Little Boy Blue (29 page)
Authors: Edward Bunker
When they had partially regained their wind,
Alex started down the dirt road, alternately trotting and walking fast. JoJo
was a few paces behind. After a quarter of a mile, they turned back into the
trees, angling back toward the institution. A highway, Alex recalled, ran
beside the east end of the reform school and this orange grove. The hunters
would expect them to be much farther away. If they could cross that highway
right next to the institution, the land on the other side was undeveloped, a
rolling landscape of sandy earth, some cactus, and dry bushes—a home for
jackrabbits.
Ten minutes later they knelt in the tall,
wild grass on the reform- school side of the road. The sweat of their exertions
met the predawn chill and turned to goose pimples and shivering. They waited
ten minutes for a break in traffic big enough where nobody would see them
cross, but the rumbling diesel trucks and whippeting automobiles kept
coming. The boys moved to the shoulder and dashed across, momentarily
illuminated in headlight beams. It wasn’t the authorities, because the
car kept going.
On the other side, they slid down the
embankment into a drainage ditch, where ankle-high water was hidden by
greenery. The mud sucked at their shoes, and when they stepped out they were
soaked and filthy halfway to the knees.
Fifty yards later Alex felt safe. They
stopped to rest and think. Looking back, he could see the line of orange on the
horizon, heralding the new day. It had been a long night, and ahead was a long
walk, but by dusk they would be at JoJo’s—if they carefully stuck
to railroad tracks and riverbeds. They were already so dirty that they would
raise eyebrows trekking through suburban streets.
“C’mon, JoJo, ol’
pal,” Alex said. “We got a long hike, so we might as well
start.” He offered a hand to the seated JoJo, helping him to his feet. It
was an effective gesture; it perked up the Italian youth.
The reform-school escapees reached the
sanctuary of JoJo’s home as the street lights came on. The boys moved
cautiously down the rutted alley behind the house, slipped through a latched
gate on a rickety wooden fence, and then crouched behind steel trash barrels
next to the pigeon coop. They watched the back door. JoJo had wanted to strut
up and surprise them flamboyantly, but Alex’s caution prevailed. Although
two teenaged boys wouldn’t warrant a police stakeout, they were worth
detectives asking a neighbor to call in if they were seen. Alex recalled it
happening to other boys.
The wait in the back yard was brief. Teresa
Altabella, the pretty older sister, came out to empty the garbage. The family
dog (a mix of German shepherd and beagle) accompanied her. He sensed the boys
and began barking and jumping from side to side. Teresa dumped the sack and
called the dog. She was reaching for his collar when JoJo called her name. She
jerked, startled, uncomprehending until JoJo called the dog’s name,
“Hey, Kilo!” and the dog recognized the family member and went
into joyous paroxysms of barking and jumping.
Teresa came into the darkness, calling her
brother’s name.
“Is it safe? No cops around?”
JoJo asked.
“No, nobody’s here but me.”
“Where’d they go?”
“To the movies… Dragon
Seed”
They entered the house and went directly
upstairs to JoJo’s room, which had one window overlooking the street.
They stripped off the soiled reform-school clothes for things in the closet.
When Alex had begun his institutional odyssey he was too young to care about
style in clothes, but pubescence was changing that. Now the right plumage was
important, both for looking good to girls and being correct in his milieu. This
was essentially a poor, inner-city milieu, and although the particular block
was Italian, the neighborhood was mostly Chicano, and to be “sharp”
a youth had to follow their styles. It was just toward the end of World War II,
when the boys in white suburbia wore Levi’s and leather flight jackets,
but in the barrios of Los Angeles, youths wore khakis or surplus marine fatigue
pants with giant patch pockets down the thighs. Sometimes they were dyed black,
and often they were topped with surplus “Eisenhower” jackets, with
patches removed and also dyed black. The shoes had a plain capped toe and extra
soles, and horseshoe taps on the heels. They could not run in such shoes, but
they could kick… The extreme zoot suit had gone, but slacks were
“semis,” loose at the knee and narrow at the cuff, and jackets had
large shoulder pads.
JoJo had a full wardrobe, and although he was
huskier than Alex, some of the girth had come since he went to Juvenile Hall,
and Alex could wear most of his clothes. After a quick rinse in the shower,
Alex dressed and looked in the mirror on the bedroom door while combing his
hair. He massaged in a heavy dose of Dixie Peach pomade, which partially came
out in his comb as he fashioned an upswept ducktail and flipped curls down over
his forehead. He liked what he saw. It was a far different image from that of
the eleven- year-old who had run away from the Valley Home for Boys some two
years ago. All he needed was a tattoo or two—a cross with three dots in
the flesh between thumb and forefinger, and maybe a beauty mark on a cheekbone
beneath an eye. Some
guys
put a cross on their
foreheads, but that was too extreme.
