The last of the milkshake gurgled up the straw and he tossed the empty container on the car’s floor. Pulling the scrap of paper from his shirt pocket, he studied the first address, then glanced up and saw the sign for the exit he wanted. He cut across two lanes and barely made it into the mouth of the exit.
The offramp was a long curving descent into another, darker world. The freeway had been coated with the sun’s glare. Below it, the light was shut out by the massive cubes of the Nueva Esperanza Housing Project, like the walls of some smoothly machined canyon. The Ford cruised slowly down the project’s main avenue with its dividers of yellow grass and stunted palm trees, as Ralph searched the high windowless walls for the right building number.
He strained to make out the stencilled numbers, buried under layer upon layer of slogans and names in the fluorescent spray paints with their oddly kinked style of lettering. Ghetto baroque, thought Ralph. Some of the words were meters high and would have required some kind of primitive mountain-climbing skills to accomplish. He envisioned the wiry Nueva teenagers rappelling down the faces of the buildings, propelling themselves from side to side with squirts of paint like gravityless space explorers in old ’50s science fiction flicks. He shook his head to get rid of the image and saw the number of the building for which he was looking.
The Ford managed to squeeze into an open space at the curb between two rusted, immobile hulks. A covey of dirty-faced children peered at him through the smashed windshield of one of the old cars as he got out of the Ford, locked it, and crossed the sidewalk to the building’s entrance.
His foot didn’t quite clear the top of a mound of trash lying in the doorway. The mound shifted and grumbled, opening one blood-rimmed eye for a moment. Ralph walked faster into the dark lobby.
Inside, he studied the list of names and apartment numbers posted between the two elevators, each bearing an Out Of Order sign. For a few uneasy seconds, the poorly-lit space brought back the memory of the inside of the Thronsen Home. But the air here was sour-smelling with the cramped miasma of old people’s diseases and the dry odor of envelopes and checks for too little money from the government offices downtown. A squat woman wearing sneakers and a thin shawl scuttled away from the mailboxes, glancing nervously at Ralph before she disappeared into a stairwell. As he reached into his shirt pocket and took out the scrap of paper, he turned back to the list.
That must be the one, he decided, comparing the name on the paper with one in the middle of the list. He re-pocketed the paper and headed for the stairwell. A short man with some kind of a sheaf of newspaper in his hand was talking to a hard-faced teenager slouched against the wall.
His legs were starting to ache by the time he reached the fifth floor. The building’s stale odor was even worse in the upper hallway. He walked slowly, scanning the doors. He heard one open after he passed by, then quickly close again.
One of the metal numbers, a five, dangled head downwards on the door at the end of the hall. After a moment’s hesitation he brought his hand up and knocked.
Muted footsteps came from inside the apartment, then the door, spanned by a chain, opened a few inches. A woman’s suspicious face peered out at him.
“Mrs. Alvarez?” Ralph had already planned what he would do. He reached into his pants pocket, brought out his wallet and flipped it open to his Opwatch ID card—the way cops in the movies did. “I’m from the, uh, California State Correctional Research Commission. Like to talk to you about your boy, Ruben.” That had been the name on one of the folders.
The woman’s eyes flicked from the open wallet to his face. Her expression didn’t change.
“You are Mrs. Alvarez, aren’t you?” He returned his wallet to his pants.
She nodded. “What’s Ruben done now?” Her voice was sullen and resentful.
“Nothing. I just want to ask—”
“You can’t do nothing ’til I talk to Mr. Hahey at the Legal Clinic.” Her chin lifted and her eyes narrowed.
“Ruben’s not in any more trouble, Mrs. Alv—”
“It’s his probation officer,” she interrupted angrily. “He causes all the trouble. Why can’t he let Ruben alone?”
“I just want to ask you some questions—”
“Sending him from this place to this place to this place. When’s he coming home?”
“I don’t know, Mrs. Alvarez. I just—”
“What kinda questions?”
Ralph took a deep breath. “When was the last time you heard from Ruben?”
A shrug. “He writes every week or so.”
He had expected that. “What does he say in his letters?”
“Not so much. He don’t write so good.”
“Does he say anything about the Thronsen Home? Anything about the treatment program he’s in?”
“He says he’s lonely out there in the desert. And he misses Angela—that’s his girlfriend. Por vida, he says.”
“Anything else?”
“I think he said in his last letter he won the ping-pong tournament. They gave him a coke for a prize.” She tilted her head and inspected him harder. “Hey, what’re you asking these questions for?”
Ralph swallowed and tried to smile. “We’re attempting to find out what the parents of the children in the Operation Dreamwatch program think of it. Sometimes the parents get feedback from the kids that the people who run the program aren’t aware of.”
“Yeah, a mother always knows.”
He nodded. “What do you think of the program he’s been sent to? This Dreamwatch thing?”
She looked suddenly tired, as if the mask had faded for a moment to reveal the fatigue beneath the skin. “I don’t know.” She wiped her forehead with the back of her hand. “I don’t know anything about it. I guess it’s okay. Ruben’s gotta be someplace, I know. He’s kind of a wild kid. He gave me a black eye once, and broke his sister’s arm. That was the last time he was home.” She sighed. “Maybe if his father hadn’t left when he was a baby . . .”
“But you feel the project’s all right? There’s nothing wrong with it?”
Another shrug. “I didn’t understand when Ruben’s P.O. told me about it. Something about dreams—I don’t know. But if it changes Ruben just a little bit, that’d be nice. Just so he didn’t blow up all the time. Then he’d be a good boy.”
“But you’re sure he’s okay?” persisted Ralph. “Nothing’s happened to him?”
“Naw, he’s okay. Hey, look.” She went away from the door, then returned with an object she handed to Ralph across the chain. “He sent me that last week. He made it in woodshop.” She smiled proudly.
It was a short piece of pine board, varnished so inexpertly that little half-beads of clear yellow had formed around the bottom edge. The words TO MY LOVING MOM had been crudely incised into the wood. It looked just like all the shop projects he had seen in the Juvenile Hall where he had once worked. He started to hand it back through the door’s narrow opening but Mrs. Alvarez waved it away.
“You keep it,” she said. “Then you can tell them at the Juvenile Court that Ruben’s not a bad boy. And you can show them that.” A kind of childlike hopefulness had filtered into her voice.
He hesitated, then nodded. “All right,” he said. “I’ll tell them.” She’s probably been disappointed so many times, he thought. A couple more lies won’t hurt.
As he headed down the stairwell, Ralph passed the man with the bundle of newspapers he had seen in the building’s lobby. Their eyes met for a moment, then the short man continued trudging upstairs. Ralph noticed that the papers under the man’s arm were copies of the Revolutionary Worker’s Party Agitant. He hurried down the dark steps before the man could come after him and ask him to subscribe.