Name:________________________________€¦ · Web viewLouie said we was all getting “home-schooled” but that was just a lie. I never even saw one book in Louie’s house. It was

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My Life as a Little Kid

Part 1 – Life with Uncle Louie

When we was little, my mom didn’t like to have us around the house much. Instead, she’d send us over to our Uncle Louie’s house to “spend the night,” she would say. But we would usually end up being stuck there for several days and sometimes several weeks or months at a time while she went off on trips with her boyfriends, or went into drug rehab, or (I suspect) did time in jail for stealing or who knows what.

She would pay Uncle Louie to keep us, and I learned early on to watch her when she was counting the money into his hand. That’s how I could figure out how long we was gonna be stuck there. If she counted out a few hundred dollars, I knew we was gonna be there for a long while. If it was only forty or fifty bucks, I knew we’d really only be there for a couple of nights. As hard as Uncle Louie made us all work, he had a lot of nerve taking any money at all from Mom. He maybe should have had to pay her money instead like as if he was buying slaves cause that’s exactly how he treated us.

There was five of us at that time because this was before Bobo died. Bobo was our youngest brother. His real name was Roberto, but we started calling him Bobo because he and I had the same name. Well, mine was actually not Roberto but Robert, and everyone called me Bobby. So to make sure we would know who they was talking to, Mom and her boyfriends all started calling him Bobo. The reason we had almost the same name was because we was named after two different dads, named Robert and Roberto – at least that’s what Mom said.

I was in the middle, with one brother and one sister older than me, and one brother and one sister younger than me. By the time we started getting dropped off at Louie’s, I guess I was about five years old. We may have stayed there some when I was younger than that, but five is the earliest I can remember anything that happened to me. The reason why I know I was about five is because my best friend, this kid who lived next door to my mom’s house, started kindergarten that same year. And he and I was the same age, only I was two weeks older. The reason it sticks in my mind about my buddy going to school is cause I never got to go to school myself when my friend started. Mom and Uncle

Louie said we was all getting “home-schooled” but that was just a lie. I never even saw one book in Louie’s house.

It was actually both Uncle Louie’s and Aunt Mazie’s house, but Aunt Mazie wasn’t all there in her mind. Most of the time, she just sat there staring, acting like she didn’t see what was going on around her. She stayed real quiet and tried not to get in Uncle Louie’s way and get herself hit. I seen him beat her down to the ground with his fists a few times, so I don’t really blame Mazie too much for not stopping Louie from doing what he done to us. Aunt Mazie was my mom’s sister, but she’s dead now. My mom’s probably dead by now, too, but I’m not allowed to see her anymore, so I have no way of knowing that for sure. I wouldn’t want to see her again, anyway, after all she let us go through.

It wasn’t just me and my four brothers and sisters over there cause Mazie had four kids of her own, plus she and Uncle Louie had a newborn named Muley and another kid still in diapers when we first started going there. So altogether there was eleven kids in the apartment, all cousins or brothers and sisters.

We was lucky we didn’t live over there all the time cause Uncle Louie beat up Mazie’s boys a lot worse than he ever beat us. The one who got beaten worst of all was Cheyenne, Aunt Mazie’s oldest boy. Mazie’s four older kids were all boys, and they was all named after the towns where they was born. As dumb as Mazie is, she probably just couldn’t think up any names on her own. I guess it was alright for the oldest two to be named Cheyenne and Casper, but I wouldn’t have wanted to be one of the two named Phoenix and Abernathy.

Whenever Louie was high on something and acting crazy, most of us had enough sense to keep our mouths shut and just go along with whatever crazy thing he was making us do, but Mazie’s oldest boy, Cheyenne, would say stuff to him like, “Why don’t you leave us alone you big bully?” or “Why don’t you do it yourself? We’re too little to have to be doing stuff like that.”

As soon as he talked back like that, Uncle Louie would get a hold of him and start throwing him across the room, slamming him into lamp stands and stereos and such. Cheyenne always had bruises all over his body, and he’d show them off to us like he was real proud of them. In fact, we’d all show off our

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bruises to each other, like normal kids would show off a new pair of blue jeans or shoes. Cheyenne was only two years older than me, but he was lots bigger. Not that he was all that big for his age – it’s just that I’ve always been short for my age as I was growing up. I’ve always wondered if that was because we never seemed to get much to eat when I was little. But Cheyenne sure didn’t eat any more than we did and he was regular sized.

Don’t get the wrong idea about Uncle Louie. He didn’t only hit Cheyenne. He beat on all of us. Probably the easiest way for me to let you see how life was at that house is to just tell you about a few of the days we spent there, so that’s what I’m going to do. Altogether we must have spent at least a thousand days and nights over there, but I’m just going to tell you about a couple of days there – and they wasn’t even some of the worst days. The only reason I remember that one time so well is because Louie almost got himself arrested for being mean to one of his younger boys in a public place.

The days I’m gonna tell you about started out like most days at Uncle Louie’s place. Louie came hollering into our room before it was even starting to get light outside. All eleven of us slept in the same little bedroom on some blankets that Mazie had spread out for us on the floor. The apartment was in the middle of an auto salvage yard above the used auto parts sales office, and our sleeping room was small and really dirty.

On the day I’m going to tell you about, it was summertime, and super hot outside. Like I said, Louie used us like slaves every day working in his junkyard, instead of sending us to school. He called that our ‘School of Hard Knocks.’ I was about to turn nine on the day I’m talking about, so we had already been stuck there off and on for four years, and we had never even opened a school book.

We had to work twelve hours every day for Louie in that stupid auto salvage yard. Even on Sundays we had to work all day. This junkyard was a really trashy place just outside Dallas, Texas. And Louie kept a tall razor-wire fence all around the place to keep people from coming in to try and steal auto parts. That big fence was also one of the things that kept us from trying to run away. There were a few thousand old busted clunker cars lined up in rows. Some of the cars were pretty much intact, but most of them already had almost everything of value taken off of them.

Mazie’s brother, our Uncle Curtis, had owned the place earlier, but he was killed with a pool cue in a bar fight, and since he didn’t have no wife or kids, Mazie got his junkyard. Louie didn’t know nothing about auto mechanics like Uncle Curtis did, so he didn’t really know much about how to take out car engines and stuff like that. Right after he got the place, He painted up a big sign saying “Self Service: Remove Your Own Parts.” People could come with their own tools and take off whatever car parts they needed and pay Louie half price that way. The problem was, the customers usually had to take off some extra parts to get to the parts they needed. They would just leave all the extra parts they didn’t want lying around on the ground. One of the jobs Louie had us doing was to pick up all the car parts that was left lying around.

But pretty soon, the customers out there removing their own parts started asking us questions like why we weren’t in school and stuff. Right away, Louie stopped letting folks come onto the property to remove their own parts. He made us put up a fence around the shop and customers were no longer allowed out into the yard where the cars were kept. After that, we had to remove all the valuable parts from the cars ourselves. Either that or, if Louie was in a worse mood than usual, we would get stuck whacking all the weeds growing up around the cars. We liked taking off car parts a lot better than weeding. We were just little kids, but he had us out there with wrenches and screwdrivers, in the summer sun, taking off transmissions and carburetors and stuff.

Then we would have to lug the big heavy parts all the way over to the sales building, clean them off with Gojo and gasoline, then show each part to Uncle Louie, and tell him which car we got it from so he could put it in the computer and label it and price tag it. Then we would stack it on the shelf exactly where he said. We learned early how to find out the make, model, and year of each car. Cause if we showed up at the sales office with a part, and we couldn’t tell him exactly which car it came from, we would have plenty of new bruises to show off.

Looking back on it now that I’m a few years older, I realize that, even as little kids, we was removing, cleaning, and stocking thousands of dollars worth of car parts for him every day, and he never paid us nothing. Not only that, but the work there was hard and dangerous. For example, when we

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took off a carburetor and cleaned it, he would make us use gasoline to scrub off all the old black gunk, and he didn’t even give us gloves to keep the gas off our hands. Our hands would be red and stinging for days after that. And the little kids would sometimes splash it in their eyes accidentally. If something like that ever happened, or one of us got hurt, Louie would scream at us, stuff like, “Suck it up and quit yer sniveling, you little shit!” or “You think that hurt? … You cry like that for about two more seconds and you’ll find out what it really means to hurt.”

On the afternoon of the day I’m going to tell you about, Muley and I was working together as a team. Muley is the nickname we always called Mazie’s youngest son, Muleshoe. He couldn’t have been over four years old at that time, so I was having to do most of the work. The two of us was out behind the car parts office that afternoon, cleaning a couple of carburetors. Used carburetors could sometimes sell for several hundred bucks apiece, so Louie liked them to be perfectly clean. On this particular day, Muley was even less help than usual because he was sick to his stomach. He still sucked his thumb, and when he would get gasoline all over his hands, like he did that day, the thumb sucking made him feel sick. Before I even realized he was getting sick, he leaned over and started puking.

I called Uncle Louie, hoping he might feel sorry for us and give us a short rest break. But instead, when he saw Muley leaned over vomiting, he kicked him in the backside, making him fall down in his own vomit. Then he cussed and threatened him for a while before he went back inside. I felt sorry for Muley. Plus, I felt a little bit guilty because I had made him really hustle all morning, running parts to Uncle Louie as fast as I could get them off the cars. Some of the parts were kind of heavy, and he was working way too hard in the hot sun – at least for a kid his age. So after he barfed, I told Muley to just lean back against the wall in the shade while I finished cleaning off the carburetors.

There was a good reason why we was all truly hustling that day. Uncle Louie had started a contest early that morning, before daybreak. He broke us into four teams, each with one big kid and one little kid. I was almost turning nine by that time, so I was considered a big kid, and I got put with Muley. Muley kind of dawdles around, and sometimes forgets what he’s supposed to be doing. He’s real

smart for a little kid, only kind of absent minded. I think Louie stuck me with Muley to try to even up the teams because whenever there was a contest, I would usually win no matter who my partner was. That’s cause I like winning, especially if there’s a good prize. That morning, Uncle Louie teamed us up, then stood there looking at us while we stood in our line.

“Okay, kids,” he told us, “like I said, this is a contest. Whichever team brings in the most parts, worth the most money total, is gonna win a good prize. But the parts all gotta be cleaned up, tagged, and stored properly … You got that?”

“What’s the prize?” Cheyenne asked, trying to sound bored. But I knew he liked prizes almost as much as I did. Louie stood there for a minute, sticking his lower lip out like he was thinking.

“Okay, here it is. Whoever brings in the most clean inventory is gonna get a big candy bar and a can of soda at the store. You can even come with me and pick out which kind you want.” That was a treat we hardly ever got – getting to go somewhere out of the junkyard.

“Would we each get our own candy and coke, or do I have to share with her?” Abernathy asked, nodding at my big sister, Janie, who was his partner. Louie thought for another moment.

“Both people on the winning team will each get their own soda and candy. And that’s gonna cost me plenty! … Okay, Casper, you and Shirley have got the northwest section of the lot; Cheyenne, you two are in the southwest, Bob and Muley, northeast, and Abernathy, you’re with Janie in the southeast … You got that?” Louie had the salvage yard divided into four equal parts, and, when we had contests, each team was only allowed to scavenge parts from the section they was assigned to. That way, if something on one of the old cars got broken or ruined because we were hurrying too much, Louie would always know which team needed to be punished.

