Little Boy Blue (37 page)

Around ten a.m. the next morning, Alex was
lying on the concrete floor, but his mind was living in the Oklahoma Territory
of the late nineteenth century, carried there by the novel resting on his
stomach. He was really enjoying the story and missed the sound of the
approaching man until the key hit the lock.

“C’mon,
Hammond.
The disciplinary
committee wants to see you.

The disciplinary committee used the building
office for a hearing room. Each youth waiting to be heard sat on a bench
outside the office. One “G” Company counselor stood next to the
door, watching the boy and waiting to usher him in when the last one came out.
A second counselor brought another boy when he took one back to his cell. A
youth was just going in when Alex arrived and was pointed to the bench.

The man beside the door eyed Alex for a long
time. It was unabashed scrutiny, and thirty seconds of that is long. Finally
the man asked, “How old are you, Hammond?”

“Fourteen,” he lied glibly,
adding three months.

“That’s pretty young for Preston.
There’s a few your age, but eighty percent of our boys are sixteen or
seventeen. You must be a fuckup.”

Alex didn’t know what—or
if—he should answer, so he shrugged, but he was careful to avoid
flippancy in the gesture.

“I know you fucked Kennedy up. He
almost lost his eye… won’t ever see right out of it again.”

Once more Alex was silent; he couldn’t
very well say he was glad and that in the jungle culture it would give him
status. Nobody else would try to take anything from him.

The door behind the man opened and a face
with a goatee appeared. “Hammond?”

The man waved Alex in.

Three persons sat around the desk. It had
been cleared except for a pile of manila folders. Each one contained a
boy’s file. Some were skinny, with just a few sheets of paper; others
were thicker. Alex’s was among the thickest. The man in the chair behind
the desk (the other two were on each end) had a graying crewcut and a nameplate
pinned to his jacket: j.n. keppel, asst. supt
.
He had a long,
thin face and a sharp-bridged nose. His necktie was too tight, and it
exaggerated his Adam’s apple. The other two men were Reverend Flowers,
the Protestant chaplain, and Mr. Hill, the institution’s consulting
psychologist. Keppel was obviously the power. He had the center position and
his visage was stern, his eyes penetrating and cold. “It
didn’t take you long, did it, Hammond? You nearly killed that boy.”

Alex looked down at the floor between his
legs.

“What was it about, Alex?” the
psychologist asked.

Alex shook his head without looking up.

“Christ almighty!” Keppel said,
huffing and puffing. “We’ve got another punk with the code. Let me
see his file.” As he took the file, he added, “You don’t like
being called a punk, do you? That’s bad, isn’t it? Well,
that’s what you are—a punk!”

A punk submitted to sodomy, and to be called
that was a bad insult. But Alex restrained a retort.

While Keppel leafed through the file, which
he then handed to Reverend Flowers, Mr. Hill commented, “Kennedy says he
doesn’t know why you attacked him. Was he trying to fuck you?”

“Nobody’s tryin’ to fuck
me,” Alex said,
raising
up to snap angrily at
the bait.

“Well, you must’ve had a
reason.”

“I’ve got nothing to say.”

The chaplain, meanwhile, had brought out a
letter stapled to a hand-addressed envelope. Letter and envelope had been loose
in the folder, not holed and spindled. “Did you see this?” he asked
his associates.

The psychologist shook his head and took the
letter. Alex was halfway watching them, curious about what it was. It
wasn’t a regular report from an official.

“You’re not a child and you
aren’t going to get kid gloves around here,” Keppel was saying.
“We have fist fights around here… but we don’t have punks
doing this. You’ve got a lot of violence on your record. Don’t you
ever want to get out of these places?”

“Sure I do… but…”

“But what?”

“Nothing.”

“Say, Alex,” the chaplain
interrupted after reading the letter. “Your aunt is looking for
you.”

“Aunt.
What aunt?”

“Your father’s
sister.
She and her husband just
moved to Los Angeles and tried to find her brother. She found out that…
about him… and that you were in Whittier. She wrote this”—he
held up the letter—“but you were gone, sic transit gloria, from
Whittier. You had escaped.”

