Little Boy Blue (36 page)

As in Whittier, the companies came to the
detail grounds for work call. Alex had been told to wait until all the crews
were gone, but he saw Kennedy lounging with the other black-clad detail boys
next to the office, and when the ranks of companies dissolved to report to work
supervisors, he went over to Kennedy, who saw him coming and took a step
forward.

“Hey, man,” Alex said, “I gotta
have my kicks back.”

“Whaddya mean?”

“You gave me a bullshit story. I could
have kept them.”

“Could you? I didn’t know
that.” The way Kennedy spoke, however, was edged with arrogance.

“I want those shoes back.”

“I ain’t got your shoes.”

“You took ‘em. I want the
motherfuckers back, man.”

“You want! Who the
fuck
are
you?”

“I don’t want no trouble,
but—”

“If you don’t want trouble, get
outa my face before I put the foot in your ass.” Kennedy was swollen up,
ready to fight, his whole being coiled for violence. He outweighed Alex by
twenty-five pounds, and there was no doubt he could easily handle Alex in a
fight. His arrogant confidence became contempt. “Look, punk, get
outa my face before you get hurt.”

For a moment Alex was actually dizzy as the
blood pounded through his brain, his rage magnified because of his
helplessness. Yet he’d known he was no match for Kennedy, and that
previous awareness jerked him back to a semblance of rationality. He dropped
his head and wound his way through the shifting crowd. Boys were going to
specified areas according to assignment. Work supervisors waited with
clipboards.

Watkins and a slender Indian youth were at
the “B” Company formation area when Alex got back. He’d seen
the Indian in Whittier but didn’t know his name. He was with Watkins.

“Where you been?” Watkins asked
as they shook hands.

“I had to see a guy ‘bout
something.”

“We gotta go in a minute. Do you know
Miller?”

“In Lincoln, weren’t you?”
Alex said, shaking hands.

“Right,” Miller said.

“Here,” Watkins said, openly
giving Alex a pack of Chesterfields, grinning when Alex looked around.
“They don’t bother you about cigarettes here. It’s kind of
fucked up, though. They don’t let you buy ‘em, but you can have
’em. They have a ‘smoke line’ after meals.”

“Where do they come from?”

“Mostly visits. Some guys from
Sacramento and San Francisco get visits every week—and bring in two
cartons apiece.”

“The fuzz lets ‘em?”

“Yeah, man. In a lot of ways this is
better’n Whittier. Shit, I do all right. I work in the butcher shop.
I’ve got three cops bringin’ me cigarettes for meat… a pound
of choice steak for a pack. Another one brings me a Benzedrine inhaler for two
filets. That’s where they come from.” He indicated the pack of
cigarettes in Alex’s pocket.

“Hey, you!” a counselor yelled at
them, starting to come over. “Where are you supposed to be?”

The detail grounds had nearly emptied, and
the boys who remained were in groups under the watchful eye of a
foreman
.

“We gotta go,” Watkins said, he
and Miller turning their backs to the man, faking that they hadn’t heard
him as they walked away. Suddenly Watkins snapped his fingers and called back.
“What happened to Altabella?”

“Fuck, they got him two months ago.
Sent him back to Whittier.”

“Okay. I’ll see you after
work.”

When “work call” was over, a
supervising counselor gathered the three newcomers and drove them to the
institution hospital for a cursory physical examination. It was in the waiting
room that he found what he’d been looking for: a weapon. He hadn’t
wanted to ask anyone because it could conceivably have gotten back to Kennedy.
What he found was the heavy brass nozzle of a firehose. He unscrewed it from
the hose while Chester Nelson was in the examination room. Stuck in his
waistband beneath his shirt and jacket, it pulled his pants down on one side.
It was so blatant that he expected some man to ask him what he had hidden
there—but none of them really looked at him, much less noticed the sag.
He had misgivings because it was so heavy. He had no desire to kill Kennedy,
yet if the equation was reduced to forgetting what had happened or
killing, he would kill. During the remainder of the morning, which he spent
leafing through tattered magazines in “B” Company dayroom, he kept
looking futilely for something more appropriate. He simultaneously had to
lock his mind, refuse to look at anything beyond the act he planned. Whenever
any image of consequence came up, he ruthlessly pushed it out of his
mind… and deliberately remembered Kennedy’s contemptuous
arrogance until his fear was replaced by the pounding blood of fury in his
brain.

He planned to wait until afternoon work call,
following lunch. But at eleven-thirty a.m., the whistle blew for recall.
Everyone returned to their companies for noon count and lunch. The detail
grounds again filled with the seven hundred reform-school inmates.

