Silent Boy (36 page)

Regardless, I gained great comfort from having the lists in front of me. I suspect the entire theory of behaviorism and its subsequent manifestations in the forms of behavior management and modification all came about in response to man’s infinite need to believe he understands his little bit of existence and can control it. Knowing what one is doing or at least believing one knows, especially when confirmed on paper, gives one a really incredible sense of power.

Kevin was considerably less enthusiastic about this whole matter. ‘How come it can’t be like it used to be?’ he asked me one afternoon.

‘Because how it used to be never got us anywhere.’

‘Yes, it did. I’m better. Look at me. I don’t sit under tables anymore. I’m not so afraid.’

‘Yes, but you’re still living in some lock-up joint like a thief, aren’t you?’

‘Yeah, but …’

‘Remember how you were always saying that you couldn’t understand how come it was you who was locked up when it was your stepfather who committed all the crimes? Well, I’m trying to change all that. I’m trying to get you out of here and where you belong. You want to get out of here, don’t you?’

‘Yeah, but …’

‘This is the only way I know how.’

‘Yeah, but …’ He frowned and turned away from me. ‘I mean, I do want to get out, but, well, it’s just that, well, I wish it was like it used to be. I liked it better.’

‘But it didn’t work.’

‘Yeah, but …’

As it turned out, there was only one real goal Kevin wanted to accomplish. He kept it from me for a long time, until one day when we were sitting in the warm, gold-shaded interview room.

‘You know – about goals? I got a goal,’ he said to me.

‘Oh? What’s that?’

He raised one side of his mouth in a self-conscious little expression. ‘Well, you wouldn’t laugh, would you? If I told you?’

‘No, of course not.’

I could see he was considering it carefully, weighing the risks of exposure in telling me. ‘I want to make myself into Bryan.’

‘I see.’

‘I think I decided on a way how. Is it a stupid goal?’

I shook my head. ‘No. How do you think you can do it?’

‘Learning to swim. I figure Bryan would swim. So I’m going to swim. I’m going to do it. I’ve decided that.’ He smiled gently. ‘If, of course, you wouldn’t mind teaching me.’

So off we started under the banner of contingency management. I plastered Kevin’s room with charts and we colored up graphs with bright Magic Markers, following day by day his progress toward the predetermined goals: personal hygiene (brush your teeth, xl, x2, x3; brush your hair; wash your face; wash your hands before meals; change your underwear; put on clean shirt; bonus point for everything done), group participation, individual activities, and so on and so on. I dealt in poker chips and gold stars and anything else I could find to motivate Kevin to earn. The payoffs were many and varied, little ones that he could earn through the day, medium-sized ones for the end of the day and big ones to be aimed at over a week or even longer, like going off the Seven Oaks campus. We colored and counted and charted. At home at night I would draw lines on logarithmic graph paper and keep charts in a binder on my desk. At work I would compare what we were doing with old charts I had done or with what the books said. The whole month of June passed that way, with me using up enough paper to kill a small forest and with Kevin dazed into action by the blitzkrieg.

Oddly, the one thing we did do together, the one thing that I had meant most to hitch up to Kevin’s management program but in the end never did, was swimming. There was a pool right there on the Seven Oaks grounds, so three times a week I brought my swimsuit and when we were done with our session, we went over to the pool and I endeavored to teach Kevin to swim. It was a wretched, protracted job but it became a secret communication between us, an act that superseded all the things we were trying to accomplish with words on paper. No matter what happened during the day, no matter how unsuccessful he was with his goals or in his sessions with me, we still went swimming. It developed into a war free zone. Swimming just happened, unconditionally, the way love does in other people’s lives.

When the school year had ended in mid-June, Charity’s relationship with Mrs Thatcher paled somewhat by virtue of the fact that Charity was no longer her student. Without the daily contact, Charity slipped a little. Her weight, which was almost down to normal, went up a few pounds and her behavior slackened. However, Mrs Thatcher made an effort to still see Charity and not to set her adrift entirely. That helped. Plus, Charity’s extended family absorbed her difficulties better in the summer because she frequently went out to see her cousins on the reservation, and the freedom of the dusty hills seemed to calm her down a little. But to compensate for those moments when she just did not know what to do with herself, Charity resumed living at my house.

