The other kid started to holler too. I guess he’d been handlin’ that knife a long time but never used it on no one. This was his first kill, and he was real sick at the sight of what it could do to a guy. He just dropped it—all covered with Sickle’s blood—and ran the hell off that field like he was gonna barf.
I didn’t have no time to help Sickle. I saw Snapjack comin’ down on Flip from behind. With the zip. Flip was boxin’ off some kid with a brick, and havin’ a ball while he did it. But Snapjack wasn’t playing no games. He knew if we won this war, the power the Organization had in John Adams would be broken. He had to get all four of us. I saw him thumbing back the rubberband driven pin, and started runnin’ for him, tryin’ to stop him, screaming and waving my hands.
‘Look out, Flip! Flipper, look out! Behind ya! It’s Snapjack!’
The shot went ringin’ around the football field, and I saw Flip straighten up sharply, like someone had put a brace against his back. He arched up, and his face got all wounded lookin’. The kid with the brick must not’ve known what happened, ’cause he came in, leveled off, and clipped Flipper in the jaw with the brick. It caught him flush, and I could hear the crack as the jawbone shattered.
‘Oh, God, no!’ I yelled, and saw Flip fall on his face into the soft dust of the twenty-yard line.
Then I was on the kid with the brick. I grabbed it out of his hand while he was standing there grinning about what he’d done to Flipper, and brought it down as hard as I could across the top of his skull.
He flung his hands out and fell across Flipper.
‘You bastards, you bastards, you dirty slimy crawlin’ bastards!’ I was screaming. I took a step toward Snapjack. He was gettin’ edgy. Movin’ away. He didn’t like the looks of the six-foot-one, madder’n hell, and comin’ at him.
‘I didn’t mean to do it, Softy! I only meant to wing him, only meant to…’
Then he turned and ran like a sonofabitch! I started after him and all of a sudden my screaming blended in with the cop sirens.
I didn’t stop. I kept right on goin’, just like on the ball court, coming up close behind him. I heaved the brick and it caught him in the back of the head. He left his feet and sailed right off the ground. I was on top of him, beatin’ the hell outta him, smashing him in the face the second he landed. I hit him hard, then I hit him again, and all I could hear in my head was myself screamin’, ‘You bastard, you bastard, you bastard! He was a crip! He was a crip! You dirty slob! Whyn’t ya give him a chance! I’ll kill ya, ya lousy skunkin’ fraykin’ sonofabitch!’
And I kept hittin’ him, hittin’ him, hittin’ him…
I felt his face going soft under my fingers.
I looked down at him. His eyes were covered with the blood from his raw-meat face. I didn’t stop—I couldn’t stop; I had to make up for what they did to Flip!
When the cops pulled me off a couple minutes later, he was still breathing—but I don’t know how.
My hands were dripping with blood, and I was crying so hard they had to show me the way they wanted me to walk.
Principal’s office. He’s a good sort of Joe, I suppose.
A stuffed shirt sometimes, but after a game he always comes down on the court and claps me on the back and says, ‘Softy, that was a very nice game! You did a swell job, my boy.’
But now he wasn’t smiling. His face was strained and white, and he had hard black lines around his eyes and mouth. He was staring at me across the desk, and behind me I could hear the rest of them shuffling their feet.
The cops had hauled me into the office. And Tony, and Dick Plumber, and Shark, and a half-dozen other dummies that hadn’t been smart enough to cut out when the cops showed. But it wasn’t funny. This wasn’t just a dressing-down we were in for. Three kids had got killed out there.
Flip was gone, and so was Sickle, and a third kid I didn’t even know. He’d gotten his throat stomped in during a tussle. It was all pretty miserable and rotten.
The principal—Mr Greenberg—steepled his fingers and shook his head sadly. ‘Trouble. Always trouble.’ I could see the old man was up against it. If he didn’t make some move to handle things, the cops were going to.
