Jesus Land (25 page)

There’s another zero ranker across the courtyard from me, a boy. He’s as scrawny as a plucked chicken and looks to be about
thirteen—a mere kid. He hangs from a doorway in a yellow T-shirt, braying at the staff table.

“May I enter the courtyard, please?”

They ignore him. Apparently he isn’t demonstrating proper Courtesy and Respect Towards Authority Figures, one of the categories on the daily scorecard Debbie showed me, along with Attitude, Cooperation, and Being Totally Truthful and Honest, Facing Reality. We get points for all of them.

After braying his request four more times, Boy 0 hammers the doorframe with his child’s fist, muttering cuss words only I can hear. He catches me staring and squinches his face at me; I look away.

Unlike him, I refuse to call out. I won’t ask permission to sit, stand, walk, to
exist,
one more time. I simply won’t. I’ll stand in this doorway like a statue until the world ends around me.

“I said! Please, may I please enter the courtyard, please!” Boy 0 bellows again, his voice growing thinner and higher with each word.

At the picnic tables, there is no pause in the eating activity; no one even glances in his direction. I regard the chewing faces, the glaring sky, a three-inch, half-smashed cockroach that drags itself over the bricks to my sneakers. I kick it away and it lands on its back next to a cement bench, where it mechanically probes the air with its good legs. After several minutes, it bumps up against the bench and manages to flip itself over.

The next time it lugs itself to my feet, I press the toe of my tennis shoe onto the working half of its body. It pops, and a yellow pus squirts out.

A hot wind races through the courtyard and I take off my safari hat and fan my face with it. In the valley below, the sun glints off the rice paddies. Some of the kids cast their eyes in my direction as
I fan myself, but mostly they just stare at their plates and chew. None of them talk much.

A large parrot lands in a palm tree next to the picnic tables, where it screeches down as if it found the presence of humans on this hillside offensive. At my feet, a line of ants streams toward the cockroach’s glistening innards.

I contemplate the hazy green horizon and wonder which way is home. Not that I have one anymore. At this very moment, Mother is probably in my bedroom, erasing the stain of my existence with rubber gloves and hot bleach, just like she did after David and Jerome left. “Our children are gone,” I imagine her writing to her missionaries. “Now it’s just Jake and me and our dedication to God.”

Across from me, Boy 0 has sunk to the bottom of the doorframe, where he hunches over, chewing the side of his hand and glaring at the picnic tables.

The Dominican woman from this morning shuffles into the courtyard carrying a glass pitcher of red liquid. Strawberry pop? Cherry juice? Raspberry? She refills glasses at the staff table and ice cubes tumble from the pitcher along with the sparkling red cascade. I swallow dryly. The staff are the only ones demonstrating proper behavior at this picnic, chatting and laughing as if this were a church social and not some hell devised for teenagers.

At my feet, the ants have swarmed over the cockroach. I’m about to crush them as well when a body rises from a far table and turns in my direction. David. We stare at each other for a sour second before he walks to the staff table and bends to talk to someone I can’t see. A moment later, Debbie is marching toward me, a napkin tucked into the collar of her blouse like a bib. Boy 0 jumps to his feet.

“Debbie! Over here, Debbie, over here!” he yells. She pays him no mind, and comes to a halt before me, her left sandal
falling squarely on the insect sacrifice. She swallows before speaking.

“Yes, Julia?”

I clear my throat, look down at her sandal, and croak out the words. “May I enter the patio, please?”

“Yes, you may.”

She follows me to the girls’ table, where I stand behind the sole empty place setting.

“May I sit down, please?”

“Yes.”

“May I begin eating, please?”

“Yes.”

There are five girls at the table, all about my age. No one says hello or looks at me, but I’m not much for pleasantries at the moment anyway. The cheerleader sits across from me; she gazes at a space just over my hat, nibbling the sandwich she holds in both hands.

