Little Boy Blue (12 page)
Authors: Edward Bunker
One morning, without warning, Alex was among
a score of boys taken to court in a battered gray bus with wire mesh on the
windows. The juvenile court was in the Hall of Justice, and the bus pulled into
a tunnel beneath the tall building, parking near a sign of a red arrow with
coroner and morgue above it. They rode a freight elevator to the eighth floor
and went down a tunnel to a window- less room with walls defaced by
graffiti—some in pencil, some gouged into the paint. They were mostly
names, but some were crude drawings of immense phalluses or female breasts and
crotch, the last merely a dark triangle. No matter how crude and distorted the
drawings, Alex looked at them with curiosity, wondering how closely they
approached reality.
Most of the boys were pensive while waiting
to be called, though one who had already been in reform school and knew he was
going back was angry and contemptuous. Among the first half dozen to be called,
four were put on probation and two were committed to county camps. One of the
two broke into tears—he’d expected to go home—and the
reform-school graduate began kicking him in the shins, spitting on him and
telling him to shut up. This cruelty elicited nervous snickers from the others.
Alex had neither fear nor hope of what was going to happen, but he would never
show any feelings that might bring ridicule. Everyone looked up to the reform-
school boy and looked down on the crybaby.
A key turned in the lock, and a uniformed
bailiff called Alex’s name. In the hallway the boy was startled by the
crowd. Somehow he’d expected the corridor to be empty and silent, an
image garnered from the movies. Instead it was packed. Theater-style chairs
with foldup seats lined one wall, and each seat was filled with a body. Many
people stood up, and the bailiff held his arm and led him in a weaving route
through the press of bodies. The crowd was mostly frazzled-looking women, poor
and prematurely worn. For each woman there was a sullen boy—plus toddlers
and babies. The few men there were also grizzled and seamed, looking stiff and
uncomfortable in their ill-fitting Sunday clothes. As in Juvenile Hall, most of
the faces were chocolate or
olive,
and the voices
maimed diction or rattled in Spanish.
The brass doorplate read: Harrington p.
wymore, referee
.
Alex had only a moment to read it before the
bailiff opened the door. The light filtering through immense Venetian blinds
struck his eyes, momentarily dazing him as they entered, so he heard a rattle
of polite, dry laughter to some previous quip before he could see faces
emerging from the glare. He was in an aisle with two rows of empty chairs on
each side, facing a long, wide, and highly polished table. One man in a dark
suit sat in the middle; another was at the end, a pile of folders in front of
him. A middle-aged woman, whose corpulent body seemed to consume the chair she
spilled over, was next to the window, pencil in hand, seated at the table.
The man in the middle, who seemed dwarfed by
the table, had his head bent
forward,
exposing
thinning gray hair on a narrow skull, but his eyes and features were hidden.
One bony hand was turning typewritten pages, until he paused and finally looked
up. For the first time Alex was afraid—not the tight knot of physical
fear before he got into a fight or did something dangerous, but the dull
hollowness that sucks strength because one understands powerlessness when confronted
by power. It wasn’t fear of what the narrow-visaged old man might do hut
a sense that nothing could be done about it. When the judge looked up, it
seemed like a signal for the others to do the same, focusing their eyes on him
as if they could tell something about him by his face in repose. The judge
glanced to the stenographer to make sure her pencil was ready.
“The number here is A, five, five,
zero, four, zero,” the judge intoned, “on a petition In loco
parentis filed by the probation department on behalf of Alexander Hammond,
a juvenile.” He paused and looked into the boy’s eyes.
“I’m very sorry about your father.”
For a few seconds Alex screwed up his face in
perplexity, not understanding what the man meant. Sorry about what? It
wasn’t that Alex had stopped thinking about his father’s death,
though emotional wounds turn quickly to scar tissue in an eleven-year-old.
Rather, this expression of sympathy was so far from what Alex had expected that
he didn’t know what the words referred to. His puzzlement showed,
and the judge blinked rapidly, taken aback.
