Little Boy Blue (3 page)

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 administration 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.

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 cafe 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?