We all mumbled that we understood, then turned and headed quickly out into the salvage yard. It was still kind of dark outside because we had started so early, but I didn’t mind that. By starting early, I could bring in a lot of parts before it got too hot to really hustle. By the afternoon I knew I’d have to slow down. Whenever there was a contest, my strategy was to work fast in the morning, and bring in at least $3,000 worth of parts before noon. The contest was

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always about how much the parts were worth based on what price tag Uncle Louie put on each part after looking it up in the computer. I knew which parts cost the most, so those were the parts I went after on contest days. But before we got 20 feet past the inner fence, Louie stepped out and yelled after us.

“And one more thing. I don’t want to see any of the little ones hanging around here all afternoon sucking water out of the hose. You don’t be coming back over here unless you got car parts in your hands. Y’ hear me? I don’t care how thirsty you get. If you need to drink that often, then you need to get those parts off faster. Any little kids I see slacking are gonna be on weed detail for a week – and no prizes. You got that?”

Louie’s warning about coming around just to drink water didn’t worry me. What Louie didn’t know was that I kept an empty gallon milk jug hidden in the trunk of one of the old cars in the area where we was yanking parts. Early in the day, after sending Muley in with cleaned parts to be inventoried, I ran and got the jug, filled it with water, and hid it before Louie came back out. That way, Muley and I could drink water any time we liked without having to waste time walking all the way back to the office.

To make a long story short, my team won as usual, even with Muley too sick to help much the last few hours. By seven o’clock that evening, we had all the parts cleaned, turned in and inventoried. We had been at it for thirteen hours, and we was all pretty tired.

Shirley, Muley, and Bobo, the three littlest kids had flopped right down in the oily dirt at the parts-cleaning area, and they was already asleep. I guess in most homes, kids that age got to take naps and stuff, but here, if a little kid was caught passed out somewhere, Louie would kick them hard and scream, “Ain’t gonna be none of that sleeping.” Of course he would also throw in a couple of filthy words into every sentence he ever said, but I’d better not put all that in here. Finally, Louie came out and announced that Muley and I was the winners.

“So what else is new?” Cheyenne muttered, all disgusted. He picked up a lug nut out of the dirt and chucked it hard off into the distance. But he was careful with his aim cause he knew if Louie had heard it hit one of his crummy old cars, he would have chucked something a lot bigger than a lug nut at Cheyenne.

The members of the other teams, looking dejected, all lined up at the hose to wash up. There was a rule that nobody could go inside the apartment until they had washed themselves off and stripped down out of their work clothes. So we would all strip off our filthy work clothes, with girls and boys right there in front of each other, scrubbing oursleves in our wet underwear. We would hang up our clothes on these giant nails Louie had pounded into the wall behind the sales office. Each one of us had our own nail, with the little guys getting the lower nails.

The next morning, we would put the same set of clothes back on without ever washing them. Them clothes was dark blackish-grey because of all the oily crud stuck on them. The fresh dew and leftover sweat always made the clothes feel soggy when we put them on the next day. That was okay for hot days, but whenever it was cold outside, it felt really ugly and uncomfortable to put the same wet, dirty clothes back on.

After we stripped and washed off in the hose, with our underwear still all wet from the water, we had to get our “inside clothes” off the nail and put them on. Our inside clothes were just some shorts and a t-shirt without any shoes. Mazie called them our “pajamas” cause that’s what we slept in too. Louie stayed and made me and Muley clean ourselves extra well to be ready for our trip to the store for our prizes. Then he tossed us some flip-flops for our feet since we was going out in public, and Louie didn’t want nobody saying anything about us being barefooted.

Then we had to wait around while everybody ate some bologna sandwiches. Little Muley kept talking about what kind of candy and coke he was going to pick. He couldn’t remember the name of the candy bar he wanted, so he just kept trying to explain what it looked like and tasted like. Then we had to wait a few more hours while Uncle Louie drank beer and yelled at Mazie. At one point he went back into his bedroom for a few minutes where I guess he took some drugs because of the way he was acting later at the grocery store.

It was after ten o’clock at night by the time we finally got to the grocery store that night. Muley and I were both exhausted because we had been working so hard in the salvage yard all day long. Other shoppers were already looking at us funny, maybe cause they thought little kids should be home in bed at that hour, or maybe because we were dressed in

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kind of dirty, ratty looking clothes. But they was most likely looking at us because of the things Uncle Louie was doing.

I could tell Uncle Louie was kind of high on something – probably meth or crack judging from how jittery he was acting. He kept looking around kind of like he was paranoid – the way someone would look over their shoulders if they was planning to shoplift something. But I knew Louie wasn’t planning to steal nothing. He’s way too smart for that. He was just cranked up on something. That’s why I knew we had to be really quiet and careful around him in order to keep from getting hurt. But Muley was too little to know any better yet. I guess he couldn’t tell when Louie was high or maybe he never understood how crazy Louie could get when he was cranked up on something.

“Where’s the candy at?” Muley asked as Louie loaded cases of beer into our cart.

“Shut your stupid little mouth or you won’t get any candy,” Louie said, louder than he should have with other people standing nearby.

“You said we’d get candy,” Muley whined. “We worked real hard!”

“That’s it kid! I warned you to shut your mouth. Now you ain’t getting nothing!” Louie leaned down and shouted loudly into Muley’s face. Some people had stopped shopping, and they was looking over at us now. The shoppers was behind Louie where he couldn’t see them. But I saw them watching us, and I was hoping Louie would get in trouble.

“But you promised,” Muley wailed, tears starting to roll down his face. “You said if we won …” Uncle Louie reached down real fast, grabbed Muley and shook him around pretty hard.

“I’m tired of telling you to shut your f___ing little mouth,” he screamed at him. “You want to cry? I’ll give you something to cry about.”

He suddenly grabbed both of Muley’s little thumbs, tightly gripping one thumb in each of his fists, then lifted him up off the ground by just his thumbs. Muley immediately let out a big howl. I guess his thumbs must have been popping out of their sockets or something, and it probably hurt like crazy. An elderly man pushed his cart hard against Louie’s butt to get his attention.

“You put that child down this instant!” He demanded. Louie seemed to realize for the first time

that people had witnessed how mean he was being. A pretty lady wheeled up, with a sleeping baby in a car seat inside her cart. She whipped out a cell phone and started pushing buttons.

“I’m calling the police right now,” she said.

But nothing ever happened to Louie from that. He hustled us outside and sped off before anyone could get his license number. On the way home he assured me that I would still get my prize… someday.

“But there won’t ever be nothing for this howling brat!” He yelled, reaching across to slap the back of his hand hard across Muley’s face.

When we came back from the store and went into our bedroom, Muley was still sobbing weakly. It was pretty dark in that little room where we all had to sleep, and we was stepping carefully over all the arms and legs sprawled everywhere. I saw a small open area where I told Muley to lie down, then I headed back over to the side I usually sleep on with the older kids. The little kid’s crying must have woken up Mazie’s two oldest boys and my oldest sister, Janie.

“What’d he do to Muley?” Casper asked.

I told them all about the store, whispering just loud enough that they could hear but not Uncle Louie. Then everybody got real quiet for a long time. I was just about to drift off to sleep when Cheyenne spoke up.

“We ought to kill him,” he said, like he was really serious.

“How could we do it?” Janie asked, sitting up. I could tell from her voice that she wasn’t just asking cause she was curious how to kill somebody. I could see she wanted to kill Louie, too.

“We ought to shoot him,” Cheyenne said. His voice sounded calm, like maybe he had been thinking about this for a while.

“He keeps all the guns locked up,” I heard Casper’s voice saying. I hesitated for only a few seconds before I spoke.

“I know where he hides the key to his gun safe,” I said quietly, but not whispering anymore. Casper and Cheyenne both sat up real quick and looked at me hard. I could tell they thought maybe I was just making stuff up, so I told them, “I swear I ain’t lying. I sneaked down into the sales office one day to see if

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I could find something to eat. Louie was out in the yard shooting at rats and possums. I figured he’d stay out there for a while, but he came back in sooner than I expected, so I had to hide behind a counter. I was peeking right at him when he put his gun away and hid the key. He’s got it in a place where nobody’s gonna find it no matter how hard they look. But I saw exactly where he hides it.

“I want to be the one who gets to shoot him,” Janie whispered so none of the littler kids could hear in case they wasn’t sleeping.

“You never held a gun in your life,” I reminded her.

“So? Neither did you,” she hissed back at me.

“Did so! The one we called Climbing Joe had lots of guns. Remember? Before he got locked up, I used to sneak into his closet and mess with them.” I was just bragging at that point, but what I told her was half true. I had sneaked into Climbing Joe’s closet to have a look at all his weapons. I hadn’t actually had the nerve to touch any of them, but I really had looked real close, and I figured I could shoot one if there was any bullets in it.

Whenever we was talking about one of the many men in my mother’s life, we’d always just refer to him as “the one we called Buster” or “the one called Climbing Joe.” A lot of their names we couldn’t even remember or never knew in the first place. But we had stayed at Climbing Joe’s place for several months. He was about the longest one ever. Whenever my mom had a man friend, at least we had some place warm to sleep. Climbing Joe used to brag that he got his name from having to climb out of so many windows when ladies’ husbands came home. But I suspect it was more likely that he got it from climbing into people’s windows to steal from them.

“Bobby’s right,” Cheyenne told Janie, with his voice sounding like he had made up his mind and there wasn’t nothing she could do about it. “Girls got no business messing with guns, especially not when somebody needs shooting. You’re likely to drop the gun or shoot your own damned self.”

“I want to be the one who gets to shoot him,” she insisted.

“We all hate him just as much. Why should you get to be the one?” Casper grumbled.

“Cause he … he done something to me.” I could tell from her voice that she was trying real hard to

keep her tears back. We had all learned not to be caught crying around Louie, so we wasn’t used to seeing tears.

“What’d he do to you?” I asked, not bothering to whisper. By the time she answered, she really was crying.

“He locked me in the bathroom two days ago while you was all out in the yard. I had brought in some parts and he was looking them up. Then he suddenly grabbed me and dragged me in there and wouldn’t let me out ... He done something … bad to me. It hurt me real bad, and it still hurts.”

Cheyenne cussed so loud that several of the little ones started moving around in their sleep. Cheyenne really liked Janie, and I don’t mean just liked her as a cousin.

Our murderous plans were all set before we slept that night. Cheyenne finally agreed that Janie could hold a gun when we shot up Uncle Louie, but, just to be sure we killed him, each one of us older boys would also have a weapon, and the plan was we would all begin firing into him at the same time. That way, even if one of us missed or chickened out or had trouble making our gun shoot, at least one or two shots would hit him. Counting the rifles, pistols, and shotguns, Louie must have had at least 20 firearms in that gun safe of his, so there was plenty of guns for all of us to shoot him with.

Cheyenne said, “I figure all we have to do is knock him down with the first few shots. If he’s still alive, then we can shoot him some more once he’s on the ground.”

“If we all shoot him, what’s gonna happen if they catch us?” Casper wondered. “Can they send kids our age to jail?”

“They got jails for kids, too. You know that. But they probably aren’t going to send us to jail if we all shoot him. Don’t you see, if we all hate him enough to kill him, they’ll believe us that he really was a bad person.”

