Girl on the Best Seller List (22 page)

“I like surprises too,” said Miles.

“Ah, but you’re not the type that surprises happen to,” Gina told him.

— FROM
Population 12,360

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The Young and Violent

T
HE
K
INGS OF THE
E
ARTH
live on Park Avenue in New York City. They stand now on the wooden bridge at 99th Street, over the train tracks, looking out at the red switch lights of the New York Central, and looking down at their turf. Their turf belongs to them and they control it. Their turf extends ten blocks along the left side of Park, from 98th street on up into 109th, where it fringes El Barrio, Spanish Harlem. Somewhere within this boundary the Kings of the Earth live, and over it, they rule. In all there are nineteen Kings; but here and now only two, Tea Bag Perrez, and Red Eyes de Jarro, the War Counselors. They smoke, and watch, and wait for Rigoberto Gonzalves —
Gober
— the King of Kings, their leader.

In the deep blue light of beginning evening a figure mounts the steps of the bridge, and thinking it is their leader approaching, they tense and turn to see.

“Naw, naw, it ain’t Gobe,” Tea Bag sighs impatiently. “S’only Detached Dan.”

“Suppose he knows?” Red Eyes wonders.

“Either that or he’s smellin’,” Tea Bag answers.

The pair watch Dan Roan’s approach. Dan is what social-welfare circles call a “detached” worker; a street-gang worker. He is employed by the Youth Board; a slender fellow in his early thirties, well over six feet, with sand-colored, close-cropped hair, a lean, sharp-boned face, and bright green almond-shaped eyes. Dan walks leisurely toward them, a burned-down cigarette clutched between his long, narrow fingers, a faint smile at the edges of his wide, strong mouth. He wears a gray flannel suit, a green wool sweater under the jacket, a white shirt and plain yellow tie. “Hi, boys!”

“Dan.”

“Hello, Dan.”

“Nice night.” Dan stands beside them now, looking down at the squalor that is upper Park Avenue. A lumbering vegetable truck squeezes its way in the close street beneath them, snorting and coughing smoky fumes and somewhere across from them in one of the tenement rooms a woman’s husky voice croons,
“A room with a view — and you — ”
The early May sky is not yet dark, but the red neons in the drugstore on the corner are shining, and the raggedy yellow tomcat from the grubby grocery next to it is locked inside, lying on a bunch of grapefruit in the display window, staring out moodily with his tail switching.

Dan says, “What’s new?”

Tea Bag shrugs his shoulders. “They shot a bomb off at Yucca: Flats, I hear. I hear tell they did that.”

Tea is a short, medium-sized fifteen-year-old with mud-colored hair, a smooth, ruddy complexion, and a slumping posture. He is an alumnus of Coxsackie, a state correctional institution, and under the sleeves of his shiny black leather jacket his arms are punctured with needle marks. Before he went to Coxsack, he enjoyed a brief flirtation with marijuana and earned his nickname when his ma got in the habit of chiding him, “You’re nothing but a bag of tea, sonny boy,” but then he was only playing with the stuff. Now he has a romance with heroin, the white, white snow.

Dan stubs his cigarette out and tosses it over his shoulder, sticks his hands in his trousers pockets and rocks back and forth on his heels. “Yes, I read about Yucca Flats in the paper,” he says quietly.

“Big explosion,” Tea remarks.

“It’s the time of the year for them,” Red Eyes de Jarro says. “It’s in the air.”

Red Eyes wears a black jacket, too, with the same gold crown stamped on its back, and his name King de Jarro stenciled in white on the front above his heart. He is taller than Tea, but not truly tall, and he is thinner. His brown hair is darker, his large round eyes are darker. Red is far-sighted, so much so that the strain from the years he went without glasses gave his eyes the bleary, bloodshot appearance which inspired his name. Now he has glasses in an imitation leather case shoved in a drawer somewhere at home. In September he will be sixteen, old enough to quit school.

“That’s the truth, Eyes,” Tea Bag agrees. “It’s in the air.”

Dan addresses them seriously, “What’s up, boys?”

“Gober’s dinner when he finds out what happened,” Tea tells him.

“Gober has a proprietary attitude toward his possessions,” Red Eyes asserts.

“Meaning?”

“Meaning Babe Limon.”

“Suppose you let me in on it, boys. You don’t want another rumble. Is it something between the Kings and the Jungles again?”

Red Eyes unzips his jacket; and zips it up again, toying with the zipper as he talks. “Babe Limon is Gober’s girl. You know that, Dan. It’s a fact anyone knows. She’s his property!”

“I never see them together much any more.”

