And, in a manner of speaking, the dick was right. He and Whit got along just fine. Whit was most cooperative. He eagerly answered all questions put to him, and the dick beamed, much pleased widi himself. “Now we’re getting somewhere,” he said, and the questioning continued. Whit obligingly told the dick everything he wanted to know. Except for the fact that it was unabashed hokum, the cop would have gotten himself a promotion on the strength of it. Instead, he ended up with a fairy tale and no prisoner.
When they began to fingerprint Whit, he shoved over a table, ran out of the room, into another room and jumped out an open window. He got away.
That made it a game. You got away with anything you were smart enough to get away with.
Sometimes events would move too swiftly and crowd Whit, not give him time to think. When this happened he would go off by himself. He would go to the hills and stand there, looking down, thinking.
One day he had been a slave whose masters were contemptuous of him. The next he had rebelled; he had declared himself free. And the irony was that, without doubt, he soon would be enjoying his stolen freedom in jail.
What would the good people think, should they suspect for a moment that he regarded crime more as the projection of a philosophical war between ideas into physical terms than as a means of getting something for nothing?
The game of cops and robbers was the most competitive game in the world. Whit liked the rewards of that game and he gave not a damn for the penalties, but that didn’t erase the fact that he was contemptuous of those rewards. Those who preached, “You can’t win; you can’t outsmart the law!” were nothing more than talking parrots or provocateurs; the most’they could accomplish was to excite him and his kind to anger, greater defiance. To act out the disproof.
Why wasn’t all this obvious? Whit knew and he didn’t know. He cared and he didn’t care.
Whit stood on the grass looking down. A wire fence ran around three sides of the walkway that surrounded the swimming pool. The building housing the dressing rooms was on the far side, away from him. He stood right where the grassy earth of the park sloped downward rather abruptly. He stood and looked, intently, fixedly. The anger started with a tightening in his belly, and it was not a blind anger. But it was an anger that insisted he ignore everything except the object inspiring it.
Sonny. Sonny stood at the fence enclosing the swimming pool, talking to a tall, blond girl in a two-piece bathing suit. Talking big talk, with two cohorts feeding him his lines, stooging for him. One of the two was the leering Charley. T-shirted, Sonny looked huge, brutishly huge and tanned. He was smoking a cigarette and he held it through the fence so the blonde could take a drag. She did and puffed the smoke out foolishly, in a cloud, without first having inhaled it. Then she said, addressing Sonny with her eyes as well as her voice, “You wait right here. I’ll be out in a jiffy.” She disappeared into the girls’ dressing room with a suggestive twitch of her ample der-riere. Sonny whistled appreciatively.
And Whit’s anger grew much colder. The afternoon was hot and the sky cloudless but he couldn’t feel the burning warmth of the summer sun. He could feel only the dry, cold anger as it writhed within him, changing him, not subtly but crudely. He had to hold himself back. He had to wait, no matter how hard waiting was. He surely could stand waiting a few more minutes. For weeks he had waited. He had seen Sonny from a distance during those weeks; but he hadn’t been ready. The time hadn’t been right. Now it was.
Keyed up, he waited for them at the head of the stairs. Sonny came first, with a cocky walk, with the blond girl beside him. Sonny’s two pals, his two stooges, were bringing up the rear.
Whit said casually, with mock deference, “Hello, Sonny.”
“Yeah, hello,” Sonny said, not even bothering to glance at Whit.
Then Sonny was almost beside him, and Whit said, “It’s me, Sonny. It’s your old friend Whit.”
Sonny stopped, abruptly. He had been hearing stories about Whit, how Whit had changed. Sonny measured Whit with his eyes, “fronting” for the blonde. “Well,” he said, “if it ain’t the gutless wonder. You looking for another ass-kicking, maybe?”
