The Warriors (8 page)

“Are you all right? Who's with you? Are the boys with you?” Wallie asked.

“You're so inquisitive, Wallie. Man, I don't think you're accepting us.”

“Don't give me that shit, Hector,” Wallie tough-talked.

Hector grinned; they were training Wallie, but good. “Like
there are a few of us here, one or two, and like it's two thirty-third street, and are you like coming, Wallie?” His throat felt raw; he had to get out of that phone booth.

“Two hundred and thirty-third and where?”

Outside the men had faded away and were holed up in the shadows; he couldn't see anyone. A prowl car drifted by and Hector turned his back to them, but not fast and not too jerky; not far, just enough so they wouldn't see the pin shining in his hat. He could feel them giving him the hard look as they passed, but he was one man making a call; what was so bad about that? The spot-car passed.

Hector told Wallie, “It's by an elevated train.”

“But what's the street?”

“You're so inquisitive, man.”

“Do you want me to come or not?”

“I called you, didn't I?”

“How am I going to get to you if I don't know where?”

“Like some grave called White Plains Road.”

“How did you get all the way up to the ass end of the Bronx? You were mixed up in that rumble, weren't you? Are you in trouble? Did you do anything? Some boys were killed.”

“No. Nothing serious. We didn't do anything.”

“Anyone in prison?”

Or could they tap any booth at will?

“For Christ's sake, stop asking so many questions. We're in trouble here,” Hector yelled and was ashamed he had shown strain. He would fix that Wallie for making him show weakness.

“I'm coming. Don't move. Was anyone hurt? Don't move. Just stay where you are and I'll come. An hour. Don't move, do you understand? If it takes me a little longer, don't worry. I'll be there.”

“I'm cool. I'm waiting. Come on, lover.”

“Don't move . . .” Wallie was saying as Hector hung up on
him. He was sweating when he got out of the phone booth. Between a building and the elevated tracks, he could see the cloud front had come up on the moon and the white-tipped edges of the clouds were swallowing the light. What had Wallie meant by its taking a little longer? How much was longer? Why should there be an extra wait?

“The man is on the way with the excursion bus,” Hector went around and told each of them. They were placed where they could see one another. A train passed overhead, going uptown. One came downtown. They fidgeted in the darkness. Hector holed up where he could see all the other hiding places. After a while he went out and over to The Junior to ask him what time it was. The Junior's watch said 11:41, but that seemed wrong. They listened and found the watch wasn't running. That fucked everything up, Hector thought; how much time had passed? He went back to his hiding place. He wondered how long it was going to take and tried to figure out a way of knowing how much time had passed. He tried counting, but that went too slowly. Two of the men, Dewey and The Junior, began horsing around. Hector crossed the street and ordered them to stay in the freeze. Dewey asked how long they had been waiting; it was hours, he was sure. He was bored hanging around. How much longer was it going to take? The Junior said no one could be expected to be perfectly still; besides, there were no cops anyway. Hector said to maintain discipline; whose fault was it they were out of the cemetery? That quieted The Junior because he was a little ashamed.

Hector inspected Hinton's cave. Hinton was sitting in a small, dark alleyway between two stores, his knees drawn up to his chin, staring at the wall ahead. Over his head a sign in luminescent gold paint announced that the territory belonged to Golden Janissaries. Hinton pointed, “Can't be hard—they have a bad Crayon.”

Hector had never heard of them. He asked how it was going. Hinton said it was going. Lunkface was fidgeting in a store door, squirming, wanting to move it, bouncing in and out of the shadows. He kept leaving his place to go and talk to his brothers. Hector ordered Lunkface to get back and returned to his own hole-up. Bimbo came over and asked how long did Hector think it took to get up here from where Wallie was? Hector said he wasn't sure, but it shouldn't take too much longer.

“It took us more than an hour to get up here.”

“But that was on the train.”

“Well, he's got a car. That .means he should come twice as fast, doesn't it?”

“It don't mean that.”

“I mean a car should go twice as fast.”

