1
Chocolate
Milk & Tornadoes
They come to get me on a Tuesday.
I know it was, cause I keep a
calendar on my wall. The calendar shows girls on it, but not the dirty kind of
girls like a lot of the fellas like. These girls are dressed, or mostly dressed
anyway, in swimmin’ suits. They’re all holding Snap-On brand tools, and are
hanging around in garages, like they’re going to fix your car. I like them
because they look like they are useful, and not just like for sex. I always
don’t feel like you’re supposed to just be pretty, even if you’re a girl, but
like you oughtta also be good at something. Something useful, like knowing how
to fix things. I also like those girls on the calendar because they are all
smiling, like they’d like to maybe be my friend. Seems like it would be really
nice to have a pretty girlfriend who knew how to fix stuff when it was broken.
On account of how I never expected
to get out of here at all, and how I mostly like the summer months when it’s
warm the best, I always keep the calendar turned to June, or July, or August. It
doesn’t really matter which page I have it turned to. It’s always the same in
there. The same temperature. There’s no summer, and it’s mostly cold. So it was
a Tuesday in July when they come to get me.
I knew something was happening all
day, because James said at breakfast that there wasn’t no way they was gonna
give us all chocolate milk unless they was about to do something bad to us.
That ain’t exactly the way James said it, but I ain’t gonna use the words he
said. My mother always told me that only ignorant people use words like
cussin’, and she said even if you’re stupid, you don’t have to sound ignorant.
So I ain’t even gonna tell you the kinda words James uses, cause he was my
friend, and I don’t want you to think he was ignorant. Cause he wasn’t. He was
really smart. That’s how come he knew about the chocolate milk.
See, James wasn’t from Texas Omaha
I didn’t think too much about what
James told me, but I guess I should have listened. Cause it turned out he was
right. Everything was normal during most of the day, when we was workin, and
when we got time to play ball in the gym.
My team played really good that day.
That Tuesday. Our team was the Tornadoes. We even had white shirts with a
little grey whirling tornado up on the muscle above your heart. Stew had
bargained the grey thread out of one of the guys who brings the clean laundry
and picks up the dirty stuff every week. Then Stew gave all us guys on the
team, there was five of us, he gave us all the shirts for Christmas last year. He’s
always been really generous like that with giving stuff away. And that day the
Tornadoes did really good.
They don’t let us play football, or
basketball either, like some of the guys back home liked. Those games were bad
influences, on account of they got people riled up and upset sometimes. They
were bad games, because they would stir us up to be violent I guess, maybe. We
played kickball instead, which is a good game instead, where you roll a big
yellow ball at a fella and he kicks it, and then runs around the bases. They
let us use old wore out cushions from the Caf as bases, and since the gym floor
was kinda slippery, and it was hard to run in a straight line, so if a fella
ran too fast then he’d go sliding when he hit a base, and it’d be funny. So
everybody ran pretty slow usually, cause nobody wanted to get laughed at when
they was playin’. But somebody always went for a slide anyway usually. But not the
Tornadoes that day. I kicked the ball really good twice, and Stew made a triple
play. Even James, who don’t always like to play, he even played with us that
day, and caught the ball pretty good too. That was good, cause he don’t always
know how to catch it. Usually he remembers, but some days he gets confused,
even though he’s smart, and he can’t get his arms up right. He says it’s cause
they get doses wrong sometimes and make him more clumsy than they’re supposed
to. I don’t know, but I know he caught it that day, which makes him in a good
mood. And I liked that, cause he was my friend.
But so because of how the Tornadoes
won, I was really happy. And we was all clappin’ each other on the back and
stuff when we was on the way to taking showers to get ready for supper. Don’t
laugh when I say shower. It wasn’t like that. Guys is always givin’ me a hard
time and makin’ jokes when they hear where I come from, but I never saw nothing
like that happen in the shower. It was pretty much just like when you was a kid
and had to go to school gym class. I’m not sayin’ that there wasn’t guys who
wanted to have sex and stuff. And maybe they did. Some guys were ignorant and
talked about all kinds of weird dirty stuff. I’m just saying, I never saw it,
and I never saw nothing funny happen in the shower, that’s all. So don’t be
givin’ me a hard time about dropping’ soap or whatever. And anyway, that day
cause we won we was just all happy, like I said.
But then when we were back in our
holes before it was time for supper, is when I really knew something weird was
gonna happen. Up to that point, besides the chocolate milk, it had been a
pretty normal day I guess.
They normally would give us dinner
at the same time every day, except on Christmas, which was how you knew when it
was Christmas. But every other day of a year, it got to where you’d know,
because your tummy would start rumbling and you’d get hungry just a few minutes
before the doors and the gates would open to let you go up the tunnel into the
Caf.
But on that day, just after my
stomach started telling me it was time for supper, instead of the doors sliding
open, the screens all came down. Normally, they didn’t have to bring the
screens down unless some guys was actin’ up or trying to start a fight
somewhere or something. But that day everything was good, as far as I knew, so
it didn’t make no sense when they lowered down the screens.
You probably don’t know about the
screens, but they was made of some kinda hard plastic. They made it to where
you couldn’t see or hear anything happening outside your own hole. I didn’t
ever like ‘em because they made it really lonely, and a little bit scary in
there, like you didn’t know you weren’t the only person alive anymore. Or maybe
you’d start thinkin’ about how they might not ever open the screens again, so
you’d never see your friends. They made it dark and lonely in your hole
whenever the screens came down, so I didn’t like em.
