I CRIED FOR A LITTLE BOY
WHO ONCE LIVED THERE ©

Chapter Thirty-Three

I Needed Help More Than Ever Before.
But There Was No One There For Me.
Larry Eugene 17 years old.

RAINBOW
     By the time I had gotten home I had found my stepfather had come to Denver to live with my mother.  I don't know how long he had been there before I had come home from the reform  school but by that time he had a job building caskets for a casket company.
     Almost the first day I noticed there seemed to be some sort of change in him.  He acted as though he was almost happy to see me.  Almost the first week I was home he took me to the casket company where he worked to show me how caskets were built.  I thought they were built pretty cheap.  They looked nice when they were finished, they looked expensive but were cheaply made in my opinion.
     My stepfather was still driving the same old car.  The first time I had seen the car was when he and my mother had come to visit me in the juvenile home when I was twelve or thirteen years old, some four or five years before.
     Once in a while, on weekends when the weather was nice, my mother, stepfather and I would all go for a ride up in the mountains.  Mostly just to regular tourist spots, Central City, Royal Gorge, Garden of the Gods, the Cliff Dwellings, Seven Falls and things like that.
     That Christmas, my stepfather and I drove back to our home town of Nevada.  For some reason my mother stayed in Denver.  Maybe to work.  Whatever the reason was I never question why she didn't go with us.  That was normal for me though, never to ask questions.
     Dropping me off at my grandparents' apartment, Ed went on to Zearing, Iowa, about fifteen miles north of Nevada, to visit with his two kids who were several years younger than I was.  When Ed had left me in Nevada he had given me ten dollars to spend while he was gone since he wouldn't return until the next day.
     That night my grandmother made up the Simons hide-a-bed for me to sleep on.  I didn't want to stay at my grandmother's though, for some reason I felt uncomfortable staying there overnight.  So I had told her I would stay at the hotel.
     The next day when Ed got back he jumped all over me for staying at the hotel when I had a free place to stay for the night.  As usual I had felt I was wrong in what I had done but he seemed to get over it in a few minutes for we had no more problems while we were there in Nevada or for the next several weeks after we had returned to Denver.
     I guess all good things come to and end though for, one evening, about three months after I had come home I had been in the bathroom taking a shower and had gotten out and was drying off when Ed walked in.  He had stepped past me to use the stool.  So once I was dried off I had to wait until he was out of my way for my clothes were laying on a ledge on the other side of him.
     This was the first time Ed had ever seen me with all of my clothes off.  I was feeling a little uncomfortable, standing there naked, trying to cover myself the best I could with the towel, waiting for him to get done and leave.
     He was standing at the stool, I was to his right, facing the shower, slightly turned away from him.  When he left he would have to pass behind me.
     He had turned towards me, briefly exposing himself to me.  As he had turned he said, "Have you ever had anything like this?"  When he had started to turn at the stool I had turned my head more towards him and was almost facing him when he had spoken.
     I knew at that instance, he hadn't changed.  I hadn't said a thing but turned back towards the shower.  I didn't know what to say.
     He had walked behind me to leave.  As he was passing me I felt his hand on my buttocks, one of his fingers following the crease as his hand slid downward.  "If your mother wasn't here you and me would be going in the bedroom."  He had almost whispered as I felt his hand squeeze me.  As I had dressed there had been tears in my eyes.
     Some way I knew he didn't mean what he had said to me but was only harassing me.  But it had hurt for I had thought he was starting to treat me as a man.  I had even stopped saying "Sir" to him, which hadn't been easy.
     By now, if a boy had done that to me there may have been a fight.  But there was no way I would show my temper to an adult or even strike out at one.  Then again, when an adult was involved I had a lot of trouble feeling anger, instead it would usualley be a hurt feeling I felt.
     It was a couple of weeks later my stepfather left for South Carolina to work with my uncle Howard, who had closed his business and went to work on the Savanna River Project.  A nuclear energy project.
     I don't know but I suppose my mother elected to stay in Denver because of me.  Maybe it was over me that they separated.  I know I wasn't on probation or anything like that.  Not even the federal government wanted me.  So I think we all could have gone to South Carolina together.  Unless there were problems between Ed and my mother.  Knowing them that was quite possible.
     There were many nights as I went to sleep I would fantasize about going up into the mountains and live alone.  I don't know, but maybe it was because of this fantasy when one day in March as I was walking back from downtown Denver I noticed some rifles though a window of hardware store at about No. 84 So. Broadway.  Looking through the window, I had seen the rifles in a glass fronted case, along the south wall  beneath a small window about half way back in the store.  I decided to break in that night and take one of the rifles, then I would go up in the mountains to live.
     Waiting until late at night I went to the back of the store, climbed a telephone pole and got onto the roof of the adjoining building.  There was an open space between the building I was on and the one I wanted to get into, that ran almost to the front of the two buildings.  By climbing down between the two buildings I could put my feet on the windowsill and my back against the wall of the building I had just been on.
     The glass in the window had been clear so anyone walking by the front of the store I would have seen and I would have pulled back away from the window where I wouldn't be seen.
