Nobody answered. The two lacing their shoes sat motionless. If Constantine summoned the Man, they would spend the night naked in a stripped cell and the next few months doing road-gang work in Thomas Jefferson Cottage. Alex, too, was near panic—for a few moments. But when Constantine looked at him, he’d realized that a yell wouldn’t be heard upstairs, and Constantine wasn’t leaving this room. Maybe Alex would have trouble alone, but three of them could surely overpower him.
Constantine read Alex’s eyes, and the confident smile dissolved. He started to edge backward, but Alex took a long stride, grabbed Constantine’s nightgown front with both hands, and swung him around, deeper into the room, so now he was more or less surrounded.
“Hey! What the fuck!”
“What the fuck! Your ass.”
Watkins and JoJo had scrambled up, shoes on but untied.
“We should stomp your ass,” Alex said, his pleasure at this power making him forget momentarily freedom’s imminence.
“Why, man? What’d I do?”
“You’re a fuckin’ fink, that’s why.”
“I’m no fink, man.”
“Whaa! What the fuck are you, then?”
“It’s my job. I wanna go home as quick as I can.”
“So you fuck over other people.”
“Easy, Alex … cool it,” Watkins said, gently touching Alex’s shoulder. “I know Constantine. He’s okay.” He patted Constantine’s shoulder; only Alex could see the wink.
Despite the wink, Alex wanted to plant his fist in Constantine’s eye. The codes of the underworld were becoming Alex’s own, written on his forming personality by his experience. By the code, Constantine was a stool pigeon, even if some thought otherwise because of his job.… He couldn’t interfere with them, or get out to sound an alarm—so fuck him.…
“Look here, Connie,” Watkins said. “We’ve got an extra pack of Luckies. No use takin’ ’em. We can get plenty out there—”
Now the blood was pounding in Alex’s head. The Luckies were in his pocket.
JoJo had finished lacing his shoes and was tucking in his shirt. He was conscious of his appearance no matter what the situation. “Hey, man, you won’t give us up to the Man after we’re gone, will you?”
“He’s not gonna do that,” Watkins said. “That wouldn’t be right after we give him the smokes.”
“I wouldn’t anyway,” Constantine said. “I do what I do ’cause the Man’s watching.”
“Here, man,” Watkins said, extending his hand to Alex for the cigarettes. Alex realized that the hillbilly wasn’t stupid. Watkins had seen that the danger from Constantine was after they were out the window. There was no way to stop that by force short of murder. Alex handed the cigarettes to Watkins, who gave them to Constantine.
JoJo was by the window. “Man, let’s go,” he said, unfastening the wire, the chain clattering as it fell free.
“I better get back upstairs,” Constantine said, but he didn’t move until Watkins nodded approval. As he went out one way, JoJo was in the window to go out the other.
As with all institutions, the grounds had many bright lights, making pools of brightness, many overlapping. Where there were shadows, they were deep black.
The escapees came out behind shrubbery next to the cottage. The greenery was already damp with night dew. It sprayed on them as they crept along the side of the building, bending limbs that sprang back. At the end of the building they couldn’t be seen from the upstairs windows when they took off across a lawn toward an institution road, through floodlit brightness to darkness beyond. This was the shortest route.
“We’ll circle around the recreation fields to get to horticulture,” Watkins said. “It’ll take a few minutes longer, but it’s away from the buildings. Some fool might look out and yell: ‘Check this!’”
“Yeah, yeah,” Alex said, having acknowledged silently that Watkins was the leader, at least for now.
“Go,” Watkins said. They crashed from the bushes together, running low across the wet lawn, throwing elongated shadows in the bright lights. In half a dozen seconds they were in the safety of darkness. Again they were in bushes. These were next to the fence around the superintendent’s house. They could see it, a two-storeyed brick cottage. To Alex it was a mansion. The lights were on downstairs, and a night breeze wafted the sound of music to the fugitives.
Watkins led them around the outside of the back yard, and across a patch of dark lawn between the rear of the hospital and the fence. Then they were on the recreation fields, three in a row, all slightly larger than a softball field. Beyond the last was a storm fence. The vocational landscaping area was on the other side, separated from the farm. Here was half an acre of canned infant shrubs and trees and flowers. A greenhouse was attached to a small office and, on the other end, to a wooden double door a few feet aboveground. The door went down to the underground furnace.
