“Wait now,” he said after parking around the corner. “I’ll be right back.”
Scabs was gone about fifteen minutes, and when he returned a blanket was tucked under one arm along with a shopping bag. He slid inside.
“Here’s some socks and underwear and stuff in here.”
“Thanks.”
“All I could get was eight bucks. My mom just had fifteen in her purse.”
“That’s fine. Look, man, I’d better get going.”
“What time tomorrow?”
“Huh? Tomorrow?”
“When’ll you get here?”
Alex snorted and shrugged. “Who knows? I don’t even know where I am … or where I’m going now. I wish I hadn’t—” He stifled the last words. Saying it aloud would make it worse, like tearing a scab from a fresh sore.
“All right,” Alex said, trying to shift without depressing the clutch. “Jesus!” But he quickly did it right and got under way without a jump. He stayed on side streets, mainly residential, avoiding boulevards with traffic where anyone who saw him would know he wasn’t supposed to be driving an automobile. The only way someone his age could get a car was to steal it, and if a cop saw him … In the residential streets the darkness hid him; drivers were shadows, traffic an occasional pair of yellow orbs. At first he was so concentrated on the automobile that he dripped sweat; his hands were so slippery that he couldn’t hold the wheel unless he wiped them off on his pants. From the outset he was lost, but now he didn’t even know north from south, or anywhere else. Not that it mattered. He had no destination. He was driving for practice and pleasure, and soon he was running the speedometer up to sixty between stop signs, braking in squeals. Now he was having fun, troubles forgotten.
Scabs’s parents lived in Culver City, one of several incorporated “cities” within the endless sprawl of Los Angeles. It was about five miles from the Pacific Coast Highway. Alex didn’t know which direction he’d gone from there after dropping Scabs, nor whereabouts he’d emerge along the coast, but heading west would bring him there eventually, and from there he could find his way, although he had nowhere to go except back to Scabs in the morning.
The side streets disappeared in the direction he was going. He tried to appear taller, and if someone at a traffic light glanced his way, he turned his head. He was at a light when the engine coughed twice and fell silent.
Repeatedly he jammed down on the starter button, uselessly grinding the small motor to an ugly sound that made him frantic. Then he saw the fuel gauge on empty. He would go no farther in this car. His trying to gas it up would bring a chuckle and a grip around his collar.
Two large boulevards intersected here, but the blackness was absolute until lights speckled the hillsides miles away. He had no idea where he was, which increased his dread. The traffic lights went through their cycle; as a red got ready to change, headlights flashed into the stolen car from the rear. Brakes squealed when Alex’s car didn’t move. The car behind pulled around and stopped, a window coming down. The male voice came from the featureless shadow of a face.
“What’s that car doin’ out there in the middle of the street?”
“It just stopped,” Alex said; his voice squeaked in fear.
“Hey, who’s drivin’ over there?”
“My father,” Alex said, still squeaking.
“Where the hell is he? Leavin’ a car in the middle of an intersection is inviting trouble.”
“He went … to get help … call somebody.”
“Why didn’t you push it to the side?”
Alex was stumped for long seconds; then in a stronger voice he said, “He’s got a heart condition.”
“Uh-huh, I get it. Well, we can’t leave it there.” The man pulled to the curb and came over. As he lumbered forward, a big man in checked mackinaw, Alex reached for the door, primed to bolt. But he’d never outrun the man. The odds were better to brazen it out.
The man slipped the cap from a flare and scratched it until it fired. He dropped it behind the car and told Alex to get out and help.
“How long’s your pa been gone?” the man asked.
“Twenty minutes, maybe.”
“I got time. I better stay here with you—damn boondocks out here. There’s bums back in the beach canyons.”
“I’ll be okay,” Alex said. “I’ll lock myself in.”
“No, that’s okay. I got off work early an’ the old lady’d think I got fired if she hears the car come in now.”
Minutes ticked away, and Alex sat physically quiet in the front passenger seat, feet outside on the curb. His mind was spinning. The man paced on the other side, out of Alex’s sight but not out of his consciousness.
