He headed for George’s, which was one of those taverns on a corner that are made of concrete and look like a great concrete block, with narrow slits of windows. The neon lighting was turned off. Jules supposed that there was a back entrance, an easy way in; maybe he could locate a crowbar or a board or something to break open the door. He stood out front, waiting. He missed his friend Ramie, who would have known exactly what to do.
He walked around the side of the building. Some junk lay in back. A back door, a mess of garbage pails, boxes. He walked all the way around the building, beginning to be nervous. It was too dark. Too quiet. Out in front again, by a street light, he stood for a few minutes to give himself time to think. He lit a cigarette.
A squad car turned the corner, cruising slowly.
Jules made a mistake—he took a guilty step backward. He turned and began to walk. He walked slowly, bringing his elbows closer to his body; he did not look around at the car. But it was too late—he had made a mistake. The car braked to a stop in the middle of the street, the door flew open, and a cop yelled, “Hey, you! Just a minute, kid!” Jules threw his cigarette away. His brain went blank and he turned to run. He headed up an alley, running, and now he knew that he had really made a mistake but he couldn’t stop. How could he stop?
The cop was yelling, “Stop! Get back here!” and though it flashed through Jules’s mind that he was in danger, he still could not stop. He dashed around a pile of junk and fled across the barren back yard of some high building, turning his ankle, not even crying out, and behind him the cop was muttering something loudly. Jules thought that he had to hide, but shrewd and fast as such thoughts came, his body kept on running in panic and would not be brought to earth. Jesus Christ help me! Jules thought, reaching out for a building’s rough brick wall and trying to flatten himself against it. He’s going to kill me. He knew enough not to cross back to the street again, where the other cop would be cruising with the car, but fled along a side street he had never seen before, past small, darkened one-story homes. Behind him the policeman fired his first shot. Jules had no idea how close the bullet came. He lunged for someone’s porch, thinking maybe he could crawl under it, but, panicked, he had no time to stop and kept on running into the back yard of the house. There was an old doghouse there but luckily no dog, and just as the cop shouted, “Stop!” and fired another shot, Jules dived through a broken fence. He got to his knees and then to his feet and found himself running alongside another small house out toward another street. He was sobbing. He had no idea what was happening. On the street a car’s headlights flashed, and he thought madly the squad car had doubled back and was about to run him over, so he turned to the side and smashed through someone’s bushes, getting scratched on the face. He ran panting across a row of front yards. His heart was pounding violently. He felt pain in his side, in his chest, but more than anything his brain seemed to be throbbing with surprise and anger, asking, How did this happen? How did you let it happen?
“I got you!” cried the cop, and Jules felt sure the bullet would get him in the back, but he felt it whiz by him. Nothing to do but run. Keep going. If he could get over to his own neighborhood where he knew places to hide…basements, warehouses, sheds, garages, his own house…but the cop would not let him run in that direction, he seemed to be steering Jules, herding him off into the dark. Though it was dark Jules was becoming visible: he could feel himself becoming visible. Two or three shots rang out. Jules burst his way into someone’s shanty and there, panting, weeping like a child, he fell to his knees and embraced his own body, which was shuddering. He was safe. He would not be found here. Then suddenly he heard the cop’s footsteps again; he could hear the man muttering right up to the shanty itself. The footsteps thudded against the ground. The door was kicked open. “Don’t shoot me!” Jules cried. He was bent over, kneeling, with his shoulders hunched as if he were trying to bend himself in two. “I didn’t do anything!” Jules said, sobbing. He shut his eyes and leaned toward the ground, his hands hard on the back of his neck, gripping his neck.
“Hey, you little bastard, little motherfucker, trying to run away on me!” the cop cried. He put the barrel of his pistol against Jules’s head. “You know what I’m going to do? Going to blow out all your brains, kid, you smart-ass kid, running me all over the goddam neighborhood!” And he pulled the trigger, but it clicked upon an empty chamber. In disgust he raised the gun and brought it down on Jules’s head.
