Little Boy Blue (41 page)

The red rage flashed up, nearly blinding
Alex. “Get it, punkl” he snarled, meaning the butcher knife.
“See if you can back up that shit you’re talkin’! I’ll
cut your motherfuckin’ heart out and feed it to you.” He punctuated
the maniacal threat by raising the razor- sharp knife and edging forward. Ray
flinched, put his hands up with palms forward, his eyes wide.
“Don’t, Alex, don’t. God…”

“You weren’t saying that a minute
ago. Where’s all that shit you were talkin’? See if you can walk that
walk.”

At that moment, Ava entered the kitchen,
oblivious to what had been going on.

“Get out of here,” Ray said.

“What’s going on?”

“I’m leaving,” Alex said.
“I’m getting out of this garbage can with this fuckin’
asshole.”

“What’s wrong?” she nearly
wailed.

“I said get outa here,” Ray said.

“You can stay,” Alex said.
“This man of yours is a punk. If he was pretty I’d fuck him in the
ass.”

“Alex!” she cried.

“He’s crazy,” Ray said.
“Okay, okay,” he said to Alex. “Just leave.”

“I’m goin’, I’m
goin’, motherfucker!
Get outa the way.”
He
gestured with the wicked knife, indicating that Ray should move away from the
door.

Aunt Ava broke into tears. They came in
sudden, racking sobs. Her husband reached for her hand, pulling her away from
the doorway.

Alex moved in a slight circle toward the arch
while they kept edging away from him. “Motherfuckers like you fucked me
over bad,” Alex
said,
his escape route now
clear. “I should—but fuck it. You talk all that shit, but you
ain’t got
no
guts when it gets tough.
Call the motherfuckin’ police.
I’ll be long
gone.” He backed from the kitchen door into the living room, pausing for
a moment to look around. He saw nothing to hold him back, nothing he wanted to
take with him. He pulled open the front door and stepped out into the night.

“On the fuckin’ run
again” he muttered as he reached the sidewalk and began to run. He
laughed at his predicament. Destiny seemed to be either incarceration or the
threat of it. “Fuck it! I’d rather be a fugitive than a captive. I
don’t belong with those people.” He saw a dark alley and turned
into it, looking for a place to hole up for a few hours, knowing that Ray and
Ava would call the police, who would be looking for him in the area. When
things cooled down he’d get away and find his friends in the underworld
where he belonged.

Teresa’s voice had a lilt of affection
that warmed Alex even over the telephone, though he did feel a momentary pang
when she said she hoped he’d learned how to stay out of jail.
“Things are so much better out here. Just be patient and willing to work
and you’ll have what you want.” He didn’t deflate her
optimistic advice by saying he was already a fugitive—or would be
tomorrow when a parole violation warrant was issued.

“How can I see Wedo?” he asked.

“Did my mom tell you
…
?”

“She told me what’s happening.
He still’s my partner.”

“I know… I still see him…
when he has time. That stuff takes every minute of his life. He can’t
even think about anything else. When he isn’t chasing it, he’s half
asleep on the nod.”

“What about his phone number?”

“He doesn’t have a regular place
to live. He’s here, there, with a friend, in a motel or hotel. He calls
me.”

“You don’t have any place to
reach him?”

“In a way.
On Temple Street near downtown there’s a place
called ‘The Traveler’s.’ He goes in there a lot, I guess. He
said they’d take messages for him.”

“What is it… a bar?”

“I think it’s a cafe and a pool
hall, but I’ve never been there. The number’s
upstairs—”

“No, I’ll get it from the
book—or find it.”

“When’re you coming by to see me?
Lisa says you look really good, tanned and everything.”

“Sheeit!
Lisa really looks good. I’ll come by in a few
days, maybe on the weekend.”

