the van, filling the air with a dense perfume, and somewhere beyond the hedge, waves collapse on sand with a muted swoosh. My pulse quickens. I’m on Hispaniola,
Treasure Island—
the book I read three times in fifth grade. Maybe there are adventures to be had here, maybe this won’t be so bad after all.

Debbie hoists herself into the front passenger seat and Ron slides open the van’s side panel and heaves my suitcases inside before signaling me to get in. I bend my head to enter and stop short: There are no seats behind the front bench, just a metal floor. It’s a cargo van. I turn to look at Ron.

“Should be a mat back there somewhere,” he says. “Be about two hours, so try and make yourself comfortable.”

I crawl in and the door clanks shut behind me. Ron walks around the van and climbs into the driver’s seat, pausing to roll down his window before starting the ignition. There’s enough
space on the front bench for a third person, yet I am cargo. I can’t find the mat, so I perch on a suitcase.

“Alrighty, here we go!” Debbie chirps, running chubby fingers through her cropped brown hair.

As we rattle down the dirt road leaving the airport, I clutch the window ledge with my fingertips and peer through the dusty glass at the Dominican Republic. Images blaze in the van’s headlights then disappear. Clapboard shanties gussied up in jewel colors, pink, purple, green. Solitary figures with baskets and bundles of sticks on their heads who turn to regard our passage with blank faces. Ash-colored cows with enormous humps on their shoulders and turkey wattles under their necks. Everything strange and other-worldly. And everywhere the sweet stench of smoke and rot and vegetation.

We speed up when the road turns concrete and curves along the ocean. The van’s rattling is replaced by the low thrum of the tires gripping asphalt, and the air thickens with the briny smell of the ocean. I gaze at a giant moonbeam rippling over the water, and for the first time since my arrival, think of David.

“So, when can I see my brother?” I ask.

My question hangs in the sweaty air like a large object. An object that is ignored and grows dim and shrinks and is finally sucked out the window into the rushing night. I clear my throat to repeat the question, louder this time, when Debbie speaks.

“He asked to wait up for you, but I told him no,” she says, her rah-rah voice gone.

“How come?” I ask. “I haven’t seen him in months!”

“Because it’s the rules,” she says flatly.

I start to protest, but she lifts a hand to the dashboard and shoves a tape into the cassette player, and Sandi Patti’s “Lord Oh
Lord, How Majestic Is Thy Name” bursts from the speakers and ricochets off the van’s metal walls. It’s the same tape Mother used to play to block us out in her van.

I shove my suitcase perch into a back corner, away from the synthesized organ music and these strangers who now control my life. Plugging my ears, I scowl out the rear window.

After jail, the judge sent me to a children’s home until my parents completed the paperwork for Escuela Caribe.

I got my first square meals in weeks at the home, but also had to do chores and participate in activities with the other kids, all of whom were much younger than me. I avoided them as much as possible until the social workers came around and forced us to participate in humiliating activities like finger painting or charades.

Then, I went home to pack. My parents were chilly to me, but Rejoice Radio played so loudly during supper that we didn’t have to talk. Afterward, I listened to WAZY for hours and hours in my room, trying to memorize the words to the songs, knowing that it would be a long time before I could listen to secular music again.

Scott showed up at the airport with a promise ring. He’d become protective of me after I left home; just as my feelings for him iced over, his flared up. As I walked down the tube to the airplane, he lurched after me, begging me to run away with him.

“Run away to what?” I asked.

He couldn’t come up with an answer before a security guard came and escorted him away.

I wake when the van bangs over a pothole and I’m chucked against the metal siding. Sandi Patti is still wailing for Jesus on
the tape player, but the air pouring through the windows is cooler now, fresher. I climb back onto the suitcase and look outside. We drive down a dirt road flanked by pine trees, and then the pine trees end and the road winds through pastures dotted with the deformed ash-colored cows.

A sign spelling out
JARABACOA
in white reflectors appears in the headlights and I tilt my watch to the moonlight; it’s a little after two. A dim streetlamp appears at the side of the road, and then another, and then comes a row of shanties. As we drive through the tight streets of the dark village, a pack of dogs lopes silently behind us, herding us toward our destination. They stop when we ford a shallow stream crossing the road. The van tilts up a hill and bushes rake the side paneling as vegetation closes in on us.

“We’re here,” Ron calls over the music when a metal gate looms abruptly before us. He taps the horn twice, and it swings open. A Dominican with a long knife hanging from his belt and a German shepherd at his side salutes us as we drive through the gate, then closes it behind us.

Just inside, two buildings—long and low like cement chicken coops—face each other across a courtyard, and Ron pulls up to them and cuts the engine. Sandi Patti finally shuts up.

“You’ll stay here tonight,” Debbie says, switching on a flashlight and dancing it over the buildings. “Tomorrow you’ll move into your home.”

