In the Spider's Web Read online

  IN THE SPIDER’S WEB

  Books by Jerome Gold

  FICTION

  The Moral Life of Soldiers

  Sergeant Dickinson (originally titled The Negligence of Death)

  Prisoners

  The Prisoner’s Son

  The Inquisitor

  Of Great Spaces (with Les Galloway)

  POETRY

  Stillness

  NONFICTION

  In the Spider’s Web

  The Divers and Other Mysteries of Seattle (and California, but Just a Little)

  The Burg and Other Seattle Scenes

  Paranoia & Heartbreak: Fifteen Years in a Juvenile Facility

  How I Learned that I Could Push the Button

  Obscure in the Shade of the Giants: Publishing Lives Volume II

  Publishing Lives Volume I: Interviews with Independent Book Publishers

  Hurricanes (editor)

  IN THE SPIDER’S WEB

  Jerome Gold

  Copyright © 2015 Jerome Gold.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  ISBN: 978-1-936364-14-5

  ISBN ebook: 978-1-936364-15-2

  Black Heron Press

  Post Office Box 13396

  Mill Creek, Washington 98082

  www.blackheronpress.com

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Everything that happens in this book happened in life. Some of the characters are composites of real people. The characters Bernie, Caitlin, Dick, Frank, Jan, Jerry, Julius, Sonia, and others are not composites, although, with the exception of my own, Jerry, these are not their real names. I have used false names for all persons except myself, and most places mentioned in this book. As well, I have used other techniques to disguise many of the people encountered. In the Spider’s Web is drawn from my experience as a rehabilitation counselor in “Ash Meadow,” a prison for juveniles in Washington State, and my observations and conversations with staff and residents of that prison. In writing this book, I have relied heavily on the journal I kept during my years at Ash Meadow.

  This book is dedicated to Caitlin and Sonia.

  CONTENTS

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  Part I: Twenty-nine years later: the cottage

  Part II: Caitlin: scenes from a life

  Epilogue

  Second Epilogue

  Afterword

  Glossary

  Cast of Characters

  PROLOGUE

  He was a gawky kid with too many teeth, not much older than the kids I know now. I wasn’t much older then than they are now either. What, twenty-two? I was twenty-two. Which made Maurice—isn’t that a fucked-up name to put on a kid? Maurice St. Pierre—which made Maurice twenty. And he went into that hut in that village, so small it wasn’t even a village, just a collection of farmers’ hooches, and instead of herding everybody out before we torched it, he shot someone. When I went in he was buttoning up, and a child, a toddler, was dead three or four feet away, a red hole in its face where the nose had been, and the mother, her pants dragging from one ankle, was crying uncontrollably. At least I could see her face moving as if in hysteria, and the water bubbling out of her nose and mouth. She was crawling toward the baby, and Maurice looked at me and mouthed “What the fuck” and shot the woman and then I shot him, a short burst, a burst of three. From the time I’d entered the hut I hadn’t been able to hear, but now I could hear again. I heard the burst and I saw Maurice’s body snap backward and then I turned and there was another soldier standing at the entrance, staring at me. I can’t remember his name now, or what he looked like, but I remember how dark his silhouette was with the bright noon light behind him. And I got on the radio and told the commander what I had done.

  I told it differently, of course. The way I told it was that I could see Maurice intended to shoot the woman and I told him to put his weapon down but he swung his rifle toward her and I fired but I was too late, he fired a quarter of a second before I did and, yes, I was trying to prevent a murder, a second murder, counting the child. This is the way I told it to the commander and this is the way I told it to the investigator Division sent down.

  And everything was okay. I don’t know what the soldier whose name I can’t remember told anybody, but everything went okay for me. I couldn’t stay with my platoon, of course. I had only a month before my tour was up and I spent that at Division on special projects, which meant I didn’t have a job. But the war was ending, at least the infantry’s role in it, and I went home only a little before the entire division stood down.