“Let’s do it quick before Mom shows up to pick us up,” Janie said. Then she turned and stared at our oldest two cousins. “Cause I don’t want you guys doing it without us while we’re gone.”

“Let’s do it tomorrow night,” I suggested. “We can sneak out, and I’ll show you where the key’s hid for the safe.”

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“Tomorrow’s fine,” Cheyenne agreed. “But only if he goes out drinking. If he’s home when we go looking for the keys, he’s likely to catch us down there and use those guns on us.”

“Okay, then,” Janie said. “But it needs to be in the next few days. The very first time he leaves to a bar, that’s when we do it.”

“We all know it won’t take long for him to go out to a bar. And when he comes staggering back in all drunk …. We ambush him! Boom! Boom! Boom!” Cheyenne said, aiming his finger like a pistol. There was a deadly ring of certainty in that final comment. His words seemed to hang in our thoughts in that dark little room as we drifted off to sleep that night, dreaming about all the terrible things we was gonna do to get back at Uncle Louie.

The next day, while we was working out in the salvage yard, it seemed for the first time like we had some kind of hope – some way out. I found myself smiling for no reason, and I also saw Cheyenne smiling once when he went by. I guess Uncle Louie noticed our happiness, too, cause when he blew his car horn to call us in for lunch, he had one of his talks with us.

Usually, he just lines us up for lunch and walks down the line, handing out a dry bologna sandwich to each kid. Then we have two minutes to stand there and eat it or he’ll jerk it out of our hands and throw it down in the greasy dirt. But today, instead of handing out the sandwiches, he looked up and down the line, stopping to stare each of us in the face.

“Okay, what in hell is up with you kids? …” he finally hollered. “Something’s up, and you’re gonna tell me what it is … Y’all think I’m too stupid to see you got something up your sleeves, grinning around here, right and left … You ain’t eating till you tell me what you’re up to.”

Nobody said a word for about one full minute as Louie glared at us one by one. Suddenly, he stepped over to my little brother, Bobo, who was the youngest kid required to work in the lot. He was only three – barely out of diapers. Because Bobo was too small to get any real work done around the yard, Louie kept him around the office to be like his personal slave. Every time Louie needed a beer from the fridge or something from upstairs, he would send Bobo running for it. If he accidentally brought back the wrong thing, he would get a bad beating with Louie’s walking stick.

Now, Louie stood right in front of Bobo for a few seconds, giving him the evil eye, then he bent down and talked to him in that quiet tone he usually had when he was just about to hurt someone.

“You’re gonna tell me what they’re up to, Bobo. You’re gonna tell me right now.” Bobo was already shaking his head back and forth, and getting tears in his eyes before Louie started counting down. And, of course, Bobo had been was sound asleep when we made our plans for murder the night before, so there’s no way he could have told Louie anything.

“Five … four … three …”

“I don’t know nothing, Uncle Louie. Nobody said nothing to me. I pwomise. I thought they was just happy. Pwease! Pwease!” he pleaded as Louie continued to count down, and he was telling the truth. Bobo was so little that whenever he said “Uncle Louie,” it sounded like he was saying “Unkawooey.”

“ … two … one ...”

As soon as Louie raised his arm, Bobo fell down on the ground and balled up with his arms up over his head, moaning and begging like he would always do.

“Pwease, Unkawooey! I pwomise!” He howled.

Louie had only hit him a couple of times when all us big kids started moving in closer. He turned to face us, waving his stick back and forth viciously. It was a thick, oak cane, more like a club than a walking stick.

“You want some of this?” He screamed at us. Then he charged toward us and we scattered in all directions cause we knew what that stick felt like. We didn’t get no sandwiches, but at least he didn’t hit Bobo no more after that.

At suppertime that night, Louie refused, once again, to hand out the sandwiches but marched us straight up to our bedroom without any supper. Since we don’t ever get no breakfast, that meant that none of us had eaten since the day before, and after working fast all day, we was all starving.

Louie always kept us locked in our room at night so we wouldn’t try to run off. I don’t know what he was worried about because, with the tall fences and those big, vicious dogs he kept in the yard at night, there was no way any of us were going to try and make a run for it.

We were like prisoners in there all night every night. For a long time after we first started getting

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dumped there, we didn’t even have no place to go to the bathroom at night. But Aunt Mazie didn’t like that. So, in one corner of our bedroom, Louie finally started leaving a bucket where we could go to the bathroom at night since Mazie had complained to him that, “the littler ones are peeing all over themselves, and I can smell it all over the house.”

Four times that hungry night, each of us older kids had risked death by crawling out the window, and creeping along a narrow ledge to the far end of the building where we could see whether Louie’s car was still down there. If the car was gone, that meant he had left to get drunk at some bar. As soon as he left, we planned to kick open the door of our room and go downstairs to get his guns and wait for him to come back. Aunt Mazie never woke up for nothing because of her pills she took for being crazy, so we didn’t have to worry about her hearing us. If we had fallen off that ledge while we were sneaking back to see if Louie’s car was there, even if we had survived the fall, those dogs would have torn us to pieces as soon as we hit the ground. Louie had trained them to be as mean as he was.

“I got them dogs to protect my property,” he had told us one time. “And to protect you,” he added, pointing his finger at us like he was pointing a pistol. We knew exactly what he meant.

Until way after midnight, Janie, Cheyenne, Casper and I kept taking turns going across the ledge to check on that car. Dwayne, my older brother was afraid of heights –and dogs – so he chickened out when it was his turn.

I was the last one to go across, but Louie’s car was still there. He obviously wasn’t going out to the bar that night. I was heartbroken that the death of Uncle Louie would have to be postponed until another night. Then, by the time I started inching along the ledge to get back in the bedroom window, Louie’s attack dogs had started hanging around right below me, barking and jumping up against the wall, trying to reach my feet. I kept hoping their barking wouldn’t wake up Uncle Louie. But sure enough, when I was only a few feet from the window, I heard the sound of locks slamming open in the side door below. Louie kept three locks on that door, so it took him half a minute to get them all open – just enough time for me to crawl back into the window.

When I looked back out the window, Louie came charging out waving his walking stick and cussing at the dogs. I yanked my head back out of sight so he

wouldn’t see me. But I heard his voice start shouting up at us a moment later. This is what he said, except with all the bad words taken out:

“You _______ kids! You been messing with these ______ dogs? …” We didn’t answer. “I’m talking to you!” He screamed. “Don’t make me come up there …” Casper jumped up and stuck his head out the window.

“Yeah?” Casper said.

“Why the ______ are these dogs barking?”

“I don’t know. They just started barking. Maybe there was another possum.”

“Who said you could open that window?” Louie asked.

“It’s burning hot up here.”

“Your butt’s gonna be burning hot if you don’t close that window right now.” Casper closed the window immediately, but we could still hear Louie shouting, “And keep it closed!”

What Casper had said about the heat was actually true. The room where we all slept was always real hot in summertime and real cold in winter. It must have been a hundred degrees in there that night, but we were used to it. And I remember that being one of the hottest nights of the whole summer. The only air conditioners was in Louie’s bedroom and in his office downstairs.

The next morning, we had high hopes, once again, that Louie would leave that night for his final trip to his favorite bar, but once again our dreams never came true. Because things happened the way they did, we never knew if he went out that night or not because we weren’t around.

When you’re a little kid, you don’t have any control over your own life. You can dream about doing something. You can make all kinds of plans to do this or that, but if your plans interfere in any way with what the grownups want to do, forget about them. Cause the adults aren’t ever even going to consider what you want to do if you’re just a kid. If they want to move hundreds of miles away from your friends and cousins, to some place where you don’t know nobody, then that’s exactly what they’re gonna do no matter how you feel about it. If they want to stick you in a bad school where mean punks beat you up every day, then they’ll do it. If your mom wants to live with some scary guy you don’t like, you had

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better just keep your mouth shut about it. As a kid, you always have to go whenever and wherever they tell you.

And that’s exactly what happened to us the following day – the day after Uncle Louie never left to the bar. Our big plan to get Louie was ruined. We had started our day still in high spirits, but being more careful not to let it show. While I was taking off a car starter and a fender, I kept daydreaming about how it would be that night – the quiet waiting, guns in our hands, and then the loud shooting ...

In my daydreams, we five oldest kids would be waiting inside the office in the middle of the night, each of us hiding behind a counter or a big car part like an engine or a transmission. Then Louie would come stumbling in, all drunk. We would all jump out as soon as the door opened and start shooting at him. We would just keep shooting until he was dead, dead, dead! And then we’d shoot him a few more times just for fun! I tried to imagine what look he would get on his face when he first saw it was us and that we was shooting him.

But then, at 10:30 that morning, our mom’s crummy old van came driving into the salvage yard. I didn’t notice because I was under a 1976 Ford pickup truck by that time. Cheyenne had just helped me jack it up and drop it on blocks. I was trying to pull off a rear axle, but it was rusted on pretty solid on one end. When I heard Janie screaming my name, I crawled out headfirst.

“What’s wrong?” I asked her, squinting up at her in the sun.

“Mom’s van just pulled in,” she said, talking fast. “That ruins everything.” Cheyenne had come out from under the hood of a nearby clunker and was approaching us.

“We can still do it,” he said, looking at me. “Casper and I can get him by ourselves if we take him by surprise. Only we don’t know where that key is for his gun safe. You gotta tell me where that key is, Bobby, quick!”

“Don’t you dare tell him,” Janie warned me. “Cheyenne promised me I could shoot him, too. He’s gonna have to wait till we get back.”

“Tell me, Bobby, right now, before he comes over here,” Cheyenne insisted.

“It ain’t fair,” Janie whined, trying not to cry.

“No, Cheyenne, she’s right. It ain’t fair to Janie, and it ain’t fair to me,” I agreed. “I ain’t saying where it is. You promised all of us we could help do it. I been thinking about this a long time, and I ain’t gonna be left out of it either. You can just wait till we get back. We’re never gone for long.”

“What if he gets high and hurts one of us before you get back … I don’t know if I can wait, Bobby. I’m really getting scared of him. He’s acting crazier and crazier. He’s probably gonna kill one of the littluns any day now.”

“Just hang on and do what he says till we get back. Quit standing up to him. That’s stupid anyway. He’s more likely gonna kill you some day. Anyway, if we wait till there’s all five of us, I know we can take him. But if it’s just you and Casper trying to shoot him in the dark, he might get to you before you can finish him off.”

Cheyenne was shaking his head, but I could tell that he realized he was gonna have to go along with us on this. He cussed, then bent down and grabbed a piece of a broken car mirror and flung it as far as he could throw into the distance.

“See ya before long, Cheyenne,” Janie told him, moving in for a hug.

“Yeah, okay,” he said, pretending to slug her on the shoulder as he let go of her and moved away. Then he trudged back toward the old car he was tearing down. Janie and I started walking over toward Mom’s van.

Part 2 – Life with Mom

Getting in the van with Mom after a long stay at Uncle Louie’s always gave me mixed feelings. On one hand, I was always relieved to be away from the salvage yard and Louie. On the other hand, I was always sad to be parting from our cousins cause they was just like brothers and sisters to us. Not only that, but I worried about their safety and well-being. My brothers and sisters and I never knew what Louie might do to the cousins by the time we got back. They always had new scars and bruises to show off each time we returned. I guess we all felt kind of sad and worried that morning because, as soon as we

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climbed into the van, we all got kind of quiet and mopey looking. Bobo was whimpering and waving at Muley through the window. I noticed that Muley still had dark bruises across his face in the shape of fingers where Louie had back-handed him on the way back from the grocery store when Muley hadn’t gotten the prize Louie had promised. (And, of course, that reminded me that I never got my prize either.)

