Web of the City

  He sat down on the trough, then remembered the last prisoner had peed in it and got up before he felt moisture. He slouched against the wall and then decided he, too, wanted a smoke. He had the cigarette in his mouth before he remembered he had no matches.

  “You wanna send them matches back?” he asked.

  For a second he saw relationships all too clearly, and was sure the Negro would say, “Go screw yaself. I got ’em, they’re mine.”

  The Negro said, “Sure ’nuff, man,” and they skittered across the floor, sliding up against the cell door. Rusty reached down in the darkness and found them.

  As he was lighting up, the other prisoner remarked, “A real bitch, man.” As though they were not in jail, merely neighbors. A casual remark, so incongruous.

  Rusty looked up. “What’s that?”

  “They get you in here and they let you have butts, but no matches; so we got to keep one butt goin’ all night or nobody smoke. You know?”

  Rusty grunted understanding.

  “I ’member one night they’s about six of us in here and all with butts, none with matches. One guy was lit-up when he got in, an’ we hadda roll them butts back an’ forth all night, till we was near shook, man, we got so nervous.”

  Silence for a while. Then, “They take your shoelaces and belt, jack?”

  Rusty leaned his head against the wall. “Not my laces. Took my belt an’ tie, though. Yours?”

  “Mmm. Took mine.” The Negro laughed deeply, it rumbled. “But then, I’m a veteran. I’m tank bait, man.”

  “Why they take that stuff?”

  “You know, like some cat gets the lows. Tries to cool hisself with his belt. Ties it up to that screen ’round the light thing in the ceilin’, and hangs hisself with it. That makes a bad smell for the coppers, somebody goes out the hangin’ way overnight. So they takes the stuff. They must not of booked you if you still got your laces an’ matches.”

  Rusty grunted agreement. “No, they didn’t.”

  The Negro went on. “That explains it. They can’t take ya stuff they just holdin’ ya, in procoo or like that.”

  “What’s procoo?”

  “Man, you sure ’nuff new to this, ain’tcha?”

  “I been in the cooler a couple times. With some other guys. I been around.”

  The Negro chuckled wryly. The calf trying to be the bull. “Yeah, sure, jack. Didn’t mean no harm. Sure you been around, you say so, it’s so.”

  “What’s procoo?”

  “Protective cust’idy, man. Like they’s holdin’ you for your own good. A crock. You know, so they know where you are overnight.”

  Rusty stood up. He leaned his head against the thin, cool metal of the bars. “What you in for?”

  The Negro laughed cheerily. “Sheet, man. Nothin’ much. They makin’ a big thing outta nothin’.”

  “Oh? What?”

  “Sheet, man. I just cut someone, thass all.”

  “Who’d you cut?”

  The prisoner hesitated, and Rusty heard a deep drag on the cigarette. The Negro’s voice came in a deeper, more strained, more worried tone, belying his words. “Oh, no one much. I just cut my old lady a little. She peed me off and I took the blade to her, is all.”

  Rusty slid back along the wall, staring up at the ceiling, staring at nothing. He didn’t want to talk to the guy; that was nowhere. He had to think. He had to give it a long, long think.

  Was Pancoast going to come down tomorrow and bail him loose? Was he going to sit in the can till his tail turned blue? He thought of Moms and he thought of Dolo and the last thought worried him.

  Where was she? She had been at the dance, he was certain of that, but she had gone and not come back. For some reason he worried the thought about and found it singularly unpleasant. He wanted to get out, fast—to check home with Moms.

  That had been a rough time and anything could have happened. Rusty realized he was foolish to be worrying about Dolores when he was so deep in trouble himself, but he could not help himself. The darkness of the cell did nothing to reassure him.

  He took his handkerchief out and moved in the cell till his thighs hit the trough-bunk. He struck a light and swabbed out the troughload of puke as best he could. It wasn’t much to sleep on, but he had to try.

  He loosed a flood of cursing at the sight; but did the best he could with it. He prepared to lie down, finally. A deep tone sounded from the cell across the way.