There’s orange liquid in a cup by my paper plate and a basket with bread in it at the far end of the table.

“Will someone pass me the food, please?” I ask.

When the basket reaches me, it contains the smashed remains of half a sandwich—egg spilling from white bread. It looks like someone punched it; I can see the knuckle marks clearly. I glance around.

“Are there any more of these?”

“Nope,” says the cheerleader, still gazing over my head. She looks like the girl in the Sea Breeze commercial, all clear skin and white teeth perfection, and this makes me hate her all the more.

I shove the basket away and take a drink of Tang.

“They’ll dock your points if you don’t eat it,” says the girl sitting next to the cheerleader. She’s wearing a pink T-shirt with
“Praise Jesus!” on the front, and is shredding a napkin and watching the pieces fall like snowflakes onto her plate.

“But it’s been smashed!”

She shrugs and a small smile flashes over her face and I realize that my food was ruined on purpose, for their entertainment.

The girl sitting next to me pushes an orange wedge toward my plate.

“You can eat this if you so desire,” she says in a soft Southern twang. She lifts her sorrowful brown eyes to mine. “Being as I’m not all that hungry anyway.”

“Susan, you know you’re not supposed to . . .” the cheerleader says before lifting her head and breaking into a smile-forthe-camera grin. Hands clamp down on my shoulders, and I jump and turn around. A bearded man with a protruding belly stands behind me.

“Howdy, I’m Bruce, the Starr housefather,” the man says, his hands still on my shoulders. “How are you liking Escuela so far, eh?”

Oh yeah, he’s Canadian
.

“Everything’s great,” I respond, knowing this is the only acceptable answer.

“That’s what we like to hear!”

He digs his fingers into my shoulders in a painful massage, and I arch my back away from his belly.

“Everyone been properly introduced?”

“Been” he pronounces like “bean.”

“We were just getting acquainted,” says a girl with bad acne at the end of the table. She waves at me, and a rainbow of jelly bracelets ripples down her arm. “Hi, I’m Carrie, Starr high ranker.”

The girls go round the table stating their name and rank and how long they’ve been in The Program. The cheerleader’s name
is Tiffany (of course), and the sorrowful girl sitting next to me is Susan; she was the lowest-ranking girl before my arrival. They’ve all been here under eight months, except for Carrie, who’s been here two years. (
Two years
!)

“If you need anything, please don’t hesitate to ask,” Tiffany gushes with her fake smile. I glare at her.

Bruce bounces on his toes and his belly jostles my spine.

“Okay, we’ll see you up at the house,” he says. His footsteps recede, then return, and my hat is lifted from my head.

“Nice topper!”

I turn to see him yanking my new safari hat over his thick curls; he bends the brim over one eye and juts out his hip like a fashion model. All the girls laugh politely except for Susan, who looks at me with her sorrowful eyes. Bruce struts back to the staff table swaying his hips like a faggot, my hat crunched on his head.

I glance at my watch—it’s 12:26, four minutes to the next class—and stuff the sandwich into my mouth, trying not to gag on the snotty texture.

A teacher blows a whistle, and kids stream across the courtyard into the classrooms. Alone at the picnic table, I search for an adult who will notice me and grant me permission to move, but none of them pay attention to me. My eyes fall on Boy 0, who’s slumped at the bottom of his doorway, rocking and raking his fingernails over the bare flesh of his forearm, over and over.

There’s a soft tap on my back, and I turn. It’s Susan. She brushes back my hair with her hand and bends to whisper in my ear: “This place is Hell.”

I see David several times in the courtyard between classes, and because we’re not allowed to communicate, we just stare at each
other. All I can do is drink in the concern stamped on his face, which makes me feel a little bit better and a little bit worse.

When I need to use the toilet, the English teacher follows me to the bathroom and stands on the other side of the stall, tapping her sandal on the cement floor as I piss. They must fear that given half a chance, newcomers will either make a break for it or bash their heads against a wall. Both options have crossed my mind.

