Kids These Days (6 page)

“Salad Tong?” Alice said. “No way. That's not even in the game.” When we played the game, it seemed like a game, and I liked that—it felt less like we were headed for a screaming infant in our laps, and more like this was all some puzzle in an in-flight magazine.

“Salad Tong,” I said. “Salad Tong and Salad Shooter.” We were sitting in the food court, looking out on a long riverwalk, finishing our lunch. There was a guy outside doing airbrushed portraits on T-shirts. Inside, there were carts where you could buy perfumes, wigs, hats with the logo of your choice stitched in while you waited. The mall went on forever, like a mall of a mall. I had a vague sense of being frightened by it. I had a definite sense of being frightened by everything else.

“But which one would be the boy?” she said.

“Salad Shooter, of course,” I said.

“Why of course?”

“You can't call a girl Shooter.”

“Don't be a jackass,” she said. “Go get us smoothies, OK? Bring me a strawberry.”

I stood in line at New World Smoothie. All the flavors were named for explorers—the Ponce de Lemon, the Vasco de Gamagranate. They didn't have plain strawberry. They didn't have plain anything. I ordered Melon Magellan for myself, got an Eric the Red for Alice.
EXCITING BERRY BLEND,
it said on the menu board. She was on the phone when I got back to the table. I tried to explain about the flavors, but she waved me off. “Carolyn,” she said. “Slow down.”

I could hear Carolyn on the other end, but couldn't make out what she was saying. A group of kids came through wearing those shoes with wheels. One of them hit a chair a couple of tables over, went down. It looked like he was thinking about crying, but he held it together, got himself up, rubbed his knee, rolled back over to his friends. Alice said, “How is he in jail?”

I snapped right back in. “Who?” I said. “Mid?”

She put a finger in her other ear. “Is he alright?”

“What's going on?” I whispered.

“Did he know?” she said. While Carolyn answered, Alice took a sip of her smoothie, winced. “What is this?” she asked me.

“It's an Eric the Red. What the hell's happening right now?”

“Carolyn, hold on a second.” She covered the phone. “Mid's in jail,” she said. “The police raided Island Pizza this morning, and somebody was selling pot out of the kitchen. I think. Or out of the stockroom. Carolyn's freaking, so it's a little hard to understand.”

“Who was selling the pot?”

“I've been on the phone three minutes.”

“Was he there? Why is he in jail?”

She said, “What is it you think I'm doing right now?” She took her hand back off the mouthpiece. “What?” she said. “He's right here. I just told him. Is that OK?” She tried her smoothie again. “Of course we can come. We'll leave right now.” Carolyn said something on her end. “That's crazy talk,” Alice told her. “It's got to be a mistake. We'll meet you there. We'll be right there. Just tell me how to find it.” She made a gesture for a pen. I didn't have one. She looked around, then went to a counter-height table in the center of the food court where there were customer comment cards and ballpoint pens on chains. She wrote a few things down, hung up, came back to the table. “Let's go,” she said.

“What happened?”

“She's half-hysterical, and she probably should be. We're supposed to meet her at the—” She looked down at her comment card. “The St. John's County Jail.” She looked at me. “The
jail.
How could he be in jail?”

“Was he selling?” I asked. “Was Mid the one selling it?”

“All I could get out of her is that he was there, for some reason, when the police got there.”

“But do they arrest you for just standing around?”

“How would I know? I don't know anything about this kind of thing. Where did we park?”

“Blue level,” I said.

“I thought it was green.”

“Level G,” I said. “But it was blue.”

We found our way out of the mall. Everything felt heavy and bent. On the drive back south, Alice kept talking about how she knew something was wrong, how she could just tell.

“But he doesn't seem the type for jail,” I said.

“What is the type?”

“Fiercer?” I said.

She chewed on her lip. “Walter,” she said, twisting in her seat. “The check. Do you think they can trace the check?”

“Do I think they can what?”

“The police. The check. Do you think we're in this?”

“OK,” I said. “Wait. We don't even know if there's a ‘this' to be in. And, yeah, they can trace the check. We deposited it. It's ours. But we haven't done anything. If somebody needs the check back, we'll give it back. That's all.”

“Are you sure?”

“I'm sure.”

“When you were with him,” she said. “When you were with him, did you see anything like this?”

“Are you asking me if I've been dealing marijuana for a week without telling you?”

“I'm asking you if there's anything you know about. Anything you haven't told me.”

“No,” I said. “Jesus Christ. I mean, I can't figure out exactly how all his money works, but we haven't been in any gunfights in the town square, if that's what you're asking.”

“That's not what I'm asking.”

“What are you asking?”

“I'm not. I'm not asking anything.”

I changed lanes, passed two trucks carrying culverts, worked a little bit on the math of what might be happening to me, to us, to Mid. Whatever it was, it was not good. Only motivational speakers and singers were better off for having gone to jail. For your average pizza house owner, jail time was probably not R&D.

“How could he do this to her?” she said.

“We don't know if he did.”

“He did something.” She put the ultrasound pictures in the glove compartment. “Also, what was going on with the smoothies?”

