Herb Mestman slammed at the brake pedal. The Plymouth heaved and bucked like a live thing, screeched in the lane, and slowed.
Frenchie Murrow cut into the lane, and sped out of sight around the curve.
The bakery truck came down the hill with a gigantic whoosh and passed Mestman where he was stalled.
FRENCHIE MURROW
This wasn’t no game for kids, and at least old man Mestman realized that. He hadn’t spilled the beans to Pop about that drag on the Bluffs Road. He had kept it under his lid, and if Frenchie had not hated Mestman so much — already identifying him as a symbol of authority and adult obnoxiousness — he would have respected him.
Frenchie held the cat aloft, and withdrew the switchblade from his boot top.
The cat shrieked at the first slash, and writhed maniacally in the boy’s grasp. But the third stroke did it, severing the head almost completely from the body.
Frenchie threw the dead cat onto Mestman’s breezeway, where he had found it sleeping.
Let the old sonofabitch play with that for a while.
He cut out, and wound up downtown.
For a long moment he thought he was being watched, thought he recognized the old green Plymouth that had turned the corner as he paused before the entrance to the malt shop. But he put it from his mind, and went inside. The place was quite empty, except for the jerk. He climbed onto a stool and ordered a chocolate Coke. Just enough to establish an alibi for the time; time enough to let Mestman find his scuddy cat.
He downed the chocoke and realized he wanted a beer real bad. So he walked out without paying, throwing at the jerk a particularly vicious string of curse words.
Who was that in the doorway across the street?
Frenchie saw a group of the Laughing Princes coming down the sidewalk a block away. They were ranged in their usual belligerent formation, strung out across the cement so that anyone walking past had to walk in the gutter. They looked too mean to play with today. He’d cut, and see ’em when they were mellower.
He broke into a hunching run, and rounded the corner. At Rooney’s he turned in. Nine beers later he was ready for Mr. Wiseguy Mestman. Darkness lapped at the edge of the town.
He parked the Studebaker in his own folks’ garage, and cut through the hedge to Mestman’s house.
The French windows at the back of the house were open, and he slipped in without realizing he was doing it. A fog had descended across his thinking. There was a big beat down around his neck someplace, and a snare drummer kept ti-ba-ba-ba-powing it till Frenchie wanted to snap his fingers, or get out the tire jack and belt someone or get that friggin’ cat and slice it again.
There was a woman in the living room.
He stood there, just inside the French doors, and watched her, the way her skirt was tight around her legs while she sat watching the TV. The way her dark line of eyebrow rose at something funny there. He watched her and the fog swirled the higher; he felt a great and uncontrollable wrenching in his gut.
He stepped out of the shadows of the dining room, into the half-light of the TV-illuminated living room.
She saw him at once, and her hand flew to her mouth in reflex. “What do you — what …”
Her eyes were large and terrified, and her breasts rose and fell in spastic rhythm. He came toward her, only knowing this was a good-lookin’ broad, only knowing that he hated that bastard Mestman with all his heart, only knowing what he knew he had to do to make the Princes think he was a rough stud.
He stumbled toward her, and his hand came out and clenched in the fabric of her blouse, and ripped down …
She was standing before him, her hands like claws, raking at him, while shriek after shriek after shriek cascaded down the walls.
He was going to rape her, damn her, damn her louse of a big-dome husband, he was going to …
Someone was banging at the door, and then he heard, ever so faintly, a key turning in the lock, and it was Mestman, and he bolted away, out the French doors, over the hedge, and into the garage, where he crouched down behind his Stude for a long time, shivering.
HERBERT MESTMAN
He tried to comfort her, though her hysteria was beginning to catch. He had followed the boy after he had come home and found the cat. Sir Epicure had been a fine animal; quick to take dislike, even quicker to be a friend. They had struck it off well, and the cat had been a warmth to Herbert Mestman.
First the peeping, then the trouble on the Bluffs Road, and so terribly this evening, Sir Epicure, and now — now —
This!
He felt his hands clenching into fists.
Herbert Mestman was a calm man, a decent man; but the game had been declared, and it was no game for children. He realized despite his pacifist ways, there were lice that had to be condemned.
He huddled Margaret in her torn blouse closer to him, soothing her senselessly with senseless mouthings, while in his mind, he made his decision.
FRENCHIE MURROW
Mornings had come and gone in a steady, heady stream of white-hot thoughtlessness. After that night, Frenchie had stayed away from Mestman and his wife, from even the casual sight of Mestman’s house. Somehow, and he was thankfully frightened about it, Mestman had not reported him.
Not that it would have done any good … there was no proof and no way of backing up the story, not really. A stray fingerprint here or there didn’t count too much when they lived next door and it might easily be thought that Bruce Murrow had come over at any time, and left them.
So Frenchie settled back into his routine.
Stealing hubcaps for pocket money.
Visiting Joannie when her old lady was swing-shifting it.
And then there were the Laughing Princes:
“Hey, man, you wanna get in the group?”
Frenchie was amazed. Out of a clear field of vision, this afternoon when he had come into the malt shop, Monkey had broached the subject.
“Well, hell, I mean, yeah,sure! ”
“Okay, daddy, tell you what. You come on out to the chickie-run tonight, and we’ll see you got gut enough to be a Prince. You dig?”
“I dig.”
And here he was, close to midnight, with the great empty field stretching off before him, rippled with shadows where the lights of the cars did not penetrate.
It had been good bottom land, this field, in the days when the old city reservoir had used water deflected from the now-dry creek. Water deflected through the huge steel culvert pipe that rose up in the center of the field. The culvert was in a ditch ten feet deep, and the pipe still rose up several feet above the flat of the field. The ditch just before the pipe was still a good ten feet deep.
The cars were revving, readying for the chickie-run.
“Hey, you, Frenchie … hey, c’mon over here!”
It was Monkey, and Frenchie climbed from his Stude, pulling at his chinos, wanting to look cool for the debs clustered around the many cars in the field. This was a big chickie-run, and his chance to become one of the Princes.
He walked into the group of young hot-rodders, clustered off to one side, near a stunted grove of trees. He could feel everyone’s eyes on him. There were perhaps fifteen of them.
“Now here’s the rules,” Monkey said. “Frenchie and Pooch and Jimmy get out there on either side of the road that runs over the cul. On the road is where I’ll be, pacin’ ya. And when Gloria — ” he indicated a full-chested girl with a blonde ponytail, “ — when she gives the signal, you race out, and head for that ditch, an’ the cul. The last one who turns is the winner, the others are chickie. You dig?”
They all nodded, and Frenchie started to turn, to leave. To get back in his Stude and win this drag.
But the blond girl stopped him, and with a hand on his arm, came over close, saying, “They promised me to the guy wins this run, Frenchie. I’d like to see you bug them other two. Win for me, willya, baby?”