Finally, Rusty shoved off and got his feet steadied for the swing he knew was coming. But it came from an entirely new direction. Candle’s knife hand stayed in sight, and his free hand caught Rusty in the kidneys.
Rusty’s face went pasty and he staggered back. Candle hit him again, this time with the handle of the knife, wrapped in his fist, in the side of the head, and Rusty started to fall. He grabbed out, and Candle came across with the knife once more. Rusty felt the razor-keen blade slice flesh between thumb and forefinger. He wanted to scream, but could not without dropping the hankie, so he wadded it more behind his teeth, and sank to his knees. Blood poured across his hand.
Candle stepped back for the death-swing and it came up like a jet from around the stout boy’s knees. Rusty jerked sidewise, throwing out one leg. Candle went down in a heap and the hankie popped from his mouth with a snap.
Rusty was on his feet in an instant and Candle lay there staring up at him, the hankie hanging ludicrously from Rusty’s thin lips.
The gang went insane. “Kill him! Jab him! Knife! Knife! Knife!” they screamed, and one hand shot out of the crowd to snatch away Candle’s blade from where it lay in the dirt. Another hand caught Rusty’s arm and shoved him forward. He stumbled and stopped.
“Get him, he was gonna put you down!”
Rusty stared down at Candle, lying on his elbows, at his feet. There was a queer mixture of fear and surliness on the boy’s heavy features. He had lost, but he was going to be angry about dying. It made no sense, but that was the way he looked. Rusty stood silently as the storm of directions grew behind him.
As he stood there, Candle’s cool, green eyes met his own and he saw right to the center of the boy. He saw all the garbage that Candle had substituted for guts, for integrity, for honesty; and Rusty was frightened again. Not so much frightened at how close, but scared because this was the way he had been, before Pancoast had showed him there were other ways than the ways of the gutter.
He knew he had slipped back and knew the gang would now expect him to resume his position at the head of the Cougars. He didn’t want that! He wasn’t going back to all that. Inside him, two warring natures fought for the mind of Rusty Santoro.
The hand holding the knife moved itself, of its own volition, and the blade reversed itself—overhand, so that one downward stroke would slash the throat of the terrified Candle. The stout boy sat looking up at Rusty, knowing his life hung by a thread, hung on that thread of decency—that he called cowardice—he knew was in the boy.
Rusty moved an inch forward and the gang went crazy.
“Kill him! Kill him! Knife ’im!”
Rusty tried to stop his feet, tried to say to himself, this is no good, but the days of the gang were back with him, smothering him like a blanket and he knew the only way he would be safe from an enemy was to kill the enemy. His arm came back and the blade poised there in nothingness for an instant, then started the downward arc that would slice deeply. The hand moved, and then it stopped.
All the hatred passed away. Everything was clear again. Clear and smooth.
“Clear and smooth,” Rusty said, to no one at all.
No one understood.
But they understood what he did next.
He put the blade under his boot and with all his strength bent upward. The blade did not give and he pulled up his foot, brought it down with a crack on the blade. The knife snapped in two, at the base of the steel, and Rusty let it lay there.
“I’m through,” he said.
No one argued with him.
This time no one demanded a stand, for he had proved his strength in the only way they could understand. Now that he had proved it, he was free. Free of them forever and the days would not be filled with wandering and hating.
“Anybody going back to town?” he asked.
There was a tacit agreement that the affair was concluded, an agreement that no one would help Candle to his feet. They walked away, back to their cars and Fish gave the finger-circle to Rusty, to show him the outcome had been right by him.
“I got room in mine,” Fish said, and nodded his head in the direction of the battered Plymouth.
“Ain’t you afraid I’ll whocko on your floor again?”
Fish laughed, then, and they walked to the car together. Only then, when she called from behind, did Rusty remember Weezee.
“Rusty?”
