Children of the Streets

by Harlan Ellison

  Like wild animals those children of the streets went at each other, engaging themselves in a manner that would have terrified the most battle-hardened war veteran.

  The flash of the Very pistol cast a red glow momentarily, and I saw terrified faces turn toward the sky. It died in a while and the blind trampling went on unabated.

  Even the girls, tight jeans somehow concealing vicious knives and straight-edged razors, fought like wildcats. I saw one girl smash another in the breast with a lead pipe, and keep beating her with it, even after the other had fallen moaning among the leaves.

  No one in the park that night would have been safe.

  Eventually I heard the siren wail of New York’s Finest arriving. The scream, ‘Leech out! The cops! Out! The cops are here!’ rose over the wails of filth and agony of the combatants. Joined in one common bond, hatred of authority, they broke and ran, scattering back the way they had come, leaving their friends and brothers lying on the dew-fresh ground.

  Suddenly I realized my position. I was as liable to get thrown in jail as anyone else left lying there. I had to get out, and fast!

  I dragged myself erect and limped through the trees till I was a block away from where the patrol cars had drawn up to the curb and were shining their spots.

  I crossed the street, my arm hanging limp and burning, and ducked into an alley between two modern apartment buildings.

  I never went back.

  Look in the daily paper to see how many died and how many were arrested, man. Or don’t bother. Grab your kid when he comes in late tonight and ask him how many got theirs.

  He’ll know.

  But do you know? Do you know how to prevent this from happening to your kid, in your neighborhood?

  I said you couldn’t stop a rumble, or a kid gang, once it got started rolling. Well, that isn’t quite true. But you can’t go on as you have, either. Use your heads, you damned fools!

  There isn’t really much you can do when slums take the place of football fields, and when alleys are more convenient for loving up a date than taking her to a canteen for dancing and clean entertainment.

  But as long as there is a solid family unit to which the kid can run when the city closes down on him and the world snaps and snarls, as long as the parents and the school and the church stop looking at juvenile delinquency as a recent cultural leprosy, get off their cans and try to understand the young hood, try to aid him in helping himself, not shove him the way they think he should go, there’s a chance.

  This isn’t the whole solution—it may not even be a right solution, but it’s a start.

  First we need parent education. ‘Honor thy father and mother’ is a sweet sentiment, but what if the father is a lush and beats the mother, who’s too lazy to take notice that the stains on her kid’s hankie aren’t lipstick but blood?

  Get those adults trained. Rid them of the idea that just because they gave birth to something they are competent to bring it up. Most parents are so incompetent they wouldn’t know it if their kid was Public Enemy Number One till they saw his picture in the post office.

  Train them, train them, train them.

  Education is a wonderful thing, and ‘you can’t teach an old dog new tricks’ just doesn’t hold up. There are lives involved here, thousands of them, and you can’t let this continue merely because it doesn’t seem judicious to tell a parent he’s slovenly and doesn’t know how to bring up his kid.

  Tell him—or he may not have any kid to bring up!

  Second, we need more beat cops—get them out of the prowl cars. There isn’t a thing they can do rolling around like conquering heroes, advertising their presence, blocks from trouble when it happens.

  Let the paid servant earn his pay instead of grousing about how many calluses he has on his fat behind for the pittance he’s paid. Let the cop walk around. Then send more cops to walk over the ground he just covered. Blanket your rough sections. Stamp out the street mugger and the rapist and the juvie and the rumble by having so many cops in sight that there’s no place clear of a bull to start trouble.

  Third, we need better education. Kids who don’t understand homosexuals or Negroes will time and again roll them, mug them, hate them.

  We need more action and less talk. Organized action, not lynch-law insanity that screams, ‘Wipe out every little bastard you see on the streets after nine o’clock!’

