Wrong Thing (5 page)

Then he got busted.

I don't know what it was for; there are so many stories about it. But it can't have been very serious, because he was only sentenced to a year inside.

His first day inside felt like his first day at school, and he handled it the same way. He kept quiet and did as he was told. He soon stopped being nervous. Many of the boys he was locked up with had killed people, but they didn't seem very different than most of the people on the outside. His father had said, “I hope you get raped up the ass every day,” but nothing like that happened. The Kid took a reputation inside with him, and nobody wanted to try to turn him into their bitch. People made passes at him, but nobody forced it when he said no.

He knew he was lucky. There was a boy there who didn't come in with a reputation, but came in with the same slight build and quiet manner as the Kid. The boy had almost immediately become the bitch of a bigger, tougher boy, who made him sleep under his bunk and lent him out to other people. He'd tell his friends, “Yeah, you can borrow him.” The boy would say nothing, just go with his master's friend, who would fuck him in the ass or the mouth or both. Then he'd come back, still saying nothing, and curl up under the bed.

The Kid masturbated a lot. Even before being locked up, when he was getting laid plenty, he had been in the habit of jacking off at least twice a day, when he woke up in the morning and last thing at night. In confinement, with no girls around, the frequency increased. But he never considered guys. This might have been because he knew he was just going to be there for a year. He wondered if it might be different if he was there for a long time, if he would become attracted to men through loneliness and conditioning.

He didn't find it to be any lonelier in there than on the outside. His family never visited him or wrote to him, but that didn't feel like anything new. The violence around him didn't bother him much. The worst thing about incarceration was other people's bodies, having to share cells and showers and toilets. The smell of someone else's breath, piss, shit, semen. And the other, unidentifiable smells that bodies produce. Waiting to piss or shit because someone else has just taken a shit in the toilet you have to use. The Kid hated the sight of other guys spitting out toothpaste, washing their asses.

But he made some friends and he learned a lot. He didn't like being told what to do by the guards, but other than that it wasn't too bad. He didn't talk back, and most of the guards seemed to like him.

Except for one, whose name was Voas. He was a large, hairy, stupid-looking man of forty who nonetheless seemed to suffer from Little Man's Syndrome. He'd been a promising football player in college, and had thought he was going somewhere with that. But he was too cowardly for the big leagues, and he quit the game after being knocked unconscious while trying to run away from another player. He didn't finish college, and he didn't do much of anything else. He'd taken the job as a guard because he wanted to be a tough guy, the kind of guard you see in movies like
Cool Hand Luke.
The way he talked to his friends, it sounded as though he was the warden at Sing Sing, rather than a turnkey at a boys' farm. It burned his ass that none of the inmates respected him, even with his size and bullying manner. The other guards commanded more respect without even trying, and they all thought Voas was an asshole. To impress his peers, he tried harder and harder to be Charles Bronson, and the inmates laughed at him more and more.

He couldn't stand the Kid. It wasn't anything the Kid said—most of the other inmates were mouthier—it was the contemptuous way the Kid looked at him. The others would sometimes be provoked by Voas's antics, but the Kid just seemed amused.

Voas kept telling the Kid he'd better watch it with the “dumb insolence,” but the Kid never did anything he could write him up for. A lot of drugs were finding their way into the institution, and Voas was sure that the Kid had something to do with it, though there was no way he could prove anything. But he never stopped looking for a way to hurt the Kid. And eventually he found it.

The institution had a visiting artist, who came once a week to work with inmates who wanted to learn to draw or write. Her name was Chrissie. Although she was white, she was interested in panos, an art form created by Latino prisoners. Panos are drawn on handkerchiefs with pens, and are usually created as gifts for family and friends on the outside. The Kid had never seen any art that he thought had anything to do with him, but panos contained nothing but the images of the barrio—the two most common, Chrissie told her students, were the Virgin of Guadalupe, and the peacock, which symbolized pride and the lowrider. Panos would often contain both images. The drawings were dense, very detailed, and often used to convey messages that would be censored if written in letters.

Chrissie was a good teacher. She'd come from white trash, and she didn't talk down to the boys or go touchy-feely on them. She asked about their lives, not like a sociologist but like a neighbor, and they talked to her. Before long, she had a number of boys working on panos.

She was well connected on the Santa Fe art scene, and she hustled a gallery owner into agreeing to let her curate an exhibition of panos there. She asked her students if they wanted to contribute, and they all said yes. Especially the Kid. He wasn't very good at drawing, but he loved doing panos, and Chrissie thought there was an unusual wit to his drawing, crude as it was. His panos had the usual images, but also food, snow, girls, empty streets. He knew he wasn't technically great, but he drew every day. He told Chrissie, “If I do a lot of panos, they probably won't all suck.”

Shortly before Chrissie was due to come and pick up all the panos for the exhibition, Voas accused the Kid of involvement in the inmates' drug trade. The Kid just shrugged and said he had nothing to do with it and didn't know anything about it. Voas told him his cell would have to be searched.

“What for? What makes you think I did anything?”

Voas shoved the Kid. “And what makes you think I have to explain anything to you, you little prick?”

The Kid didn't answer. He just gave Voas that condescending look.

The Kid was taken out of his cell while it was searched. When he was brought back to it, he asked, straight-faced, if anything had been found. He'd been a little worried that Voas might plant something. “No,” Voas said. “But that doesn't mean you're not doing it. It just means we're not looking in the right places.”

The Kid said nothing.