During the last class of the day, P.E., we play soccer on a flattish part of the hillside next to the entrance gate. As we run over the curved field, the Dominican guard sits in the shade of an enormous banyan tree near the gate, mopping his face with a rag as the German shepherd pants at his feet.

My jeans are pasted to my legs with sweat and it’s hard to move. There are far too many players on the field and no way to get near the ball. After a while, I stop running and let the game swarm past me. I look around for Boy 0 but don’t see him.

David throws me stern glances as he sprints by me, trying to get me moving, but the whole setup is too retarded. Everyone claps whenever a goal is made, no matter which team makes it, and when the ball lands in a thicket, everyone jogs in place or does jumping jacks while it’s fished out. What’s
wrong
with these kids? The object of the game doesn’t appear to be winning, but to “be a good sport” and to stay in perpetual motion. The P.E. teacher—a tall man in shorts—frowns at me and scribbles in one of those notepads all the staffers carry around with them, along with the referee whistles that dangle from their necks. No doubt he’s scrutinizing my performance. What bull crap. David pleads at me with his eyes, but I shake my head at him. Am I the only one who realizes how asinine this all is?

At the end of the hour, the P.E. teacher blows his whistle one last time and we sort ourselves by house and rank and trudge up
the steep cement drive to our residences. I lag behind my housemates, stopping several times to catch my breath.

“You’d best not be poky,” Susan tells me, but I can’t help it, I’m out of shape. Six months of junk food and little exercise have taken their toll.

At Starr, the after-school hours are chopped into Housework Time, Supper Time, Homework Time, Free Time, Bed Time. Too much Time.

My housework consists of “mowing” the grass around Starr with a machete, Becky, the Starr Group Leader, tells me.

Becky’s from Rhode Island, pencil thin, and a recent graduate of some junior college in the East. She talks even queerer than the Canadian housefather, and she’s an American. She tells me that she lives in a locked room next to the upstairs dormitory, and that it’s her job to watch me in the bathroom.

She gives me a quick lesson on how to use the machete, squatting on the ground with the handle of the machete in one hand and the tops of the weeds in the other.

“Pretend you’re scalping the earth, Julia
r
,” she says, swiping the sharp blade against the base of the grass.

But I have nothing against the earth, only against certain people treading its surface. When Becky hands me the machete, I try to think of someone I’d like to scalp, but there are too many of them—my mind skips from Jerome, to my parents, to the cop who arrested me, to the social workers, to the Economics teacher, to the cheerleader, to the housefather—before settling on a generic anger at the world in general. I chop the grass-hair with such vehemence that Becky compliments me on my skill.

As I weed whack, she stands behind me and tells me how she came to Escuela Caribe.

“Julia
r,
I was driving my
cah
home from a church
potty,
when I had the idea
r
that Gawd was
cahlling
me,” she says, fanning herself with a straw hat. “On that
dawk
road, Gawd
tawked
to me, just as He did to Paul on the road to Damascus. He told me to come
heah
to
minista
to the girls and precious unborn babies.”

I want to ask her if she drank booze at this potty and if Gawd’s voice sounded like it does in movies, as if it were booming down from a megaphone in the sky. And what do unborn babies have to do with reform school?

But I know it’s better to keep my thoughts to myself, so I bite my lip and hack grass. After a while, Becky goes to lean against the shady wall of the house and watches me from afar. By the time the five o’clock whistle blows, my palms are blistered but I’ve cut only a tiny patch in the huge swath of field grass surrounding the house.

“You will improve,” Becky says, and I don’t know if I’m meant to take her words as encouragement or a threat.

After Housework Time ends at five, we’re summoned to a “special function.” We walk down the cement driveway ordered by rank and join the crowd of boys gathered by the banyan tree. A makeshift pen, constructed from metal stakes and twine, has been erected in the dust.