Web of the City (11 page)

“I said something to you, kid—Santoro.”

Rusty nodded, “Yessir.”

“You knew there was gonna be a rumble tonight?”

Rusty spread his hands eloquently. “That’s why I went after my sister. I heard there was gonna be trouble.”

“You know you’re skatin’ pretty thin ice, Santoro.”

“Yessir.”

“Go on home and we’re gonna call this Pancoast. He’s not answering now so we’ll call him tomorrow, and we’re gonna give him a report on this, let him decide if he still wants you under his custody. If not, you’ll sail into the pokey so fast it’ll make your butt ache. Be at home when we want you.”

Rusty was amazed. Go home? Just like that? What was this? What was the catch?

The boy turned and started toward the door.

The Cherokees set up a howl.

“Hey, man! That ain’t no fair!”

“You gonna let him go like that?”

“You let
him
go, you gotta let us
all
go!”

“Lousy fuzz-lover!”

The sergeant bit his lower lip, regretting his decision. Then, “Hey, you. Santoro. Wait a minute.”

The cop tapped a pencil against the desktop, then said resignedly, “Wiswell, put him in a cell, by himself, till tomorrow. Protective, call it. We’ll call this Pancoast tonight again and if he doesn’t answer, then tomorrow morning. Can’t just let him go without some word, y’know.” His voice was apologetic, to no one but himself.

“Tomorrow’s Sunday,” said Wiswell.

“I know it,” the desk sergeant snapped back. “Do like I told you.”

The officer named Wiswell took Rusty by the arm and led him from the squad room, down the corridor.

They opened the cell block and Wiswell walked Rusty down the broad aisle between the cubicles. In the center of the room was a heavy wooden table and benches joined together like a picnic table, and bolted to the floor. Either wall was the barred face of a cell.

Wiswell stopped before one of the empty ones and motioned to the end of the line. The turnkey there threw the bar and the cell door slid into the wall. Wiswell motioned Rusty forward and the boy walked into the cell.

“Wait a minute,” said the cop. “We didn’t book you in because you’re not charged. But you better let me have your tie and belt. Any weapons hidden?”

Rusty shook his head, and slipped off his tie. He pulled the belt loose with a swishhh and handed it over, too. Wiswell took them, said, “Ask the guard in the morning…I’m not going to bother with a receipt tonight. Too late.

“Take it easy,” he added and left the cell.

Once outside, he motioned again and the cell door slid to with a clump. Rusty looked around: a metal trough without a mattress suspended by clamps from the wall (bowed in the center, and smelling faintly of urine and the last man who had slept there); a toilet without seat or paper (a wall button for flushing); a sink with one hold-in button (cold water only); a wire-shielded naked bulb in the ceiling.

Even as he stared at it, the light went out, throwing the cell into striped duskiness.

From a cell across the block, a Negro voice called out to him. “Ay, man.”

Rusty moved to the bars, hooked his fingers through, and tried to stare across, to discern who was speaking. Finally, through the darkness, he got a dim picture of the big, ebony shape in the other cell. The man repeated his first greeting.

“Whaddaya want?” Rusty answered, wary, though separated by two thicknesses of steel bar.

“Ay, man, you got a cigarette there for me? I ain’t had one in fo’ hours.”

Rusty fished in his pocket, came out with the deck and pulled one loose, then he realized they were beyond flipping distance and if he chanced it the cigarette would lay in the aisle till morning when they were turned loose into the tank.

“How’m I supposed to get it over to you?” Rusty asked.

The big Negro pressed up against the bars, instructed, “You lay it down on the floor, man, and then like you snap yo’r finger aside it, and it should roll right in here sweet-like. Okay?”

Rusty did as he had been told, and snapped his finger against the tube, sending it spinning straight across. It rolled, and for a second he thought he had not tapped it hard enough, but the years playing “knuckles-down” in the streets had done their work. It skittered across and the man reached out, snaring it.

“I got no matches, man.”

Rusty threw him the matches. They struck the cell door, and rebounded, but not out of reach, and in a few moments he saw a firefly tail winking in the blackness across from him. He watched the dim shape silently, then heard the soft, “Thanks, man,” and grunted an acknowledgement.

After a little while, Rusty realized he had been standing at the bars, his fingers hooked through, without movement, and though he knew no one could see him, he was aware that this was the traditional melodramatic pose of the prisoner and he stepped away from the cell door.

There was a barred window far down at the end of the tank. Through it he could see the night sky. It was as though he were in a well, looking at the stars. But there were no stars. And no moon. And no clouds. And nothing up there but what should be there; the sky. Somehow it meant something to him. He wasn’t quite sure what, but he thought it meant something like inevitability. It was a cinch the sky was there and it was a cinch he was down here in the cell. That was the way it was and the way it would wind up. You’d never find the sky being used as a rug and you’d never find Rusty Santoro living the good life. Didn’t figure.

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?”