  Action on the part of parents too busy with church key and beer can; action on the part of school boards too hypocritical and stingy to persuade good teachers to teach the right way; action on the part of clergy and governmental officials too busy dredging up the proper flowery phrases for ‘the present outrageous situation’ to get out in the gutters where the kids play stickball, and see what is going on.

  Yeah, man, don’t bother asking your ward heeler or congressman what’s up. Don’t take it to the bartender or the psychiatrist. Take it to the kids. Ask them.

  They know.

  No Way Out tells a typical story about a typical child of the gutters. In this story his name is Rusty Santoro. It might as easily be Juanito Valdes or Jesus Martinez. Today in New York—and other great urban centers of America—the influx of Puerto Rican-Americans has brought back the factional wars that raged when the Poles, Irish, Jews, Italians moved into Manhattan. Melting-pot, they call it, but no-man’s-land is more like it. The grab for space to live, food to eat, a buck and a half for kicks: all of it adds up to tension, terror and the big fists. Here is a boy who wants out, who knows the folly of his life, who knows it has to end in a sewer somewhere, but who gets dragged back inexorably, inevitably. This is just the way it is, and it may cause a flicker of understanding so you won’t ask again, ‘Why don’t they just walk away from it?’

  NO WAY OUT

  Rusty choked as the chisel bit into the leg of wood, sprayed sawdust across his face and T-shirt. He puffed air between his thin lips, continued working, and continued to ignore the stout boy who stood behind him.

  The wood shop had quieted down. No one else moved, and their tools were silent. Only the constant machine-hum of lathes that had been ignored, left running, filled the shop with sound. Yet somehow the room was silent.

  The boy behind Rusty took a short half-step closer, shoved his shoulder hard. Rusty was thrown off balance, and the chisel bit too deep into the chair leg between the lathe points. The design was ruined. The chisel snapped away, and Rusty spun, anger flaming his face. He stared hard at the other boy, changed his grip on the wood chisel.

  Now he held it underhand—knife-style.

  The other boy didn’t move.

  ‘What’s a’matter, spic? Y’don’t wanna talk to your old buddy Candle no more?’ His thick, square face drew up in a wild grimace.

  Rusty Santoro’s face tightened. His thin line of mouth jerked with the effort to keep words from spewing out. He had known the Cougars would try to get to him today, but he hadn’t figured on it during school hours.

  Over him, somehow—tense as he was, knowing a stand was here and he couldn’t run without being chick-chick—Rusty felt the brick-and-steel bulk of Pulaski High School.

  You just can’t run away from them, he thought.

  The boy Candle had come into the basement wood shop a minute before. He had told the shop teacher, Mr Pancoast, that he was wanted in the principal’s office. Mr Pancoast had left the shop untended—oh, Kammy Josephs was monitor, but hell, that didn’t cut any ice with anyone—and Candle had moved in fast. First the little nudge. Then the dirty names. Then the shove that could not be ignored. Now they were face-to-face, Rusty with the sharp wood chisel, and Candle with a blade. Some place. Somewhere. It wasn’t in sight, but Candle had a switch on him. That boy wouldn’t leave home without being heeled.

  Rusty looked across into Candle’s eyes. His own gray ones were level and wide. ‘You call me spic, craphead?’

  Candle’s square jaw moved idly, as though he were chewing gum. ‘Ain’t that what you are, man? Ain’t you a Puerto? You look lik
e a spic…’

  Rusty didn’t wait for the sentence to linger in the air. He lunged quickly, slashing upward with the chisel. The shank zipped lose to Candle, and the boy sucked in his belly, leaped backward. Then the switchblade was in his square, short-fingered hand.

  The blade was there, and it filled the room for Rusty. It was all live and flashing, everything that was, and the end to everything else. Rusty Santoro watched—as though what was about to happen was moving through heavy syrup, slow, terribly slow—and saw Candle’s hairy arm come up, the knife clutched tightly between white fingers. He heard the snick of the opening blade, even as the other’s thumb shoved the button.