He looked up at me. ‘I picked you to speak, Softy, because I know you. I know your mom and dad, and I know you wouldn’t be involved in anything as terrible as this unless there was a good reason. I’d like to know what’s behind all this, Softy.’
He leaned forward as he spoke, and I felt my mouth dry up on me. He wanted some straight stuff, and I couldn’t give it to him.
He didn’t know about the Organization. The three slobs had kept it underground, and there wasn’t a kid in school would open his mouth. They knew if they did, the others would make sure they didn’t get home that night alive.
‘I don’t know, Mr Greenberg.’
He stared at me, his weary eyes narrowing. ‘You’d better speak up, Softy. This isn’t some little school brawl, you know. Three boys were horribly murdered out there! Now I want the truth out of you, or someone’s going to be in really bad trouble.’ He looked at me closely and said, ‘It might be you, Softy, or…’ He paused, sank back in the chair. ‘Or me.’
I couldn’t speak. I knew it was more than just ratting. Hell, that was kid stuff! This was big-time business now. I couldn’t speak because I knew there was a code of honor, even toward scum like Shark and Snapjack and wormy little Porky.
If they were going to be taken care of, I had to do it myself. I couldn’t talk. They were ruining our school, but I couldn’t say a word.
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ I said, looking down at my hands, ‘but if you have to blame someone for starting it, then it better be me. I can’t say anything.’
I heard breath being blown out behind me, and I knew without turning that Porky and Shark and their side-boys were grinning like a batch of animals.
Mr Greenberg looked at me tightly. He pursed his lips, then sucked them in.
He motioned to the cops standing inside the door, and one of them came over, leaned down so the principal could talk to him. I saw the cop shake his head no, no, no, then finally he came up with a yes. He hustled the other kids out in front of him, and he closed the office door behind him, leaving Greenberg and me alone.
I turned back to the principal. He was wiping the back of his thick neck with a towel he’d pulled out of a top drawer. I knew he was looking for a few answers, and I was damned if I’d give him any. I wasn’t going to let him think just because I was a decent student he was gonna use me for a stoolie.
‘I’m not talking about—’ I started to say, but he cut me off.
‘Sit down, Softy. Sit down, boy.’ He looked like he wanted to crawl into the top drawer of that desk himself, so I plopped into the chair next to the desk.
He stared at me wearily. ‘Why do you kids all have the same damned idea there’s an honor you have to defend? Don’t you think I know what’s been going on around here? Don’t you think I know Fred Gardiner and Bob Normand and Willie Hapsell have got a business gang going here in J. A.?’ He’d used Snapjack’s and Shark’s and Porky’s real names.
‘Don’t you think I’ve got my eyes open, Emerson? For God’s sake, what kind of a school could I run if I didn’t know they had this—this—what do they call it? This Organization going? So you’re not revealing anything I didn’t already know! I know damned well Shark and Snapjack started that brawl.’ Just to hear him use the word damn made me snap up. I’d never thought of Greenberg swearing.
‘Now look,’ he began again, ‘we’ve got to crack this thing, but there’s nothing we can do as long as every kid in this school is afraid of those boys and their friends. I want some help, Softy. I need some help! Will you give it to me? Will you help me break this Organization and make up for Flip Shapiro?’
I didn’t say anything. All I could do was frown and shake my head. So I did that.
‘I can stall off the police. Tell them it was just a misunderstanding that started the fight, and
toss them a couple of the Organization’s knife-carriers to sit in jail till we can pin this thing on those who deserve it.’
I didn’t like the sound of that.
‘What if those kids get stuck with the charges? What if they go to prison—or get the chair?’
‘It would serve them right,’ he said thinly. He looked as though he was on the edge of a pit.
‘No,’ I said slowly. ‘We—’
‘Don’t worry. They won’t. I’ll make sure the police just hold them incommunicado till further notice. They can be booked for rioting. They won’t even charge them till we can give them something more substantial. This is a juvenile case, and I have a little authority in it. Not much, but a little.
