The Warriors (5 page)

Ismael stabbed his forefinger toward the circling city lights and turned all the way around, his rigid arm pointing, accusing.

Hector whispered, “Listen to the man.” Ismael started. They could hear none of it yet, only see his arms moving.

Ismael talked. He talked, hard-lipped and softly the way he always did. He told three signalers squatting in front of him; he told the swarming darkness and the far-off shifting headlights, and he told the city lights and the silly-kid fireworks in the air and the blinking plane lights crossing overhead, challenging everything. The three signal men heard his first words, turned and passed it on to the other communicators who repeated the Word, relaying it, conversationally, deeper and deeper into the night. There was no other sound now.

Ismael told them what he was. They knew him. He had come up and taken over a fall-apart gang that had been dying for ten years through changes of personnel. He had the reputation of being a fierce fighter, a cunning planner. Who led his forces better? He had challenged, conquered, and assimilated a number of other gangs and won face for himself and rep for his fighters. Then he had made his men into mercenaries, hiring out his army to help other gangs in their rumbles. What army had more experience? What army had more discipline? He had given them new, magic signs which had force. He could now muster three hundred men, counting auxiliaries. What army had more equipment and money?

They knew him. His face was there for all to see. His big blue lenses mocked them all with daring equanimity.

In the darkness they all nodded.

Why were they here? He gestured again, finger pointing, arm stiff, pivoting on the mound. He told them they were here because of the Enemy.

He reminded them about the Enemy, the adults, the world of the Other, those who put them down. The courts and the prisons and the school-prisons and the home-prisons; these put them down. The newspapers put them down. The big-gang men put them down because they would never take them into the rackets. The ones who charged too much for everything put them down. The pushers working to hook their people put them down. The ones who held all the good things of life and misered it out—cheap living, televisions to dream with, the overpriced and easily repossessed cars, the fall-apart, cheap-slick clothes, all to be earned by breaking their backs for the rest of their lives—these put them down. And the worst were the people who were supposed to be
their
friends: the social workers, the Youth Board men, teachers, all the guidance people who spoke words like community centers, organized dances, sports, outings, reading,
the Mobilization for Youth, the Career, this Haryou shit, Peace-Core fags; promises like church . . . They all remembered what a big fist his older brother used to be. Now some pentecostals had hooked his brother; his wife dropped children once a year and he clapped hands and body-rocked to that Jesus
salva
shit, didn't smoke, repented for being put down, dog-worked, and smug-smiled all the time. All worse than tea; dreamier than junk. War on poverty? He had the real war and he gestured again, fist shooting out, elbow locked, finger pointing, turning slowly in place.

They knew. They nodded.

He told them they were all lost, lost from the beginning and lost now, lost till their deaths. If they were lucky, they would make a quick end and if they were not, they would drag it on, child surrounded, like their parents, being nothing more or less than put-down and fit-in machine parts. Some of them would go junkie, or psycho; they knew what that meant. Sure, they could be pushers, or policy runners, but that fed the machine too.

They nodded. They knew it.

Or did they think they might make the big escape by stealing, working their way up into the rackets? There were no rackets for them; hard work was not rewarded; all they would do was to sneak-steal till they were caught and busted and spent a third of their lives on the Inside. And if the police didn't chill them, the racket boys would ice them. Did they think they could make it? Ismael anticipated them. He reminded them: If they were hard, where were the old hard boys now? Where were all their wasted brothers and all the busted heroes? But how much more
hombre
was an
hombre
in a group than a man alone? They had to know it.

Most of them agreed. A few hardheads and a few kooks kept shaking their heads because they
knew
they had the stuff to lift themselves into a new destiny. They would make it out of the
strongness of their fists, the insanity of their drives, or because they were much man: wasn't America full of such stories? Even the blazing skies painted heroes who had made it the hard way and told them about the power of violence. A little luck . . . that was all it ever took.