  So I had murdered someone, but only I knew it, and possibly the soldier who had been standing at the entrance to the hut. When I thought about it, I didn’t think about the kid with the hole in its face, nor even Maurice St. Pierre. When I thought about it, I thought first about the woman, naked from her hips down, in agony, trying to reach her child. Then I thought of Maurice’s mouth moving, saying “What the fuck.”

  At some point in the years since, although I couldn’t hear anything at the time, I began to hear him say it, I began to hear his voice behind it. Memory does that, doesn’t it? It isn’t a matter of playing tricks. Memory tries to make your life easier. It combines events, it leaves things out. The purpose of memory is to help you get through your life with a notion of yourself that is acceptable to you. If you are true to what you remember, you are lying, even if you do not know you are.

  Someone I used to know, a teacher, told me this story. I was interviewing him for a study on the impact of war on the lives of its participants. Eventually I abandoned the project. I was not able to define to my own satisfaction the word “participant” and the project grew beyond my capacity to manage it.

  PART I

  Twenty-nine years later: the cottage

  “Is it sensible for ‘atrocitologists’ to think about the decline in violence purely as a question of percentages? After all, each life ended is a life, whether it is a tiny or not-so-tiny percentage of a given population: there is the bloodshed, the pain of dying, and the grieving family… No manipulation of percentages is going to diminish that grief and suffering.”

  —Jeremy Waldron

  ONE

  The last seven years I spent at Ash Meadow, I worked in Wolf Cottage, Maximum Security. I worked swing shift four days a week, but on Tuesdays I came in early to attend the psychiatry-team meetings to which I was Wolf’s liaison. Except for Sundays and holidays, the kids were in school when I got to the cottage.

  Arriving on campus, I checked for cottage mail at the Administration building, then walked the quarter-mile to Wolf at the far end of the grounds. On sunny days, this walk was a pure pleasure; on rainy or blustery days, it could be miserable. I passed a playing field on my left, then asphalted basketball and volleyball courts. Once, years ago, I was monitoring a basketball game when I noticed a couple of smaller boys playing with tiny plastic cars on a patch of bare ground beside the courts. They had scooped some dirt out, making a shallow depression with a miniature headland above it, and they were running their cars off the bluff and crashing them below. They were engrossed in their fantasies the way children get, and didn’t notice my staring, or didn’t care. There was something anomalous in what I was seeing, but I couldn’t fasten on what it was. Then it came to me: the play itself was the anomaly. The other boys were into sports or flirting with the girls who admired or made fun of them, but these little guys were so young that they hadn’t begun to play ball games yet. It, their play, was one of the saddest things I ever saw here.

  On my right as I walked was another, larger field, and then, as the walkway curve
d left, other cottages—Fox, Bull, Whale—and between them and the walkway, trees, varieties of ash and spruce and a handful of ponderosa pines. A gaggle of Canada geese divided to allow me to walk through. Past Bull and then Whale, I started up an incline that, owing to the greater density of trees on either side of the walkway, more pines and spruces, with a weeping birch here and there, could be icy in the winter days after the ice had melted below.

  At Wolf I rang the bell and waited. Sensing something, I turned and saw half a dozen black-tail deer that had come out of the trees and gathered behind me and were watching me. They were all does and fawns. “I don’t have any apples,” I said. If they understood me, they didn’t let on.

  Through the thick glass window beside the door, I could see one of the staff—on Tuesdays it was usually Bernie, Dick being down at the classroom, monitoring the kids there—rise from the desk and walk the breadth of the cottage toward me. When he let me in, I looked at his face and listened carefully to the tone of his greeting—“How ya doin’?”, “Hey…”, “Good morning, Jerry”—to get a hint of the mood of the cottage. Were his eyes distant? Was his voice strained? Was he angry? Only once was there a deviation, when Bernie unlocked the door and asked, “Have you heard?” That was on Nine-eleven.