‘Think you can come up with something definite, Softy?’
I didn’t much like the idea of playing secret agent, but I wanted to get those sonsabitches worse than Greenberg did. ‘I’ll get what I can, Mr Greenberg. We’ll split ’em.’
He grinned at me, as though it was hard for him to grin at all, and shook my hand.
Then he called in the cops, and told them the names of four kids in the bunch. Not Shark or Porky.
They took the four kids away, and the rest of us waited while Greenberg gave a nasty little lecture about how he was watchin’ everybody. I saw Porky and Shark staring at me hard, their eyes sayin’, ‘We’ll get you for squealin’ on them four.’
Then Greenberg let us go, and I went home.
Nobody of that bunch talked to me for the rest of the week; none of them bothered me.
On Friday night of that week, after school was closed, a bunch of them jumped Mr Greenberg as he was unlocking his car. They shot off the top of his skull with a zip .38 bullet through the eye.
I was alone.
Things happened fast and unpleasant around J. A. after that.
First the cops moved in, and all day long we saw bluecoats marching through the halls. Patrol cars cruised around the school. The building was locked at 3:30, and the cops made sure no one was left inside. Basketball practice and extracurricular stuff was cut off dead.
A week later we got a substitute principal. A hard, fish-eyed, no-nonsense ramrod of a character named Shisgall, who walked the halls looking for someone to make a move the wrong way.
On Monday he called an assembly and gave it to us cold.
‘I’m going to make this a clean school,’ he said real hard. ‘I’m going to find out who the trouble-makers are and take them out of circulation for good. All of you that have been getting away with it in the past are going to find things rough from here on out.
‘There will be no passes, and there will be no privileges in this entire school until things are straightened out to my satisfaction.’
He went on and on, layin’ it down to us, and I could see everybody in that joint gettin’ to hate him like poison.
Shisgall didn’t know he was up against the Organization.
On Tuesday he caught Lockjaw Harry Thomas in the wood shop during lunch period, layin’ Margie Novak on one of the benches.
They were both expelled, and Lockjaw went to the detention home.
On Wednesday he caught a kid sneaking to his locker to grab a bite of a sandwich. He slapped him around good, and turned him over to the cops for questioning.
They made a couple of arrests, but they didn’t stick.
You’re never gonna make this school any better that way, Shisgall, I thought to myself.
They’ll burn it down first. They won’t let you win.
The only guys that got it bad during that time were the four in the poky. They stayed there, and court proceedings were instigated—on charges of second-degree murder.
The word about what had happened to the four filtered back to J. A. on the following Monday, and that night, as I walked home with Tony Brown, a bunch of them jumped us.
Porky was leading them—I didn’t see Shark. They weren’t fooling around. They weren’t taking any chances on my getting away again.
They clobbered Tony from behind. Came out of an alley—six of them—and slammed him across the head with an honest-to-God sap made of rubber and leather thongs.
I don’t know where the hell Porky came up with it, but he had a .38 and he pointed it right smack at my head.
‘The Organization’s been quiet for a while, big man, but now we’re gonna settle everything up real good and fast. You gotta answer for squealing,’ he snarled at me. It looked so damned funny, that little punk, yappin’ away at me. But that .38 wasn’t no joke, and neither were the five switchblades the others had out, ready to puncture me.
‘Let’s go,’ he said.
He waggled the gun and I knew I had to move.
I had to go. I didn’t want to die.
They had it set up in the basement of an empty icehouse. They had it set up so good I was sick to my stomach when I saw it. There was a courtroom built out of orange crates, with Shark, black and shiny and waiting for me to get in front of him, sitting in the judge’s seat.
And a lot of crates around, with members of the Organization sitting there, looking real unhappy about it, but knowing they had to go through with it. I was sure they’d had a bellyfull of the Organization by now, but were still too scared to break it up.
But that wasn’t what rocked my belly.
