Page 47 of Boy Blue
I was sent there in June, the month after I turned seventeen. Two years ago. A lifetime ago. Still reeling from my brother Cameron’s death. Still staggering beneath the weight of the idea that I should have known. Should have stopped him.
My parents acknowledged that Cameron was dead, but insisted the line must continue. I must get engaged to be married because the family tree must grow.
I fought back, though I don’t know why. Why didn’t I just say yes and get on with it? The family fortune amounted to millions. It might have been worth it.
The Reserve was a place that quickly taught me to keep my mouth shut. To not argue. To not fight back when they shaved all the hair from my head, because of lice, they said.
The heat in summer was intense; the land the Reserve was located on was nearly a swamp, sloping down to a low, sluggish river, across from which were a twin set of railroad tracks. Trains ran nearly five times a day, two in one direction, headed north. Three headed south.
They fed us food that wasn’t fit for a prison. Generic oatmeal. Stale bread. Liquid eggs past their use-by date. Water that tasted like flint rock had been washed in it. Chicken patties and ketchup. Powdered milk that had barely been mixed and was definitely watered too far.
The showers were communal. The toilets were all in one room with no stalls and no seats. You learned to live with it.
They dressed us in dull-colored canvas pants, white t-shirts that scratched. Our shoes were like blocks on our feet. They were distinctive. If you ran off, which some boys tried, you would be spotted right away and brought back. And then punished.
They were inventive. Cellar was damp and cold. They’d make you sit cross-legged on the cement and then they’d pour water over you, over and over. There was a drain, so you didn’t sit in pools of water, but it was cold. The smell coming out of the drain was murky. What had I done to go to Cellar? That memory flitted away before I could grab it.
House was a little whitewashed cement hut off to one side. They made you lie face down on a metal cot with wire springs and no mattress and hold on to the metal head frame. Then they’d beat you with a belt they hung on a nail. It was on the edgeof the property, probably because the thicket beyond swallowed the screams.
I went there exactly once. For stealing another boy’s bread. I was starving. So was he. His name was Mike. I regretted it the second I’d done it, far sorrier than they wanted to make me with the beating. He was gone soon after. Dead? Run off? I didn’t know. I remember wanting to find him and say I was sorry.
Room was the memory that hit me hardest. It was at the top of the boys’ dormitory, the main building. There was no AC up there. Just a wooden floor, a window that was painted shut, and an ankle cuff attached to a chain pinned to the wall.
There was no lock on the door because if you were inside that room, you wore the ankle cuff and couldn’t leave, anyway. It was a hot box. They didn’t give you water. The temperature inside that room rose quickly by mid-morning, and it didn’t cool off much at night.
Ask me how I know. I think maybe I’d rebelled at one point, mid-July. My parents had come for a visit, approved of my surroundings, and then left. I threw folding chairs that were lined up in the gym for visiting day, a joke, since we’d been scrubbing and cleaning for days to make everything look good. We even got real food at lunch that day: sheet pizza, brownies, slices of orange, but it wasn’t enough to make a difference. Everyone I saw was skin and bones. The whole thing was a sham.
Those chairs made noise when they hit the wall, so there was no ignoring them. They dragged me up to Room. I sweated it out for twenty-four hours and, by the end of it, drenched from head to toe, my regrown hair in my eyes, I grunted that I was sorry and would never do it again.
The odd thing about Room was the lack of locks. I noticed this as they chained me to the wall. No locks. No need for them. If you got up to Room, you could let yourself in. If you weren’t chained to the wall, you could let yourself out.
The latch on the window, an old, thin iron tab painted over with layers of white paint, wouldn’t withstand a good kick. You could get out that way. They wouldn’t even look for you there because who would be stupid enough to hide in Room?
Me. I was that stupid. Or maybe, crazed with hunger, I was crazy like a fox. The idea came in September, long after parent’s day. Workers were again at the Reserve, mowing the lawn, whitewashing everything because journalists were coming to do an exposé and the stage must be properly set.
The workers were sloppy with the paint; the gym floor was only half polished in the open area where the shine would be visible. They also left things behind. Like a white bucket that had a box cutter in the bottom, buried in white paint.
I’d been told to rinse out the buckets and leave them by the trash bins. I did this. I rinsed off the box cutter and hid it in the long grass at the edge of the property. Another worker left his blue jeans, stiffened with paint, hung over the bollard near the old, disused phone box buried in the ground.
The blue jeans were faded. The bollard was rusted. They blended together. I grabbed the jeans during one forced march and hid them near the box cutter, still neatly nestled in the tall grass.
The last thing I found, the most important thing, was a pair of sneakers. They were blue Converse high-tops with white toe caps, so completely out of place in the middle of the newly mown field that I paused during trash picking. They’d been rained on, so they had dried out just about flat. They had red paint spattered on those white toes.
Someone shouted at me to get moving, so I swooped up those sneakers and stuffed them in my pants. And thought about Room. And looked up at the top floor as I went inside, holding those sneakers to my belly like I was about to give birth to them. There was a drainpipe coming down from the roof. Theclapboard siding, newly painted white, was warped by weather, with rickrack handholds all the way down. I’d be fine.
The thing was to be smart. To wait. For darkness. For a thunderstorm, so the bangs of thunder could velvet my footsteps, and the lightning could light my way. The other thing was to be crazy-smart. To not put on the paint-spattered sneakers and leave the clogs under my bed. But to wear the clogs and carry the sneakers.
I waited, then tip-toed up to Room, and let myself in. Tugged on the slender latch on the window, already softened by humidity, and opened the window to the outside. Tied the laces, looped the sneakers around my neck, and crawled down the drainpipe, using the warped siding for foot and handholds. Rain got in my eyes, the wind whipped the shirt up my back, baring it to the rain.
I crawled on my hands and knees to the edge of the property where the box cutter and jeans were. I changed into the jeans. Laced up the sneakers while the rain soaked me to the skin.
I tucked the box cutter into my back pocket, where it sat like a cell phone, and then, because I was smart, so fucking smart, I took the clogs and my canvas pantswithme.
I didn’t leave them behind like an arrow that would point out I’d changed into something else. No. It would look like I’d run off in Reserve-issued clothes. They wouldn’t be looking for a guy in blue jeans and blue sneakers at all. I’d get rid of those clothes later. Which I did.
After crossing through the industrial area, and over the cement watershed to get over the creek, I made my way to the train tracks, going through the spicy smelling loblolly pines, their needles smacking together in the storm, the humidity of the dense thicket soaking into me. Sat on the low rise above the tracks and waited for whatever train would come next, going inwhatever direction it was going. Fate would decide for me: north or south.
At the first wail of train horn coming up the tracks, I stood up and listened, the electric wind lifting my hair. I heard two long blasts, one short blast, and another long blast, the sound slithering between hard raindrops.