Jules fell. He felt himself being kicked, being turned over onto his back; he felt his pockets being turned inside out and something taken, and he began to weep with his eyes closed, too terrified to play dead.
When the cop left, Jules did not move. It was strange that so much noise hadn’t brought people out back, or maybe it would not bring them out of their houses but make them hide under their bedclothes. Nothing happened. He heard boat whistles from the river. He lay still. Time passed. He shivered convulsively; his head felt soft and wet where the gun had struck him. He had better get home. But for a while he could not move, as if he were paralyzed—his legs too weak or too cunning to move. Finally he got onto his stomach, then onto his hands and knees. He was breathing very hard. He found his empty wallet lying a few inches away and put it back in his pocket. He got shakily to his feet. His head pounded violently, but it was something he could stand. Punishment for his mistake. Being stupid was a mistake. One false move, a guilty step, running when he should not have run, should have met that cop face to face. He wept silently, in pain, ashamed, and made his way back out to the street.
It was after three when he finally got home. He washed his face in the bathroom, wincing with pain. Maureen came to see what was going on. He said, “Go back to bed, mind your own goddam business.” He pushed the door shut so that she couldn’t see him, but when he came out she was still standing there.
“What happened?” she said. “Did somebody beat you up?”
“No. Nothing.”
Maureen stared at him. “They didn’t take your money, did they?”
He tried to get by her.
“Jules, did they get your money?”
“Yes.” He pushed past her on his way to bed.
She said, “That’s going to drive Ma wild.”
He fell onto his unmade bed and slept. The next sound he heard was an alarm clock going off in his parents’ room. He got out of bed. He hadn’t undressed so he didn’t bother to change. He looked all right. There was some dried blood on his head, a bruise. His head pounded. But that was all right, he could stand it. What sickened him was his stupidity. He tasted vomit, thinking of how stupid he was.
After his father left for work he went out into the kitchen and had some coffee, standing. Loretta was sitting at the table. She stared dully at him. “What time did you get in last night?” she said.
“The usual time,” he said.
There was a pause as she waited, dense with politeness, for him to say something more—didn’t he have a few dollars to give her?
But he said nothing.
She watched him, sleepily and a little sullen. “When are you coming home tonight, if I may ask?” she said.
“The usual time,” said Jules. He escaped from her and got outside, though he had two hours before school started. He walked around. He ran and reran in his imagination that chase behind buildings and through alleys, wondering how it would look in the daylight. The cop had yelled at him, warned him. I’m going to get you! Jules had been too stupid to get away and too stupid to turn around and face the cop. That pistol had slammed down on his head, hard. Jules had bowed his head and down onto his head had come the pistol, very hard, meaning to crack his skull. That was almost that. Almost the end of Jules.
The high school was fenced off from one of the city’s busier streets. Against the fence, blown up to its full height, were scraps of newspapers and bags. Jules leaned against the fence and smoked a cigarette. He tried to get himself calm. At a quarter
to nine he made his way inside with a crowd of other kids. He inched by instinct toward his friends, who were already idling in the corridors by their lockers, hating school but somehow drawn by its walls and noise and its scent of prison, an instinct with them too. They were joking about something. They banged their lockers shut. Jules’s head ached, and he turned away from them and went to his homeroom just as the final bell was ringing, not a second before. He did this every morning. It was all right; he hadn’t died.