“Your father,” he said
,
as if to clarify or remind.
“My father’s dead, sir.”
“That’s why I was saying I was
sorry.” “Oh.”
The judge flushed red blotches through his
gray skin,
then
pushed his glasses higher up on his
nose, as if this would let him observe better this strange boy sitting primly
with hands folded in his lap. The psychiatric report mentioned a lack of
“affect,” and the off- kilter reply seemed to confirm it.
“You know why you’re here, Alex,
don’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“We’re not here to punish
you… but to help you. How do you feel about what you did?”
Feel?
Alex wished he hadn’t shot the man, was sorry
about his condition, but there was nothing to feel. Yet he instinctively knew that
the judge wanted to hear something different. “I’m sorry,
sir,” he said. Then he added, “I didn’t think when I did it.
I was… scared… and it just happened.” He tossed a shoulder.
“But you were in the man’s
store.”
“We were hungry, sir. I didn’t
think—”
“You know it’s wrong to steal,
don’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“But you’ve stolen before. You
ran away from the Valley Home for Boys because you were caught
shoplifting.”
“I wasn’t,” Alex said
quickly, his body stiffening and voice rising. “They said I did but I didn’t.”
“Why would they lie?”
“I don’t know.”
“I can’t imagine, either…
Then there’s this temper of yours. You’ve been in several fights in
the last three weeks, and you attacked the woman at the Valley Home the evening
you ran away…
And those tantrums.
Now
you’re just a little boy, but if you can’t train your temper by the
time you grow up… when you weigh a hundred and eighty pounds you’ll
be dangerous.”
The judge stopped to sip some water from a
glass beside a carafe. Alex watched his Adam’s apple bob and
tried—unsuccessfully—to imagine weighing a hundred and eighty
pounds.
“I don’t know what to do with
you, son. You’re a smart boy, and although you haven’t had a happy
childhood, it couldn’t very well be described as deprived. You’ve
always had enough to eat… Committing you to the Youth Authority and
sending you to a state school
is
what the probation
officer recommends, but that’s the final alternative. We can always do
that if we can’t help you any other way. You’re too young for our
county camps, and I don’t know if that would be any good for you anyway.
You’ve got emotional problems. A foster home isn’t the
answer… you’ve been through them. So I’m going to order that
you go to the state hospital at Camarillo for a ninety-day observation period.
If the staff there needs more time we can extend it. Maybe they can help you,
or tell me what to do for you. You’re a troubled child and—”
The closing words faded out of the
boy’s consciousness. He was going to a nuthouse! Maybe I am crazy, he
thought. I don’t feel crazy… but how does a crazy person feel? They
must know something about what they’re doing. The thought frightened him
so that he had to fight back tears.
He didn’t tell the other boys where
he was going when he got back in the room. He told them that he was going to
the Youth Authority.
The waxed deep red of the dayroom floor
sparkled from the yellow winter sunlight, sliced into squares by the flat bars
of the windows. Inexpensive wicker-framed chairs with removable cushions ran
along all walls and in back-to-back rows around the room. Most of the chairs
were occupied, and most of the occupants wore grossly ill- fitting, rumpled
state denim, the pants cuffs either high above skinny ankles or drooping low
enough to be walked upon, either too small to be buttoned or so large they were
held up by string or shoelaces. The more ragged the clothes, the crazier the
person, or so it seemed. Some talked to themselves, some to Christ and whoever
else came to mind and sight. The ward population was over one hundred, but less
than half were in the room. The sitters were unusually placid this Saturday
morning, for most had been given shock treatments yesterday and were still
trying to sift facts from the ashes of memory. The really berserk patients were
strapped to cots in small, dim rooms along a corridor (one of two) leading from
the dayroom. They, too, were temporarily quieted from electricity applied to
the brain.
