Young and Violent (11 page)

“Right!”

Two Heads snarls, “What we need maybe is a new King of Kings.”

“Look, Heads,” Braden says, “whether that is what we need or not is not what we treat here in this meeting tonight. What we got to decide is how to get Gober back in on this rumble with his old heart beating in time, instead of all off half-cocked like he is now. We can’t afford changing boats in the middle of the river. Our rep would be ruined, word got around our leader punked. We’d be worth half the price of a grind girl, word ever got out Gobe chickened. I mean, Gobe’s got to show up at the dance and go through the formalities of the grudge, otherwise we got no style. What we got to do is devise a scheme to make Gober want to rumble more than rub up against that bim. Right?”

Two Heads says, “What you gonna do, cut it off him?”

“You listen to what I thought up in relation to this subject, men,” Braden says, “for I think I have a scheme that will work on Gober and bring him back to the fold — but fast! And also — Blitz, will you kindly pass me the gin? — also this plan is not going to harm our morale. Things have been a little dull of late, and we might as well just work up to tomorrow’s adventure in Rumblesville with a little target practice of some kind — just to more or less unify us Kings of the Earth!” Braden pauses, lifts the bottle Blitz passes forward, swallows a good three shots, and draws a deep breath before he says, “Okay, here’s the strategy….”

• • •

On the roof, near the drainpipe, a spotted cat has a dead rat. A wedge of light from the door behind her holds the darkness away from Dolores Ventura’s outline, as she leans against the brick wall and worries. It is hard for her to believe that there is life in her womb, though the sickness of it has sent her to the employees’ washroom mornings, and the anxiety over it has left her sleepless. This morning a bland priest with sinus trouble blew his nose through her confession of the sin; said for her to say her “Hail Mary,” and go home and tell her mother and father immediately; said to remember the child is a Catholic; and said to sin no more but grieve at such a sin as this. And behind her in the line, others waited to unburden themselves with things they had done wrong — failure to pray, denial and doubts of God, cursing, missing Mass, thoughts, words, or actions.

This afternoon Dan Roan told her to say nothing to anyone about her condition until after the interview with the social worker set up for tomorrow. And not to feel bad, because it was a very human mistake.

“When I come home tonight,” Dom had promised her this evening, “I’ll know all about writing them big musicals, and you and me will be on the way to Outsville, Lorry, where we can move around a little and live it up!”

Dolores Ventura thinks of these things and stares up ahead of her at the tall buildings down Park, stretching their stories to the stars in the May night sky, at the lights in the windows of another world, and at the slice of yellow moon directly above her. She hears the sounds of buses and television sets, horns from the rivers, and whistles from the tugs there, and the noises people make living close together, hiding behind paper-thin walls from the impersonal life outside. Everything seems to shut her out; no one she can think of seems to invite her in; and Dom, who is off somewhere far away from her in his presence and his thoughts, seems to isolate her more than any other person, because he is the only thing she has to love, and now his Outsville isn’t real for either of them.

So she stands there on the roof, oblivious to the fact that she is not as alone as she imagines, and to the figure behind her that blocks the light from the door as it watches her momentarily, before it starts to move toward her.

A
T MIDNIGHT
, Michael Manzi turns the light switch, leaving only the neons on the signs and the clock. Coming from behind the counter, he pushes a soda cooler near the open door, out into the street. The street is not too noisy: music from the jukebox in the bar up the street, the Madison Avenue buses choking in power for the hill ahead, a man whistling
Dixie,
and some moths and night bugs whispering around the lamplight. Mr. Manzi drags the cooler near the curb, opens the valve on the bottom of it, and lets the water pour into the gutter. Then he rolls it back inside the luncheonette.

Behind him the door shuts, and strong arms grab his shoulders, forcing him backward across the cooler. A voice tells him if he screams he gets “this” in the stomach, and “this” is a knife with a six-inch sharp silver blade. Four husky teen-agers surround him.

“Give the place a work-over,” one commands the others.

“What is this for?” Michael Manzi asks.