He reminded them; it was hopeless . . . unless they listened to him. Arnold nodded wisely and wished he had thought of it all that way himself. And he believed he just might bring his children in. The Junior kept edging back at the words the signal man passed on: he didn't understand them and shook his head violently, saying that man, he didn't dig any of that jive at all, and what was more, he didn't want to hear any more of it. Arnold nudged the Junior. Bimbo, the bearer, waited, ready to agree with whatever Arnold and Hector agreed with. Hinton fought his wild terror, but managed to look as icy as Ismael there, frozen in that pool of light in the Park darkness. Lunkface listened to the words and began to see where it was all heading and understood that here was the Man, the leader they had all been waiting for. His face began to twist with excitement and he kept nodding in time to the moving lips he could just make out. Hector, always alert to threats from the outside and internal discipline, kept half-listening to the words, hardly hearing them, watching both his men and the surrounding groups, barely visible in the darkness. Dewey heard.

What was to be done, Ismael asked? Ismael said that at any time there were twenty thousand hard-core members, forty thousand counting regular affiliates, sixty thousand counting the unorganized but ready-to-fight. That was about four army divisions. Did they realize what that meant? He told them. With the women it would come to a hundred thousand. A hundred thousand! They had their arsenals. He told them about the big dream he had. One gang could, in time, run the city. Did they know what a hundred thousand was? There were only about twenty
thousand fuzz. Why should the biggest power force, one hundred thousand, in the city be put down by the Enemy, the Other? They would tax the city and tax the crime syndicates. What was to be done, Ismael asked, and waved his palm-down hand over the great area of darkness.

Brotherhood, he said. There were one hundred thousand brothers and sisters. And before he heard the protesting murmurs, he told them, “Now we're all brothers, I don't care what you say. They make us think we're all different so we rumble in colored gangs, white gangs, Puerto Rican gangs, Polish gangs, Irish gangs, Italian gangs, Mau-Mau gangs, and Nazi gangs. But the iron fists break all our heads in the station house the same; and when that judge, he looks down on us and says Youth House, reformatory, or Riker's Island, or the Pen, he is treating us the same; they treat us like we, one and all, had the same mother, and they fuck our mother and that's what makes us brothers.”

He shot out his arm. The fist was clenched. His other hand was over his arm in the Gesture and he turned, more slowly than before, gesturing at the whole world around them.

And for a moment they were all one. Two hundred yards away The Junior felt it; he was one of a vast and comforting throng, and the terror of being in a strange place was not so frightening for a moment. Lunkface could see the backed-up headbusters being beat in their own prison cells. Hector could think, now, in terms of handling big platoons, companies, battalions of men, who could move in swift, devastating raids. Hinton would be able to walk long distances without having to fight. Bimbo dreamed of being deferred to. Dewey hoped that it would be an end to hanging around, waiting in the morning for the night to come, bored, always bored. Papa Arnold wondered how he could get close to Ismael. They yelled and Ismael held them for a second. They were formed into a soothing bubble of power
and warm community. They yelled together stood and made the Gesture in every direction. But it could only hold for a second; too many things probed at the skin that united them all. What Ismael said got garbled in the passage because the communicators and the listeners to the Word could hardly understand its power or meaning, and so saying it right, or hearing it right wasn't so important. The dissident elements couldn't stand it. Some gangs had too much rep; some too little. The Nazis hated that crazy nigger prancing up there. The Muslim gangs thought he was a traitor, a Puerto Rican, and so really white and where was the white man you could trust? Their harsh hatreds could only rest for a second at a time and they must break out, knowing only to offer violence before it was offered to them. The psychotics could never maintain discipline, could never be grouped too long with others; they were too restless. Most of the others could never dare place themselves far from their dreamy wants of kicks, power, women, clothes, cars, and honor; some of them had almost been won back into the world, were beginning to believe in the way things were and couldn't dare to sacrifice the joy of belonging. The frightened shied away from it because they could almost see, palpable out there, beyond the park ends, the terrifying shape of the opposition, those massed apartment-house lights, the now-innocent fireworks sounding and flashing in the air; only a little sign of how the world could come down on them.

