“I’m not gonna waste a lockup,” he said. Compromising, he handcuffed Alex to a chair in front of the booking desk.
They fingerprinted him and took down his information, but even Alex knew it was all just to scare the shit out of him; he was a minor, and in New Orleans shoplifting only earned you a slap on the wrist.
The sergeant cuffed him to the chair again and Alex sat quietly, his knees drawn up to his chest and his free arm clasped around his ankles.
He closed his eyes and pretended he was on death row, at the eleventh hour.
Some time later, the sergeant noticed him. “Shit,” he said. “Didn’t someone come for you yet?”
Alex shook his head. The sergeant asked for his phone number and dialed it, leaning on the desk and staring into an arrest log. He glanced up at Alex. “Your mama and daddy work?” he asked.
Alex shrugged. “Someone should be home,” he said.
“Well,” the officer said, “someone’s not.”
An hour later the sergeant tried again. This time he got Andrew Riveaux; Alex knew by the way he held the phone several inches away from his ear, as if whatever ran through his father’s veins might be catching. After a minute the sergeant handed the phone to Alex.
The cord stretched to its limit. Alex put the receiver to his ear. He did not know what to say; “Hello” didn’t seem quite right. His father began shouting an orange stream of Cajun curses, and ended by saying he was going to beat Alex’s hide. “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes,” he said, and severed the connection.
But Andrew Riveaux did not come in fifteen minutes, or even in an hour. From his position on the chair Alex watched the sun go down and the moon float into the sky like an old ghost’s white, wrinkled face.
He knew this was part of the punishment—the pity he’d get from the officers as they passed and the secretaries who pretended not to see him.
He shifted uncomfortably, needing to pee but unwilling to call attention to himself by asking to be unlocked. The sergeant noticed him on his way home at the end of the shift.
“Didn’t you call home?” he asked, puzzled.
Alex nodded. “My father’s coming,” he said.
The policeman offered to call again, but Alex shook his head. He did not want the sergeant, whom he’d begun to consider an ally, knowing the problem was not that his father could not come to pick him up, but simply that he did notwantto.
He wondered if his father had deliberately decided to leave Alex hanging, or if he’d found something better to do—haul his crawfish traps, drink, be a fifth in a poker game. His mother might have come—
Alex tried to believe that—but if his mother had been sober enough to comprehend that Alex was at the station, she would have been kept in her place by her husband.
Alex put his head on the arm of the chair and closed his eyes.
After three in the morning, he was awakened by the strong smell of perfume. A whore was sitting on the chair beside his. She had cherry hair and skin the color of mahogany and eyelashes as long as his little finger. She wore a string of jet beads that looped over one of her breasts, as if to outline it. She was chewing gum—grape—and she held a fistful of money.
She was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.
“Hi,” she said to Alex.
“Hi.”
“I’m picking up my friend,” she said, as if she needed to justify being in front of a booking table. “How come you’re locked onto the chair?”
“I went crazy and strangled my whole family,” Alex said, not batting an eye. “And they ran out of jail cells.”
The whore laughed. She had big, horsey white teeth. “You’re a cute one,” she said. “What are you? Ten? Eleven?”
“Fifteen,” Alex lied.
The woman grinned. “And I’m Pat Nixon,” she said. “What did you do?”
“Shoplift,” Alex murmured.
“And they’re keeping you overnight?” Her eyebrows shot up.
