Walter Myers - Lockdown

"So I'll tell Clara that everything is fine?"

"Everything is fine," Mr. Hooft said. "Sure. How are her children?"

"I guess they're okay," John said. "She's always whining about them. If she calls you, tell her I came to see you. And if you have any problems, tell her and she can tell me. You understand that?"

"Yes, sure," Mr. Hooft said.

John went over and put his face near his grandfather and gave him a half of a kiss on the cheek. Then he turned on one heel and walked out of the room.

"Busy man," Mr. Hooft said after he was gone. "He's got two minutes to spare on a sunny day, one minute if there's a cloud in the sky."

"He acts like a tough guy," I said.

"Tough? What does he know about being tough? What do you know about being tough?" Mr. Hooft asked. "Does swinging your fist make you tough? Does hitting a man make you tough? Do you think you would hit-what's his name? That little Negro who looks like a bull-Mike Tyson? Would you hit him? Would you?"

"No."

"Because he would kill you! Am I right?"

"Yeah."

"Well, sonny, Reese-which is no name for a boy, but your people make up names-you should try being old. Because old is tough and you don't swing at being old because old always kills you. So what do you think of that?"

"Well…"

"He's going to go home and call everybody and say…and say that he came and he visited me even though…even though he didn't have a lot of time…" Mr. Hooft was crying.

"Yo, man, you need some water or something?" I asked.

"In five years, maybe I've had three visits, maybe four visits," he said. "They celebrate their heritage. They go back to the Netherlands and they weren't born there. They are no more Dutch than you are. But they can't come to see me and I was born there."

Mr. Hooft's eyes seemed different. They were darker when he cried, almost like a bird's eyes. I wanted to go over and put my arm around him or something, but I didn't. I did think about beating up his grandson. He was looking me up and down, but I wondered how he would have felt if I had landed some thunder upside his head.

"Don't sit on my bed," Mr. Hooft spoke softly.

"Excuse me?"

"Don't sit on my bed," he said. "That's how it gets messed up."

I cleaned his room real good. Before I left, I let him put his arm around my shoulder so he could get up on the bed. He was wearing a hospital gown and I could see his legs. They were thin and white and wrinkly.

I got the top of the bed up a little for him and started to bring the bottom up too, but he wanted his legs straight.

"Sometimes they cramp up if I have them bent," he said. "Then I have to straighten them out really slow."

I sat in the corner thinking about his grandson. I thought that maybe Mr. Hooft didn't have a lot of interesting things to say to him.

"You know, I don't get many visits, either," I said.

"Well, you have to remember"-Mr. Hooft was smiling-"you're not too good-looking."

"When you…when you were in that children's camp," I asked him, "did you ever think about just starting a fight with one of the guards and, you know, getting it over with?"

Mr. Hooft turned to me, looked in my face for a long moment, and then turned toward the window. "We lived nine to a hut," he said. "There was never enough to eat, never enough hope to spread around to nine boys. Sometimes I wished it would just end. But I didn't want to be shot or die by violence. I didn't have that kind of courage. But then one day I saw, behind the huts, in a corner, some flowers. Jasmine. You know jasmine?"

"No."

"Beautiful flower. It was closed tight during the day, but at night it opened up and somehow I thought that flower was like me. Afraid to speak when I was around the guards, always scared that I would do something wrong and they would hurt me. But at night I would lie on my cot, and I would dream about other things. About our home in Java, about my mother. And when I took my mind away from how miserable I felt, things became better for me. I would be out in the fields digging a ditch or piling up rocks around the wells-the Japanese had us doing that a lot-but I would think about that flower and I would worry about it and be anxious for it to be all right when I returned to the hut. It wasn't much, but it was better than stewing in my own juices."

All the time he was talking to me he was looking out of the window. From where he was, I knew, he couldn't see much. The sky was gray and there were clouds in the distance. After a while, I could see that he had fallen asleep. I stayed in the corner. Simi brought me some magazines to read and I leafed through them until it was time to go.

On the way back to Progress, I kept thinking of Mr. Hooft as a kid digging a ditch with a guard watching him. I could imagine how scared he was. I was feeling sorry for him being scared back then, even if it had happened a long time ago.

Mr. Hooft's life was harder than I had thought it was. All the time he was talking about how much he had done in his life, it was all a front. A lot of people seemed to be making up their lives, and I guessed if you didn't have anything else really going on, it was the thing to do. But it was sad.

Mr. Cintron called me to the office and pointed toward a chair. He took a sip of his coffee, made a little face, and then leaned back in his chair.

"You hear there was a fight in the corridor yesterday afternoon?" he asked.

"Nobody told me," I said. I was surprised, because usually Play clues me in on all the happenings.

"Diego punched Leon Munoz in the back of the head," Mr. Cintron said.

"And Leon is supposed to be his boy, too," I said. "Diego is just foul."

"So how does that make you feel?"

"How does it make me feel? I feel like it's just wrong, that's all," I said.

"You want some coffee?"

"I should take some," I said. "But I don't like it."

"You want to talk about what happened at the precinct yesterday?" he asked.

"Nothing happened," I said. "They said they were considering laying some new charges on me and I didn't know what they were talking about. You know, I got busted two years ago for taking some prescription pads and-"

"Stealing some prescription pads-"

"Yeah, stealing some prescription pads," I said. "Now they're saying somebody took some drugs from the doctor's office, too. I didn't do that and I've never heard of anybody laying on charges for something that happened two years ago and it wasn't homicide."

"The detectives called me after you left and said that you were considering copping a plea," Mr. Cintron said. "They said you were facing twenty years and you were looking to cop to a lesser for three years."

"They might have said that, but I still don't know what they're talking about. They said that Little Freddy told them that I took the drugs from the doctor's office and messed with them, and then I sold them and somebody died-"

"That's homicide. 'Somebody died' is automatically homicide until it gets to the D.A.'s office and he makes the final decision about what the charge is going to be."

"But I didn't take any drugs out of the doctor's office. I took the pads. The prescription pads were all I took. He had some money on the desk and I didn't even take that."

"Why not?"

"Because I was scared and wanted to get out of there. I know some guys get off breaking into people's houses and offices and things, but I don't," I said. "Soon as I was inside his office, I was looking to snatch some pads and run."

"You knew where the pads were?"

"Yeah, Freddy told me."

"What's Freddy been doing this last year or so?" Mr. Cintron was putting more sugar in his coffee. "If I gave you the phone, could you find out what he was doing?"

"I don't know. I could ask my brother or maybe my friend, but I don't want to get them involved in nothing."