Little Boy Blue

by Edward Bunker

  “We can get a small place.”

  Clem shook his head. He wanted to hug the boy, but such gestures had stopped. Maybe … maybe, he thought, we can rent a place and have a woman come in to help. “I can’t make any promises,” he said, “but maybe we can work something out.”

  “Oh, Pop, please.”

  “Remember, it’s not a promise … but I’ll see what I can arrange.”

  The tears welled in the boy’s eyes, triggering a similar response in the man, and he gathered his son in his arms. Please God, Alex pleaded silently, let it be so. I won’t do anything wrong.

  Clem held his son at arm’s length, hands on his shoulders. “Okay, I’ll work on it, but you be good here. Don’t give them any trouble. I’ve got to work out of town this week, but I’ll be here to see you a week from Sunday.”

  “Promise, Pop?”

  “Promise. You can go horseback riding at Griffith Park if you want.”

  “Oh, yes!”

  “I talked to the superintendent. He’s a nice man and he tells me the housemother, Mrs. Cavendish, is a fine person. Show me you can stay out of trouble so I can leave you alone while I work.” He tapped the boy’s arm with a clenched fist.

  Alex nodded rapidly, his face glowing.

  “You’ll have to apologize for causing the lady all that trouble. Then we’ll see about getting you settled.”

  The glow faded from the boy’s eyes. Suddenly he was embarrassed by what he’d done and pricked by the reality that he had to stay while his father left.

  2

  Thelma Cavendish, a widow, lived in three cluttered rooms of the cottage—the cottage being the lower floor of the two-story dormitory. The upper floor was for boys aged fourteen to sixteen. The clutter of Thelma’s quarters was in contrast to the strict neatness she insisted on for the boys on her floor. She was sixty-five years old and healthy as a bull elephant, despite more than two hundred pounds on a five-foot-five frame. She’d raised her own three children into good, successful Christians, and a thousand other boys had come under her wing during twenty-two years as a housemother. Her stamina was evidenced by her being in charge of thirty boys, ages eleven and twelve, five and a half days a week. Other housemothers had a college student to assist them, but Thelma Cavendish ran her cottage alone. If she had Victorian strictness, she could also clamp a homesick boy to her bosom. If excessive strictness had occasionally harmed a forming personality, the balance sheet was still in her favor. She lacked patience with interfering parents. They’d turned over to her a job they couldn’t handle. Most of the boys came from broken homes; many had alcoholic parents, some had been abused, and a few were en route to full-blown delinquency and institutions.

  Thelma Cavendish told Alex to make his bed, put his clothes away, and then come to see her.

  The room had two double bunks. A bottom bunk was empty, and Alex put his duffel bag and cardboard box on top of it. He ignored the two boys watching him silently from their bunks. Alex didn’t unpack anything but instead went back down the hallway to Mrs. Cavendish’s rooms. The door was open, and he could see the woman darning socks from a large basket, her fingers flying. Alex knocked on the doorframe, and she beckoned him in with a head gesture. She nodded toward a wicker chair, the only place to sit not piled with clothes.

  “I saw that display in the parking lot and I’m not going to stand for anything like that, you understand?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I’m not going to be here very long anyway.”

  The woman’s fingers paused as she looked closely at the youth. “I talked with your father. He didn’t mention that you weren’t staying.”

  “When did you talk with him?”

  “Last week. We had a long talk about your problems.”

  “Well, he just told me.”

  “Are you sure you’re telling the truth? That it isn’t something you’re imagining because you want it to be true?”

  “No, it’s true.”

  The woman’s lips pressed tighter. “Well, be that as it may, while you’re here you’re going to have to follow my rules. If you do, we’ll get along fine. If you don’t, we won’t get along at all.”

  Alex said nothing. He resented her authority and the threat it represented.

  “I can’t tell you all that’s expected in one session,” she said. “But the boys get up at six and clean their rooms. Breakfast is at seven. We all go together. The school bus leaves at seven forty-five. When the bus brings you home, you check with me before you go out. You get back to the cottage by five. Study hall is from seven to eight for junior high school.

