The boy was quiet today; introspective. He had been angry when he woke up, but he stuffed it down deep inside himself. The anger never did him much good; it just made him feel worse.
His mother had beaten him again last night and locked him in his bedroom for the rest of the night. He was used to it but hated to have to pee in an old coffee can and remembered the time when he had to go number two and had to pound on the door to wake someone up to let him out in the middle of the night.
He had heard rustling and grumbling in his parents bedroom next door, followed by his mother screaming at his Dad. He had prayed that the one to open the door would be his Dad for he feared what his mother would do if she opened it. Thankfully, it was his Dad who opened the door, tossled his hair, and told him to be quiet so he didn't further upset his mother.
He loved his Dad beyond measure and was very grateful that he had come into his life three years earlier when Mom decided to marry him. Dad was his only protection and there were mornings when he was on the verge of tears seeing Dad go off to work knowing that he would be captive to the ever changing moods of Mom without Dad there to protect him.
Ironically, summer times which his teacher said were great times to be a child, to run and play and feel the joy of freedom from school work were the worst times of the boy's life. He lived for school, the protection it provided, the niceness of the adults, even the stern ones, and he worked very hard to please them.
They, in turn, seemed to like him a lot and thought it was wonderful that a poor boy who lived in the old Army barracks down by the Bay was such a good and intelligent student. They knew nothing of his home life and he was not about to tell them.
And so the boy became what we would call "bookish" and for the rest of his life he would escape into the world of books where he was free to do whatever the writer did, taking flights to worlds he could explore without fear, reading the biographies of great men who overcame lives much like his own.
Books became his mentors, his guides, his lovers, and most of all, his friends. They still are to this day. In books he saw that any life could be overcome, that better things could happen to those who really worked at having a better life. And he learned that while it helped to have at least a few people to serve as guides, like his Dad and his teachers, mostly it was up to him what he would become.
But there were times like today when he was listless, tired of the beatings, tired of trying to please when what he did one day was praised and the same thing the next day criticized and often punished.
While he knew that he was brighter than most of his classmates the inconsistency of his mother's moods was more than even a bright nine year old mind could handle. He could not understand the smothering, gushing shows of love and affection at one moment only to be followed by screaming, spitting rage and beatings the next.
Dad had let him out of the bedroom at 5:30 this morning, had kissed him on the forehead, and gone off to work. The boy had gone quietly into the bathroom, washed his face and brushed his teeth. He got dressed in an old pair of jeans, put on a fresh t-shirt and his socks and tennis shoes and headed to the kitchen to make a couple of peanut butter and banana sandwiches.
He grabbed a few of the Toll House cookies Mom had made yesterday and filled the large old Thermos that Dad had given him with milk, placing all of this in a cotton bag. He went carefully back to his room and got two books from the series "The Lives of the Presidents" that he had checked out of the library. He put them in the bag, and quietly slipped out of the door.
This decision could have consequences that he had already weighed. Mom would not be up until much later but when she got up and started on her three pots of coffee and three packs of cigarettes for the day she would at some point realize that he was gone. Then it would be a flip of a coin as to how Mom would react.
She could be furious and be waiting for him at the door when he came home, or she could be grateful that she did not have to deal with "that little bastard" all day. But either way he knew he would not come home until he saw Dad's car in the parking lot. Dad was the only protection he had.
So as he walked away from the barracks apartment he knew that this was just one of the chances that he had to take. He had taken it many times before and he could not begin to predict how she would react.
Later, he learned that life in general would be no different. He would learn that you did whatever you had to do to keep yourself together as much as possible, to protect and improve your own person, because not many others cared one way or the other. And to do that you often had to take chances.
He headed for the slough that flowed into San Diego Bay and his day brightened. He went to his favorite spot under some scrub brush, sat down in the sand near where he had managed to capture a trap door spider a couple of days before. He had let the spider go soon after and watched it scamper back to its hole and close the door firmly over itself. That hole was its sanctuary.
This spot on the sandy banks of a dirty creek flowing through National City's slums was his sanctuary. He could see North Island far in the distance from here. Dad was there and would be home in the evening and provide him some protection.
So he had his sanctuary, his Dad for protection later that day, something to eat and drink and two good books to read. He would read and dream about how the Presidents had each overcome their own particular problems and he would tell himself that if they could do it so could he.
He would watch the gulls and the herons, the pipers and the other sea birds that fed in the slough. And he would walk down later a few hundred yards to where the creek entered the bay and see if he could spot some crawdads and flounder and, if he got lucky, he might see a couple of immature hammerhead sharks that hunted the small fish where the slough joined the bay.
For today, it was enough. He opened the cotton bag, took a drink of milk from the Thermos, got out the next book in the series and started reading. For a boy who did not often smile there was a smile on his face, just a little one, by the time he got to page two.
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