“It should, but it isn't on the straightaway. Stay cool. He'll come,” and he remembered what Wallie had said about it maybe taking time and not to panic. So he had Bimbo break out the bottle. Hector took a drink; Bimbo took a drink. Bimbo went all around and gave everyone a drink. That killed the bottle, but Bimbo put it back inside his raincoat—you couldn't tell when it would be useful.

They waited. Another train passed. About a half-hour passed. Two couples passed, the boys leaning all over the girls, playing their hands on the house fronts; one couple was walking with their lips glued and their eyes shut tight. The men thought it was funny; the lovers didn't even know they were being watched. One of the girls carried a portable radio and it played rockabilly love songs. But Lunkface had to play cute and come drag-dancing out of the shadows and strut by them very close, looking carefully, insolently, at the girls. The boys stepped free to look him over. Lunkface kept swaggering. The boys wanted to give Lunkface what he was looking for, but the girls held them back. The lovers let Lunkface go striding on, high, and the Family
didn't have to come out and stand up for him. One day he was going to do that, Hector thought, and the Family was going to let him get what he deserved; he had it coming, but good. Lunkface turned the corner and disappeared and the boys relaxed and kept walking with the girls. One girl's hand kept holding on to her boy's ass, squeezing, and that excited the Family. The other boy kept turning his head, looking back at the direction Lunkface had taken. That clown, Hector thought again; he would have to penalize Lunkface when they got back to the territory. What if Wallie came while Lunkface was gone? What if the fuzz showed?

The time kept dragging. No other trains came for a long while. Did the trains stop running after a certain hour? He began to wonder if he had made a mistake in calling Wallie after all. They could have been almost home. And how much could you trust him—any Other, for that matter? If Wallie knew where they were—and tonight—could the Other overlook a rumble like this—how sure of Wallie could they be?—could they be sure this wasn't a trap—what if the cops were tipped—what if they were just around that corner—if Lunkface had danced into their arms? And after all, the trains went downtown; that was the way the hometurf lay. If they were on that train, they could always look up which way they had to go, what transfers they would have to make. It was really simple. And now the Lunkface had called attention to them. What if the boys were part of some army, those Spahis or these Janissaries, and came back with reinforcements? A prowl-car siren sounded from a long way off and Hinton got nervous until it faded. Why had Wallie insisted that they shouldn't move—some kind of trap? No. That wasn't the way these Youth Board jokers moved. But what if they had decided to clean them up, once and for all—what if it all
had
been some kind of trap to get all the gang leaders, all the hardest rocks into a net—what then? Well, if that was the case,
Ismael had gotten his, but good. But now it would be a matter of cleaning up the ones who had gotten away.

Lunkface came back and was laughing. He went over to Hector's hiding place and said he had gone around the block and passed the couples again. “They didn't even see me. I walked by so close and they didn't even see me. You know, they're all sitting on a stoop, their mouths slobbering and that eyes-shut jazz, and one of them had his hand inside her pants and was feeling the old you know what, man. We could take them chicks away.”

“Get back to the hole and wait,” Hector told him.

“Man, it wouldn't take long,” Lunkface said. “They're around the corner and all we have to do is indian up and jap them quick and take those cunt. We could go back down to the park and do the job and be back before that Wallie would get here. We
owe
it to them chicks to show them how
men
operate, don't we?”

“Get back and wait. We're in enough trouble as it is.”

“Or man, we take them with us! We could do that. And if that Wallie, he don't like it, why we could just take the car too.”

Hector told Lunkface to make the girl out of his hand and to cool his warrior in the dark waiting place. The Lunkface did what Hector said, but he was hot and didn't much like it.

They waited. Hector began to trust Wallie's word less and less, perhaps because no one's word should be trusted. And the longer they waited, the more exposed their own hiding places seemed to be. Hector saw a prowl car drifting by, about two blocks away; in the other direction, a block or so down, a beat-bull strolled by. They seemed to be casual enough, but—on the other hand they could be moving in on them. Arnold would have waited it out, Hector thought, and now that
he
was the Father, he would play it wise, old, and cool, too. Clouds began to float over the moon, and for a while they could see it, but its light was dimming, breaking through less and less till after a while the moon became completely blocked out. It slowly grew more airless,
closer, and the thickness, mugginess, became palpable, and Hector could smell something faintly smoky—smog, maybe.