  “What you in for, man?”

  Rusty turned, and tried to make out the face of the man in the cell opposite. For some strange reason, he wanted to see his face, to engrave it with bitterness in his mind. He never wanted to come back here again.

  “Nothing, mac. Just—nothing at all,” the boy answered.

  He lay down in the shallow trough and the hard, unyielding metal seemed right, somehow. He knew it was foolish, the same as Moms’ religion kick every now and then, but he wanted the bunk to be hard; he had done wrong tonight, very wrong. He had let himself slip back a little, thinking release from everything he had been and done was so easy to come by. He knew better now. It was a constant thing, a steady thing. He had to work at it and keep himself clean and away from it. It was like pot or liquor. It got to you and sucked you down every time, if you weren’t careful.

  He closed his eyes. But sleep would not come.

  Finally, the lights behind his eyes dimmed away to a darkness deeper than that of the tank and he slipped away to weird, disquieting, running dreams.

  Just before the curtain slid down completely, he thought he heard the fuzzy, indistinct, deep voice from nowhere saying, “You got to be good, man, or they set you in the jailhouse. An’ that’s so bad, man, so bad…”

  It registered. Rusty slept.

  The morning dawned muggy and gray. Rusty slipped out of the trough, and his back was a mass of aches. His neck was stiff and he had a chill that ran through his bones. It wasn’t the most pleasant awakening of his life, but somehow things seemed all clear now, all clean, all fresh and ready for a start.

  The turnkey came to open the cell doors at nine o’clock, and as the bars slid into the wall with a thump, Rusty turned away from the sink, his face wet, his eyes feeling strange and gritty in their sockets, even with the cold water doused in them.

  He stood there and watched the other man come out of the cell across the way.

  Rusty knew he would remember what the big Negro looked like. Not the color of his skin or the range of his arms or the skew of his nose, but the lines of the face, the meaning in the eyes, the whole composite thing. The whole, damned-forever thing. And it wasn’t nice, but he knew he would keep it close and any time he might need it there would be no trouble getting it out where he could look at it tightly.

  The man did not speak and Rusty did not come out of the cell. But when the big man went down to the far end of the tank to rattle the bars and scream for breakfast Rusty knelt down on the sandpapery floor and shut his eyes.

  “Hail Mary, full of grace, blessed—”

  Later, the turnkey came to get him. The officer walked Rusty back down the corridor and into the squad room. The beefy sergeant from the night before was gone. In his place was a sallow-faced officer with a Madison Avenue haircut and large ears. Rusty had seen this man around the neighborhood from time to time. His name was Bedzyk. It seemed right, for this morning.

  No matter what happened, Rusty felt very, very clean.

  The desk officer looked up as he came in and his eyes frosted over quickly. No emotion before these street punks. Bedzyk hated the gangs. A group of hoods one afternoon had followed his bride of eight months, calling filthy suggestions after her as she walked down the street to her apartment. But there was nothing he could do to rough it on them this time. He examined the notation.

  “You Santoro, Russell?”

  Rusty nodded.

  “Answer when I speak to you!” Bedzyk’s voice was hard and deadly. Rusty felt himself averting the man’s snake-like gaze.


  “Yessir.”

  Bedzyk grudgingly acknowledged the boy’s thumbing-under. “I got a release order here for you, left by Sergeant Dohrmann. Says some man named Pancoast okayed your release. You’re supposed to report to his place this evening. You know where to go to see him?”

  Rusty answered sharply, “Yessir.”

  “Okay. Then remember this, kid. I ever see you in here again, I’m going to personally see that the book’s tossed at you. Understand me, comprende?”

  Rusty bristled at the offhand remark, but answered humbly, “Yessir.”

  “Okay then, get the devil out of here. I can’t stomach looking at your ugly face.”

  Rusty felt anger frying the insides of his gut, but he held it back. He needed some information. “ ’Scuse me, sir.”

  Bedzyk looked up blackly. “You still there?”