They scrambled over the fence, the sound racing along it as the fence rippled. It seemed loud and goaded them into action.
Alex dropped first, one foot crashing into a small plant, the stick snapping. “Shit!” he said, crouching and trying to fluff it up.
“C’mon, man,” Watkins said.
At the door into the ground, Watkins pulled a pin and lifted the door from the wrong side. The padlock was still closed. The space was about eighteen inches wide, but that was enough for three boys to slide in on their stomachs, swinging their legs down to the ladder. The firelight from the furnace cut the darkness enough to see silhouettes and shapes. It was hot down in this hole. The furnace took most of the space, but Alex found room to lie down on the concrete. The others did the same next to him.
“You sure they won’t look here?” JoJo asked.
“They didn’t the last time somebody was missing. I left a thread across the door for a month and checked it when those two Mexicans from Roosevelt beat it. The lock’s outside. They probably look at it.”
“Where’s those cigarettes?” Alex asked. “You gave mine to that … fink rat bastard.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know you didn’t dig it—but what the fuck could I do? We had to stop him from snitchin’ the minute we were gone. When we had him jammed, we could kick his ass to keep him quiet, but after that … My brother, he’s in Leavenworth, said somethin’, ‘You gotta kill a stool pigeon or kiss his ass. Ain’t no way to get around ’em.’ Me, I didn’t wanna kill Constantine, so I bribed him. It seemed to work. Wasn’t nobody out chasin’ us. Right?”
“Yeah, right,” Alex said grudgingly, thinking that this semiliterate Okie was older than everyone else in Whittier. Watkins didn’t think like a kid. Nevertheless, Alex couldn’t decide whether or not he liked Watkins.
The cigarettes came over while Watkins talked. JoJo also lighted one.
“There’s water and candy bars,” Watkins said.
“Any Snickers?” JoJo asked.
“Yeah, but you’re not hungry now, are you?”
“I want a candy bar.”
“Okay … but when they’re gone, they’re gone. We got a dozen, and that’s what we eat at least until tomorrow night.”
“Shhh,” Alex said. “Voices carry at night. We don’t know when they’re up there.”
“Right,” Watkins said. Thereafter they talked in whispers. But conversation was meager. They lay side by side, heads resting against the concrete wall, feet toward the furnace. Alex had misgivings when he faced that he had nowhere and nobody to go to—not alone. Without their connections he could only wander around for a few days, until he was too dirty and too hungry, and then the police would swallow him. He’d learned that much from his prepubescent runaways. Even with money he couldn’t rent a hotel room, not a young boy. At some future time he might be a successful fugitive in an intense manhunt, but not now. Not without the help JoJo and Watkins had.
Yet it would be worth it if he got a few months of freedom, especially if they were really free; then he could take the punishment and extra incarceration. Despite th
e tension, or perhaps because of it, he dozed off amid these thoughts. The furnace’s proximity made him dream of sunbathing and sweating on a beach—sea, sun, sand, and water.
A hand was over his mouth. Another shook his shoulder. He jerked his head and came awake, instinctively struggling to breathe freely—until his mind registered the circumstances.
“Shhh,” JoJo whispered, lips almost touching Alex’s ear, jerking a thumb upward.
Voices of indecipherable words drifted down. Then came the clanging sound of a gate being opened. Seconds later the padlock rattled.
All three boys held their breaths, waiting, but after the padlock everything was silent. Moments later the gate clanged again. It was obvious the searchers were gone, but the boys remained quiet just in case.
Three hours and half a dozen cigarettes later, all of them sweating profusely from the heat, JoJo said: “Fuck this, you guys. Let’s make a move now. By tomorrow night I’ll be shriveled up—dehydrated.”
Alex, too, had been fretting with impatience.
“Whaddya think?” Watkins asked.
“Fuck, man,” Alex said. “It’s gotta be three or four in the morning. They’re probably done looking already. I ain’t got no eyes to stay here all day. And the man might come down here.”
