The Deadly Streets

by Harlan Ellison

  Then Carlos was told to step forward.

  “Your name is Carlos Arando?”

  No answer.

  “I asked you what your name was, boy.”

  No answer.

  “Can you hear me, Arando? Speak up!”

  Still no answer, and handsome Carlos lifted his head to stare directly into the lights. His mouth was a fine, tight, visibly black line, closed.

  “Look me in the eye, boy! I’m speaking to you.”

  No answer, and in disgust the officer said, “Step back. We’ll see you later.”

  Then it was Tommy’s turn.

  “Step up there, kid.”

  The boy stepped forward. Not arrogantly, not hesitantly, not comically. He merely stepped forward and stood, hands in pockets, calmly looking out at the ebony curtain between the microphone and himself.

  “Your name’s Thomas Kilpatrick?”

  “That’s it.”

  “We have it here that you stabbed a boy named Daniel Johnson, during the rumble tonight with the Wild Gentlemen. That right?”

  Before Tommy Kilpatrick could answer, even before the words could be formed, a deeper voice came out of the darkness behind the speaker at the microphone. It cut the boy off before he could admit his crime.

  “I want to talk to that boy, Sergeant. Send him into my office.”

  The Sergeant’s tones were tentative, inquiring, but he answered, “Yes, sir. Right away, Captain.”

  A face materialized at the foot of the stage, just inside the ball of light where Tommy stood. “Okay, kid, down off there…you got an appointment.”

  Tommy let the edge of a grin slide onto his lips. Stinkin’ cops. He knew how they operated, he knew he had figured it right the first time. His old man wasn’t going to let his son stand up there and get booked for assault with intent to kill. Let the rest of the BackBlasters go sit on their cans in the pokey, get booked for life. He was going to walk away from this free!

  “I’m coming…Sir,” he replied, starting toward the stairs that led down from the platform, the grin flickering wider.

  The officer with the bad breath brought Tommy into the office, and closed the door, staying outside.

  The boy stared at the big man behind the desk for a moment, then grinned. “Hi, dad.” The boy walked to the chair across from the desk, and slumped into it.

  He lifted one leg and threw it laconically over the arm of the chair. He stared for a moment at the thin dossier file in front of the man, and knew it was his own. He let his eyes roam about the office, taking in the framed certificates of graduation from the police academy, the citations, the letters of commendation. “Quite the office ya got here, dad. This’s the first time I been in it. How come ya never brought me here before?”

  Then he looked at his father.

  Big, with a square jaw, and crew-cut light brown hair. Blue eyes much like his son’s. Eyes that snapped a bit at a person’s nerves. A nose that half-skewed across his blocky face. The face of an ex-pug. The face of a hard man who knew when to be hard.

  “I guess you wanted to see me.” Tommy said. “I’d like to make it fast, Dad, ’cause there’s a couple good shows on tv tonight, and I can make ’em if I get home real fast.”

  His tone was condescending, violently rude.

  The Captain’s face hardened even more. His jaw was a curved line of rigidity, and his mouth moved faintly, as though he were trying to drown a word or an emotion, a feeling or a decision.

  “Tommy…” he murmured, as though the word were a speech of great meaning in itself. The boy cocked an eyebrow humorously, inquisitively.

  “Did you kill that boy?”

  “What do you think?” He looked away, at the door that separated him from freedom and the television. He would be going out that door in a little while.

  “Look me in the eye, boy!” Tommy recognized that brutal edge to his father’s tone. The tone he had employed often at home. And he knew how the microphone cop could have picked up his father’s phrase; it was one of the Captain’s favorites. Even at home he never let anyone forget who was on top, who was the Man, who was in charge.

  “Dum da dum-dum…” The boy grinned.

  The Captain’s hand on the desk clenched into a fist, till the knuckles whitened out. “I’ve told you a million times not to get snotty with me. I’m your father, and I’ll crack open your foul little mouth if you don’t answer straight, boy!”