  “One place my boys don’t go—behind the kitchen. That’s the smoking area for high school boys. I don’t approve of it, but Mr. Trepesanti is the superintendent, and he lets them smoke there.”

  Alex said, “Yes, ma’am,” whenever it was appropriate; he was glad when she let him go back to his room.

  When he reentered the room, a fat little boy was searching through Alex’s box. When he saw Alex he wheeled around, flushing wildly, obviously frightened. Alex had long ago learned how boys steal in boarding homes. He’d done it himself. Usually he would have started a fight, but today he was too drained. The fat boy had nothing in his hands, so Alex simply warned him to never do it again. The boy’s name, he later learned, was an appropriate “Porky.”

  No sooner had Alex put his property on the floor and started to make his bed when an olive-skinned boy came in. He slept on the bunk above Alex. His name was Sammy Macias. His father was Mexican, but his reddish hair came from his Irish mother. She’d died in an automobile wreck two years ago, which was how Sammy had gotten into the Valley Home for Boys. He was also constantly in trouble.

  When they finished putting Alex’s things away, Sammy offered to show Alex the grounds.

  “We can go swimming after supper,” Sammy said.

  Much of the Valley Home’s ten acres was trees and underbrush, wild as a forest and more green than most of the area because a trickle of the Los Angeles River bordered one side of the property. In the shadows of the greenery, where their feet crunched on fallen leaves, the heat was less intense. Streaks of dazzling light broke through the trees. When they were through exploring there, Sammy showed him the barns and pastures. The Valley Home bought its milk, but there was a small herd of steers. Sammy picked up a dirt clod and threw it at them, trying to make them move. Alex told him not to. “Why hurt helpless animals?” he said.

  “That won’t hurt them.”

  “Well, don’t do it.”

  Sammy dropped the second clod of dirt. The steers, Sammy explained, were owned by some of the high school boys, who bought them as calves, raised and fattened them, and sold them for a profit. The younger boys weren’t allowed such enterprise, though many of them worked for various motion picture celebrities who had homes in the area. The Valley Home for Boys had friends.

  As they wandered around the grounds, several boys passed them, the older ones ignoring them, and those their own age greeting Sammy and eyeing the newcomer shyly. Once Alex glanced back and saw the three boys they’d just passed with their heads together, the motions of one of them indicating he was describing Alex’s struggle when the bus drove up. Alex looked away quickly, his eye muscles twitching.

  The swimming pool was Olympic-sized and filled with lithe young bodies cutting the pale chlorinated water. Their suntans were deep and their eyes red. Even the youngest ones swam like fish. They were hurrying, diving, laughing. Alex could swim, but not like these boys.

  A whistle bleated, and the boys began to pull themselves from the pool grudgingly. “Come on,” a voice called. “It’ll be open after supper.” A tow-headed boy, hair plastered to his head, dove back into the water, and when his head bobbed up, the voice called, “Billy Boyd, if you’re not out in ten seconds you won’t swim for the rest of the week.”

  The boy scrambled up, grinning.

  Only then did Alex recognize the voice of control as that of the young coach from the adminis
tration building. He was coming over to where Alex and Sammy stood behind a low wall. Usually Alex wouldn’t have recalled a name from such a frenzied episode, but this time he remembered. Mike.

  “Hi, Alex,” the coach said. “You look better.”

  The boy blushed, looked down, and circled a foot in the dry grass.

  “What’re you guys doing?” Mike asked.

  “I’m just showing him around,” Sammy said.

  The coach nodded. Then to Alex, “Seen the gym yet?”

  “No, it’s locked.”

  “Come on.”

  “I got to call my father,” Sammy said. “I call him collect every Wednesday.”

  Alex went with the coach. He wasn’t interested in sports, but he yearned for some attention and dreaded meeting the other boys in his cottage. He remembered how they’d first seen him. He wanted to belong and be liked—and in most places he was, but only by the outcasts and troublemakers.

