“Because I don’t like punks who try to behave like wheels, that’s why. I mean, this guy is nothing,” Frankie said. “A real nowhere. But he’s always trying to make a name for himself. He’s got this idea, you know, that the big-time racketeers are watching him. He makes a name in a street club, and he thinks he’s going to control the waterfront next week. He’s got holes in his head. I mean, man, this bopping is sheeeeeet, you know. I mean, real sheeeeet, man. But he keeps trying to get a rep. So now he’s got one. Now he’s got a rep going to take him straight to the electric chair. You want to know something?”
“What’s that?”
“We had a bop scheduled for the night Ralphie was killed. The Birds knew all about it. Gargantua met with their warlord, this cat called Diablo, a Spanish name, how do you like that? So it was all set up. The project on a Hun’ Twenty-fifth. At ten o’clock. The Birds knew this. And if the Birds knew it, then Reardon knew it, too. He makes it his business to know everything that happens on that club. So what happens? Early in the night, he rounds up this idiot Aposto, and this kid Di Pace who I never heard of, and he stages his own private raid into our turf. Man, don’t you read it?”
“He was looking for personal glory?”
“Sure, what else? He’s trying to make a rep for himself. Naturally, he didn’t expect the cops to get him. Nobody expects to get busted. He figured he’d come in here and raise a little hell, and then go back to the Birds and get elected president or something. I’ll bet you a hundred dollars that was just how it happened. Reardon conned those two shmoes into coming in here. Hey, you ain’t touched your beer.”
Hank picked up his glass and drank from it.
“Good, ain’t it?”
“Yes, very good,” Hank said. “You talk as if you know Reardon very well.”
“I once give him a hole on the side of his head, I bet he’s still got the scar,” Frankie said.
“When was this?”
“In a bop. I hit him and he went down, so I kicked him in the head. I was wearing combat boots, I mean anybody goes bopping without combat boots is out of his mind. So I musta split his head wide open.”
“Why’d you kick him?”
“Because he was down, and I didn’t want him to get up again.”
“Do you kick anyone who’s down?”
“Anybody.”
“Why?”
“Because I know that if they get me down, they’re gonna kick me. You ever been stomped, mister?”
“No.”
“Well, it ain’t so much fun. Unless maybe you like getting stepped on all over. Me, I don’t like it. So I do it to the other guy first. This way, when he’s down, he stays down, and he can’t hurt me. Reardon hit me with a ball bat once, you know that? He almost broke my leg, that bastard. Man, I got a thing for him, believe me. If you don’t kill that son of a bitch, I’m gonna do the job for you some day.”
“And get busted?” Hank asked.
“Not me. Besides, if I got busted it wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Then I could stop all this gang bopping. Maybe getting busted is the only way out. Or else getting drafted in the Army. ’Cause, man, this bopping is strictly sheeeeeeet.”
“Then why do you do it?”
“You got to live, don’t you? You got to protect your rights.”
“Which rights?”
“Your turf, man, your territory. Otherwise they be coming in here all the time — like they done with Ralphie. You got to stop them, don’t you? You can’t let them step all over you.”
“They seem to feel that you’re the intruders,” Hank said.
“Yeah, big intruders,” Frankie said. “All we try to do is get along, so all we get is trouble. With guys like Reardon around, you can’t even blow your nose. He’s a real troublemaker, that bastard. All the time. Right from when he first joined the Birds. You remember that time at the pool, Gargantua?”
“Yeah, I remember that time, all right. They almost drowned Alfie.”
“When was this?”
“Last summer,” Gargantua said. “There’s a pool on First Avenue. The Jefferson Pool. It’s open in the summertime, you know? It’s near the school — only the school’s on Pleasant Avenue. This is on First, around a Hun’ Thirteenth. So we used to go over there sometimes. It gets pretty hot around here in the summer, you know.”
“Yeah, but we don’t go there no more,” Frankie said. “They made sure of that. We go over there, it’s like taking our lives in our hands. Even if we didn’t have to pass through their turf to get there. That pool is like a battleground. We step in there, man, there’s fireworks. Like that day last summer.”
“Di Pace was there, you know that?” Gargantua said to Frankie. “I remember that was the first time I seen him. He just moved in the neighborhood that winter, I think. Yeah, he was with Reardon that day.”
“I don’t remember him,” Frankie said. “Aposto was there, I know, because I remember he threw the first punch. But I don’t think I ever seen this Di Pace kid. It don’t matter, anyway, because it was Reardon started it all. He was the one.”
“What happened?” Hank asked.
“Well, it was a real hot day,” Frankie said. “Hotter even than today. We were hanging around doing nothing and somebody said let’s go over to the pool. So we got our trunks and towels, and we grabbed a cab to take us—”
“You took a taxi?”
“Sure, there was six guys, so what did it cost us, a dime each or something? Including the tip? We hopped in the cab and went right to the pool. Then we changed in the locker room and went outside. All we had on our minds was getting in that water...”
(The temperature on this August day is going to break all records previously set for the city of New York. It is now noon, with the sun at its apex directly overhead, and the thermometer on the brick wall of the bathhouse reads 100.6. As the Puerto Rican boys emerge from the locker room to the pool area, they are assailed by the hum of voices which seems to hover over all bathing places, indistinct, a rumble like the ocean itself, interspersed with the clearer sounds of water splashing, laughter, the reverberating deep click of the diving board.
The pool, a glistening blue rectangle, ripples with reflected sunlight. It is crowded on this Saturday, but then it is usually crowded on weekends. Most of the people in the pool and surrounding it are young. There is the usual amount of horseplay, the duckings, the shrieking girls being tossed into the water, the water fights with young girls sitting astride the shoulders of their mock stallions.
The entrance of the Puerto Rican boys does not evoke an immediate show of antagonism. They walk carefully and cautiously, because they are, after all, in enemy turf no matter how allegedly neutral the ground. But their entrance has gone largely unobserved. There are six boys in all. One is brown, another white, and the remainder range the tan spectrum. The dark boy, Mike, speaks only Spanish. He has no desire to learn English. He is afraid that if he learns to speak English well, he will be mistaken for a Negro. The fact that he speaks Spanish, then, is a badge of pride to him. He has resisted every effort of his schoolteachers to get him to learn English. Another of the boys, Alfredo, cannot speak English too well, either, but it is not through lack of trying. He is an intelligent boy who, being taught by born-and-bred New Yorkers who do not speak Spanish, finds it difficult to learn. He is also a devout Catholic, and he wears a slender gold chain about his throat, from which dangles a miniature gold cross. The boys enter the water. They stay close to each other, swimming in the tight formation of a convoy. The lifeguard glances at them disinterestedly and then goes back to chatting with a blonde who seems determined to lose the top half of her two-piece swimsuit.