Read Online Lockdown by Walter Dean Myers - Free Book Online Page A

Martin Luther—a German—who lived many years ago and who was also a religious leader. You don’t know anything. That’s why you’re in jail.”
    “Fuck you.”
    “So when they rounded up the boys and took us to another camp, we were all terrified. The Japanese soldiers were very scary because they had dark skins—not as dark as you—and they were short. They were no bigger than we were, and we were only boys.
    “But they swaggered around and they had guns. And anything you did they would punish you. Sometimes the punishment would only be a slap. Sometimes they would tie you to a fence and beat you with whips. Sometimes they would take boys away and we wouldn’t see them again.”
    “They cut their heads off?”
    “I don’t think so. There were even stories that some of the youngest boys were taken to Japan,” Mr. Hooft said. “But I know we never saw them again. Anyway, there was one boy in the camp I was taken to who seemed to hate everyone, but especially me. It was as if he had the soul of the devil.
    “I was thin and not used to having to defend myself. When he found me—that’s the way I thought it was, him finding me—it was as if he had found an answer to all of his problems. He would torment me day and night. We were given a ration of boiled barley every morning, and he would come and take mine. The other boys would see him coming and eat as quickly as possible, but I would be so petrified I would just sit and tremble.”
    “He punked you out,” I said. “You were too scared to deal.”
    “I don’t know exactly what you are saying,” Mr. Hooft said. “What I know is that I was afraid of the Japanese. If we had a fight, I knew the Japanese would take us away and punish us. They would beat us up and maybe even kill us, and he knew it too.”
    “He knew that?”
    “Of course he knew it,” Mr. Hooft said. “He saw what the rest of us saw. But for some reason he lived on the very edge all the time.”
    “So what happened?”
    “So after a while, maybe ten months to a year after the Japanese took over the island, and all the boys and some of the older men were in this one camp, we settled into a routine. Every morning we would have to go up the road—maybe two miles to where the men were working—and we would sit outside the gates until the guards led the men away on work details. Then we would have to go into the camp and find the dead bodies and load them onto trucks.”
    “The dead bodies?”
    “Men died from being weak, from disease, from whatever,” Mr. Hooft said. “At the time I didn’t know what dying was about. But I didn’t want to touch thebodies. When someone died, they tied them in cloth and put them in baskets. Then we had to lift the baskets onto the trucks. If you got the legs it wasn’t too bad, because the legs weren’t too heavy. The legs went up first, and then the boy carrying that end would run around and help push the basket onto the truck. But it was from the other end that the liquids came out. That was terrible, because it stunk and it would get on you and you would smell terrible all day. That’s what dying meant to me, the smell. This boy, he wouldn’t push the basket with the others, and then maybe the whole basket would fall on you.
    “One day he and I were pushing a basket onto a truck and he moved away. I struggled as much as I could but then it fell back on me and I was on the ground and trying to catch my breath. He was a boy like me, but when he came over, he looked gigantic. His face was wide and big and he was kicking me like he had so much hate for me. His hate scared me more than the pain from his foot. I was lying on the ground. Did I fight back? I don’t know. I knew it was hopeless, that we were fighting against different demons. Two guards came up and started kickingme and they knocked him down. He was bleeding and he wouldn’t get up, and they kept beating him and beating him. Later that day me and another boy had to carry him in a