So when the screen came down on
Tuesday in July, I thought maybe there must be a fight or something that just
nobody told me was gonna happen. Usually you’d know a long time before if
somebody was gonna fight. Everybody knew, cause whoever it was would stop
eatin’ for a few days to where they could get their strength back. Then whoever
they were gonna fight would find out and they’d stop eatin’ too, and just hide
the food in their pants, so they could fool the toilet later. So then
everybody’d know two guys was gonna fight, and you could be ready for the
screens to come down.
But like I said, this time didn’t
nobody seem like they was gettin’ ready to fight, so I was real surprised when
the screens came down. You’d think they might have made a big loud noise, like
some rusty cage door in an old movie or something. But they were real quiet.
Just a little woosh that you couldn’t barely hear. Besides us fellas, there
really wasn’t too much that made noise in there. Not like here. It was a pretty
quiet place, I guess.
But so the screen came down, and it
got real dark in my hole, and I waited a while for it to come back up, like I
always do. And then I started to get a little worried, and I started to get a
little scared that maybe there wasn’t anybody else out there anymore.
Whenever I get lonely or scared,
since I was a little kid I got a song I think about. Okay, well, I sing it real
quiet to where only I can hear it. I ain’t gonna sing it out loud to you, cause
I’d be embarrassed. But so this time I started to kinda whisper the song to
myself, and I sang it a whole bunch of times. And I tried to think about how
good I kicked the ball, and how Stew said I was a natural. But the screen
stayed down a really long time, and I think maybe I was really scared, cause I
sang the song a lot, and then I fell asleep, which I don’t ever do except at
the time when you’re supposed to.
When I woke up, it was cause the
screen was open, and my door was open, and there was two guys I didn’t know
looking at me. They was both dressed real nice, in really shiny boots and tan
clothes and hats, and they both had black sticks strapped to their legs. I
didn’t know who they were, and they were just looking at me, making me scared,
and then I heard a voice I knew.
“This is a good one. Take him.”
It was Guard Salazar, who talks to
us over the speakers sometimes. I knew his name, cause he would introduce
himself on mornings sometimes and say, “This is Salazar, rise and shine,
amigos!” At first I couldn’t see him, but then I saw he was standing behind the
two big men with boots.
I was a little surprised when I saw
him, cause he always had such a big voice I thought he was probably a really
huge guy, but he wasn’t. He was really small, littler than James is even. He
had on a blue uniform suit, and a mustache, and he looked about as scared as I
felt.
So then before I could say hello to
him, which I wasn’t sure I was supposed to do anyway, the two big guys reached
down like there were gonna grab me and one said, “Stand up.”
And so I stood up, and they got me
to come out of my hole, and I could see all the way up the row that most of the
screens were down, but that some of them were open, and that there were other
guys in tan suits and black boots getting other guys to come out. I didn’t see
anyone on the Tornadoes, and most of the guys were ones I didn’t really know
too good.
I did notice though that most of the
guys they were pullin’ out were black guys. I wasn’t a black guy, at least not
really. Guys made fun of me sometimes cause they said I was so much a
everything that I wasn’t nothing at all. But that never made no sense to me. If
you’re a little bit of everything don’t that make you more like everybody? But
most guys there was Mexicans or black dudes and they stuck together. Like me
and Stew and James was the only three guys on the Tornadoes who wasn’t black.
But that didn’t never matter any to me though. Cause my mother also told me it
don’t matter what people look like on the outside and you should never be mean
to anyone just cause of how they look. It’s like with those girls on the
calendar. Just cause you look a certain way, like if you’re pretty, don’t mean
you don’t have to be useful too. It’s like that, is what she meant. So then it
was pretty weird how they were pullin’ out mostly black guys.
But I didn’t say nothing. I just
walked in front of the two big guys, listening to their boots. I remember that
I was kinda thinkin’ how great it would be if I could get boots like that, and
you could hear my feet walking big down the row like that. I guess I sure got
em now, don’t I?
So I was a little afraid, but I
wasn’t at the same time, cause I thought if Guard Salazar said I was a good
one, then they wasn’t gonna do anything too bad to me. I guess maybe I was
kinda right and kinda wrong.
These two guys took me all the way
down past the gym and the Caf to a place in a wall where I didn’t ever see a
door before. But there was an open door there now. And they took me through it
and up a hallway, kinda like one I think I remember from when they put me down
in there a long time ago. And they took me into a room that was like an office,
with a desk and everything.
There were a bunch of men in the
room, and most of them were dressed like the two guys who came to get me. I
figured out that they was soldiers, cause they was standing up real straight,
like at attention. There was one guy sitting at the desk and he said, “thank
you” to Guard Salazar. Then Guard Salazar turned and walked off without ever
looking at me once and I didn’t ever see him again since.
The man behind the desk said to me,
“do you know why you’re here?”
And I said, “Yes sir, cause I done
something wrong.”
And he said, “No, son, I mean, do
you know why you’re here today?”
And I said, “No, sir. I don’t think
there was a fight, sir.”
And he gave me a weird look and
kinda sad and then he said, “Son, there is a fight, and it’s a really important
one, but it’s a long way from here. Now what I’d like to know is, will you help
us with this fight?”
And I kinda looked down at my feet
and thought about how much I’d like to have the shiny boots, but then I said, “Sir,
I’m not supposed to be fightin’.”
And he said, “Well, that’s different
now. Son, we’d like you to join the army. If you accept, the remainder of your
sentence will be pardoned upon fulfilling your tenure conditions.”
I didn’t understand, and I was getting
nervous, cause I thought maybe he thought I was gonna try to fight someone, and
I wasn’t. So I didn’t say nothing for a minute, and I thought some of the other
men in the room were mad at me.
And then he said, “Son, will you
join the US Army and help us fight the Terrorists?”
And I wanted to help him so they
wouldn’t be mad at me so I said yes.
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Maybe if anyone is interested I'll write more of this one some day. But it won't be for Vic.
-tf
