The reformatory, p.14
The Reformatory, page 14
And sour.
He spit out the taste as the stench in the water spilled across his skin. Robert kept from throwing up only because of his fear of ridicule and his worry that Boone might take him to the Funhouse for making a mess. None of the other punishments were fair, so why would it be different for getting sick? He glanced quickly at the boy beside him, who was slapping his soapy hands under his arms without a care.
Maybe no one else could smell it. Maybe it was a ghost smell, like the fire.
I hate this place, Robert thought. I just want to go home, Mama.
PING.
The sound came so loudly that Robert jumped. Even the boy beside him turned his head to look at the pipe that ran across the length of their stall. But the boy looked away, not interested. Robert laid his hand on the pipe, as warm as human flesh, coursing with water like blood. Mama was here, somehow! Whatever gave the water its terrible smell, it wasn’t from Mama. She was fighting through the smell to get to him. Robert didn’t know how he knew, but he knew that plainly. Robert leaned against the slimy shower wall nestling the pipe. He wished he could climb into the wall, through the concrete. He wanted to feel his mother’s hug again. He wished she would appear like the stabbed boy in the kitchen, solid enough to lay eyes on. A sob—part joy, part sorrow—clawed from his throat.
“Hey,” the boy beside him said. “You can’t act like a sissy in here, dummy.”
“My mama’s ghost is here,” Robert whispered. “Right now.”
“So?” the boy said. “Be glad it’s only your mama, stupid.”
Robert swallowed back his sob and stood up straight. He grabbed a chalky bar of soap from the dish and tried to make enough lather to wash. No one had given him a washrag like Gloria always insisted he use at home, so he did his best with his hands on his face, under his arms, between his legs, though he barely brushed his privates because he didn’t want anyone to see him washing there. Robert was shivering as he grabbed his damp towel and tried to rub himself dry.
* * *
The bunk room was hotter than the shower room even without steam.
Redbone led Robert down the length of the beds pushed so closely together that he could barely avoid bumping them. Robert took small steps, hips to the side. Many of the boys were already on their beds, either sitting or lying down. Talking was more fevered, everyone squeezing in their last bit of living while the lights were on, some playing cards or dominos, some sharing jokes. He heard a crack of marbles. A few were so tired they were already curled under their blankets, trying to sleep in the din. A handful were thumbing through their New Testaments, reading with their lips moving, as if memorizing the words could set them free.
Redbone pointed out a bed in the middle section, almost dead center, far from doors or windows. His neighbors were so close, they might as well be sharing one bed. One boy had glasses that made his eyes look like an owl’s, listening to their every word with his chin propped on his elbows like they were a shiny new television screen in a store window. The other was sketching on a pad with black chalk, seeing and hearing nothing. Neither one looked like trouble.
“If a bed opens up by a window, grab it,” Redbone said. “But you’ll have to fight somebody for it. Ev’rybody likes windows for the breeze. Hot as hell in the middle.”
Redbone glanced back at Robert and must have felt sorry for the look on his face. “You git used to it, though. We all start in the middle.”
Robert stared at the windows lining the room, amazed again to see no bars. And most of the windows were cracked open. Did they sleep beneath open windows every night? The panes were too narrow to climb through, but with a screwdriver and time to work on the frame, maybe over days, he could get out. The windows were high, but he could stand on his bed. He almost said it aloud: Why don’t more of y’all run away?
Redbone saw the unspoken question in his eyes.
“Oh, you might hear barkin’ from the dogs,” Redbone said casually. “The dog boys march up an’ down outside with those hounds all night long, an’ sometimes a squirrel or a possum riles ’em. But you’ll git used to the barkin’ too.” Robert nodded that he understood: more boys didn’t flee through the dorm’s open windows because they were afraid of the dogs.
Redbone left him to go to his own bed in a far corner, beneath a window. Blue’s bed was beside Redbone’s, so close they could be sharing one, and Robert envied how they must whisper jokes in each other’s ears. Blue gave him a nod. Robert almost smiled.
