Jodi Picoult - Small Great Things

The lawyer stands so that she can grab a file on her desk. It’s got the little colored confetti of stickers on the side that is some secret code, I imagine. She opens it, and even from here I can see the Post-it note. Her nostrils flare, but she doesn’t comment.

“That nurse wasn’t supposed to be taking care of my son,” I say, “and she was left alone with him.”

Carla Luongo looks at me. “How do you know that, Mr. Bauer?”

“Because your staff can’t keep their voices down. I heard her say she was covering for the other nurse. The day before, she was screaming her head off, just because I made a request to take her off my son’s case. And what happened? She was pounding on my baby. I watched her,” I say, tears springing to my eyes. I wipe them away, feeling foolish, feeling weak. “You know what? Fuck this. I’m going to take this hospital to the bank. You killed my son; you’re going to pay for it.”

Honestly, I have no idea how the legal system works; I’ve done my best to stay away from getting caught by the cops. But I’ve watched enough TV infomercials to believe that if you can get cash in a class-action lawsuit for having some lung disease brought about by asbestos, you most certainly have a bone to pick if your baby dies when he’s supposed to be receiving choice medical care.

I grab my suit jacket in one fist and half-drag Brit to the office door. I’ve just managed to open it when I hear the lawyer’s voice behind me. “Mr. Bauer,” she asks. “Why would you sue the hospital?”

“You’re kidding, right?”

She takes a step forward, gently but firmly closing the door of her office again. “Why would you sue the hospital, ” she repeats, “when everything suggests that Ruth Jefferson was the individual who killed your baby?”

–

ABOUT A YEAR into my running the Hartford NADS crew, we had a steady income. I was able to lift guns from Colt’s by forging inventory, and then sell them on the street. Mostly, we sold to blacks, because they were just going to kill each other with them anyway, and also because they paid three times more for a weapon than the Italians would. Yorkey and I ran the operation, and one night we were on our way home from a deal when a cop car pulled up behind me, its lights flashing.

Yorkey nearly shit a brick. “Fuck, man. What do we do?”

“We pull over,” I told him. It wasn’t like we had the stolen gun in the car anymore. As far as the police were concerned, Yorkey and I were headed back from a party at a buddy’s apartment. But when the cops asked us to step out of the car, Yorkey was sweating like a coal miner. He looked like he was guilty as sin, which is probably why the police searched the car. I waited, because I knew I had nothing to hide.

Apparently, Yorkey couldn’t say the same thing. That gun hadn’t been the only deal going down that night. While I was negotiating, Yorkey had bought himself an eight ball of meth.

But because it was in my glove compartment, I went down for it.

The thing about doing time is that it was a world I understood, where everyone was separated by race. My sentence for possession was six months, and I planned to spend every minute planning my revenge. Yorkey had used before he became part of NADS; it was part of the skater culture. But my squad, they didn’t touch drugs. And they sure as hell didn’t squirrel them away in my glove compartment.

In prison, the black gangs have everyone outnumbered, so sometimes the Latinos and the White gangs will band together. But in jail, you just basically try to keep your head straight and keep out of trouble. I knew that if there was anyone in the White Power Movement who happened to be in doing time, they would find me sooner or later-but I was hoping that the niggers wouldn’t find me first.

I took to keeping my nose buried in a Bible. I needed God in my life, because I had a public defender, and when you have a public defender, you’d better hope that God’s on your side, too. But I wasn’t reading the parts of Scripture I’d read before, when I was learning the doctrines of Christian Identity theology. Instead, I found myself dog-earing the pages about suffering, and salvation, and hope. I fasted, because I read something about it in the Bible. And during my fast God told me to surround myself with other people like me.

So the next day, I showed up at the jail Bible study group.

I was the only guy there who wasn’t black.

At first we just stared at each other. Then, the dude running the meeting jerked his chin at a kid who couldn’t have been much older than me, and he made a space next to himself. We all held hands, and when I held his, it was soft, like my father’s hands used to be. I have no idea why that popped into my head, but that’s what I was thinking when they started to say the Lord’s Prayer, and then suddenly I was saying it along with them.

I went to Bible study every day. When we finished reading Scripture, we’d say Amen, and then Big Ike, who ran the group, would ask, “Who’s got court tomorrow?” Usually, someone would say they had a preliminary hearing or that the arresting officer was testifying or something like that, and Big Ike would say, “All right, then, let’s pray that the officer don’t throw you under no bus,” and he’d find a passage in the Bible about redemption.

Twinkie was the black kid who was my age. We talked a lot about girls, and how we missed hooking up with them. But believe it or not, we talked more about the food we craved on the outside. Me, I would have committed a felony for Taco Bell; Twinkie only wanted Chef Boyardee. Somehow, it didn’t matter so much what color his skin was. Had I met him on the streets of Hartford, I would have kicked his ass. But in jail, it was different. We’d team up when we played Spades, cheating with hand signals and eye rolls that we made up in private, because no one expected the White Power guy and the black kid to be working together.

One day, I was sitting in the common room with a bunch of White guys when a gang shooting came in on the midday news. The anchor on the TV was talking about how the bullets sprayed, how many people had been hit by accident. “That’s why if we ever go at it with the gangs,” I said, “we win. They don’t go target shooting like us. They don’t know how to hold weapons, look at that death grip. Typical nigger bullshit.”

Twink wasn’t sitting with us, but I could see him across the room. His eyes sort of skated over me, and then back to whatever he was doing. Later that day, we were playing cards for cigarettes, and I gave him a sign to come back in diamonds, because I was cutting diamond spades. Instead, he threw clubs, and we lost. As we were walking out of the common room, I turned on him. “What the hell, dude? I gave you a sign.”

He looked right at me. “Guess it’s just typical nigger bullshit,” he said.

I thought : Shit, I hurt his feelings . Then: So what?

It’s not like I stopped using that word. But I’ll admit, sometimes when I said it, it stuck in my throat like a fish bone before I could cough it free.

–

FRANCIS FINDS ME just as I put my boot through the front window of our duplex, pushing out the old casing so that it explodes onto the porch in a rain of splinters and glass. He folds his arms, raises a brow.

“Sill’s rotted out,” I explain. “And I didn’t have a pry bar.”

With a gaping hole in the wall, the cold air rushes into the house. It feels good, because I’m on fire.

“So this has nothing to do with your meeting,” Francis says, in a way that suggests it has everything to do with the last half hour I’ve spent at the local police department. It was my next stop after the hospital. I’d dropped off Brit, who crawled back into bed, and drove straight there.