  “No you won’t. You won’t touch me and I know it. You don’t want those cops out there to know your son runs with a gang of juvies. You got your rep-yoo-tayshun to watch out for…”

  The man leaned across and flat-handed the blond boy with a violence that snapped the boy’s head around. He turned back, and the hatred blazed up like an inferno in his blue eyes. “You done that before. You can do better, can’cha?”

  “Why did you stab that boy?”

  “Because he got in my way. I’ll slice anybody gets in my way. You can remember that…dad.” He spat the final word as though it were poison.

  The older man’s face softened momentarily. His eyes gathered a luster of pleading. “You don’t have to run the streets.”

  “Why not? Anything better for me to do?”

  “You’ve got a good home. Tommy. God knows I’ve had a difficult time bringing you up since your mother died, but I’ve done my best, tried—”

  The boy laughed roughly. “Some home. Three rooms and no old lady.”

  “What’s that got to do with it? Lots of kids have no mother. And you know I’ve been saving all our money for that farm when I’m on pension. That’s why we haven’t got a bigger place, but there are just the two of us—”

  “That goddamn farm. That’s your idea. Always your ideas, all the time what you want when you’re on pension. Slops to that!”

  “That’s got nothing to do with it. What’s the matter with you? Are you really rotten inside the way you’re making me think you are? What’s wrong with you?”

  “I got a bastard for an old man, that’s all’s wrong with me.”

  He stared straight at the Captain, as though daring him to make an issue of it, to slap him again, to ask more questions. The arrogance was an open thing now, the swagger of the streets in his tones. The Captain watched him, shook his head sadly, put a hand rubbingly across his eyes.

  Softly. “That bad?”

  “Yeah, that fucking bad. I can’t stomach you, with your lousy holier-than-anybody way, and you got no guts when you need guts!”

  “I think you hate everybody, Tommy.”

  “Pretty close.”

  “And I think I’ve helped you get that way.”

  The boy laughed raucously, confirming the statement.

  “What will you do if you get out of here?”

  “Go back and slice some more of those black bastards. And then some spic bastards, and then some white bastards! And maybe even someday you…Dad.”

  The Captain let the hand slide from his eyes. His face hardened. He pressed the intercom button on his desk.

  A nasal voice came through the box. “Yes, sir?”

  “Come on in here, Stenson.”

  The boy shifted in the chair. His leg slapped down on the floor abruptly. What was this? This wasn’t in the calculations. What was his old man pulling? He knew the old man was hard when he should have been soft, and soft when he should have been tough, but Tommy hadn’t figured this. What was he going to do? Provide an honor guard home to make certain he didn’t get into any mischief tonight? Well, he didn’t have to worry about that. Tonight was dead…but there was always tomorrow. And all the tomorrows that would make up his life.

  The Captain stared at his son, and the boy’s eyes grew wide, he licked his lips. He looked as though anticipation was not the proper attitude now. He looked as though he didn’t quite know what was going to happen, but he suspected.

  The door opened, and the officer with bad breath came into the room He stood waiting.

  “Something I c
an do. Captain Kilpatrick?”

  “Take this boy back to the desk.” he said shortly.

  His voice was very quiet, and he stared down at the dossier.

  The line of his jaw was rigid, yet his cheeks contracted and expanded, as though his tongue were working within his mouth.

  He said, “Stenson, this is my son. I want him treated exactly as those other boys were treated. Do you understand?

  The officer nodded, started to take Tommy by the arm. The boy leaped up. “Look at me, dad. Look at me, for Chrissakes! I’m your only kid.”

  The older man looked up, and the boy’s glance fell. “Look me in the eye, boy!” he said, as cold and flat as an artic wasteland. Tommy stared at the cold, hard blue eyes, and the Captain said, “I don’t know what’s right and what’s wrong with you. I don’t know if I’m fulfilling my obligation, or righting the wrong I did to you and to all the people you’ve harmed, or whether I’m letting you down again…I don’t know. But this is the only way I can do it.”

  He turned his eyes back to the dossier.

  The boy’s voice came out slowly, disbelievingly.

