The Journey Back Read Free Page B

the prison yard, up the hill. The whirring of the compactor grew faster and louder as everything got slowly pushed toward the back. I kept digging myself in between bags, trying to find the handle of that shovel, but I wasn’t having any luck.
    The truck moved on, faster, smoother. I figured we were outside the prison grounds at that point, maybe on the road down the mountain. I wondered where the truck would stop next and whether Mr. R. would put two and two together back in the classroom and guess that I’d gone out with the trash. I could just see him, taking a big sip of coffee out of that thermos cup of his, maybe peeling back the cupcake wrapper on one of those nice muffins his wife made, and then setting it down quick when it suddenly dawned on him. He’d step outside the classroom to make a call down to the office, and instantly all the boys would be on to it. Even Dontaye would stop doodling and crack a smile.
    The boys would be guessing how I did it, like did I hide out in the back of someone’s pickup the way this kid did a year ago? He hid there at the end of the day and rode all the way to Cumberland to a staffer’s house where he slipped out and hijacked a car. Amazing, but he got about a half hour down the interstate before they caught him. Hopefully, they’d be checking all the vehicles in the parking lot first, but Mr. R. might be insisting on the garbage truck theory. Which meant there could be police cars waiting at the landfill. Or maybe the cops would stop the truck on the highway and poke around, looking for me. Anything could happen.
    Like a big bug, I crawled over the bags of garbage and kept searching for that shovel. At the same time I had a flash vision of what would happen to me if I couldn’t find it. Maybe it would be justice after all. For what I did to be in prison, maybe I deserved to get squished to death like a dumb insect and buried under a bunch of trash. Maybe I was nothing but trash myself. Heck, my father had been telling me that for years!
    But my poor mom. She’d cry her eyes out when she heard how I died. It’s true that sometimes I got mad at her for not stopping things. But other times, my throat got tight thinking about her, like how she had driven all those hours in that piece of junk truck just to see me on Visiting Day a week ago. She brought that plastic bag of broken-up chocolate chip cookies from the kids and kept trying to tell me about Hank’s new third-grade teacher and the front tooth LeeAnn lost, but all I could see was that cheap makeup caked on her face. It wasn’t even the same color as her skin and I knew she was covering up another bruise, which meant it was still going on.
    If I got snuffed out, then I wouldn’t be there to help her. Or protect Hank and LeeAnn! And that made me think about my father. . . . He’d be laughing his head off when he heard I got crushed to death in a garbage truck. Yup. Laugh his fat, bald head off ’cause he’d get a real kick out of it.
I always said that kid was no good. A knucklehead with no brains.
I could just hear him, slurring his words and slapping the table. It made me mad, thinking of my father getting the last laugh. And that got me fired up all over again. I shook all those distracting thoughts out of my head and scrambled like a cockroach when the lights got turned on looking for that shovel.
    Finally, my hand touched metal. Was it the shovel? Yes! I grabbed the handle and started wiggling something fierce so I could get down to the bottom of the truck and jam that thing under the blade. I had to move a couple bags around and wouldn’t you know it? Another one broke and a bunch of disgusting stuff spewed out like puke. Rotten oranges, eggshells, coffee grounds, soggy paper towels. I just plowed through it, tossing handfuls of gunk aside, until I felt the floor of the truck under my feet. I pulled the shovel down beside me and managed to get it on the