“Shut up that damn whining, Bobo, and get in the back where you belong,” Mom told him after we got out to the highway.

“Uncle Louie was worse than ever, Mom,” Dwayne said right away. “He hit Bobo with a stick again.”

“Well,” she answered, “knowing Bobo, I’m sure he deserved it.”

“He’s got a bruise on his back,” Dwayne said, pulling Bobo’s shirt up to show her. But she never even glanced over at his back.

“Quit complaining,” she warned us. “At least you had a roof over your heads. There’s a lotta kids in this world who ain’t even got that, I’ll tell you right now … I swear to God. I ought to pull this van over right here and dump you brats by the side of the road … teach you what it’s like to really be bad off. You got anything against Louie, just shut up about it from here on out.”

We got quiet and looked at each other all disgusted. We knew she wasn’t ever gonna do nothing. We figured we’d be back at Louie’s pretty soon. Still, I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who was actually a little bit glad about that … cause next time, things was gonna be different! Next time, we would get even ... or so I thought.

“Where are we going this time?” Janie asked Mom after we had been going down the road a few minutes.

“I’ve got a big surprise for you. We’re going all the way to California!” Mom announced.

“This van ain’t never gonna make it to California,” Dwayne said. I figured he was right. I had no idea where California was, since I had never been in school, but if it was much farther than five or ten miles, I knew Mom’s old van probably wouldn’t make it.

“For your information, Mr. Smarty Pants, we’re not going in this van. My friend Ginny’s gonna give me five hundred dollars for the van.”

“So how are we getting to California?” I asked.

“We got a ride set up with some old guy – has a nice big truck rig we’re riding in.”

“You mean like an eighteen wheeler?”

“Yeah, a big semi.”

“Are we riding in back?” My five-year-old sister, Shirley, asked.

“No, Silly, it’s got a nice big cab with a bed and everything.”

Janie was shaking her head like she couldn’t believe her ears. “All six of us are gonna ride together with some truck driver we don’t even know all the way to California in the cab of his truck?” Janie asked.

“Yeah, so what? Why you gotta always be so negative?” Mom snarled.

When we got over to Mom’s so-called friend’s house to sell her the van, the lady said she only had $180 instead of the $500 she had told my mom she would pay. I guess she knew Mom was kind of desperate to sell it, and she was right cause Mom went ahead and let her have it for $180. Mom made the lady promise to send her the rest as soon as she had an address in California, but we all knew she would never send her any more money.

“Why don’t I hold onto this title until you send me the rest and then I’ll mail it to you,” Mom suggested.

“No,” the lady said. “If you want the hundred and eighty bucks, you’ll have to sign over the title today. You’re gonna have to trust me for the rest.” So Mom leaned against the hood of the van, signed the title paper, gave it to her, and got the money.

The lady dropped us off at this crummy little motel where there was some big trucks all parked side by side. Mom pounded on one of the doors for a long time before this old guy – maybe about 60 – finally came out. He had obviously just woke up cause his face had wrinkles from the covers and his eyes were red. He stood there blinking and staring at us for a minute, not inviting us to come in.

“I’m not taking you and all these kids with me in the cab of my truck!” He finally said.

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“These are my kids. I told you I was going to pick up my kids.”

“You didn’t mention you had … what is it? Five of them?”

“Well I do.”

“And these kids are big! You must’ve started popping them out when you were about 13.”

“Something like that,” she admitted. “Look, they’re used to sleeping all together in a small space. And they’re real quiet and well behaved. I promise they won’t be no trouble.”

“You got the money?” The guy asked after staring at us a while longer.

“Well, I … I won’t be able to give you the whole $200 today, but I’ve got $150 I can give you. And I can pay you the rest when we get out there to Oakland.”

“Yeah? Where you gonna get the money out there?”

“I got a lady who’s sending me some money. I just sold her my van, and she still owes me for most of it.”

“And why do you think she would ever send it to you?”

“Cause I’m holding the title till she does. Then I’ll send it to her,” Mom said. We all knew she was lying, but we kept our mouths shut. We knew better than to speak up whenever Mom was lying. The man was still shaking his head and looking like he wasn’t interested, so my mom added, “C’mon man! I’ll make it worth your while if you know what I mean.”

I think we all knew exactly what she meant – except maybe Bobo, and he would have learned about her pretty soon if things hadn’t turned out like they did. The truth is, my mom would take money and drugs and stuff from a lot of men, and she would do bad stuff to pay them for it. She said she had to do it to make money to provide for us, but she was just making excuses cause she didn’t want to quit taking drugs and get herself a real job.

The old truck driver guy finally decided to let us come, but he made us all wait outside for several hours while he finished sleeping. It was hot and boring there outside the motel room, but we were used to that by then.

I’m just gonna tell you a little bit about the trip out to California cause it was mostly just driving and sleeping and stopping at truck stops. Stopping at the truck stops was kind of embarrassing, but at least it was different from driving all day and night.

We found out our driver’s name was Jackson. We never knew if that was his first or last name or maybe some name he just made up. He said, “You can call me Jackson,” so that’s what we called him. Jackson would stop at a truck stop and make us get out so he could sleep. Mom usually stayed out with us, but she’d sometimes stay with Jackson part of the time.

We would all hang out in the truck stop for hours at a time. Sometimes we’d look at pictures in the magazines until the cashier would tell us to stop it. None of us could really read much, but we liked the pictures. And we would sit around making up stories about the lonely looking truck drivers that came in and out.

We didn’t have enough money to buy restaurant food since Mom said she only had $30 to eat with all the way to California. The good smells in the truck stops made all of us hungry like crazy. We would take turns trying to steal leftover food from the truckers’ plates after they had paid and left – a scrap of hamburger bun, a piece of egg, stuff like that. We got thrown out of one place cause the waitress asked us not to be taking food off the plates, but Bobo went and grabbed another handful of fries.

A couple of truck stops were in big cities where Mom figured there must be grocery stores nearby, so she asked for directions, then left with Dwayne to get us some bread and bologna. Janie stayed with the rest of us to keep us out of trouble. Most of my life, Dwayne and Janie were more like a dad and mom to us than anyone else was. I wish I could find out where they are now. I’d at least like to say hello and make sure they’re all right.

It took us five full days and nights to get from where Louie’s place was, close to Dallas, all the way to San Francisco, California. One of the most disappointing things that happened was when we found Mom’s drug stash. She was up in the front of the cab with the three little ones and that Jackson guy. Dwayne and Janie and I started snooping around in Mom’s suitcase, hoping she might have something hidden in there that we could eat, and that’s when we found her kit for shooting up drugs, along with her syringe and several tiny baggies of white powder. It

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was all in a plastic bag rolled up inside her leather jacket. That’s how we knew for certain that she was strung out again. Course we already had a pretty good idea about that cause of how she was acting.

We were sure glad to finally get to San Francisco. Actually the place we were looking for was across the bay in Oakland, but Jackson, the trucker guy, was going straight on into San Francisco. Instead of going thirty miles out of his way, he dropped us off in the rain beside the highway access road and just drove off. He wasn’t a nice man. I’m not going to tell you some of the words mom used to describe him.

We didn’t know exactly how to find the place where we were going in Oakland. It was a house belonging to this guy Mom said she knew. He was going to let us stay there she said. And she had explained that we couldn’t go back to Texas because of some arrest warrant they had on her there.

None of us had suitcases except Mom. She had a big suitcase with her stuff and Bobo’s stuff in it. Each of us kids was carrying a plastic grocery bag with all our clothes in it. Fortunately, we didn’t have too much, so it wasn’t very heavy. Mom’s suitcase had wheels for rolling, but the handle thing had broken off so it was easier just to pick it up and carry it. She and Dwayne took turns doing that. Dwayne is kind of scared of certain things like spiders and dogs and stuff, but he’s real strong for his age, and he don’t never cry, even if he gets hurt bad.

We slogged along by the highway, getting splashed by cars and stepping into mud puddles. By the time we found a gas station, we was completely soaked and freezing. Oakland’s cold and raining all the time, even in summer – not one bit like Dallas.

In the gas station, Mom looked at a map and found out the place she was looking for was nearly thirty miles away. She tried for several hours to call the guy who was letting us stay at his house, but someone there kept telling Mom that the guy still wasn’t home. After a while, the gas station attendant told us we was gonna have to find another place to wait.

Mom took us outside and let us stay dry under the little roof thing where people were pumping gas into their cars. She asked a bunch of the people if they were going to the south part of Oakland, but they all shook their heads or said no. Finally, an old lady in a big fancy Cadillac SUV said she would take

us. At first, she shook her head “no,” but when she seen Mom talking to us, she came over and asked if we was all her kids. When she found out we were a family, she said, “I’ll take you where you need to go.”

We was in that station so long that we was nearly dry by that time, but I still felt bad getting into that old lady’s sparkling clean vehicle cause we had a lot of dirt and mud splashed on us. The lady took us all the way to where we was going, even stopping a couple of times to help my mom read the little map thingy in the dashboard of her fancy car. She said her name was Mrs. Greene, and this Greene lady also stopped and got us some food to eat – not just bread and bologna but real hamburgers and fries. It had already been dark for a few hours, and we hadn’t eaten since breakfast the day before. So we was all super hungry, but she just kept on buying us more food until we couldn’t eat another bite. I could tell she was worried about us.

When we got to the place Mom said was the right address, it was in a dangerous looking neighborhood and the house looked like it was about to fall over. It was up on blocks and one side of the house sagged down a little bit. Plus there was different kinds of gang tagging overlapping all over the walls. It looked like that tagging was about the only paint anyone had ever put on the house. The yard had grass and weeds taller than me growing up everywhere, and there was a man asleep on the narrow porch with what looked like a pool of vomit by his head.

The old rich lady put her car window down and spoke to Mom through the window. “Ma’am, are you sure you’re going to be all right here? You’re welcome to stay at my place, at least for tonight, if you need to.”

Mom looked at us, then glanced back at the house again. Then she turned back and said, “Nah, we’ll be okay here. I know the guy who has this house. We’ll get it all straightened out.”

“At least let me leave you my number in case you need to call someone,” the lady said.

“No, no,” Mom insisted. “I said we’d be all right here.” But the lady pushed this little business card into Mom’s hand anyway. One thing about Mom – she don’t like no one trying to mess with her family. I knew she was worrying that the Social Services people would get involved and maybe take us away

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from her. And if we was taken away, that would mean no more food stamps or welfare money for her.

We wanted to get inside the crummy looking house so we could warm up and maybe lie down and sleep for a while, but the lady who answered the door said she couldn’t let us in. She looked at all us kids, then shook her head at Mom and gave her a dirty look, like she thought Mom was crazy to bring us there.

“You ain’t coming in here unless Miles says so, and, like I’ve told you ten times already, he ain’t home,” she said, then closed the door and locked it real loud.

We waited out on the porch as far as we could get from the guy passed out on the other end of the porch. Where we waited at the far end of the porch, the smell of the man’s vomit didn’t stink as much. Shirley and Bobo flopped down onto the dirty porch and were asleep within a few seconds.