The black-and-white highway patrol car came from the other direction; its driver looked over at the two parked vehicles. The man stopped pacing and watched the cruiser go along the highway divider to a place for a U-turn. Alex watched in the mirror. As the headlights began to turn, he made sure the man wasn’t looking; then he crouched down, using the stolen car as a shield, and ran awkwardly toward the darkness. He saw the waist-high ditch two steps ahead, so he only half-fell into the soft, damp dirt.
The prowl car headlights lighted up the route he traveled, but car and ditch hid him enough—until he was far enough away where he could scramble up and duck into the wild bushes. He halted there, looked back, and now a flashlight beam was playing across the bushes nearest the car.
It was much like the last hunt, he thought, momentarily dismayed as he recalled the ending of that one. Then dismay disappeared into excitement, and the excitement made him feel alive. The exhaustion of having to run went away. He was oblivious to the scratching twigs and shrubs. He would avoid getting boxed in.
Another hundred yards ahead, he crept back to the roadside and looked at the starting point. A fourth set of headlights was there, another highway patrol cruiser. He was beyond the range of their lights. Bunching himself, he ran bent over across the highway and through another wall of bushes. But then he was on smooth lawn with occasional silhouettes of trees. Minutes later the grass was manicured, and he saw a flag in a hole. He was on a golf course. He could walk without worrying that he’d run into a wire and cut his head off. However trivial and temporary the escape—victory—elated him. He’d gotten away, and he felt a form of exaltation. Tired as he was, he walked jauntily through the night.
11
Morning found him under the boardwalk of the beach near the Venice Amusement Pier. He’d trudged for three hours, first following a westward railway right-of-way, then keeping as much to alleys as possible. When he was forced onto regular streets he sprang into bushes or whatever cranny was available the instant headlights appeared. Every police officer would stop to question a child wandering the city at three A.M., especially when there was a call about the stolen car. A couple of times he detoured around gas stations or passed open cafés, their windows misted from the warmth within. He was afraid to enter because most adults would be as curious as a policeman. So he walked until he reached the beach, the sea glimmering in the moonlight a hundred yards away, and then curled into a niche to wait, shivering, for dawn, wishing that he’d never gotten into the car with Scabs, sad and angry at having done so. But he would never give up. He would postpone the consequences of his behavior as long as possible.
When the sun sparkled on the sea, bright but morning-cool, he came out and stretched his cramped muscles.
The hour was early, and the few persons on the boardwalk were elderly and poor. Later it would fill up with servicemen, sun-worshippers, and amusement pier patrons, but now it was those who lived nearby, mostly retirees who had come west to die in the sun and who lived on in its warmth. For nearly three decades from the turn of the century, the Venice area had been a fashionable playground at the sea. The planners had even dug canals nearby to mime the Italian city it was named after, and on the banks were cottages used as vacation homes. But decay and disfavor came together as other parts of the coast were developed, and the can
als became weed-clogged ditches breeding mosquitoes, and the hotels were turned into third-rate apartments. The war brought a temporary resurgence to the amusement pier and boardwalk, but a block away the children of the poor played in alleys and on a streetcar right-of-way.
Alex found a group of children near his age playing in an overgrown vacant lot. Divided into armies, they split the territory and lined up on the borders, facing each other at thirty feet. They tore up clods of packed earth with tall clumps of grass. The grass served as a stabilizer and gave visual grace to the hand-launched missiles. Being hit put the target out of the game. It was simple, wild fun to the children. Alex watched for a while, and when a boy quit, Alex offered to take his place to make the sides even.
For the next hour he forgot that he was an escapee from a mental institution and an orphan. He even forgot that he’d shot a man.
When two brothers and a sister had to leave the vacant lot, the contest ended. Some drifted off, but a handful remained, and Alex was no longer an outsider. They were curious, and when he mentioned he was hungry, a tow-headed girl of ten who lived on the block went home to return with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and a Thermos of milk.
