The next morning the deputy superintendent came to see if Chester and Alex were through fighting and ready to go back out with other boys, though to a regular company rather than Receiving company. Chester was ready to promise anything, and Alex went along with the attitude expected of him, although he was really content to stay indefinitely where he was—as long as he had enough to read.
* * *
“B” Company was in its dayroom when the escort brought Alex in before supper. The boys sat in silence, arms folded, on hard benches around three sides of the long room, while the counselor and monitors were in chairs on a landing up three steps, as if onstage. The proscenium was the frame of the bars and the grille gate, beyond which was the rest of the company quarters.
All the watching eyes burned into Alex from faces already trained in hardened repose, and he colored and looked along the floor. It was concrete, but waxed and buffed to gleam like varnished maple. No human blemishes marred its surface. Alex saw that every boy except himself was in stocking feet.
The seated counselor was speaking to him, and he could see a yellow nicotine stain at the base of the man’s lower teeth, but he couldn’t see his eyes—they were hidden behind wire-framed, tinted glasses, and they caught the sunlight through the window. The man was swarthy and his name was Miranda, that much Alex understood from the words. A pointed finger told him to remove his shoes, and one of the monitors, fetching him a folded rag of gray blanket, told him to buff away the marks he’d made.
The shoes encumbered him, but he didn’t know what to do with them. His face flamed, and he knew he looked like a fool.
“Put them down, dummy,” Mr. Miranda said, his voice cutting through the silence, eliciting a few snorts and snickers before his glance stifled them.
Just as Alex got on his knees and his rump jutted up, someone made a loud farting sound. Laughter followed, and although Alex was embarrassed to the point of pain, he managed a lopsided, cemetery grin to convey camaraderie.
“It’s funny, yes?” Mr. Miranda asked. “Someone makes a foul sound with their mouth, and you young heathens think it’s hilarious.”
Alex had raised himself upright, though still on his knees.
“Nobody told you to stop,” Mr. Miranda said, flicking a hand and dismissing him back to work.
Alex kept at it until the company went to eat supper.
After supper they stayed outdoors until dark. They had the softball diamond area, but a vote switched the game to dodgeball instead. The forty boys became a herd, and Mr. Miranda hurled a white volleyball into it. The boy it hit came out and threw, and then a second boy joined him. At first it was impossible to miss, and those hit slowly formed a large circle. As more came out, those who remained had more room to dodge, leaping, ducking, feinting one way and jumping another, running from one side of the circle to the other. The boys yelled in triumph and dismay. Alex was caught up in the game, enjoying himself immensely. He was still in the circle when just five others remained, more because others threw at their friends than because of his agility. Finally, a ball missed everyone, and before he could scurry to the far side, he tripped and fell down just four feet from the boy with the ball. Moments later he was a member of the circle.
It wasn’t until shower time, just before bed, that he realized how few of the boys were white—not more than half a dozen among forty. Nearly every torso and pair of legs was olive or brown. He wondered why it was, but otherwise he had no feelings about it. During the fight with Chester, when he had been getting the better of it, he hadn’t attached any significance to the grumbling blacks, and if asked what it meant, he would have answered that they simply knew and liked Chester. Clem had always used “nigger” and “kike,” and because these were said so easily by the father, the son didn’t know they were offensive.
He learned otherwise on Sunday morning. The boys had to attend church, Catholic or Protestant, and since he wasn’t Catholic he went to the other, which was really just fervent volunteers in shiny, cheap suits, poor sinners who had found Jesus and were offering him to these troubled children. There was much praising the Lord and singing of “The Old Rugged Cross” and “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” On the way out the boys were each given a candy bar. Alex didn’t want his, and two boys immediately clamored for it. “Eenie, meenie, minie, moe,” he said, the timeworn child’s litany, thoughtless and without malice. “Catch a nigger by the toe.…” Suddenly looming in front of Alex was a whipcord-lean thirteen-year-old with chocolate features twisted in anger, fists clenched in challenge. Alex stood his ground and put his hands up, because he knew no other way. A bony black fist whacked into his nose, knocking him on the seat of his pants and bringing forth a stream of blood. When he was getting up, puzzled and afraid because he was overmatched, the counselor ran over between them. This time it was a different counselor, one who liked the black youth, so he sent Alex to the washroom to stanch the blood and afterward made Alex apologize for using the word. Alex never again used “nigger,” except—very rarely—as a curse of hate directed at a specific individual. He never used it just with whites, feeling it was wrong to be two-faced.
The following week he was fully impressed with the differences and divisions of race when a husky white fourteen-year-old called “Okie” got into a scrap with a Mexican in the schoolhouse latrine. Okie was big and strong, but as he rammed the Mexican youth against a wall, four other Chicanos leaped at him. One white youth came to Okie’s aid, and both took a beating before the uproar brought an adult to the rescue. All involved were older boys, on a different level than a eleven-year-old, so Alex just watched, but finally he understood. Thereafter he was conscious of race, self-conscious whenever skin color was different, until he’d had some sign about attitudes. One part of innocence was over.