JoJo took a longer shower after Alex and
dressed himself much the same way. Alex, propped on the bed, watched his
confederate comb the curly hair and thought how good-looking he was. It was
obvious that Teresa adored her brother. She made them tuna salad sandwiches and
brought them up with a quart of milk. They were gulping them down when the
headlights of the family car sprayed across the front of the house, flaring
momentarily in the window. The horn honked, unnecessarily announcing the
arrival of the family, and then the motor went silent. Teresa started for the
door.
“Don’t tell ‘em we’re
here,” JoJo said.
Teresa stopped, hand on the knob.
“Why?”
“Well…”
“Lisa’s going to come up here,
so—”
“Tell her… and we gotta tell Mama
pretty quick, but the old man—he
don’t
need to know. No tellin’ what he’ll do.”
“Mom got the call from the reformatory
this morning, but she wasn’t going to tell him—at least not till
they went out to the movie. She knew he’d use it as an excuse not to take
her.”
“What difference would that
make?” Alex asked.
“Anything might make a
difference,” Teresa answered, moving from the door to gather the pile of
dirty clothes. “I’ll burn these.”
When she went out, Alex was both sorry and
glad.
Whenever she looked at him with more than a glance, his
face got hot and his tongue thick and unwieldy.
This was the first girl
he’d talked to since puberty, which had changed his fantasies and
hungers. Teresa Altabella was pretty and prematurely enticing, with full
breasts, a tiny waist, and full hips and thighs. It was enough to discomfit
many adult males, much less a thirteen-year-old who had seen no girls for a
long, long time. He knew that she was thirteen from JoJo, and, when asked,
he’d told her that he was freshly fifteen, blushing even more hotly at
the lie.
When she was gone, JoJo explained that his
parents weren’t happy, not that there was any chance of their separating.
They didn’t do such things. But Joe, Sr. was from the old country, and
didn’t care about anything but making money and babies. He owned a dozen
small apartment buildings in the slums. He’d put three thousand dollars
into a unit in 1934, and when he had enough equity, he borrowed against it to
buy another; the peasant understands the value of property more than the middle
class does. Nevertheless, he kept working as a meat-cutter for a supermarket,
taking all the overtime they offered. His wife, born in Brooklyn, thought they
should enjoy life, that he should buy her nice things and take her out. At
thirty-eight Lorraine was young enough to want some fun. She didn’t want
to bear more children, whereas babies were also wealth to him.
Even at thirteen Alex knew enough, had read
enough, to know that the Altabella family was somewhat bizarre. Despite that,
he felt the underlying warmth between them. It felt
good
,
the belonging. It felt even better when he thought of Teresa—she with the
soft brown eyes and quick smile and breasts uptilted in an off-the- shoulder
peasant blouse. He stared at her compulsively when her gaze was elsewhere, but
the moment their eyes touched, his dropped to his shoes.
The older Altabellas slept in the large
downstairs bedroom at the rear of the house, while the three children had two
small bedrooms upstairs. The house roof slanted to a peak, making it much
smaller upstairs. There was a small bathroom and the two bedrooms, nothing
else. In fact one had to go through the girls’ room to reach
JoJo’s.
Teresa went downstairs and returned with her
eleven-year-old sister, Lisa, for whom no genes of beauty had been left. With
eyes set too close, teeth needing braces, and a nose both big and hooked, she
caused her mother to worry that she wouldn’t find a husband. Lisa was
still too young to feel much pain about her homely face. Now, when she burst
into the room, she was visibly afire with joyous excitement. She leaped up and
hooked her arms around her brother’s neck, and he swung her around
several times while she screeched and kissed him.
Never had Alex been told that men rise to
their feet as courtesy when women enter a room, so he hadn’t moved from
the bed, back against the headboard, legs extended. He was moved by the love
flowing between the handsome older brother and homely little sister.
“Alex, meet my baby sister,
Lisa.”
He nodded, still on the bed. “I met you
on the visiting grounds a couple of weeks ago.”
“Oh yes, I remember! You had a Boy
Scout uniform.” She turned to JoJo. “When I saw you in a Boy Scout
uniform I nearly started laughing.”
“Yeah,” JoJo said, grinning and
shaking his head. “And the old man was fuckin’ proud of me in it.
It didn’t matter that I was in reform school… I was a Boy
Scout.”
“Lisa,” said Teresa, “you’re
Daddy’s favorite, so maybe you should tell him about JoJo.”
“Why tell him?” JoJo asked.
