Little Boy Blue (38 page)

Fear of freedom, an emotion known to everyone
imprisoned for very long and repressed by everyone else, came upon Alex the
night before his parole. Until that moment he’d handled the situation by
not really thinking about it. He performed the behavior of
release—talking to social workers, getting measured for clothes, taking a
“dressout” photo—without dwelling on what these things meant,
detached from feeling. When he couldn’t ignore it any longer, he broke
out in a heavy sweat and felt nauseated. The fear had nothing specific to focus
on, nothing to overcome. Indeed, it was the lack of specifics, the lack of
knowledge, that
engendered the fear. It was going into the
unknown. That was the world outside, the unknown. What did he know of freedom?
The episodes of escape, when he’d been a fugitive, weren’t
preparation for real freedom and its demands. The fear came upon him when the
garrulous bedtime dialogues were cut off by lights-out. The darkness triggered
the previously suppressed fear; it had been kept hidden by talk and horseplay.
As the release date neared, sleep became harder. It was most unusual, because
he always slept easily, no matter how tough the circumstances. In fact, he
usually slept to avoid tension…

Alex’s eyes were open when the cell
lights came on for the last time. His mouth was cottony and he had stomach
cramps. Alex swiftly stripped the bedding from the mattress. Days ago his
locker had been cleaned out, so now there was one set of new underwear that he’d
wear to freedom and the ragged shirt and jeans that he’d discard in
Receiving and Release. He’d finished dressing and brushing his teeth when
the night counselor unlocked his door.

“C’mon, Hammond,” he said.
“I’ll escort you to Receiving and Release when my relief gets
here.”

Outdoors was bright with
a
lingering
night coolness, the weather that raises hopes and spirits.
Later it would be hot, but now it was perfect. As Alex crossed the detail
grounds, heading toward RR in the basement of the Castle, exultant
anticipation swept away the night’s doubts. He was finally going to be
legitimately free, and there were infinite possibilities in everything. So good
was his mood that he was humming aloud, and he stopped momentarily to look at
the institution’s brick buildings dotting the
hills.
He felt a tug of affection for the reform school, not that he would ever admit
it. Looking back, it hadn’t been that tough.
Yeah,
maybe tough, but not terrible.
According to books he’d read, prep
schools were also tough in their way. Here in Preston he’d gotten
smarter, and he’d made lifelong friends. He had many addresses and phone
numbers in his sock.

Outside the door, the escort shook hands with
Alex. “Guess I can leave you here.”

The freeman was due any moment. A small-boned,
extremely dark black youth appeared, carrying four unframed paintings, two in
each hand. He, too, was being paroled this morning, and the paintings were his
own work or he wouldn’t be allowed to take them. The paintings surprised
Alex. He knew nothing of art, but the two he could see (one a slum cityscape,
the other a view of the Golden Gate Bridge) looked good. It surprised Alex
because the black looked really stupid. He’d seen the black in the white
clothes of a kitchen worker, but they’d never spoken and didn’t
know each other’s names. Now the black ignored Alex and leaned the paintings
on the wall.

“That bridge is nice,” Alex said.
“You do it?” Alex knew he had.

The black hesitated, suspicion in his eyes.
“Yeah,
I done
it. I’m takin’ it home
to Mama… that one. Gonna try to sell the others.”

“We’ll be travelin’
together, huh?”

“Nope.
My mama and her boyfriend are drivin’ from
Oakland. They’ll be at the gate.”

“Yeah, I’m goin’ to L.A.
anyway, out near Santa Monica. I’ve got an aunt and uncle came out from
Louisville last year. Ain’t never seen ’em, but
they’ve—-” Alex stopped talking, realizing the black youth
wasn’t listening. The Receiving and Release man appeared at that moment,
his keys jingling.

Twenty minutes later, when they were dressed
and given their sealed packages (sealed so nothing could be slipped into them
and smuggled out), the man escorted them upstairs in the Castle to the
cashier’s office. The black boy got the nine dollars in his account; he
got nothing else because he was going out to “home and care.” Alex
got forty-four dollars and a ticket for the train, plus a sheet of travel
instructions and the address and phone number of his parole officer. He had to
report to the parole officer within forty- eight hours of arrival.

All that remained was to leave, but even that
required a wait. The RR man had Alex sit on a hallway bench outside the
administrative offices while he, the man, escorted the black to the front
gate. Then he went for a state car to drive Alex to Stockton, twenty miles
away.

While the man was gone, the office workers
began arriving for work. None of them knew Alex, so none spoke, except one
young secretary; she saw from his clothes that he was being released.
“Good luck,” she said. “Stay out of trouble. This isn’t
a fun place to grow up.”

“Thank you,” Alex said,
then
blushed furiously. He could smell her cologne, and when
she walked away he stared at her legs and buttocks, which were the ideal of his
sexual fantasies. Every boy in the reform school had masturbated over her, and
the memory of doing it caused Alex to blush.
That and the
fact that he hadn’t talked to any female (except the old nurse in the
hospital) for more than a year.
When she was gone her scent lingered,
strong to him because that, too, had been a long time back.