  Stepping inside, I waited in the alcove for the staff to unlock the second door, a barred gate made of aluminum alloy. We had had a wooden gate until three years ago when a Security van barreled through both doors and into the cottage, stopping only when it struck the brick platform where, during the years before we got electric heating, we’d had a wood stove. The story was that the driver’s foot had slipped off the brake and onto the accelerator, or that he had gotten his foot trapped under the brake pedal, so couldn’t stop or even slow the van. He had been coming to pick up a girl to take to the Health Center.

  It was our practice then, when we knew the van was on its way, to put the resident in the alcove, locked between the two doors, so Security could take her without having to unlock the second door. In fact, Dick had been about to do that, had been walking across the living room to the alcove with the girl, when he suddenly took her arm and ran with her toward the staff office an instant before the van came crashing through. He told us afterward that he had not seen the van before it came in, he could not rationalize why he did what he did, he had not thought at all, he had just grabbed the girl on impulse and moved her away from the door. When the front of the cottage was rebuilt, the wooden gate was replaced by a metal one that would not stop a van any better than its predecessor had.

  Walking past this door into the cottage, I was at the edge of the living room enclosed on three sides by stuffed chairs of a uniform gray-blue color and on the fourth by a wall against which sat a rack of DVDs and video cassettes and a cabinet housing the TV and its attachments. On Sundays some kids would be watching a movie and I could hear other kids in the recreation yard out behind the cottage. Some of those in the living room would say hi, or they might not, and I would say something to them in return and watch to see how their faces worked and listen to their voices. Were any trying to conceal their emotions? Or were they advertising them by pretending to conceal them so I or another staff would ask what was wrong? Did anyone have his fists clenched? Was anger closer to the surface than usual?

  Often enough someone on my caseload, or on someone else’s but with whom I got on well, wanted to talk with me and I would say “After I get changed” or Bernie would say “Let him get his coat off.” Then I would go into the staff office, say “Hey” to whoever was in there, if anybody was in there, and go down a narrow aisle to the head. Now, out of visual contact with the rest of the cottage, I began listening for the odd sound, the voice suddenly grown loud, the scuffing of shoes or sandals against the carpet, staff shouts, and, of course, the scream of a body alarm. Before going into the head, I would place the mail on the counter below the staff mailboxes at the end of the aisle.

  In the head, I hung my jacket on a hook embedded in a varnished rack on the wall and placed my pack on the bookcase that was used not for books, but to shelve extra toilet paper, tissue, Tampax, picks and brushes and combs, toothbrushes and, on the bottom shelf, our sharps—knives and scissors we had an occasional use for—and a small toolbox. I carried a backpack to lug books in—a survival from my days as a university student, or perhaps from my army days before I went to university. Of course, in that faraway time I was not much concerned with putting books in my rucksack. Now I always brought books to work, as I never knew when I might have to work late and, if I did, whether or not the graveyard person would show up to relieve me.

  From the cabinet on the wall beside the door, I took a set of keys—the difference between staff and kids, I sometimes thought, and other staff members sometimes said, was that we had the keys—which I put in the right front pocket of my Levis, a body alarm on a breakaway chain that I hung around my neck, and a set of handcuffs that I put in my right rear pocket. I urinated, flushed, and washed my hands. Then I left the head and picked up the mail again and distributed it to the mailboxes. I put the kids’ mail in their respective staff’s box.

  I returned to the door, scanned the kids’ faces again, and walked out into the living room. If a kid on my caseload had mail and he was in the living room, I gave it to him. If he was outside, I went to his room and left it on his bed. Then I went to the staff desk and, if this was a weekday, I read the log entries from this morning and from last night after I left. If this was a Sunday, I would read the log back to Thursday night, the last night before my weekend. Afterward I read the incident reports, if there were any, and then I checked my email on the computer beside the desk. As I read, Bernie or Dick talked to me about what was going on in the cottage, which kids were having problems with which other kids, which kids had had upsetting phone calls, which kids were off-program and why and for how long, which kids I should keep an eye on.