Alex replaced the receiver. The telephone
booth was in a gas station. He walked out—and out of the circle of
light—and down half a block to the car he’d hotwired and stolen a
mile from his aunt’s bungalow. By daylight he would have to abandon it.
The owner would find it gone in the morning and report its theft. For that the
license plates could be changed. He would have done that if it was an older
car, the kind a teenager might drive; but he would be in the city’s
poorer neighborhoods, and it was a gleaming new Packard.

Driving the huge automobile
through the night, the dashboard radio giving forth sentimental songs,
Alex’s earlier rage pendulumed to a mixture of melancholy, loneliness,
and an inchoate longing.
The
feelings were not unalloyed agony; they were bittersweet. It was the ache
of yearning, not of despair. At the particular time and under the particular
circumstances, he was weary of his perpetual war with the whole world—a
war he’d been fighting since before he had words to articulate such an
idea—a war that, in the beginning, back in the mist of being four years
old, had been an instinctive rebellion against being abandoned to foster homes
and military schools. Now he somewhat understood his outcast condition,
understood it more than even sympathetic adults would understand. In a few
weeks he would have a fifteenth
birthday,
and he was already
an outsider, a leper of the modern era. He had no family, the cold Calvinists
he’d run from hours ago were certainly not his family. He already had a
long record he could never escape. His choices were already severely truncated.
He already belonged to the underworld and was locked out of the other world.
What parents would let their nice daughters go out with him? Although he
didn’t face the reality head-on even in his mind, and although there were
other fires and yearnings, the main pain was longing to belong, to love and be
loved. That was the irreducible truth. He would find Wedo and team up with him,
if Wedo was willing—not because that was his real choice but because he
couldn’t think of anything else to do. Wedo was a junky, and Alex had
heard enough stories to be leery and prejudiced about junkies, but Wedo was
Wedo, whom he knew down to the real truths of loyalty and friendship. No matter
if Wedo was flawed, was nearly illiterate, he was a loyal friend. He would
gladly accept Alex as a partner. Whatever he was doing to maintain his habit,
Wedo would know that Alex was game for it.

Tonight it was too late to continue the hunt.
Temple Street was “hot” at any hour, but especially so after
midnight. Anyone there at such an hour would either be the law or outside the
law.

Alex nevertheless drove toward Temple Street,
but a couple of miles away he turned into a closed gas station and parked in
the dark at the rear. He left the radio on and climbed to the back seat. He
cracked the back door so he could push it open and slide through bushes into a
back yard. He had an escape route. He tucked his hands between his legs, curled
up, and went to sleep.

When dawn was orange streaks against eastern
clouds, Alex left the stolen car and began walking toward Temple Street. Half
an hour later the streets were glutted, the sun was morning-bright, and he was
on the block where the Traveler’s Cafe Pool Hall was located. The
neighborhood was known to every junky in sprawling Los Angeles County. When the
city was dry everywhere else, Temple Street connections still had heroin for
sale. Narcotics officers also knew it, making the neighborhood as
“hot” as any; the cafe was “on fire.” Alex first walked
by without going in, pausing for just a moment to look through the window, but
unable to see much because of vapor fogging it. He circled the block, readying
himself, and then opened the door and went in.

The cafe and pool hall had separate sidewalk
entrances, while inside an archway at the rear connected them. The cafe never
closed, but the pool hall did so at midnight, opening again at noon. Alex
paused to briefly study the hangout. On the left was the counter with two dozen
stools. At the right, until the archway, were high- backed booths. At the rear
was
the kitchen door, a hallway to rest- rooms and
telephone, and a jukebox (now playing Mexican ranchero music). Alex walked
toward the restrooms, unobtrusively glancing in each booth on the slim chance
of spotting Wedo.