“For kicks!” is the answer, “Same as this,” and the boy holding the knife in Manzi’s stomach lets a fist crack across the old man’s jaw.

“Come on, Jungles, let’s do it fast, before the nabs smell the air!” the boy shouts at the three others. He watches them while they run through the place, ripping up the leather booths with their switch blades, cracking the mirrors with a rock-filled sock one swings around his head, tipping the juke over to pry at the lock, and running back to the kitchen and emptying big containers of food, cleansing powders, and seasonings on the floor.

“You like the party, dad?” the boy asks Manzi. “You like the Jungle entertainment, dad?”

“You’ll pay! You’ll pay for this!”

“You like another fat lip, dad?” the boy says. He punches the old man again, this time below the belly. The old man groans and writhes across the cooler’s top. Blood trickles down his chin from his mouth, and on to his white shirt.

“I can’t get this lock, f’Chrissake. Help me on this lock!” the boy at the jukebox calls.

“Leave the goddam thing! Empty the cash from the register — that’s all the loot we need. But fix the place! Fix it pretty! And then let’s cut!”

“I’ll remember the Jungles,” the old man murmurs.

The boys says, “Dad, I doubt it,” and he gives the old man his fist in his nose, and then in his head, until he doesn’t have to hold him with the knife any more, because Michael Manzi’s body slumps down unconscious to the floor.

• • •

Dan Roan holds the soft and lovely naked body of his wife; his own nakedness pressed, against her in the double bed. There is a closeness between them now that had begun when he arrived home from the theater that is reminiscent of previous times they had cherished, when the love of each so permeates the other in every look and word and movement that they seem one identity, a complete and beautiful being that knows no separation. They had sat together for hours in the living room, sipping wine Enid had bought on sale — ”a luxury,” she had laughed, “for no particular occasion — ” and he had told her about his evening with de Jarro.

He had described the ill-fitting “sweet” clothes Eyes had borrowed for the event, the lilac hair lotion he had drenched himself with, and the cocky, blasé mannerisms he had attempted to affect, to shield his unsureness in those novel surroundings. He had told Enid of the dark thoughts that had invaded his mind as he sat beside Eyes, the peculiar way he had transferred their significance into the jargon of the gang — ”chickening” — and discussing this with her, he had found his right perspective. The job he has to do, he believes he will do without “punking out,” but no longer at the expense of this marriage he has with Enid. The child they have made will get the same chances the children he is responsible for at the Youth Board, so far as Roan’s work with them is concerned; and Enid will never again know the loneliness which had forced the childish withholding of the news of her pregnancy until it burst from her as an angry announcement, told almost in spite. Dan Roan has zeal and perhaps too much, but he is not a zealot. The changes he would bring about among the young and tough products of city streets must be as concrete as those streets, and well planned and laid out. This is work for a man, not a fanatic, and a man weighs his work and his private life in balance.

In the darkness Enid Roan helps her husband know her, and thinks also of the affinity they feel. And for her own part too, there is the resolution to help him, with her love, to do the things he can: face the insurmountable without counting it failure, and learn, in the slow way humans do, the difference between the two.

Their bodies sing them toward fulfillment that would have been theirs then, if the phone had not frustrated it.

Dan’s long arm fumbles for the telephone’s neck.

“Dan?” the voice cracks across the wire, “Dan, is it you?”

“Oh, no! Look, Red Eyes, I just left you!”

“Dan, you gotta come down here!”

“Where the hell have I got to come? Where the hell have I got to come at one o’clock in the morning?”

“Mount Sinai Hospital, at the emergency ward. Jesus, Dan — oh, Jesus!”

“What’s this all about? You sound like you’re — ” Dan says incredulously — ”like you’re — bawling.”

There is a pause and then the click comes over the phone. Dan sits staring in the darkness of the bedroom, rubbing his eyes and passing his hands back through his hair restlessly.
“You gotta come down here!”
The anguished command of a King in trouble, and the shocking surprise of the sound of a King’s choked-back sob….

