Little Boy Blue (7 page)

The juvenile detectives came in the
afternoon—big Irishmen with booze-reddened complexions, Sen-Sen on their
breaths, and aftershave on their razor-polished jaws. They were a matched
pair.

“C’mon kid,” one of them
said when the steel door opened, spilling light within. “We’re
taking you downtown and then to Juvenile Hall. Who put you in here,
anyway?” The detective indicated the hole.

Alex ignored the question. He heard what was
said, but the words meant nothing that he cared about.

The detective knew the boy had been told
about his father, but the big Irishman didn’t know what to say. It was
beyond the realm of police work. And the boy had shot a man, nearly paralyzed
him. The detective had once felt sorry for straying boys, but he’d seen
too many go from delinquency to hard crime, from reform school to prison. Now
they were acorns to trees he could anticipate.

“C’mon, lad, let’s put the
show on the road.”

Absolutely nothing mattered to Alex. The
man’s tone said they would drag him out if they had to, and Alex was
indifferent to that, too. Still, he got up and came out. The handcuffs
appeared, making a clicking whirr as they opened.

“Behind him?” the second
detective asked, cuffs poised.

“Naw, he’s not going to give us
any shit, are you, kid?”

Alex said nothing. The cuffs went in front.
Now the detectives were quick, getting on each side while the turnkey led them
out.

The white light of the sun on concrete hurt
Alex’s eyes. Blinking, held by the elbows and rushed down the stairs to a
no parking zone, he couldn’t believe the waiting crowd was for him.
Nearly a dozen reporters and
cameramen
were there, the
latter retreating with cameras clicking. The reporters came as close as the
detectives would let them and tried to ask questions: Where was his mother? How
did he feel? Where was the gun?

The cluster reached the car and he was pushed
in the back seat, one detective beside him while the other rushed to the
driver’s seat. The men with cameras photographed him through the glass.

The car lurched away.

“First time I’ve seen such a
blowup for a kid,” one detective said.

“It’s one helluva human-interest
story.”

The car moved quickly through the light
traffic, and then came to a two-lane highway.

The detective in the back seat glanced down
at the boy, who was staring ahead blindly, eyes level with the top of the front
seat.

“City Hall first,” the driver
said.
“Then Juvie?”

“That’s the schedule.”

Alex didn’t even move his eyes.

“The district attorney’s office
wants to talk to you, Alex,” the back seat detective said.

Alex didn’t reply. The detective
shrugged and dug around in a pocket for a pack of cigarettes.

The interrogation at the district
attorney’s office was brief. A young man with ambition gleaming from
behind his horn-rimmed glasses sat on his desk, legs dangling, and tried to
question Alex, expecting that any eleven-year-old would pour out all that had
happened and, certainly, tell where the revolver was. Actually, without a
statement they had no case. No identifiable fingerprints had been found. The
victim and his wife couldn’t identify Alex. They’d seen nothing but
shadows. Under California law Alex could not be found guilty solely on
Sammy’s testimony, for Sammy was an accomplice, and an accomplice’s
testimony had to be corroborated by something independent: a confession,
the missing gun, something… The deputy district attorney’s
infectious smile and man-to-man demeanor cracked into perspiring worry when
Alex sat absolutely silent before sympathy, cajolery, and, finally, threats.

“Please let us get that pistol before
it hurts someone else. You don’t want that, do you? We know you were just
scared, that you didn’t intend to hurt the man…”

Alex’s hazel eyes stared blankly into
space. He didn’t open his mouth, except to eat a hamburger and drink a
Coke. The bribe failed, and in exasperation the deputy district attorney
slapped the empty cup away from him, scattering ice around the room.

Alex’s thoughts behind the
impassiveness stormed with guilt. He saw his father disappearing into the
ground—it was all he could see.

“Get
him out of here,” the deputy district attorney said. “I’ll
get an order for a psycho exam. I think he’s loony.”

Juvenile Hall’s front door was innocent
in appearance but really impregnable to anything short of a bazooka. It could
be opened only by an electric buzzer from inside a glass booth.

The detective handed his papers to a female
receptionist. The reception area was roomy, with dark hard hacked benches along
one pale-green wall, on which glass-framed prints of Norman Rockwell’s
visions of America were hung. The prints and the drapes covering the wire-mesh
windows were the total decor. The half- glass control booth, with a periscope
view of the outside, had a six- foot bulletin board, black, with removable
white lettering and numbers giving the count by unit and then the total: 476
males, 53 females. Now the count would be increasing by four. A very pregnant
black girl, her hair askew, sat weeping on a bench. Two young teenaged Mexicans
in dirty jeans and maroon sport shirts buttoned to the throat sat on the other
bench. Both wore upswept ducktails. When Alex had started to load his hair with
pomade and comb a ducktail, Clem immediately took him for a haircut, saying,
“
We’ll have no pachucos in this family.”