Whit was grinning, the way a skull grins. “No,” he said, shaking his head, keeping his eyes riveted on Sonny, but seeing the others too. “No, that’s not what I’m looking for. I just wanted to tell you what a vile, rotten, lying dog you are, Sonny. I just wanted you to know I knew.”
For an instant Sonny’s jaw fell open, and he couldn’t believe his ears. Then the enormity of the words sunk in.
“Why, you . . .”
Whit held the revolver in his right hand. The blonde’s eyes grew wide, round at the sight of it. She and Sonny’s two stooges froze. And once more Sonny hesitated, trying to convince himself his eyes were deceiving him.
“It’s loaded, Sonny. And I know how to use it.”
“You ain’t got the guts,” Sonny said, but without conviction.
“Then take one step toward me and find out. Take that step and I’ll blow you to hell.”
Sonny blustered, “I got a notion to take that pop gun away from you and shove it where it’ll fit.” But he couldn’t bring himself to take the step.
“Why don’t you try to take the gun away from me, Sonny?” And then it was Whit who took that one step forward. “Please, Sonny, please try to take it away from me.”
Whit’s voice was faint and hoarse. Anger amounting almost to blood lust had taken hold of him. It was goading him. Sibilant words of hate were pouring from his lips without his being more than partially aware of what he was saying: that those who arbitrarily took advantage of others who were smaller were unspeakably vile. That he would happily kill all the Sonnys in the world. That he’d like to squash them as bugs are squashed.
And then, having spoken the theretofore unworded hate inside him, the cold, destructive anger left Whit.
The sun was back in the sky and its warmth could be felt. Sonny once more stood in front of him, a real, live person again. And Whit could see he had spat in Sonny’s face. And that face was ugly with fear, a more terrible fear because of the degradation it imposed.
Whit felt no triumph. Disgust, revulsion, but not triumph. Rational once more, he smiled and said with an excess of politeness, “You caused me to lose Barbara, Sonny. Your filthy mouth caused that. You trampled on something I thought was sacred and your rotten mind soiled it. So now I’m getting even, Sonny. I’m taking the blonde here. She’s going with me. And if you or your two stooges don’t like it, or if you tell anybody about it, I’ll kill all three of you. That’s not a threat, that’s* a promise. Now scram. All of you.”
He watched them go.
There followed a series of gun fights, arrests, escapes and attempted escapes from juvenile detention homes and police stations, interviews by psychologists and social workers, appearances before juvenile court referees.
Tim started it off when he was arrested in a stolen car. He was drunk, cocky and defiant when first taken to the police station, but the officers were familiar with his kind. They talked tough and shoved him around a little, not hurting him but scaring the daylights out of him. This psychology worked. In the language of the street, Tim then spilled his guts. He told everything he knew, implicating Bobby, Virginia, himself and all the others, including some who had ridden in stolen cars without knowing they were stolen.
The police called at Whit’s home when he was away and his father promised he would bring his son to the station. When Whit returned home that evening, Serl and Hallie had a talk with him. Between themselves, before Whit had returned home, they had concluded their son had fallen into bad company. They told Whit they wanted him to give himself up, to take his medicine and get a new start. They said they would stand by him.
“O.K.,” Whit readily agreed, “I’ll do exactly what you want.”
And he did. Accompanied by his father, he walked into the police station and surrendered. “I’ll make you a deal,” he told the lieutenant of detecti
ves in charge of the investigation. “I’ll tell you everything I’ve done and that I know has been done, but not who did it, if you’ll promise to let everybody go but me and my pal Tim. We’re the only really guilty ones.”
After asking a few questions to satisfy himself that Whit meant what he said, the lieutenant agreed and kept the bargain. None of the others involved was ever arrested. Many of them are respected citizens today, substantial young men and women without a mark against them. Three of them volunteered for military service and gave their lives to their country during World War II.
As a result of Whit’s deal with the police, he and Tim were committed to a—but a different—forestry camp maintained by the county for young delinquents. Each escaped. Each was recaptured. Whit escaped again, again was taken into custody after a wild adventure. Then he was committed to reform school.
