CHAPTER 6


I was in a cubicle at the Department of Youth Services, talking to a DYS caseworker named Arlene Rodriguez. She was a thin woman with a large chest and straight black hair pulled back tight into a braid in back. Her cheekbones were high and her eyes were black. She wore bright red lipstick. Her blouse was black. Her slacks were gray and tight and tucked into black boots. She wore no jewelry except a wide gold wedding band.

“Major is his real name,” she said. She had a big manila folder open on her desk. “It sounds like a street handle but it’s not. His given name is Major Johnson. In his first eighteen years he was arrested thirty-eight times. In the twenty-seven months preceding his eighteenth birthday he was arrested twenty times.”

“When he turned eighteen he went off the list?” I said.

“He’s no longer a juvenile,” she said. “After that you’ll have to see his probation officer or the youth gang unit at BPD.”

“What were the offenses?” I said.

“All thirty-eight of them?”

“Just give me a sense of it,” I said.

“Drugs, intent to sell… assault… assault… possession of burglary tools… possession of a machine gun… assault… suspicion of rape… suspicion armed robbery… ” She shrugged. “You get the idea.”

“How much time inside?” I said.

She glanced down at the folder on her desk. “Six months,” she said. “Juvenile Facility in Lakeville.”

“Period?”

“Period,” she said. “Probably the crimes were committed within the, ah, black community.”

“Ah what a shame,” I said. “Your work has made you cynical.”

“Of course it has. Hasn’t yours?”

“Certainly,” I said. “You got any background on him family, education, favorite food?”

“His mother’s name was Celia Johnson. She bore him in August of 1971 when she was fifteen years and two months old. She was also addicted to PCP.”

“Which meant he was, at birth,” I said.

“Un huh. She dumped him with her mother, his grandmother, who was herself, at the time, thirty-two years old. Celia had three more babies before she was nineteen, all of them PCP addicted, all of them handed over to Grandma. One of them died by drowning. There was evidence of child abuse, including sodomy. Grandma was sent away for six months on a child-endangerment conviction.”

“Six months?” I said.

“And three years’ probation,” Arlene Rodriguez said.

“Teach her,” I said.

“His mother hanged herself about two months later, doesn’t say why, though I seem to remember it had something to do with a boyfriend.”

“So Major is on his own,” I said. Arlene Rodriguez looked down at her folder again.

“At eleven years and three months of age,” she said.

“Anything else?”

“While we had him at Lakeville,” she said, “we did some testing. He doesn’t read very well, or he didn’t then, but one of the testers devised ways to get around that, and around the cultural bias of the standard tests, and when she did, Major proved to be very smart. If IQ scores meant anything, which they don’t, Major would have a very high IQ.”

We were quiet. Around us there were other cubicles like this one, and other people like Arlene Rodriguez, whose business it was to deal with lives like Major Johnson’s. The cubicle partitions were painted a garish assortment of bright reds and yellows and greens, in some bizarre bureaucratic conceit of cheeriness. The windows were thick with grime, and the spring sunshine barely filtered through it to make pallid splashes on the gray metal desk tops.

“Any thoughts on how to deal with this kid?” I said.

Arlene Rodriguez shook her head. “Any way to turn him around?” I said.

“No.”

“Any way to save him?”

“No.”

I sat for a moment, then I got up and shook her hand.

“Have a nice day,” I said.

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