  The gym was ten years old, gift of a fraternal organization. It had a polished hardwood floor with a basketball court and signs that said no street shoes were allowed on it. There were collapsible bleachers and a storeroom of folding chairs, so it could double as an auditorium if necessary. The shower room was cluttered with towels, discarded basketball jerseys, and soap that had turned soft from being left on a wet floor.

  Mike told Alex that the boys at the Valley Home got fifty cents an hour for any work they did, and if Alex cleaned the shower room, Mike would put in an hour voucher. Alex was surprised. He’d never heard of being paid in any of the other places he’d been. He accepted quickly, not so much because of the money but because he wanted Mike’s friendship. It took him half an hour to fill the laundry hamper, sweep and mop the floor, and put everything away.

  Alex had been gone from the cottage for two hours; it was late afternoon when he finally walked back in. The long center corridor from which the room doors opened was full of boys moving up and down from a community washroom. They formed a line beside the washroom doorway, towels over their shoulders, toothbrushes, combs, and other things in their hands. When a boy finished and left the washroom, the next boy in line entered. They went in with tousled hair and dirty faces, and came back scrubbed clean, with hair soaked but combed flat.

  Thelma Cavendish stood in the middle of the hallway where she could watch both the traffic and the washroom.

  Alex’s room was beyond it, and he walked nonchalantly toward the woman, though inside he was very tense. He saw the boys glancing at him, and more than one conversation stopped at his approach.

  Thelma Cavendish seemed not to see Alex—until he started to pass her. Then a hand reached out and snatched his earlobe, holding him frozen.

  “Where have you been?” she demanded. An anonymous giggle made her glance around wrathfully for a moment, in futile search of the culprit. Alex’s eyes also searched, for he wanted someone to vent his humiliation upon.

  “Don’t look away when I talk to you,” she said, shaking him by the ear. She let him go. “Didn’t I tell you the schedule?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I was with the coach at the gym. I didn’t notice—”

  “The coach! The coach doesn’t have anything to do with my cottage.” She noticed two vacancies in the washroom—the first two boys in line were more interested in Alex’s predicament than in washing—and motioned the two to go in.

  Alex was swollen with indignation. He’d done nothing wrong. He wanted to scream at her, but nothing came through the wall of control but wet eyes. When she turned her gaze back to him, the sternness was gone. She was strict but not cruel. “I talked to Mr. Trepesanti about you this morning, Alex. I know you’re a brilliant boy with a lot of troubles. Whatever trouble you’ve been in elsewhere doesn’t matter—just what you do here. You did wrong by not coming in. I could’ve thought you’d run away, but Sammy told me where you were. Still, you’ve got to remember that old Cavendish runs things.”

  He hated people who “ran things,” who expected obedience simply because of who they were rather than because what they ordered was right and just. The woman went on about what a good man Mr. Trepesanti was, how he loved all the boys, and although this wasn’t as good as a regular home with a mother and father, it was as good as the staff could make it. “If you have a problem, my door is always open. It doesn’t matter if it’s midnight. Mrs. C. loves all her boys. Even when I have to make them mind or punish them, it’s for their own good. We live in a world of rules and orders, and we’ve got to learn to follow them.”

  She waited for a response. He stared silently at the floor. He already hated the place.

  “It’s almost time for supper,” she said. “Get yourself washed up. And this evening bring your clothes so we can mark them for the laundry.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Alex said.

  “All right. Go on now.”

  Sammy wasn’t in the room, but the other two roommates were, both in T-shirts and blue jeans. One was roly-poly, with carefully parted lank blond hair. The other boy was thin, with a butch haircut. Both were tanned, and the slender boy, who had freckles, was peeling. He had white salve on his nose.

  Alex nodded as a greeting, and the chubby boy broke the ice. “Boy, that was some fight you put up in the parking lot,” he said.

  Alex didn’t know what to say, so he tossed a shoulder and looked at the freckled boy, whose legs dangled over the edge of an upper bunk.

  “My name’s Freddy Wilson,” he said, jumping down and extending a hand.

  “I’m Alex Hammond. How long have you been here?”

  “Two years.”