“Okay, let’s try it. We’ll stay off the roads if we can … and duck when we see headlights. By morning we’ll be a few miles away.”
“Let’s have another smoke and put the show on the road,” JoJo said.
Which is what they did. They squeezed out the way they had entered, the sweat turning to goosebumps in the night breeze. Alex fought down shivers while waiting for the others to emerge.
Bending low at the waist to minimize visibility, they trudged through the reform-school’s fields—first the beets, then next a cornfield, where they had to protect their faces from the crackling, dry stalks. At the end of the cornfield was a dirt road just inside the fence. The fence had rolled concertina wire along its top, except at the rear gate. There it was just three strands of barbed wire sticking straight up. On the other side was a privately owned orange grove—and freedom.
The boys crouched in the cornfield, watching the gate.
“Let’s go,” Watkins said.
“Hold it,” Alex said. “We oughta wait here awhile, I think.”
“Why?”
“’Cause they ain’t damn fools, and it’s obvious this is the easiest place to climb out. They could be watching.”
“Man, make up your mind. You wanted to get going instead of waiting. Now you wanna wait.”
Alex tossed a shoulder. “Fuck it. Do what you want.”
“You guys wait.”
Alex hesitated, feeling it was a challenge to his courage. The moonlit night seemed peaceful and unthreatening. Crickets serenaded.
“We’ll be right behind you if it’s cool,” he said.
Watkins moved farther back into the cornfield and urinated. He moved away from them to a more direct run at the fence. He sprinted out and leaped. The fence began rattling instantly, a loud sound in the still night.
“HOLD IT!” screamed a voice. Two men burst from the cornfield only twenty yards away, flashlight beams bouncing as they ran.
Watkins had his hands at the top, one leg up. But he didn’t get the other leg above their grasp. They tore him down. A flashlight beam whipped through the darkness as it was used to club the struggling boy.
JoJo turned to run, but Alex grabbed his shirt collar and jerked, sitting him on his rump. Alex wanted to help Watkins, but he knew it was hopeless without a weapon, and none was within reach.
The men bent Watkins’ arms behind his back, doubling him over, cuffing him on the back of the head, demanding: “Where’s your pals … where’s your pals?” Meanwhile they dragged him down the road.
When they were a hundred yards away but still visible, Alex patted JoJo’s back. “Now we go. C’mon!” Without waiting for a response, he leaped up and ran to the gate, springing high, his fingers curling over the top, but below the barbed wire. JoJo hit the fence a moment later.
“There they are!” one man yelled. “Goddammit! Stop!” They were too far away for anything more than yells.
Alex’s pants cuff caught on the wire. He tore it loose. A barb raked his calf, but he ignored it. He poised on top, gathered himself, and leaped, landing in plowed dirt. JoJo grunted as he landed a moment later. Alex was already running into the trees. “Run, motherfucker, run!” he said, now enveloped by the darkness of overhanging foliage.
The dirt was soft and loose and seemed to grab at their feet. Alex’s leg muscles quickly began aching. JoJo was falling behind.
A dirt road ran through the orange grove. Alex turned down it, now able to run faster. Hot knives cut into his lungs when he sucked in air. Soon, however, he stopped, ducking back into the trees. JoJo caught up and stood bent over at the waist because it was easier to breathe. Alex knew that speed wasn’t the answer. The men would sound an alarm, and no matter how fast they ran, the institution’s automobiles were faster and could cut them off. In minutes those who’d caught Watkins would send pursuers, and they would know the terrain, whereas Alex had no idea what was beyond the orange grove. He knew they had to keep moving yet avoid what the hunters would expect.
When they had partially regained their wind, Alex started down the dirt road, alternately trotting and walking fast. JoJo was a few paces behind. After a quarter of a mile, they turned back into the trees, angling back toward the institution. A highway, Alex recalled, ran beside the east end of the reform school and this orange grove. The hunters would expect them to be much farther away. If they could cross that highway right next to the institution, the land on the other side was undeveloped, a rolling landscape of sandy earth, some cactus, and dry bushes—a home for jackrabbits.