Hence, when the warm weather of late June stretched out into July and Mrs Thatcher invited Charity out for a barbecue at the farm, Charity in turn invited Hugh and me to come with her. I had never met Mrs Thatcher previously and, needless to say, I was most curious about her. As undoubtedly she was about me. So one hot, hazy July evening we all loaded into Hugh’s van and headed out to the farm. With us also was Ransome, a fourteen-year-old cousin of Charity’s. He lived in one of the small towns on the reservation, but after persistent trouble with the law there, he’d been shipped in by the relatives to live with Charity’s branch of the family for a while. He was a tall, handsome, sullen-looking youth with his hair grown long and a band around his forehead, like an Apache. He wore only jeans, no shirt, no shoes. Hugh and I exchanged looks over his head as we got into the car. Ransome never said a word to either of us.

The Thatchers had a delightful place, a small mixed-animal farm in an area mostly overrun by huge, sprawling ranches. Chickens scattered as we drove up the long, dusty drive, and a goat tied to the railing of the front porch bleated a greeting. Mrs Thatcher came running out to meet us. She had an apron hitched up under her boobs and gray hair tied back in a kerchief. I loved the woman immediately and dearly; she had that warm, unpretentious familiarity of Western women and greeted us like family. Then she brought us around back of the house to meet the other guests as we waited for the beef on the spit to finish cooking.

The children ran off to play in the pasture after we had eaten. Hugh and I stayed a while longer to chat with the Thatchers and with some of the other guests, but we really did not know a soul there aside from Charity. After a decent amount of time had passed, we excused ourselves to go for a walk. Privately, I was worrying about Ransome, whom I had not seen since dinner, and Hugh was just plain tired of all the sitting and the small talk and the barbecue smoke.

Dusk was approaching, although the sun was still on the horizon. Twilight lasted forever during those months, when the day remained suspended between light and dark. Hand in hand, Hugh and I strolled along the small lanes adjoining the farm. They were not much more than Jeep tracks in most cases and ran along barbed-wire fences.

It was not until we got to the far pasture near the river that I finally spotted Ransome. The Thatchers had accepted ten head of wild mustang ponies from the Bureau of Land Management and there among them he was. Ransome obviously knew what he was doing there, barefoot and shirtless, the sweat gleaming along his brown body. He waved the mustangs one way and then the other as they ran by. Then a small mare with a foal at her side broke out from the others. He grabbed her by the mane and bolted onto her back. She was just a wild pony, small and wiry, and his feet nearly touched the ground beneath her. But she wasn’t used to being ridden and she galloped fiercely, kicking and twisting. Ransome, his long black hair flowing, lay low against her neck and refused to be unseated.

It was a magic thing to watch, like March hares in the moonlight, and I was beguiled, wanting his shameless, stolen ride to last forever. But he saw us and within moments had slipped to the ground.

For several seconds he paused, clearly weighing the merits of running from us. But he didn’t. After a minute or two, he sauntered over.

‘I wasn’t hurting them,’ he said.

‘No,’ said Hugh, ‘we could see that.’

‘It’s easy to do.’ Ransome turned and looked over his shoulder at the horses, still frenzied from his presence. ‘It’s something my grandfather taught me how to do. He taught me so that I would know what it is to live when other men are just surviving.’

Back at the farmhouse where Charity and the other kids were roasting marshmallows over the embers on the grill, Mrs Thatcher and I sat in the shadows and talked. I was enjoying the company of another teacher, and we relived good times. When the phone rang, I was startled to discover it was for me.

Jules was on the other end. Seven Oaks had telephoned the emergency number at the clinic. ‘I was supposed to relay this to you,’ Jules said. ‘There’s been a breakout. Three boys. One of them was your Kevin.’

