Free Taken by Chris Jordan Page B

on the grass, in the middle of a game?
    Bladder hurts. The boy has to go, badly. He’s thinking if he can unzip his fly, maybe he can pee into the grass while he’s lying down and no one will notice. But when he tries to move his hands, his wrists get pinched somehow. Is someone standing on his wrists? Maybe they haven’t noticed him lying in the grass.
    The boy concentrates on moving his hands to his waist, desperate to get his zipper down so he can relieve the pain in his bladder. He concentrates so hard that it hurts and the pain helps wake him up so he can force his eyes open.
    His eyes are still blurred with sleep, so it takes a while to focus. And then when he does focus, it still doesn’t make sense. There’s a thick white plastic strap around his right wrist, cuffing him to a bedpost. He’s not facedown in the infield grass at all, he’s facedown on a mattress. A mattress that stinks of pee.
    Not his bed, not his mattress. Can’t see all that well yet, can’t turn his head to look, but this doesn’t feel like his bedroom at all. Something wrong here. Something worse than wetting your pants in public. Something so terrible he doesn’t dare think about it yet, not until his head clears. Something that makes him want his mother very badly.
    “Mom,” he calls out. “Mom, are you there?”
    Right behind him, right in his ear, so close that it almost stops his heart, a stranger’s voice suddenly says, “If you don’t stop pissing the bed, kid, we’ll have to put rubber pants on you.”
    Tomas starts to thrash on the bed, fighting the cuffs, and trying not to scream.

13
memory lane
    H ere in the suburbs, even the holding cells are upscale, more or less. My cell is a small, plain room, eight feet by eight feet, with no seat or lid on the commode, but the paint on the walls is fresh, and the floors have been scrubbed with pine-scented disinfectant. The bunk is narrow but adequate, rubberized and fireproof. No pillow, of course, because a distraught prisoner might stuff a pillow into her mouth and choke to death. No graffiti on the walls, no cockroaches, nobody there but me.
    The lack of roaches is notable because I spend most of the first awful night on a trip down memory lane, and insects are included. One notorious Roach Motel in particular.
    It happened like this. When we were first married, Ted and I drove across the country in his grandmother’s Ford Crown Victoria. That was her wedding present to us, a ten-year-old sedan with unusually low mileage because she was, as she told us, the “classic little old lady who drives to church on Sundays.”
    In addition to being little and old, Clara was a lovely lady, and a wise one, too. “Drive until the road ends,” she advised us. “See everything you can along the way. Two weeks on the road, you’ll be bonded for life or applying for annulment. Either way it goes, at least you’ll know.”
    In addition to the car keys, she gave us a thousand dollars for expenses. In other words she paid for our discount honeymoon with savings she could ill afford to lose. The Bickfords were not wealthy, or even particularly well off, and Grandma lived on her social security and the proceeds of her lifelong savings, which had already been tapped to help put Ted through college. When we protested, Clara fluttered her age-mottled hands dismissively. “I know how much I have in the bank and how long I’m likely to last. I did the math, Teddy. It’s a rather simple calculation, you know. Take the money, have fun.”
    So we did. Piloting the boatlike Crown Vic down through the Amish farmlands of Pennsylvania and into the Ohio Valley, then swinging up for a glimpse of the Great Lakes, and on through Wisconsin and Minnesota and the Badlands of South Dakota. Where Ted insisted we go fifty miles out of our way to check out Wall Drug, whose signs had been haunting us for a hundred billboards along the way.
    It was in Montana, Big Sky Country, that we came upon a bargain we were