Hector was hot and sweating now; the sweat made him uncomfortable, but he didn't take off his jacket in case he had to move fast. He waited. A sudden rill of perspiration running down his side made him jump. He realized he hadn't heard any fireworks going off for a long time. Did that mean they had stopped shooting off because the neighborhood was becoming loaded with Law? Hector made himself think it was all right; traffic was holding Wallie up. But, on the other hand, where was the traffic this time of the night? If Wallie reported them, it might take just about this much time to set the net, surround them, trap them, but good. From uptown far off, he heard the faint sound of a train rumbling. Hector thought he would give it till the train after this one—that would be enough time for Wallie. If Wallie wasn't here by then they would know, definitely, that something was wrong and they would cut out.

That patrol car passed, but it seemed as if it was a block nearer. Or was it a different hunt-buggy—going a little faster than he thought it should. Some older men came by, never noticing the Family hiding—or did they
pretend
not to notice. Could they be the plain clothes?

As the train came in, Hector couldn't take it; he stepped out and gave the signal.

They all came out of the shadows, ran, and were clattering up the stairs and vaulting the turnstiles while the furious changemaker was screaming at them, shaking his fist from behind the booth bars.

They turned and gave him the upyourself sign. The changemaker started to come out of his booth. Bimbo brandished the bottle. The coin flunky ducked in and down in his cage.

They ran up the second flight of stairs to the train as it was ready to close its doors. Lunkface threw himself between the
doors and held them open as, laughing, the others slipped under his arms one by one into the train.

But Hinton turned, took out the Magic Marker and went back to the advertising signs and wrote the Family name, big, across everyone else's marks—and he downed the Golden Janissaries and the Spahis for good measure, and strolled over and ducked under Lunkface's arm while, a few cars up, the conductor was shouting at them to let the doors alone.

They thought it was only a matter of taking a long, dragging ride in an empty train. The shit was off here; the subways were relatively neutral territory; you only had to fear the fuzz. They might even sleep a little. But the train was crowded. People were sitting in every seat; the aisles were jammed.

“Maybe it's that old night shift,” Dewey whispered to The Junior. But something was wrong with the riders—all of them. They were eerie, weird, something else. What was it? The doors closed. The clothes were wrong, but not with all of them: the faces were—off, but not with all of them: the eyes—sitting or standing they all looked asleep—but the eyes were
open
—yet closed. The Dominators moved together. Wild and crazy looks flicked over them. They tightened their enclave, shutting out the
Other to feel safer. Men drooped from the poles or hung from the handholds; women lolled, their hair uncombed, gazing laxly into space, sitting with their legs loose, spread out; people leaned on one another in twos or threes; some of them concentrated on empty space; others peered at newspapers; some of them were bent over sheets with rows of figures, peering intensely, making marks with pencils, muttering to themselves; some of them, pushed, took a few seconds to see the Family, frowned at them and their bust-in noise, and shifting their position, looked away and seemed to forget they had been shoved.

The place chilled the Family. They looked into the car behind; it was crowded, too. They tried to see what was ahead; too many people were in the way. Hector asked a squatty man with a flattened nose and thick eye-ridge flesh, standing next to him, whether this train went to Coney Island. The man turned slowly, looking up from a sheet covered with printed and penciled figures, as if being dragged away from something very important, as if barely having heard the sound, let alone the words—and looked at Hector's face, focusing slowly, slowly, the eyes becoming not-dead, perhaps even recognizing another face, trying to think about the question very hard, but not making it and not caring to. Hector repeated the question. The man finally seemed to understand what it was they wanted of him, shook his head, not so much at the question but because it was too much trouble to answer, whether he knew or not, and looked away.