Monster by Walter Dean Myers Page B

Nesbitt.
    Sunset said he committed the crime. Isn’t that what being guilty is all about? You actually do something? You pick up a gun and you aim it across a small space and pull a trigger? You grab the purse and run screaming down the street? Maybe, even, you buy some baseball cards that you know were stolen?
    The guys in the cell playeddirty hearts in the afternoon and talked, as usual, about their cases. They weighed the evidence against them and for them and commented on each other’s cases. Some of them sound like lawyers. The guards brought in a guy named Ernie who was caught sticking up a jewelry store. Ernie was small, white, and either Cuban or Italian. I couldn’t tell. The police had caught him in the act. He had taken the money and the jewelry and then locked the two employees in the back room with a padlock they used on the front gates.
    â€œBut then I couldn’t get out because they had a buzzer toopen the front door,” Ernie said. “I didn’t know where the buzzer was and I had locked the two dudes who knew up in the back.”
    He waited for two hours while people came and tried to get into the store before he called the police. He said he wasn’t guilty because he hadn’t taken anything out of the store. He didn’t even have a gun, just his hand in his pocket like he had a gun.
    â€œWhat they charging you with?” somebody asked.
    â€œArmed robbery, unlawful detention, possession of a deadly weapon, assault, and menacing.”
    But he felt he wasn’t guilty. He had made a mistake in going into the store, but when the robbery didn’t go down there was nothing he could do.
    â€œSay you going to rob a guy and he’s sitting down,” Ernie went on. “You say to him, ‘Give me all your money,’ and then he stands up and he’s like, seven feet tall, and you got to run. They can’t charge you with robbing the dude, right?”
    He was trying to convince himself that he wasn’t guilty.
    There was a fight just before lunch and a guy was stabbed in the eye. The guy who was stabbed was screaming, but that didn’tstop the other guy from hitting him more. Violence in here is always happening or just about ready to happen. I think these guys like it—they want it to be normal because that’s what they’re used to dealing with.
    If I got out after 20 years, I’d be 36. Maybe I wouldn’t live that long. Maybe I would think about killing myself so I wouldn’t have to live that long in here.
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    Mama came to see me. It’s her first time and she tried to explain to me why she hadn’t been here before, but she didn’t have to. All you had to see were the tearsrunning down her face and the whole story was there. I wanted to show strong for her, to let her know that she didn’t have to cry for me.
    The visitors’ room was crowded, noisy. We tried to speak softly, to create a kind of privacy with our voices, but we couldn’t hear each other even though we were only 18 inches away from each other, which is the width of the table in the visitors’ room. I asked her how Jerry was doing and she said he was doing all right. She was going to bring him tomorrow and I could see him from the window.
    â€œDo you think I should have got aBlack lawyer?” she asked. “Some of the people in the neighborhood said I should have contacted a Black lawyer.”
    I shook my head. It wasn’t a matter of race.
    She brought me a Bible. The guards had searched it. I wanted to ask if they had found anything in it. Salvation. Grace, maybe. Compassion. She had marked off a passage for me and asked me to read it out loud: “‘The Lord is my strength and my shield; my heart trusted in him, and I am helped: therefore my heart greatly rejoiceth; and with my song will I praise him.’”
    â€œIt seems like you’ve been in here so long,” she said.
    â€œSome guys have done a