Nevada Barr - 13 1/2

Dylan knew he was killing his chance of any kind of leniency. And he knew he could not show them his pain. Should the least tiny little droplet of it leak out it would breach the dam; the trickle would become a stream, and the stream, a flood. He would be washed away in it.

The last day of the trial a cop took the stand and told the jury Dylan had gone insane and peed in his pants rather than look at what he’d done. He told them how Dylan had laughed. Then two more cops repeated the story. Dylan sort of remembered doing that, but it wasn’t the way they said it was.

When the last cop was telling how Rich nearly died from the hack job on his leg and how Dylan had laughed, Dylan shut down his ears. It was too weird. Somebody else did all those things, not Dylan. A monster got in. Maybe Rich was protecting that monster. His girlfriend. Vondra was always peeking out the windows at them and making up excuses to come by. Maybe she was psycho.

Maybe he was.

Voices washed around him as he sat straight and stiff and stared at the tabletop and tried to remember stuff-not the bad stuff-just stuff. Searching his mind, looking way back into the dark places where dead-and-over things were stored, he saw only fog, thick and white the way fog was from the machines they used in high school plays. But he wasn’t going to go to high school. Even a moron could figure that out.

That afternoon the trial ended. “Dylan, the judge asked you a question!” Mrs. Eisenhart’s voice dragged him out of himself. When she called him, he was seeing a picture in his mind of the butterfly kiss his mom had given him that last night, the tiny gold cross she always wore cool on his cheek. It made him smile.

“Look at him! He’s grinning!” a whisper hissed loud in the courtroom.

“Huh?” It took him longer than it should have to make sense of what she’d said. He sounded retarded.

“We are going into the sentencing phase now. Judge Farnsworth wants to know if you want to say anything in your own behalf.”

Then he did a stupid thing. He meant to ask if the jury had found him guilty. He meant to say, “I’m guilty?” with the end of the sentence going up, so everybody would know it was a question. What came out was, “I’m guilty.”

After that he got so confused he decided not to say anything else.

Dylan was sentenced to a juvenile detention center in Drummond, Minnesota, until he was eighteen years of age. On his eighteenth birthday he was to be transferred to the state penitentiary where he would be imprisoned until the age of twenty-seven.

The gavel rapped and the judge rose. Mrs. Eisenhart stood as well, chunked her papers into order on the top of the desk and fed them to her briefcase. Dylan watched as the leather jaws clamped shut on their catch.

“That, as they say, is that,” Mrs. Eisenhart said. She found Dylan’s dead-fish right hand and shook it perfunctorily. “Call me if you need anything.” Clack, clack, clack, and the double doors ate her as neatly as the leather had swallowed the papers.

A quiet man, maybe the bailiff, with a big gut and eyes that were kind even when he looked at Dylan, said: “Come on, boy. Let’s get this over with.” For a horrible second, Dylan looked around desperately for his mom and dad. The bailiff cuffed him, putting the manacles on carefully so the sliding part wouldn’t pinch his wrists, and asked, “That too tight?” This casual kindness was too rich to bear. Dylan couldn’t even say thank you and, seeming cold and ungrateful, he walked toward the door.

As before-the before between the night the things happened and the trial-Dylan was put in rooms. Taken out of rooms. People talked over and around him. He held himself tight and still so he wouldn’t blast apart and hurt them with the shrapnel of his bones. Finally he was escorted to a big van, the kind church groups use, but with iron mesh and seats where handcuffs could be locked.

For the first part of the four-hour drive to the detention center the bailiff rode in front with the driver. From what they said Dylan guessed the bailiff was getting a lift home. They pretty much ignored him, and when they did talk to him, they were nice enough. If he could have made their words line up in his brain, he would have answered them; but he couldn’t, and trying made the panic so bad he was afraid he was going to vomit. Then they’d think he was carsick, like a little kid.

After the bailiff got out the driver started talking to Dylan. “So you’re the famous Butcher Boy, eh.” He didn’t sound mean, just making conversation, the way somebody might say, “So you’re Frank Raines’s boy.” The thought of not being Frank Raines’s boy anymore caught crosswise in Dylan’s mind, and he bit down hard to keep from screaming and banging his head against the side of the van.

“Not many little kids in juvie. None as young as eleven as a matter of fact. Lots of half-grown men acting like little kids, if that’s any consolation to you. Eleven!” He whistled long and low. For a while, he didn’t say anything, and Dylan stared out the window. The snow was deep and silent and blue from the bit of moon. Trees edged the fields like jagged teeth. Every few miles a house showed lights.

No axe boys there. Sleep tight, Dylan thought. Craziness gnawed at him. He forced his mind to make a movie where he could stay sane. He did the television show The Fugitive, with the van sliding on ice, crashing, and him getting out. He was going to make it so that he found the one-armed guy, but instead the mind-Dylan who escaped the van lay down in the snow and let the cold freeze him quiet.

Having flicked through a bunch of radio stations and finally gotten bored, the driver started talking again. He told Dylan the juvenile facility wasn’t really in Drummond but on the prairie about twenty miles outside of town. That it looked like an old city hall from the outside but it was for really bad kids. “The place was built in nineteen twenty-nine,” he said, sounding like a tour guide. “That was before the crash, but then a whippersnapper like you wouldn’t care anything about that. When they built it, it was considered real modern, but it won’t look like that to a sharp young town boy like you. The architect… You know what an architect is?”

Dylan didn’t answer. Maybe he could have put the words together, but he didn’t want to. The driver was turning mean. Must be past his bedtime, Dylan thought in his mother’s voice.

“The architect was an Englishman. He went nuts with all the granite here and built the thing with arches and towers that would have looked right at home in merry olde England.” The driver told Dylan the guards were pretty good Joes, but it was thankless work, and he wouldn’t do it if wild horses dragged him. “Most are okay, but not all.” Then, as if embarrassed that he’d slipped into being nice, he threw in, “You better not try any funny stuff. These old boys won’t put up with that kind of thing. You’ll find yourself in a box no bigger than a coffin eating nothing but bread and water for a month.

“I don’t know where they’re going to put you,” the driver said. “Little skinny stick of a boy like you, put in with some of them big boys and… ” He stopped the way Dylan’s parents would stop when they realized “little pitchers have big ears.”

Dylan went back out the window into the snow where the cold could numb his heart and cool his head.

The next time the driver talked, his voice had changed, the way people’s do when they are talking to themselves instead of somebody else. “My gosh. What happened to make you do a thing like that? An axe of all things. I can’t imagine what must have been going through your head.”

He’s scared of me, Dylan realized. A grown-up, frightened of a little kid. They were all scared of him. That’s why they called him names. And not just him. He made them scared of all little kids. Dylan wanted to tell him not to be afraid, but he didn’t know how to do it without being “impertinent.” His mother’s word.