“Mom has to know, but he’s gone all day, and he never comes up here
or goes out back. He goes from the dinner table to the bedroom—in a
straight line.”
Teresa shrugged her indifference, and it was
thus decided. At least for now, Joe Altabella Senior would be kept unaware that
his son was more or less at home. The way the house was arranged, with the
master bedroom at the rear downstairs and the stairs at the front, JoJo and
Alex could come and go, even with Joe, Sr. home, without being seen. During the
day, when Joe was gone, they would exit by the kitchen door into the back yard
and through the gate into the alley, emerging on a busy boulevard a block away.
This route made it unlikely that neighbors would see, just in case the police
had someone watching. At night, when Joe was home, the darkness would protect
them from possible eyes as they went out the front door.
On the second day, a pair of juvenile
detectives came to ask the mother if JoJo had contacted his home. (She shook
her head no, silently saying a Hail Mary to expiate the lie.) They also asked
her to call them if he did. They promised not to hurt him if she turned him in.
But on the
first night, totally exhausted from the tension of the escape and the thirty
miles of trekking, Alex unintentionally fell asleep fully dressed on the bare
mattress of JoJo’s bed. It was around midnight, and they had turned the
radio on, tuning in a popular music disc jockey who broadcast from a South L.A.
drive-in, and who took dedications over the phone. Alex’s interest in the
love songs of popular music had risen almost simultaneously with puberty. The
real music to him, however, was the mellifluous voice of Teresa. She was telling
JoJo about mutual friends and about his girlfriend, Connie Gianetta, who kept
asking when he was coming home. Alex was a listener, entranced because such
talk was totally new to him. He failed to see the banality because of his age.
He listened while lying comfortably on the bed, totally comfortable, even
though he was dressed and the mattress was bare. Sleep clubbed him down without
him asking for it. He dreamed of Teresa. It was the first time dreaming of a
girl—or at least the first time he remembered in the morning. It was
a flash of a dream: she was lying beside him, fully clothed, though he could
feel her body arousing him. Her month was on his face, so warm, so very warm,
and he moaned with longing for the open mouth and hot, sweet breath. Those were
the fragments he recalled in the morning.
Also in the morning, JoJo had two
twenty-dollar bills. He’d crept downstairs in the wee hours and took them
from his father’s wallet.
“Man, I’ve been gettin’ him
since I was nine years old. It’s the only way to get a nickel from
him—steal it. Shit! He
don’t
even give Mom
grocery money. He does the shopping.”
“You don’t have to convince me,
JoJo,” Alex said, sensing from the tone that his approval was important.
“And he’s fuckin’
rich,” JoJo said. “We live in this fucked-up neighborhood when we
could be somewhere nice. Ah,
man
! I’d do
anything to meet some of those chicks from Hollywood High and Beverly Hills
High, even if they are mostly Jewish chicks… who don’t fuck around.
Lana Turner went to Hollywood High. Did you know that?”
Alex shook his head, and chuckled. “
That don’t
mean they all look like Lana Turner.”
“Naw, but they are fine, fine,
fine…”
“So what’re we gonna do
today?”
“Whatever we do, it’s gotta be
better than what we were doing.
Right?”
“No bullshit!”
A light knock on the door preceded
Teresa’s entrance. A tight, white turtleneck sweater accented her
breasts, and a tight gabardine skirt did the same for her derriere and thighs.
She also wore the mandatory white and brown saddle shoes and bobby socks.
“Daddy’s gone to work. We’ll tell Mom you’re here
now.”
“Okay,” JoJo said.
“What’re you dressed up
for?” Alex said impulsively,
then
blushed.
The blush worsened when she replied, “I
go to school. Remember?”
“We’ll be down in a few
minutes,” JoJo said.
“Not me, man,” Alex said.
“This is a heavy scene and I’ll just get in the way.”
“I want you to meet her.”
“Yeah, sure, but not
right now this morning.
We’ve got time.”
Alex gently but firmly
pushed JoJo toward the door.
“Go on, see your mom.”
Teresa had left the door
ajar
moments before. She was visible through it in her bedroom, leaning slightly
forward while drawing her mouth in the heavy red lipstick of the time. While
passing her to reach the stairs, JoJo slapped her backside, not hard enough to
hurt but enough to make her arch perceptibly forward. JoJo’s footsteps
clattered on the narrow stairwell while Alex stood in the doorway between the
two bedrooms, watching Teresa and wondering what to say when she turned from
the mirror.
She pressed her lips together, joined the
lipstick tube together, and her eyes met his via the mirror.
“You’re sure pretty,” he
said, half tentative, half blurting.
She smiled and glowed with it. “Thank
you.”
