Sadly, beating me wasn’t going to make me stop stealing. The next morning, while I was walking to school, I came across a fat-tired bicycle someone had leaned up against the concrete wall at the bottom of Newport Avenue that served as a barrier between the sidewalk and South Beach. There wasn’t a soul nearby. I looked out over the empty sand toward the gray water. Several surfers were floating out beyond the breaking waves, waiting for their perfect ride. I figured the bike might belong to one of them. This was almost too good to be true, I thought. But as I was about to hop on and ride away, I heard a man’s sharp voice behind me: “Hey, kid!”
Something icy jetted into my chest. When I turned, there was a black and white police car, stopped in the middle of the street, and the khaki-uniformed officer was looking right at me. There was something vaguely familiar about him, and I wondered if he wasn’t part of the group of cops looking for the gun I’d lost in the sand yesterday. “Yeah?” I said to him.
“That bike belong to you?”
I turned and looked at the bike. “This bike?” I took a step back and looked back at the officer. “No,” I said. “I don’t know who it belongs to.”
“Hmmm,” he said, nodding. He looked at me thoughtfully for a few seconds. “You on your way to school?” he asked finally.
“Uh-huh. I go to Ocean Beach Elementary.” I pointed up Newport Avenue toward the school. “I’m in the fifth grade.”
He nodded again. “Well, maybe you ought to be moving on, then, so you’re not late?” He asked it like a question, but I knew he was really telling me.
I bobbed my head up and down and started walking. The officer watched me until I rounded the corner and headed up Newport, and then I heard him drive away. A couple of times I saw the car again as I walked along. It was slowly crossing the side streets a block away, keeping pace with me, as if he were following me to make sure I didn’t forget where I was going.
Mama had made me a margarine and sugar sandwich for lunch, so by the time I got out of school later that day, I was still pretty hungry. I dropped into the Safeway on my way down to the beach and, when I was sure no one was looking, slipped a berry fruit pie down my pants. But before I could make it out the front door, a hand clamped down on my shoulder. It seemed so heavy, it might as well have been a car being dropped on me. “Wait just a minute, young man,” came a deep voice. “Just where do you think you’re going with that?”
The hand, I soon discovered, belonged to a store manager. He wore a white shirt and tie. He gripped my shoulder even harder and turned me around and pushed me into the small office next to the exit door. He pushed me down into a small chair in front of his desk and immediately picked up the phone, dialed the operator, and asked for the police. While he waited, he snapped the fingers on his free hand a couple of times and put the open hand out in front of me and gave me a look. He frowned when I didn’t move, and snapped his fingers again. “I know what you’ve got,” he said. “Now let’s have it.” I figured it’d be stupid to pretend I didn’t know what he meant. I pulled the slightly squished pie from my pants and dropped it onto his hand. “Yes,” the man said into the phone. “My name is Paul Wilkes. I’m the assistant manager of the Ocean Beach Safeway on Santa Monica Avenue. I’ve just caught a young man trying to steal from the store.”
After a ten-minute wait in the office, a tall, young-looking policeman arrived. Immediately I recognized him from that morning, the one questioning me about the bicycle I’d been about to swipe. I could tell from his slight, humorless grin that he recognized me, too. He stood outside the office door with the assistant manager and listened, nodding, while he heard my terrible story. He came in afterward and sat down in the chair next to mine, his dark-brown leather jacket and the leather gun-belt squeaking. He took his hat off, and pulled a small lined-paper notebook from his jacket pocket and a pen from his uniform shirt.
“I’m Officer Cushman,” he said. There was something immediately calming about his voice. He asked me where I lived, and if my mom and dad were home. I told him my address, which he wrote down in the notebook in neat all-capital lettering, along with my name. He looked at the address for a second, then flipped through some other pages of the notebook, and nodded to himself. I told him Mama was probably home, that my dad didn’t live with us anymore. He took some more notes. Then he put the notebook and the pen away, stood back up and put his hat back on. “Let’s go,” he said, sounding almost sad.
“Are you going to arrest me?” I asked him.
“Not the way you’re thinking,” he said, guiding me through the store’s automatic doors. “I’m taking you home. We need to talk to your mother.”
I wanted to tell him I didn’t much want to talk to my mother: my butt was still sore from the last conversation we’d had. In fact, I wanted to tell him to just take me to jail, or Juvenile Hall, bypass Mama—and her belt—altogether.
At least he didn’t put me in the back seat of his police car, behind the wire cage. I got to sit up front. He got in and started the car and picked up the police radio microphone, which was crackling and sputtering with a woman’s voice. He told her where he was going, and I heard her answer, “Ten-four, unit twenty-two.”