  It seemed an eternity to Alex—a fifth of the boy’s life, perhaps a third of what he remembered of life.

  “It’s okay, though,” the boy said, as if sensing Alex’s thoughts. “I haven’t been in any other homes, but it’s better than being with my mother.”

  “What about your father?”

  “He took off when she was going to have another baby. Then she started drinking, and when she got mad at me she’d burn me with cigarettes.”

  “I don’t like it here,” Alex said. “I don’t like any of these places, and I’ve been in plenty.”

  “Me too,” the fat boy said. “This is okay, as far as they go … even if Mrs. C. is always giving me swats.”

  Suddenly it was time to eat. Sammy Macias appeared in the doorway. He took it for granted that Alex and he would buddy up.

  The boys gathered inside the front door and went out together and down the walk in a loose group, their noisy voices raised in the perpetual excitation of the very young.

  Alex walked with the crowd, but he was thinking of his father and of getting out of there. Outside he could be alone to read, walk to school by himself, go alone to weekend matinees. His father would be the only authority. He and Clem could do things together all the time instead of just a few hours on the weekend.

  Other groups of boys from other cottages were straggling along the walks. Thelma Cavendish waved to another housemother; they were hens shooing in their brood. The last sun was filtering through the trees, turning the leaves gold and red before black. A faint breeze had risen, taking the edge from the day’s heat. It was the hue of twilight before the night.

  3

  The city of Los Angeles had no breeze. Clem Hammond sat dripping sweat on the edge of his bed in the furnished room. He leaned forward, elbows on knees, a cigarette smoldering between his fingers. In the dusk the objects in the room were colorless silhouettes. Clem looked around. The room was no place to raise a boy, even if Mrs. Griffin would let him. The big rooming house was dreary, the tenants elderly, the neighborhood bad. Alex had already displayed delinquent tendencies, such as the theft in the military school (they’d broken into the kitchen, stuffed themselves, and vandalized the place, with Alex as ringleader). And once Alex had stolen money from Clem’s wallet. The boy also had a tendency to roam, and the neighborhood was fertile for trouble.

  Clem felt the cigarette burn his fingers. He
mashed it out and continued thinking. Could he afford a small house and a woman to come in a couple times a week? Alex was getting old enough to care for himself most of the time. Work was steadier, the Depression seeming to recede. It could be managed if work was regular. Two years ago it would have been unthinkable. Now it was possible. Barely possible. Certainly something had to be done. The psychologist was wrong—Alex simply needed a home. Clem would pick up the classified section of the newspaper after he went to eat.

  Clem glanced at his heavy pocket watch. It was nearly seven, and the traffic would be clear. He took a sweater, gulped a shot of bourbon from a bottle he kept in the drawer, and went out. He was conscious of the narrow, dark hallway and stairs with the frayed carpet. It was the wrong place for an energetic eleven-year-old.

  The landlady had an apartment on the bottom floor, and her door was open to stir a breeze. Fibber McGee and Molly were on her radio; though he couldn’t hear the words he recognized the voices. He’d have to get a radio, maybe a used one.

  Clem’s mailbox was empty, as he’d expected. His only relative, his sister in Louisville, wrote about once a year, and he usually sent her a Christmas card.

  Near the rooming house was an early version of a shopping center, a market bordered by small shops and a café that catered to the neighborhood. Clem always ate his evening meal there; the waitresses knew him. He always left a tip, not large but something. He always joked lightly with the waitresses. They were plain girls—such prettiness as they possessed came entirely from their youth. It was the most fleeting kind of prettiness, especially in their world of arid poverty.

  It was still a hot night. Clem ate a cold ham sandwich and a salad. Tonight his conversation with the girls, though never lengthy, was close to silence. He was still preoccupied with the problem of his son. Increasingly Clem was feeling the necessity of getting Alex away from the boys’ homes, the military schools—with having him live at home. Then, too, there was the boy’s potential. Clem had been told that Alex’s I.Q. was in the very superior range. Alex should go to college. How did a man who sometimes couldn’t find work send a boy through college?