He was relieved Cleo and his friends weren’t hidden anywhere in the room of nearly fifty boys. Cleo’s gang was older, so they must be in the Washington wing. The first good news: he wouldn’t have to be afraid Cleo might attack him in the night. He couldn’t forget Cleo’s terrible stare in the cafeteria. Some people never forgot a slight, no matter how small or unintended.
Robert noticed Owl still staring, wondering what to expect from him. “You don’t bother me, I won’t bother you,” Robert said.
Owl shrugged.
“Shhhhh,” said the boy who was drawing. He was sketching a cypress tree standing alone in the swamp, and it was good enough to be a photograph: fat trunk squatting in the water, tendrils hanging like string, the water shining the tree’s reflection back at it. Robert wished he could draw himself away somewhere else too. He sat on his bed and watched the boy’s sure strokes as he drew shadows like a magician. A wiry boy in the bed in front of the artist’s was leaning back to watch too.
“When you gonna draw me?” the other boy said.
“When you gonna cough up that dollar?”
Owl snickered. “Nobody’s payin’ you a dollar for that. A nickel, maybe.”
A voice roared from the doorway: “Prayer!”
Everything shuffled around him. The artist shoved his pad under his bed, playing card decks fanned closed, marbles rolled stray on the floor. Everyone kneeled on the right side of their beds, folding their hands in a prayer position. For a moment, Robert only watched before he remembered to kneel and pray too. The cool floor was his only relief from the heat.
“The Lord is my shepherd…,” a boy began, and then the room was one voice, matching the tempo and monotone: “I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures…”
Robert heard officious footsteps and peeked through a half-open eyelid: Boone and Crutcher were pacing the rows of beds. Boone was carrying a long wooden ruler. A thwack sounded as Boone smacked a boy across his back. Robert squeezed his eyes closed and recited in rhythm with the others, afraid to scratch his itching ear: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.…”
Thwack. A brief, startled cry of pain somewhere behind him. That boy sounded very young. Robert was so nervous, he nearly forgot the words to the prayer he had recited in front of his entire congregation when he was only six while Mama, Papa, and Pastor Jenkins stared on with pride. He’d imagined that God was staring down at him with pride too—but he could barely think about God with a prayer interrupted by ruler strokes. The words seemed a boldfaced lie. “… Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.”
What goodness and mercy? But Robert said “Amen” with everyone else. He was grateful not to feel the ruler across his back for wrongdoing he didn’t know was wrong. What had those boys done? Squirmed? Not prayed fast enough?
“Lights out!” Boone shouted, and the overhead lights switched off. Robert hadn’t realized how bright the lights had been until they were gone. The only light left in the room streamed in from the hall. Around him, everyone hurried back into bed.
“Try me tonight,” Boone warned from the doorway. “Somebody try me just once. I can’t wait to take some of y’all out to the Funhouse with Warden Haddock. Who’s it gon’ be?”
The room was a tomb, no one breathing. Robert’s folded blanket had fallen to the floor beside his bed, but he was afraid to pick it up. Would Boone take him to the Funhouse for dropping it? For reaching for it? The footsteps snapped down the hall, and they all sighed and breathed together. A couple of boys snickered, trying to be tough, but hardly loud enough for anyone to hear but themselves. Robert waited to hear if the footsteps would return, but in time even the echo was gone.
In the dark, Robert couldn’t ignore the heat. His thin sheet clung to his sweaty skin so tightly that he felt like a bug trapped in a giant spider’s web. He flung the sheet away. His house let in breezes in the summer, but this heavy heat was like someone lying on top of him. Was it truly this hot, or was this heat a memory from the fire? The heat sat so hard that Robert was sure his lungs were filling with hot water instead of air.
A mosquito landed on his shoulder, invisible in the dark. He ignored it and glanced right and left at the other boys, who still seemed afraid to move although Boone and Crutcher were gone. When the mosquito bit him, Robert slapped lightly at his slick skin. Every movement made the heat worse, a rippling current. No wonder everyone lay so still.