The RR man was silent while driving
through the countryside to Stockton. Alex was glad, for he thrilled at simply
looking at the landscape. It wasn’t magnificent countryside. Mostly it
was alfalfa and grapes, with a few walnut orchards. This was not autumn, and it
was dry and dusty. Heat waves shimmered early, prelude to a scorcher. Yet it
was beautiful freedom and had infinite possibilities for him.

Stockton was a farm metropolis, serving a
vast valley of unsurpassed munificence. Stockton had many tree-shaded
streets, not just in the residential neighborhoods but also in part of the
business section. It was larger than Alex expected; it took fifteen minutes
from the outskirts of town to reach the train depot near the center.

“There’s a two-hour wait,
kid,” the man said as he pulled to the curb and left the motor running.
“Don’t get in trouble.
Last week I left three
here.
They’re in jail down in Fresno. They stole a car instead of
waiting for the train. The highway patrol ran ‘em down four hours after
they
was
released.”

Alex laughed. “Don’t worry.
I’m not that crazy.”

“Ain’t my
worry.
Don’t bother me none
what you do. Good luck.”

“Thanks,” Alex said.

They completed the ritual of release by
shaking hands; then Alex got out, package tucked under his arm, watching the
state car until it turned a corner.

With the car’s disappearance, freedom
crashed on his sensibilities. It was nearly a physical blow, and for a
moment it was frightening. Then he recalled that he had to catch a train,
and somehow that mollified him. Still, there were two hours to fill. Several
blocks away were signs above storefronts, and vehicle and pedestrian traffic
was heavier. No doubt there was a place there to obtain a hamburger; his mouth
salivated at the thought of relish, mustard, and onions. Hamburgers in Preston
were a liberal mix of bread crumbs with ground meat, cooked in an oven so they
were hard and dry on the outside and often raw in the center. Ah yes, he
definitely wanted a hamburger. And the cafe would also have a cigarette
machine.

He walked with a grin on his face, feeling a
giddy hilarity, meanwhile oblivious to the sweat streaming down his
forehead and making his shirt stick to him.

Although air-conditioning was a decade away
from small cafes, a pivoting fan there created a cooling breeze. The cafe was
nearly deserted; it was after the breakfast crowd and before lunch. Alex
savored the hamburger, delighting in the juices and tastes of meat and relish,
mustard and onions. He dripped sweat and finished eating. He wanted to walk
around sightseeing before getting on the train.

A cigarette machine was next to the front
door. He timed his exit so the
waitress
was at the
rear—just in case she should say something. His twenty cents gave him a
pack of Chesterfields and two pennies of change inside the cellophane.
He’d left the
waitress
a quarter tip, and she
ignored the minor illegally operating the cigarette machine.

Instead of walking a direct route down the
boulevard to the train station, Alex zigzagged down shaded residential
streets—just to see what was there. It was a habit he would always keep,
this curiosity. Now he saw elderly persons on shaded porches of big, old
houses; he saw tanned six-year-olds running through a lawn sprinkler. Two
teenaged girls in cut-off blue jeans passed him from the opposite direction. As
they went by he smelled, momentarily, their sweetness, and saw the hints
of breasts pressing out at their shirts. That and imagination brought an
immediate erection.

Yes, there was so much to do out here. He
shook his head in expectation as he turned the last corner and saw that station
half a block away. But a lot of what he did depended on Aunt Ada and her
husband. Ray was his name. Alex impressed it in his mind, for he tended to
forget it. Aunt Ada seemed good enough in the letters, except for the religious
bullshit—but lots of middle-aged women got all involved with God. It was
all right if she prayed for him, just as long as she didn’t want him to
pray. What he wanted was to work in the cafe, besides going to school (that was
depressing), and save five dollars a week for an automobile. He was worth
twenty-five dollars a week and room and board. He was old enough for a
learner’s permit, but certainly they would understand that he was more
mature than most fourteen-year-olds, and that when he was fifteen in a few
months (he wouldn’t be able to save enough money until then anyway), it
would be right to say he was sixteen so he could get a license and have some
kind of car. It was so important that he couldn’t let doubt creep into
his mind, at least not into his conscious mind. He had some other ideas and
hopes, too, but he’d wait to see how everyone got along before bringing
them out. Maybe he’d been wrong when he stood on the San Pedro breakwater
and saw himself fated to be an outlaw. Maybe he had a chance for something
else.

When the train came out of the switchbacks
and curves of the mountains into the basin of the San Fernando Valley, now
gathering speed for the final twenty-mile run into Los Angeles’ Union
Station, the sun was a red half-disk being pulled down between the peaks into
the unseen Pacific. Alex had stared avidly from the window every minute of the
journey. He’d just read The Grapes of Wrath, and when the train went
through Salinas and Soledad and the other towns of Steinbeck’s world, he
wondered where the people were. These were sleepy farm villages without enough
life for drama; or maybe there were things he was unable to see. Now it was the
San Fernando Valley, and it was all orange groves and alfalfa and desert except
for a few small communities close to the Hollywood Hills. On their fringes were
the white, wood skeletons of tract homes, precursors to the greatest exodus in
human history, though Alex Hammond had no awareness of such things as he rode
by.