Read Online Lockdown by Walter Dean Myers - Free Book Online

tore open an envelope and took out a piece of gauze and tried to put it on his leg.
    “You want me to do that?” I asked.
    “You’re a nurse now?”
    “I can move around better than you can,” I answered.
    “Just put the gauze on and cover it with a piece of tape,” he said.
    He had a hole in his leg. I didn’t want to look at it.
    “I got to go talk to Simi,” I said.
    “What do you have to say to her?” he was asking as I left the room.
    I found Simi and told her what I had seen. “He got a hole in his leg about this big.” I made a circle with my fingers around the size of a quarter.

CHAPTER 13
    Simi led me back to Mr. Hooft’s room. He had covered himself up with the sheet and she threw it off and looked at the hole. Then she went out of the room.
    I looked at Mr. Hooft and he wasn’t moving. I knew he wasn’t dead, but he was lying still. When Simi came back, she had a small tube of something.
    “This is not going to hurt, Mr. Hoof,” she said, still leaving off the t from his name. “It’s just an antibiotic. I’m going to get Reese to change this bandage whenever he comes. I’ll change it the other days.”
    She looked over at me and nodded for me to come watch.
    What she did was to put some antibiotic on thehole, then take out a piece of gauze, roll it carefully, and place it right over the hole. Then she pulled the hole together a little and taped it shut.
    When she left, I sat back down again in the corner. I didn’t like seeing nobody messed around like that. Even though I wasn’t liking him, I didn’t want to see the hole in his leg.
    “You want to hear what I was telling you that happened to me?” he asked.
    “Go on,” I said.
    “My family lived in Java. My country owned all of those little islands before the war. My father was a schoolteacher. Very tall. We’re a tall people. My mother was a seamstress at home, but when she married, she settled down to being a housewife.
    “My father was offered the position of headmaster in a rural school outside of Surakarta. He planned to work there for two years as headmaster, and then return to Europe to teach. But then the war broke out. First it was the Germans and then the Japanese. Nobody thought it was going to last because nobody took the Japanese seriously. In December 1941, they attacked your country. Then in 1942, they overran Dutch Indonesia.
    “We heard rumors and more rumors and I was afraid, but Mama kept telling me that everything would be all right. Then one day some Japanese soldiers showed up in our garden. There they were, sitting in our garden with their long rifles, and we were having breakfast inside. They came and took Papa away and searched the house. We had nothing in the house except books and papers. Then they left. Three days later they came again and took Mama and my sister and me to a camp. We stayed in that camp for months, and it was terrible. There wasn’t enough food and we were all living one on top of the other one.”
    Mr. Hooft was turning in his bed and winced when he got around on his bad leg.
    “You want me to call Simi again?” I asked.
    He shifted onto his back and waved his hand in the air.
    “But then one day they came and got all the boys and took us to a different camp. There were people crying and screaming and women fighting to hang on to their boys. You know why? You don’t know why. Because there was talk of some of the men being killed. They said that the Japanese soldiers shotsome of the men, and some they made them kneel on the ground and then cut their heads off.”
    “I don’t believe that,” I said.
    “Why?” Mr. Hooft asked. “Why don’t you believe it?”
    “I never heard of it before,” I said.
    “Do you know about the Dutch East Indies?” he asked.
    “No.”
    “Do you know about Martin Luther?”
    “Yeah, Martin Luther King,” I said. “He made that ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.”
    “No,” Mr. Hooft said. “Your black Martin Luther King was named after