Three seats over to his right was the girl he was in love with, a blond, small-nosed girl who wore pleated skirts and white wool socks and sneakers and who rarely looked at him, being for some reason nervous of him and his sideburns and smirky stylized grin. He allowed himself to fill with an eerie, mystical desire for her, dazzling himself with desire, while his homeroom teacher—a woman in her fifties, frail and spidery—talked to them about filling out health-card forms. When was your most recent dental examination? Jules looked over at the girl. She was no better off than he was, her parents were just as low, but she carried herself carefully, with an eye for what was neat and proper and clean; her friends were good girls, like herself, though more given to horseplay than she; her name was Edith. Jules loved her. He dreamed about her…
When the bell rang, he made his painful way to the front of the room to say to his teacher, “My ma forgot to write my excuse for yesterday,” and the woman dismissed him, a little nervous of him and his friends and put off perhaps by his glazed eyes. His breath too—it tasted stale. Everything about him was stale—but at least he was alive. He walked slowly and carefully to his first class, English.
At first he could not remember where his assigned seat was, and a daring girl giggled at him, Jules so clumsy this morning, but finally he located the seat and fell into it. English class. He opened his notebook. He had forgotten, or lost, his English textbook. He groped around in the desk and came across someone’s book, not exactly the English text but near enough in color to it. Jules stared toward the front of the room. The teacher was already talking. The blackboard was watery. Something was being written on the blackboard—handwriting large enough but strangely jumbled. Jules squinted; he brought his fingers to his eyes and pressed them, trying to see. What was all that? Coming around the corner the firehouse…Jules leaned forward and let his elbows grope against the desk top, seeking support. He felt his mind go blank, then come back to life. He was slipping off. With his fingers spread around his eyes he tried to hang onto consciousness, desperate and ashamed, but still he was slipping off. The teacher turned his head, then turned it another way, a bald head, talking, and Jules felt himself falling. Something scuffed against his thigh, maybe a rat, and with dreamy loathing he recalled a rat jumping up against him when he’d been about seven or eight, fooling around somewhere, and a rat had leaped toward him and ricocheted from him in a panic, pushing off violently from his thigh. He remembered it now, vividly, and felt the rat leaping crazily against his thigh and pushing itself off in terror, and in a numb terror of his own Jules began to lean forward, his head slowly dropping, his forehead slowly moving to the top of the desk.
10
When Maureen was thirteen they moved from the house on Twentieth Street to another like it on a street named Labrosse, still in the same neighborhood but closer now to Tiger Stadium and not far from the New York Central railroad terminal, a great gothic building with hundreds of windows. She was getting too old to explore buildings and vacated houses, too conscious of herself as a girl to run yelling through warehouses with a bunch of other kids. She held herself back, she carried herself cautiously, afraid but not knowing exactly why she was afraid. Moving from one house to another disturbed her. She couldn’t sleep for many nights in the new house. All those boxes, the trouble, her mother sweating and angry and her father grunting with the effort of carrying things, everything in a turmoil, uprooted—she was frightened.
Even Jules lost patience with her. “Oh, come off it,” he said, poking her to get her going, growing up himself now and always in a hurry. Even sitting down he had a distracted look, as if he were making plans for what he would do when he got up. She admired him, she resented him. She went through the pockets of his trousers when he hung them up in his room, looking for evidence of his larger, mysterious life, a life lived away from her.
The house they lived in now was like a barn, a square box of a house set close to the sidewalk. There were only a few feet of yard, without grass; a few broken bricks, some rocks, unidentifiable junk, ruts and footprints hardened in the earth. The house had once been painted gray. When you ran up the front steps the third step sagged. There was a closed-in, sly feeling to the whole neighborhood, that put off strangers—policemen or plainclothesmen on the prowl, water-meter men, gas-meter men, welfare snoops, social workers—the welfare bumps, as Loretta called them. The women would yell from one back yard to another, “The Investigator is coming!” when just about anyone showed up who didn’t belong in the neighborhood. Sometimes Jehovah’s Witnesses came through and argued with the Catholics.
Her mother sank into the neighborhood and made friends at once. On any morning women just like her, older or younger, pregnant or not pregnant, were to be seen hurrying out in their cotton dresses, their hair wound up on plastic rollers, anxious to talk—what happened last night next door, what was all that noise? what happened with that nigger in a car down the street, did he run into someone? “Oh, them niggers,” Loretta would complain pleasantly to her neighbors, being understood at once. “Them niggers have a birth rate twice as much as white people, or ten times, I forget which, and they’re all on ADC and play poker with the checks. I know all about it.” She complained about the new house, about her mother-in-law, about her kids. She complained about her husband. Everything she said was understood at once; she sank into the neighborhood and might have been living there all her life.