Days drifted into weeks of routine in a world similar to the schools he’d known, but it was different, too—tougher, crueler, and a greater challenge. All the boys spoke atrocious English laced with vulgarity, and his own precise grammar stood out, though it began to change slightly, like a bright leaf with the first dot of brown mold at its edge. His vocabulary was extensive for his age, and often the other boys couldn’t understand a word he used. So instead of using the vocabulary he’d been proud of, it became a habit to use simpler words. Sometimes he had to think consciously of an easier word, and it gave him a sort of hesitant stutter. The boys used the word “motherfucker,” which he’d never heard previously. “Fuck” had been rare and daring, and “motherfucker” slapped him for a while.
A probation officer called him to the front office for an interview. A clinical psychologist summoned him to the hospital, and he took tests, saying what he saw in ink blots, putting blocks together, reciting numbers backward and forward, figuring out puzzles.
He didn’t think about his future. The world of Juvenile Hall pressed lives too closely together for him to dream as he used to. The hours were scheduled tightly, from lights-on to lights-out. Only on Sunday evening did he feel his lonely condition. On Sunday afternoons the boys had visitors, and nearly every boy had someone, usually a whole family. Families could leave bags of candy, cookies, and magazines. After supper the bags were distributed. While the bags were being passed out, he sat alone, sunk into himself, shaking his head if someone offered him something. In his pain was bitter anger, a way of coping with it.
He had no friends in the company and was pretty much ignored. He’d established that he would fight if bothered, so he was left alone. The half dozen other whites were older and from different backgrounds, nearly all of them affecting ducktails and low pants. Two were cousins and bragged that they had been charged with murder. They had shot a hobo walking along the railroad grade behind their house with a .22 rifle stolen from a neighbor’s bedroom. No newspapers were allowed, so the claim was unverified. True or not, it was their prestige in a world where rank depended on skill at violence. The toughest boys were the most respected, even if the toughest were slobbering cretins. Most of the ado
lescents had committed some crime—broken into a house or got caught rifling glove compartments. A few had stolen cars, and one twelve-year-old black, Lewis—he seemed much older—had been caught burglarizing gas stations for ration stamps which he then peddled lucratively in his neighborhood. This boy seemed always ready to smile in a warm but superior way, and when the company was seated on the benches and forbidden to talk, which was for hour-long periods several times a day, Lewis always read a book. Nobody else did so except Alex, though it was the one activity Mr. Miranda allowed.
Books were sneered at, but nobody sneered at Lewis. On boxing day nobody would put the gloves on with him. Although Alex couldn’t call him a friend, Lewis was the first to notice that he had no visitors and to offer cookies from what his own family left. Once when an older black crowded in front of Alex at the sink in the washroom, Alex pushed back, and before the uneven fight could start, Lewis stepped in and stopped it. He didn’t make the black give back the sink but instead gave Alex his own.
At the school, Alex had Lulu, who was friendly when they were in the classroom. But during recess, when the boys withdrew into groups, Lulu ignored him, though he sometimes picked Alex for his softball team ahead of boys with more ability. He was from Temple Street, and there were several boys from his neighborhood gang in Juvenile Hall. He hung out with them and had time for Alex only when they weren’t around.
Only to Chester did Alex talk very much, as if the fight and being in seclusion had cemented the friendship. Chester had four brothers and two sisters, and his father was in the army; his mother worked as a cleaning woman in a hotel, and the children were pretty much on their own. He wanted to be a professional baseball player. This was his third trip to Juvenile Hall, and he was waiting to go to a county camp for six months. He planned to run away as soon as he got there.
* * *
One morning, without warning, Alex was among a score of boys taken to court in a battered gray bus with wire mesh on the windows. The juvenile court was in the Hall of Justice, and the bus pulled into a tunnel beneath the tall building, parking near a sign of a red arrow with CORONER and MORGUE above it. They rode a freight elevator to the eighth floor and went down a tunnel to a windowless room with walls defaced by graffiti—some in pencil, some gouged into the paint. They were mostly names, but some were crude drawings of immense phalluses or female breasts and crotch, the last merely a dark triangle. No matter how crude and distorted the drawings, Alex looked at them with curiosity, wondering how closely they approached reality.
Most of the boys were pensive while waiting to be called, though one who had already been in reform school and knew he was going back was angry and contemptuous. Among the first half dozen to be called, four were put on probation and two were committed to county camps. One of the two broke into tears—he’d expected to go home—and the reform-school graduate began kicking him in the shins, spitting on him and telling him to shut up. This cruelty elicited nervous snickers from the others. Alex had neither fear nor hope of what was going to happen, but he would never show any feelings that might bring ridicule. Everyone looked up to the reform-school boy and looked down on the crybaby.
