by Herman Wouk
The springtime will not be denied its annual entrance, even in Herbie's home town of stone. Beneath the buildings, beneath the streets, beneath the whole hard plating, there is quick earth yet, showing green at every chink, whether it be a little corner park, a vacant lot, or just a crack between cobblestones. Boys snuff the air and go wandering until they find a green place where they can inhale the pleasantness. The fit of nostalgia for the land under the stone does not last long, nor do the boys really understand what it is. Soon they resume their sports in the familiar paths of the angular canyons in which they live. While it lasts, this springtime mood causes great waste of child hours, lowers school grades, and brings on scoldings and blows. For the boys it is little more than an inconvenient costly frenzy.
Herbie and Cliff found the vacant lots along Homer Avenue too commonplace to still the restlessness of the first warm Sunday in May. They had gone down the long hill of Westchester Avenue past Byron, past Shakespeare, past Tennyson Avenues, to the creek which they avoided all year round, partly in obedience to the sternest sort of orders from their parents, but more because of the legend that the river bank was the haunt of a pack of boyish cutthroats known as the “creek gang.” Many bloody tales were told about this band. They all carried knives. The bigger boys carried guns. They captured boys and girls, robbed them, and performed nameless outrages upon them. And they killed each other, when there was nothing more profitable to do. Nobody of Herbie's acquaintance had ever seen a genuine gang menber, but this did not prevent all the children on Homer Avenue from scurrying indoors and peeping out through windows whenever the cry “Creek gang! Creek gang!” startled the neighborhood. The cause of the alarm generally proved to be an exceptionally shabby, dirty boy from another avenue, ambling along the deserted sidewalks in puzzlement.
The thought that they might encounter these desperadoes lent an edge of pleasure to the excursion of Herbie and his cousin, for today they were in a mood for braving the unknown. To reach the bank of the stream they had to cross railroad tracks, another tremendous taboo. They slid carefully down a gravel embankment and picked their way across the cinder bed on which the tracks rested. Of course they avoided the rails, which were supposed to have a power of suction that could hold unwary treaders fast until the next train destroyed them, and they leaped anxiously over the death-dealing third rail, along which they both averred they could hear the hum of the fatal electric current. These hazards passed at last, the boys reached the side of the creek and lolled on the fresh grass and spiky weeds that covered the narrow strip of wasteland between the railroad bed and the river mud. The sun was high; the ground was warm; the smell of the mud and slime of the inlet at low tide was pungent and interesting. The boys were alone in a new place, lying on the ground in Sunday clothes, successfully defiant of their parents' orders and their own fears. Perhaps they could have been made happier at this moment by the arrival of the Messiah. More likely they would have regarded it as an unnecessary interruption.
Herbie's lecture on the mechanics of spring, delivered as both boys lay on their backs with hands clasped under their heads, had reached a point beyond which Cliff's earthbound imagination would not budge.
“Look,” said Herbie in exasperation. “Let's start from the beginning again. What shape is the earth?”
“Round.”
“Does the sun go around it?”
“No, it goes around the sun.”
“O.K. You do know that much. Now you only gotta realize one thing more. The earth slants.”
“That's what I don't understand.”
Cliff's brows were knitted. He was a meek-appearing but sturdy boy, with light brown hair and exceptionally long arms and legs. He was two classes behind Herbie in school, though they were the same age, and he regarded his bright cousin with deference and affection.
“What's so hard about it? Watch.” Herbie picked up a stick and held it vertically. “It slants.” He tilted the stick. “Like that. It slants.”
“Now, hold on, Herbie. The earth ain't no stick. It's a ball.” Cliff pulled a rubber ball out of his pocket. “See this? I'm holdin' it straight up 'n' down.”
“Yeah, I see it. So what?”
“Now I slant it.” He tilted the ball. “Does it look any different? You know it don't. How the hell can you know when a round ball slants?”
Herbie was silenced for a moment. The question had never occurred to him during Mrs. Gorkin's glib explanation of spring. But after puzzling over it, he said, “Oh, now I get it. Look, there's a North Pole an' a South Pole, ain't there?”
“Yeah.”
“All right. The North Pole points in toward the sun. That's how we know the earth slants.”
Cliff nodded slowly. “Now you're talkin'. Well, but how does that make spring?”
“Easy. If the north part of the world is pointed toward the sun, that makes it warmer, don't it?”
“Sure.”
“Well, there you are.”
“Yeah. But that means it oughta be spring or summer all year round. Why ain't it?”
This question hadn't occurred to Herbie, either. But instead of admitting that his grasp of the subject was imperfect, he said, “What's so hard about that? After a while the earth just flips over 'n' slants the other way.”
“Now, wait. Are you tryin' to tell me that the earth keeps goin' flip-flop, flip-flop around the sun every year?” Cliff turned the ball back and forth in his hand to illustrate.
“I ain't tryin' to tell it to you. That's what the books say.”
“Well, those books are crazy, then. Herbie, you don't believe that, either. The earth wobblin' around the sun like a drunken bum. It don't make sense.”
