Lights out, and Jomon is on his cot in the dorm.
He slaps at a mosquito. He rolls over onto his side, then back onto his back.
It is way too early to be in bed.
Supper — a bread roll with peanut butter — was not that long ago. Then shower time, then half an hour of free time in the dorm room before the guard flicked off the light and told them, “Not a sound.”
The moon is bright enough that the boys can continue to play under its light. Jomon sits up and looks around.
The smaller boys have stones from the yard that they have turned into cars. They are using the bed sheets to construct mountains and highways. Lucky and another one of the older boys grab the sheets, ball them up and toss them into a corner.
The smaller boys don’t complain. They wait until the older boys have moved on, then retrieve the sheets and start again.
Jomon sees Angel playing a game of pickup sticks with a few other boys, using twigs they have collected from the yard. There are whispered arguments from that group.
“I saw it move!” “No, you didn’t.” “I saw it! My turn.”
“Here’s how it works,” Lucky said to Jomon before lights out. “Someone makes a sound, the guard comes, someone goes to solitary. The guard doesn’t care who. If it’s me that goes, and you made the noise, you’d better be gone before I get out. You hear me?”
Jomon heard.
“Tell your brothers,” said Lucky.
“They’re not —” But Lucky had already moved on.
One of the boys has a deck of cards. The game they started before bedtime continues in a beam of light from the full moon.
Hi is in the middle of that group.
“Six of clubs,” he whispers.
“That’s a nine,” says a boy. “Are you cheating?”
“Nine? Really?” asks Hi. “If you’re so smart, why are you in here?”
“I killed a boy who was cheating at cards.”
“No, you didn’t,” says a third boy. “You tried to sneak into the go-kart place.”
“Hi’s having a good time,” says Angel, coming to sit on the foot of Jomon’s bed. “I don’t think he got much time to play when he was a kid.”
“Nothing seems to bother him,” says Jomon, sitting up. “Was he always like that?”
“I don’t know,” says Angel. “I got the drunk and sad Hi. I don’t know what he was like before my mother died.”
Jomon slaps at another mosquito. “Are you still mad at him?”
“I should be,” says Angel. “I planned out a whole speech I’d say to him if I ever saw him again, about how he was a terrible father and just brought misery to my life.”
“And now?”
“He’s still all that, but I don’t know what the point is in telling him. He won’t get it. He’s not like us.”
“What do you mean?”
“He had his father with him all his life. He can’t understand what it was like for me to not have him. I could give him my speech but then what? Probably nothing, and where would that leave me? No, I think I’ll forget about the speech. I would like one thing, though.”
“What’s that?”
“I want him to call me Angel.”
“You going to tell him that?”
Angel sighs. “What if I tell him and he still calls me Dev?”
“I think it’s worth a try.” Jomon looks over at the card players. They’ve stopped the game and are now trying to make a tower with the cards. Hi adds one to the tower. Everything collapses. Hi’s smile is so broad it seems to take up his whole head.
“I think he likes to be liked,” says Jomon. “I think he wants you to like him.”
Angel thinks about it. “Maybe. What about you? It sounds like my grandson was a hard father to have. There must have been some good times, though?”
Jomon remembers his father shaping ends of lumber into shelves for Jomon’s room. Jomon handing him the nails, the two of them smoothing down the wood with sandpaper. He remembers riding on his father’s shoulders, high, high, high above the Mashramani parade, seeing all the costumes, smelling the food.
But there are other memories, too. His father’s face near his, angry, drunk and spitting. Oozy, boozy vomit stinking on the floor. Knowing that anything Jomon and his mother did or did not do would be wrong.
“We had a big fight,” Jomon says, “after Mum died. I didn’t know how sick she was. I mean, she often had pain because my father hit her, but she pretended she didn’t and I pretended to believe her. When she finally went to a doctor, it was too late. The cancer had spread from her pancreas to her liver and everywhere else. She was dead a week later.”
“How did your dad handle that?”
“Same as he handled everything else. He drank. Mum’s church lady friends showed up with a collection they’d taken to help with her funeral. He threw them out when they wouldn’t hand over the money to him. He was falling-down drunk, so why would they trust him? As they left, one of them told me that they would see she was buried in her family plot near New Amsterdam. I never even knew she had a family plot.”
“You never went to look for her grave?”
“I asked Dad about it after he’d sobered up a bit. He said I always did side with Mum and if I wanted to go, I should go, but then I could keep on going.”
“And you were afraid to lose the last parent you had,” says Angel.
“I let her down,” says Jomon. “I’m … nothing. I’m just nothing.”
He turns away from Angel and curls up on his bunk.
“Hey, Jomon. Come to the window,” whispers Hi. “You’ve got to see this! Angel — come on!”
Angel leaves the bed. Jomon hears excited whispering and the quiet pushing of kids. He puts his arms over his head. He wishes he could retreat to Jomonland. He wishes he had killed himself back in the police-station lockup.
“Jomon,” says Angel. “You really ought to come here and see this.”
But Jomon is done for the day. He stays on his cot, his eyes closed, and leaves the others to ooh and aah at whatever they are seeing out the window.