  “You’re kiddin’. Tell him you’re kiddin”! You ain’t gonna do it to me?”

  “Take him away, Stenson.”

  The officer grasped the boy by his upper arms, started to drag him from the room. The boy struggled, turned, inched back toward the desk, spat violently on the Captain’s desk.

  The officer dragged the boy toward the door, stopped and looked back at the Captain, holding tightly to the struggling boy. “Should I return him to the line-up, Captain?”

  The ex-pug face sank into a soft expression of complete, final, utter defeat. “Don’t bother with that,” he said.

  He didn’t raise his bleak eyes from the dossier.

  The defeat in his voice hung like smoke in the air.

  “Book him,” he said.

  THE DEAD SHOT

  My old man brought me back a rifle from Germany.

  Now he’s dead. He got his in a bar about three years ago, and they smashed open his skull with a chair leg. But I don’t miss him, honest.

  I got the gun.

  I don’t keep that gun on the shelf, no sir! I take it out, like right now. I got that barrel sawed-off so it’ll fit in my pants leg. I walk down the street with it in my pants, the butt covered up by my jacket. I make like I got a limp so they can’t tell I got the rifle in there, and then I have myself some real fun, man!

  I’m a dead shot.

  I can knock the window out of an apartment “house at a block and a half’s distance. I’m good, I am, and not brag-gin” neither. Here, let me show you.

  Down the block there. See that man? He’s nothin’ but a janitor. See him carryin’ out that garbage, and putting it in front of the building. Now watch what I can do to him. He thinks he’s so safe; so damned smug and safe. Like Life’s going to be miserable to everybody else, but pass him by.

  I’ll show him what misery is.

  Takin’ careful aim is the most important part. I sight down through the back and front eye-notches, and then I squeeze the trigger ever so slow and careful. Pow!

  The first shot hits right through the garbage can he’s carryin’ on his shoulder.

  He feels the bam of it and it knocks the garbage can off his stringy shoulder. He’s staring at all the garbage all over the sidewalk and the street. He knows he’s gotta go and get the broom and clean it up, or the cops’ll haul him in.

  He’s starting back toward the building. Now watch this!

  I snap off a quickie, and it goes Pow! right through the glass pane of the door, right in front of his big, red-veined nose.

  He’s jumping back, and looking around. He can’t spot me over here in this doorway, and I snap another one his way. He jumps again, and now I can see the crazy scare in his face. His old mustache is jumping, and he’s got his skinny hands over his heart. He looks like he’s gonna fall on his pan, any second.

  But I can’t keep him dancin’ all day. The cops might charge along here any minute. I’ve got to stop this screwy fooling around. I’ve got important business tonight.

  Pow!

  It catches him in the right hip, and throws him halfway across the sidewalk. He takes a half-step and falls flat on his ugly old face in the gutter.

  He’s got his arm all fouled up in that dirty vest, and he’s screaming like he was hung with a harpoon.

  Them old men are always good for a laugh.

  See, I’m in this empty lot now, where they’re buildin’ a playground. I’m behind a stack of bricks, and it’s ever so dark in the streets. Not complete dark yet “cause they haven’t even turned on the street lamps, but dark just the same. I don’t know why everything always seems dark to me. You think there’s something wrong with my eyes?

  No, there couldn’t be. I can see anything. I can see to knock the window out of an apartment with one shot, or shoot the hat off a woman, or pick off a banana from a stem in a grocery window.

  The Puerto Ricans call their groceries bodegas, and I like to put the shot right through the “O”, ’cause they usually got green bananas hanging up there behind the “O”. That’s fun. But what I got on tonight is even more fun.

  There’s an apartment house ’cross the street, and it’s real hot. It’s a tenement, and this is summer, and all the old women put pillows on the window sills, and stare out at everybody walkin’ by. Sometimes they spit down onto the sidewalk just for kicks, or they dump empty beer cans out the windows.

  I hate them.

  I hate the way they get everything dirty and the noise those cans make. Sometimes when I’m sleepin’ late at night, one of those stinkin’ bitch women’ll toss a beer can out, and it’ll clatter like all hell, and wake me!