The month was September. The year, 1937.
• 11 •
A Reformation Factory
This was “reform” school. A reformation factory.
A group of buildings, some old, some new, out in the sticks. Out in rolling farm country. With the big cities far off but beckoning. Unseen, and glittering all the more because of it.
A school of industry, they called it, with its old-fashioned, ugly, brick administration building squatting on “the hill,” but rising up, not proudly, and visible for miles around. A stern puritan of a building.
A school of industry, with its seven hundred odd charges. A school of industry bulging widi charges, with boys, young men between fifteen and twenty-one years, of all sizes and shapes. With young rebels and young savages and young fools. With young minds, some twisted, some warped, some wounded, some confused. All dirown together. Put on the conveyor belt. Mass production correction. . . .
Whit’s indoctrination began with suddenness and violence. His first day in the receiving company, he was jabbed in the ribs by the captain for getting out’ of step as the company marched to the dining room. Whit expressed his indignation.
“You don’t like it, huh, peewee?” asked the cadet officer, a lean, redheaded youngster.
“No,” Whit said; “I don’t like it, huh.”
“Well, you will before I get through with you,” the captain assured him, “because I got a way of learning you to like it.”
Still naive in the savage ways of his new environment, Whit wondered, as he ate his meal in the huge B.D.R.—boy’s dining room—how this brick-topped cadet officer would go about learning him to like it. He found out that night when, in the dressing room and after the rest of the company had undressed, pegged their clothes, and were passed to their dormitory cots, the captain started slapping him around, his two lieutenants standing nearby.
Whit fought back, and when he did all three cadet officers battered him with their fists. He was hospitalized with a broken nose and a fractured jaw. When questioned sharply by school personnel about the beating, he said it had been his fault, that he had started the fight. The statement was not prompted by fear but by the conviction that what had happened to him was his personal problem. He would look out for himself or get his brains scrambled worse than they already were.
Red, the captain, visited Whit at the hospital. “So you’re no stoolie, huh, peewee?” Red said. “That’s good. I been talking to some of your friends from LA. They tell me you’re an all right guy even if you are a shrimp. I heard you rode the beef for a lot of other people when your partner squealed. That made me feel bad about the other night, so I came to see you and thought maybe we could be friends, huh?”
It was difficult to speak with a swollen, fractured jaw, but Whit managed. “Sure, Red,” he said, “I’d like that. And forget about the other night. I already have.”
“You’re O.K.,” Red said. “You know, usually you shrimps are wise guys. I guess that’s what fooled me, because I thought you was a smart little snitch at first. I felt like hell when I found out different.”
Thinking it over later, Whit realized he had learned something extremely important from Red: Don’t be a wise guy. Be tough, be “right,” but not wise in the sense of thinking you know all the answers and running off at the mouth all the time. And never tell a policeman or anyone else in authority the right time.
After that, more and more, Whit aligned himself with that hard core of tough young rebels who, conscious of the fact or not, were serving their apprenticeship in crime. The reasons for their rebellion were many: a broken home, no parental supervision, poverty, feelings of antagonism or rejection, a craving for thrills, adventure, a good time, a power or sex impulse. And once they had had a taste of the false freedom of living outside the law, rebelliously, as nonconformists, their former lives seemed tame and insipid by contrast. They were young, impressionable rebels, and because such rebels must have a cause they made their cause crime.
They justified that cause—society, they believed, didn’t give a damn about them personally; so why should they give a damn about society? They idealized that cause. They observed its code, its proprieties. They said you didn’t squeal. They said you were fiercely loyal to one of your kind and to hell with all the rest. They said you had to be tough and able to take it. They said to hell with authority in any form; when authority got hold of you you out-toughed or out-slicked it. You’d “shoot an angle.” They embraced the necessarily cynical philosophy of that cause. The squares with dough—the hoosiers, the marks, the chumps—would have to look out for themselves. The only thing you ever regretted was getting caught; and if you were caught you didn’t let them con you or break you.
