Web of the City

  The boy who had come to kill him, surely. Candle; their Prez, their assassin.

  The wood shop had quieted down. No one else moved, and their tools were silent.

  He had wakened in the alley this morning, and hurried right to school. He couldn’t cut out, or the boom would lower on him… after all, he was in Pancoast’s custody, and any infraction of the rules would stone him good. He ignored Candle, behind him.

  The alley had been cold, and his back had been stiff and he had ached terribly, but as the hours had passed, the pain had simmered down to merely a constant throbbing. Three teeth were broken, but they were in the back, and when he had washed his face, only a group of blue and ugly welts were left on his face. Broken flesh and shattered capillaries studded his right cheekbone, but it would pass. His lips were raw.

  His back was in worse shape. But he knew he would live. He had to—because the Cougars wanted him dead.

  The school shop was empty of voices. Only the constant machine hum of lathes that had been ignored, left running, filled the shop with sound. Yet somehow the room was silent.

  The boy behind Rusty took a short half-step closer, shoved his shoulder hard. Rusty was thrown off-balance, and the chisel bit too deep into the chair leg between the lathe points. The design was ruined. The chisel snapped away, and Rusty spun, anger flaming his face. He stared hard at the other boy, changed his grip on the wood chisel. Now he held it underhand—knife-style.

  The other boy didn’t move.

  “What’s a’matter, spick? Y’don’t wanna talk to your old buddy Candle no more?” His thick, square face drew up in a wild grimace.

  Rusty Santoro’s face tightened. His thin line of mouth jerked with the effort to keep words from spewing out. He had known the Cougars would try to get to him today, but he hadn’t figured on it during school hours.

  Over him, somehow—tense as he was, knowing a stand was here and he couldn’t run without being chick-chick—Rusty felt the brick-and-steel bulk of Pulaski High School.

  You just can’t run away from them, he thought.

  The boy, Candle, had come into the basement wood shop a minute before. He had told the shop teacher, Mr. Pancoast, that he was wanted in the Principal’s office. Mr. Pancoast had left the shop untended—oh, Kammy Josephs was monitor, but hell, that didn’t cut any ice with anyone—and Candle had moved in fast. First the little nudge. Then the shove that could not be ignored. The dirty names. Now they were face-to-face, Rusty with the sharp wood chisel, and Candle with a blade. Someplace. Somewhere. It wasn’t in sight, but Candle had a switch on him. That boy wouldn’t leave home without being heeled.

  Rusty looked across into Candle’s eyes. His own gray ones were level and wide. “You call me spick, craphead?”

  Candle’s square jaw moved idly, as though he were chewing gum, when he was not chewing gum. “Ain’t that what you are, man? Ain’t you a Puerto? You look like a spick…”

  Rusty didn’t wait for the sentence to linger in the air. He lunged quickly, slashing upward with the chisel. The weapon zipped close to Candle, and the boy sucked in his belly, leaped backward. Then the switchblade was in his square, shortfingered hand.

  The blade was there, and it filled the room for Rusty. It was all live and lightning, everything that was, and the end to everything else. Rusty Santoro watched—as though what was about to happen was moving through heavy syrup, slow, terribly slow—and saw Candle’s hairy arm come up, the knife clutched tightly between white fingers. He heard the snick! of the opening blade, even as the other’s thumb pressed the button.

  Then there was a green plastic shank, and a strip of light that was honed steel.

  The shop was washed by bands of lazy sunlight, slanting through the barred window; and in those bands of light, with sawdust motes rising and turning slowly, slowly, Rusty saw the blade of the switch gleam. Saw it turn in Candle’s hand, saw the way his flesh cleaved to it with more than need; this was part of Candle. Part of his thought and part of his life. His hand had been formed to end in a knife. Anything else would have been wrong, all wrong.

  “Don’t you ever call me that again, man. Just don’t you call me no spick again!”

  Candle dropped his shoulders slightly. He automatically assumed the stance of the street-fighter. No spick bastard was going to buck him. There was more to this than just a wood chisel. Nobody, but nobody, leaves the gang.

