TWENTY-FIVE

When the police took me to jail that hot day just before my junior year, I believed I was not going to see ordinary life for a long time. I was locked into a police car, both cops ignoring me, except once. We had to stop suddenly for a cardboard box rolling across Broadway. The police unit braked hard, and the driver looked back and said, “You okay?”

The police station in Oakland is like a post office, fluorescent lights, folders, desks covered with paper, nothing happening. You notice mostly what isn’t there, no background music, no potted plants, the tack heads on the bulletin board red and white plastic lined up along one side, most of the bulletin board empty except for the faces of missing people.

The only other person they had arrested was the one I had spat on and thrown through the window. He wouldn’t meet my eyes. He wouldn’t look directly at the cop asking him to spell his name.

The fingerprint room was a surprisingly small chamber, signs warning not to smoke. There were moments of surprising courtesy, a moistened paper towel to wipe the ink off my fingers, being told there would be a restroom when we were on our way to the holding cells “if we could just hold our water.” That was the phrase the cop-clerk used, but it didn’t strike me as quaint or comical. Everyone in that room down through the decades had been aware of his bladder, a sac that can only hold so much.

The personnel acted polite in a leathery, impersonal way, calling me Mr. Madison, maybe the first time I had ever been addressed that way. Before I could be showered or deloused or raped a beefy woman was holding open the door, calling my name. At the end of a hall my mother was standing with her arms crossed, wearing too much makeup. I walked along beside her, sure there was some kind of mistake. We were in her car before I could ask, and then I couldn’t talk when I first tried.

“They dropped the charges,” she said, sounding like a gangster’s mom, used to this.

She didn’t start the car. We sat there staring ahead at a blank wall, green cinder block.

“The owner of the tropical fish store,” she said, “called up to tell what he saw, you taking on half the East Bay. He laughed about it. Can you imagine a business owner having a sense of humor about a broken window? He said if you’re going to get into another fight, he wants to be in the front row.”

I kept my mouth shut. I’d like to meet this man, whoever he was, thinking this was funny.

“What I want to know is why couldn’t you wait?” she said. “Why couldn’t you wait until you’re eighteen and out of school before you decide to tear big chunks out of people. Because then you won’t be my problem, Zachary. You’ll be on your own.”

I had to shut up and listen to this. It was music compared with what could have been happening that moment. Still, it hurt.

“It was the property damage that made them arrest you. You could stand and bash each other in the face all day and all night and it wouldn’t matter. You break a window and they send in the Eighty-Second Airborne.”

“I could have really hurt him,” I said.

She was quiet for a moment. “I called the owner and said we would pay for the window. He told me he was glad you showed up, said the kids were a nuisance, blocking the sidewalk, keeping away customers.”

I was in that mood I get into sometimes: I will never say another word again. I folded my arms, a family gesture, closed up and ready for the rest of my life.

She said, “You hungry?”

That was when my working life started, carrying bags of cement for a place that sold gravel and sand, paying back my mother for the window by putting in two or three hours after school. And then I worked for a nursery, stacking wooden pallets against a wall, chasing the raccoons away from the storage shed in the evenings, their brilliant eyes looking out from among the fuchsias. By the time I quit school I was ready to work full-time, hungry for it, wanting to put in long hours and forget.

After our drive down Jackson Street to the neighborhood of Taco Bell, Bea made us some instant onion soup, stirring it and pouring it into big stars-and-stripes mugs, dishwasher and microwave safe. Her mother was in San Jose with free tickets to a horse show featuring the Budweiser team from television and a team of mustangs descended from the wild horses of Nevada. My mom was spending the evening staying beyond visiting hours at the hospital. It was good to be in a house that was quiet but not empty.

“What do you think Earl is going to do with his life?” said Bea.

“What will any of us do?” I asked. I had meant to just hit the conversational ball back across the net.

“Do you think he’ll get serious in another couple of years or stay the way he is?”

I couldn’t think about Earl without picturing him almost losing consciousness, almost breaking the Taco Bell wall with his head. She must have read my thoughts. “Earl wasn’t hurt,” said Bea.

“He was,” I said. “But Earl doesn’t let a little brain hemorrhage slow him down.”

We had all parted as friends, pals who were glad to get away from each other, picking up the trash in the street, laughing shakily, hey, we ought to have fun like this more often.

“And he was making a terrible mess,” she said, “all over the road.”

To me a “road” is out in the country, two-lane highways through hills and fields. Jackson was a street. Something must have shown in my eyes because Bea brightened, coming over to put her arm around my neck, holding my head to her slim hip. On a few other nights like this I had helped Bea undress, all the way down to her little boy’s body, except for the bird’s nest of fluff between her legs, and her petite breasts, pixie breasts, and I could hardly breathe I was so happy.

Tonight I was just glad to sit there in the kitchen with her, one of those times when the neighborhood is quiet and the one room you are in is like a space station, solitary but peaceful, all the experiments finished for the day.

“I almost forgot!” she said, scrambling to the back door, down the back steps.

The kitchen door threw a carpet of light, illuminating a pink garden hose and a snail in full sail. Beyond was all darkness, Bea out there somewhere, talking in her raspy whisper, scolding tenderly.

She bore something into the light, carrying it like an infant. “You hold him!” she said.

“Do I have to?”

“You’re afraid!” she laughed.

I took into my arms the largest rabbit I had ever seen, big eared, black and white, and kicking, scratching my belly through my shirt. But then calming as Bea made kissing noises at it. I put it down, glad to have it off my hands.

The mammoth rabbit snuffled its mobile nose around the kitchen, taking no notice of our pant legs and shoes the way a dog would, browsing along the table legs and the wire from the toaster.

“I saved Carl’s life,” said Bea.

My mother had bought a yellow parakeet once, called him Pecker. When, as a boy, I asked why we couldn’t have a dog, she would respond with stories of animals named Snout and Fuzz and Squats who ended up getting run over, in each case, “right in the middle of Ensenada Street.” She kept the parakeet in the kitchen, until he escaped out the back door when she was cleaning his cage for the first time.

“Carl was drowning?” I asked. “Trapped in a fire?”

“I bought Carl from the Harveys.”

Mr. Harvey was always having trouble with the zoning policies, the laws against livestock inside city limits. He had sued the city supervisors, claming his right to raise and eat whatever he wanted. When a group of South Sea Islanders were arrested for killing, roasting, and eating a horse one Sunday in July, Mr. Harvey was on television talking about religious freedom, even though he had nothing personally to do with the celebration in question.

She answered my question before I could ask. “Mom goes to the same acupuncturist as Mrs. Harvey.”

Bea could always surprise me.

“The Harveys are very nice,” said Bea.

I felt embarrassed, narrow-minded, ready to laugh at people I didn’t know.

“Look, he likes you,” said Bea.

I was swept just then with the warmest gratitude for Bea, thankful to be with her, gazing into the red eyes of the rabbit she held up for me to caress.

“Why?” I asked, not wanting to break the spell, “did you name him Carl?”