Unwittingly, the citizen who clamors for more and severer laws, bigger and tougher jails and prisons, harsher punishments is crime’s most successful recruiting officer, for his loud voice is always heard and his heavy hand felt by the young rebel who invariably reacts against that voice and hand with increased hostility.
There must be laws and law enforcement, of course. But society must understand that the delinquent who worships toughness, and who mistakenly equates that toughness with lawlessness, will never live within the law, tractably, at peace with his fellows, simply because of a fear of consequences, however dire. Society must understand, too, that it is considerably cheaper, more humane and more practical to salvage the potential young criminal than it is to destroy his spirit or so harden it that he turns into professional badman and killer.
The months he spent at the school were memorable ones for Whit. Memorable for their savagery and violence. Memorable, too, for what they taught. Whit soon learned how cruel youth can be to its own, and how a systematized cruelty was encouraged by those in charge. Here, violence was a virtue, and rewarded accordingly. The boys were kept in line by other boys, and snitching, finking to The Man was encouraged. God help you if you were small, had any personal sense of honor and showed the least inclination to be a man.
When released from the hospital, Whit was transferred to another company where the younger inmates, who were not yet chronic disciplinary problems, were quartered. Quite a few of these were snotty brats who hadn’t long been away from mama. These were especially vicious, especially quick to turn against each other and become tools of The Man. Whit noted this and considered it wrong. He had it in his head they should stick together and not be used. Custody should be The Man’s worry alone. But it wasn’t. The Man had his cadet officers and his detail boys, and he gave you two hundred extra credits toward release for catching anodier boy trying to escape. And, of course, there were the clever ones who talked or bullied other youngsters into making escape attempts and then grabbed them for the credits. Whit cheerfully hated the guts of the escape-catchers and those who made them possible.
At his own request he was made a cadet officer, thinking he could change this, that by his own example he could show the others they didn’t have to prey upon each other like jungle animals. But several of the would-be tough guys mistook his actions for weakness. They reasoned that he had to be weak because he didn’t swagger and pose a
nd growl and throw Sunday punches and try to make sex perverts or “punks” out of the small and the frightened. Because he said “please” and “thank you” to everybody, not just to The Man.
So they took advantage of him and The Man asked him if he couldn’t run the company “the way it’s supposed to be run.” The Man told him if he couldn’t he would find somebody who could. And the word got around. Forced into it, Whit began to fight, reluctantly at first. He learned that another cadet officer was agitating the whole company against him because he didn’t fit into the pattern. Whit and this other cadet officer tangled; they had quite a battle, and The Man got rid of Whit, had him transferred to another company, the Foreign Legion, it was called. E Company. By chance, the cadet officers in E Company all were released on parole within two weeks after Whit’s transfer and the supervisor in charge made Whit captain, perhaps more as a grim joke than anything, since Whit was one of the smallest and most pleasant boys in the company.
But he ran the company. He ran it without “copping Sundays,” catching any who attempted to escape or telling The Man anything, and not as a policeman. He ran it by fighting whenever he had to, which was often. There were those who wanted his job, who wanted to make a reputation as tough guys, bad dukes, at his expense. Whit was often battered to the borderline of insensibility. But he never quit. Something inside himself wouldn’t let him. No matter how badly he found himself being beaten, he stood his ground and, grinning hideously, would continue fighting until his arm-weary opponent grew sick at the sight of his own gory handiwork and quit.
Once a company supervisor, who took pleasure in watching his youthful charges battle, chided one iron-fisted young stalwart for quitting under such conditions. “Dammit,” was this youngster’s gasped retort, “what good would it do to keep pounding on a grinning little bastard who doesn’t know when he’s beat?”
Cell 2455, Death Row Page 12