Walter Myers - Lockdown

"If you're not involved in anything, and if you didn't take the drugs like the city detectives are saying, how can you get somebody else involved?" Mr. Cintron asked.

"Yo, I don't mean any disrespect, sir, but how am I involved?" I asked. "Y'all took me down there and they questioned me and told me about the drugs and I didn't know anything about them."

Mr. Cintron pushed the phone toward me. "Call your brother," he said.

"I don't know if I should," I said.

"It's unofficial, just between you and me," Mr. Cintron said.

I picked up the phone and dialed home. I was hoping that Mom or Icy answered.

"The Andersons!" Icy.

"Hey, baby girl, how you doing?"

"Reese, how you doing?" she asked. "You coming home?"

"No, not yet," I said. "Say, Icy, is Willis home?"

"You don't want to talk to me?"

"I do, but this is about some business," I said. "I'll call you Sunday if I can borrow some money."

Mr. Cintron nodded to me.

"Willis isn't home," she said. "Just me. What time are you going to call Sunday?"

"If I call at eight in the morning will that be too early?"

"No, I'll be up," Icy said. "And you'd better call. What did you want Willis for?"

"I wanted to know-I wanted to know if he's heard anything about Freddy," I said.

"Freddy Booker, that light-skinned boy that was in your case?"

"Yeah, just tell Willis-"

"He got arrested."

"Willis?"

"No, that Freddy. I don't know why he got arrested. Probably drugs, because that's what he does. He's pretty much messed up," Icy said. "You want me to ask around?"

"No!" I heard myself holler into the phone. "Look, Icy, don't say nothing to anybody. I'll call you Sunday, okay?"

"Eight o'clock."

It took me a minute to come down off the phone call and tell Mr. Cintron I didn't really know what Freddy was doing. "I know he got arrested but I don't know what he was doing."

"Why are you upset?" Mr. Cintron asked.

"That was my baby sister on the phone," I said. "I don't like her knowing who got arrested and who using drugs and everything. You know, she should just be going to school."

"If Freddy got arrested, he's probably looking to bring as many people into the case as he can," Mr. Cintron said.

"Why would he want to bring me into it?" I asked. "I didn't do anything to him. Even when our case went down, he was the one who turned me in. I didn't snitch him out."

"He sounds like a career thug," Mr. Cintron said. "And there are two good reasons to bring you into the case. If you did anything, or if he can pin something on you, he can cooperate with the prosecution and hope to get a lighter sentence. If you didn't do anything and went on trial with him and you looked innocent, then maybe the jury would let him slide because the overall case was weak. Remember what I told you about those crabs?"

"You think that shit is correct?" I asked.

"No, but I think it's the life you're in when you walk through some of the doors you've been walking through," he said. He stood up.

"You going to loan me the money to call Icy on Sunday?"

He looked at his calendar. "I'll be in Sunday morning for about an hour," he said. "You get your breakfast Sunday morning and I'll have Pugh or whoever's on let you eat it in here and make the phone call. Okay?"

"Yes."

"And try not to get into a fight with anybody between now and then."

"So you got funded?"

"No, I did not get funded, Mr. Robinson," Miss Rossetti said. "I am just doing the job that I am scheduled to do."

"This is the second group meeting we've had this month," Play went on.

"And with your kind permission, sir, we will continue," Miss Rossetti said.

"Yes, ma'am." Play was wearing a half smile like he owned it and slouching in his chair with his legs stretched out in front of him.

There was a new girl in the group, and she was fine as she wanted to be. She looked a little Spanish, with dark hair and eyes, but I wasn't sure.

"In our last session we discussed what made us afraid," Miss Rossetti said, looking around the room. "This time I want to know what each of you feels you can do to make someone else happy. And we'll start with Mr. Robinson. I think your first name is…Eddie?"

"I let people I like call me Play."

"What shall I call you?" Miss Rossetti asked.

"That all depends on how attracted to me you are," Play said. "If you think me and you can be-"

"You can start, Mr. Robinson," Miss Rossetti said, her voice rising. "What do you think you could do to make someone else happy?"

"I could make my parents happy if I got a good job," Play said. "Maybe tighten up a gig with the post office. Nine to five. They would dig that big-time."

"That's a good observation," Miss Rossetti said. "You show very good understanding of what someone else feels and thinks. How about you, Deepak? You want to run with the ball?"

"My parents would be happy if I became an engineer," Toon said. "I wouldn't be as good an engineer as my brother, but that would make them happy, I think."

"Very good. Paola?" She was speaking to the new girl.

"My parents would be happy if I let my grandmother adopt my son," Paola said. "If she adopted him legally, then she could get ADC and she would be eligible for Section Eight housing on her own. Plus, she could get some start-up money from Family Services to help her set up her own place. And they even speak Spanish down there."

"You going to let her adopt your kid?" King Kong asked.

"Uh-uh." Paola shook her head. "I only got a five-year bid, and if God is on my side, I can walk in three, maybe even two and a half. Then if I can find somebody to hook up with, I can get my son back if he's in the foster system. But if the legal thing goes through with my grandmother, I can't get him back because my moms is going to want to keep Abuela on welfare so she don't have to support her."

"That's very technical, Paola," Miss Rossetti said.

"Baby, you got to know the technical stuff to survive in New York," Paola said. "The other thing I could do to make my parents happy is to marry some rich dude, but that ain't hardly happening because you got to be hooked up even to meet a rich dude."

"You never know what love will produce," Miss Rossetti said. "Mr. Right might just come along. You're a very attractive young woman."

"Honey, there's so many women out there ready to satisfy any man who comes along that pretty ain't hardly cutting it. Being smart isn't enough, and being nice isn't enough," Paola said. "I've got a baby and a jail record. Don't even talk to me about no Mr. Right."

Miss Rossetti took a deep breath and smiled. She didn't call King Kong's name but she kind of gestured toward his dumb butt.

"What I would like to do to make somebody else happy is to have my own place, you know." King Kong pulled at his crotch. "Right now-not right now but before I came up here-I was living in the shelter. Really, I was living in two shelters. Sometimes I stayed uptown with the folks, you know, on 126th Street. That was okay and I could deal with it. I was also spending some time downtown with the white folks because I thought that was interesting. I mean, downtown was where you had a whole different set of people-"

"But how would you make someone else happy, Mr. Sanders?"

"Well, you know, I'm thinking-if I had my own place, I could invite a girl up to the place and have some wine or something or maybe order out some fried chicken and have it up there or maybe even I could have my cousin drop by and check out my crib. Then he would see that I was doing okay and he could split and think maybe he would drop by again if he was in the neighborhood. He wouldn't be falling out behind that scene but maybe it would give him something else to do and that would make him happy."