Beside Dan, Enid Roan waits for him to say he has to go someplace, but instead, he comes back to her, leaving the phone’s neck off the hook on the table beside their bed.

Detached Dan, the fix-it man … The trouble with you is you’re too goddam detached … Chicken! Chic-ken! Chick-en!

There is a “crisis confab” about to start over at the Jungle Club. Flat Head Pontiac works his big, blocky body comfortably in the leather armchair’s padding. The room begins to fill up with the gang members who crowd together on its studio couches, wood folding chairs, and along its bare floors. The “club” is Pontiac’s brother’s three-room, cold-water, walk-up flat, lodged on the top floor of a decrepit tenement on 109th Street east of Third Avenue. It is a railroad flat, with one room after the other in a row; the Jungles occupy the first room, and the ones behind them have their doors locked. In front of the door leading to the second room, Bull Rossi spreads his bulk. Pontiac talks with the Jungle’s War Counselor, Blackie Buttoni, as they wait for all members to arrive and settle down.

“… so when this Lorenzi broad gives me the clue about Baby-O Limon not digging the moving pictures, dad,” Pontiac is saying, “I figure Baby-O could move me the most. As a fact, Blackie, I got eyes to make her my personal deb, here on in. A chick that don’t let herself get common is the kinda chick ‘at would make the scene with a cat of my caliber!”

“But Lorenzi’s still gonna cooperate, isn’t she?”

“Or she don’t qualify as a Junglette, dad, I’m hip! I mean a bim like Marie is already used and abused goods. She’s gotta do something to make the scene … and even at that she’s not the best-stacked film queen we ever had. But Larry can fix that. She buys the routine, all right. She’s got a yen for Moneysville, long as you use sugar when you describe it. She’ll be a good gang girl too, as good as any of them. But Baby-O’s got discrimination, dad, and that moves me.”

Pontiac glances around the jammed room. A dozen Jungles sit smoking, talking in subdued voices so the landlord of the building doesn’t get a complaint and have to be paid off, and waiting for things to start.

“Blackie,” Pontiac says, “check with Silly Charlie and see if all the Jungles is with it.”

Blackie walks to the door, stepping around the boys scattered about there, and pokes his head outside. In a second he signals Pontiac that the house is full and ready. Then Pontiac rises, and the room hushes automatically.

Pontiac assumes an oratorical stance as he surveys the expectant faces of the Jungles. They range in age from fourteen to sixteen; Pontiac is the oldest. They, like their leader, all lean toward the sweet and neat style of dress. Even on a night such as this, when they are not to a fashion show, they dress down, in subdued, conservative slacks, shirts, and socks and loafers. Their gang jackets follow suit. They are simple black sailcloth with no other emblem but a drum over the button-down breast pocket. On the drum, which is white, are their individual initials embroidered in gold. Unlike the Kings, they identify themselves no more than that, wary of the omnipresent threat of arrest, for their activities are extensive, unlike the Kings. Still in gangdom style, the initials serve to stamp them as separate beings, part of a whole. They are more orderly than are the Kings. It is Pontiac’s conceit that the Jungles, under his training, have more “sav-ware fare” than any other gang in or around El Barrio.

Pontiac says, “It’s not news any more that tonight the Kings of the Earth staged a crazy mutiny against dad Gober. For any who don’t know, a report from our scout, Jeep, came to my hands, around twenty after ten, that a cat named Braden dreamed up a scheme he put into action shortly after, without Gonzalves knowing nothing about it. The scheme was to take four Kings and stage a bust-up in a luncheonette owned by the father of this new bim Gober is hot for. The gimmick was to pretend they were Jungles; to be sure to drop the name to the old man while they’re beating him around and wrecking his “bread” so that when the nabs come and word gets around, it looks like a Jungle raid. The result is supposed to be that Gonzalves will get steamed like crazy, and jap us tomorrow like he never japped before. You want to continue this message, Blackie, while I take a breather and light up?”

