“Mr. Glass, you are under arrest for possession and intent to distribute illegal narcotics,” Deputy Smalls said. He took a pair of handcuffs from his belt. “Please turn around, sir.”
Whatever anger had risen in me vanished in the face of Smalls and his handcuffs, and, numbly, I complied. Smalls snapped one of the cuffs over my right wrist, brought it up to the small of my back, and then brought my left hand up, snapping the second bracelet over my left wrist. As he was cuffing me, Smalls went through the Miranda litany: “You have the right to an attorney, anything you say can and will be used against you.” The entire time, incredulous, I watched Sam’s face. I had to look over my shoulder to do this. His expression ran the gamut from uncertainty to disbelief to sadness. It was this last image of Sam’s sad face that lingered long after Smalls turned me around and swiftly and professionally escorted me out of my apartment to the parking lot and into his cruiser, placing his hand on my head to steer me into the backseat. Stunned as I was, I did manage to feel thankful that no students appeared to have seen me led in handcuffs to a police car. Just then, I saw Stephen Watterson, standing, mouth open, in the glassed-in second-floor walkway. He stared at me as I was placed in the backseat of the cruiser.
THE MIDDLE RIVER REGIONAL Jail had two large holding cells. One was empty and dark. They put me in the second one. A dozen people eyed me lazily when another deputy escorted me in and closed the cell door behind me with a hollow clang. I found a spot on a bench and sat down, rubbing my hands over my head. This would be funny, I thought, if I weren’t sitting in a jail cell with an open toilet in the corner. As if he could hear my thoughts, one of the other prisoners stood, ambled over to the toilet, dropped trou, and squatted on it.
For hours, it seemed, I just sat there, staring at the mottled concrete floor and the drain in its center. I tried to get a hold on what was happening. Deputy Smalls had told me that a student had found a plastic bag with three buds and a handful of Oxycontin pills in my classroom desk and told Ren Middleton, who had called Sheriff Townsend. Smalls had been dispatched to my apartment, where he had found traces of marijuana. My stating emphatically that the marijuana in the classroom desk wasn’t mine didn’t seem to make an impression on Smalls, or perhaps his carefully neutral expression was simply a professional necessity. Or maybe he was used to people protesting their innocence when they were hauled to jail. Staring at the cross-hatching of the metal drain in the floor, I wondered about my students, about who would teach them now. Would someone pass them back their papers, which I had graded and were in my workbag next to the futon in what had been my apartment? Would my students want to read my comments, or would they just talk about how I’d been arrested? What would happen to the boys who lived on my dorm? The look on Stephen Watterson’s face as he stared at me in handcuffs floated in my head like a hangover.
Sitting in that cell, I considered my prospects, which weren’t cheerful. My job was gone, for one thing—that was certain. One didn’t remain a teacher for long if one was handcuffed and marched out of school in front of students. I was apparently going to need a lawyer, but while a female deputy had said something about public defenders and arraignment hearings, I’d been unable to process what she said. I did know that if I wanted to get out of jail, I would need bail money, but as that would likely involve calling my parents, I balked and refrained from asking the guard for my phone call. I felt I would rather have my teeth pulled out of my mouth without the benefit of anesthesia than call my mother and father and ask them to bail me out of jail. Whom else could I call? Sam Hodges’s face had been like a closing door. Gray Smith, who for the past several months had covered for me on dorm duty after I had gently harassed him, would probably hang up, and I was pretty sure he didn’t have much in the way of available cash. I briefly considered calling Wat Davenport but buried that thought out of a mixture of shame and pride. That morning I had been eating blueberry muffins in Wat’s Georgetown home; it seemed indecent, somehow, to call him that afternoon from jail. Trip was a possibility, but I held back for the same reasons I wouldn’t call Wat. Abby? Right. It was like some sort of Kafkaesque test of friendship: Whom could you call if you were incarcerated? Maybe I could call Diamond and have the Marines bust me out. Or I could pull a Jason Bourne, disarm the one overweight deputy, who appeared to be endlessly reading the same magazine at his station across the hall, climb up the wall to the window at the top, and wriggle out.
The dinner they served us was on a heavy cardboard tray with corn, carrots, applesauce, and some sort of mystery meat. Two deputies passed out the trays in the cell, along with grade-school-sized cartons of milk. I ate mechanically, not because I was hungry but because it was something to do.
After dinner, I was thinking about calling Wat Davenport, and my pride be damned, when the fat deputy got a call on his cell phone, grunted into it, and folded it shut. “Glass!” he called out. I raised my hand, like a kid answering roll call in class. “Step up,” he said. “You’ve got a visitor.”
THE JAIL’S VISITING ROOM followed Hollywood conventions to the letter—the camera mounted in a corner of the ceiling, the uniformed deputy scanning the room, even down to the rows of booths and the glass barriers between prisoners and visitors.
Out of eighteen booths, only one, at the far left, was occupied—a thin, bearded prisoner was talking to a tired-looking woman with graying hair. Someone could have taken a photograph of the two and titled it Despair and sold it in a gallery. The fat deputy steered me to the middle booth, where I saw Lester Briggs waiting for me. He was wearing the same plaid shirt he’d worn when we’d met in the Fir Tree.
I pulled out my chair and sat down across from Briggs, who leaned forward to talk at me through the glass. “You okay?” he asked.
“I’m incarcerated, Lloyd,” I said. Briggs blinked. “It’s from a movie,” I said. “Forget it.” I wanted to giggle. No—I wanted to laugh out loud, guffaw in the face of the deputy in the corner at the absurdity of all of it: this is just too fucking funny!
Briggs moved his jaw a bit as if mulling over his words. “Your arraignment won’t be until tomorrow at the earliest,” he said. “You’ll want to make bail then.”
I chose to continue ignoring reality and smiled. “And how much would bail be?” I asked lightly.
Briggs thought for a moment. “First-time offender with possession of drugs on school grounds, you’re looking at twenty thousand, give or take.”
My attempt at lighthearted indifference evaporated. “Twenty thousand dollars?”