“You got it all wrong,” mourned Herbie, standing up reluctantly. “This,” he said, pointing to a rough gray rock imbedded in the mud, “is the sun. And this”—he placed near it a stone half as big—“is the earth.” (Pedagogues always falsify proportions; it makes their job easier.) “Now the earth starts moving—” But the rest of the discourse was not to be spoken. “Cliff!” said Herbie with a violent change in tone. “The creek gang!”
Cliff jumped up, and looking in the direction of Herbie's terrified stare, he saw two small, swarthy, ragged boys with bottles in their hands, about fifty yards down the river, walking toward them.
“Let's run,” said Herbie.
“What for?” said Cliff. He was a head taller than Herbie, more agile of body and rather less inflammable of mind. “They're smaller than we are.”
“Are you crazy?” said Herbert. “They've got knives. Come on!”
He turned toward the railroad tracks. At this moment, unluckily, a long freight train appeared, the engine chugging heavily as it dragged its chain of freight cars of different shapes and hues out of the mouth of the far-off river tunnel. To cross the path of an oncoming train was beyond the daring of both boys. To flee along the river bed was useless; a short way from them it was blocked by the concrete base of a bridge. Caught between sure destruction and probable destruction they stood at bay, their holiday mood quenched, and awaited their fate.
The two small terrorists came within a yard of them, stopped, and inspected them insolently with keen brown eyes. Then they exchanged guttural remarks in a strange tongue. They moved closer slowly until the unhappy cousins could have reached out and touched them. The bottles they carried were full of greenish water in which many tiny fishes were darting. The strangers' knee breeches were patched, their stockings were torn, their sweaters had huge irregular holes, and from the shoe of one of them a toe poked out. To boys brought up in the politeness of Homer Avenue and Public School 50 they were as picturesque as pirates—and more dreadful, because they obviously regarded boys as worthy antagonists.
Finally Herbert, unable to endure the tension of the scrutiny, said, “What you guys got in them there bottles?”—mutilating grammar as much as possible to suggest manliness, but making the mistake of swallowing loudly in the middle of the word “bottles.” The qu
avering of his voice was full of information to the two strangers, who exchanged a swift glance.
“Never mind that,” one of them snarled. “Gimme a nickel.”
“Ain't got no nickel,” faltered Herbie.
“All I find I keep?”
Herbie did not reply.
“All I find I keep?” repeated the enemy, with a gesture at Herbie's jacket pocket. The boy winced; it was the pocket containing the key to heaven, fifteen cents for the movies.
“I got a hundred dollars,” said Cliff suddenly. “Let's see one o' you guys search me.”
Herbert grew weak at this insane effrontery of his cousin. He looked for the glitter of long knives.
“Oh,” sneered the talking one, turning on Cliff. “A fresh guy.”
“That's right,” said Cliff, and stepped up to him so that they were toe to toe. The well-dressed boy was several inches taller; even Herbert was almost as large as the bigger of the two strangers. Instinct, undistracted by a hot imagination, had risen to tell Cliff that the advantage was on his side so long as fear did not weigh in the balance. “How about searching me?”
“Yeah, or me?” said Herbert, plucking up heart the instant he saw the situation shifting. He faced the smaller foe.
There was a silent opposing of glares between the paired-off boys for several seconds.
The smaller bandit broke the spell, and informed Herbie, “I can fight you.”
“You can not,” said Herbie. He jerked his thumb toward Cliff. “Anyway, he can fight him.”
“Who can fight who?” said the large opponent fiercely, turning on Herbie.
“My cousin can fight you—I bet,” said Herbie, with slightly less assurance.
“I can fight you,” barked back the big creek gangman.
“Never said you couldn't.”
“He can fight you.” (Pointing to his small henchman.)
“Well, he can fight you.” (Pointing to his tall cousin.) Cliff said nothing.
“I can fight both of you,” said the leading enemy, “with both hands tied behind me.”
“O.K.,” said Herbie, “let us tie your hands, then.”
“Pretty fresh, both of them, ain't they?” said the leader to his minion.
“I can fight him,” said the small one doggedly, pointing at Herbie.
The fat boy, who was sure this was quite true, said, “You guys better not start anything. My cousin is the champion boxer of P.S. 45. He knows all the tricks.”
“A regular Jack Dempsey, huh?” sneered bandit number one. But he sized up Cliff with a flicker of caution in his eyes.
“I'm getting tired of this blab,” said Cliff. He poked the leader lightly on the shoulder with two fingers. “If you can fight me, start fighting.”
The leader glared, and pouted, and breathed heavily, and dusted off the place that had been touched (not that it had been rendered any dirtier) with a clenched fist. But no knives flashed, and no blows ensued.
“I can fight him,” said the smaller one again, indicating Herbie to the two big boys. “Please, I can fight him.”
“And me, too?” said Cliff.
The small gangster looked at his chief questioningly. The leader spoke a few words in the strange tongue again. Then he glanced at Herbie with contempt and said, “Just let us catch you alone sometime. Come on,” he added to his companion. “Let's let the sissies go.”
“You still ain't told us what you got in the bottles,” called Cliff to the retreating backs.