Pontiac slumps back luxuriously in his leather chair and sticks a cigarette in his long, robin’s-egg blue holder. Blackie saunters over to the spot beside Pontiac and carries on in less elegant stance, but with a noble effort to effect the same mannerisms as his leader.

“Well,” he drawls, “Pontiac gets this news and passes it among us Jungles he can locate. So seven, eight of us show up over at the Police Athletic League and make with the basketball. This is so any ideas the nabs get we are in on the bust-up is disproved by our lively presence at P.A.L. The rest of you can probably no doubt account for where you was, too, so nobody can pin it on a Jungle.

“The reason we let the Kings go ahead is obvious. If this is the way they have to go about making the rumble a success tomorrow, then we buy it, because that rumble must come off! And it must come off formal — -with the bit at the dance and all the trimmings. In addition, it will not hurt our rep any to have the newspapers writing that we Jungles are responsible for a bust-up, but no arrests are made. It doesn’t hurt our rep at all. We get the credit for doing nothing. We get the glory.”

“All right!” Pontiac snaps. “You made your point! Get on with the rest of the business. It is ten after one!”

“Well,” Blackie continues, “mum is the word tomorrow. In fact we even act a little like we did pull the bust-up, so as to keep Gonzalves steamed. Pontiac is even going to drop a clue to Gonzalves like we might very well have done it — maybe like even Pontiac was in on it…. The time of the rumble is the same, right after the dance, when they plan to jap us. That too is mum! Is that the score, Pontiac?”

“Yes, from your mouth it is,” Pontiac says, and he raises himself to his feet. “Now we present the surprise. Bull, bring in the first prisoner.”

The Jungles remain attentive, not saying very much among themselves, as they watch Bull open the door to the second room, and from that room, yank out the shivering figure of Nothin’ Brown. His eyes are wide and tear-brimmed, and his skinny knees knock together with a frightened rhythm as he stands before the Jungles.

Pontiac walks up to him and peering down at him, announces, “This cat was on his way to the Kings’ place tonight when he discovers Jeep getting his ear full over the Kings’ clubroom. It was necessary for us to take him hostage so the news does not leak to the Kings that we got them cased from above.”

“What’s he jumping around inside his pants so much,” a Jungle jeers. “He gotta take a leak?”

“No, man, like — he’s doing a mambo,” another cackles.

“Silence!” Pontiac orders. “We don’t have the whole night to burn. Besides, it is beneath our dignity, cats, to worry this jig for our petty kicks.” He places a hand on Junior Brown’s shoulder. “If you were a King, cat, we’d maybe have to work you over, but you’re not a King. You just smell like a King from hanging around Kings.”

“Man, I’m not a anything, man. I am a neutral. And my mother will be yelling to the nabs why I ain’t home by now, I swear.” Tears roll out of Nothin’ Brown’s eyes.

“And you’re going home to your mother, cat, because who needs you? But before you go,” Pontiac says, pulling Nothin’ up by his sweater, leaning down and looking menacingly into his eyes, “there’s a clue I plan to drop in your brain, for what it’s worth, dad, and it’s worth every crazy limb in your skinny brown frame.”

“Yes sir, I knows that.” Nothin’ trembles.

“You know a lot, cat. You know a whole lot. So I’m gonna make a deal with you. You go out and tell what you know, and give me the pleasure of working you over. You do that?”

“No sir, I don’t wanta do that, Flat Head.”

“Don’t get informal, colored boy!”

“No sir, Mr. Pontiac, sir. I won’t again.”

“So I let you go, dad, but I give you the news, didn’t I?”

“Yes sir, and that’s a fact.”

“Because you don’t button your big flabby lip, colored boy, you’ll get wasted.”

Nothin’ whimpers, “You don’t havta spell that out for me, Mr. Pontiac!”

“Okay,” Pontiac says. “Vamoose!”

Nothin’ darts toward the door without looking back. His hands fumble on the knob, as the Jungles watch laughing, and after he has gone, they hear his silly-scared steps clattering down the six flights like a lead-shoed dog with his tail on fire.