“At least we’re on the porch and not standing out in the rain,” Mom said, trying to act all cheerful.

Soon we each followed Bobo and Shirley’s example and sprawled out on the porch to sleep. But after we had been asleep for a short time, we got woken up by the passed out guy cussing and moaning and kind of crying a little. We watched him trying to get up for a while, but he kept falling down again. He was acting just like Mom would always act whenever she would shoot up too much drugs. Finally, the junkie got all the way up and staggered off into the wet weeds and tall grass behind the house. He kept walking all leaned over to one side like he was just about to topple over that direction at any second. We didn’t see him again after that.

The next time we woke up, it was just starting to get light outside, and some guy was yelling and cussing at us. He was getting out of a really cool looking classic low-rider Chevy Impala, and he slammed the car door hard.

“What the ____ are you doing on my porch? Get the ____ out of here!”

My mom jumped up and took a couple of steps toward him. “I’m Sandy … the new girl, remember? You said we could have a place to stay here … JayJay called you from Dallas, remember?”

“Yeah, so? You can’t stay here with all them kids.”

“JayJay told you I had kids. I was standing right there when she talked to you on the phone.”

“One or two little kids might have been okay, but this is way too many. And these kids are half grown. They’re gonna know everything that’s going on here. They’ll be going off to school every day, shooting their mouths off to their little buddies all about my business. I can’t have that.”

“No they won’t say nothing, cause these kids all know how to keep their mouths shut … Don’t you, kids?” She looked over at us and we all started nodding our heads and saying “Sure,” and stuff like that. We just wanted in out of the cold, no matter what the house was like or what was going on inside there. But the guy was shaking his head. He told us no way and said we needed to get out of there right now or he would send someone out to get rid of us, “the hard way.” Then he went into the house.

We all stood there looking at Mom for a minute. She was rubbing her hands together cause they were cold, and looking around the neighborhood as if there might be some other place to go nearby. She was also shivering all over like she does when she wants to sneak off to take some more drugs.

“You need to call that lady back and tell her to help us … the lady who gave us a ride,” Dwayne finally said.

“Yeah, she said she would help us, and I saw her give you her number,” Janie said.

“Nah,” Mom said quickly, “that old do-gooder’s gonna call the cops on me. People like her always gotta be sticking their noses into other people’s business.”

“What else have you got in mind?” Janie demanded.

“Just shut up and let me think a second.”

“Give me the number,” Janie said holding her hand out. “I’ll call her myself.”

Janie sounded like she always did when she had made her mind up about something. You see, Janie’s the one who usually makes a lot of the decisions for our family. Mom’s either not around or she’s completely out of it when she is around. So Janie usually is telling us all what we should do. And Mom usually just goes along with Janie’s plan.

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But Mom was shaking her head. “We could go back to Mazie and Louie’s for a while, just until I get back on my feet.”

“You ain’t ever been on your feet,” Janie said. “And we ain’t going back to Louie’s. He’s a pervert. Course you probably knew that all along and put us over there anyway.”

“You better watch your mouth, Girl, or I’ll slap the _____ out of you. And don’t think I can’t still do it,” Mom yelled, taking a couple of steps toward Janie.

Janie stood her ground, put her hands on her hips and stuck her chin out. “Yeah? … Well, come on and try it.” Janie was a foot shorter than Mom and kind of skinny, but as messed up as Mom looked, I was thinking maybe Janie could take her.

“Give her the number, Mom,” I said. “We need to get out of here.”

“We could try another women’s shelter,” Mom said. “We don’t need that old lady’s help.”

“We don’t want to go to another women’s shelter,” Dwayne said. “We’re getting a little bit old to be in those places. And they’re more likely to call the cops on you there than at that old lady’s house.”

“I’m gonna call the cops myself unless you give me that lady’s number right now,” Janie said, putting her hand out again. “And I’ll also mention something you got hidden, all rolled up inside your jacket.”

“You little ____!” Mom called her a really filthy word. “You had no right to go through my stuff.”

“I was the one who opened your bag, Mom,” Dwayne admitted. “We was looking for something to eat.”

Mom stopped rubbing her hands together and dug the lady’s card out of her blue jeans pocket, then threw the card down on the porch instead of handing it to Janie. She stomped out to the sidewalk and stood there in the rain waiting for us. We each grabbed our grocery bag of clothes – plus Dwayne got Mom’s suitcase, and we headed off down the street, searching for a pay phone.

When we found a phone and called the lady, she came over to pick us up in her big Cadillac SUV. It took her a long time to get there because, like she told us, she lived a long way from that trashy ghetto.

When we reached her neighborhood, we were amazed. We had never seen any place like that.

Every one of the houses in the area where she took us must have cost millions of dollars, and her house must have been about the biggest one.

The old lady seemed kind of nervous – not only like as if she thought we was gonna steal stuff, but more like she just couldn’t figure out what to say to us. She told us again that her name was Mrs. Greene. Probably she would have been wise if she was more nervous about us stealing stuff. There was all kinds of fancy stuff in her house, like it was some kind of museum for rich folks. For instance, there must have been a couple thousand clocks in there – all different kinds and every one of them the fanciest, most amazing thing you could ever imagine, all full of gold and jewels everywhere. She said her husband, Solomon, liked to collect clocks. She said we shouldn’t touch any of the clocks cause they might break real easy. She said all of the clocks had ‘historical value.’ Some of them, she said, were hundreds of years old from Europe and Tibet and places like that.

“Actually, it would probably be best if you didn’t touch anything in the house. Just to be on the safe side,” she informed us.

“What if I gotta pee? Could I at least touch the toilet?” Shirley asked.

“Of course you can, Sweetie,” Mrs. Greene said, smiling and smoothing Shirley’s damp hair down. “Do you need to use the bathroom now?” Shirley was nodding. “Would you mind taking her?” Mrs. Greene said to Janie. “It’s the second door on the right.” She pointed down this huge hallway as long as a bowling alley. I think she didn’t want to take Shirley herself cause she probably wanted to stay and watch us to make sure we didn’t swipe something or break stuff.

When I asked her what kind of work her husband did, she said he was in “finance” whatever that means.

Then, when Shirley and Janie got back, she showed us this long room that had shelves on all the walls from the floor to the ceiling. Every shelf was completely full of dolls, and every doll was different. Them dolls was the most beautiful things we had ever seen. Don’t get the wrong idea. I don’t like playing with dolls or nothing like that, but these was really nice ones.

“Solomon likes his clocks, but this is what I like to collect,” she said. She took us down and pointed at one wall. “These are the oldest dolls in the world –

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older even than the dolls you can see in museums,” she told us, talking in a whisper like we was in a library. She picked one doll off the shelf carefully and held it out to show us. “This one is four hundred sixty years old, made in Paris long before the French revolution. It’s twice as old as our country. It belonged to the dauphine – the French crown princess.”

Little Shirley had reached out to touch the doll’s face because it was so pretty, but she remembered she wasn’t supposed to touch nothing, so she pulled her hand back. “Would you like to hold her,” Mrs. Greene asked her. Shirley nodded, with her eyes all wide and amazed. “Sit down here first,” she told her, “cause you mustn’t drop her. Her face is porcelain, and if she’s dropped, her face might get broken.”

Once she had Shirley seated in this fancy little chair, she handed her the doll and showed her how to hold it like a woman holds a baby. Shirley touched the doll’s smooth face carefully with her dirty little fingertips and rocked her back and forth. I guess that was about the only time Shirley had ever gotten to hold any kind of doll.

After Mrs. Greene showed us some more dolls, we was about to leave. “I better put her back where she belongs,” she told Shirley. I could tell my little sister was really sad about giving the doll back because her eyes had some tears, but she knew better than to cry out loud. We all knew better than that. “You can hold her some more later after you’ve had a bath and gotten something to eat. How does that sound?” The lady asked her.

“Thank you,” Shirley said. After that, she kept walking around real close to Mrs. Greene, like some little spoiled kids always walk close to their mamas.

We had a big huge lunch after that. Mrs. Greene said she had to make some phone calls, but this lady dressed up in, like, a black and white waitress uniform came and got us – Mrs. Greene called her Alice. Then Alice led us into this gigantic dining room with a long table and all these sparkling plates and silverware all over it.

There was another lady with an apron who kept coming out of the kitchen with more good stuff to eat. And there was a man dressed up all fancy – like a doorman in front of those big hotels – and he kept putting more food on our plates. At first, he just put some salad on my plate. I ate that really fast, and I

was looking around for more, wondering if that’s all we got. Then he came over to me.

“Are you ready for the soup course, Master Bobbie,” he asked me, all smiles.

“Sure,” I told him, and he set this little flat bowl of soup down in front of me. It didn’t look like it was very full, but it was still more than I was used to eating. Anyway, it sure tasted better than another bologna sandwich. But just after I had tilted up my bowl to finish slurping up the last few drops of my soup, the man swooped down on me again and took away my bowl. There was still some soup stuck on the edges of my bowl, and I was trying to lick it off, but he got my bowl away from me.

“Don’t worry, Sir,” he said. “There’s plenty more food coming. Then he set down a big plate full of meat and vegetables – more food than I was used to eating in a week.

Pretty soon, the doorman guy was having trouble keeping up with us because we was all eating so fast. By the time I finished that big plate of food, he trotted over carrying another saucer with this delicious pastry and ice cream on it. After I gobbled that down, I was so stuffed I couldn’t have eaten one more bite. The doorman guy tried to give me a little bowl of fruit – it was fresh peeled peaches with little fancy leaves decorating around the edges – but I had to say no. It was the first time I ever turned down food in my life.

I finally stopped eating long enough to notice that Bobo had fallen asleep with his head on the empty plate in front of him on the table. Mrs. Greene had perched him up in this highchair she kept for when her great-grandchildren visited. I also noticed that Shirley was nodding off and looked like she was going to fall out of her chair any minute. Her head kept nodding down, over and over. I don’t think we had gotten more than three or four hours of sleep the night before.

Mrs. Greene came in for the first time since we started eating. “Oh, my! These children clearly need their naps,” she said to the doorman. “But first, can you call Alice and Sandra down, and ask them to bath them all before putting them to bed. Have them placed in the six guest bedrooms in the east wing. I’ve ordered new clothing to be delivered, but it won’t be here until later this afternoon. Meantime, Alice can wash the clothing they have on while they’re bathing.”

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“Yes, Ma’am,” the doorman guy said.

We were all hustled upstairs and given a bath. There was a bathroom, along with a separate bedroom, for each one of us except for Bobo. They said he was too little for his own room, so he had to stay with me.

This place was like where a king would live or something. My bathtub was round and huge, and about four feet deep. It had little squirter things on the sides that squirted you under the water. The bar of soap in my bathtub was shaped like a goose or a swan or something. At first, I couldn’t figure out where the soap was until I asked the lady who took my clothes from me through the bathroom door.

“It’s on the edge of the tub,” she said, talking through the closed door. “It’s white and shaped like a bird.”

“Oh, yeah, I see it,” I said. I felt kind of guilty scrubbing myself with something so pretty looking. I felt like I was using up a piece of art just to clean myself.

When I finished bathing, I had to wait awhile for my cleaned clothes to be brought back to me by the lady. Then I was taken to this giant bed with all kinds of pillows and fancy smelling covers on it. Bobo was already sound asleep on one side of the bed. I was a little bit worried cause he had been swilling down gallons of milk at lunch, but I was too tired to make him wake up and use the toilet. I was so tired after not sleeping much lately that I lay down on top of the covers and went to sleep about two seconds later.