This ward was the infirmary as well as a
receiving and processing unit, and had many slightly corroded minds, including
alcoholics and a few addicts taking the cure. Most of these were off the ward
this time of day, working in the kitchen or loose on the vast semi- desert
acreage of hospital property; like most of southern California, what wasn’t
desert was farm. They all had grounds parole cards.
The sane
who
remained on the ward wore civilian clothes—or at least shirts—and
were involved in the nearly perpetual ward poker game. Today the locked wicker
cabinet with the radio had been moved close to the table, and the gamblers
half-listened to the Notre Dame announcer sadly describe a slaughter by the
great Army team led by Blanchard and Davis, a pair of All-America backs in
tandem, while Notre Dame players who might have stopped them were at Guadalcanal
and North Africa. “Now for the half-time statistics,” the announcer
said.
The poker game was five patients and an
attendant, the last a young man in crisp whites who stood at a corner of the
table, following the regulation that he wasn’t to sit down on the job
except in the office during coffee breaks. Three white patients were playing,
two of them alcoholics and the third an ex-con trying to avoid a forgery
sentence to San Quentin by claiming he heard voices. The two blacks
(“colored,” then) in the game were junky confidence men,
partners in crime and time, taking a cure because their supply of narcotics had
been cut off by the war; they’d been reduced to paregoric and trying to
talk doctors into writing morphine prescriptions. One of them was ebony-black,
square-jawed and heavy-shouldered, with the flat nose and scarred eyebrows of
an unproductive prizefight career. He was known as First Choice Floyd.
The largest pile of money was in front of the
other black, who was lighter-skinned than the average Sicilian. His partner
Floyd sometimes joshed him as “you ol’ shit-colored nigger,”
and indeed, his name was Red Barzo. His reddish hair was processed to stiffness
and had a pompadour in front. He looked younger than his thirty-eight years. He
was thin and voluble, chattering far more than a poker player is supposed to,
continually counting his coins in stacks between hands, counting and arranging,
knowing full well that a new hand would erase his count and his neatness and
he’d have to start over. He was fidgety, and occasionally his eyes
wandered to a wall clock. “I’m gonna have to start gettin’
the funk off my body and get dressed pretty soon, so Clarice don’ be
waitin’.”
Alex Hammond stood just behind Red
Barzo’s right shoulder, sometimes shifting his weight from one foot to
the other but otherwise expressionless, which were the conditions under
which he was allowed to watch. His wise young eyes burned with concentration.
If Red stayed a winner, he would let Alex play for him when he left to get
ready for the visit.
“Last hand for me,” Red said,
shuffling and dealing smoothly but without excessive flourish. Only Alex,
standing behind him, could see him squeeze back and view the bottom card when
he retrieved the cut. The man could ease it off so smoothly that the eye
couldn’t tell, though there would be a telltale popping sound that he
covered with a cough. Red wasn’t a good poker player—he was too
prone to gamble and bluff—but he could cheat pretty good and usually won.
The down cards spun low across the blanket so
there was no chance for exposure. As he turned up the second card, Red chanted
the values: “Jack… Ace… ten…
Ace…
another ten… and a cocksuckin’ low-ass seven to the dealer.”
Alex was fascinated by the exposure of mysteries, by something he sensed but
could not
articulate,
that this had meaning or
metaphor beyond itself. “First Ace bets,” Barzo said.
First Choice Floyd had the Ace and dropped a
quarter into the middle of the bare blanket. The next player dropped. The
second Ace called and so did the second ten. Red pinched up his hole card so
Alex could see: a King. He pushed out two quarters. “Small raise,”
he said. Alex, who had been watching and studying the techniques of the game
for weeks, was surprised by the raise. He could understand it if Red had
another seven in the hole (then it would be a bigger raise), or an Ace with no
Aces showing. But the King couldn’t beat what was showing.
“Two sevens,” said the next man,
the alcoholic with the exposed Jack. “You wouldn’t
raise
with an Ace, not with two showing.”
