Little Boy Blue (35 page)
Authors: Edward Bunker
Twenty minutes later he was handcuffed in the
back seat of a prowl car, fighting back tears as he stared out at the
city—the lights, the night, the people, freedom—all gone again. The
only sound was the chronic crackle of the radio and the monotoned voices
calling out.
“Eight twelve to fourteen twelve East
Beverly.
See the man and keep the peace…” Police radio calls
would always thereafter wrench his stomach.
He could tell by the sights that he was
being taken to Georgia Street. They would try to get him to “clean the
books” on burglaries in the area. He would say nothing—and even if
he did, they could do nothing. He was already in the worst place they could
send him. They would call Whittier. Tomorrow he would be picked up and taken
back.
Alex expected someone from Whittier to pick
him up the day after his arrest, but it took four days, and the men who signed
him out were from the Los Angeles office. Sacramento had ordered him
transferred to the Preston School of Industry, the reformatory for older,
tougher youths. Its age bracket was fifteen to seventeen. Alex was thirteen,
and his stomach felt hollow when they told him the destination. Nobody in
Whittier had ever been in Preston, but there were legends of how tough it was.
When he signed for his property envelope,
which the transportation officers took possession of, he asked if he could get
cigarettes from a machine in the corner. One of them took twenty cents from the
envelope and got a pack of Luckies for him.
Then
came
handcuffs.
From now on whenever he was transported there would be restraints. He was
a known rabbit.
Night’s dark coolness was still on the
city when they took him out to the parking lot. While they unlocked the station
wagon, the back seat of which was screened off, Alex sucked in the fresh
predawn air and stared with longing at the dismal old buildings. The coolness
felt especially good after the stale odors of the jail. A hundred youths had
passed through during his four days, seven of them in his cell. Despite the
momentary twinge of fear when he heard about Preston, his mood was jovial.
Without being conscious of it, he’d learned to derive pleasure from what
was available, and at the moment it was his first ride up the California
coast,
or at least partly up the coast before turning
inland. He didn’t probe or try to dissect his unlikely good mood. If
asked, he would have replied that it came from getting out of the dirty jail.
“Did they feed you back there?”
one of the men asked.
“Naw,” Alex lied. At four a.m.
the jailers passed out compartment trays with nothing on them but mush. It was
so rubbery that they slid the trays through the bars sideways, for the mush
stuck to the tray. Then a jailer came with two slices of bread for each boy.
Very few stayed in Georgia Street more than a night, so swill for food hardly
mattered.
“We’ll feed you later,” the
man said. “We want to get out of the city before the morning rush.”
“How come we’re going up the
coast route? It’s not the shortest, is it?”
“We have to pick up two more in Santa
Barbara.”
A few minutes later the car passed the
lighted Examiner building. Trucks with the morning edition were pulling out.
The familiar streets put a pang of longing in Alex. Then he saw Hank’s
car at the curb, and his ache turned to damp eyes; he cursed the tears silently
and fought them down.
As they drove west toward the coast highway,
Alex stared at everything, imprinting on his memory
all that
he could of freedom. Everything had an unusual clarity. Even the red and green
of traffic lights had unusual intensity.
It grew light while they were following the
curves of the coast highway. The blackness of the sea turned into an oily dark
green under the solid gray blanket of clouds.
They pulled off into a truck stop cafe.
Several big rigs and half a dozen cars were parked in the lot, and through the misted
glass Alex could see it was crowded.
“You ready to eat, son?” one of
the men asked.
“Are you going to take these
off?” He extended his handcuffed wrists.
“Oh, no, no, no,” the man said
with a pleasant grin. “We don’t have any weapons with us, and you’re
too young… no doubt you can outrun us.”
“Yeah, okay,” Alex said.
“Let’s go.” A protective anger surged through him, so that he
swaggered, and inside the cafe he met the looks of customers and
waitresses
with burning eyes and lips trembling near
the snarl of an animal. Most of them met his eyes only for a second, then
looked away nervously—at least those who noticed him in the first place
did so. It was only a handful; the vast majority were too involved in their own
affairs to pay any attention.
The men with him, however, did notice. They
exchanged glances and made mental notes to document the boy’s streak of
hostility and viciousness.
In Santa Barbara the driver waited at the car
with Alex while the other man went inside. Fifteen minutes later he came down
the walk with two youths handcuffed together, one white, one black. Alex began
grinning and chuckling. The black was Chester Nelson, he of the light, freckled
skin whom Alex had met his first morning in Juvenile Hall. Chester, however,
was no longer a skinny kid. His chest, shoulders, and arms filled out his
shirt, and he obviously needed to shave twice a week. He leaned forward to get
in first, saw Alex, and froze momentarily; then he shook his head and grinned,
showing another change: he’d lost his two front teeth.