Ten minutes later they knelt in the tall, wild grass on the reform-school side of the road. The sweat of their exertions met the predawn chill and turned to goose pimples and shivering. They waited ten minutes for a break in traffic big enough where nobody would see them cross, but the rumbling diesel trucks and whippeting automobiles kept coming. The boys moved to the shoulder and dashed across, momentarily illuminated in headlight beams. It wasn’t the authorities, because the car kept going.
On the other side, they slid down the embankment into a drainage ditch, where ankle-high water was hidden by greenery. The mud sucked at their shoes, and when they stepped out they were soaked and filthy halfway to the knees.
Fifty yards later Alex felt safe. They stopped to rest and think. Looking back, he could see the line of orange on the horizon, heralding the new day. It had been a long night, and ahead was a long walk, but by dusk they would be at JoJo’s—if they carefully stuck to railroad tracks and riverbeds. They were already so dirty that they would raise eyebrows trekking through suburban streets.
“C’mon, JoJo, ol’ pal,” Alex said. “We got a long hike, so we might as well start.” He offered a hand to the seated JoJo, helping him to his feet. It was an effective gesture; it perked up the Italian youth.
16
The reform—school escapees reached the sanctuary of JoJo’s home as the street lights came on. The boys moved cautiously down the rutted alley behind the house, slipped through a latched gate on a rickety wooden fence, and then crouched behind steel trash barrels next to the pigeon coop. They watched the back door. JoJo had wanted to strut up and surprise them flamboyantly, but Alex’s caution prevailed. Although two teenaged boys wouldn’t warrant a police stakeout, they were worth detectives asking a neighbor to call in if they were seen. Alex recalled it happening to other boys.
The wait in the back yard was brief. Teresa Altabella, the pretty older sister, came out to empty the garbage. The family dog (a mix of German shepherd and beagle) accompanied her. He sensed the boys and began barking and jumping from side to side. Teresa dumped the sack and called the dog. She was reaching for his collar when JoJo called her name. She jerked, startled, unc
omprehending until JoJo called the dog’s name, “Hey, Kilo!” and the dog recognized the family member and went into joyous paroxysms of barking and jumping.
Teresa came into the darkness, calling her brother’s name.
“Is it safe? No cops around?” JoJo asked.
“No, nobody’s here but me.”
“Where’d they go?”
“To the movies … Dragon Seed.”
They entered the house and went directly upstairs to JoJo’s room, which had one window overlooking the street. They stripped off the soiled reform-school clothes for things in the closet. When Alex had begun his institutional odyssey he was too young to care about style in clothes, but pubescence was changing that. Now the right plumage was important, both for looking good to girls and being correct in his milieu. This was essentially a poor, inner-city milieu, and although the particular block was Italian, the neighborhood was mostly Chicano, and to be “sharp” a youth had to follow their styles. It was just toward the end of World War II, when the boys in white suburbia wore Levi’s and leather flight jackets, but in the barrios of Los Angeles, youths wore khakis or surplus marine fatigue pants with giant patch pockets down the thighs. Sometimes they were dyed black, and often they were topped with surplus “Eisenhower” jackets, with patches removed and also dyed black. The shoes had a plain capped toe and extra soles, and horseshoe taps on the heels. They could not run in such shoes, but they could kick.… The extreme zoot suit had gone, but slacks were “semis,” loose at the knee and narrow at the cuff, and jackets had large shoulder pads.
JoJo had a full wardrobe, and although he was huskier than Alex, some of the girth had come since he went to Juvenile Hall, and Alex could wear most of his clothes. After a quick rinse in the shower, Alex dressed and looked in the mirror on the bedroom door while combing his hair. He massaged in a heavy dose of Dixie Peach pomade, which partially came out in his comb as he fashioned an upswept ducktail and flipped curls down over his forehead. He liked what he saw. It was a far different image from that of the eleven-year-old who had run away from the Valley Home for Boys some two years ago. All he needed was a tattoo or two—a cross with three dots in the flesh between thumb and forefinger, and maybe a beauty mark on a cheekbone beneath an eye. Some guys put a cross on their foreheads, but that was too extreme.
Little Boy Blue Page 24