John Gilstrap - Nathan’s Run

The recreation hall was literally and figuratively the center of activity at the Juvenile Detention Center. Roughly hexagonal in shape and fabricated out of concrete block painted yellow-orange, the rec hall served all nonsleeping activities. Three glass-partitioned rooms served as makeshift classrooms during the day, with the largest of the rooms doubling as a dining hall. The detention cells extended down two hallways on opposite ends of the hexagon—one for the boys and one for the girls. From seven in the morning until eight at night, the doors to those hallways remained locked. By eight-thirty they were locked again, with their residents inside.

The sixth side of the hexagon was the control room, half-Lexan and half-concrete. When residents were in the rec hall, the control room was occupied. Reinforced doors on either side led to the administrative areas and to the Crisis Unit.

At around seven o’clock that night, Ricky entered the rec hall from the administrative section, walked directly over to Nathan, and lifted him out of the chair by his ear. “Come with me, you little shit,” he said.

Nathan yelped, “Ow! What’d I do?”

“You know what you did,” Ricky hissed, his breath smelling of booze and cigarettes. He yanked Nathan across the rec hall toward the door on the other side of the control station. “Maybe a night in the Unit will teach you to draw on the walls.”

Nathan hung onto Ricky’s forearm with both hands, and danced along on tiptoes to keep his ear from being ripped from his head. “Let go, Ricky, please,” he pleaded. “I didn’t do anything. Honest to God, Ricky, I didn’t do anything!”

Ricky didn’t reply, except to lift a little higher on the ear. All activity in the rec hall stopped as dozens of eyes watched the smallest resident of the WC being dragged across the room by the man they all feared most. Each of them looked away, though, as Nathan made eye contact with them, silently pleading for help that he knew they couldn’t offer, even if they’d wanted to.

Ricky paused at the door to the Crisis Unit long enough to snap his key ring from his belt. As the lock turned, Nathan began to panic. The Crisis Unit was little more than a single cell, set apart from all the rest as a place where a resident in crisis could regain his composure and set his head straight. In reality, it was a place of punishment, where food or clothes or even light could be denied until such time as the resident was prepared to change his ways. Although it was rarely used, the Crisis Unit had a reputation among the residents. Nathan was terrified.

The lock turned, and the door opened. Nathan yelled louder still, crying like a baby, and promising not to be bad anymore. He started to grab the doorjamb, but instantly had to return his hands to Ricky’s wrist. “Ricky, you’re hurting me!”

“No shit, jerkoff. If you yell one more time, you’ll find out what hurt really means.”

Once they were through the door, they were in an area of the JDC where Nathan had never been. The hallway was narrow, barely enough room for the door to swing open. Ricky changed his grip to Nathan’s bicep and shoved the boy against the opposite wall, holding him in place with a stiff arm while he once again locked the door to the rec hall. Down to the left, maybe eight feet, the hallway opened up again slightly. Around an angled corner was the door marked with the dreaded words, “CRISIS UNIT.”

Nathan renewed his struggle, pulling his arm from Ricky’s grasp, only to be taken to the floor by his hair. Ricky followed him down to the ground and placed his mouth an inch from Nathan’s ear. “Listen to me, jerkoff,” he growled, droplets of spittle splashing against Nathan’s cheek. “You’re going in that room over there, one way or another, if I have to break bones to make it happen. Do you understand me?”

Nathan nodded, his face pressed against the tile floor. He tried to look at Ricky, but couldn’t focus through the tears in his eyes.

“And stop crying, you fucking cunt.” He stood once again, keeping a tight hold on a fistful of Nathan’s hair and dragging him down the short hallway. He one-handed the lock again, and half-shoved, half-tossed Nathan into the tiny cell.

The Crisis Unit was surprisingly like Nathan’s own quarters, though about half the size, with a metal cot and thin mattress on one side of the room, and a combination toilet and sink on the other. There was no source of outside light, the only illumination coming from a glaring bank of fluorescent lights set above the ceiling behind reinforced glass. The floor was bare concrete, without the tile he had in his own cell. And it was cold, much colder than the always-chilly residential wing.

“Take off your shoes and hand them to me,” Ricky commanded.

“why?”

“Do what I tell you, boy.”

Nathan knew better than to argue. He did as he was told, kicking off the standard-issue black sneakers without untying them. He handed the shoes over to Ricky with one hand while rubbing his sore ear with the other.

“And the socks.”

“But it’s cold in here.”

Ricky just glared, and held out his hand expectantly. Nathan slumped to the edge of the cot and started to cry again. He hated himself for giving in to the tears. No matter how hard he tried, he always ended up crying in front of these people. The fact that they all took such pleasure in it really pissed him off.

One foot at a time, Nathan scooped off his socks and handed them to Ricky, who abruptly left, locking the door behind him. Nathan listened to the footsteps disappear down the hall.

“What did I do wrong?!” he shrieked, loudly enough that his ears rang from the echo off the concrete walls.

Cold, confused and miserable, Nathan drew his legs up and rested his forehead on his knees, forcing himself to regain his composure. A single swipe of his sleeve cleaned his eyes and nose. Only ten more months, he told himself Only ten more months, and I’m out of here. It’s been eight months already. In half that time, it’ll be a year, and after half of that, I get out. I can do this. Easy as pie.

The trick, he had found, was to make the time go as quickly as possible; and no time passed more quickly than sleep. Keeping his knees up, Nathan lay on his side, and tried to make his feet disappear into his coveralls for warmth.

“These people are such assholes,” he. said aloud.

The sound of a key in the lock awoke Nathan with a start. Though the light was on within his cell, he could tell through the three-by-five-inch observation window in the door that the hallway beyond it was dark. For a long while after the lock turned, nothing happened. Nathan sat up and brought his knees to his chest again. He remembered seeing a scene like this in a movie once, where the door creaked open and at first there was nothing there. But then, all of a sudden, a vampire appeared and made everybody scream in their seats.

It was a stupid thing to think about, he scolded himself. There were no such things as vampires, and that stuff in the movies was all made up anyway. They called it special effects, things that some brainiac engineers thought up just to scare people.

His dad had always chided him for having an overactive imagination, always imagining creatures and burglars in the dark. Though he told himself in those seconds when he sat on the bunk waiting for the door to open that there was nothing to be afraid of, the fear he felt was quite real. His heart pounded in his chest like a drum. His breathing started to get noisy. Should he get up and go to the door? Was somebody coming in? Maybe he had a friend in the JDC after all, and this was a signal that it was okay for him to walk out.

Nathan jumped again when the door finally started to move inward, revealing Ricky standing alone in the doorway. He was drunk. Or stoned. Nathan could tell by the empty look in his eyes. It was the look that always preceded the beatings from Uncle Mark. Ricky was hiding something in his right hand, keeping it just out of sight behind his back. The look in his eyes got even emptier.