  I hate them.

  I hate the way they stare at everybody, and make dirty cracks about the way they dress. There was an old bitch, this one I mean, and she was talkin’ to a neighbor woman two floors down, the other night when I walked by with Jackie—that was before she and me broke up, damn her!—and they made cracks about the way I looked.

  Screamin” like all hell—down two floors!

  Everybody in the world must of heard ’em. I hate ’em.

  But I was smart. I didn’t yell at them then. I just checked where we was, and saw where they lived and what they looked like, and knew I’d come back tonight. I waited till now. I see ’em. I see the two old women. Look up there. Look at them!

  I’d like to kill those bitches. They don’t care for nobody. They ain’t got no compassion, that’s what they ain’t got!

  Their old men come home at night and they got cold cuts and boiled potatoes for ’em, and not even a decent word. They take the paper away from the old men, and they plomp their fat cans on the window ledges and read and talk and watch the folks going by underneath!

  The one on the fifth floor, she got a real dough-kisser, like a pudding with raisins for eyes. She got a mouth that flaps, flaps, flaps alla time. I’m gonna make sure she don’t say no more what she said the other night.

  And that other biddy. She looks like she ain’t got twenty pounds on her—real wire, that one. So thin you’d think the breeze would whip her off her pillow and toss her out on the sidewalk. No knockers on her, and a miserable old dress she must of had since she was nine years old.

  I remember once when I worked on a farm for a summer, they had grain bags that had patterns on ’em, and the girls used to take ’em and make dresses outta them. That’s what this dress looks like. Real cheap crap.

  She got a nose like a baling-hook, and wrinkles all the hell over her.

  Them two got nothing to do but sit in their windows and talk about people going by. Like me.

  “That kid there dresses like he was a bum,” the fat one said.

  “Yeah, and who’s the little tramp he’s walkin’ with? I don’t know her from this neighborhood,” the thin one had screamed back.

  “You’d think them goddam foreigners would s
tay in their own blocks!” the fat one had answered.

  What did they think? No one could hear them? The lousy old pots!

  Jackie had looked up, and I’d seen the street lights reflect crazy in her blue eyes. She didn’t say nothin’ but I saw her mouth go white around the edges and I knew she wanted to kill them two old biddies.

  So I’ll do it for you, Jackie, even though we’re broke up.

  I got my rifle up against my shoulder, and I’m sightin’ careful. I’m hunkered down behind them bricks so they can’t tell where the shots come from. I got to get them both, and they ain’t gonna have a chance to get away.

  The fat one’s leanin’ out a little, leanin’ on her pig-pudgy arms so the fat on her forearms is all squeezed down. Her face hangs like it was a ham on a hook and she’s screamin’ to the skinny bitch. I got to take her carefully.

  I’m glad I used a match to black down the sights. That way I can aim right into the light behind her. She lives in a crummy two-roomer, and I see her big fat breasts and her big fat belly, right in the line of my sights. Now I’m steadying the rifle careful on my knee, and bending my head low.

  Now I’m squeezin’ careful, slow…careful…slowww…

  Pow!

  Man! Looka the way she caught it. Right in the kisser, on the right cheek. Blew half her head away. She looks like somebody painted her with fish guts. Now she’s screamin’ and hangin’ onto the pulpy side of her kisser. And—Oh! Jeezus! There she goes!

  She’s slippin’ across the sill, and the pillow falls like a dirty newspaper out from under her and falls into the street.

  She’s tryin’ to hang on, and cryin’ and bleedin’. Die, damn you——fat stinkin’ lousy gossip! Die! Now…there…she…goes!

  Over and over, all that fat,, all the way down and bango, right into the sidewalk with a real squish, and she spattered and sprayed blood all over the Buick at the curb.

  The thin one’s lookin’, just lookin’. She don’t know what’s comin’ off, but I’m gonna show her too and I got the rifle over the bricks and now I’m linin’ her up in the sights like she was the onny thing in the world, that thin sonofabitchin’ gossiping pot!