Home. Group home, she means. Ron opens the side panel, grabs a suitcase, and carries it toward the buildings, and I stumble out on cramped legs.

The school is built on a steep hillside surrounded by a barbed wire fence. Far below lays a dark valley, and above us are four small buildings, the residences. Three for boys, one for girls, David wrote.

“Let’s go, it’s late,” Debbie says, wagging the flashlight at me. I jerk my suitcase from the van and tug it over the gravel, following her across the brick courtyard to a small room at the far end of the first building. I set my suitcase next to the one Ron brought in. There’s a cot shoved against the far wall, but no other furniture. Debbie unhooks a flashlight from the wall and hands it to me.

“No lights?” I ask.

“Nope,” Debbie says. “No electricity. We’re pretty much isolated out here. Pretty much alone.”

No electricity. That means no TV. No radio. No VCR. No ColecoVision. No hair dryer or curling iron. Why didn’t David mention any of this? These things are important! I shine my flashlight on a large green bug crawling up the wall over the cot.

“Don’t worry, those ones don’t bite,” Debbie says.

I turn to her.

“When do I get to see David?” I ask again, because I really need him to explain some things to me.

“We’ll discuss that in the morning, along with everything else,” she says curtly, turning to leave. “The bathroom’s two doors down. I’ll be by to wake you at seven o’clock sharp.”

I wait until her footsteps fade before stepping outside; the moon has set and the sky glitters with billions of stars. A breeze shuffles through the palm trees at the edge of the courtyard—
shh shh shh—
and foreign noises come from the jungle on the other side of the barbed wire.
Birds? Animals? People
? I contemplate the residences on the hill and wonder which one holds my brother.

A sick squalling prods me toward consciousness at dawn, and it takes me a second to recognize the crow of roosters. In the next second, I remember where I am.
Reform school
. I squint at my watch in the gray light that leaks through a small window above
the cot. 5:20. Before the roosters started croaking, I was dreaming about swimming in the Harrison pool. I was naked and alone in the warm turquoise water, my hair streaming over my shoulders, happy. Then Jerome walked naked out of the boys’ locker room and dove into the water and the pool turned into a murky ocean. I thrashed through the cold waves in a panic, searching for the shoreline, waiting for his hand to tug me under.

My heart is still pounding as I grab my jean jacket off the cement floor and wad it under my head as a pillow. Sometime in the dark, the deadbolt slid shut on the door, locking me in. Where could I have run?

I drift in and out of sleep until the deadbolt slides back and the door swings open. “Time to begin,” Debbie says, her wide form filling the doorframe. “Meet me in the courtyard in five minutes sharp.”

After she pulls the door shut, I jump from the bed and salute her,
Heil Hitler
! before tugging on my clothes. I take the safari hat I bought at Tippecanoe Mall last week from my suitcase. The jungle look was in, and I was going to the jungle, so I bought it. I jam it on my head and walk out the door. Let the adventure begin.

Outside, the sky shimmers like blue cellophane. Underneath, everything’s green. The valley below is combed into orderly rows of plants and water, which I recognize from
National Geographic
as rice paddies.

I walk past picnic tables that I didn’t notice last night to the bathroom. These picnic tables are made of real wood, they’re not the plastic jail kind. Maybe that’s a good sign. Debbie sits at one of them with her back to me, shuffling through sheets of paper.

The bathroom reeked last night and reeks again this morning and now I find out why. Next to the toilet is a wastebasket brimming with wadded-up toilet paper, some of it smeared brown. A
sign is taped to the side of the stall: Do NOT put ANYTHING but human waste in the toilet, it will CLOG!

I hold my nose as I pee, then add my dirty paper to the pile. At the sink, I twist the hot water handle all the way open, but the water stays cold. No electricity, no hot water, broken toilets. With our parents shelling out $4,000 a month to keep us both down here, I’d expect the baby-sitting service to be a little better.

I lean into the mirror over the sink and cake foundation onto a ripening cluster of zits on my forehead, then sweep electric blue mascara over my eyelashes. There, my mask is on, and I’m ready to make my debut at this new school:
Party Impression, Take Two
. Maybe I’ll have better luck here than at Harrison. I think fondly of the Comfort still hidden in my closet. I wish I had some now.

“Go wash that stuff off your face,” Debbie says when I sit across from her. “Makeup is a privilege you have not earned.”

My mouth flops open at the thought of my blistering forehead. Privilege? No, makeup is a necessity. But something tells me not to press the issue and I bite my lip and shuffle back to the bathroom.

I’ll play the reform school game, just like I played the jail game and the children’s home game and the family game. And when I’m eighteen, I’ll stop playing games and start living for real.

Debbie slides a fat binder printed with the school’s logo toward me when I return to the table. “Escuela Caribe Rules & Regulations” it says on the front.