The next day, the Kid drew two panos. When he went to put them with all the others he'd done, he found that they were gone. “I didn't see any handkerchiefs,” Voas said. “You're a fucking liar.”

“Watch it . . . ”

“You watch it. You fucking stole my panos.” The Kid felt his eyes get wet. He fought it and won.

Voas looked at the guard who was with him. “Looks like we got a crybaby here,” he said. He wanted the other guard to laugh, but he didn't even smile.

“What's your problem?” the Kid said. “Are you on the rag?”

Voas looked at him.

“Your boyfriend keep coming in your mouth? Is that it?” the Kid said.

“Don't push your luck, boy.”

“I'm not pushing anything. I want my panos back.”

“Well, you better find out where they are” Voas said, and smiled.

“I'll tell you something. If I don't get my panos back, I'm going to cut your fucking throat.”

Voas laughed, and spread his arms. “Whenever you're ready. Come on.”

The Kid didn't make any move, but the other guard got in between them. “Come on, chill out,” he told Voas.

“I'm not doing anything. He threatened me.”

“That's right” said the Kid. “I ain't gonna do nothing to you now. I can't. But when I get out of here I'm gonna find out where you live, and you're gonna be dead.”

Voas turned to the other guard. “You heard that, right? You heard him say that?”

The guard nodded. “Yeah, I heard it. Come on, he's upset. He's lost his drawings . . . ”

Voas wrote the Kid up anyway.

The Kid had been sentenced to a year. His good behavior would have gotten him out in a lot less time than that. But with the write-up for threatening a guard, he lost any chance of that and would have to serve the entire sentence.

He told Chrissie what had happened. She was outraged, but there was nothing she could do about it. Even some of the other guards were pissed at Voas. A couple of them asked him if he really had taken the Kid's panos. He denied it, but nobody believed him. The Kid and his cellmate were friends, and, even if they hadn't been, the cellmate would have been too scared of the Kid to do something like that to him. And, even if he had, where would he have been able to dispose of the panos? No, there was no doubt in anybody's mind that it was Voas.

The inmates expected Voas to get shanked before long. So did many of the guards, and not all of them minded. It didn't happen. A couple of days after the incident, the Kid was treating Voas just as he had before, without hostility, but with the air of someone humoring a backward child. Voas was now watching his back, thinking the Kid was trying to lull him into a false sense of security. He would have liked to take things even further with the Kid, set him up for something, but he was afraid of the reaction of his colleagues. One of them had told him to his face that he was a weasel, and he could see that the others felt the same way, though they didn't say anything. Some of the guards were treating the Kid with more warmth than they treated Voas.

The Kid's cellmate, Armando, asked him if he was going to do anything to Voas.

“I already have,” the Kid said.

“What?”

“He shits his pants every time he comes near me. If I reach my hand behind my back, he jumps. Every day, he's waiting for it.” “He gonna get it?”

“I ain't gonna give him any way to keep me in here any longer than they can already. Fuck that. Fuck him. There's always outside.”

But the Kid knew that Voas had won. Because, though he wasn't sure why, the Kid didn't want to draw panos anymore.

T
he year ran out, and the Kid was released. Some of the friends he'd made would soon be getting out too, and they gave the Kid phone numbers where they could be reached.

It was a spring morning when they let him out. He could have taken the bus, but he wanted to walk. It took him four hours to walk into town, but he wouldn't have minded if it had been even longer. He walked along the edge of the highway, and every now and then someone would pull over and offer him a ride. He always politely said no, he wanted to walk. He could tell that they thought he was crazy, but it didn't bother him. And it didn't occur to him to suggest that they try being locked up for a year.

The sky was a cool blue, and a light wind was blowing. The Kid walked, live desert on either side of the highway. He came to a convenience store, went in and got some nachos and a can of Dr Pepper. He sat on a low wall outside and ate. Normally he'd have hated the food, the synthetic, cheese-flavored goo that covered the chips. But, after a year of Department of Corrections cuisine, it felt like nothing had ever tasted so good. He swallowed each mouthful with a swig of Dr Pepper, holding it in his mouth until the food became a sweet pulp.

When he'd finished eating, he wiped his sticky fingers with a paper napkin. It didn't get them clean, so he threw the empty can and nachos container in the trash, then went back inside the store and asked the clerk if they had a restroom. She was in her fifties, white, unfriendly. The Kid wondered if she was like that with everybody, or if she somehow knew where he'd been. She crabbily told him where the restroom was. He went in and washed his hands at the sink. The restroom stank, but the stink felt different from the stink in the institution. This place had pubic hairs stuck to the toilet, shit stains in the bowl, splashes of piss on the floor. But it didn't stink of the same people doing the same piss and shit every day. This place had the stink of people who just came through, pissed and shat, and never came back. And that was what the Kid wanted.

He left the restroom, got another Dr Pepper from the fridge and took it to the counter. The clerk didn't look at him as he paid for it. There was something about her sullenness that depressed the Kid. He hadn't done anything to her. Why not be nice to people if they hadn't done anything to you? Outside the store, he opened the can and chugged the soda, then threw the can in the trash. He started to feel better. For the past year, if he'd met a mean, unfriendly person, he couldn't get away from them. Now, with this woman and anybody else, all he had to do was walk.

It was the middle of the afternoon when he got into town. It was just as it had been. He wandered around the Plaza for a while, enjoying the sky and the cars and the buildings. Then he walked to the barrio. He wondered if he would run into anybody he knew, but he didn't. He came to his parents' house and knocked on the door.