Little Boy Blue (6 page)

It was an ambulance.

The highway was empty.

Alex rose up and ran—it felt like slow
motion, as if he were running in a dream. Would the highway never end? Then he
was on the other side, scrambling through bushes up an embankment, falling once
as he went down the other side.

Looming everywhere were oil wells, a forest
of them, their pumps in silhouette like prehistoric birds scavenging the earth.

Now he walked, driven by the blind instinct
to flee, not thinking rationally of his predicament but rather suffused with
it. He was in mental shock that insulated him from emotions, though flashes of
panic, pain, and guilty horror cut in for a second or two, pushed out before a
whole thought could form. The sense of destroyed hope was intense. What would
happen to him now? His wrongdoing was beyond what he could conceive.

As he trudged through the forest of oil
derricks and wells, he sensed the extremity of his isolation. He saw again the
looming figure behind the flashlight and remembered his own fear; then the
explosion, the darting tongue of fire, the scent of burnt gunpowder. For the
rest of his life he would have flashbacks and dreams. He thought of the
screaming woman and caught his breath. He’d taken her love away, and he
knew what it was to be alone.

The oilfield was on softly rolling hills. At
the summit of the first he took a last look back toward the highway. The
traffic flowed slowly past the cluster of lights at the store—curious yet
oblivious. For the first time Alex sensed how alone everyone really is.

He stood for a long time, but nothing moved
below. The sea wind was growing. Sudden shivers went through him, and goose
bumps rose. He began walking again, without destination, the smell of oil and
ocean in his nostrils, despair in his mind. He never should have run away. If
God gave him mercy this time, he would never do anything wrong again as long as
he lived.

He had nowhere to go, so he headed toward the
glow of Los Angeles. He’d go to his father’s room. If nothing else,
he would be fed and given a bath before being turned in. He thought that maybe
his father would stick by him this time, help him hide out.

An hour later the air was muggy and he was
perspiring. Suddenly the sky rippled with light, followed by a clap of thunder.
It
happened
a couple of times, and then a sprinkling
rain began. Alex was soaked before he could find a place to hide, in an
unfinished tract home. At dawn he was walking, clothes dry but caked with dirt.
He was coughing green phlegm now and had a fever and chills. He was sick and
going home to his father, no matter what happened afterward. He still had the
two dollars in pennies from the cash register, so he would get something to eat
and catch a bus for downtown Los Angeles. From there he knew his way to the
furnished room.

He came upon the railroad tracks where they
cut through a barrio on the outskirts of Santa Ana, an impoverished place of
sagging fences, mongrel dogs, and olive-skinned women and children. The
women hanging clothes on backyard lines looked at him silently, without
curiosity or judgment.

A passenger train went by, and he stood
beside the tracks and watched the faces stare out.

The populated area fell behind, and now there
were orange groves and avocado orchards. As the tracks crossed a rural boulevard
Alex saw another market a quarter of a mile away. It was a converted house with
signs on its walls. He took the wrappers off the pennies and let them drift
away. The pennies weighted his pocket down.

The store had a screen door and a bell that
tinkled when he entered. An old woman came from the back room. He went to the
freezer and got a quart of milk, then took two prepackaged cupcakes and two
candy bars. He piled everything on the counter and saw the woman look away
quickly when he turned to her. He realized how he must look, covered with
everything from dry mud to cockleburs. His hands and face were gray with a film
of dust.

“Sixty-four cents,” the woman
said.

Alex plunked the pile of pennies down and
began pushing them across with a forefinger, counting them out one by one.

“Where’d you get all these
pennies?” she asked.

“What?”

“The pennies.
Where’d you get so many?”

“I saved them in my bank.”

“I haven’t seen you around here
before. Where do you live?”

“Just a couple of
miles away.”
He jerked a
thumb to indicate a direction. The woman’s false teeth clicked as she
started to speak,
then
decided against it. She rang up
the sale.

Carrying his breakfast in a paper bag, Alex
hurried down the road to the tracks, glancing back occasionally. He thought he
saw her behind the screen door but couldn’t be sure.

He climbed up the embankment and walked in
the dust for half a mile, looking for a shady place to eat. Both sides of the
tracks had thick foliage, but it was low and dry and ugly as well as uncomfortable.
Finally there was a tree, and the earth was cool beneath it. He ate the
cupcakes and gulped the milk. He could see an overpass a mile away, and
suddenly a black-and-white police car was there, halting long enough for its
occupants to scrutinize both ways. Alex was hidden by the shadows and
shrubbery. The woman had called the police. They were closing in. He dropped
the unfinished milk container, darted around the tree, and went into the brush.
The dry foliage was thick, a cousin to cactus without spines, but it had many
sharp branches that tore at his clothes and scratched his hands. He struggled
for fifty yards until he reached the edge of a plowed field. It stretched for a
mile before there was a fence and a road. Moving slowly down the road was a
police car. He backed into the shrubbery, keeping out of sight while
heading toward the road with the overpass. The railroad right-of-way seemed to
be fifty yards on each side, and then there were flat fields, either freshly
plowed or with low-growing beets.

Ten minutes went by, many heartbeats for the
hunted, and he crawled back to the edge of the bushes. The police car had a
twin now, and they were parked three hundred yards apart; one
policeman
was outside, holding up binoculars. He heard dogs
baying. He began to run blindly, the shrubbery whipping and scratching at his
face and hands. Before long his lungs were on fire, he felt a searing pain in
his side, and his legs weighed fifty pounds each. He kept running entirely on
instinct. He did veer toward the railroad tracks, where the brush was thinner.
The baying sounds were relentless, but he couldn’t tell if they were
louder or falling back. He ran without hope, but he wouldn’t surrender.

The end came when another dusty road cut
across the tracks. The shrubbery thinned and he saw the police car, the two
patrolmen
in leather puttees and wide-brimmed Stetsons. He
had no strength and nowhere to go. He was surrounded, and the dogs were getting
even louder.

He sat down in the dirt, legs crossed,
chest heaving. He was empty of fear, empty of all feeling and all
strength—a sponge squeezed dry.