Little Boy Blue (20 page)

“Can’t take it down in the
breadbasket though,” another said.

The attendants all had an excited levity
following the incident, as if they felt both good and a bit ashamed. Their
faces were flushed and their laughter was nervous.

Alex was given a seat on a bench near a
corner. His name was inked on adhesive tape fastened to the bench. He was told
to sit without talking when everyone else did so.

So now he sat, conscious of his heartbeat,
wondering if his feelings showed to the many eyes that seemed to be
studying him. He was afraid to meet any gaze because his moving glances told
him that nearly everyone was older; some were even young men. Nor did he see
any of the horrible distortions of the fenced yard, nor even the disarray of
Camarillo’s deranged minds. In the coming weeks, he would learn that
nearly all of these (except for three or four like himself, who were
observation cases) had gotten into trouble with the law and had scored below 65
on I.Q. tests, which got them committed as feeble-minded. However, all
functioned at least adequately in the world of institutions. But when Alex
tried to explain something abstract, even something simple like “light
years,” he failed to get through no matter how he tried. Some, however,
had apparently just not tried to perform on the tests. It was a way to keep
them out of society for long periods.

But these things were in the future, and now
he was conscious of being younger and smaller. Though someone sat at his right,
the person didn’t try to speak. The seat on his left was empty. Everyone
was silent, and attendants walked quietly in a space behind the benches. If
someone was caught talking during silent periods, they were knocked off the
bench. Alex saw it happen before he was seated ten minutes.

An attendant banged a key on a door.
“Yard and recreation,” he yelled. The room erupted in movement.
About half of the men gathered around the door to the yard; others dragged
two large tables and benches to the center of the room. Blankets were stretched
over the tables, and there was a scurry for seats in the two poker games, one
for higher stakes than the other. An attendant turned a radio in a wall cabinet
to a rhythm and blues station,
then
locked the
cabinet.

Alex sat watching. Nobody spoke to him. He
could see down one of the two corridors. From the foot traffic in and out of a
door he was certain it was the latrine. His bladder ached with fullness.

When Alex entered, several youths were
lounging next to a barred window, smoking and talking. None spoke to him, but
he could feel their eyes as he relieved himself. On the way out, as he reached
for the door, someone called:

“Hey, you!
New guy!”

Alex half turned.

“You were in Juvenile Hall last year,
huh?”

Alex nodded.

“Shot a guy, didn’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“Kill him?”

“No.” Alex waited, but the
questioner turned away, speaking to his friends. Alex couldn’t hear.
Slightly embarrassed, conscious of his face warming up, he pushed out into the
corridor, feeling simultaneously stupid and yet gratified. What he’d
done in the darkness of the grocery store on the beach gave him some status in
the topsyturvy world of institutions and outlawry. He’d felt it way
back in Juvenile Hall, but his pain and remorse and despair had overwhelmed any
shred of gratification. Now it was so long ago that remorse was gone, and his
spirits lifted mildly at the recognition.

Thus, looking inward, he stumbled over a
weird contraption. He didn’t fall but almost lost his balance. Then he
froze and stared at it in disbelief. A hundred-pound block of concrete was sewn
into several layers of old blanket. A twelve-foot canvas harness stretched from
it and was wrapped around the waist of the black who’d been fighting. His
dark face was puffed and discolored. Thick wax had been put on the floor. He
pulled the device up and down the corridor, turning the wax into
a sheen
. His face was expressionless as he looked at the
younger boy. The dread and gloom that had lessened in the latrine now rushed
back more intensely than ever. It was horror.

It’s
torture, he thought while walking back to the
dayroom, fighting tears of despair while wondering how such things could be.

The dayroom was noisy now with music on the
radio and voices from the poker game, which had a crowd of spectators. He, too,
stopped at the rear of the crowd, but just momentarily, his mind not on it,
except to note the stakes (nickel ante, fifty-cent limit), and that two
attendants were playing. Poker was apparently a big thing here. For the first
time he had no desire to play. And as he went back to his place on the bench,
he vowed also, for the first time in his life, to stay out of trouble.

