Then he pulled away, smirking. We walked side by side.
Sounds of metal clanging grew louder as we neared, and I realized inmates were banging on the cells.
“Guess ’cause they thinking about what they done,” he said, chuckling.
In the control room the jailers were chatting, watching Matlock, and eating breakfast. The odor was a weird mix of grease and must.
“I’m gonna quit this motherfucking job.”
“You ain’t gonna quit nothing.”
“You watch me.”
“Boy, you gone get fired in any other place. That mouth of yours, you know you got it.”
“I sure do.”
I tried my best to be unobtrusive. But nobody appeared to notice I was there.
Back in the windowless room, I was looking up at the ceiling, searching for the source of a puddle on the floor, when Patrick suddenly appeared in the doorway. Seeing me, he smiled and pulled up his baggy black-and-white-striped jumpsuit.
“Ms. Kuo,” Patrick said, walking in, shaking his head, marveling. “You came back.”
Then he asked, “What you doing here, Ms. Kuo?”
I told him I was going to be around Helena for longer than I’d expected, that I’d missed living here.
“Here?” he said. “That sure crazy.” He shook his head again, but he was smiling.
We caught up. I told him I’d just gotten back from seeing my parents in Indiana.
“You got a mom and a daddy?” he asked.
I said I did. I took out my phone to show him pictures.
“You can take pictures on these?” he asked.
Patrick watched the screen carefully as I swiped the screen with my thumb and the next picture appeared.
“See?” I said. “Now you try.”
He wiped his hand on the side of his jumpsuit and placed his finger on the screen. Gingerly, he imitated my gesture.
“You look like them,” he said.
He seemed interested in the pictures, examining every image thoroughly before proceeding to the next. “What’s that?” he’d ask. I had taken pictures of my mother’s cooking. Noodle soup, I’d say, or Chinese vegetables—I didn’t know the exact name in English. For a few he supplied the answer. “Shrimp,” he said to himself.
Then he said, “You been to China, Ms. Kuo?”
“Yes.”
“You been to Africa?”
“Yes.” I paused. “Do you want to go to any of those places?”
Still looking down at my pictures, he said, “I don’t know about all that. I just wanna get out of jail.”
He handed me back the phone.
“How are you?” I asked.
Patrick’s mood shifted suddenly, as if I’d brought up a forbidden topic. He slouched back in his seat, shoulders sagging.
“Ain’t nothing happening here.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing. Just crazy stuff.”
He put his hands over his face, then took them off.
“My cousin be here; there be this other dude messing with him. Dude went crazy, threw my cousin’s tray against the wall. Then he took the juice jug, threw it up in the air.” He paused. “And they be burning plastic.”
“Burning what?” I asked, unsure if I’d heard correctly.
“Plastic,” he said, louder.
I was puzzled.
Patrick tried to be patient. “It cover the windows, you know. They be trying to burn a hole through the windows.”
I recalled The Shawshank Redemption and Tim Robbins chipping away at the wall.
“Why?” I asked, feeling foolish, wondering if the answer was obvious. “To escape?”
“Naw. To get weed through the windows. Then they sell it to the jailers. Or the trusties.” At this he scowled.
“Who?”
He explained. The trusties were inmates who lived in separate quarters. The jail outsourced janitorial work to them. “They cook, you know, clean up around here. They mop; they work; they just don’t get paid.”
“Trusty?” I repeated. I’d never heard the word before.
“Yeah, trusty. Like somebody you supposed to trust. People who supposed to be trustworthy.” He grimaced, affronted—he still expected words to mean what they promised to mean.
He opened his mouth to say something but stopped himself. His head dangled lower, a gesture now almost familiar to me.
“Ms. Kuo, I don’t—I don’t know what I got myself into.”
He laid his head in his hands.
“I can’t sleep. I can’t help but breathe in all that smoke.”
The room was still. I was at a loss.
I heard myself ask, “Can you get a different room—cell?”
His voice came out muffled from under his hands: “If the jailer let you.”
Then words poured out of him. “And nothing be working here. Like, they got these intercoms. But they don’t work. If you need some attention or someone get to fighting, you gotta beat on the window. Like the other day, this guy had a seizure back there. But the jailers only come back when they feel like coming back. You gotta beat the window, and they don’t know if you serious or not, because people beat the window all the time for nothing.” He rubbed his hands over his temples. “Trapped around these niggers all day long.”
I reached awkwardly to touch his shoulder, a tentative pat on his back. Yet his body was coiled so tightly that he didn’t appear to register my touch.
“Time,” he said. “You can’t go back in time. Everything that happen is about cause and effect. One day lead to another. And now I’m here.”
Patrick covered his face with his hands.
“Hey, Patrick,” I said finally, consolingly, wanting to say something. “You’re being strong. Keep your chin up.”
At this he lifted his chin, as if I’d meant the phrase literally.
—
THAT AFTERNOON, OUT of the blue, Jordan, an old teaching friend, called. Jordan was among that special breed of teacher who had come with Teach for America and decided to stay. He’d started the year before I had, bought a house, married another teacher, had two kids, and was planning to live in Helena permanently. He was a Catholic with religious tattoos and sported the grim persona of a former gang member turned priest.
My students at Stars had had him at Miller and recalled him with a mixture of respect and recoil. Kids never forget a class where they feel expected to succeed at a deep level and are given the means to do so. The memory of feeling smart, even if only for a day or week, doesn’t ever go entirely away.
Jordan asked how California was.
I replied nonchalantly. “It’s okay. I’m going to do legal aid. I’m excited about that.”
Among the dozens or so teachers who had stayed in the Delta, with the exception of Danny and Lucy, I tended to withhold mention of anything that made me look frivolous, likely because I felt exposed around them: They had done what I could not, and more, they’d done it without any apparent agony.
Jordan was now a principal at KIPP. It desperately needed a part-time Spanish teacher, he told me. His full-time teacher, Ms. Alvarado, was overloaded with seven classes. “My Spanish is pretty bad,” I began. “I just had two years of college Spanish.”
Jordan smiled; in the Delta, that was worth a lot.
“I could teach English,” I tried. No, he needed Spanish.
I have never been good at saying no. Also, I wanted Jordan to like me.