Read Online Little Boy Blue by Edward Bunker - Free Book Online Page A

opened with a big key It clanged shut, and they were in another, even wider
corridor. The masonite floor was waxed, the
green-enameled walls immaculate, and the corridor seemed to stretch into infinity,
though actually it was only a hundred yards or so. The lights were dim and his
escort’s leather heels reverberated in the stillness. They passed a nurse
at a desk in an alcove. She looked up at them without expression. Now they
were at a gate of bars like a grille, beyond which another corridor formed a T.
At the juncture was another desk, a hooded lamp fastened to its side so the
beam of light hit the green blotter but shadowed the face of the man in the
chair.
    “See we got a baby this time,”
the faceless man said.
    “Yeah, pretty young,”
Alex’s escort said, handing over a sheet of paper. “Not too young
to pull a trigger… or fight. He’s already had a tiff with a couple
of Mexicans in Receiving—they’ll be down pretty soon. Better put ‘em
in a different dorm.”
    The man behind the desk grunted; he was
looking at the paper. “Attempted murder,” he said, then
“humphed” disparagingly. “Shit, they’re never too young
anymore.” He made a sucking sound with his teeth while he opened a
battered loose-leaf binder and inserted the paper in proper alphabetical order
with fifty other identical papers. Each sheet was a log for an individual boy.
The man opened the drawer and shoved a small brown-paper sack across the desk.
It was stapled at the top. “Take it,” he said to Alex.
“It’s a comb, toothbrush and—but you won’t need the
razor blades.”
    “You got him?” The escort said.
“It’s my lunch hour.”
    “You can go. I’ll have him tucked
in bed in a minute.”
    The gate clanged shut behind the escort, and
the sound of his footsteps grew fainter as Alex waited. The man behind the desk
swiveled his chair around and looked at a huge board that covered the wall. It
had slots for tags, grouped according to dorms, and most of the slots were
filled. The man wrote Alex’s name on a tag and inserted it in an empty
slot.
    “Come on, Hammond,” the man said,
unwinding his legs from under the desk and startling the eleven-year-old with
his six-foot- six height. He took a flashlight from a drawer and led Alex down
a hallway. The dormitory door was a frame of heavy wire mesh. The man used the
flashlight to judge the keyhole. “Third bed on the left,” he said,
locking the door behind Alex without waiting to see if the boy could find it.
    Along each wall were ten beds, the
blanket-covered mounds illuminated by a floodlight outside the windows.
The glare was sliced into elongated rectangles by the bars on the windows.
    Alex was surprised at the hospital bed,
expecting a cot. He undressed quickly. A hospital stand was between each bed,
but he didn’t know which one went with his bed, so he dropped the ill- fitting
clothes on the floor and got quickly under the sheets. He felt conspicuous and
didn’t want anyone to wake up and question him. The cool, clean sheets
felt surprisingly good, making him remember the preceding night, spent
shivering and wet in the house beside the railroad tracks. From that
recollection jumped the image of the man looming over him and the fang of fire
leaping from his own hand. Then suddenly, always there in the background, was
the stabbing memory that his father was dead. He had no visual recollection
or impression, but the thought suffused him in total anguish. All he
had—the one person—now gone forever. Crying out to God was useless.
Death was as mysterious to Alex as to everyone, and because of his age less
frightening, but he was old enough to know that his father was going under the
earth forever. And Alex felt responsible, not merely for shooting the man in
the market but also, even worse, for having in times of fury wished Clem dead.
Then it had been just a word, “dead,” but now he was damned by the
reality. He trembled with stifled sobs, wanting to