Little Boy Blue (32 page)

Following Wedo down the sidewalk to the car,
Alex was filled with anticipation of adventure. The car was a black ‘39
Ford convertible customized according to the fashion. Both the windshield
and the canvas top had been “chopped,” so the roof was very low.
Nobody mentioned the decreased visibility—how it looked was what
mattered. This was a really sharp car, Alex thought, the black bodywork
gleaming from many coats of paint and wax. The wheels had chrome spinners. It
was the first time Alex had ridden in a peer’s
automobile
,
and it made him feel good. It was a sign of getting older, the way to greater
freedom of choice and experience.

Hank was husky and swarthy. He nodded at the
introduction as Alex slid in beside him and Wedo took the outside.

“Where to, man?” Hank asked.
“I can’t fuck around too long right now. I gotta be at work, you
know. Payin’ this car off keeps me on the ball.”

“Well… fuck… cruise by
Metropolitan. I know some fine chicks there from the west side. And I gotta
check in.”

Alex didn’t care where they went. He felt
gloriously adult. He leaned back and devoured the city scenery. The dingy
streets of East Central Los Angeles seemed beautiful. Unlike the slums of other
cities, where the poor were stacked in tenements like sardines, in Los Angeles
they were just as likely to be in a bungalow or duplex— and no matter how
ramshackle, it was in the sun with a palm tree on the street in front.

Alex liked how teenaged girls ogled the car.
Wedo flirted with two waiting for a bus, offering them a ride. They giggled but
declined. Hank didn’t even look, and when the traffic light turned green,
he released the clutch and pushed the gas. He spoke very little, and Alex
wondered about him. He looked to be eighteen and had a dark shadow of a heavy
beard. He drove fast, accelerating hard from each stop, braking equally hard on
every red light. It kept Alex keyed up, but he also enjoyed the excitement.

As they crossed the city, Alex learned that
Metropolitan was a special high school. Its students attended as little as four
hours a week and had permits to hold jobs the rest of the time usually spent in
school. Wedo had a permit but no job. He was supposed to attend school six
hours a week, but it was rare that he attended six hours a month. In fact, he
hadn’t been in a real class for half a semester— and under the
circumstances the Board of Education had no way to force him. His mother
couldn’t even understand the papers they sent.

“Wedo, man,” Hank said as they
turned down the last block, “I’m gonna have to leave you here. I
gotta get to work.”

“Where do you work?” Alex asked.

“At the Examiner,” Wedo answered.
“He takes proofs around to the department stores—proofs of their
ads—to get them
okayed
.”

“That sounds like a good job,”
Alex said, and he meant it. For a moment he imagined himself having a car like
this and a job like this; it was all he wanted to change his whole life.

“Usually I don’t make the run
until later, but this is for the Sunday paper and they run it early.”

“Okay, man,” Wedo said. “I
don’t wanna hang you up, ese. We can come by later on, que no?”

“Sure…
you been
there before.”

“Yeah.”
Wedo turned to Alex. “Hank here got me a
way-out picture of John Dillinger, a big, glossy thing.” He shaped his
hands to show a ten-by-twelve photo. “He sure looked square, Dillinger, I
mean. His hair was short and parted… and he wore a square suit with a
necktie.”

“It was a different time,” Alex
said. “You know, man, styles change. A couple years ago everybody was
wearing full drapes, now
it’s
semis.”

“Yeah, right.
I didn’t think of that.”

Hank pulled to the curb in front of the brick
administration building. Alex and Wedo got out and the customized Ford pulled
away, tires screeching.

“Wait here,” Wedo said.
“I’ll be about ten minutes. Then we can go to my pad so I can
change my rags. Is that cool?”

“Okay, fine.”

Wedo disappeared through the tall doors and
Alex loitered on the sidewalk. He really liked Wedo, who seemed so smart and
confident—and he also liked Hank. It was so good to be free, away
from institutions and able to do precisely what he wanted. Moreover, he was
being accepted by youths several years older. They were almost grown men. He
would never let them know his real age, not by word or action. He would make
them respect him by their own standards.