     I took my pocket knife and with the leather punch I worked around the glass cracking it as I went.  This way I knew that it wouldn't make a lot of noise when I knocked glass out.  Once the glass was out I climbed in down over the gun case.  As soon as I was on the floor of the store I opened the case and took out three rifles, a 22 caliber, a 30-30 caliber lever action carbine and a 30-06.  Then I got a sack and put several boxes of ammunition for each one of the rifles in it.  I loaded the 30-06 and then thinking I shouldn't, I unloaded it.
     Going to the back door I found I couldn't open it.  The only way out was the way I had come in.  So I started climbing back up to the window, about half way up I heard a click.  It was the firing pin in the 30-06.  If I hadn't unloaded it the rifle would have fired, making a tremendous noise inside of the store.
     Getting onto the roof again I quickly retraced my rout back to the alley.  Then staying in the alleys I walked home carrying three rifles and a large sack of ammunition.  It had been around ten in the evening and I was at least four blocks from home, why no one saw me as I crossed each street I came to, I will never know.
     Not wanting to take the guns upstairs where my mother might see them I hid them in some bushes along side of a garage across the alley from where my mother and I lived.  Taking the ammunition with me I went upstairs to our apartment.  As I opened the door I could see my mother was asleep or at least she was in bed and I thought asleep.
     My mother kept an empty Avon sample case stored in the bathroom.  (The same case I carried to California when I had hitched-hike out there about sixteen moths before.)  This was an ideal storage case for all of the ammunition I had.
     Going directly to the bathroom I closed the door, got the case and started filling it with the all of the cartons of bullets I had carried home with me.  There must have been twenty, twenty-five boxes of shells.
     As I was sitting on the stool, putting the last box of shells in the case my mother opened the bathroom door, in a quick like fashion, to see what I was doing in the bathroom.
     I had failed to lock the door for as I had grown up I had been taught, there was no such thing as personal privacy in my life.  For others, yes.
     "Where did you get those?"  My mother had asked me.
     "They belong to a friend of mine."  I had replied without hesitating and then continued, "We are going up in the mountains tomorrow to do some shooting."  I had no friends.  I am sure she knew that for I had never spoken of any nor had I ever brought any home with me.
     She said something like, "Oh."  Closed the door and went back to bed.
     Looking back on it now, I don't know why she bought that story.  Maybe she didn't but realley didn't know what to do about it and only hoped I was telling the truth.
     Closing the case up I took it into the front room and hid it behind the couch where I slept.  Taking off my clothes I crawled into the bed my mother had made for me while I had been out.
     Waking the next morning I found my mother had already left for work.  Quickly getting dressed I got the case from behind the couch and went to the rear outside stairway of the apartment building.  The same stairway where I had slipped and fell cutting my head open a year before.
     It had been chilly outside, I had hesitated only for a few moments at the top of the stairway as I buttoned the front of my coat and surveyed the ground below.  I could see the garage directly across the alley and the bushes where I had hidden the rifles.  Not seeing anyone about, I headed down the stairway, taking the steps two at a time.  At the bottom of the stairs I could no longer see the garage across the alley because the garage for our apartment building blocked my view.
    For fear I might draw attention to myself  I slowed my pace down as I circled our garage, I came directly across the alley from where I had hid the rifles.  At the edge of the alley I stopped.  First looking one way down the alley and then the other way.  There was no one in the alley.  Looking across the alley I could see all of the way to the house that sat in front of the garage where I had hid the rifles.  From where I was standing I could see the bushes where I had hid the rifles the night before.  The way was clear for me to go and pick the rifles up.
     Crossing the alley at a normal walk, my feelings were I realley didn't want the rifles but I  couldn't leave them there.  Maybe someone would find them and being that close to my home would trace them to me.
     As I had approached the bushes I kept aware of my surroundings, not wanting to stop at the bushes if someone should suddenly appear.  As I had come abreast of the bushes I couldn't see anyone to the front of me.  I stopped as though I had forgotten something and had turned back towards the way I had just come.  Quickly glancing about I could see it was safe for me to get the rifles.
     Not until then did I look down.  I could easily see behind the barren bushes where I had hid the rifles.  The rifles were gone.  When I had hidden the rifles the night before it had been dark and there had been no light in that area of the alley.  Then it had looked like a good place to hide the rifles but because of the daylight in the morning and because the bushes were without leaves someone had seen the rifles before I had gotten back to them.
     Seeing the rifles were gone I decided to get rid of the ammunition I was carrying.  But where?  Not in the trash, not anywhere near my home.  It was a wonder someone wasn't already watching to see who would come back for the rifles.  Maybe they had just found the rifles and hadn't yet thought about keeping the area under surveillance.
     Returning to the alley I turned south and crossed Alameda Avenue.  Then halfway down the next block I came to an incinerator that paper and trash was burned in.  Looking all around I seen there was no one in sight.  Opening the case I dumped all of the ammunition in the incinerator and then threw the case in.  Not thinking how dangerous it was in what I had done.
     At the time there wasn't a fire in the incinerator nor did I stay around until someone else lit one.  But I have often wonder if someone found the bullets before they had lit a fire.  It had been a very heavy concrete incinerator so it is doubtful anyone would have gotten hurt if they hadn't found the bullets before they had lit a fire.

RAINBOW
Have You Ever Been Lonely
MIDI By the courtesy of the MIDI Picking Harry Todd The best on the NET.

 Chapter Thirty-Four