They had two rings welded on to a metal frame the icemen had used for attaching a chute, and the rings opened and closed when you stuck someone’s hands through them.
Snapjack was out of the hospital. I hadn’t seen him at school, but here he was. With his kisser all plastered up in bandages, and big blue blotches on the skin where I’d slammed him. His eyes were hating me. Here he was, with a home-made cat-o-nine-tails and a hungry grin on his ugly, pockmarked kisser.
He was waitin’ for me.
‘Let’s get this trial under way,’ Shark said, and the five guys with switches grabbed me. I tried to tussle away from them, but I knew it was no good. They had me.
I walked between them, draggin’ my legs, and they pulled me past Snapjack, over to them two rings. It was a good two feet off the ground, and they hadda hoist me up so Porky—standin’ on an orange crate—could shove my wrists through them rings. Then he locked ’em.
He wasn’t gentle about it, and when they were snapped locked, he grinned down at the others. Lightly jumping off the box, he yelled, ‘Let him go!’
They let me loose, and I dropped the two feet. The pain almost ripped my arms out of their sockets. I felt the tears comin’ into my eyes, it hurt so bad.
I hung up there, my face to the wall, and I heard Snapjack come up behind me. I twisted my head around and he cracked me across the bridge of the nose. ‘You bastard!’ he hissed at me under his breath. ‘I’m gonna pay you back real good for all that clubbin’ I took from you!’
I knew he meant it, and I knew it even better when he grabbed my T-shirt, yanked hard and ripped it off my back.
He was easin’ back, ready to belt me with that damned cat, when I heard Shark yell at him, ‘Easy, Snapper, you’ll get your licks. Don’t rush it. We gotta have law and order in this Organization. Let’s get on with it!’
So Snapjack backed off and sat down on a crate, just fingerin’ that cat, running his hands over it like it was some cheap broad he was datin’, and smiled up at me. He was waitin’ out this strike. He wasn’t gonna let it get fouled out because Shark got mad.
A minute later the trial got started. It was a combined trial and business meeting.
Shark said, ‘Quixie, you got anything to report on the girls?’
This Quixie, a jerk of a kid with an itchy knife-hand and a pimply nose, stood up and faced the other twenty-or-so members.
‘We got five broads up at school who’ll go into this pad deal with us. But they want twenty-five bucks a week apiece, or they won’t lay for us.’
Porky jumped up and yelled at him, ‘Tell ’em to go to hell. We’ll find twists that’ll roll for us for ten. We won’t make that much
off them in the first place!’
Shark banged the hammer he was usin’ as a gaval, and his face got real dark. ‘Hey! Enough of that crap! You shut up, Pork, till Quixie gets his say in.’
Porky slumped back down, fingering the .38 nervously and casting dirty looks at Shark. Quixie put one foot on the crate and started in again.
‘I talked to Dorrie and Jan and Bloobs and Kitten Whelan and her sister Emmy. This Emmy is a young twist, but got a nice shape on her. She oughtta do. They ain’t the dirty broads, but real clean stuff. We should be able to make an easy couple hundred a week off them if we charge two bucks a crack and set ’em up down here, or some place else where we don’t have to pay rent.
‘If we can talk ’em down to fifteen, we got a good deal. Just pressure the kids into usin’ the girls, and we’re all set.’
‘Sounds smooth,’ Shark said. ‘We delegate you to finish talkin’ it up with them broads—and get them down to twelve, not fifteen. Let us know day after tomorrow.’
Then I felt the air get thicker. They were gonna start the trial now. Shark stood up and motioned to a kid named Fleep. ‘Will the witness, Fleep, take the stand.’ Everybody laughed like hell at the way he was imitating a judge, with a real sober voice and all.
This Fleep was a skinny kid with a mean, nasty temper. I knew he didn’t care for me, ’cause he’d gotten squeezed off the basketball team for slashin’ the ball one day when he’d had an argument with the coach. He thought all of us on the team had blackballed him, which wasn’t true.