The fifteen minutes became half an hour, and
still Wedo failed to reappear. Alex began to fret. He felt conspicuous standing
on the empty sidewalk, and he got scared when a black-and-white police car
cruised past, the uniformed passenger eyeing him. He felt sure they would have
stopped and asked why he wasn’t in school, except that he was standing in
front of one.
Policemen
were suspicious of youths with
long, ducktailed hair.

A minute later, however, the bell rang, and
within seconds the doors flew wide and a multitude spilled out, hiding him in
the crowd. Cars went by filled with students. Metropolitan was the only school
of its kind in the Los Angeles School District. Its students came from
everywhere, a polyglot collection. Nobody more than glanced at the boy lounging
against a wall. Wedo exited as one of the multitude. He was shaking his head in
apology as he came over.

“Carnal, I’m sorry. That fuckin’
ruka made me go to class.”

Alex moved away from the wall, preparatory to
departing. Wedo held up a hand in a gesture of restraint. “Hang on, man.
There’s a fine gabacha chick comin’ out in few minutes. I wanna
shoot on her.”

So they waited, Alex copying Wedo’s
pose of propping one leg up on the wall, meanwhile flourishing a cigarette and
commenting on the girls going by.

“Where you from?”
Wedo asked.

“Here… L.A.”

“What neighborhood?”

“I dunno. Fuck… all over in
foster homes and military schools.
Mostly in the Valley and
Hollywood.”

“Your people got money or somethin’?”

“Uh uh, I’m
an
…
orphan.” It was the first time he’d formed the word
consciously—and doing so meant something painful that he rejected
instantly. To Wedo it had no special significance. He just nodded. “How
long you been busted?”

“Bout two
years.”

Wedo whistled silently.

“I shot a guy in a burglary.”

Now Wedo’s eyes were wide, his head
cocked. His was the world that admired violence. Alex had proven himself really
violent by that world’s standards. “You kill him?”

“No, just fucked him up.”

Wedo nodded slowly, savoring the information,
planning to ask JoJo if it was true. So many punks bullshitted about how tough
they were. “I asked you if you were from a neighborhood ‘cause you
could go in the wrong one and get hurt. Vatos from Maravilla are after White
Fence, Temple Street is at war with Alpine and Third Street.”

Alex nodded, although he already knew the
facts from reform school. Suddenly Wedo was moving toward a pale girl in
ponytail, bobby socks, and saddle shoes. She blushed as he cornered her, some
distance down. Her back was against the wall and Wedo leaned over her, one hand
against the wall, his face close to hers. It was a position of capture and
domination. The girl was husky; she would be fat at thirty. She had
precociously large breasts encased in an uplift bra within a tight blue
sweater. Alex imagined how they would look (his vision didn’t match what
would have been the sag of reality) and how they would feel against his chest.
It dizzied him.

He watched avidly, wondering if he would ever
be half so confident and relaxed with girls. Finally Wedo nuzzled the girl
on the ear, whispered something, and touched her breast. She pushed him away,
raising a hand in feigned readiness to slap. He turned away, laughing, and she
was smiling, too. He had a street-hip walk, exaggerated by a slightly
pigeon-toed right foot. It added bounce to his stride.

“Sorry, man, but her tits
are—” He grunted in punctuation. “Besides, she fucks…
she likes it. We might go by her pad tonight. Her folks go out a lot.” He
had started down the sidewalk with Alex beside him. “I live about six
blocks away. We can wait for the bus or walk.”

“Let’s walk.”

The neighborhood was mostly brick warehouses
and garment factories, or other light industry. Occasionally a faded-gray frame
house sat between the business buildings—a house with a sagging board
fence, a dirt yard, and plants in gallon cans on the porch railing. In the
window of one such house were three small flags with stars. One flag had a blue
star. The others each had a gold star. Wedo pointed them out.
“That’s where a camarada of mine lived. His older brother got
killed at Guadalcanal, so Ralphie lied and enlisted. They got him at Iwo Jima.
Their mama went crazy. I was thinking ‘bout joinin’ the
Eighty-second Airborne, but—” He stopped.