Alex was frowning, head spinning. He vaguely
recalled his father mentioning a sister, she had a husband Clem disliked,
Or
so it seemed. Alex didn’t even know her name. It
didn’t really matter what he remembered of yesterday; the future was what
counted. An aunt!

“Can I write her?”

“I’m sure we can arrange
that,” said the chaplain expansively.

“Hold that up, Mr. Flowers,”
interrupted the assistant superintendent. “You can talk to him
tomorrow. This is a disciplinary hearing.” To Alex he said,
“You’re here on a serious charge—attempted murder of that
boy.” Now Keppel’s voice had the wrath of righteousness. Gone
was the false fatherliness most of them used talking to him. The harsh tone was
a bony finger of accusation, an accusation that demanded an accounting and
responsibility. It surprised Alex. He was already spinning about this new aunt,
his father’s sister. Did it mean he had a home somewhere?

“You sneaked up on him like a coward
and hit him when he wasn’t looking. And you’re old enough to know
just what you were doing.”

“Yeah, I knew… and I wish
I’d killed the motherfucker!” The words flew forth unbidden,
unexpected. In a way he meant them, at least figuratively; Kennedy had started
it by taking the shoes.

Whether or not he meant it literally he would
have to think about when he wasn’t upset.

The sentence upset them instantly. They all
sat up straighter, and their eyes came to life.
Mr. Keppel
turned ashen and then red, and then even redder with white spots in the red,
while his jaw muscles pulsed.
He looked back and forth at his associates
with the jerky motions of a chicken moving its head.

Alex expected him to yell, but when he spoke
it was almost a whisper, albeit a furious whisper:

“Can we send this… this… to
San Quentin? Is he old enough? What’s the law?”

Alex was sorry he’d flared up. Now he
hurt, and they would never forget. It would be an immutable fact documented in
his file forever- more. Whenever someone looked in the file they would see that
he was unremorsefully homicidal. He already knew about files; whatever was
in them became the gospel. Who knew how long people would be deciding his worth
and destiny by the file? He wanted to say he was sorry, but he
couldn’t—so he sat with a burning, unrepentant face while
Keppel learned that only seventeen-year-olds could be moved to San Quentin, and
then only in unusual cases.

“I’d say it’s unusual
enough—he’s already shot a man, too. But he’s
only—” He looked at the age on the file and decided not to say it
aloud.

Being unable to transfer a thirteen-year-old
to San Quentin, the disciplinary committee ordered him assigned permanently to
“G” Company, with review of the order in six months. On the report
of their decision, which also went in the file, it was their conclusion
that he’d committed an unprovoked armed assault on another boy, that he
showed no remorse whatsoever, and he was too unpredictably explosive to be
trusted in the general population.

That night they moved him to the other side
of “G” Company.

From the beginning Alex knew he would remain
in “G” Company until he went to “Broadway,” the
nickname for freedom. How long that would be was unknown, but until whenever
happened he would be in a “G” Company cell.