“They were named after explorers. They were all combo deals.”

“Why?”

“I didn't ask.”

She said, “Don't ever get arrested, OK? Don't ever make anybody come to jail to get you. This is awful.”

“I'll try.”

“I'm not kidding around. You don't get to go to jail. Neither of us does.”

“I bet he didn't choose this,” I said. “I bet this isn't what he had in mind for today.”

“I still want us to make a rule.”

“OK,” I said. “It's a rule.”

“Thank you,” she said, and right then it occurred to me that if I'd been riding with him that morning, chances seemed better than average that whatever it was that had happened to him at Island Pizza would have happened to me, too.

The jail was a low cinderblock building set into scrub, with grassy areas cleared out all around. It was also the sheriff's office, the DMV, the courthouse, the tax and tag, and city hall. It took us four tries to find the right door.

The inside was nowhere near as nice as the waiting room at Varden's office, but it was the same basic idea: chairs and a window with somebody official behind it. You gave your name, you sat down, you held tight. Carolyn was already signed in on the register. We assumed she was in the back, wherever that was, with Mid. We were the only ones in the room. “I hate it here,” Alice said.

I said, “I think you're supposed to.” The woman behind the glass looked up at us and frowned. There was a Coke machine off in the corner, unplugged, its door half-open. There wasn't anything in it except a few cans of Tab. I asked Alice if she wanted one.

“They won't be cold,” she said.

“Still,” I said. “They're right there.”

“You can't just take one,” she said. “You can't steal from a jail.”

I went back up to the desk. “Do you have a water fountain?” I asked.

The woman said, “We do not.”

“What about the soda?”

“That machine is out of order.”

I said, “Would you mind if we—”

She said, “Sir, please sit down. Someone will be with you in a moment.”

I walked the edges of the room. Alice sat by the window, staring out into the parking lot. There was a clock, childhood-era industrial, the kind that plugged into the wall and ran its second hand around. Carolyn finally appeared out of a door in the side of the room that said
UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY PROHIBITED
, and when she saw Alice, she went straight to her, put her face in her shoulder. I couldn't tell whether to watch or look away. I heard her say, “Goddamnit, Leecy, I didn't sign up for this.” I looked away.

Alice took her outside to get her calmed down. I sat inside with the Tab. By the time they came back in, I had a plan going where I would just grab one, start drinking, see what happened. The machine bothered me, standing open like that. Alice and Carolyn sat down, and Alice said, “He asked to see you when you got here.”

I said, “Me?”

“He asked specifically,” Carolyn said. Her face was puffed up.

“What do I do?”

“They call you,” said Carolyn. “I asked them to give us a few minutes first.”

“I just go back there?”

“They come and get you,” she said.

I wasn't thinking right. “Are they not letting him go?” I asked, and Carolyn started crying again.

“They're keeping him overnight,” Alice said, almost whispering. “They can't find a judge who can see him before tomorrow.”

I said, “A judge?”

Alice mouthed
not right now,
rubbed her hand across Carolyn's back.

The door opened again, the
UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY
door. A policeman dressed in brown and green said, “Walter Ingram?” I raised my hand. “Come with me,” he said. Carolyn pushed her hair out of her eyes, then leaned back into Alice again. The officer let me through the door. “Empty your pockets for me, sir,” he said, and I put my keys and my wallet on a beige table in the middle of a beige room. Change and receipts. Little bits of sand. There was a camera up in the corner by the ceiling. The officer said, “Please hold your arms out from your sides.” I held my arms up and he passed a small black wand over my body. It beeped at my belt buckle. He made me take that off. Once we were beepless, he let me through another door and into another tan room, and there was Mid, in a pair of jeans and a Hawaiian shirt and sock feet. He was not in handcuffs. He was sitting at a table with a paper cup of water in front of him. The table was too small for him, or the chair, or both. He said, “Did you bring me a beer?”

“They took everything I had back there.” I turned my pockets inside out.

Mid said, “They took my shoes and shoelaces. Apparently I'm not supposed to hang myself.”

“Are you wanting to hang yourself?”

“Not yet.”

“Good,” I said. “Right? That's a positive.”

“One way to look at it.” He picked up his water, set it down again without drinking. “Thanks for coming.”

“Anytime.” I sat down across from him.

“This isn't me,” he said. “I wanted to make sure to tell you that to your face. This isn't me.”

“OK,” I said.

“But I can't really talk about it. The lawyer's telling me not to discuss it until we get to court.”

“It's good you have a lawyer,” I said.

“He's a tax attorney, but he said he'll have somebody by tomorrow. Somebody who does criminal.”

“Criminal,” I said.

“It's just a precaution.”

“Alice says you might be in overnight?”

“We have to set bail. Then I'll be out again.”

“What is this?” I said. “Are you alright? Are we—”

“I'm fine,” he said. “We're fine. Everybody's fine. This is a setback. I'll be out tomorrow.” He sounded tired. I felt bad for him, but I also wanted to ask him how he'd managed to achieve this.