  “Well, ain’t you gettin’ big these days. One minute you’re too good for the Cougars, and the next you’re particular who calls ya what.” His green eyes narrowed, and the knife moved in aimless, circling little movements, as though it were a snake, all too anxious to strike.

  “I don’t dig you, spick man…”

  And he came in fast.

  The knife came out and up and around in one movement that was all lightning and swiftness. Rusty slipped sidewise, lost his footing, and went down, his shoulder striking hard against the base of the lathe. He saw Candle strut back and get ready to pounce. Then there was all that knife in his vision, and he knew he was going to get it at last. Not later, not sometime never, but here, gutted and cut, right here on the floor, and there was nothing he could do about it. He saw Moms and Dolores.

  Candle rose high, and his arm drew back, and then his arm was dragged back of his head by someone else. Rusty looked up and everything was out of focus, and his shoulder hurt, but a man with dull red hair had Candle around the throat, had the knife-hand bent back double. Candle screamed high and loud, over the whine of the machines, and the man twisted the arm an inch more.

  The blade clattered to the floor.

  The man kicked it out of sight under a drill press, into sawdust debris. Then the man had Candle by the front of his dirty T-shirt, was leaning in close, and saying, “You get the hell out of here, or I turn you over to the Principal and tell him you lied to get me out of my shop while you attacked a pupil with a switch. With your record around here, Shaster, you couldn’t stand it. Now beat it!” He shoved Candle Shaster away from him, sent him spinning into the door.

  Candle threw it open, spat on the floor, and was gone in a moment.

  Rusty still found himself unable to focus in properly, but Mr. Pancoast was lifting him to his feet, and yelling to the other boys, “Okay, let’s get back to work.”

  The rising clatter of shop work filled his universe, and then he was out in the basement hall, in the cool depths of the school. “Sit down,” Pancoast directed him, pushing him gently toward the stairs.

  Rusty sat down heavily. Now he not only felt the incessant throbbing of his shoulder, but for the first time felt the full force of the pain where, he now realized, he had struck his head. It throbbed mercilessly.

  Pancoast slid down next to the boy. He was a short man, with hair just a few shades darker than orange. His face was tired, but there was something alive in his eyes that gave the lie to his features. He had been dealing with high-school boys so long, he had difficulty with adults, so geared were his thoughts to the adolescent mind.

  He pursed his lips, then asked, “What was that all about, Rusty? I thought after that last scrape you were going to stay away from the Cougars, from Candle and his bunch.”

  Rusty tapped gently at the bruise that ached on his head. He swung his body back and forth, as though he were caught in some tremor that would not release him. His entire body shook. The aftereffects were setting in—they always did, just this way. It made him wonder if he was a coward. He shook and quivered and wished he’d never heard of the Cougars.

  “I told ’em I was quitting. Last night. They don’t like that. They tell me nobody leaves the gang. I said I did.”

  Pancoast rubbed the short stubble on his small chin. He stared levelly at Rusty. “That all, Rusty?”

  “Isn’t that enough?”

  Pancoast replied, “Look, Rusty. When they caught you, along with those other Cougars, trying to break into that liquor store, I went out for you. Remember?” He waited for an answer. Finally, Rusty nodde
d.

  The teacher went on. “I had them release you into my custody, Rusty, and you’ve been good as your word ever since. At first I thought you were like all the rest of them—hard, no real guts, just a little killer inside—but you’ve shown me you’re a man. You’ve got real woodworking talent, Rusty. You could be a sculptor, or a designer, even an architect, if you wanted to be.”

  Rusty was impatient. Being praised like this, in the crowd he ran, usually meant a slap was coming. “So?”

  “So, we’re both going to have to go over there, Rusty, and let them know for sure, for finally, that you’re out of the gang, that you don’t want any part of it…”

  Rusty was shaking his head. “It ain’t that easy. You don’t understand, Mr. Pancoast. It ain’t like being a member of Kiwanis or the P.T.A. It ain’t like nothin’ else in the world. When you’re in, you’re in. And the only thing that gets you out is if you land in the can, or you get a shank in your gut. That’s what I tried to tell ya when ya made me quit.”