“Okay! So maybe he has a thing on some other broad, or something. I’m not saying he does or he doesn’t, Dan, but Babe Limon is Gober’s property, and the Jungles know that. They know that as well as they know their turf from our turf!”

“All right, Red. All right. Now, what’s the deal? Did a Jungle try to cut in on Babe?”

“Not yet! And not just
a
Jungle.
The
Jungle did it, Dan — the leader, no less. Flat Head Pontiac!” Red Eyes scratches a match on the bridge’s side, touches it to his cigarette, and sucks in smoke. He says, “Flat Head Pontiac’s spread the word he’s out to make Babe at the Friday-night dance.”

“ ‘At’s right,” Tea says. “Word’s spread all over like grassfire.”

“But he can’t do it, boys, if Babe isn’t willing.”

Red Eyes sighs. “You don’t get the point, Dan. Even if Babe isn’t willing we lose face if we let Flat Head even try. Don’t you see that? That’s some gall Flat Head has, even to say a thing like that.”

“Yeah,” Tea Bag reflects. “Another thing. There’s no tellin’ ‘bout that bitch, Babe. Like, she’d
enjoy
a rumble over her. She teases, you know? She might just come on strong with Flat Head to see the fireworks.”

The threesome stand meditating momentarily, each thinking over the problem. In Dan’s book a rumble is defined as an all-out mass gang fight, juvenile delinquency in the raw. But to Tea Bag and Red Eyes, to the Kings of the Earth and the Jungle Boys, to those and those like them, a rumble is Russian Roulette played with iron pipes and ball bats. It is violence “on the rocks,” with the rocks stuffed inside socks, swung through the air at random and with malice. Or it is violence, neat, clean and quick as the flashing sharp blade of a switch knife or a straight razor. A rumble is a rumble. Red Eyes and Tea have fought and bled in rumbles, and seen boys drop beside them and get wasted by a bullet in their brains or a dagger in their guts.

“Look, boys,” Dan says finally, “you’re the war counselors of the Kings. Why don’t you declare a talk with the Jungles; and if they have a grievance, arrange a fair fight?”

Tea gives a high, wild giggle to punctuate the impossibility of this suggestion. “What we supposed to say, Detached Dan? We supposed to say, ‘Look here, Flat Head, you can fight for something that belongs to Gober if you wants to, but you got to fight fair, man.’ That what we supposed to declare a talk about? How to cop another guy’s broad by the rule book?”

Red Eyes slaps Dan’s back good-naturedly. “The trouble with you, Dan,” he says tolerantly, “is that you’re too goddam detached. No, sir, if Flat Head does like he says and makes a play for Babe, there’s just got to be a rumble.”

A whistle hoots and a train roars toward them, down under them on the sooty tracks. Above the noise it makes, Dan tells Red Eyes to remember that he’s on probation; and Red Eyes, singing loudly so the engines don’t drown him out, chants:
“Re-habil-i-ta-tion, re-ha-bil-i-ta-tion, rehabilitation — bull-lew-oohs!”
Tea laughs with his shoulders shaking, and spits down at the train; and Dan Roan watches the pair through tired, thoughtful eyes.

Then the train has passed on into the distance; and it is quiet and getting darker.

“Wonder what’s keeping Gobe?” says Tea. “Gang’s all up in the cellar waitin’.”

“Maybe he’s gone on up there,” says Red Eyes.

“Naw, I tole him to come here. Tole him we wanted to talk to him before the meetin’. Figured be better he get it from us first.”

“Then he’s probably delayed,” Red Eyes states flatly.

“Yeah, like you know he is, man — and by
who
he is too, I’m hip!”

“I don’t know that for sure, Tea. You don’t either.” “It ain’t my business.” “Darn right.”

“A broad is only a broad, so who cares?” “You don’t even know that, Bag.” “Am I arguing?”

They talk, ignoring Dan Roan. They talk freely before him, knowing he will not stool; unsure about what he hopes to gain by hanging in their turf with his mild, impartial ways, his calm, persistent reasoning, and his undemanding and perpetual concern for them. There was a time when they were suspicious of this man, in the very beginning when he first showed up night after night in their haunts — the candy stores, restaurants and pool halls where the Kings concentrate. D.&D., the mute who is the Kings’ scout, followed Roan and observed him two weeks straight, and came back and wrote what he knew. “Seem o.k…. Clame to be sochal workor … Talk with kids … Dont buddy with cops … Seem o.k.”

“Still and all,” Gober had decided, “keep him at arm’s length. He might be an undercover narcotics agent.”

“Or a plain-clothes Friday,” Tea had suggested.