A key turned in the lock, and a uniformed bailiff called Alex’s name. In the hallway the boy was startled by the crowd. Somehow he’d expected the corridor to be empty and silent, an image garnered from the movies. Instead it was packed. Theater-style chairs with foldup seats lined one wall, and each seat was filled with a body. Many people stood up, and the bailiff held his arm and led him in a weaving route through the press of bodies. The crowd was mostly frazzled-looking women, poor and prematurely worn. For each woman there was a sullen boy—plus toddlers and babies. The few men there were also grizzled and seamed, looking stiff and uncomfortable in their ill-fitting Sunday clothes. As in Juvenile Hall, most of the faces were chocolate or olive, and the voices maimed diction or rattled in Spanish.
The brass doorplate read: HARRINGTON P. WYMORE, REFEREE. Alex had only a moment to read it before the bailiff opened the door. The light filtering through immense Venetian blinds struck his eyes, momentarily dazing him as they entered, so he heard a rattle of polite, dry laughter to some previous quip before he could see faces emerging from the glare. He was in an aisle with two rows of empty chairs on each side, facing a long, wide, and highly polished table. One man in a dark suit sat in the middle; another was at the end, a pile of folders in front of him. A middle-aged woman, whose corpulent body seemed to consume the chair she spilled over, was next to the window, pencil in hand, seated at the table.
The man in the middle, who seemed dwarfed by the table, had his head bent forward, exposing thinning gray hair on a narrow skull, but his eyes and features were hidden. One bony hand was turning typewritten pages, until he paused and finally looked up. For the first time Alex was afraid—not the tight knot of physical fear before he got into a fight or did something dangerous, but the dull hollowness that sucks strength because one understands powerlessness when confronted by power. It wasn’t fear of what the narrow-visaged old man might do but a sense that nothing could be done about it. When the judge looked up, it seemed like a signal for the others to do the same, focusing their eyes on him as if they could tell something about him by his face in repose. The judge glanced to the stenographer to make sure her pencil was ready.
“The number here is A, five, five, zero, four, zero,” the judge intoned, “on a petition In loco parentis filed by the probation department on behalf of Alexander Hammond, a juvenile.” He paused and looked into the boy’s eyes. “I’m very sorry about your father.”
For a few seconds Alex screwed up his face in perplexity, not understanding what the man meant. Sorry about what? It wasn’t that Alex had stopped thinking about his father’s death, though emotional wounds turn quickly to scar tissue in an eleven-year-old. Rather, this expression of sympathy was so far from what Alex had expected that he didn’t know what the words referred to. His puzzlement showed, and the judge blinked rapidly, taken aback.
“Your father,” he said, as if to clarify or remind.
“My father’s dead, sir.”
“That’s why I was saying I was sorry.”
“Oh.”
The judge flushed red blotches through his gray skin, then pushed his glasses higher up on his nose, as if this would let him observe better this strange boy sitting primly with hands folded in his lap. The psychiatric report mentioned a lack of “affect,” and the off-kilter reply seemed to confirm it.
“You know why you’re here, Alex, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“We’re not here to punish you … but to help you. How do you feel about what you did?”
Feel? Alex wished he hadn’t shot the man, was sorry about his condition, but there was nothing to feel. Yet he instinctively knew that the judge wanted to hear something different. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said. Then he added, “I didn’t think when I did it. I was … scared … and it just happened.” He tossed a shoulder.
“But you were in the man’s store.”
“We were hungry, sir. I didn’t think—”
“You know it’s wrong to steal, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“But you’ve stolen before. You ran away from the Valley Home for Boys because you were caught shoplifting.”
“I wasn’t,” Alex said quickly, his body stiffening and voice rising. “They said I did but I didn’t.”
“Why would they lie?”
“I don’t know.”
“I can’t imagine, either.… Then there’s this temper of yours. You’ve been in several fights in the last three weeks, and you attacked the woman at the Valley Home the evening you ran away.… And those tantrums. Now you’re just a little boy, but if you can’t train your temper by the time you grow up … when you weigh a hundred and eighty pounds you’ll be dangerous.”
The judge stopped to sip some water from a glass beside a carafe. Alex watched his Adam’s apple bob and tried—u
nsuccessfully—to imagine weighing a hundred and eighty pounds.
“I don’t know what to do with you, son. You’re a smart boy, and although you haven’t had a happy childhood, it couldn’t very well be described as deprived. You’ve always had enough to eat.… Committing you to the Youth Authority and sending you to a state school is what the probation officer recommends, but that’s the final alternative. We can always do that if we can’t help you any other way. You’re too young for our county camps, and I don’t know if that would be any good for you anyway. You’ve got emotional problems. A foster home isn’t the answer … you’ve been through them. So I’m going to order that you go to the state hospital at Camarillo for a ninety-day observation period. If the staff there needs more time we can extend it. Maybe they can help you, or tell me what to do for you. You’re a troubled child and—”
The closing words faded out of the boy’s consciousness. He was going to a nuthouse! Maybe I am crazy, he thought. I don’t feel crazy … but how does a crazy person feel? They must know something about what they’re doing. The thought frightened him so that he had to fight back tears.
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