But despite the heat—or maybe because of it—Robert’s sore, weary bones sank into the thin mattress and made him so drowsy that he didn’t notice the return of the terrible smell for a long time. And when he did notice, he thought he was only remembering the shower room. But then the sharpness seared his nostrils—burned, rancid flesh—and Robert jolted awake.
The banks of windows and beds were not familiar when he first woke, and when he remembered—The judge sent me to the Reformatory, and I’ll be here six months—his heart thudded and then sank with such misery that only the threat hidden in the awful smell kept him from whimpering. He heard someone crying softly in the vast room, smothered against a pillow. An angry “Shhhhhh” and “Damn baby gon’ get us all whipped” silenced the crying.
Robert hoped the smell would fade, but instead it grew stronger. A slow, rough scraping across the floor was much louder than the buzzing flies or soft snoring around him: moving and halting, moving and halting, coming closer to him from the center row where his head lay. The object dragging sounded like… a bum leg, his foot dragging slowly? The smell and the scraping sound were tied together; when one came closer, so did the other.
It definitely wasn’t Mama.
Robert warred with himself: Should he turn his head to look or not? Would it go away if he waited long enough, like the stabbed boy in the kitchen? What had Redbone’s advice been about ghosts? His head swam as he tried to remember.
“Go away,” Robert whispered, staring up at the ceiling’s dark, sleeping light bulbs. “You’re dead. So just stay dead.”
The dragging came closer, the smell so powerful that it brought tears to Robert’s eyes. He locked his throat to keep from vomiting. It was the worst smell he had ever known—worse than the deer carcass bloating in the creek bed he and Papa had found when they were hunting, its body a gross whitish pink from swelling. Papa had pulled him away, tried to cover his eyes. Just like then, everything inside Robert told him to keep his eyes away, but he had to see it. He had to know. (Had it really been a deer? Or had it been a child wrapped in wet clothing?)
Robert’s neck gave a tiny crack as he turned his head toward the insistent scraping. The shadow was the size of a boy not much bigger than he was, the shape so black that it was darker than night, leaching colors from everything it passed. Too-white eyes stared at him from the blackness. The figure moved slowly, so slowly, with the scraping sound: the boy, or whatever the shadow thing was, dragged a lame leg behind.
Robert’s heart tried to fight free of his ribs. He thought he would faint, but he couldn’t stop staring even as the shadowed boy came closer. When the figure was close enough to touch—and when the smell was choking him—Robert saw glimmering on the figure’s face and skin and realized he was burned all over, charred like meat on a grill. The alien eyes stared.
Robert’s teeth chattered. It must be one of the boys who had died in the fire. Maybe he had followed him all the way from the field.
“I’m sorry…,” Robert whispered. “But you’re dead. I can’t help you. Go away.”
For good measure, he closed his eyes tight and counted to ten. One… two… three…
He took his time counting, because counting was his last plan to keep from screaming. His heartbeat rocked him as he counted, as if a part of him knew the shadow would be staring him face-to-face when he opened his eyes. … Eight… nine… TEN.
He held his breath. And peeked.
Nothing but a bare floor and the empty row between the cots. Even the smell was gone. Robert’s relief was so great that he gulped at the air and shuddered when he exhaled. He might not have breathed for two minutes. A mad giggle tickled the back of his throat and almost escaped. He was giddy with the thought of it: ghosts came to him, yes, but he could make them leave. Maybe no ghost could hurt him.
Robert was still smiling when the lights glared on, waking everyone, and Boone yanked him from his bed.
12
“Y’all must be the dumbest bastards ever born,” Boone said.
Robert would have been sure he was having a nightmare, except for the way his shoulder smarted from Boone’s rough handling. He’d been shoved out in the hallway, blinking in the bright lights. He, Redbone, and Blue stood lined up with Boone and Crutcher tall over them. At first he thought he’d been roused for Warden Haddock’s twenty lashes, but why all three of them? Was it for swiping the apple tarts in the kitchen? Playing in the freezer? Arriving a few seconds late for curfew? With each thrum of his heart, Robert thought of a new reason he, Blue, and Redbone might be in trouble.