He turned and looked at her and there was nothing really wrong. She was what she was and for the time being she was all the woman he needed; weak and watery and scared and only doing her best by living the rules as they’d been put to her; building a sin once in a bit, and trying to make it from day to day—that was the best anyone could do, till a passage opened up.
He walked back and stood before her, not saying anything. He still had his pride. He still had to let her make the first move.
“I’m—I’m glad ya won, Rusty…”
He let the slow smile build off the corner of his mouth and he fumbled with his jacket to show it had been nothing really. Then he said, “Wanna go back to Tom-Tom’s with us and have a soda?”
She nodded brightly, the past wiped away like clouds from the sky and he decided to let it settle that way.
What was the use of carrying the hurt? It didn’t matter. There were worse hurts than this little one. He took her with him in the way the rules decreed. Not by the hand, gently, as he wanted to for that would have left her confused—but with the hand at the back of her neck. Commanding, leading, directing, roughly, the way a mean stud did it to his broad.
She came up close to him as they walked back and her body said she was his girl again, to whatever extent he wanted her.
Strangely, though, Rusty felt no heat for her, felt no desire to be the big man. She was his girl and he would treat her as he was expected to treat her, but the distantness of their relationship was too profound, too unexplainable, for him to try to love her.
They were together and that was enough for the time being. Alone was bad enough. Together was at least not alone.
In the car, with the others behind them, churning up the dirt of the dumps, with the dual exhausts deep-throating a challenge at the land and the city, they tooled around in a winner’s circle, and sped around the grounds once, like a parading matador with the downed bull still bleeding in the center of the arena.
Candle lay where he had fallen.
The days were finished for him, too. Now he was a mean stud, but he wasn’t the big man. He was just another cat without a tail. He knew his place now and if he tried to overstep it, they would toss this affair at him. That was the code. Silent and eternal, that was it on skates.
The cars tooled around, honked their horns at one another, missed colliding because, hell, that was the way to do it, and ripped back toward town on the shore drive.
It seemed like a good day, a free day, the last day of it all.
Rusty settled back with the hankie around his bleeding hand and let the peace of release flood through his body. He was out of the woods at last.
Free at last. Free of the past and free to move ahead.
He was dead wrong.
FIVE:
SATURDAY NIGHT
rusty santoro
dolores
the war
News spread down through the neighborhood like a swollen river rushing to the sea. By the time he got home, after the many congratulations in the streets—as though he had actually accomplished something—Dolores was waiting, pride and affection shining in her face. She rushed to him as he entered and kissed him warmly on the mouth.
“I heard,” she said.
He grunted a noncommittal answer and shoved past.
Dolo turned uncomprehending eyes on his back, and said, “What’s a’ matter? You got the botts or somethin’?”
Rusty flopped into the chair beside the TV, and threw a leg over the arm. “I don’t like you runnin’ with the Cougie Cats.”
“What’s that got to do with
anything?”
“I just don’t like it is all.”
She bristled and flipped her ponytail insultingly. “That doesn’t much matter to me. I got my life, you got yours. You wanna stand with Candle like that, you do it. I wanna split with the kids, that’s my biz, none of yours.”
Rusty slung the leg to the floor and leaned forward, hands clasped between his knees. He stared intently at the pretty girl with the brown hair. He loved her more than anyone he had ever known. Since she was old enough to talk he had been her self-appointed guardian. Her addition to the family had not been a loss of affection from his mother and father, for there had been little enough of that to begin with. Instead, she had been a light toward which he could direct his own affection. And she had needed it, received it with gratitude. But as she had grown older, with the poison of the neighborhood in which they lived flowing through her young veins, she had changed—grown apart from Rusty. He needed her as he knew she needed him. His relationship with Weezee could never have been complete, or deep, for they took each other lightly, as playthings; but his love for his sister was a completely realized thing. Now he was deprived of the one outlet for his warmth, and having introduced her to the Cats, he felt more than just responsible for her. He felt as though he had given her cancer.