Kennedy was easy to spot in his black
uniform. He was with two other detail boys, forming a conversational circle
outside the door of the detail office. Alex held his breath, clenched his teeth,
and ran on tiptoe the last three strides. Kennedy’s back was to him, but
one of the others saw the heavy brass nozzle glint in the sunlight. His eyes
widened in reflex, and he yelped, “Look—” as it arched down.

At the last fraction of a second, even while
striking, Alex pulled the blow, snapping it with his wrist instead of smashing
it with arm and shoulder. Nonetheless, the heavy nozzle made a loud
“plop!”—
a
hollow sound like a giant
egg breaking. Blood jumped from Kennedy’s head. His legs buckled, but he
didn’t go down. His companions blanched and fell back, aghast.
Kennedy
stumbled
forward two steps and whirled around.
He now faced Alex. His face had two huge streams of blood running down his
cheekbones—bright red tears. He wiped his palm across his face, smearing
the gore and covering his hand.

“You fuckin’ punk,” he
snarled.

Alex had been stunned, hypnotized, but he
heard the words and thought he saw the body tense to attack—so he swung
the heavy nozzle again, this time without hesitation. It was the horizontal
blow of a frightened youth. It caved in Kennedy’s cheekbone and dropped
him as if he’d been shot in the brain.

Many dozen eyes had turned at the first sound
of violence. The second made them gasp collectively, and those who were close
backed up reflexively. Some thought they’d just seen a boy murdered.

Then Kennedy began slowly pumping his legs,
as if he were riding a bicycle. A hand came up to clutch his cheek, blood seeping
between his fingers. Alex stood unmoving, the nozzle dangling by his side, the
image being cooked into his brain. Misgivings flickered for one moment,
and then were snuffed out by indignation; the bullyin’ motherfucker had
it coming.

Several
freemen had turned in time to see the second blow. Seconds passed with everyone
on the detail grounds frozen motionless and silent. Then a
foreman
who was behind Alex ran on tiptoe and crashed into
him with a high blind-side tackle. Alex went down, the nozzle flying from his
hand. Even before he hit the asphalt, others were piling on top of him. One of
them, driven by fear, grabbed his hair and began slamming his face into the
pavement.

Every institution that confines people has a
“hole.” It may be called anything—Isolation, Segregation,
Seclusion, Meditation, The Cooler, The Shelf, The Adjustment Unit,
etcetera—but it is still “the hole,” a jail within a jail,
and often there’s a special hole inside the hole. In Preston the hole was
called “G” Company, and was in a secluded part of the institution.
Alex was handcuffed and driven to “G” Company by three supervising
counselors.

The men on duty in “G” Company
had been telephoned and were waiting when he was brought to the door. They
seemed indifferent, maybe even bored, as they took custody of him. Later
he’d learn that two, the Neiman brothers, were from Alcatraz; a kid, no
matter how violent, wasn’t going to upset them in the least.

“G” Company was newer than most
of Preston, and it was actually a prison cellhouse in design, with two
tiers or galleries instead of floors. The center of the building did have a
solid floor. Around it were rooms used for necessary functions: an office, a
shower, a clothing room, and a closet that served as a library. The mess hall
was down a corridor off the center, it extended out from the rectangular
shape of the building. Each tier had seventy-five cells. The doors were solid
except for a barred observation window. Light came into the building from high,
barred windows at each end. The sunbeams were dissected into patterns, spilling
down on the highly waxed tile floor and giving a sepulchral mood to the place.
Everything was spotless, and everything was silent, except for their footsteps.
A few faces appeared at cell doors to see the newcomer.

Alex’s clothes were taken and he was
given
a strip-search
. He’d been locked in cells
before, but never in a place so much like a prison.

He was given an unpressed, zipup jumpsuit
without pockets and a pair of cloth slippers. One man motioned for him to
follow along the bottom tier, while the other opened a box and pulled a lever.
It raised a security bar that dropped into a slot over the door. As long as it
was down no cell door could be opened.

The man escorting Alex opened a huge spike
key to unlock the cell door. Alex immediately saw that someone had slept in the
bunk since it was made up. It had sheets and blankets, but they were turned
back and rumpled. Dirty socks and a towel were on the floor under a pushbutton
sink, below which was the toilet.

“Go on in,” the man said. Then,
when he’d relocked the door and his partner had dropped the bar, he
added, “We’ll send you down some bedding later. The kid who was in
here went to the hospital last night—appendicitis. Anyway, the rules are
simple. No talking in here at any time. It’s a silent system. We catch
you yelling out the window and we’ve got a place without a
window—or anything else except concrete and a hole in the floor to shit
in.”

Alex nodded.