He dared a quick glance at Redbone and saw how afraid he was too: the hard set of his jaw, and a nervous swaying, like a scarecrow in a storm. Blue was already crying, his silent jaw quivering. Why couldn’t this night, this whole day, this year, just be a dream? Robert felt himself pushing himself back against the wall as if he were a ghost who could vanish through it.
“Mister Boone, we didn’t think we was late, sir,” Redbone said, voice hardly above a whisper. “We ran here fast as we could.”
Redbone braced for the crack across his shoulder from Boone’s ruler. He flinched, but barely. Robert didn’t see even a blink.
“You so dumb,” Boone said, “you don’t even know.”
None of them could say they did. None of them dared to ask.
Crutcher leaned close enough for Robert to smell smoke on his breath. “What were you talking about at dinner, gentlemen?” he said. “Maybe that would ring a bell.”
Dinner! Robert realized he was panting only when he opened his mouth to speak. “I w-was j-just asking questions ’bout this place.”
“That’s not what we heard,” Boone said. “Boy over in Washington says he heard you talking ’bout running away.”
All three of them let out wails: realization, horror, shock. Boone’s charge sounded so much worse than anything they had imagined. Tears streamed freely down Blue’s face, and he shook his head as if it might fall loose. The memory crashed back over Robert: how Redbone said not to talk about how boys ran away, but how Blue had pressed on. The way the other boys at the table had jumped up and walked away, too wise to stay close to them.
“We wasn’t plannin’ nothin’. It was just stories. I just got here, Mister Boone—” Boone’s blow with the ruler landed on Robert’s crown and grazed his ear—not the one Red McCormack hurt, but the thin wood smarted enough that he dodged away and won a second blow across his hip, which made his teeth hiss. The second blow was harder, like a snakebite through his thin pants, stinging long after the ruler was gone.
“You don’t even say the word runnin’,” Boone said. “You don’t think about runnin’. Some things is common sense, or ought to be if you ain’t dumb as hell.”
“It was me,” Redbone said. “Robert didn’t ask nothin’ ’bout where to run. I was just talkin’ ’bout those stupid boys at Boot Hill. Why I wanna run now? Wouldn’t make no sense. You know me, Mister Boone, sir. I ain’t like these simple boys out here missin’ their mamas, cryin’ ’cuz they never held a plow or rode a thresher. You know how I tell stories, Mister Boone.”
Redbone’s voice was a low, quiet begging, but he was so persuasive that Robert doubted his own memory. Hadn’t it been Blue who told the stories about running away? Hadn’t Redbone been the one who’d tried to shush him? Redbone had seen this horror coming.
“You talk too damn much,” Boone said. “I told you, ain’t I? Talkin’ all the damn time.”
“All the time,” Crutcher said. He mimicked talking with his hand. “Yak yak yak.”
“Yessir. I’m sorry, sir,” Redbone said. “I didn’t mean to get nobody in trouble.”
Blue’s head wobbled up and down as he tried to nod despite his shaking. “I didn’t do nothin’, Mister Boone. I can go back to bed, sir?” Robert heard Blue’s homeland thick in his accent, parts of him already fleeing far from Gracetown. When Boone didn’t say anything or give him a glance, Blue ventured a step toward the door and scurried away. And he’d talked more than anyone at dinner!
Robert’s heart ran with Blue, but he didn’t dare move. Robert hoped he would be next, that Boone would say That true? and he’d say Yessir, he hadn’t known what he was asking, and Redbone had told him about a stupid boy who ran and ended up getting buried—because that’s what happened when you ran.
“Can we go back to bed?” Redbone said. “We’ll work extra hours. We wouldn’t try nothin’ like what you said, Mister Boone. You know I ain’t that way.”