Patients going by looked at the new arrival,
but nobody said anything to him, which was fine with him. He hungered for
friendship and acceptance, but he wanted nothing in this place except to
be left alone—and to get away. Why had he been such a fool to go with
Scabs?

At three-thirty in the afternoon, those in
the exercise yard came inside. The poker game broke up and everyone went to
their places. At a signal the noise became silence. Half a dozen patients swept
the floor and then ran steaming, wrung-dry mops over it; then they had to push
wooden polishers up and down to restore the shine. An attendant came along the
benches with a clipboard, taking count by checking off each name.

For the next hour they sat in silence. Some
whispered or made faces when no attendant was watching. One young attendant, a
clean-cut young giant in his early twenties, tiptoed behind the benches. He
came upon two whispering patients and smashed their heads together. It brought
titters of laughter from most of the others, and the young attendant grinned.
Alex didn’t laugh; into his fear came hatred.

At five o’clock they lined up in the
corridor, double-file against the wall, and trudged into the mess hall. They
passed the black still hauling the concrete block, his swollen face stoic.

An attendant supervised the mess-hall
seating, filling each eight-man table, letting each start eating when the table
was full. A cafeteria-style serving table wasn’t used. The food was
already on stainless steel trays and already many minutes cold. If hot it would
have been unpalatable even by institutional standards. Alex gagged, forcing
down a few bites of something resembling stew, though the nearest thing to meat
was grayish lumps of grease. Alex hadn’t eaten in a dozen hours and had
an institution-strengthened palate, but his stomach threatened to throw this
back up. He saw that others were managing to nibble down bits and pieces picked
out. They all wolfed down the two slices of bread; it was the main thing they
ate.

Hunger’s hollowness was still with Alex
when he followed the others out. In coming weeks he would manage to eat a
little more of the swill and crave much less as his stomach shriveled. The
awful food was a small problem in the sea of torments.

As the patients crowded the hallway another
fight suddenly erupted ahead. To Alex, it was as if the whole press of bodies
became agitated. He could hear grunts, curses, and blows and see the movement,
but all he really saw of the fight was two Chicanos being dragged away in
choke-holds and arm-locks. The next day he saw them in leather restraints, the
punishment for an unauthorized fight.

The ward had a second long corridor, and this
one had sleeping rooms. A low cot was the only furnishing in each room. Most
patients slept in a dormitory. Younger patients and observation cases were
given the rooms, where they couldn’t be raped. At nine o’clock,
Alex and the others were called. He did what they did, taking off his clothes
and piling them neatly at the mouth of the hallway. They walked naked past an
attendant while another one let them into their rooms. The locks clicked
behind. Soon the room lights were turned off from outside. Alex was already in
his bunk, but he got up to look out. The grounds were lighted. On the outside
roof above him were lights. He could see myriad insects rushing and whirling
toward the lights, battering out their brief lives. A big gray moth bounced its
life away on the screen, finally fluttering out of sight below the window
ledge. Alex remembered the lights coming through the dormitory window in
Juvenile Hall. Every institution seemed afraid of darkness. All of them had
lighted grounds at night, even when nobody was moving around. He could see one
ward about a hundred yards away, most of its windows glowing squares.
He’d soon learn that it was the high-security ward for females, confining
the same category females as the males on his ward. It was easier for the
females to get released, however; they could go whenever they agreed to
sterilization.

Now, however, the day’s tension had
enervated him. His body yearned for sleep, both to rejuvenate and because sleep
was an escape. He was gone to Morpheus half a minute after he closed his eyes.
He didn’t remember dreaming, but he came awake suddenly in the middle of
the night. An attendant had a flashlight trained on his eyes through the small
window in the door and was banging on it. The bed was soaked with sweat.

“Knock off that yelling!” the man
behind the light said, “or I’ll come in there and give you
something to yell about.”

This time Alex cried himself to sleep but
muffled the sound in the pillow.