Sure enough, a little while later, I woke up from a really deep sleep cause Bobo was crying. He was standing on my side of the bed, butt naked, holding his wet underwear in one hand, and in the other, his new pajamas, also soaked.

“I peed on the new undies and pj’s they gave me, Bobby,” he said, crying so hard I had trouble hearing what he was saying. “I couldn’t find the bathwoom, and I couldn’t hold it. You gotta help me hide these peed on things, Bobby! They gonna hit me if they see what I done.”

Right then, there was a tap on the door, and Mrs. Greene came in, probably to see what all the wailing was about. Bobo, still naked as a jaybird, flopped down on the floor in front of her and balled up in case she was gonna start hitting him or kicking him.

“I didn’t mean to do it!” He wailed. “It was a accident! Pwease don’t hit me, Mizz Gweene!”

She crouched down by him on her knees and put her hand on his back. “For goodness sake, Bobo! I would never, ever hit you.” She picked him up and held him against her. “You’re in a safe place now, little one. No one’s ever going to hurt you again.” She picked up his wet clothes and carried him out of the room.

I must have fallen asleep again right after that cause it was already getting dark outside when I woke up again. When I came out of my bedroom, I looked into different rooms until I found Janie and Dwayne. They was standing in the same huge bedroom.

“Did you both have to stay in the same room? Cause Bobo and I had one even bigger,” I said, kind of bragging.

“Nah, this is Mom’s room,” Janie said. “We was in two separate rooms down the hall.”

“Where is Mom?”

“She’s in the bathroom,” Dwayne said, pointing at a closed door. They was talking kind of quiet like they didn’t want her to be able to hear us through the bathroom door.

“She’s fixing herself up to go out on the streets,” Janie added.

“Did she put on lots of make-up?” I asked them.

“Yeah, and she’s fixing her hair up now,” Dwayne confirmed.

“She claims she’s going to look for a job, but she’s got that short little street skirt on already,” Janie said. “Ain’t nobody gonna hire her looking like that ... not for a real job anyway.”

“Does Mrs. Greene know what she’s up to?” I wondered.

“She probably has a pretty good idea after she seen how Mom was dressed,” Janie said. “We heard Mom talking to her when we first woke up. She asked Mrs. Greene if she’d watch us while she was looking for work, and she asked for bus fare. She said she needed to start earning money to get us a place, but we could tell she was feeling sick and needing more drugs from the way her hands were shaking, plus she was sweating and wiping her nose all the time. I guess her stash ran out ...”

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Dwayne interrupted her. “If she goes out there and finds some guys to give her more money for drugs, she won’t come back here for a week –maybe a month. That’s if she even figures out how to find her way back here. We’re trying to talk her into staying here and getting clean off the drugs before she goes out looking for work.”

“Who cares?” I said plenty loud enough for Mom to hear. “Let her go. She ain’t ever gonna stay off drugs. We all know that.”

“Shut up, Bobby.” Dwayne said. “Don’t be such an idiot. You suppose this Greene Lady’s gonna let us stay here after she figures out Mom ain’t coming back? Think about it. We won’t last 24 hours in this house before she calls Social Services on us.”

“So? Let’s go to social services then. Anything’s better than going back with Uncle Louie or staying with Mom either one. I say let them stick us in a foster home,” I told them, making sure I talked loud enough so Mom couldn’t help but hear me through the bathroom door. Then I thought of an even better idea and mentioned it even louder. “Anyway, that Greene woman’s really nice in case you haven’t noticed. She said something to Bobo that made me think she might even let us stay here for a while. We could tell her all about Mom and Uncle Louie, and how they been treating us.” I was practically shouting this last part to make sure Mom was hearing it. “And we could beg her to help us. She’s really rich and stuff. I’ll bet she could make the Social Services people put us in a super nice place.”

“Maybe Bobby’s right,” Janie said to Dwayne. He just shrugged his shoulders, but I could tell he also thought maybe I had the right idea. Right then Mom came charging out of the bathroom, all painted up and ready for the streets.

“You want to turn me in to Social Services? Go ahead! I wash my hands of you! After all I’ve done for you! Ungrateful little brats!” She had on a sleeveless blouse, and I could see the bruises all over her arms where she had been shooting up drugs. Usually she keeps on long sleeves so her needle tracks won’t show. Not that the long sleeves hide much cause the sleeves all have plenty of little blood stains right around the places where she always shoots up.

Dwayne and Janie just stared at her for a few seconds before Dwayne finally told her, “Get going then. You think we care?”

Mom got some tears in her eyes, like she was about to start crying, but then she just turned and walked out of the bedroom. All three of us stepped out into the long hallway and watched her walking away with her skimpy outfit and with her high-heels clicking on the shiny hardwood floor.

“Thanks again for all your tender loving care,” Janie shouted at her when she was way down the hall. Mom never even turned around to look at us.

That was the last time I ever seen her. I actually felt a little bit sorry for her right then, but I don’t any more. She was a bad mom. I hope I never see her again in my life. I hope she’s dead. That would serve her right.

Maybe you’re thinking I’m kind of a bad kid to talk about my mom like that, but that’s the way I really feel. So, yeah, maybe I really am bad like everybody is saying about me now.

Part 3 – Life with Mrs. Greene

After Mom went clicking off down the long hallway, never to be seen again, Mrs. Greene kept on being nice to us. She didn’t send us away that very same day like Dwayne said she would. After things had kept going on like that for a few days, we was all starting to think that maybe we could just keep on staying there forever. We would sneak over to each other’s bedrooms at night and talk about stuff like that. We would make up stories about how we would all start going to school for the first time and maybe even find friends and stuff – the kinds of things most kids get to do. We had never really made friends with anyone. We just had ourselves and our cousins to hang out with cause we moved around a lot and cause Mom and Uncle Louie wouldn’t ever let us go to other people’s houses or to school.

One thing that made me think Mrs. Greene would keep us was because she liked Shirley and Bobo so much. She would sit in a big chair with both of them up on her lap and she would read to them from these big beautiful picture books. One of the oldest books, she said, had belonged to Abraham Lincoln’s family. Then she had to explain to us who Abraham Lincoln was.

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Three days after Mom left, Mrs. Greene sat down with all of us for a talk. She asked us a lot of questions about who our family was and who we could stay with. But Uncle Louie and Aunt Mazie was the only ones we knew about. She was asking us lots of questions, so we told her all about how we had been treated at Louie’s. She shook her head, clicked her tongue and said, “Oh, my! That will never do.” She got some tears in her eyes then, and that’s when I first started getting really hopeful that we could stay with her.

Sure enough, she got us all together the next day and told us that she was hoping that she could keep us there with her.

“I’ve been in contact with the police and the child welfare people in Dallas, Texas, and I told them all about your Uncle Louie and the salvage yard he runs there. And I found out about some more things that have happened there … You had a twelve-year-old cousin there? Cheyenne, I think was his name?”

“Yeah. What happened to him?” Janie said. “Is he dead? Tell us what happened!”

“Well, Janie, they say he’s had a head injury. Right now he’s alive, in a hospital, but still in a coma.” After Mrs. Greene said that, Janie looked all sad and guilty. Janie and Cheyenne was the same age and, like I said, they was always real close friends. A few times, they had even kissed even though they was cousins.

“It’s my fault,” Janie announced. “I should have let you tell him where the key was hid,” she said to me. Everyone else was looking pretty sad, too, but for some reason, I didn’t seem to feel much of anything. I don’t know why I didn’t feel nothing, but I guess I didn’t because I wasn’t crying.

“Where the key was hidden?” Mrs. Greene said, looking confused. “What key was hidden?”

“Who done it?” I asked, ignoring Mrs. Green’s question. “Who hurt Cheyenne’s head? I bet Louie hit him.”

“The police were already investigating the circumstances surrounding the incident, and the social services office was already looking into the home environment there,” Mrs. Greene told us. “When I told them what I knew, they said they were going to remove all the children and question them separately about what’s been going on there.”

“So we don’t have to go back there?” Dwayne asked.

“You will never go there again.” Mrs. Greene shook her head and smiled a little bit. “The fact is, I was hoping you could all stay here with me.”

“That’s fine with us,” Janie said. “And we’re real good workers. You could maybe use us for maids and stuff so you didn’t have to hire so many of these other people.”

“Oh, no!” She said. “You children need to be in school. Are you aware that Shirley doesn’t even know her ABC’s?”

“None of us know our ABC’s,” Dwayne informed her. “We ain’t never been in school before.”

“Dear God,” she said kind of quiet. There was tears getting in her eyes again. She got a fancy handkerchief out of her purse and smushed it against her eyes for a couple of minutes. Then she said some more stuff to us. “Of course this will all depend on Mr. Greene’s approval. We don’t ever make any major decisions unless we’re in mutual agreement. But I’m pretty sure he’ll feel the same as I do when he hears what you children have been through.”

“Who’s Mr. Greene?” Shirley wondered.

“He’s my husband. His name is Solomon. He’s in Singapore right now.”

“He’s a singer?” Bobo asked.

Mrs. Greene laughed. “No, Bobo, he’s a businessman. Singapore is just the name of the place he’s gone to do some business. It’s in southeastern Asia.” We all stared at her blankly, so she took us and showed us Singapore on a huge globe in the library – the library in their house, not the public one. It was actually bigger than most of the public libraries I’ve seen since then. That Asian place Mr. Greene was at looked like it was on the exact opposite side of the world from us. She spun the globe around and showed us where we were near San Francisco, then spun it around and showed us Singapore. She said it had recently become a part of China. Bobo started spinning the globe around and around, and Mrs. Greene didn’t even tell him to stop it. The thing was about twice as tall as he was.

“Cut that out, Bobo,” Janie commanded, and he stopped right away. One thing about Janie – she don’t

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mess around. If you don’t do what she says, she’ll smack you hard with her fist.

Everything went along just fine until Mr. Greene got home the next week. He was old like Mrs. Greene, but he didn’t smile as much as she did. Whenever he looked at us, he would rub at his eyes like he was getting tired. He didn’t say nothing to us about leaving, but we knew he wanted to get rid of us cause the night after he got home, we sneaked down and listened outside their bedroom door to see what they was saying.

“We already raised our own kids,” he was saying kind of loud like he was upset. “We’re too old to take on kids like these. Hell, most of our grandchildren are already grown. Your blood pressure’s already dangerously high. And these kids you’ve got here are going to have serious issues after growing up in that environment like they did. How in the world do you expect to be able to handle them?”

“Sol, where are they going to go? We can’t just turn them over to the authorities.”

“The state has agencies equipped to deal with situations like these … children like these,” he insisted. “They should be in some kind of foster care arrangement, with people who are trained to deal with … with these kinds of damaged kids. We could insure they get placed in the very best homes, but that’s as far as I’m willing to go.”

“You would let these poor children get split up – get parceled out into different homes? No place is going to take all five of them. They’ll put each one of them into a different home. All they’ve ever had is each other. Splitting them up would traumatize them for life – especially those littlest two. That Janie girl is the only mother figure they’ve ever known … Please, Sol, I’m begging you with all my heart! I promised them I’d watch out for them.”

Mr. Greene said something back to her, but it was too quiet for us to hear it. After that, we didn’t hear any more talking for a while, so we went back to our rooms.