“Hey, baby,” he said.
“It’s the same old faces in the same old places. I know you well, ‘member
when we met makin’ the bed in Juvie, but your name I forgot.”
“Hammond—”
“Yeah, Alex Hammond,” Chester
interrupted. Now he was inside, next to Alex. He awkwardly extended his left
hand to shake; his right was cuffed to the other youth.
“How’d you get busted up
here?” Alex asked. “You’re outa Watts, aren’t
you?”
“Not Watts, sucker.
Them’s
country niggers. I’m from the west side.”
“How’d you get here?”
“In a hot car.
How else.”
“That’s what they got you for,
car theft?”
“That and some
burglaries.”
“That’ll hold you.”
“Damn sure will.
You
goin’
to Preston, too?”
“Uh-huh.”
The man on the passenger side squirmed
around. “Okay, listen up,” he said. “We got an all-day ride.
We can do it easy or hard. You can smoke, but crack a window and use the
ashtrays. Talk all you want, but don’t start yelling out the windows.
Look at the pretty girls, but keep your mouths shut. In about ten minutes
we’re gonna stop at a gas station. You better take a leak then.
It’ll be your last chance. If you’re all right, don’t give us
any trouble, we’ll get you cheeseburgers and Cokes for lunch. If you do
give us trouble, you’ll get to Preston about five this
evening—hungry. Any questions
?“
“Yeah, man,” Chester said.
“What?”
“We get french fries too?”
Everyone
grinned.
It was five past five when they pulled up to
the gatehouse. While the driver showed the papers to the guard, the boys leaned
forward and looked up the road to the administration building, the only one
they could see. Constructed of brick, it was old for California. It sat on a
hilltop (Preston was built on low, rolling hills) and had a fifty-foot bell
tower.
“That’s the Castle,”
Chester Nelson said.
The gate slid open electrically and they
drove to the ad building, where a man waited at the top of the stairs. In a
hallway of dark wood and waxed floors, the escorts removed the handcuffs,
exchanged the inevitable paperwork, and turned the trio over, wishing them good
luck.
Still wearing their street clothes, which
were wrinkled and dirty from the jail, the newcomers followed the man out a
back door to a paved square with a small office. Several youths wearing sharply
creased black uniforms were lounging outside the door. They stopped talking and
stared at the newcomers, their faces cold, their eyes hard. Alex stared back
but not at any particular one, so as to avoid a personal challenge.
“Hey, Kennedy,” the man said,
“
run
these fish down to the mess hall. Bring ‘em
back here after they eat so we can dress ’em in.”
A burly youth with acne-pitted cheeks came
away from the wall. Without a word, he started toward an open gate, signaling
the new arrivals to follow. They went along the side of a road, passing other
two-story brick buildings that reminded Alex of Whittier, except these were
older. The road went over a low hill; at the bottom a company of about fifty
boys was forming in marching ranks outside the mess hall. They wore blue khakis,
not the black of their escort. They marched up as the newcomers came down. Alex
noted that the marching was much looser and more lackadaisical than allowed in
Whittier.
“Say, man,” Kennedy said to Alex,
“those are pretty nice kicks you’re wearin’.” He was
looking at Alex’s shoes. “You oughta let me have ’em.”
“Oh yeah.”
The mental hackles rose instantly in Alex. Kennedy
was three or four years older and twenty pounds heavier, plus being much more
muscular, but Alex now had had experience in institutional jungles and
refused to be taken advantage of. “Why should I give ‘em to
you?”
“You’re gonna lose ‘em
anyway. They’ll take ’em away when you get dressed in.”
It seemed reasonable. In Whittier the shoes
went like everything else. He didn’t mind giving them away under the
circumstances.
“I’ll give you half a pack,
too,” the detail boy said.
“I’ll need something to put on my
feet.”
“I’ll go get you something while
you’re in eating.”
“Yeah, okay.”
Talking was forbidden in the dining room. The
boys communicated by signals or learned to whisper from the sides of their
mouths without moving their lips. The rule failed in quieting the mess hall
because the inmates ate from stainless-steel trays using stainless steel
spoons. Four hundred of them scraping together made a nerve- grating cacaphony.