The routine was monastic, and Alex adjusted
to it quickly. The daily schedule was simple and seldom deviated from. He ate
in the building’s small mess hall with the rest of “G”
Company’s permanent residents. After breakfast, he went out on one of
the three crews, carrying hoe, shovel, rake, or mattock, depending on the job
to be done. Sometimes it was chopping weeds on hillsides or removing them from
roadside drainage ditches so the water would flow better. They dug up leaky
pipes or loaded piles of rotting lumber on trucks. In autumn they raked leaves
all over the institution, and for two months they cut off the side of a small
hill to widen a road. When it rained, they sat indoors shucking peas from their
pods. Most of the work was hard labor in the sun, although it was just for six
hours a day. When his muscles adjusted, Alex didn’t mind the work. He
actually sometimes took joy in it. At eleven a.m. they came in to eat lunch and
were locked up until one. They worked again until four, when they showered and
ate again. If the weather was good they were let into a small, fenced yard next
to the building until it got dark. In the winter they went directly to their
cells after supper. Twice a week a teacher came down at night for an hour,
using the mess hall as a classroom, thereby satisfying the state law about
every adolescent attending school. The teacher had no curriculum. He donated
magazines they could read and take back to their cells; or else he gave
them
pencils and paper and coaxed them into writing letters
home, which was the only place they were allowed to write to.
The teacher also had workbook courses in English and mathematics
that the boys could do in their cells, but few bothered to take them, nor
did Alex.
He disliked any structure and hated math anyway. He fed his
yearning for knowledge by voracious reading. A utility closet had been
converted into a makeshift library holding a couple hundred of the coverless,
donated books. He managed to get one of the men to let him into the bookroom
for a few minutes once or twice a week. He always grabbed half a dozen books
without bothering to open their pages to read the titles. That took too much
time with the man waiting, his key inserted in the lock. Nobody else was
interested in the bookroom, so Alex devised a procedure where he put the books
he’d read on their backs on a shelf, and then taking the next batch in
order so he wouldn’t get what he’d already read. The collection was
eclectic and middlebrow, from Book-of-the-Month Club best-sellers to nonfiction
leaning toward history and psychology. At night he always read, from the time
he went into the cell until lights-out, and sometimes when lie was particularly
engrossed he read long after that. A floodlight outside the building threw
enough light through the window to read by if he sat on the edge of the bunk
with his back to the window. It took him eight months to read every book in the
room, even those on uninteresting topics, like religion. After that he got the
teacher to bring him books. They were fewer in number but of better overall
quality. He would’ve talked to the teacher about books if the eyes of the
others weren’t always present.

As for religion, Alex got his fair share from
his aunt’s letters.
Every month or so they wrote each
other.
Along with five dollars, she never failed to admonish him to
accept Our Lord, to turn to Him for the way… Her letters were short and
uneasily formal and repetitive, the letters of someone unaccustomed to writing.
If he snickered at the religious parts, he did so with gentle thoughts,
imagining her as a kindly woman he would like—and be able to manipulate.
It was understood very near the start that he would come to stay with her and
her husband whenever he was paroled. They’d opened a small cafe in Los Angeles.
Her husband cooked and she worked as a
waitress
.

Alex turned fourteen in “G”
Company. The hard labor conditioned him as he filled out. He was still
growing, but now he stood five-seven and weighed one thirty-nine, not a mature
man but not a bony eleven-year-old either. He got to know the names of everyone
in “G” Company, but of the thirty boys permanently assigned, he
never spoke to half except when absolutely necessary. Others he kept aloof
from, and only a handful did he associate with at all. And just two were
friends. Both were fuckups. One was Allen, known as Twig because he was tall,
thin and gawky. Twig had been in Whittier with Alex. He was in permanent
segregation because a black cadet officer in “N” Company had kicked
him for horseplay and then knocked out his two front teeth when Twig fought
back. Twig melted down a toothbrush handle and inserted a razor blade in it
while it was soft. When it hardened he was ready. Twig waited until the other
youth was bent shirtless over a sink. Twig walked up behind him and stroked
once all the way down his back with the razor blade held in the handle. It took
a hundred and fourteen sutures to sew up the cut—and Twig was assigned
permanently to “G” Company. In later years, after prison and bouts
with electric shock therapy in state hospitals, Twig would become the West
Coast leader of the American Nazi party.

Alex’s other friend was Marsh, a burly
seventeen-year-old who’d killed a man who was fighting with his father
over a traffic dispute. They were rolling on the ground and Marsh came to his
father’s aid with a tire iron. He was fresh from Oklahoma and had a heavy
accent that caused him trouble sometimes. The city boys ridiculed him, while
the blacks assumed from his voice that he was a bigot. Not that it really
bothered him; he was a junior-sized grizzly. He wasn’t allowed to bring
in cartons of cigarettes as were those on the mainline, but the Man usually let
him bring two or three packs. He couldn’t keep them in his cell, but he
could get a few after each meal and when they went out into the yard. Marsh,
Twig, and Alex didn’t have to roll the Bull Durham when the sack was
passed down the mess hall table. They hated Bull Durham, although it was fine
when they could get hands on a bag and smuggle it into the cells where they
weren’t supposed to smoke.