Walter Myers - Lockdown

"So, you looking forward to going home?" he asked.

"Yeah."

I wasn't sure. I knew I didn't want to be in Progress anymore, but I wasn't sure what home was going to mean. Just the way King Kong was messing with me, I knew the streets were waiting to mess with me. All my homies hanging out and dealing whatever they had were waiting, all the suckers leaning against the rail on the corner and looking to see who was weak were waiting, and all the gangbangers with nothing to do but cook up some mad were waiting. Yeah, home.

The papers Mom had left were about some program that New York City was running. They said that anybody who was accepted for the program would be eligible for help in getting affordable housing and more money on their Family Cards. I knew it was all good on paper, but in real life it didn't go nowhere. In a way all the programs were alike. If everything worked out perfectly, you should be doing okay. But the deal was that you were going back into the same hole you had slid down before. It was like Toon. His people talking about how he had messed up and how embarrassed they were and him sitting with his head down thinking that the best thing going for him was to get out and go back to the same family. I could see him wanting to stay at Progress.

It was raining when I got to Evergreen. I had gone to class from 8 to 8:30 and King Kong had sat behind me. He kept bumping the back of my chair. I felt like turning around and lighting him up, but I knew all I had to do was get into one more fight and my game would be over.

I was cleaning up some soup in the hallway that had been spilled by one of the residents when a real dark sister came over to me.

"What you doing, cute boy?" she asked.

"Who are you?" I asked.

"Nancy Opara from Nigeria," she said. "I'm an exchange student and I work once in a while here for extra credit."

"You don't get paid?"

"I get extra credit from Saint Elizabeth's," she said. "Simi told me about you. She said you were nice."

"I'm okay," I said.

"I think I'm going to recommend you for mayor of New York City," she said. "The city needs a nice young mayor."

"I think that job would be too hard for me," I said.

"All you got to do is to hire a lot of smart people to work under you," she said. "You don't have to know anything yourself."

She was kidding around with me and I liked it. At Progress nobody kidded around with you. Even when you were talking to your friends it could change in a minute. You said the wrong thing and somebody would get mad and swing at you, or they were having a bad day and you didn't know it, or their medication wasn't working. You could never tell.

When I was collecting the garbage, the seniors looked at me careful but they didn't say nothing. I figured in a couple of weeks they would start thinking of me as somebody who worked for Evergreen. That's what I wanted to do, to fit in and be nobody special.

After I collected the garbage, I went in and cleaned up Mr. Hooft's room. He wasn't there when I first started cleaning, but then he came in. He was slow getting up on his bed and I thought maybe he wasn't feeling good.

"Good morning, sir," I said.

He didn't answer.

His room was clean to start with and I finished pretty quick. "You need me to do anything else?" I asked.

"What are you thinking?" he asked.

"I'm thinking you might want me to do something else and I can get it done," I said.

"You don't like me?"

"I guess you okay," I said. In my head I was thinking, No, I don't like you.

He picked up his paper and started reading it, and I sat down on the chair in the corner. He looked over at me and asked me again what I was thinking.

"Why you got to know what I'm thinking?" I asked.

"You could be thinking of stealing something from me," he said. "You see that soap dish in my locker? It's solid silver. Go ahead, look at it."

I looked in his locker, saw something shiny, and picked it up. It was a soap dish, like he said, with a little scene on the top part. Some kind of birds under a tree.

"It's nice," I said, putting the dish back into his locker.

"So you're thinking of stealing it?"

"Mr. Hooft, I didn't even know you had the dish," I said. "I was thinking of this guy who wants to pick a fight with me. He keeps messing with me, but I know I need to maintain my cool so I don't get into trouble. I can control myself, so it's okay. I don't think about stealing or nothing like that, because that won't get me anywhere."

"He wants to fight you in jail?"

"Yeah."

"That happened to me once," he said. "You want to hear how it happened?"

"It ain't the same because you weren't in jail," I said. "I'm in jail, and whatever you do against the rules gets you into trouble. It don't matter who's right and who's wrong. You fight, you're in trouble."

"You don't know nothing!" Mr. Hooft said. "When I was a boy, nine years old, my family lived in Java. You don't know where that is because your people don't know anything, but it's in Asia. Maybe two thousand miles from Japan-"

"How you know my people don't know anything?" I asked.

"Why are you interrupting me?" Mr. Hooft asked.

"Why you can't speak to me like I'm a man, same as you are?" I asked. "I'm not putting your people down."

"The nurse said I don't have to take nothing from you!" He was turning red. "One word from me and you are out of here!"

"Yeah, that's all good, but you don't need to be insulting me."

"I can't bother with you," Mr. Hooft said. "I have to change my bandage."

He had a bandage on the outside of his right leg up near his hip. He gave me a mean look and got up on the bed, took the tray of bandages from the white cabinet next to his bed, and lay on one side with his back toward me.

I sat down and watched him pull the old bandage off. It might have hurt him, but he didn't say nothing. Then he just lay there for a while, breathing heavy.

His butt was hanging out but he really didn't have a butt, just a crack with a little flesh on it. Seeing his naked skin, I didn't think he even looked real. More like a bad drawing or something. I had never seen many butts and I didn't like seeing his.

What I thought I should do was just walk out of the room and come back when he was finished. Instead of that I watched as he tore open an envelope and took out a piece of gauze and tried to put it on his leg.

"You want me to do that?" I asked.

"You're a nurse now?"

"I can move around better than you can," I answered.

"Just put the gauze on and cover it with a piece of tape," he said.

He had a hole in his leg. I didn't want to look at it.

"I got to go talk to Simi," I said.

"What do you have to say to her?" he was asking as I left the room.

I found Simi and told her what I had seen. "He got a hole in his leg about this big." I made a circle with my fingers around the size of a quarter.

Simi led me back to Mr. Hooft's room. He had covered himself up with the sheet and she threw it off and looked at the hole. Then she went out of the room.

I looked at Mr. Hooft and he wasn't moving. I knew he wasn't dead, but he was lying still. When Simi came back, she had a small tube of something.

"This is not going to hurt, Mr. Hoof," she said, still leaving off the t from his name. "It's just an antibiotic. I'm going to get Reese to change this bandage whenever he comes. I'll change it the other days."

She looked over at me and nodded for me to come watch.

What she did was to put some antibiotic on the hole, then take out a piece of gauze, roll it carefully, and place it right over the hole. Then she pulled the hole together a little and taped it shut.

When she left, I sat back down again in the corner. I didn't like seeing nobody messed around like that. Even though I wasn't liking him, I didn't want to see the hole in his leg.