When they had gone through the serving line,
the fish sat down with their trays in an empty area near the door. Kennedy
leaned over Alex and promised to return in ten minutes. Alex nodded and tried
to force down the meat loaf, which he usually liked. Being on display, which
was what he felt like, made his stomach too nervous for food. Sweat began
making his shirt damp under the arms.
What had been called “cottages”
in Whittier were “companies” in Preston. The companies now began
filing out, one table at a time, passing close to where the fish sat. Alex
watched them go by, his first thought being how much older they seemed than the
boys of
Whittier. Then he began seeing familiar faces
here and there, boys he’d seen leave Whittier during the first few
months, and a couple of faces he recognized from even earlier, from Juvenile
Hall. A few gave him a nod, though he couldn’t recall their names. They
had been acquaintances, not friends.
Chester Nelson was getting the same greetings,
perhaps even more, from blacks.
Then Alex saw Watkins, his Okie escape
partner who’d gotten pulled from the fence. Moments later he got another
wave; he saluted back with a clenched fist, even though he couldn’t put a
name with the familiar face. It was the youth whom he’d met in the
bullpen next to the juvenile court.
When Kennedy came back with an old pair of
low-cut brogans, the mess hall was empty except for the three fish—and
the mess hall workers wiping off the tables and mopping the floor.
The brogans were too big, but Kennedy assured
Alex that a new pair would be issued, so Alex took off his pretty, almost new
shoes and handed them over. It was better than giving them to the institution.
Back on the detail grounds, the man, who was
a supervisor, took them around the outside of “the Castle” to a
door with a “Receiving and Release” sign on it. The man had a key.
Inside were long shelves of blue khakis,
supposedly arranged by size. These were used clothes, though laundered and
halfway pressed.
“Pick yourself some and don’t
make
no
mess,” the man said. “When you get
done there find some shoes over there.” He pointed to a screened-off area
that apparently served as a shoe repair shop. It had bins marked by size, and
in each bin were state-issue brogans, high-top and low-cut, all old but with
new heels and half-soles.
“What about my own shoes?”
Chester Nelson asked. “Can I send ‘em home?”
“You can keep ‘em. You’re
entitled to one pair of personal shoes and—”
Alex missed the last clause of the dialogue,
because as the truth of the first hit him, the pounding red blood in his brain
erased everything else. Kennedy had snookered him, conned him out of his shoes.
Preston was tougher than Whittier, its inmates older and more violent; they
were also sophisticated—not that Kennedy’s “story” was
especially slick. It had been simple, and it was told simply and with
matter-of-fact sincerity. It fit the circumstances. That superficial analysis,
that momentary reasoning, sapped Alex completely—left him nearly gasping.
It was night when they came out of Receiving and Release. They had sheets,
blankets, a towel, and a pillow case, with toothbrush, comb, safety razor, and
blades.
Also half a yellow pencil, already sharpened, and
paper and an envelope.
It was the standard “fish kit.”
The man told them to write home and tell their families they were okay. He said
that the institution disliked parents
worrying,
calling the superintendent or Sacramento, so their letters were censored and
nothing upsetting was allowed to go out.
Alex barely listened; it wasn’t
relevant to him—he was thinking of Kennedy and the shoes. He was younger
than nearly everyone in Preston, and although he was as tall as many, he
wasn’t as developed. His brain pulsed with indignant rage. It almost
blinded his thoughts. Even without the emotions screaming in his mind, he knew
that he couldn’t let Kennedy get away with it. Whittier had taught him
what would happen to anyone who showed weakness. In a world with violence at
its pinnacle, to let something like this go would mark him. Others wanting to
establish their toughness would prey on him, and inevitably someone would try
to fuck him. So when the first, literally blind rage dissipated, he was left
with an implacable determination.
They assigned him to “B” Company,
the one company housed in the old Castle. A few of these fifty youths
he’d seen in Whittier or Juvenile Hall, and one or two he knew. He
exchanged nods, but they were at assigned tables in the dayroom so there was no
chance to talk that night.
His bunk was
next to a window. Bright lights outside reminded him of his first night in
Juvenile Hall. It seemed so long ago, yet it was from the same moment of panic.
By
raising
up on an elbow, he could see over the
window ledge down across part of the grounds. The fence with barbed wire on top
was nearby—and beyond it he saw a dozen deer grazing blissfully, a couple
of fawns moving between them. For some reason beyond his capacity to analyze, a
terrible ache and longing surged through him. Tears swelled in his eyes, and he
jammed his face in the pillow, struggling against sobs.
