Web of the City (25 page)

He walked back into the shop, and a minute later Pancoast heard the chisel on the ruined chair leg. Violently.

It’s going to be rough, he thought. Real rough.

Rough as banana skins.

He went back to his class, worried as hell.

After school, Rusty avoided Mr. 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, her books clutched tightly to her chest. She saw Rusty, and stopped. Rusty knew what was pelting around 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. It was tough all right.

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 on to one person in this thing… if only for a short while. He pushed away from the wall, walked over to her.

“Wanna stop for a Coke, Weezee?”

Louise Chaplin, more “Weezee” than Louise, was a highly attractive girl, with the natural features that made up her beauty 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 curved areas within her sweater and skirt. She was aware of the growing body, and so the sweater was a size too small.

Now her eyes darkened and she blinked rapidly, pausing a moment before answering—an agonizing moment for Rusty—finally answering, “Sure. Guess so. What’s new?”

It was like that all the way down the street.

Chitchat. She was scared. Really, terribly scared, and though Weezee wasn’t a member of the Cougars’ girl 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 baseball on sidewalks, against walls; radios blasting from every direction with the Giants or the Dodgers beating the pants off someone. Normal day, with the sun shining, 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 antimacassared 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 territories, hurrying back downtown to catch the 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 the weekend joviality. Rusty walked through it, dragging his feet as if he were under water.

Weezee walked along beside him, clutching her books to her firm young breasts too tightly, till her fingers whitened on the notebook. The scare was so high in her, it came out of her pores, and Rusty wished he had not approached her. 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, she 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 pack in his jacket pocket. He offered it to the girl, but she shook her head slowly. He lit it 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. 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 down 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, isn’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 were 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 around himself. 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, understand? 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 have? 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 want 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.

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 saw Rusty as an enemy now. Two days 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 that running and hiding were no good. Start running—do it once—and it would never stop. And the days in fear would be all 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.

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

Candle leaned across, folding his arms, and his face broke into 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, but he stared straight at the other. His eyes were hard, even though a five-pronged mark of red lived on his cheek.

“Listen, teacher’s pet. That bit this mornin’ was just a start. We had us a talk in the Cougars, after I was elected prez, after you ran out on us like a—”

Rusty cut in abruptly. “What’s it all about, big mouth? What’s your beef? You weren’t nothin’ in the gang till I left, now you think you’re god or somethin’.”

This time it was a double-fisted crack, once, twice, and blood erupted from Rusty’s mouth. His lip puffed, and his teeth felt slippery wet.

“I’ll hand all that back to you real soon, big deal.” But Rusty was held tightly.

“Nobody checks out on the gang, y’understand?” He nodded to one of the boys holding Rusty’s left hand, and the boy drew back. Candle’s fist came out like a striking snake, and the fingers opened and grasped Rusty’s hand tightly. Rusty flexed his hand, trying to break the grip; but Candle was there for keeps, and the knife was still at his ear. He let the other boy squeeze… and squeeze… and squeeze… and…

Rusty suddenly lunged sidewise, cracking his shoulder into the boy with the knife. The force of his movement drew Candle partially from the booth, and he released his grip.

Then Rusty moved swiftly, and his hand, flat and fingers tight together, slashed out, caught the boy with the knife across the Adam’s apple. The boy gagged, and dropped the blade. In an instant it was in Rusty’s hand, and he was around the booth, had the tip of the switchblade just behind Candle’s ear.

“Now,” he panted, trying to hold the knife steady, having difficulty with nervous jerks of his hand, “you’re all gonna listen to me.

“I left the Cougars cause I’m through. That’s all, and it doesn’t gotta make sense to any of you. I’m out, and I want out to stay, and the first guy that tries to give me trouble, I’ll cut him, so help me god!”

The other Cougars moved forward, as if to step in, but Candle’s face had whitened, and his jaw worked loosely. “No, for Christ’s sake, stay away from him!”

Rusty went on: “Listen, how long you figure I gotta run with this crowd? How long you figure I gotta keep gettin’ myself in bad with the school, with my old lady, with the cops? You guys wanna do it, that’s
your
deal, but leave me alone. I don’t bother you. Just don’t you bother me.”

Fish—tall, and slim, with long eyelashes that made him think he was a lady’s man—spoke up. “You been fed too much of that good jazz by that Pancoast cat, Rusty. You believe that stuff, man?”

Rusty edged the knife closer, the tip indenting the soft skin behind Candle’s ear, as the seated prez tried to move. “He dealt me right all along. He says I got a chance to become an industrial designer if I work hard at it. I like the idea. That’s the reason and that’s it.

“Now whaddaya say? Lemme alone, and I let your big-deal prez alone.”

At that instant, it all summed up for Rusty. That was it; that was why he was different from these others. He
wanted
a future. He
wanted
to be something. Not to wind up in a gutter with his belly split, and not to spend the rest of his life in the army—because that was where most of these guys were going to wind up finally.

He wanted a life that had some purpose. And even as he felt the vitality of the thoughts course through him, he saw the Cougars were ready to accept it. He had been with them for three years, and they had all rumbled together, all gotten records together, all screwed around and had fun together. But now, somehow, he had outgrown them.

And he wanted free.

Fish spoke for all of them. Softly, and with the first sincerity Rusty had ever heard from the boy. “I guess it sits okay with us, Rusty. Whatever you say goes. I’m off you.” He turned to the others, and his face was abruptly back in its former mold. He was the child of the gutters; hard, and looking for opposition.

“That go for the rest of you?”

Each of them nodded. Some of them smiled. The Beast waggled his head like some lowing animal, and there was only one dissenter as Rusty broke the knife and tossed it to its owner.

Candle was out of the booth, and his own weapon was out. He walked forward, and backed Rusty into the wall with it. His face was flushed, and what Rusty had always known was in the boy—the sadism, the urge to fight, the animal hunger that was there and could never really be covered by a black leather jacket or chino slacks—was there on top, boiling up like a pool of lava, waiting to engulf both him and Rusty.

“I don’t buy it, man. I think as long as you’re around, the Cougars won’t wanna take orders from their new prez. So there’s gotta be a final on this. I challenge.”

Rusty felt a sliver of cold, as sharp as the sliver of steel held by Candle, slither down into his gut. He had to stand with Candle. It was the only way. As long as you lived in a neighborhood where the fist was the law, there could be no doubt. Either you were chickie or you weren’t. If an unanswered challenge hung around his neck like an albatross, his days on the street were numbered.