The group was down to the girl, Janey, and the two eleven-year-old boys, Billy Bob and Rusty, who were cousins and lived in the same apartment building. They went to the amusement pier, where one boy’s mother worked the fun-house ticket booth. She gave Billy Bob, called “B.B.,” thirty-five cents for the matinee at one of the three movie theaters on the boardwalk. All three boys wanted to see a double feature of war movies; next to Warner Brothers gangster movies Alex liked these best. When they got to the ticket booth he found his pocket lined with dirt instead of coins; the letdown and frustration brought instant tears of anger. He wanted to go and felt responsible because he’d promised Rusty. He said he would steal what they needed. He recalled Red Barzo talking about where people hid things in their homes and decided to commit a burglary. None of them protested, though the girl seemed to lag a little while they walked away from the neighborhood of poor apartments into one of middle-class homes, two- and three-bedroom ranch-styles, just old enough for the landscaping—bushes and trees—to feel comfortable embracing the structures.
“Are you really goin’ to do it?” Janey asked when they began ringing doorbells. When someone opened the door, Alex solicited work mowing the lawn, but not right now; he would come back with his tools on a weekday afternoon around twilight. He actually got two customers and dutifully borrowed a pencil from them to write down the address. This was despite the two dollars and fifty cents he asked for, five times the rate for boys then cutting lawns.
He was ringing doorbells to find one that didn’t answer. On the fourth try his noise brought only silence at a middle-class version of a hacienda: a recessed doorway of dark wood, wrought-iron bars on the windows, red tile on the roof, the walls a facsimile of adobe. It had a riot of shrubs and trees as did the house next door, which helped to hide the yard and rear windows from neighbors. He led his band boldly down the driveway to the back yard, a postage-stamp-size place ninety-five percent occupied by a kidney-shaped swimming pool.
“Boy, this must be super-rich people here,” B.B. said, dipping a dirty bare foot into the immaculate water.
Alex grunted, his stomach now in knots. He would have walked away if he’d been alone. That was impossible with the eyes of his peers upon him. He quickly found what Red had told him to look for, the small bathroom window that most people leave unlatched and a little open to invite the fresh air inside. Using a borrowed pocket knife, he cut a hand-size hole in the screen, unhooked it and lifted the window enough to climb in. Once within, now really hidden, much of his tension deflated. He made one circuit of the house on cat’s feet, opening every door before going to the back porch and letting his gang inside. They, too, were nervous until safely inside; then bravado came, along with destructive urges and rebellion against the adult-prescribed neatness. Alex, however, left them to their own devices and went to the bedroom, the place where most valuables were hidden. He was looking for cash and gasoline-ration stamps; even an “A” stamp was worth a dollar. He could sell those, but jewelry wasn’t worth anything to him. Even at his age he understood that he couldn’t even be seen with expensive jewelry without being grabbed. Yet the plain, stainless-steel watch he immediately found in a top dresser drawer wouldn’t cause trouble. He’d never heard of “Rolex.” He looked through the pockets of hanging clothes and found a small cluster of one-dollar bills and coins, the change from a purchase, in a pants pocket. He found a flower vase on the nightstand half-full of coins, about ten dollars’ worth. He already felt good; the score was already successful; they could go to movies for a week.…
The bedroom had no more money, not under the mattress or in boxes on back shelves in the closet, or under the paper lining the drawers.
In another bedroom he found an envelope ready to be mailed to a finance company; it had a thirty-three-dollar car payment. He also found two books of gas-ration stamps, one an “A” book and the other a “C,” which meant several times as much gas and would bring three times the price.
While searching these back rooms he was vaguely conscious of the noise the others were making, mostly laughing and talking, the words indecipherable. It irritated him; one of them should be watching out the front window for the owners to drive in. He hadn’t thought of it before, but after this he’d never forget.
Having taken what he wanted, he now half-humorously planned to filch a snack from the refrigerator. Then he saw the raw egg splattered on the buffet cabinet mirror, running down it in obscene yellow and white. Sudden anger pumped blood into his cheeks and head. He’d already felt misgivings about stealing from a home, as compared to a store or business, where he had no qualms. With the flush still rising and first thoughts forming, he heard the crash of breaking glass from the kitchen, followed by laughter.