The receptionist pressed the intercom switch
and told the other end that three males were waiting. Minutes later a huge
black woman entered, her eyes sweeping over the room. She was six-foot-three
but perfectly proportioned; she wore her hair natural, unpopular in 1943. Her
white uniform said she was a nurse.

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” she
said. “We stop for lunch, too.” She took the papers from the
receptionist and waved them at the boys, beckoning them to follow her long
strides up the corridor to a large room that combined a medical dispensary with
a clothing storeroom. One corner was piled with cardboard boxes. She waved in
their direction. “Get one and put your clothes in it, except for
your shoes. They’ll be washed for you when you go out.” She walked
past Alex, saw his glum face. “Cheer up, pretty eyes. It can’t be
that bad.”

The simple words touched him, made him smile,
but then he wanted to cry. She was trying to be helpful, but she didn’t
know…

They went into a community shown with three
shower heads. The front had a tile wall, shoulder-high so they could be seen
but still have some privacy. The nurse went to a desk across the room and began
to fill out papers. She called Alex’s name. He felt so good in the water
that he was ashamed.

“What’s your birthdate,
Hammond?” she asked, “March tenth, 1932,” he said.

She was standing bent over the desk so her
rump jutted out. She asked him the routine questions of a medical
history—mumps, measles, et cetera. He answered mindlessly, oblivious to
the two older Mexicans standing beside him. They talked in Spanish, half
whispering.

Then a hand reached out and stroked his ass.
Alex jerked erect and turned abruptly, not understanding the grins confronting
him, twisted grins beneath evil eyes. Homosexuality had existed in some of the
military schools he’d been in, but it hadn’t affected him.

Prior awareness was unnecessary, however. The
bitter-looking Mexican had a semi-erection protruding from a shadow of pubic
hair. “Touch it,” he said, meaning his penis, and he seemed to be
half laughing.

The nurse was paying no attention. The wall
hid the shower area. Alex felt distaste. He shook his head.

“You better… if you know
what’s good for you.” He dropped his eyes to his penis to emphasize
his meaning. The other Mexican was out of the water, standing beside Alex.
Their postures held threats of violence. It puzzled Alex, for he’d done
nothing to them. He shook his head, smiled to show he was friendly, and went
back to his shower, quickly washing off the brown laundry soap that burned his
skin.

They were drying off when the nurse left the
room. Alex had already forgotten the momentary episode in the shower, so he
never expected or saw the punch. It was a flashing pain, exploding lights in
his eyes. He felt his feet go out on the wet floor as his rump hit the tiles
and his head snapped back into the wall.

He was sitting naked on the floor, one hand
to his mouth, blood seeping through his fingers. My father just died and they
won’t leave me alone, he thought.

“Don’t rat on us,” one
Mexican hissed.

Alex frowned; it would never enter his mind
to snitch. The ethos of boys’ homes included that rule, though it was
often ignored by the smaller boys.

But fury was welling up in him. He held up
the hand with the blood.

“Tell ‘em you fell down,”
one of the Mexicans said.

“Why’d you hit me?” Alex
asked. “I didn’t do anything to you.”

“I’ll show you.”

“Show me
what?”

“What you want, your ass kicked
good
.”

Alex came up in an explosion, surprising them
enough so that they didn’t move. They tensed for a direct attack, but
instead he sprang to a shelf where jars of saline sat in a row. He snatched
one, whirled, and half swung, half hurled the bottle. The distance was only
three feet, but he had telegraphed the attack and the Mexican ducked, so the
heavy missile missed by inches. It shattered against a wall. Alex grabbed
another.

“Man, cool it… don’t get us
busted!”

The older boys had split apart, half wary and
half afraid, ready to duck. Alex faked a throw, the Mexican ducked, and then
Alex let go. Again he missed, but he ran to the desk and snatched up a letter
opener.

The door flew open and the black nurse rushed
in, two men in blue shirts and gray pants at her heels, their heavy keyrings
jangling as they moved. One man wrapped his arms around Alex, lifting the boy
off his feet and hauling him backward. “Ho, boy, dammit!” the man
said. “Knock this shit off.”

The second man interposed himself between
Alex and the Mexicans, spreading his arms as if to hold them back, but it was
unnecessary.

“Get him out of here,” the nurse
said, nodding toward Alex. Blood was dripping from his nose to his chest. The
man carried him in the same grip out of the room. Alex wanted to cry in mortification.

Twenty minutes later the bleeding had stopped
and he was dressed in faded, unpressed green khakis. The shirtsleeves hung to
his fingertips, and his pants were both rolled up at the bottom and folded
at the waist beneath the web belt.  The man and the nurse asked him what
had happened, but he hung his head and pressed his lips together. They knew he
hadn’t started the fight because of the odds against him, the difference
in size and age as well as numbers. The men wanted to lock all three of them in
“seclusion”.
but
the nurse made both sides
swear that the fight was over, and then she decided to let the matter drop. She
outranked both of the men.