  “ ’Scuse me, sir, but can you tell me like if they let out the other guys?” He thought of the blood in the bowling alley.

  The cop stared the boy down for a long instant, then his neck cords began to stand out, and in a terribly soft slow voice he said, “Get the hell out of here.”

  Rusty left as quickly as possible.

  Outside, Boy-O was slouching against a wall, an ordinary cigarette dangling from his unshaven face. He smelled even stronger than usual and the wild, junkie-stare was so bad Rusty could have sworn a pair of diamonds were screwed into the sockets, blazing out.

  Boy-O took a shove away from the wall, approached Rusty. The other tried to swerve around him, but the junkie said, “Hey, Rusty, hold up a second.”

  Rusty stopped and looked at the hophead. “Whaddayou want?”

  “I been waitin’ till they let the gang out. Some of the guys needed carfare like. They’re holdin’ three or four of the guys.”

  So that explained what had happened to the Cherokees and the Cougars, but Rusty was impatient to be away from the great gray hulk of the police building. “So? Why you stoppin’ me?”

  “I just wanted to tell ya I was sorry ta hear what happened.”

  Rusty was puzzled. Boy-O never had been a good friend. What did he care if Rusty Santoro spent the night in a cell on a metal trough?

  “For what? I’m out, ain’t I?”

  Boy-O looked surprised, then shocked, then partial understanding filtered through to his dreamy brain. “Oh, hey, man, then you don’t know. Hey, that’s right, they didn’t find her till this mornin’, so you didn’t get the word yet.”

  A chill slipped up Rusty’s neck and he grabbed the junkie by his filthy lapels. “What? What are you talkin’ about? Come on, you sonofabitch, open up or I’ll cream ya!”

  He knew, somehow, horribly; even before Boy-O spoke.

  “Your sister, man. They found her this mornin’. Somebody—uh—raped her and left her in an alley behind Tom-Tom’s joint.”

  Rusty felt the anchors of his jaws tighten and he thought for a moment he would drop into the street. He had to know. He had to know—

  “Tell me! Talk, you dustie, talk! How is she?”

  Boy-O looked terrified, as though he were face to face with something alien. He wanted to run away, but Rusty had him fast and was choking him without knowing it.

  He stammered and Rusty hit him across the mouth. “Talk! Talk!” He bit his lips in fury and screamed loud so the whole clean, fine, nice start-all-over day would know, “Tell me—how is she?”

  “Gee, man, I’m sorry… She’s dead like. Somebody stuck a knife inta her.”

  The past screamed and Rusty heard.

  SEVEN:

  SUNDAY AFTERNOON

  rusty santoro

  moms

  Somehow, the walk home, partially through quiet Cherokee turf, passed without his knowing it. His feet moved and his arms swung and he stopped for traffic lights when he stopped. But he saw nothing and no sounds or smells came through to him.

  He was a five-foot nine-inch moving statue. He was on a trek through nowhere at all and he walked with steady persistence. Where thoughts had been, where the clean reach of the day had lain, nothing but a swirl of color remained. It was a wild mélange of heaving, surging dull orange, wisps of light gray almost blue, streaks sudden and painful of red and heavy black. It was impossible for anything to get in and nothing trapped inside could find its way free.

  Shock!

  The steady movement of feet that was completely unnoticed.

  He opened the door to the apartment and walked in. No sound. No movement of air. A stillness and a softness almost oppressive in its totality. And yes, of course, the clock had stopped. He knew it would be like that, like a dream he had once had, and forgotten, now rushing back like the night wind to fill his mind. The clock had stopped, the unity was gone, Dolores was—

  The word came then: Dead.

  No, not dead. He said it once aloud to hear it, “No, not dead,” then added as though the word meant something for the first time, “murdered.”

  No gang rumble where a nameless boy who held a switchblade lay with his belly split wide; no stomping of a Greenwich Village queer, so his head was mashed potatoes; no technicolor, CinemaScope, stereophonic daydream in an RKO shadow-house. This was real and it was the thing in itself. This was his sister, the last one, the lost one, and she was gone. And that was not just that. That was the end of a bit of the world that meant something, that had a way to the light, that moved and talked and swayed prettily to the phonograph’s noise, that tapped the fork at dinner, and that was too young—yes, goddamn it—too young to die.

