The Lost Causes of Bleak Creek(33)

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JANINE PULLED TO the side of the road, awkwardly reaching across the passenger seat of her GamGam’s Grand Marquis to roll down the window. “Excuse me,” she said to an older couple walking out of the post office. “Would you happen to know how to get to the Whitewood School?”

They stared at her. “You know parents ain’t allowed to visit, right?” the man asked, adjusting his John Deere hat.

“Of course,” Janine said, not missing a beat. “I’m just taking a look to see if I, uh, want to send my daughter there. She’s being a real terror.” Imagining herself as a mom freaked her out, but she tried to seem as normal as possible.

“It’s a very good school,” the woman said, eyeing the length of the car, then staring at Janine with more than a hint of skepticism about her ability to operate such a massive vehicle.

“I don’t know what seein’ it is gonna do,” the man said. “You either want to send her or you don’t. And you can’t even really see it from the road anyhow.”

“Well, a mother likes to know her child is gonna be okay. You know, get some peace of mind,” Janine said, hearing how unbelievable she sounded.

“What kind of trouble is she in?” the woman asked.

“Gangsta rap,” Janine said without thinking.

“Gangster rap?” the man asked.

“Yep. She listens to it nonstop. Ice-T, Ice Cube…all the Ices. She hates cops.” Janine was almost cringing at this point.

“Oh my word,” the woman said. “And you look mighty young, so she can’t be that ol—”

“She’s six,” Janine said.

The couple was shocked. The man grabbed the bill of his hat and adjusted it right back to where it was.

“Yes, it’s horrible,” Janine added, laying it on thick.

“All right,” the puzzled man said, ready for this conversation to end. “Just follow Main Street until it hits Creek Road. Take a right, and after a while you’ll see the gate. They won’t let you drive onto the premises, though.”

“Great, thanks,” Janine said. “I won’t even try.”

The man nodded without smiling. Janine rolled the window up and pulled the mammoth brown-and-beige automobile back onto the street. In the rearview mirror, she could see the couple still standing there, their furrowed brows watching her drive away.

Janine passed by the Bleak Creek landmarks she’d seen hundreds of times during her visits over the years: the redbrick First Baptist Church with its towering steeple, less than fifty yards from the light brown brick Second Baptist Church with its slightly taller steeple; Blanchard’s Bait ’n’ Tackle, which she’d literally never passed without seeing the WE’LL BE RIGHT BACK sign in the window; the THOMAS & THOMAS LAW OFFICE in an imposing plantation-style house, making it a rather ironic bastion of justice. She’d always considered these places the staples of a polite southern small town, but with her looming questions about the Whitewood School, they seemed almost like a fa?ade, carefully constructed exteriors hiding decidedly impolite truths.

She turned onto Creek Road and soon it was nothing but lonely farms and woods dominated by pine trees. A couple minutes later, she realized she’d arrived, rolling to a bumpy stop on the road’s weed-covered shoulder.

The beige sign read THE WHITEWOOD SCHOOL, CORRECTIVE CENTER FOR CHILDREN. Underneath the black text, in smaller font, it read PROVERBS 23:13.

Janine stepped out of the car with her camera, her insides knotting up, and pressed record. She filled the frame with the sign, curious as to what was said in that particular Bible verse; she figured she’d write it out in a text overlay in the final version of her film.

The old couple had been right. She couldn’t see the school, as a thick stand of trees lined the opposite side of the tall chain-link fence that surrounded the property. Three rows of barbed wire stretched along the top of the barrier. Most people would assume a prison stood behind those trees. Maybe that was the point.

Janine walked, camera in hand, up to the front gate. Once there, she realized she could in fact see a portion of the school down the long single-lane driveway. It looked to be a three-story wooden building, painted a light beige, trim and all.

Janine focused her camera on what she could see of the school, strands of the chain-link fence blurry in the foreground, obscuring the image as she panned left to right. She listened carefully, thinking maybe she would hear kids screaming or crying or something. There was only silence. She thought about young Donna in that building: scared, powerless, alone.

The camera landed on an object next to the building, the image in her viewfinder so grainy that she initially didn’t recognize it for what it was: a person. It didn’t help that the large, bored-looking man was wearing what looked to be some sort of yellowish-brown work suit that perfectly camouflaged him in front of the matching school.

“These people are really into beige,” Janine said to herself. The man appeared to be standing guard outside one of the entrances. Who do they think is going to try to break in? she wondered, before realizing the concern was more likely about who they thought might try to get out.

She zoomed in, exhausting the capabilities of her camera, framing the man from the mid-thigh up. Cowboy shot, her film school word bank reminded her.