  He stared at the teacher with mute appeal. He was boxed-in, and he knew it. There was going to have to be a face-up soon, and he wasn’t sure he was man enough.

  Carl Pancoast leaned closer to the boy, put an arm on his knee, tried to speak to him so the words went deeper than the ears. So they went right down to the core.

  “Look, Rusty. Let me tell you something. You can go on doing what the Cougars do, all your life, and wind up the way Tony Green did. You remember Tony, you remember what happened to him?”

  Pancoast could see the memory in Rusty’s eyes. He could see the vision of Tony Green, who had been top trackman at Pulaski, laid out on a slab, with a D.O.A. tag around his big toe. A zip gun .22 slug in his head. Dead in a rumble.

  “Remember why he got killed, Rusty?”

  Pancoast was pushing thoughts tightly, forcing them to the fore, making Rusty analyze his past. It wasn’t a pleasant past.

  Drenched in violence. Product of filth and slum and bigotry. Mothered by fear. Fathered by the terror of non-conformism and the fate that waited for those who did not conform. Rusty remembered. His stomach tightened, and his seventeen-year-old brain spun, but he remembered.

  Tony Green, tall and slim, and dead. Out there on a slab because someone had danced with his steady girl at a club drag. Nothing more important. Just that.

  “I’m through, Mr. Pancoast. You don’t have to worry about that. I’m through, but man, it’s gonna be rough all the way.”

  Carl Pancoast clapped the boy on the back. It would be tough all right, tough as banana skins, but that was the way it had to be. Because Rusty had to live out there in that stinking city. He had to live and learn and sweat beside those kids.

  “What are you going to do?”

  Rusty bit his lip, shrugged. “Don’t know, man. But I got to do something. They ain’t gonna give me much longer. Maybe I’ll go over there tonight, club night. Maybe I’ll go over again and have a talk with some of the kids.”

  Pancoast’s forehead assumed V-lines of worry. “Want me to go along? Most of the Cougars know me.”

  Rusty sloughed away his offer.

  “No go. They know you, but you’re still out of it, man. Way out. You’re boss-type, and they don’t dig that even a little. I come walking in with you, and I’m dead from the start.

  “No, I can handle it.”

  He stood up unsteadily, clung to the bannister for a minute. It rocked under his weight.

  “Lousy school,” he mumbled, slamming the banister, “gonna fall apart under ya.”

  He walked back into the shop, and a minute later Pancoast heard the chisel on the ruined chair leg. Violently. Could Rusty come all the way back? Could he purge the kill stuff from his blood?

  It was going to be rough. Real rough.

  He went back to his class, worried as hell.

  After school, Rusty avoided Carl Pancoast. The teacher had done too much for him, and whatever was coming, was going to have to come to him alone. Rusty slouched against the sooty brick wall of Pulaski High and drew deeply on a cigarette. The kids avoided him. The stench of trouble was all about him.

  Finally, Louise came out of the building, books clutched tightly to her chest. She saw Rusty, and stopped. Rusty knew what was running around scared inside her head: should she go to join her steady, walk home with him, stop to have a Coke with him—or should she walk past and get the hell away from what might be coming?

  It was a big choice. One way she would lose Rusty—he was like that, just like that—and the other she might lose her pretty face.

  Rusty knew what was happening within her, and he abruptly felt so alone, so terribly desperately alone, he had to remove the burden of decision from her, had to hold onto one person in this thing… if only for a short while. He pushed away from the wall. He walked over to her.

  “Wanna stop for a Coke, Weezee?”

  Louise Chaplin, more “Weezee” than Louise, was a highly attractive girl, whose natural beauty was marred by imperfect application of makeup. Her eyes were a clear blue, her skin smooth, her hair a rich chestnut brown, drawn back into a full, rippling ponytail. Her young body was already making attractive bulges and curves within her sweater and skirt. She was aware of her growing body, and so the sweater was a size and a half too small.

  Now her eyes darkened, and she blinked rapidly, pausing a moment before answering; an agonizing moment for Rusty. She finally answered, “Sure. Guess so. What’s new?”

  It was like that all the way down the street.