Today had taught him something. The break had to be a violent and final one. No one gradually grew away from the streets. To gradually grow away meant you became a different kind of street bum—one of the fat slugs who sat on the front stoops with cans of beer and listened to the cha-cha music beating out of the windows. That was no good, either. It was a dead end. And he wanted something better for Dolores than a quick lay in a back alley or a police record.
“You got to stay away from them kids, sis.”
“They’re my friends!”
“Friends, hell! You got to drop ’em.”
Her face flamed. “Mienta!”
Rusty snapped at the swear-word, leaped from the chair and cracked her solidly in the face. Dolores stumbled back, her eyes went wide with disbelief. It was the first time her brother had ever hit her.
She had hardly known what she was calling him, had regretted it the moment it had left her lips, but he had not given her the opportunity to take it back, to apologize.
Now the barrier was erected. Solid as the Great Wall of China, older than life itself and insurmountable. She backed away, turned and ran into her room. He heard the skeleton key turn in the lock and he slumped back dejectedly, hating himself for his temper.
This was indicative of what the gang had done to him; he could no longer reason. Violence was the only answer he knew; violence was the only approach. He had to learn to curb his temper, to stamp out that blood-hunt in his veins.
He let his head flop back against the cushions and tried to stop thinking.
Perhaps dinner would kill the animosity, the fury, the hatred boiling in the house. But he knew it wouldn’t.
Dinner was a silent affair, all tinkle of glasses and clatter of silverware. They ate in silence and Moms looked from one to the other with a knowing hesitance. Should she ask what was the matter? No, stay out of it.
“Where you goin’ tonight?” the gray-haired woman asked her daughter.
Dolores did not answer. Her eyes lifted sidewise from the plate to stare at her brother for an instant, then they returned to the plate.
“I ast ya where you was goin’ tonight.”
Dolores looked up again and a flash of defiance coursed across her dark eyes. Her long lashes lowered and she addressed the inch of table just beyond the plate. “To a dance.”
Rusty butted in, “Where at?”
“What’re you, the F.B.I.?”
“No, just askin’.”
“The clubhouse.”
“The Cougars’ rooms? Down in the bowling alley?”
She nodded. “You know any place else they hold their dances?” Her fork skewered a piece of meat, shucked it off.
Rusty looked across at his mother and she sensed his concern. Her own words were carefully chosen, carefully selected in softness. “You goin’ with anybody we know, Dolores?”
The girl flipped her hair again, insolently, defiantly, “Just by myself is all. Just alone, with some of the kids.”
Rusty said, “You know there’s been trouble with the Chero-kees. I heard over at Tom-Tom’s they might crash the drag tonight.” Rumors had been flooding the neighborhood, not only about Rusty’s stand with Candle—which somehow had been kept from Moms—but of a proposed war that seemed about to break. Rusty was worried. The Cherokees had been bested in a battle three weeks before and the winds had it they were still nursing their wounds.
“You never can tell,” Moms said, picking at her food nervously. “You better go to a movie tonight, or something.”
She waited for what she knew must come.
“I’m goin’ ta the dance. Alone.”
Rusty inched forward, till his hard belly pushed the edge of the table. “You know what happened to Margie?”
Dolo decided to play it cool. “Margie who?”
Rusty stared at her with exasperation. “Come off it. Lockup’s stupid broad. You know she had it right on the school grounds and put it in a paper sack an’ left it leaning against a tree.”
Margie’s stillbirth had been the talk of the school for months. Her miscarriage had been a big thing in the Cougars’ social whirl. Rusty feared a like situation with his sister. The main job of the Cougie Cats was to keep the Cougars’ studs happy. Rusty wanted nothing like that to happen to Dolores.
“You want somethin’ like that to hit you?”
Dolores shoved back from the table, anxious to bluff high and snappy, not yet ready to storm away. She dropped her fork with a clatter and her mouth twisted venomously.
“You got a dirty mouth,” she snarled.