  Then there was a green plastic shank, and a strip of light that was honed steel.

  The shop was washed by bands of lazy sunlight slanting through the barred windows; and in those bands of light, with sawdust motes rising and turning slowly, Rusty saw the blade of the switch gleam. Saw it turn in Candle’s hand, saw the way his flesh cleaved to it with more than need; this was part of Candle. Part of his thoughts and part of his life. His hand had been formed to end in a knife. Anything else would have been wrong, all wrong.

  He heard himself speaking. ‘Don’t you ever call me that again, man. Just don’t you call me no spic again!’

  Candle dropped his shoulders slightly. He automatically assumed the stance of the street-fighter. No spic bastard was going to buck him. There was more to this than just a wood chisel. Nobody, but nobody, leaves the gang.

  ‘Well, ain’t you gettin’ big these days! One minute you’re too good for the Cougars, and the next you’re particular who calls ya what.’ His green eyes narrowed, and the knife moved in aimless, circling movements, as though it were a snake, all too anxious to strike.

  ‘I don’t dig you, spic man…’

  And he whaled in.

  The knife came out and up and around in one movement that was all lightning and swiftness. Rusty slipped sidewise, lost his footing and went down, his shoulder striking hard against the base of the lathe. He saw Candle strut back and get ready to pounce. Then there was all that knife in his vision, and he knew he was going to get it at last. Not later, not sometime never, but here, gutted and cut, right here on the floor, and there was nothing he could do about it.

  Candle rose high, and his arm drew back, and then his arm was dragged back of his head by someone else. Rusty looked up and everything was out of focus, and his head hurt; but a man with dull red hair had Candle around the throat, had the knife-hand bent back double. Candle screamed high and loud, over the whine of the machines, and the man twisted the arm an inch more.

  The blade clattered to the floor.

  The man kicked it out of sight under a drill press, into sawdust debris. Then the man had Candle by the front of his dirty T-shirt, was leaning in close, and saying, ‘You get the hell out of here, or I’ll turn you over to the principal. I’ll tell him you lied to get me out of my shop while you attacked a pupil with a switch. With your record around here, Shaster, you couldn’t stand it. Now beat it!’ He shoved Candle Shaster away from him, sent him spinning into the door.

  Candle threw it open, and was gone in a moment.

  Rusty still found himself unable to focus properly, but Mr Pancoast was lifting him to his feet and yelling to the other boys, ‘Okay, let’s get back to work.’

  The rising clatter of shop work filled his universe, and then he was out in the basement hall, in the cool depths of the school. ‘Sit down,’ Pancoast directed him, pushing him gently toward the stairs.

  Rusty sat down heavily, felt the incessant throbbing in his shoulder, and for the first time realized he had struck his head also. It throbbed mercilessly.

  Pancoast slid down next to the boy. He was a short man, with hair just a few shades darker than orange. His face was tired, but there was something alive in his eyes that gave the lie to his features. He had been dealing with high-school boys so long that he had difficulty with adults, so geared to the adolescent mind were his thoughts.

  He pursed his lips, then asked, ‘What was that all about, Rusty? I thought after that last scrape you were going to stay away from the Cougars, from Candle and his bunch.’

  Rusty Santoro tapped gently at the bruise that ached on his head. He swung his body back and forth, as though he were caught in some tremor that would not release him. His entire body shook. The after-effects were setting in; they always did, just this way. He shook and quivered and wished he’d never heard of the Cougars.

  ‘I told ’em I was quitting. Yesterday. They don’t like that. They tell me nobody leaves the gang. I said I did.’

  Pancoast rubbed the short stubble on his small chin. He stared levelly at Rusty. ‘That’s all, Rusty?’

  ‘Isn’t that enough?’

  Pancoast replied, ‘Look, Rusty. When they caught you, along with those other Cougars, trying to break into that liquor store, I went out for you. Remember?’ He waited for an answer. Finally, Rusty nodded his remembrance.