  The clock had stopped. Someone had let it waste its time to stillness. It meant something, but Rusty did not know what or why, or even if he should care about it. He wanted to cry. Why couldn’t he cry?

  There was a vague noise from the kitchen. Moms.

  He walked through the long railroad flat and into the kitchen where she prowled like a warm, soft gray animal.

  He saw her as though he were looking through the wrong end of a telescope. Very far away and moving with terribly exaggerated actions—first at the vegetable bin, then at the sink, then carefully peeling the potatoes. Were they the only things in the world for her? Didn’t she know?

  “Ma,” he spoke softly, and was surprised to hear how loud and unpleasant his voice sounded in the mausoleum stillness of the apartment. She turned to him, blank eyes that were luster-less and face devoid of expression. He knew her, then; knew her as she was inside, stripped as bare as the potatoes in the sink, with only the blank eyes left.

  She turned back to her work without a word and began systematically to gouge out the potato eyes.

  He repeated the single word. “Ma?”

  She slumped a bit more from the shoulders and he thought he saw her shiver slightly. The trembling carried itself and he felt a weakness in the back of his own knees. “I was downtown, Ma,” he added.

  She did not respond and he wondered if she had suddenly gone deaf. It was an odd feeling, all at once, and he thought of Rip Van Winkle. Had he been away more than one night in jail? Had he been shut up behind steel for, say, fifty years, and had now come back to a stranger who no longer knew him? It passed in an instant, but for that instant he was standing on a cold, empty highway, watching the Last Car Ever tooling away in dust.

  “I said, I was downtown, Ma. I got picked up last night when I went after—” He stopped himself short. Dolores. He didn’t want to say her name like that. He wanted to build to it. At first, when he had come up the three flights of steps to the apartment, he had thought he would burst in and yell Where’s Dolo? Ma, Dolo’s dead! but the silence of the place had smoothed over the inferno within him.

  The fire was still there, and he could feel it building, but he knew he must be careful. She had had it bad, and if she knew—

  If she knew.

  “Ma,” he hesitated. The words were like taffy in his mouth. “I talked to somebody, Ma. He t-told me Dolo was—Dolo’s—”

  It would have to lie there. He was not going to say it.

/>   She saved him the trouble.

  “I know.”

  The voice came from the other side of the universe and barely made the journey. Soft. Soft.

  “Is it true? She was—she was—I mean, like he said?”

  Then she turned and the blank oval spaces that should have been her eyes grayed out at him and her mouth moved like a pencil line that had somehow been endowed with life. “Raped,” she said and twisted the word once. “She was on her face, in a dirty alley with a garbage can tipped over on her, to hide her. Empty ice-cream containers was dripped all over her, I don’t know. She was. There. I saw her face. She was wet. It rained last night. I don’t know. Her blouse was black where he did it with the thing, with I guess he did it with a knife, it was black…”

  Her words were confused, the agony ramblings of a woman in shock. Rusty listened, knowing he should remember all this. This was the death of his sister and perhaps the death of his mother. But it all went by rapidly and he saw her only as hysterical. He had to stop her talking that way.

  “Mom! Stop it, you gotta stop it, please, stop it!”

  But she went on, talking more to herself than to him. “I went there. I don’t know why they let her lay there like that. Why was that? I don’t know. There was a policeman who said, ‘Look there lady and tell us if that’s your daughter,’ so I looked. I thought you had to go downtown to that there, I don’t know, what do they call it? Why was I called down to the street? Why was she there in the… the… there? Why was she killed?”

  Her hands had twined soundlessly together. Two lost things searching for peace. Her face had turned half away, and the wall received her words. Rusty could not move to her, could do nothing, for a long century of pain in his chest. Then he walked slowly and put his arms around her.