B.B. and Rusty had demolished the kitchen, coating the walls with all the soft food and vegetables they could find. Now they were breaking dishes.
“Stop that!” Alex yelled, his young voice falsetto, making him blush in embarrassment. The boys froze instantly but didn’t understand his attitude. He looked around the mangled room and felt sorry for the people who lived here. For a moment he thought of cleaning it up, but that was ridiculous. But the frustration of the situation made his eyes sting.
“Where’s the girl … Janey?”
“She got scared and went home.”
Alex’s hunger had gone, and he was suddenly verging on panic as he imagined hearing a car motor in the driveway. That was a false alarm, but it put the others on edge, too. They got out quickly and broke into a wild run when they reached the alley behind the property. Alex had remembered the man on the beach coming home to his store.
The only thing taken by the two boys was a hunting knife in a scabbard for Rusty. They hadn’t even looked for loot, so Alex kept what he had. He took them to the double-feature movie, and when they came out the amusement pier lights were getting the darkness they needed to feed upon. The night was chilly, but they ignored the goose pimples as they wandered around, eating cotton candy and playing games in the penny arcade and riding the bump cars.
Both Rusty and B.B. lived in an old, substantial brick apartment building, Rusty with both parents, B.B. with his mother. She had a garage assigned to her but didn’t have a car, so it was used for storage by both families. A dismantled bed was one item in the garage. The boys moved the mattress into a corner and opened it; then they moved boxes and crates around to create a hideout. B.B. stole a blanket and a fat candle. Voilà, they had a niche where Alex could sleep at night and hide in during school hours. Both police and truant officers would want to see his excuse for not being in school. Using the candle because there was no window, Alex spent the day reading stories from Colliers, Saturday Evening Post, and Reader’s Digest; back issues were stacked along a wall. His friends invariably brought him part of their l
unches when they came home from school.
They usually went to a nearby playground until dark, playing softball or half-court basketball. When night came, they took off in search of adventure, sometimes going to the amusement pier where Alex begged change from servicemen, tearfully claiming that he had lost his bus fare home. Sometimes they just explored, walking miles, rifling the glove compartments of cars as they went.
For a week Alex lived in the garage. At his age it was time enough for memories to fade and emotional wounds to heal. The state hospital was yesteryear in his feelings instead of yesterday. Every morning he woke up in a new world, wondering what adventure would come that day, not that he was being hunted and inevitably would be caught.
* * *
The inevitable came on the eighth morning. Despite his age, the juvenile officers of the Los Angeles Police Department took no chances. “He might only be eleven years old,” one said, “but we know he can pull a trigger. He wasn’t in the nuthouse for being a good boy.” So eight uniformed officers in four cars came as backup the morning of the arrest. The uniformed policemen surrounded the garages; then the two plain-clothes officers moved in.
A kick at the mattress opened Alex’s eyes. Morning sunlight from the open door sparkled on the drawn revolvers pointed at him.
“Freeze, kid … keep your hands in sight.”
Alex was startled, too surprised to move. He could see the pistols but not the faces beneath the wide hat brims. For the first time in his young life he knew the fear of death. “Put the guns away,” he said. “I won’t run.”
A kick was his answer. Aimed blind at the blanket it hit his kneecap, making him wince.
“Get up on your knees, hands behind your back.”
As he followed the order, the same policeman who had kicked him now grabbed his hair and shoved his head down. “Keep ’em behind you,” the man said.
The handcuffs were snapped on, and he was pulled to his feet and pushed toward the door. When he stepped out, blinking in the sunlight, he was surprised to find a small crowd gathered at the back door of the apartment building, and the uniformed officers coming from their positions. Even Alex could read the surprise on the faces in the crowd when an eleven-year-old appeared. A voice rang clear in the quiet: “It’s a little boy.”
Little Boy Blue Page 14