I guess she must have talked him into letting us stay somehow cause the next day, she started buying all sorts of stuff for us – clothes, shoes, school supplies, toys, and a bunch of other things. She must have spent about a million dollars in a week.

She called a bunch of people on the phone to see about getting permission to keep us. She said Mr.

Greene was planning to leave again, this time to Europe, and he would be gone for six weeks. So she wanted to get our adoption paperwork started before he left. A couple of days later, this man and woman came over to look at the house and to ask lots of questions.

The maids came to escort us all to our rooms for “naps” but there was no way we were missing this visit. Dwayne, Janie, and I sneaked downstairs in this tiny elevator thingy called a ‘dumbwaiter.’ The cook had caught us messing around in it a few days earlier. After telling us to stay out of it, she had showed us how she could use the dumbwaiter to send up food and stuff to the upstairs maids in case Mrs. Greene or someone was asking for breakfast in bed or something like that.

After we lowered ourselves down one by one through the dumbwaiter, we crawled through the kitchen on our bellies cause we didn’t want the Greenes to see us from the dining room. Mr. and Mrs. Greene was sitting at the far end of the dining room table talking to the man and woman. They was pretty far off cause the table’s about a hundred feet long, but we could still hear what they was talking about with the visitors.

“These things usually take at least six months,” the visitor lady was saying. She was in a business suit, almost like what a man would wear. “While all the paperwork is getting done and the background checks and such, the children would normally be held in foster care arrangements. However, the commissioner and city manager have indicated that there are special circumstances requiring that we expedite the process. I was wondering why there was such urgency about your case. Now I’m beginning to get a clearer picture.” She was glancing around at all the fancy furniture and stuff, and had this little smirky grin on her face.

“The commissioner’s a good friend of ours,” Mr. Greene told her, “and there’s a good reason for our haste. I’ll be out of the country for a couple of months, starting next week. Meanwhile, these kids need to be enrolled in school, and we’ve hired a special tutor. They’re apparently pretty far behind in their academics.”

“I couldn’t help noticing that you don’t seem quite as enthusiastic as your wife about these new developments,” the lady said.

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“I told you I was in favor of the adoption,” Mr. Greene said. “That means I’m in favor of it.” He got up from his chair all of a sudden, and now he would be able to see us if he looked over. But the kitchen was kind of dark with the lights off, and we stayed real still there on our bellies by the door, so he didn’t notice us. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have work waiting for me in my study.”

“We still have several pages to get through on this questionnaire,” the lady said. But the older man with her got to his feet and spoke up.

“Julia, I’m sure Mrs. Greene can answer any further questions.” He stuck his hand out for Mr. Greene to shake. “Mr. Greene, I’ve heard a lot about you and seen you on the news and such. It’s sure a privilege to actually meet you in person.” They shook hands and Mr. Greene left. I heard his steps clicking off down the long hallway to his study. After that, there were about a million more questions. We finally sneaked back to our rooms cause all the grownups talking was getting pretty boring. Anyway, we already knew what we wanted to know: We were staying!

Looking back now on that short time we got to stay with Mrs. Greene, it all seems kind of pathetic, how happy and excited we all were. And Mrs. Greene was more excited than any one of us. It’s sad now to remember how hopeful we were and how all that hope was so suddenly crushed out of us.

I feel like, if there is some kind of super spirit watching over us all like some people say, then he must not like us very much. I told Mrs. Greene how I felt about that a few days before they took us away, but she said I shouldn’t say stuff like that. She said that she knows there is a God, that he loves us, and that we should always remember that wherever we go. She also promised to keep saying some prayers for us. But I don’t know about all that religious stuff. If she really is saying prayers for me, they ain’t helped me any so far.

One day we was all dreaming of being one big happy family with Mrs. Greene. Almost the next day, our dreams was smashed and everything had turned to crap. That horrible day started out all good and happy. It was about two weeks after Mr. Greene had left for Europe. We had been staying with Mrs. Greene for a month. She had gotten us enrolled in this fancy private school, and we had been getting tutoring every day at her house, so we had already been learning some stuff before school started. That

horrible day was the first official day of school, and Mrs. Greene was going to school with us to talk to each one of our teachers about our special circumstances.

We was all dressed up in our preppy school uniforms (except for Bobo, who was still too little to go to school). We had our hair combed and our school supplies all stowed in these wonderful book bags. I remember how excited we were, but nervous at the same time cause we hadn’t ever been to school before and we was worrying and talking together about what the other students might say since we couldn’t read yet.

Albert, Mrs. Greene’s chauffer, had driven us over to the school in the limo, but there was hundreds of other parents trying to get in there that first day, so Albert couldn’t get any closer than a couple of blocks away with that big car. Finally, Mrs. Greene decided to just walk us over.

“We’ll get out here, Albert. You can park a few blocks away. When I’m ready, I’ll call you on the cell and meet you in this same spot. It’ll just be me and Bobo on the way back.” We all hopped out together. There was school kids everywhere walking and horsing around. It was obvious that they all knew each other real well from the way they was acting. We was the only ones who didn’t know nobody else.

If only things hadn’t happened the way they did. If only Bobo hadn’t come with us. He could have stayed home with Alice, Mrs. Greene’s personal maid who was real nice and really loved Bobo. It wasn’t like he was gonna be in school himself. But Bobo had whimpered around all through breakfast, begging to come. Lately, he liked to be wherever Mrs. Greene was gonna be. He and Shirley was getting real attached to her.

“Pwease, Mizz Gween!” And of course she gave in and took him along.

As soon as we got out of the car, Albert pulled away in the car, and we all walked across the street together. Mrs. Greene had Bobo by one hand and Shirley by the other.

“Will you come to pick us up?” Shirley was asking her as we started across.

“Yes, Sweetie, Albert and I will come for you every afternoon.” The crosswalk light was already blinking like it was going to turn red, so Mrs. Greene was trying to hustle, but she couldn’t move too fast

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cause she was so old. We got across just as the light turned red. Then Bobo suddenly started yelling.

“Mom! Mom!” He screamed. I saw he was looking across the street at this woman who had on a dress that was the same color and the same flowery print as this other dress our mom had. The woman also had the same color hair, done up the same way, but I could already tell it wasn’t Mom.

During that split second when I looked across the street to see if it really was our mom, Bobo somehow jerked his little hand out of Mrs. Greene’s hand, and he darted immediately back across the same street we had just crossed, running as fast as his little legs would take him.

During the next split second, I saw this little convertible sports car, going only about 30 miles per hour, riding low to the ground, and I saw that it would hit Bobo. There’s no way anyone could have stopped that. It’s funny how my mind has memorized that moment – I wish it hadn’t – how the car was powder blue – the exact same color of the dress worn by the ancient French doll Mrs. Greene had shown us just a month before. I even remember the surprised look on the face of the young man driving the car. He never even had time to touch his brakes.

When the car hit Bobo, because it was so low to the ground, it threw him up high into the air, flipping over and over, wearing his nice new outfit of clothes. He went a long way before he crashed into a fire hydrant by the curb on our side of the street. We all ran over and crouched down by him, but there wasn’t nothing we could do. We knew he was dead. It was like he was broke in half the way he was bent over backwards against the fire hydrant. And there was lots of blood coming out of his ears.

I remember how the wind was blowing that day – like it often did in San Francisco. Even though the rest of Bobo was all still, his hair was moving back and forth across his forehead. Bobo’s hair had always been way curlier than the hair any of the rest of us had, and when his hair was kind of clean, like it had been lately, it was real fluffy and soft.

“Oh, Bobo!” Mrs. Greene cried, touching his hair. Then she started struggling to stand up. Janie helped her up.

“We need a doctor!” She screamed real loud. “Is there a doctor around?” This lady came trotting toward us from a couple of blocks away.

“I’m a physician’s assistant,” the lady said when she ran up to us. She was already starting to kneel down beside Bobo. She touched his neck for a few seconds, then looked up at Mrs. Greene and shook her head. We was all crying by then, and Janie and Mrs. Greene was hugging. The driver of the car had gotten stopped and had come running back by that time.

“I never saw that kid, and the light was already green, so I …” he said while the lady was still touching Bobo’s neck. Then he seemed to notice Bobo’s little broken body for the first time, with all the blood coming out of his ears. “Oh, God! … I’m so sorry!” A few seconds later, he walked over and started throwing up between the curb and a car parked nearby.

“Was this your grandson, Ma’am?” The doctor lady asked. “Is there some way we could get a hold of his parents?”

“No, he’s not my … he’s …” Mrs. Greene was crying so hard she could hardly talk. “I don’t know how to reach anyone ... Poor Bobo.”

“We all been adopted by Mrs. Greene here,” Janie explained.

“We were in the adoption process,” Mrs. Greene added between sobs.

It seemed like forever before the ambulance and the police car came even though it was probably only a few minutes. The doctor lady stayed with us the whole time. She kept telling the crowd of people all around us to move along and get out of the way so the emergency vehicles could get through. But all them strangers just kept milling around, gawking at poor Bobo wrapped around the fire hydrant.

After Bobo died, everything turned horrible all at once. Mrs. Greene seemed to kind of give up on everything – including us I think. I guess she started thinking she wasn’t able to take care of us after all. I think the government people who take care of adoptions also didn’t think she was young enough to take care of us cause they started coming over almost every day to talk to us.

Two days after Bobo got killed, we all went over to the funeral home. They had Bobo all straightened out in this little coffin, with one of his new suits on. But his hair was oily and combed over, so you couldn’t even see how curly and fluffy it really was. And they had put some kind of make-up on his face,

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so his color didn’t look right. I guess they was just trying to fix him so he didn’t look so pale and broken, but he ended up looking like a tiny clown with all that make-up on him. That thing in the coffin wasn’t Bobo anymore.

I guess we was all feeling the same way cause Shirley said, “That ain’t really Bobo is it?”

“No, it ain’t,” Janie said, taking Shirley’s hand.

“The real Bobo’s already up in Heaven,” Mrs. Greene told us. “I’ll bet he’s sitting in the lap of some angel up there right now, just laughing and … and …” She started crying hard and she was smashing her handkerchief into her eyes, so she had to stop talking.

“I bet there ain’t no Heaven,” I said.

“Of course there is, Robert.” She took me by the hand. “And God’s up there watching over us.”

“Then He ain’t doing too good of a job at it,” I said. And I meant it.

“Don’t ever think that,” she said. “He has a plan for all of us.”

“Yeah? Well I’ve seen enough of his plans,” I said all mad. She suddenly grabbed hold of me and hugged me up against her where she was sitting on the long wooden bench.

“Just wait, Robert. You’ll learn to trust Him.” But I remember I was feeling like all I wanted at that moment was for her to let go of me.

We stayed there for a few more minutes staring at the thing that wasn’t Bobo anymore. Then Albert drove us all back to Mrs. Greene’s.

There was a funeral the next day for Bobo, and it was cold and raining, like the day we first got to San Francisco. Mr. Greene had flown back from Europe by that time, so he was at the funeral, too. All I can remember about that funeral was how little Bobo’s coffin looked and how few people came to see him buried. It was mostly just us kids, the Greenes, and their servants there. I guess Mr. Greene decided not to invite any of their fancy friends.