Someone slapped at a mosquito; a jumpy warrior misinterpreted the sign and struck back. A fight broke out. Groups began to bop in the darkness. A lot of them, not trusting the situation completely, had brought their own flashlights and began to use them. A whorl of violence swirled, and expanded outward. Gangs reformed, shattering that holy instant of universal unity. A few men, always prepared, undid garrison belts from their middles and prepared to start lashing, buckles out. Someone put
down someone else's mother. A few of the gunbearers began to shred the gift wrappings off the token guns to feel protected; they pointed the power, still afraid to use it, probing the surrounding darkness.

The fights were still scattered and the liaison men were trying to stop them. Some fights were halted momentarily, but the guides had to linger to make sure that Honor was not offended. Movements were interpreted as being hostile, and purely defensive blows were struck. The fights kept dying down and starting up again all over the field.

Father Arnold called his children closer together. The seven of them formed into a circle, each facing outward. Lunkface, as always, wanted to break discipline and go rushing off into the darkness, swinging, smashing, but Arnold and Hector flanked him and held him in place. They just waited for the noise and the roar to die down, hoping they wouldn't have to fight.

Someone, unable to take it, fired a shot. A piece of leaf fluttered down from the bush behind Ismael. Secretary tried to pull him down. Ismael, warrior and leader, disdained to cover himself. His face was composed; his cool smile mocked them and challenged their stupidity. The blue eye-disks looked at the seething, flash-lit blackness; he heard the muffled shouts, the sounds of blows, contemptuously. His calm, he thought, would have a cooling effect; they must come to their senses.

But it had gone too far for one man to stop. The fighting was general now; peace and universal organization were irretrievable in this violent blackness. Arnold's sons held tight, checked by Hector. Here and there other groups refused to break peace and fight, but stood firm and were bumped against in the blackness. The fighters pounded at Ismael's men, identifiable in their icecream pants. Some of the wilder ones, the truce-breakers who had never trusted in the first place, who were jealous of Ismael, were unslinging secret chains wrapped around their waists.
There were more guns than had been accounted for. The gift tokens were all shredded free of their wrappings; bright flakes of colored paper fluttered in and out of the flashes of light, candy-bright in the middle of the night. Some jokers lit firecrackers and threw them around.

And someone tipped the cops. Maybe a passing motorist had seen it all. Or worried Youth Board Workers had sensed what was happening. A frightened warrior, or one of their women, feeling that old rumble-fear, had told. And they were coming down on them in prowl cars now. They heard a siren from a long way off, but unlike the city, now there was no place to run and hide, no doorway to disappear into; only the unfamiliar field, the blackness itself, or the bright highway. The siren grew louder; other wails joined it; the sound was a cliché—they had heard it so many times—but paralyzing. They couldn't run—which way, where, would they go? Only Ismael's men knew the way out. The red lights on top of the prowl cars were blinking. Police car after police car raced down both roads, flanking them. And who could have betrayed them but Ismael? Who could have gotten them there where they would all be together, easy to hand over, who but Ismael?

And so they presented their tokens of allegiance in a different way than they had intended. From all around the field they aimed their guns at the circle of light. They fired. From those distances, and in the confused lighting, only two bullets reached. Ismael's body was thrown back through the halo and held up by the thick stand of bushes. One hole was unnoticed in the dark material of his suit. The other shattered one blue lens so that Ismael's face seemed to wink at them contemptuously before he slumped. The flashlights illuminating Ismael paled suddenly as a great blaze of headlights and spotlights poured down on them from two sides.

Heaving in viscous agony, their bodies writhed, moved by the
shower of light to a moment of furious action. They pounded at one another, not only at enemies, but at friends, as if only terrific motion could make them feel less frightened. Light bathed them. Even the most well-disciplined gangs wavered. Some of them broke entirely; they began to run, and running, smashed into other men and stopped to slug. Others ran in circles. Light drenched them. More police cars were coming up, rushing to the scene along the parallel highways, screeching, turning toward the field, stopping, and aiming their headlights and spots onto the field till it became unbearable. They were all naked in the light, inundated. And, slowly, their movements began to stop. They paused. They waited. A field full of panting boys were fixed in the lights, aware only of the blazing gush that poured on them, drowning them, and aware of the complete, terrifying, shore of blackness that lay beyond those lights.