“If you weren't such a dumb mama's boy,” shouted back the outlaw, “you'd know they were killies.”
“Did you catch 'em out of the river?”
“Nah, we found 'em in a nest up a tree,” came the jeering answer, and the two creek gangsters climbed up to the railroad track, where the freight train had finally gone by, and disappeared from view.
These menacing manikins were, in fact, children of one of the poor foreign families who lived then in wood shacks near the shore of the East River, kept goats, coaxed vegetables out of the neglected Bronx dirt, and maintained an obstinate separateness from the subway-and-steamheat world during the first generation of their immigration. In time these lads were destined to be sucked into respectability, but meanwhile they lived in a free way rare among city boys. Inveterate truants, they knew a great deal about plants, fishes, and animals without benefit of Boy Scout training, and they haunted the river banks. Such was the basis of the “creek gang” legend, and it had this much truth in it, that several times a year unwary boys were deprived of their pocket money and pummeled if they fell in with these outcasts. But there was no gang, no knives, no guns, no horrid orgies, no killings. Romance had eked out fact, as it usually does in satisfactory and long-lived legends. However, none of this reassuring background being available to Herbie, he stood quaking in the aftermath of strain, hardly able to believe yet that he was safe.
The idyl by the river was gloomed. Aware of the gratitude he owed his cousin, but too shamed by his own show of fear to express it, Herbie passed the lead to him and said, “Where'll we go now, Cliff?” But the stalwart boy, his hour over, was content to follow the livelier ideas of Herbie, and said as much. So do generals, skilled in the art of violence, take the command of a nation in war and give it up when peace comes. Herbie looked up and down the river bank, and briefly considered an excursion toward the pebbly shore of the wide East River. But he decided it was too far. It then occurred to him that they might fish for killies, in the manner he had heard about but never tried, with a handkerchief. But they had no bottles, and the prospect of going home with a sopping handkerchief and a few dead little fish seemed less charming than it might have, an hour sooner. In short, he found the spring hunger waning.
“We'll go to the Place,” he said, turning and running up to the railroad tracks.
Just on the border where grass met cinders he noticed the round, long, slender little stalks of a plant the boys called “wild onions,” and he and Cliff pulled up and chewed several of the bitter little white root bulbs, vowing that they were delicious, and quickly spat them out and went their way. This was as close as they came to nature in the day's sortie.
On the other side of the stream there was a broad garbage dump, established when the growing city had been thirty years younger and the wise men had not imagined that the inhabitants could spread out so far. The flames from the dumps and the red sky-glow over them, contending with the sunset, the moon, and the stars for attention, had been a familiar sight in the Bronx for many years, but in Herbie's time the fires had ceased after bitter petitions from the new settlers in these remote stretches of the borough, and the dumps were being replaced by coal and sand piles. Jacob Bookbinder had built the Bronx River Ice Company plant on a tract of land close to the odorous heaps, and therefore as depressed in value, almost, as an acre of Sahara desert. The business had started with little money, most of it borrowed, and elegance of site had been a last consideration.
The “Place” was an oblong shell of concrete one story high, a city block long, and half as wide. Herbie had often heard his father speak of the plant as a “ninety tonner,” and in his infancy had taken the phrase to mean “ninety thunders,” an apt nickname for the clanking, pounding inferno it had seemed to him. It was traditional in his family that, on first being brought into the Place at the age of four, to be shown the huge brine tank, the ice cans, the dynamo, and the rising and falling pistons of the compressors, Herbert had gone at once into a fit of screaming; and his father, who was not too far from his European boyhood to believe in omens, had always said sadly thereafter that his son would not inherit his managerial shoes. Herbert had since come to know that “ninety tonner” described the capacity of the plant for a single day's production of ice, also that his father's goal in the world was to build and own a two-hundred tonner. He had learned, too, to control his fear of the terrible machines, and even to find a sort of wild thrill in watching them.
“We'll have to climb through a window,” h
e said, as the boys approached the long wall of the Place which faced the river. “There's nobody there on Sundays except the engineer.”
Because of the menace of the poisonous ammonia gas used in refrigeration, one section of one of the broad windows of the Place was always left open, night and day. It was through this small vent, high on one side of the window, that Herbie painfully wriggled with a boost and a push from Cliff, who followed speedily, jumping up and sliding his slender waist through the hole like an acrobat. The boys found themselves in the large machinery-filled space known as the tank room. They could see the engineer manipulating the traveling crane over the brine tank in the far corner. Then, greatly to Herbie's surprise, the boys heard echoing through the large hollow building angry voices which came from the office at the other end of the plant. The loudest and angriest voice was that of Herbie's father.
“You have no right to sell!” he was shouting. “No right to sell!”
The Safe
Jacob Bookbinder was not, in the popular phrase, a man to be trifled with. A quick estimate showed Herbie that sneaking into the Place through a window came under the head of trifling. His first impulse was to climb out again with no delay, but curiosity was stronger. He crouched, motioned to Cliff to follow him, and stole along the concrete wall, behind the ammonia tanks, to the wooden partition which separated the office from the machinery space. The partition had a glassless window in it, with a sill about as high as Herbie's eyes.