“But what?
Your family won’t sign?”

“I just got my mother—and
she’d sign anything I gave her. I just don’t read too well.”
The end of the phrase was very soft.

When they passed the neighborhood Catholic
church
, Wedo made the sign of the cross. “No use takin’
chances.”

Where Wedo lived in one room with his mother
was a three- story wooden building that appeared never to have been painted.
The bare wood was dark brown; it had been jerrybuilt forty years ago. The
entranceway reeked of urine and Lysol, and up the stairs the hallways reeked of
cooking odors impregnated in the walls.

When Wedo opened the door to the room, a
stench assailed Alex and made him queasy. It wouldn’t have been so
distasteful if it hadn’t been so heavy. It came from a homemade altar
that covered a dresser and half a wall. Dominated by a crucifix, the tableau
was jammed with icons, plaster saints, pictures of the Madonna, and dozens of
candles. The stink came from years of incense and candles. Alex nearly gagged,
but Wedo didn’t notice.

“Where’s the toilet?” Alex
asked, wanting a chance to open a window to prepare himself for this ordeal.

“Down the hall to the right,”
Wedo said.
“The last door.
Here.” He took
a key from a nightstand table and handed it over. “We gotta lock it or
the winos sneak in and sleep.”

Alex took his time in the bathroom. When he
came back, Wedo had changed clothes. The style was the same, but these were
clean. More than clean, they were pressed faultlessly. His shirts hadn’t
been folded in drawers; they were on hangers and had military creases down the
back. He buttoned a maroon sport shirt to the very top, yet wore no necktie.
Over that he put on a surplus Eisenhower jacket, patches removed, dyed black,
and also faultlessly pressed.

“Say, man, look here,” Wedo said.
“My mom is worried like a motherfucker. I know her. She’s out to
church now—goes three times a day to her Jesus. I expected her to be
here, but I gotta leave her a note. I ain’t been around for a week. I
don’t write too
good
. Do it for me,
carnal.”

“Gimme a pencil and
paper.”

The stub of a pencil was sharpened with a
used razor blade. The paper was the back of an advertising handbill. The note
neglected any mention of jail; it simply said that he was okay, would be home
later, and she was not to worry. “It’s silly to tell her not to worry,”
Alex said.

“I know it, but what the fuck… I
gotta say it… just like she’s gotta do it.” Wedo took the
pencil to sign his own name, doing so with filigree and curlicue. It was more
than a bare signature. While it had letters, its origins were the specialized
“mark.”

Darkness reigned in the lower canyons between
the buildings, though the parapets still reflected the sliding sun.

“So whaddya wanna do?” Wedo
asked. They were on the sidewalk.

“I dunno. I’m with you.”

“Got any
hondo
?”

“What’s that?”

“Money, scratch, lace,
bread, all that
shit.”

“Yeah, about seventy bucks.”

“Damn, you rob a bank or somethin’?”

“Uh-uh, a
market.”
Alex told the story
of the canister of orange smoke. They walked while he talked. As he finished,
he noticed that the buildings were taller.
“Where we
going?”

“To see if Hank’s busy. We might
borrow his car anyway. Drink some white port, smoke some yeska, and pick up a
couple of sisters

I know—fine young Chicanas with fat
legs. Actually they’re half- breeds. Their old man trains fighters
.“

The sprawling building housing Hearst’s
Examiner and Herald- Express was nearby, and they started walking there. En
route, Wedo pointed out a furniture warehouse he’d burglarized by going
through the skylight. He’d shot a flashlight beam down into an office;
then he’d hung over the open skylight and dropped down. However, he
hadn’t seen that the office was glass-enclosed. He’d smashed
through, landing terrified amidst a rain of glass. A shard had sliced something
in his leg. He’d managed to get away, but the result was the slightly
twisted right foot that gave him a pigeon-toed gait.