Alex didn’t see Wedo, but on the way
out of the restroom, now thinking that he’d perch at the counter and wait
a while, Alex did see a familiar face. It was very familiar, in fact, yet
because of civilian clothes, a freeworld haircut, and the gauntness of dissipation,
it took several consternated seconds to dredge up the name. He might not have
been able to if the name hadn’t been unusual: Itchy!
Itchy
Medina.
Always small-boned, he was now really skinny. His nickname came
from his constant fidgeting, shaking out an arm, bouncing in a chair, shaking
his head as if to ease a neck cramp; it was an obvious pathological condition
reduced to a nickname. In fact, the first thing Alex noticed was that Itchy
wasn’t fidgeting. He hadn’t spotted Alex. He was in a booth with a
young white man beside him. The young man took money from a shirt pocket and
passed it over. The young man saw Alex watching and spoke to Itchy, who turned
his head, furrows of puzzlement instantly on his face, his eyes narrow. But
recognition came in seconds. Alex knew it by the spreading grin, and he
grinned in return.

Itchy finished his business, taking the money
out and counting it, then taking something from his mouth and slipping it into
the young man’s hand. The customer was already starting to depart; he was
in a hurry to get to his spoon and needle.

Itchy beckoned Alex, who noticed
Itchy’s expensive suit even while approaching. Itchy extended a hand as
Alex sat down across the table. “Ese, Alex, mi carnal. What’s
happening? When did you get out?”

“Two fuckin’ days, man… and
I hung up the parole already.” However, Alex was thinking that he and
Itchy hadn’t been close friends, certainly not brothers. They’d
been nodding acquaintances with several mutual partners.

Itchy wrinkled his face in sympathy.

“You look like you’re doin’
real good,” Alex said. “Unless it was gum-drops you were
sellin’ that guy.”

Itchy chuckled. “Yeah, I’m makin’
it… or maybe a little better than that.” He stopped there, offering
no details beyond the obvious. Alex recalled hearing that Itchy’s uncle
was Big Mike Medina, who had moved to Mexico on the eve of the war and who had
been the first to recognize the U.S. market for brown Mexican heroin when the
war foreclosed access to Turkey and the Golden Triangle of Asia.

Big Mike was a multimillionaire “on the
other side,” the euphemism for across the Mexican border.

“What’re you doin’
here?” Itchy asked. “You wanna score?”

“Naw.
I’m lookin’ for a partner who fucks
around in here, or at least buys smack in here.”

“What’s his name?”

“Wedo… Wedo Murphy.”

“Murphy!
That jive-stutterin’ motherfucker! He owes me
two bills.” Then Itchy saw the consternation on Alex’s face.
“Hold it! I’m half-assjivin’. He owes me, but he’s good
for it. He spends a lot of money with me… and gives a lot away. He’s
been making some decent stings lately.”

“Do you know where he lives?”

Itchy shook his head. “He told me that
he moves every few days.
One motel to another.
But
you’ll find him. He comes in here to cop every day—from me.”

Alex listened, felt good, and simultaneously
wondered what Wedo was doing to support a big heroin habit and the daily rates
of motels and hotels. No matter how curious he was
,
Alex couldn’t ask Itchy. Although he was just turning fifteen, Alex had
already incorporated many of the habits and values of the criminal
underworld—and strong among these was a ban on curiosity about
anyone’s “business.”

“Hey, man,” Itchy said,
“how ‘bout a fix?
A freebie?”

“Naw, man,” Alex said, trying to
show nonchalance. “I don’t dig the high. It makes me puke.”

“Just about everybody barfs the first
couple of
times.
It still makes you feel good, man,
good! Even the barfing doesn’t ruin it.”

“For me it does.”

“Okay. You ain’t doin’
nothin’, are you? Got somewhere to go?”

“No, a blank.”

“Well, carnal—me, I gotta fix
pretty soon… so like take a walk with me. Tell me what’s happenin’
at the old reform school alma mater since I got out… What happened to
that colored
guy
they claim killed that cleaning woman
in the ad building? The trial was going on when I left.”

“They’re still in trial—the
third one. He’s had two hung juries already.”

“You think he did it?”

“I got no idea. I know he can run with
a football. And he always seemed like a cool guy—didn’t fuck with
anybody or start trouble.”