Billy Kell was embracing Angelo’s shoulder, urgent and coaxing. He drew Angelo away from the others and near to my hiding place. The cricket-voices of the other boys ceased to exist for me. “Angelo, ’tisn’t as if we were going to do him any real harm, see?” Billy Kell’s whisper was smooth and soft. I could watch him smile. “Look—” and he was showing Angelo a knife, turning it to catch the wan light, which gave me Angelo’s face too, a dim battlefield of terror and excitement, fascination and revulsion. “Just a five-and-dime gimmick,” said Billy Kell. “It’s plastic. Look.” He jabbed the knife at his own palm, so realistically that I winced before I saw the blade curl harmlessly at the tip.
“Just scare the pants off him, that it?”
“Sure, Angelo, you get it. Poke it to him without touching, see, and then a jab — oh, at the shoulder or somewheres. But listen: the other guys think you think it’s a real knife, see? I’m giving you a break because, hell, you’re my friend, I know how you feel. You couldn’t use a shiv. I understand, see, but they don’t. So put on an act for us, huh?”
“I get it. And that other thing you told me about him—”
“Oh, that was real. He did the burglary all right. We been giving him the works. He squealed. He sang, fella. He did it on a dare from the Diggers, had to take something from each room, only he went chicken about the money, just took a little and then grabbed the pictures and stuff instead — chicken. He was supposed to keep away from your apartment too. Know why? To make it look like you’d stolen from the tenants.”
“Oh hell, no!”
“Fact, kid. And he killed the pup. We made him sing, I’m telling you. He chunked her a bit of hamburg and busted her neck….”
“Mr. Miles didn’t lose anything, and that was the room—”
“May say he didn’t. Listen, Angelo: one of these days I’ll tell you a couple-three things about your Mr. Miles.”
“What d’you mean? Miles is a good guy.”
For this relief much thanks….
“Think so? Never mind — later sometime, kid. Here, take this.” And Angelo reached for the knife. There was fumbling. Billy dropped it, and stooped, searching in the dark. Then they were moving away from me, and Angelo had the knife in his hand, and the others crowded close to watch, a rabble of goblins in a confusion of troubled night. So I blundered again, Drozma. I ought to have guessed.
Angelo’s voice was thin now, thin to the cracking point: “You killed my dog? You killed my dog, you dirty Digger?”
The thin boy spat at Angelo’s foot without answering. But his nerve was crumpling, and he whimpered, watching the blade. He cringed as Angelo’s little hand lashed out with it. But he was not the one who screamed when that knife bit flesh — I saw it — and blood jumped from the bony shoulder to splash Angelo’s fingers. It was Angelo who screamed. Screamed and flung the knife away ripped a handkerchief from his hip pocket and tried to stop the blood before the others had done more than gasp and giggle. “Damn you, Billy — damn you—”
“Shut up, kid — what’s a little blood?” Billy shoved Angelo away. Swiftly and competently, Billy untied the thin boy, motioned two others to hold him, and wiped the wound to examine it. “A scratch,” said Billy, and that was true, in a way. The wounded one was Angelo.
I saw Angelo nauseated and shivering. His stained hand made abortive motions toward his mouth, and dropped. Dreamily he groped for the handkerchief Billy had discarded, and made feeble efforts to clean his fingers with it, and threw it down, and retched.
Billy twitched the captive around and kicked him. “You ain’t hurt. Now run, Digger, run! Run and tell your drips we’ve burned the wax.”
The thin boy reeled away from him, clutching a fragment of his shirt against the cut. “You wha-at?”
Billy chuckled. “We burned the wax. We’ll meet your guys any time.”
The thin boy ran. The goblins snickered. Billy Kell grabbed Angelo’s wrist and held it up. “A full member of the Mudhawks! And is he all right?”
“He’s all right,” they said. A spooks’ chorus.
“Listen, studs, you know what? He switched knives when he guessed the other was a phony. He didn’t wanta, but he did, because he knew it was right. Now there’s a real Mudhawk. I knew it, when he put his blood on the stone for the first test.”
They swarmed around then, with hugging and jittery laughter and naïve obscenities and praise for Angelo, who took it all with a sick smile, with submerging shame and hidden contempt and swelling pride, with unwilling acceptance, as if now he were making himself believe Billy’s lie. Because the lie was good politics? I couldn’t know. “Well,” said Angelo, “well, he killed my dog, didn’t he? Cheepus…”
Fog was swallowing Billy Kell’s covine one by one, with turned wrist and raised palm. Too deep a fog: I can’t pretend to understand these children. I wish I were old enough to remember four or five hundred years ago.
There is a lost quality, a vagueness in them, which I did not find in the gangs that I studied a little when I was in the States seventeen years back. The gangs of that day were, on the surface, much more vicious and noisy and difficult, motivated more by wordless resentment of the grown-up world and by obvious material hungers — sex and money and thrills. These waifs (in a sense, they are all orphans) have reverted to more primitive fantasies. Their witchcraft — in some modern dress and slanguage but still witchcraft — suggests that the mental and moral desertion by their elders has progressed to the stage of genuine indifference. It may or may not be due to the decay of the cities. South Calumet Street is a backward eddy in the stream, and I might find matters very different in the suburbs or the countryside — I don’t know. But it is hardly strange that this desertion, this adult delinquency, should occur, in a culture which has not yet learned to replace the antique religious imperatives with something better.
It is transition — I think. The force of the ancient piety was lost in what they call the nineteenth century, and millions of them, in the hasty human fashion, tossed out the baby with the bath. Such concepts as discipline, responsibility, and honor were discarded along with the discredited dogmas. With the prop of Jehovah removed, they still don’t want to learn how to stand on their own feet; but I believe they will. I see twentieth-century man as a rather nice fellow with weak legs, and a head in bad condition from banging against a stone wall. Perhaps fairly soon he will cut that out, get sense, and go on about his human business, relying on the godlike in himself and in his brother.
Billy and Angelo were the last to leave. I followed them back to No. 21. Before Angelo went in I saw him bend his wrist and raise his palm, a full member of the Mudhawks. I dreaded for him the pain that would assume shapes of unclean horror in his dreams, if he could sleep. I shadowed Billy Kell down Calumet Street. When he was a block beyond EL CAT SEN I overtook him and swung him around. I spoke in Salvayan: “Son of a murderer, are you proud?”
He watched me with a baby-face human stare, undismayed, then permitting a human fear to show. Naturally or by calculation? He stammered in English: “Mr. Miles, what the hell, you sick or drunk or something?”
I said wearily in English: “You understood me.”