Mr. Davis and Miss Parker escorted me out of the school building and put me into the back of their white county-owned sedan, and we drove away. I figured out immediately we weren’t going back to my house—it was in the opposite direction from where we were driving. Not that I really cared about saying goodbye to Mama. Still, I couldn’t help thinking she might be worried about me, would certainly wonder why I hadn’t come home from school.
“Don’t we have to tell my mother?” I asked.
“Don’t worry about it,” Miss Parker said nonchalantly. She put a cigarette to her mouth and lit it with the car lighter. She took a deep puff and exhaled. “We’ve already talked with your mother.”
Already talked with Mama? It dawned on me I’d been the victim of some sort of conspiracy, that I’d actually been set up, that even as Mama was yelling at me to hurry up and get dressed, I’d be late for school, she’d known what was going to happen but never let on. I imagined Mama getting a phone call or even a visit from Mr. Davis and Miss Parker, them telling Mama I wouldn’t be coming home, and Mama thinking for a second there’d been a terrible accident, that I was either dead or dying. For that second, I imagined, she might have actually felt bad. But then Mr. Davis or Miss Parker would have gone on to tell her, no, there hadn’t been an accident, I’d been taken away to spend the rest of my life in Juvenile Hall. I imagined Mama feeling not sadness or horror but relief. Thank God, now there was someone else to worry about me. Heaven knew she’d done her best but now she was damned tired of it all.
We didn’t go immediately to Juvenile Hall, but drove first to the County building, where I was taken inside and shuffled around between several little offices for a series of interviews. They were all the same: the people asking the questions rolled a form into their typewriters and asked me my name, my age, my address and phone number, what grade I was in at school. Then they asked me why I was being put into Juvenile Hall. “What did you do?” they asked. The question surprised me—didn’t they already know? “I stole things,” I said. My blunt admission of guilt never seemed to surprise them. They typed in my answer. “What sort of things did you steal?” they asked. I told them: bicycles; a gun. They typed. It didn’t seem to matter what I said, it was just words coming out of my mouth. I went on: some money from a gas station; fruit pies and chocolate milk; a package of pencils (which I still had in my jacket pocket); yo-yos; model airplanes. Pretty soon I started being inventive. Each time I was asked, the list of things I’d stolen grew. By the third or fourth interview, I’d managed to accumulate enough stolen goods (in my imagination, anyway) to stock a medium-size department store, and had committed crimes ranging from burglary to armed robbery to attempted murder. They took whatever I said in stride, as if there wasn’t much they hadn’t already seen and heard. No one seemed surprised that a nine-year-old could be such a hardened criminal. They listened while I recited my fanciful answers and dutifully typed in the information. Then they handed me the paperwork, and sent me on to the next interview.
I was glad to have everything out in the open, to admit to all the sordid details of my life of crime. I figured, why not? Certainly nothing more would happen to me. I was already going to Juvenile Hall; why not just get it all out? Spilling my guts this way had the effect of a confessional: all my past sins seemed to melt away. There were no more secrets. There was no more anxiety. It was freeing.
My last interview was with a man with a kind face named Mr. Olson. He spent most of the time leaning back in his chair and talking with me, asking me how I felt about living with Mama, did I like school, did I have any pets, what sort of hobbies did I have? Then he sat upright and his face seemed to become stern. “Billy,” he said, his voice serious, “do you still wet the bed at night?”
His question caught me by surprise. I felt my face redden. Suddenly the “badness” I’d just purged from myself came rushing back. I couldn’t answer the question. I fidgeted in my chair.
“Have you ever started a fire?” he said. Again, I couldn’t speak. “Do you hit your sisters?” “Have you ever done anything to hurt your cat?” Each question wasn’t a question at all, but an accusation, a slap to my face. Tears welled in my eyes. I couldn’t bring myself to look at him. How could this man whom I’d never met know these things about me?
How could I tell him that, barely a week earlier, Mama had come into my bedroom to find my sheets and blankets soaked with piss, and my reeking underwear and pajamas, which I’d shed during the night, lying in a sopping pile next to the bed? Could I possibly tell about how she’d screamed at me, “Jesus Christ, what is the matter with you? Do I have to put a goddamn diaper on you?!” How could I admit to the countless times I’d punched Karen and Debbie in the back and called them little fuckers; or worse, the times I’d swung our Siamese cat Tom around by its tail and threw it against the wall until he actually cried. And what about the fires I’d started? What about the time I’d briefly set my sister Debbie’s hair on fire, and how big—how strangely powerful—I’d felt afterward? I couldn’t tell Mr. Olson these things, not in so many words. The best I could do was shrug and nod my head and stare at the floor. Tears dropped between my feet, splattering shiny black spots on the black tile. “Which?” he asked gently. I shrugged again. “All of them,” I whispered. Mr. Olson cleared his throat. I heard him scribble something on some paper.