“We’ve got some other rules, too.
You get up at the morning bell—seven a.m.—and make your bunk. You
don’t get back on it until after supper. Other than that, keep your eyes
open and your lip buttoned and you’ll catch on to the routine.” The
man spoke laconically, a speech made to every newcomer. He waited to see if
Alex had any response—Alex was thinking how pale the man’s eyes
looked—and then turned away.

When Alex was satisfied that the receding
footsteps were real, he began examining his new domicile. Besides the bunk
bolted to the floor, there was an aluminum washbowl and toilet. They were one
unit, with the washbowl with pushbuttons on top. Its drain ran down into the
toilet bowl. It was aluminum instead of porcelain, and the inside of the toilet
was permanently stained. In the corner between the fixture and the wall
was
a small bag and some dirty rags. The bag contained
cleanser.

Alex tore the dirty sheets from the mattress.
When he lifted the mattress to turn it over, he saw a sheet of steel where springs
should have been. He also found a partial bag of Bull Durham tobacco and many
loose book matches and a striker. The matches had been split in half, so each
gave two lights instead of one. He had enough smokes for several days.

His greatest
discovery, however, was on the floor in the corner behind the bunk: a stack of
old magazines and nearly a dozen books. The covers were torn off the books. It
was before the era of paperbacks, and apparently the hard covers were a
security threat, although Alex was unable to imagine how. The tension and
violence had drained him, leaving an incipient depression and
a hollowness
, but seeing the books elevated his mood
considerably. He began flipping the pages to find the titles: The Iron Hell by
Jack London was one, The Foxes of Harrow by Frank Yerby, Saratoga
Trunk
by Edna Ferber, Main Street by Sinclair Lewis. Alex
remembered Lewis from Arrowsmith. He’d read that one first. As long as he
had books he would be okay. In fact, as long as he had good books he preferred
to live in their worlds than the ugliness of his own real world. So far he
didn’t mind this hole at all.

Around noon he heard noises and stood up to
the door to see. Across from him on the bottom the inhabitants were being let
out of their cells. They wore shoes and regular uniforms instead of the
jumpsuits and slippers.

Then security bars went up elsewhere that he
couldn’t see. He heard doors nearby being unlocked. A minute later a man
unlocked Alex’s door and pulled it open. A boy appeared carrying two
compartmented food trays. He passed one of them to Alex and told him to slide
it out under the door when he was through. The space was too small if the tray
had food, but it was enough when the tray was empty, although residues of
earlier trays already marred the door’s bottom.

The food was cold, but Alex’s two years
in institutions had made him indifferent to such things. He finished eating and
went back to his book.

When sounds of activity again broke the
silence and brought him to the door, a score of youths were lining up in twos.
They wore regular clothes and shoes. A minute later he saw them again, this
time trekking up the hill outside his window with short-handled hoes on their
shoulders. At the top they began chopping weeds, working down. Obviously there
was more than one status in “G” Company.

During the day nobody talked in the building.
It was silent as a cathedral. Three counselors were on duty until five p.m. At
night it was different. One man was in charge, although he couldn’t open
a cell door by himself; he didn’t even have a key to exit the building.
When anything happened he used the telephone to summon assistance. Also,
he couldn’t be surprised by his superiors, so he simply sat in the
office, drinking coffee, listening to a radio, reading magazines he got
from the boys, and sometimes dozing. The office door was visible from several
cell doors, and if the man came out, the youths in those cells passed a
warning. The man couldn’t hear them from the office because they talked
through the windows, calling out along the outside of the building.

The first night Alex kept out of the
conversations, but by listening and using inference he learned that
“G” Company had two sections. One was for punishment, per se, where
the boy stayed anywhere from ten to sixty days. Some of those went out to work,
but Alex was unable to learn what decided if it was work or cell. The second
section of “G” Company was the half of the building beyond the
office-administrative area. Apparently the other section was for boys
permanently assigned to “G” Company—troublemakers the staff
didn’t want in a regular company, such as “dings,”
“fruiters,” the chronically assaultive, and whoever else might
disrupt the institution. It wasn’t punishment, so the officials
said; it was just segregation. They had full privileges except for
attending the weekend movie. They worked around the building, passing out the
food and then washing the trays, keeping the floor of red tile buffed to
a sheen
, performing make-work; or else they went on a
special crew that did hard labor, their tools being mattocks, shovels, and
hoes, for the most part.

That much
Alex gleaned from listening for several hours to at least five different
voices. One reviled the disciplinary committee for permanently assigning him to
“grade B” in “G” Company. The others made fun of him:
what did he expect after three escapes. He was lucky they weren’t
transferring him to San Quentin for security. San Quentin was the next
step up the institutional ladder.