My Kevin. Those words echoed inside my head as Hugh drove me home to get my car. And they were still in my head when I began the forty-mile drive down to Seven Oaks. My Kevin.

It was almost ten-thirty when I pulled into the parking lot at Seven Oaks. Police cars crowded an otherwise empty lot. All the lights were ablaze in the main office.

Kevin and two other boys, Carlos and Troy, had run off sometime between supper and 7:30 group-activity time. No one knew exactly how they got away or in which direction, but the general consensus seemed to be that they must have walked down the riverbed. Because of the long heat wave, the river was low, and large parts of the bed now lay exposed that normally weren’t. It provided one of the few ways off the grounds, if one were small enough or wiry enough to slip between the fencing and the water itself. And it allowed for quite a long run in the protection of the willows, if one didn’t mind rocks.

I sighed wearily when Bill told me that. All I could think of was that this was what my efforts at swimming had wrought. Kevin was no longer afraid of water.

Carlos was the kind of boy who ran. He had run before from Seven Oaks and once had managed to stay free for almost two weeks. He was fourteen, tough and streetwise. Troy, the youngest of the three at twelve, was a rowdy little kid with no conscience and a string of arrests for arson and thievery. He, too, was streetwise and clever at things like purveying drugs and tobacco, so he had a good chance of surviving in the counterculture, if he could make it that far.

And then there was Kevin. An unlikelier member of this trio there could not have been. His inclusion shocked everybody, mostly because he had not been considered a high-risk kid. Why should he run? Where would he run to? They all kept pestering me with variations on these questions. Did I know? Did I have any ideas? No. I didn’t. All I could think of was that he had decided to go after his stepfather again but I was praying it wasn’t true. As I wrestled a Dr Pepper out of the pop machine and settled into a chair in the office for the long wait, they continued to quiz me. Tell us this. Tell us that. Tell us more about Kevin. And I realized once again how little I really knew him.

I stayed in the office until almost half-past two in the morning. By then even the caffeine in the colas couldn’t keep me awake any longer, and I had to give in and go home. Anyhow, nothing was happening. Despite the efforts of policemen and counselors and locals who might have seen the boys cross their land, not a single clue emerged. Thus, I wearily said good-bye to everyone, drank the last of my pop and went out to the car to start the long drive home.

I was full of a kind of listless melancholy as I drove. Undoubtedly it had something to do with the fact that I was overtired and hyped up on too much caffeine, but all I could think of was Kevin going off one more time to do his stepfather in. I
knew
in my heart of hearts he had. What was the use? I asked myself. What was the point of working with this boy? Had I accomplished anything worthwhile? Would I ever? Concrete accomplishments didn’t usually matter that much to me, but here in the summer darkness, I longed for just one indication that somewhere in all these months with Kevin I had made a difference. In a way, I thought, it would have been much easier to face a rousing defeat than this long, long, drawn-out journey through limbo.

The next day the authorities caught up with Carlos. He was in a town about twenty miles south of the city and had been picked up shoplifting. Carlos was returned to Seven Oaks and upon his arrival was cloistered away with the rest of us and quizzed on the whereabouts of the other two. They had split up almost immediately after escaping, Carlos said. There had been an argument. Then Carlos refused to say more. What the argument had been about, we could not pull from him.

I talked to Carlos later to see if Kevin had given any indication about where he was headed. Did he mention his stepfather? I asked. Did he have any weapons? Carlos just shrugged and gave the sort of half nod kids give to indicate the end of the conversation.

Three more days passed before the police found Kevin and Troy. They were still together. They had made it up to the suburbs of the city but no farther and were discovered hiding in an old tarpaper shack under the bridge by the railway tracks. Both of them were half-starved and dead tired, when they arrived, hauled unceremoniously back in the rear of a police van.

When I went in to see Kevin after he had cleaned up and been fed, I found him lying face down on his bed. The exhaustion showed. They had survived on two cans of pork and beans and a package of cookies Troy had managed to nick from a grocery store. Kevin must have lost at least five pounds. But it was the exhaustion that showed most of all.