  On school days, when most of the kids were in the classroom, a separate structure the size of a double-wide trailer at the rear of the rec yard, there were still a few in the cottage—those who had recently arrived from county detention, or who had just been transferred from another cottage, or who were OP. Those in the last category were in their rooms. The others, if there were staff available to monitor them, would be in the living room, watching TV or a video. At two-thirty, the kids would come up from the classroom. They took head calls, grabbed a snack—an apple or a banana, some Graham crackers and milk, a packaged fruit pie or cheese and Saltines, depending on what had been sent down from the central kitchen—and then all the kids who were out would go to their rooms. One of the staff would deliver a snack to each of the kids who were OP.

  Three times a week I taught Aggression Replacement Training to six kids, more or less, in the classroom after school while the others cleaned their rooms. Sometimes, when another staff was available, he or she would assist me; sometimes I did it alone. ART was a ten-week course intended to reduce recidivism, and, in fact, it did reduce recidivism by a quarter to a third. When a course ended, I took a week or two off, then started again with a new class. Once a week I did a group called Alternatives to Violence, which I had designed with the idea that kids might decide not to injure other people if they understood how they themselves had been harmed by the violence done to them.

  When the rooms had been swept and mopped and the trash emptied into the big aluminum garbage can in the kitchen and the kids in ART or Alternatives to Violence were back in the cottage, everyone except those on OP came out for free time—basketball or touch football or capture the flag in the rec yard, or TV in the living room, or cards or dominoes or Monopoly at one of the tables in the dining room.

  Supper was around five, clean-up of the kitchen, dining room, living room, mudroom, and heads afterward. Details were followed by a half-hour’s quiet time when the kids, except for the highest levels, were in their rooms. The upper levels were allowed to stay out to watch TV or talk or play cards or board games. After quiet
time, the kids were let out of their rooms again for free time.

  At eight, all but the upper levels, who were allowed to stay out until ten, were locked down. Then four at a time came out to take their meds, if they were on meds, and to brush their teeth and wash their faces if they wished. There were four heads, one in each zone, and the residents used the head in the zone they lived in. This use of the head at the end of the day to wash up and relieve themselves was called “routines,” as in “Kids are doing their routines.” They had another opportunity to relieve themselves around nine-thirty when “last head calls” were given.

  Once routines were over, one or two staff at a time could get off the floor to write case notes or progress reports or talk with the kids on their caseload. If these kids were in their rooms we would get them out. It was a treat for them, extra “out time,” and I would tell those on my caseload to help themselves to another snack, or a sandwich and some milk, and then come into the office. Sometimes I brought cookies in for them. Sometimes I made a deal with one or another of them that if he improved his behavior and maintained it for a week, I would buy him a McDonald’s hamburger or something from a Subway. One kid liked me to bring him a bottle of water; he didn’t trust tap water not to make him sick and was convinced that all of us who drank it would die earlier than we had to. This was my favorite time of day. Most of the tension you lived with during the day was gone and you could enjoy a half-hour or an hour or more with one of your kids. I always had two or three kids on my caseload when I worked in max and I tried to focus on only one on a given evening.

  If everything went as I just described it, it was a good day, a day without incident. There were periods in which good days piled up one on another so that you might think they would go on forever. But eventually we would get a kid in the unit, or a combination of kids, that provided us with bad days that led to bad weeks that bled into bad months. I used to work with a man who considered it a good day when we didn’t have to take a kid down. There were periods that gave way to eons in which your adrenalin flow never stopped. Between episodes of wrestling kids to the ground, immobilizing and handcuffing them, you waited for the next incident to erupt—a fight, an attempted suicide, occasionally one that went past trying, a kid caught hiding his meds—or the next moment of heartbreak that could lead to an incident: a kid getting a phone call informing him that someone he loved had died, or was raped, or was burned in a fire, or was moving away, or, in the case of his mother, did not want him to live with her again. “So much tragedy,” one of our psychiatrists once commented to me.