  The teacher went on. ‘I had them release you into my custody, Rusty, and you’ve been good as your word ever since. At first I thought you were like all the rest of them—hard, no real guts, just a little killer inside—but you’ve shown me you’re a man. You’ve got real woodworking talent, Rusty. You could be a sculptor, or a designer, even an architect, if you wanted to be.’

  Rusty was impatient. Being praised like this, in the crowd he ran with, usually meant a slap was coming. ‘So?’

  ‘So, we’re both going to have to go over there, Rusty, and let them know for sure that you’re out of the gang, that you don’t want any part of it.’

  Rusty shook his head. ‘It ain’t that easy. You don’t understand, Mr Pancoast. It ain’t like being a member of Kiwanis or the P.T.A. It ain’t like nothin’ else in the world. When you’re in, you’re in. And the only thing that gets you out is if you land in the can, or you get a shank in your gut. That’s what I tried to tell ya when ya made me quit.’

  He stared at the teacher with mute appeal. He was boxed in, and he knew it. There was going to have to be a face-up soon, and he wasn’t sure he was man enough.

  Carl Pancoast leaned closer to the boy, put an arm on his knee, tried to speak to him so the words went deeper than the ears. So they went right down to the core. He had to make it with this kid. There had been too many others who had come by him, like lights in the night, and he had never reached out to take that light in his hands, to stop it from rushing down that road to destruction. He had tried with Rusty Santoro—a good boy, a damned good boy—and he wasn’t going to fail now.

  ‘Look, Rusty. Let me tell you something. You can go on doing what the Cougars do, all your life, and wind up the way Tony Green did. You knew Tony. You remember what happened to him?’

  Pancoast could see the memory in Rusty’s eyes. He could see the vision of Tony Green, who had been top trackman at Pulaski, laid out on a slab, with a D.O.A. tag around his big toe. A zip gun .22 slug in his head. Dead in a rumble.

  ‘Remember why he got killed, Rusty?’

  Pancoast was pushing thoughts tightly, forcing them to the fore, making Rusty analyze his past. It wasn’t a pleasant past.

  Drenched in violence. Product of filth and slum and bigotry. Mothered by fear. Fathered by the terror of nonconformity and the fate that waited for those who did not conform. Rusty remembered. His stomach tightened, and his seventeen-year-old brain spun, but he remembered.

  Tony Green, tall and slim and dead. Stretched out on a slab, because someone had danced with his steady girl at a club drag. Nothing more important. Just that.

  ‘I’m through, Mr Pancoast. You don’t have to worry about that. I’m through, but man, it’s gonna be rough all the way.’

  Carl Pancoast clapped the boy on the back. It would be tough all right, tough as banana skins, but that was the way it had to be. Not only for himself—and God knows he had a stake in this boy; his own redemption for the sins of failure he had committed with other boys—but for
Rusty. Because Rusty had to live out there in that stinking city. He had to live and learn and sweat beside those kids.

  But, Carl Pancoast swore inside himself, Rusty Santoro was going to come out of it whole. Come out of it with his guts and his mind intact. For Rusty, and for himself.

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  Rusty bit his lip, shrugged. ‘Don’t know, man. But I got to do something. They ain’t gonna give me much longer. Maybe I’ll go over there tonight, club night. Maybe I’ll go over and have a talk with some of the kids.’

  Pancoast’s forehead assumed V-lines of worry. ‘Want me to go along? Most of the Cougars know me.’

  Rusty sloughed away his offer.

  ‘No go. They know you, but you’re still out of it, man. Way out. You’re boss-type, and they don’t dig that even a little. I come walking in with you, and I’m dead from the start…No, I can handle it.’

  He stood up unsteadily, clung to the banister for a minute. It rocked under his weight.

  ‘Damned school,’ he mumbled, slamming the banister, ‘gonna fall apart under ya.’

  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?