Little Boy Blue Read Free Page B

herd of steers. Sammy picked
up a dirt clod and threw it at them, trying to make them move. Alex told him
not to. “Why hurt helpless animals?” he said.
    “That won’t hurt them.”
    “Well, don’t do it.”
    Sammy dropped the second clod of dirt. The
steers, Sammy explained, were owned by some of the high school boys, who bought
them as calves, raised and fattened them, and sold them for a profit. The
younger boys weren’t allowed such enterprise, though many of them worked
for various motion picture celebrities who had homes in the area. The Valley
Home for Boys had friends.
    As they wandered around the grounds, several
boys passed them, the older ones ignoring them, and those their own age
greeting Sammy and eyeing the newcomer shyly. Once Alex glanced back and saw
the three boys they’d just passed with their heads together, the motions
of one of them indicating he was describing Alex’s struggle when the bus
drove up. Alex looked away quickly, his eye muscles twitching.
    The swimming pool was Olympic-sized and
filled with lithe young bodies cutting the pale chlorinated water. Their
suntans were deep and their eyes red. Even the youngest ones swam like fish.
They were hurrying, diving, laughing. Alex could swim, but not like these boys.
    A whistle bleated, and the boys began to pull
themselves from the pool grudgingly. “Come on,” a voice called.
“It’ll be open after supper.” A tow-headed boy, hair
plastered to his head, dove back into the water, and when his head bobbed up,
the voice called, “Billy Boyd, if you’re not out in ten seconds you
won’t swim for the rest of the week.”
    The boy scrambled up, grinning.
    Only then did Alex recognize the voice of
control as that of the young coach from the administration building. He was
coming over to where Alex and Sammy stood behind a low wall. Usually Alex
wouldn’t have recalled a name from such a frenzied episode, but this time
he remembered. Mike.
    “Hi, Alex,” the coach said.
“You look better.”
    The boy blushed, looked down, and circled a
foot in the dry grass.
    “What’re you guys doing?”
Mike asked.
    “I’m just showing him
around,” Sammy said.
    The coach nodded. Then to
Alex, “Seen the gym yet?”
    “No, it’s locked.”
    “Come on.”
    “I got to call my father,” Sammy
said. “I call him collect every Wednesday.”
    Alex went with the coach. He wasn’t
interested in sports, but he yearned for some attention and dreaded meeting the
other boys in his cottage. He remembered how they’d first seen him. He
wanted to belong and be liked—and in most places he was, but only by the
outcasts and troublemakers.
    The gym was ten years old, gift of a
fraternal organization. It had a polished hardwood floor with a basketball
court and signs that said no street shoes were allowed on it. There were
collapsible bleachers and a storeroom of folding chairs, so it could double as
an auditorium if necessary. The shower room was cluttered with towels,
discarded basketball jerseys, and soap that had turned soft from being left on
a wet floor.
    Mike told Alex that the boys at the Valley
Home got fifty cents an hour for any work they did, and if Alex cleaned the
shower room, Mike would put in an hour voucher. Alex was surprised. He’d
never heard of being paid in any of the other places he’d been. He
accepted quickly, not so much because of the money but because he wanted
Mike’s friendship. It took him half an hour to fill the laundry hamper,
sweep and mop the floor, and put everything away.
    Alex had been gone from the cottage for two
hours; it was late afternoon when he finally walked back in. The long center
corridor from which the room doors opened was full of boys moving up and down
from a community washroom. They formed a line beside the washroom doorway,
towels over their shoulders, toothbrushes, combs, and other things in their
hands. When a boy finished and left the washroom, the next boy in line entered.
They went in with