When Mama opened the door, answering Officer Cushman’s firm knock, she looked up at the officer, then down at me, and a strange disbelieving look crossed her face, like she was suddenly a woman on The Twilight Zone who’d awakened from a terrible nightmare, only to discover she was having an even more terrifying nightmare. She couldn’t seem to gather enough strength to look angry. Instead, she looked exhausted, as if she’d been sick for years, and now just wanted to give up the fight. She sighed. “Jesus Christ, what has he done now!”
“Are you Mrs. Campbell?” the policeman said to her.
“Yes,” she said, “—unfortunately.”
“I’m Officer Cushman,” he said. He told her about Safeway, about the fruit pie. Then he took off his hat. “I wouldn’t normally think too much of this, Mrs. Campbell,” he said, “if it were an isolated incident. But, considering what happened yesterday, the breaking and entering, the gun, I think it’s safe to say Billy’s got some significant problems.”
Mama looked at him as if to say, no shit, Sherlock.
The officer looked past Mama into the ratty-looking apartment, taking things in. Mama looked behind her uncomfortably for a moment, then opened the door a little wider. “Sorry,” she said to him. “Would you—do you want to come in for a few minutes?”
“No,” he said. “That’s all right. I can fill out my report out here.” He glanced down at me. “I would like to talk to Billy for a few minutes, though, if that’s okay with you,” he said.
“Are you kidding?” she said. “Talk to him all you want. Knock yourself out. Maybe you can put some sense into that thick head of his!” She closed the door.
We talked on the porch for nearly an hour, until it was dark outside. He asked me about myself, where I’d lived, what happened to my father, what it was like living with my mother. I told him. He listened, intently, watching me as I talked. There was something about him that made me feel safe. He asked me if I had enough food to eat, clothes to wear. What sort of toys did I have to play with? Did I like school? Did I miss my father? Then he asked me when it was I’d first begun to steal, what sorts of things I stole, did I have any idea why I stole. I’d never had a grownup ask me these things before. He listened. He didn’t seem to be angry, or surprised, at anything I said. I told him everything. Then he asked me if I wished I had a father, and I thought about it, and before I knew it, I’d started crying, and he put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed it. “It’s okay, son,” he said soothingly, “it’s okay.”
He looked at his watch and said it was time for him to go, there were real crooks out there that needed catching, and I opened the door and went inside, while he waited on the porch. Mama went out the door and closed it and they stood on the porch talking for a few more minutes. I hated to see him go. I knew when Mama came back in, it would be the belt for me.
She came in and closed the door and, surprisingly, told me to get to the table and eat—Karen was just now finishing up—and that I was to do the dishes after dinner and then go right to bed, no TV. I didn’t dare ask why she wasn’t going to punish me more, especially after yesterday. I ate my dinner of pan-fried chicken and mashed potatoes, which tasted even better than usual. Then I washed the dishes, which took awhile—Mama was a messy cook, to say the least—and went straight to my bedroom. I tried not to look too happy about the turn of events.
Two days later, I snuck off the school grounds during the lunch hour and skipped down to the Cornet five-and-dime, and swiped a package of pencils. I had wanted a yo-yo, but they didn’t have any of the shiny black Duncan Imperials I was looking for, and I certainly couldn’t have left the store without taking something. I figured I could always use some extra pencils, never mind that the school gave me all the pencils I needed, all I had to do was ask Miss Senior for them.
No sooner had I sat down at my desk after lunch and opened my package of pencils, when the vice principal, Mr. Flores, stuck his head in the door and looked at Miss Senior and then pointed at me. When I just looked back at him with a sinking feeling in my stomach, he came into the room and over to my desk and gathered my pencils up with both hands and ordered me to get my jacket and to come with him. The rest of the kids looked at me, wide-eyed. It was an impressive moment. And I was thinking to myself, how could I have been found out so soon?
We went to his office, and there were a man and a woman I’d never seen before. Mr. Flores said to me, “Billy, this is Mr. Davis and Miss Parker. They work for San Diego County.”
He told me to sit down, and opened up a notebook. “Billy, I’ll be honest with you,” he said directly. “Your behavior, both in school and elsewhere in the community, is becoming a real problem.” He looked at me. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“I think so,” I said to him, looking at the floor.
“And it’s the kind of problem,” he continued, “that the staff here at school really isn’t equipped to handle.”
“Are you going to expel me?” I asked.
“Well, no, not exactly. You see, your mother isn’t—well—equipped to take care of you, either. And you need to be in a place where you can be looked after until the County figures out what to do with you.”
“Where is that?” I asked.
“It’s the Juvenile Detention Center, Billy,” he said carefully.
“Juvenile Hall?” I said. I felt the blood drain suddenly from my face.
“It really is the best thing,” he said.