We sat there for a few moments, not saying anything. Then he clapped his hands together and said, “Why don’t we do something else, okay? Something fun?”
He reached into a drawer in his desk and took out a stack of large square cards. “I’m going to show you something called inkblots,” he said. “I want you to look at them and tell me what the inkblots look like to you.” He turned the first card over and laid it out on the desk in front of me. There were dark-colored shapes on the card. I thought they didn’t look like anything at all. I frowned. I wondered if this was some kind of test. “Go ahead,” he said encouragingly. “There aren’t any wrong answers.” I studied the card again. The inkblots were a lot like black storm clouds in the sky. In the first card, I saw a butterfly. Another card had a dog, or maybe some women dancing, I couldn’t make up my mind. There were bats, a dinosaur, some fish. Some of the shapes had parts to them that looked a lot like men’s dicks or women’s titties, but I couldn’t tell Mr. Olson that. Then there were cards with shapes on them that didn’t look like anything, no matter how hard I thought about them. The last one, I said, looked like a giant man about to squash me. Mr. Olson raised his eyebrows and nodded, as if this were important, and scribbled some more notes. I didn’t tell him that it looked like the man had the biggest dick I’d ever seen, hanging between his legs.
Finally, Mr. Davis came in and told me it was time to go. They were waiting for me, he said, at the Hall.
Getting there was nearly a half hour drive. This time it was just Mr. Davis in the car. He was even quieter than when we’d first met. I could feel my heartbeat quicken as we left the downtown area of San Diego and drove north along the state highway toward Kearny Mesa. It began to rain. I tried not to think too hard about what was happening, where I was going. Why was I suddenly scared? I squinted my eyes and gazed through the wet windows at the flat red-brown earth and dark gray sky, turning them into blurry blobs. I thought then of the watercolor pictures Daddy used to paint. Daddy had called them abstract.
Finally, up ahead, I glimpsed a group of flat brown stucco buildings surrounded by asphalt and grass fields. “Is that—?“ I stammered. I couldn’t say the words.
Mr. Davis nodded toward the group of buildings. “Juvenile Hall?” he said, finishing my question.
“Yes,” I said.
He nodded again. ‘That’s it.”
I couldn’t understand the dread gushing into my chest. After all, being sent to Juvey really wasn’t such a big deal, was it? Hadn’t I known plenty of other kids who’d been sent to Juvey, for one reason or another? And hadn’t they all said it was more like a boys’ camp, or going into the Army? And hadn’t just about all of the bad things I’d ever heard about the Hall (stupid things like being tortured and forced to eat rotten food and thrown into wire cages with hungry rats) come from kids who’d never been there? No place, I kept telling myself, could be that bad.
But now that I was nearly there, I wasn’t so sure. After all, kids weren’t sent to Juvey because they’d been good citizens. Kids were sent there to be punished. It dawned on me then why the people interviewing me earlier hadn’t been fazed by the incredible things I’d said about myself or the things I’d done. Was it because they knew what I was in for? I thought back to the hideous things I’d heard about Juvey. If only part of the rumors were true, then—!
I couldn’t think of such things. Suddenly my life back at home with Mama didn’t seem nearly so bad. Who cared if I had to take a little beating now and then? Who cared about the crappy clothes I had to wear, or even being hungry? My heart raced. I wanted to open the car door and jump out.
Mr. Davis pulled the sedan into the small parking lot outside the main entrance to the Hall. The place looked harmless enough; it could have been the entrance to any of the newer high schools being built around San Diego—except for the taut lines of barbed wire atop the chain link fencing encircling the Hall grounds. The same sort of barbed wire I’d noticed in the background of old black-and-white pictures I’d seen, many of them in some of Daddy’s books, of gaunt Jews in concentration camps, all of them bug-eyed from starvation and torture. I couldn’t help thinking I’d be greeted at the front door by men with huge square jaws wearing black Nazi SS uniforms.