The very same day of the funeral, later on in the evening, Mrs. Greene had a stroke. That’s when part of your brain dies from not getting enough blood or when a blood vessel pops in your brain. They said it was a mild stroke, but she still wouldn’t be able to talk to anyone for a long while.

The day after that, lots of doctors and nurses were there, and they was hauling lots of hospital stuff into her bedroom – one of those funny beds and lots of machines with blinking lights and wires coming out all over the place. Before that day was over, some people came and took all us kids away. We didn’t even get to say goodbye to Mrs. Greene or nothing. All the maids was hustling around, folding all our new clothes into some fancy new suitcases. Then we was all herded outside to a van.

Shirley was crying and carrying on about some doll named Carmen that she had been dragging around for the last few weeks. She had set the doll down somewhere in some room inside that huge mansion and couldn’t remember where she had left it.

“Mizz Greene gave Carmen to me!” She was hollering. “She said I could have her forever and ever.” But nobody would let us take any more time looking for the doll. They shoved us all into that van, and we took off, leaving that grand house and that rich neighborhood behind forever.

It turned out that Mrs. Greene had been right about them splitting us up if we went into foster care cause the first thing they done was to stick Janie and Dwayne into two different houses – I never knew where, and I ain’t seen or heard from either one of them since. That was six years ago.

At least Shirley and I got put in a place together, but that didn’t even last for 24 hours because of something I done in there. When we moved into that place, it was a week after my tenth birthday. I remember cause a week earlier, I had spent my birthday in this big children’s home with about 70 other kids all lined up on little cots, with the girls in one dorm and the boys in the other. That’s the last place we was all together – except for Bobo of course. He wasn’t there.

The same day they moved Dwayne and Janie somewhere else, they moved Shirley and me to our foster home. We got there way after dark cause the place was about 200 miles out in the country. Shirley was tired from the long drive, and she had barely fallen asleep in the van when they woke her up to go in the new house. After we got inside, a lady was trying to drag her down to the girls’ bedroom without me coming along. I was trying to go into the boys’ bedroom, but Shirley was putting up a fuss cause she didn’t want to have to go anywhere without me. At the last place with all the kids, at least she had Janie next to her in the room where they had stayed.

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“No, I wanna stay with Bobby! I wanna stay with Bobby!” she was wailing. I was already one step into the boys’ room, but she was still clinging onto me, with her arms locked around my waist. A boy on one of the top bunks grunted and sat up. It was kind of dark in there with nothing turned on except a nightlight. Still, I could see that the kid was about two years older than me, and probably weighed about twice as much as me. But it was mostly just fat weight, cause he was kind of porky.

“You better shut that brat up unless you want me to kick her little ass.” He said to me, cussing about Shirley. As soon as he said that, I wanted to kill him. I know it wasn’t really that fat kid I was mad about. It was more about feeling helpless and kicked around by life. But I was becoming furious. I wanted to hurt someone.

“Now, William, we don’t address one another like that in this home, remember?” The big lady dragging on Shirley told the fat kid.

“Oh, yeah,” the kid muttered.

For some reason, something about that kid’s voice made me feel furious, like I wanted to hurt him bad. I grabbed Shirley by the wrists and yanked her hands apart so she had to let go of me. Then I pushed her out through the door to the lady. I could hear her being dragged off down the hall, still yowling.

But instead of going to my bunk which the lady had pointed out to me, I stood there quietly, just inside the door in the semi-dark room, thinking of what I could do to the fat kid who had cussed and threatened my sister. He had already flopped down, rolled over, and gone back to sleep as soon as Shirley was out of the room. But I wasn’t going to let him get away with talking like that to Shirley.

That fat kid was the first person they say I seriously injured. Before I explain exactly how that happened, I probably should explain some more stuff that happened at Uncle Louie’s so you’ll understand better about me and why I’m so good at fighting and hurting people. Maybe you still remember what I was telling you about that contest Uncle Louie made us do, to see who could bring in the most parts. Well, that’s not the only kind of contest he would have.

About once a week, when he was pretty high on drugs, he would have what he called “sports contests.” He paired us off with another kid about the same size and made us do all kinds of hard things. For example, he would give each of us two bricks

and make us hold one in each hand, with our arms held straight out. Whichever kid unlocked his elbows or let his bricks go down too far lost the contest. If we put them down too fast, he’d whack us with his cane. Other contests were stuff like sit-ups, pull-ups, foot races, and metal tosses. In the metal tosses, he would give us some busted car part he knew he couldn’t get no money for and he’d see who could toss it the farthest.

He would usually make us go through ten or twelve sports contests in a row before he started losing interest and went off to his room to crash from whatever high he was on. Our muscles would be sore for days after that. Whichever kids lost the most contests had to go to bed without eating, and if Louie had two of us competing against each other, and he figured neither one of us was even trying on a contest, he’d come charging in and whack us both real hard a few times with his walking stick.

Uncle Louie’s favorite contest of all was really just street fighting. But he called that contest “Gladiators.” There wasn’t no rules in Gladiators, so it wasn’t just fist fighting, You could kick, or wrestle, or even bite each other if you wanted to, but all of us kids had agreed not to try to hurt each other too bad.

For the fighting, I usually got paired off against Casper. He was a year older than me, real strong, and had arms about six inches longer than mine. If he connected with a solid punch, it was like getting kicked by a mule. So one of the first things I learned was to dodge my head back and to the sides. His fists would come close to my face and sometimes bump against it a little, but he rarely managed to land a direct hit. I also learned to jump away just in time cause if he ever got a good hold on me and got me on the ground, I knew I was in for a bad beating. After he beat me up a few times, I learned to kind of hold my own. He was way bigger, but I was faster and sneakier. I’m short, but my muscles are hard like a rock. All that hard work and never eating too much food had kept each of us kids in good fighting shape all the time.

The worst times was when Louie made me fight against my own sister, Janie. She was more than two years older than me, and she was a lot smarter than Casper. Her knuckles were also a lot sharper than his. If she hit me a good one, I could count on having an ugly bruise there for a month.

Louie didn’t care who he had fighting each other. He sometimes made Muley go against Shirley, and

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twice he even tried to make him go after Bobo. That turned out to be no fun for Uncle Louie though, cause all Bobo would ever do is ball up on the ground and beg for mercy no matter how much Muley and then Louie would beat him for it.

What I’m trying to explain to you is that, with all the hard physical work we had to do and all the practice we got fighting, we was all trained fighters – and hard as nails. And we was used to going up against other hard-muscled, trained fighters who knew what they was doing – not a bunch of fat sissies who never won a fight in their lives. I just want you to understand why things turned out the way they did in that dark bedroom when we got to our new foster home.

Like I said, I looked around that dark room, kind of checking things out. I seen a few other boys sleeping in the other bunks. I thought of jumping up there on that fat kid’s bunk right away, dragging the guy off his bunk and beating him up, but I seen there was this long piece of wood across his top bunk – to keep him from falling off I guess. I would have had trouble dragging a kid that fat up over that bar.

I set my suitcase down without making any noise and stepped over to the kid’s bunk to have a closer look. I seen there was some latches you could open to take off that long piece of wood, so I stepped up on the bottom bunk real gentle like so as not to bother the kid sleeping down there. I unlatched one end of the board, then stepped up again to unlatch the other end. Then I took the long piece of wood off and stood it in the corner of the room.

Then I stepped up real quick-like on the bottom end of the bunk, grabbed that fat kid by the ankles and jumped back, pulling him off his bunk feet-first. His whole body, coming down from that top bunk, crashed down on the tile floor real hard, and I guess his head hit the floor pretty hard, too, even though I didn’t realize that at the time. I jumped onto him and started punching him with my fists as fast and hard as I could, but he wasn’t even trying to fight. It was like he was still sleeping.

About two seconds later, all them other kids had jumped up and was coming after me from all sides. But like I said, they was weak and didn’t know nothing about real fighting. Every time one of them came near me, I’d land a hard punch or kick. It was way too easy fighting guys like these. One little guy I swung around and threw up against a bunk.

Right after I threw that kid, both foster parents came running into the bedroom and got a hold of me. I managed to bite the foster mom pretty hard, but then the dad got my hands behind my back and sat on me. I thought I was gonna suffocate for a minute there.

I didn’t find out till later how bad that fat kid was hurt, with brain damage and all that. I guess you figure I was pretty cowardly dragging the guy off his bunk while he was still asleep. Well, I don’t care about what you think of me. I don’t care about anything anymore.

The next kid I injured real bad was in a fair fight though. You should know that at least. That second kid I guess I hurt even worse, but he was just some stupid jerk in one of those juvenile detention camps they try to make like military boot camp. I guess he thought he was a gangster hit man – came up and tried to sucker-punch me. Let me just say that he won’t ever be able to try that on anyone else. Maybe it was cowardly what I did to the first one – the fat kid – but like I say, I don’t care what you think of me.

The psychiatrists are always after me to try and think of how my victims must have felt. When the cops took me out of that foster home the next day, the first place they took me was to this nuthouse for criminals. Everyone else in there was a crazy grownup except me. That’s where I had my first chat with a psychiatrist.

She told me, “You need to understand why William spoke to you and your sister as he did. He was probably a bit grumpy after being awakened so abruptly by your sister’s screaming. And from what everyone has told me, William was a very nice boy. He will never function at full mental capacity again after what you did to him. Don’t you feel the least bit sorry for what you did to him.”

But the trouble was, I didn’t feel sorry, and I ain’t gonna lie about it either. I ain’t ever felt sorry about none of the things I done. I guess that’s why I’m still locked up. But that’s okay, too. At least in here there’s food every day and a mattress to lie down on. I been bounced around between secure facilities and nuthouses and halfway houses ever since.

Just recently, in the placement center where they got me staying now, I sneaked into the files they keep on me and read some stuff about how bad I am. By

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now, I’m 15, and I can read okay, so I read the papers in my file. They said in there that I had a “Conduct Disorder,” and that I might grow up to be a sociopath who repeatedly victimizes others. I looked up that ‘sociopath’ word on the Internet and it was all about serial killers and stuff. I think that’s just a bunch of crap.

But maybe it’s true. Maybe I’m gonna keep hurting people or even killing people. I don’t know, and maybe I don’t even care. I know I already hurt a couple of people pretty bad, but ain’t nobody died from it. I ain’t killed nobody. Not yet anyway.

That psychiatrist lady that wrote that stuff in there about me never even talked to me for more than about 20 minutes. In fact, she never really talked to me at all. That one time, she was just on the television talking to me. I guess she could see me on her television, too, and hear what I was saying cause when I said stuff, she would answer me back.

She never even asked me about what it was like for me growing up the way I did. All she did was talk to me about “personal responsibility.” Any time I tried to say anything at all about how my life has been, she would stop me and start saying more stuff about how I’m responsible for everything I do now – that the past is the past. And whatever I do wrong in the future, I have no one to blame but myself.

She said that I would be held accountable – that I would have to pay the price myself for everything I do from now on. I guess that means they aim to keep me locked up from now on unless I stop getting mad and hurting people. I’m sure they have plenty of ways to make me pay for everything I do.

But what I still would like to know is who’s gonna pay for the things that was done to me and my brothers and sisters – the way my mom treated us and the way Uncle Louie treated us? Who’s gonna pay for what happened to Bobo for no reason? If I have to pay for whatever I do, who’s gonna pay for what they done to me? Somebody ought to have to pay for that. Somebody’s gonna pay for that.