“I’m just tellin’ the truth. An’ Paulie Ricco’s sister got a busted spine in that Prospect Park thing a few weeks back. You wanna spend the rest of your life in bed like that? You keep runnin’ with them girls, that’s what’s gonna happen.”
“Don’t you chop low on my friends.”
“Friends, crap! They don’t know from friends!”
Moms had been sitting there, her faded gray eyes open wide at these tales of horror from just beyond her walls. She had sensed the crowd with which Dolores ran was a wild one, but she had never suspected that they were—were like this. Her heart stopped beating, she was sure, and she was sure her daughter heard the silence. This was her baby, her Dolores, just baptized and just having her first party and just wearing her first high heels and now suddenly grown, and playing with a deadly sort of fire.
She had to stop her.
“Dolores, I forbid you to go there tonight. You gonna stay home and dry dishes with me, then we’ll go take in a show, huh?”
The girl sensed the time for total retaliation had come. She leaned over, as if to clamp down on everything her mother had said, and she came back with, “Can’t you ever leave me alone? Can’t you let me have a little fun once in a while? I’m not hurtin’ you. I don’t care if I never see my old man or if you got no time for nothin’, always here in the kitchen, and you,” she turned on Rusty, “you got big crazy ideas, the big brother thing all the time, and just cause you was yellow, you think I have to be. Well, it ain’t gonna be that way. Leave me alone, both of you crapheads!”
The word hit Rusty with all the force of a steam drill. He saw the effect it had on Moms and for the second time, hardly knowing what he was doing, his hand came out and cracked hard against Dolores’ cheek.
She fell back against the chair and her face told everything there was to tell. It told the past was rotten and the future was a disappointment and the present was the rock that lay in the pit of her stomach. She slid back the chair and ran from the room, yelling, “I’m never comin’ back here again! Never! Never!”
Then the sound of the vase on the shelf near the door smashing to the floor and th
e sound of the slamming door, then that going-away-forever sound of Dolores hitting for the street.
The word “never” hung like fog in the kitchen. Rusty avoided his mother’s eyes until he heard her crying.
By then it was too late. They were all lost to one another down a dark lonely road that led nowhere. She cried too easily, damn her. Cried too easily, showed she was human, fallible, too easily. There’s only one way to escape the hurt; that way is the safe way. Just keep it locked in, down inside you somewhere, where they can’t get to you. No mother, no father, no sister, no one, because when they know they got you suckered, they know they can hurt you. And ain’t no one who doesn’t like to play god once in a while. No one who doesn’t like to hurt when they know they can be god and so they try it every once in a while. So play it cool, play it steady, keep it back where they can’t see it. Let the others—the mothers, the fathers, the friends—let them make the move, then you can play god! That’s the way.
Rusty wadded up the paper napkin lying unused beside his plate and tossed it into the waste basket. He played with his food for a few moments, trying not to let the sound of Moms sobbing get to him. Finally, he could take it no longer and he slid away from the table, went to his room. It was going to be like that, all day, he was sure.
He turned on the record player absently, letting a stack of 45s start turning on the center post. Without knowing it, he pushed the reject button, allowing the first disc to slip down. Music had become very important to Rusty. When he had no one else around, when solitude was forced on him, he could use the music to stave off loneliness, fear. The words were pointless, the tunes vapid, but he desperately needed the sounds. Nothing more, just the sounds.
Come on over baby, Whole lot of shakin’ going on—Come on over, baby, Whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on—
The music reminded him where Dolo had gone.
He sat down heavily on the edge of the bed letting his arms hang between his legs drawing tightly at the shoulder joints. It wasn’t good to let Dolores run loose like that, particularly not tonight. Besides the rumors of Cherokee action, there was always Candle—who might still harbor enough of a grudge to want to take it out on Rusty’s sister—and Boy-O with his always handy supply of sticks. There were the girl-hungry Cougars, and the lousy influence of the Cougie Cats, many of whom had police records.