Web of the City (3 page)

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 nodded.

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 lit 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.

“Are you chick-chick?”

Rusty slammed forward against the table. His hand came down flat with a smash, and his eyes burned fiercely. “Look, don’t you never call me that, unnerstand. I’m no more chickie than anybody else.” His face smoothed out slowly, the anger ebbed away even more slowly.

Finally, he added, “Weezee, I been runnin’ the streets with the Cougars for three years. I got in lots of trouble with ’em. Look at me. I’m seventeen, an’ I got a record. Nice thing to know? Like hell it is! I been usin’ my fists since I could talk, and I’m just up to here with it, and that’s on the square. I just wanted out, is all.”

The girl shook her head. The brown hair swirled in its ponytail, and she began twirling it nervously. “They’re gonna make it rough on you, Rusty.”

He nodded silently.

Tom-Tom brought the Cokes, collected the two dimes Rusty laid out, and went back to his fountain.

Five minutes later, they arrived. The silent word had passed down the neighborhood.

Not the entire gang; just ten of them, with Candle in the front. Many of Rusty’s old buddies were there—Fish, Clipper, Johnny Slice, even the kid they called the Beast—and they all had the same look in their eyes. All but the Beast. He was half-animal, only half-human, and what he had behind his eyes, no one knew. But all the rest, they saw Rusty as an enemy now. Two months before he had been their leader, but now the lines had changed, and Rusty was on the outside.

Why did I come here with Weezee? Why didn’t I go straight home? His thoughts spun and whirled and ate at him. They answered themselves immediately. There were several reasons. He had to prove he wasn’t chicken, both to himself and to everyone else. That was part of it, deep inside. There were worse things than being dead, and being chicken was one of them. Then too, he knew the running and hiding was no good. Start running, do it once, and it would never stop. And the days in fear would all be the worse.

That was why he was here, and that was why he would have to face up to them.

Candle made the first move.

He stepped forward, and before either of them could say anything, he had slid into the booth beside Weezee. The boy’s face was hard, and the square, flat, almost-Mongoloid look of it was frightening. Rusty made a tentative move forward, to get Candle away from his girl, but three Cougars stepped in quickly, and pinned his arms.

One of them brought a fist close to Rusty’s left ear, and the boy heard a click. He caught the blade’s gleam from the corner of his eye.

“Waddaya want?” Rusty snarled, straining against their hands.

Candle leaned across, folding his arms, and his face broke in a smile that was straight from hell. “I didn’t get called onna carpet by Pancoast. He kept his mouth shut.”

“Why don’t you?” Rusty replied sharply.

Candle’s hand came up off the table quickly, and landed full across Rusty’s jaw. The boy’s head jerked, the night-before’s pain started anew, but he stared straight at the other. His eyes were hard, even though a five-pronged mark of red lived on his cheek.