“Or a pigeon,” another King had speculated.

“Or a fag.”

Dan Roan’s acceptance by the Kings of the Earth was slow, and never quite complete. Tea Bag was still prone to put him down now and then, though Tea knew Dan was aware of his romance with the white snow, and had never turned him in or slipped his name to the feds. Just on principal, Tea was hot and cold with Dan, because he’d learned at Coxsack that a hophead had to be careful. About these social guys, Tea had a slogan: “Let them help you if they can; but don’t you help them if you can.”

The King of Kings — Gober — said Dan Roan was all right so long as he knew his place, and he stayed lukewarm with him all the time. Most of the Kings followed suit. Red Eyes dug Dan more than the others; in fact, Dan was the only person in the world besides Red Eyes’ girl who knew that Red Eyes’ ambition was to be a lyricist.

Dan listens as they talk; waiting until they have chewed down the subject of Gober’s delay, and paused, and again scanned the narrow streets beneath them for a sign of Gober, anxiously now, and silently.

To Red Eyes, Dan says, “Still want to go on Thursday night?”

“I’ll think about it,” Red Eyes answers noncommittally.

“Well, let me know. If you don’t, I’ll take my wife.”

Red Eyes snorts. “She sleeps with you; I don’t. Maybe you ought to.” He is embarrassed before Tea to discuss the matter.

“What happens on Thursdee night?” Tea Bag grins. “Second honeymoon trip to Gibralter, somethin’?”

“Sure, sure,” Eyes tells him. “How’d you know?”

“No kiddin’, what gives Thursdee?”

“Someone at the Youth Board came up with tickets for a show,” Dan says. “I told Red Eyes he could come along with me if he liked.”

Red Eyes blushes and mumbles, “My mind isn’t made up.”

“Oh yeah? Big Bro’way show? I never seen one.”

“Well, maybe next time — ” but Dan does not finish.

Tea says, “Naw, naw, Christ, naw. S’for the birds. Who needs it, huh? Who needs it?”

“I might be busy Thursday anyway,” Eyes says. “Things are in the air.”

“Where de hell is Gobe, f’Chrissake!” Tea complains. “Delay, delay, only I bet it don’t lay. Not the stuff he’s chasin’.”

Eyes tells Bag he’s asking for it, to talk too much.

“Did I say anything?” Bag says innocently. “Did you hear
me
say somethin’?”

The sky grows dark; and from a television set off behind them, a commentator barks out news in a clipped jumble of words. Dan Roan pushes back his coat sleeve and holds his arm to the light to see his watch. He whistles and says, “Whew! It’s late.”

Red Eyes feels bad the way he talked to Roan. His voice is polite. “Do you have to meet your wife at the church, Dan?”

“Yes, in about an hour. But I have to stop somewhere else first. I’d better run along.”

“I’ll let you know, Dan,” Eyes says.

“Do that, Red Eyes.” Roan clamps his hand on Red Eyes’ arm. “A rumble won’t do you any good at all; you know that, don’t you?”

“What can I do? If the Kings rumble, I gotta rumble, Dan. I can’t punk out.”

“You’re not punking out. It isn’t like punking out. You’re on probation and you can’t afford to rumble.”

Tea says, “So he’s on probation, f’Chrissake. What’s that? You say you go school. ‘At’s what they want you to say. You say you home every night ten o’clock. ‘At’s what they want you to say. You tell ‘em what they want to hear, ‘at’s all. F’Chrissake, an old Coxsack alum like me get caught, I gotta go to Warwick for post graduate work. Probation! F’Chrissake! What’s that?”

Dan says, “Red Eyes knows what it is. He knows what it means.”

“Still, I gotta rumble, Dan, if they decide. I’m a King. Hell, I’m a War Counselor.”

“You think it over,” Dan tells him, “and tell Gober I’d like to talk with him during the week. Some time before Friday. Will you tell him?”

“Sure, Dan.”

Tea Bag says, “Probation, f’Chrissake!”

In his pocket Red Eyes has a dog-eared letter he has received from the Arco Music Publishers of America. Since Dan arrived he has wanted to show it to him to get his opinion, but around Tea he is unwilling to mention it. Now as Dan starts away he fingers it without taking it out of his jacket, wondering if he should run ahead and show Dan. But Dan walks fast, and Tea is curious like an undertaker reading the obits. Tomorrow maybe. The next day.

As Dan starts down the bridge’s wooden steps, Tea Bag calls, “You see Gobe up round Ninety-seventh in a certain place, you tell him hot-foot it over here, huh, Dan? You going that way? Where you going?”