They had had to leave their old house because part of a block was to be torn down—for a reason, they weren’t sure why. Someone said a park was going to be built there. But years were to pass and no park appeared, only a half-block of demolished houses and pipes and miscellaneous rubble, open basements, jagged jails….Maybe a park hadn’t been planned, or maybe it had been forgotten. Anyway, the Wendalls had had to move. Not that Loretta really regretted the move, once she made friends. It was just that she hated to be kicked around. She told Maureen and Betty every morning at breakfast, “Look, don’t you let anybody kick you around today. Jules I don’t need to tell, he knows what’s what in this world. But you two, you’re dumb enough to get pushed around, and just don’t stand for it—tell them you don’t take no mess. Don’t ever let anybody push you around.”
“Oh, Ma,” Maureen would say in embarrassment, “pushed around how? Who’s going to push us around?”
“Not the nuns and not any other kids. Remember that,” Loretta said.
“Nobody’s going to mess with me,” Betty said.
Maureen emerged from the house onto the sagging veranda with a cautious, befuddled sense of alarm—who was going to kick her around today? It was true that somebody always kicked her around—an older girl or an older boy, a nun patrolling the corridor, or Betty—Betty might push her around, having the strength of greater simplicity and tighter, tougher muscles. Maureen thought it was all crazy, this worry about being kicked around, when all you had to do was recoil with the blow and start to cry as soon as possible—not like Jules, who had refused to cry for years now, no matter what happened; not like Betty, who always seemed to be asking for more. Maureen walked out onto the veranda each morning, clutching her books and her lunchbag, and let her eyes wander out onto the street to see if there was any danger.
The veranda was so long that all the kids who lived in the house and kids from next door could play on it, making forts of crates and arranging them into two camps. On one side of the veranda was the Wendalls’ door and on the other side the Stanleys’ door. When it rained the kids sl
ammed in and out of those doors and hung around the porch, the little kids busy with their noisy games and the older kids like Maureen and Betty and Faith, from next door, reading comic books. After the Wendalls had lived there a month the Stanleys moved and another family, with six children and a deep drawling accent, moved in. They said they were from Kentucky. All their things were in a truck, loaded up and covered with sheets, and Jules and Maureen and Betty helped them unpack, excited with their new neighbors. Six children! On moving day Maureen felt giddy and out of control, so much was happening, so much was always happening, so much noise! So many faces! So many footsteps, so many mothers and fathers and children to keep straight! Loretta brought out some beer in cans. Maureen and the kids ran through the rooms of the other part of the house, overturning boxes and shrieking with laughter. Then, suddenly, Maureen wished that no one had moved in. She wished they might live alone in a house for once. So with a nail she made jagged little marks in the wallpaper of what had been Faith’s parents’ bedroom.
After a while everyone forgot about the Stanleys, who had moved to Grand Rapids. The new people were named Stonewall. Mrs. Stonewall came over to talk with Maureen’s mother all the time, and they sat on the veranda and sipped beer or coffee and smoked, the two of them exactly the same age, wearing slacks that were a little too tight across the back or skirts that were a little too long for this year, while behind them small children played and the radio squawked with no one to listen to it. On Saturdays, Maureen had to get out of the house because of all the noise; she walked two miles or so to the library, where it was quiet. The library was like a home should be, quiet. As she walked she muttered to herself about what she would do if she was old enough to be a mother: how she would take care of all those kids, punish them when they needed it, give them a good slap and a good spanking and even, for the worst of the kids like her sister Betty, find some dark wet place—the “dungeon” under the veranda—and nail her up in it until she was good.