  Chit-chat. She was scared. Really, terribly scared, and though Weezee wasn’t a member of the Cougars’ girls’ auxiliary—the Cougie Cats—she was still in Cougar turf, and if a war started, she would be one of the first to get it. Right after Rusty.

  The streets were crowded. Late Friday afternoon, with fat Polish women going from butcher to butcher, trying to get the best cuts of meat for the weekend; little kids playing hopscotch and stick-ball on sidewalks, against walls; radios blasting from every direction with the Giants or the Dodgers beating the pants off someone. Normal day, with a sun, with gutters dirtied by candy wrappers and dogs that had been curbed, with the sound of the subway underfoot, with everything normal. Including the stink of death that hung not unknown above everything else.

  It was funny how the territory—the turf—knew when something was burning. Even the old women in their anti-macassared single rooms, waiting for their government checks, knew the gangs were about to rise. The shopkeepers knew it, and they feared for their windows. The cops knew it and they began to straighten in harness. The cabbies knew it, and they shifted territory, hurrying back uptown to catch the safe Madison Avenue crowd.

  Everyone knew it, yet a word was never spoken, an action never completed. It hung rank in the air, dampening everyone’s mood of weekend joviality. Rusty walked through it, dragging his feet as if he were underwater.

  Weezee walked along beside him, clutching her books to her firm young breasts, too tightly, till her fingers whitened out on the notebook. The scare was so high in her, it came out of her pores, and Rusty wished he had not approached her. They were steadies, but their feeling went no deeper than movies, casual loving, kicks and mutual respect. Was it enough to die for? No sense dragging her into this.

  But at the same time, he was perversely glad she was there; he was determined to make her sweat, if he had to sweat. They turned in at Tom-Tom’s Ice Cream Parlor. Rusty gave the place a quick look-over before entering, and then pushed open one of the wooden doors with the glass almost covered by soft drink advertisements. They walked past the counter, past the magazine racks, to the booths in the back.

  Weezee slipped into one far back, and even as Rusty watched, drew in on herself, slid closer to the wall, made herself ready for what had to come.

  Rusty sat down across from her, two-fingered a cigarette from the crush-box in his jacket pocket. He offered it to the girl, but she shook her head slowly. Her eyes were very blue and very frightened. He li
t the cigarette with a kitchen match and settled back, one foot up on the bench, watching her steadily.

  Finally Tom-Tom came back to get their order.

  He was a stubby man, built like a beachball, with rolls of baby fat under his chin, where a neck should have been but was not, with faint lines where his wrists joined his hands… like the lines on a baby’s wrists. He had been in the neighborhood a long time, and his hair was white, but his appearance was always the same. So was his service. Bad.

  Rusty looked across at Weezee. “Coke?” She nodded. “Make it a pair,” he said to Tom-Tom.

  The beachball rolled away, shaking its head. These damned kids sat here for three hours over one lousy Coke, and if he tried to bounce them he’d get a staved-in candy counter for his trouble. Damned neighborhood. One of these days, he was going to move, open a high-class little shop in the Village somewhere.

  Rusty sat silently watching his girl. Weezee bit her red, red lips, and her hands moved nervously. Finally, she asked, “Why are you quitting the Cougars?”

  Rusty made a vague movement with his hand, uneasy that she had broken the law. She had let her feelings be known, had asked him a straight question he could not goof out of answering. “Dunno. Just tired, I guess.”

  Her face grew rigid. “It’s that goddamned teacher, that Pancoast, ain’t it?” she asked.

  Rusty leaned forward an inch, said tightly, “Just forget about him. He’s okay. He saved my tail from the can a month ago, that’s all I know.”

  “But it is him, isn’t it?”

  “For Christ’s sake, can’t you knock it off? I just quit because I wanted to, and that’s it, period.”

  She shook her head in bewilderment. “But you was Prez of the Cougars for three years. They ain’t gonna like you leeching out that way.”

  “That’s their row to hoe.”

  She tried desperately to pierce the shield he had erected before his thoughts. What he was doing was suicide and she felt a desperate need to communicate with him, to get him to see what he was doing to himself—and to her. For as Rusty’s drag, she was as marked as he.