Up here where Luretta lived, the drive-bys were a common thing, you learned to live with them, same as you learned to live with a junkie chasing after you all the time, trying to get in your pants, she’d kill him next time. She had sworn that in church on Sunday, she would kill him the next time he came at her. Mrs. Welles had taught her April was the cruellest month, but she’d been wrong. June was really the month that got you. June was when you had to face it, girl.
Luretta walked through this evening spread against the sky, seeing this place where she lived with laser-beam eyes. White-hot laser cutting through the jiveass dealers on every corner, pushing their six-bit hits off of crack pipes. White-hot eyes burning through hookers no older than herself strutting like movie stars in high heels and silk, selling blowjobs to cruising motorists for twenty bucks a throw. Her ears tuned out the incessant word fuck that rang on the air like a one-note call-and-response. Her ears closed to the screaming police sirens, and the screaming fire engines, and the rapping of the automatic pistols, and the rage everywhere, the white-hot rage reduced to cold dead ashes by her white-hot eyes and her indifferent ears. She wished to be Eliot’s hyacinth girl, her arms full, her hair wet, speechless, neither living nor dead, looking into the heart of light, the silence. He had written of a heap of broken images where the sun beat. He had written of a cry of fear in a handful of dust. Walking alone and breathing deeply of a night turned suddenly gentle by the first flush hint of summer, Luretta wished with all her heart that Sarah Fitch Welles was still alive to show her what roots might clutch, what branches grow out of this stony rubbish.
On the ninth day of June, the day before Hanover Prep and most of the other private schools in the city were scheduled to close for the summer, Winona Weingarten took the M-11 bus uptown from where she lived on Seventy-Fifth and West End, and then walked through Morningside Park on her way to the old stone building behind the cathedral.
It was a beautiful day, the kind New York City was often blessed with in early summer, the sky a piercing blue, the air crisp and clear. Winona was wearing the school uniform with the short pleated skirt and the white blouse and blue jacket with the crest over the pocket.
“Hey, kid,” the voice called.
She turned to look.
A black man was sitting on one of the park benches.
“Wanna try suppin’ new,” he said, “fly you to the moon?”
“No, thanks,” Winona said.
“Coss you on’y a dollah,” the man said, and flashed a wide entreating grin.
Winona shook her head, and hurried past.
But her heart was pounding.
And she wondered if he’d be there again tomorrow.