“I’ll bet you’ve got tons
of boyfriends.” He cursed the comment the moment it was in the air. His
feeling of stupidity grew when she continued to smile without replying.
“Do you?” He pressed because the
silence was worse.
“I guess boys like me. I wouldn’t
say tons though.”
“Anyone
special?”
“Mmm, yes, I guess so… sort
of.” “Oh…”
“I haven’t heard from him in a
couple of days.
Which is kinda weird.
He comes by
nearly every day, and calls once or twice.” She was obviously musing
aloud; then she pointedly added: “He’s half Chicano and half Irish.
His name is Wedo. Wedo Murphy. He’ll be seventeen next week.
A real sharp guy.”
The information wilted sprouting fantasies.
He’d known that any girl this pretty and developed would have boyfriends,
but a seventeen-year-old was virtually an adult. A thirteen-year-old, even
one passing as fifteen, was no competition.
“Oh, oh, wow!” she said suddenly.
“I gotta go. I’m already going to be late—again. God! I wish
I could quit.”
She was an explosion of energy, grabbing
books and things, pausing for a last long look around to see if anything was
forgotten. Then she was gone, leaving a smile and a “see you
later.” Her scent and her presence lingered, at least Alex thought so.
The pleasurable nervousness and the sort of ache was something new—and he
recognized what he felt. He went into JoJo’s bedroom and looked
through the window as she appeared below, went through the gate and down the
sidewalk, finally moving beyond his angle of vision. He remained looking long
after she was gone. Everything was bright and
clean
in
the sunlight. The neighborhood was a poor working-class one, but there were
postage-stamp lawns and occasional palm trees, jutting high and tilted.
Somewhere a carpenter was already pounding nails, the sound of the hammer
carrying clearly in the morning air. Alex suddenly longed to go out into the
sunlight and see the city. He wanted to look for experience.
Sometime later JoJo came rushing upstairs.
Alex was on the unmade bed, reading an old Esquire he’d found. JoJo was
obviously happy.
“It went good, huh?” Alex asked,
putting down the magazine and sitting up.
“Oh yeah… but she’s all
fucked up… happy to see me, scared to death ‘cause I’m on the
run. She wants to meet you—and you’re welcome here forever as far
as she’s concerned.”
“You’ll have to tell your old
man, too.”
“Who?
He doesn’t have to know.”
“What happens when he goes to Whittier
to visit?”
JoJo’s grin turned blank. He
hadn’t thought of the visits. Two Sundays a month the family went to
Whittier. After a ticking silence, he threw off the problem. “So we tell
him. He ain’t gonna turn me in, that I know. So fuck it, why worry?
Let’s go out somewhere. I’ll show you San Pedro. It’s a
beautiful day.”
“That sounds real good to me.
What’ve you got in mind?”
“Well, man, I thought we might check
out the neighborhood, get some reefer—I can get some good, fat joints for
half a buck apiece. How’s that sound?”
“Sounds good to
me.”
Even under torture Alex
wouldn’t have admitted to never
before smoking
marijuana, nor that he had fears of it while wanting to be initiated. All the
sharpest
guys
in Whittier talked about getting high on
weed and, yes, another thing: breaking open Benzedrine inhalers for the
saturated strips inside. He had to try that, too.
“Can you roll?” JoJo asked.
“Roll?”
“Yeah, roll cigarettes, joints.”
JoJo made a hand gesture to indicate.
“Oh yeah,” Alex said,
then
laughed inwardly, recalling that he’d learned to
roll cigarettes by hand in Camarillo. It already seemed a long time ago. For a
moment he wondered what had happened to Red Barzo and First Choice Floyd.
“Good,” JoJo said. “I gotta
learn how. I use a little pipe now when I can’t get somebody to roll ‘em.
It’s a lot cheaper to buy it loose instead of joints already rolled. Man,
I can get a lid, ’bout fifty joints, for eight bucks, if it’s
loose.”
“So let’s get it that way. But
let’s go. Fuck, I didn’t split from that place to look out windows.
Maybe we can go downtown to a movie.”
“No, no, a flick is risky in the
daytime. Truant officers check ‘em out ’cause every kid playin’
hooky goes to a flick.”
“Yeah, you’re right. I
didn’t think. But there’s something we can do.”
“We’ll go to the pool hall, get
that weed. Then sort of play it by ear.
You hungry?”
Alex shrugged.
“Yeah,
sort of.
We got used to regular meals in there.”
“I know a good Mexican cafe where they
give up huevos rancheros for sixty-five cents.”
“
What’s
huevos
rancheros
?”
“Mexican-style
eggs… with chile and refried beans.
It’s good.”
“Yeah, it sounds good.”
“Let’s
get moving before the breakfast hour is over.”