“He can go,” the nurse said,
patting the boy’s head. “Take it easy, kid.” She smiled, her
good white teeth contrasting with the mahogany of her skin.

One man had already disappeared; the other
got off his perch on a table and motioned to Alex. “Time to go to
bed,” he said.

Still shivering slightly, his energy spent
from the fight, Alex followed the man. He was afraid of this place, having
heard wild stories in the military schools and boarding homes; it was the
threat the housemothers always used. The man led him down enclosed stairs,
along a narrow corridor where the concrete walls shone dully from light
striking enamel, then through a steel door that the man opened with a big key
It
clanged shut, and they were in another, even wider
corridor. The
masonite
floor was waxed, the
green-enameled walls immaculate, and the corridor seemed to stretch into infinity,
though actually it was only a hundred yards or so. The lights were dim and his
escort’s leather heels reverberated in the stillness. They passed a nurse
at a desk in an alcove. She looked up at them without expression. Now they
were at a gate of bars like a grille, beyond which another corridor formed a T.
At the juncture was another desk, a hooded lamp fastened to its side so the
beam of light hit the green blotter but shadowed the face of the man in the
chair.

“See we got a baby this time,”
the faceless man said.

“Yeah, pretty young,”
Alex’s escort said, handing over a sheet of paper. “Not too young
to pull a trigger… or fight. He’s already had a tiff with a couple
of Mexicans in Receiving—they’ll be down pretty soon. Better put ‘em
in a different dorm.”

The man behind the desk grunted; he was
looking at the paper. “Attempted murder,” he said, then
“humphed” disparagingly. “Shit, they’re never too young
anymore.” He made a sucking sound with his teeth while he opened a
battered loose-leaf binder and inserted the paper in proper alphabetical order
with fifty other identical papers. Each sheet was a log for an individual boy.
The man opened the drawer and shoved a small brown-paper sack across the desk.
It was stapled at the top. “Take it,” he said to Alex.
“It’s a comb, toothbrush and—but you won’t need the
razor blades.”

“You got him?” The escort said.
“It’s my lunch hour.”

“You can go. I’ll have him tucked
in bed in a minute.”

The gate clanged shut behind the escort, and
the sound of his footsteps grew fainter as Alex waited. The man behind the desk
swiveled his chair around and looked at a huge board that covered the wall. It
had slots for tags, grouped according to dorms, and most of the slots were
filled. The man wrote Alex’s name on a tag and inserted it in an empty
slot.

“Come on, Hammond,” the man said,
unwinding his legs from under the desk and startling the eleven-year-old with
his six-foot- six height. He took a flashlight from a drawer and led Alex down
a hallway. The dormitory door was a frame of heavy wire mesh. The man used the
flashlight to judge the keyhole. “Third bed on the left,” he said,
locking the door behind Alex without waiting to see if the boy could find it.

Along each wall were ten beds, the
blanket-covered mounds illuminated by a floodlight outside the windows.
The glare was sliced into elongated rectangles by the bars on the windows.

Alex was surprised at the hospital bed,
expecting a cot. He undressed quickly. A hospital stand was between each bed,
but he didn’t know which one went with his bed, so he dropped the ill- fitting
clothes on the floor and got quickly under the sheets. He felt conspicuous and
didn’t want anyone to wake up and question him. The cool, clean sheets
felt surprisingly good, making him remember the preceding night, spent
shivering and wet in the house beside the railroad tracks. From that
recollection jumped the image of the man looming over him and the fang of fire
leaping from his own hand. Then suddenly, always there in the background, was
the stabbing memory that his father was dead. He had no visual recollection
or impression, but the thought suffused him in total anguish. All he
had—the one person—now gone forever. Crying out to God was useless.
Death was as mysterious to Alex as to everyone, and because of his age less
frightening, but he was old enough to know that his father was going under the
earth forever. And Alex felt responsible, not merely for shooting the man in
the market but also, even worse, for having in times of fury wished Clem dead.
Then it had been just a word, “dead,” but now he was damned by the
reality. He trembled with stifled sobs, wanting to purge the hurt in long,
loud, and exhausting tears. Instead he bit his lips while streaks of tears ran
down his cheeks. He couldn’t let go; he’d wake up the others and they
would see his torment. Children were cruel to a child who cried, and these kids
would be more callous than most. He stared at the lighted windows, at the bars,
and he quaked in silence. He was rigid, holding back, but eventually the accumulated
exhaustion of nearly two sleepless nights overcame everything else, and he fell
into a troubled sleep, emitting moans that disturbed nobody.