Portrait of young con artist
Chapter Four:
When Half Gods Go
The place looked as if it had been bombed, six whole blocks of urban Paterson broken into pieces, buildings half-demolished, cross streets thick with rubble, trash and abandoned cars.
"It was like the war stories Uncle Harry used to tell," Kenny recalled later.
Tales of war-torn urban Europe laid to waste in the tug between East and West that had become nearly a nightly obsession each time Ed had his evening wine.
No one ever expected to find any scene so similar in the middle of Paterson.
"I guess that's why the place fascinated me," Kenny said. "I just didn't believe it could be real."
No simple blue barricades put up by the Paterson police could keep him out.
"I wasn't so much afraid of the police as the gangs that hung out here," Kenny recalled. "And even though the street looked empty, you never knew when someone might pop out from among the junk and grab you."
People were always grabbing at him, if not black gangs, then confused cops thinking he had wandered into the dangerous neighborhood from downtown.
White people didn't wander these streets willingly, and certainly didn't poke their noses into one of the most sacred enclaves of urban gangs the way Kenny was.
"In some ways, the emptiness scared me most -- especially on this particular day when I could hardly see a soul inside or outside the lot, except for the tiny figures down near the front of school," Kenny said. "On most days, the lots had a number of hangers on, kids who stared in, but didn't dare step over the line the Broadway Gang set as the beginning of their turf. On other days, a smart assed kid or two would be leaning against the wall, cigarette dangling from their lower lips, giving me warnings about the danger I was in if I stepped beyond the police barricade."
These weren't Broadway gang members, but that clutch of pontificating characters who pretended to be with this gang or that, as if that section of Northern Paterson had any gang but one worth talking about.
"They kept growling at me, as if I didn't know better, tossing stones at me the moment I turned my back," Kenny recalled. "These kids liked to think they had a piece of turf among the crumbled bricks and open sewers, when they were just as scared as I was, perhaps even more scared."
Kenny's living in that part of town scared everybody.
"I was white," he said. "Nobody with a white face like mine hung out anywhere near this side of town unless they were crazy. So almost everybody assumed I was crazy, and I let them think it as long as it meant I didn't get beat up."
On most days, these sideline critics scattered the minute Kenny set foot on the wrong side of the barrier, fearful that the Broadway gang would blame them for the instruction.
"Sometimes the Broadway Gang got real riled at lookers on, blaming them for not doing or saying anything to keep people like me away from their turf, and they beat up on the onlookers as much as they did the people who did more than look."
For a number of reasons, Kenny said he remembered this particular day and how queer it seems that there were no onlookers to scatter, no greedy, grimy faces with dangling cigarettes, no backhanded rock throwing.
"Maybe that should have told me something," he said. "But being white in a black and Latino world might have announced already I wasn't so bright as you'd expect. Sure, you could argue at my age I didn't have many choices as where I lived. At ten, I pretty much dangled at my mother's skirts, dragged along wherever and whenever she wanted, from going up to Carroll Street when I was very young to the projects now."
Since her released from the mental hospital, Kenny's mother acted possessed, carrying around with her an intense rage to escape, as if she expected her father and mother and brothers to send her back.
"She also wanted to keep me out of their hands," Kenny recalled. "She seemed convinced they wanted to turn me against her."
South Paterson and his grandfather's house were only a bus ride away.
"If I was smart, I would have headed back to that part of the world," Kenny surmised. "But I wasn't smart. I actually liked it there."
At intervals along that street, someone had painted a clump of three red stars along the crumbling walls, marking the limits of the Broadway Gang's turf. During our months here, the lots had always seemed lopsided with the bulk possessing the starred symbol while a thin sliver along the eastern most portion retained independence -- symbols of differing sorts indicating the profusion of gangs that laid claim to the remaining turf. Yet over night, the star symbols had leaped over the cobble stone gap, laying claim to the remaining bits of lot, some stars so fresh they still dripped red.
"I expected an army of black faces to swarm over the broken walls on either side the moment I set foot on the wrong side of the barrier," Kenny said.
But none did. In the distance, music sounded, heavy with the backbeat he'd often heard coming out of black bars along West Broadway. The eerie echoes hid the scuff of his own clumsy step as he struggled to remain silent as he slipped through the rubble.
Just why the city had stopped their demolition effort when they had remained a mystery to him. Perhaps the city fathers had run out of money. Perhaps, they had given up on the idea of constructing another set of housing projects in an area where the first set had already turned into a violent fifteen-story high ghetto. Kenny's mother often complained about the lots, claiming the half-knocked down buildings had become a haven for rodents, and a dumping ground for every unscrupulous character who did not want to pay the cost of properly disposing their waste. So the place not only boasted of buildings whose brick faces had been ground down to single storied wreckage, but also a refuge of refuse such as old washing machines, old stoves and abandoned cars. Even the more ordinary waste got dumped here, filling in the piles of broken brick with piles of tin cans and rotting vegetables. Rats that lacked substance in the wasteland of dust fed greedily on rotting rice and beans, egg shells and beef grease.
The distant music, the scurrying of rats, the rising dust of his own footsteps made the lots seem more terrible than ever, thick with spies and threat of violence. Kenny kept staring up along the southside wall, gaze fixed on its broken ridge anticipating the army on the other side.
While most kids at school eyed the lots from the classroom windows with eager fascination, none ever crossed the barrier the way he did. With a few notable exceptions, most kids chose to make their way to and from school along the longer walk around the lots, dutifully suffering the continued indignities of harassment the gang gave them anyway, robbing lunch money, books even clothing then retreating into the sanctuary of the lots.
The police, when ushered in to pursue the thieves, never left the few streets crossing through the devastated landscape, none daring to venture out of their cars -- except when the gangs in a fitful mood barraged the car tops with a rain of stones.
Concerned teachers grilled Kenny as why he chose to go through the lots.
"Because it's the shortest way home," he said.
"It is also the most dangerous."
But as one of the few white kids in the Christopher Columbus Housing project, every street was dangerous. While the teachers, storekeepers and police were also mostly white, they also mostly lived outside Paterson, traveling here each morning, rushing away each night.
If any actually lived in Paterson, they occupied the safer more distant Lakeview section where Kenny's grandparents lived, guarded day and night by routine police patrols and warning signs of dogs posted on their fences.
This was not to say other kids hadn't tried to make their way through the lots. Nearly every kid saw it as a test of courage to make it across South Street to the other side. Some even made it without the more dismal side trip to St. Joseph's emergency room. But none, save members of various gangs, ever repeated the feat, gauging themselves lucky enough to have survived the journey once. Each lived off the reputation of that feat the way the Native American Indians did their dream quest.
"To my knowledge, only I insisted on making the trip a daily routine," Kenny said later. "It was a trip as predictable as the local Public Service bus, and one destined to irritate the gang whose standing order was to beat up anybody who tried. My white face irritated them more than most because it served to remind them of the downtown turf they had lost to the Irish Gangs of South Paterson. For all the increasing black and Latino population of Paterson, the turf itself seemed to shrink, with police and white gangs condemning blacks to the most undesirable parts of the city. While the blacks and Latino gangs held their own in many of the battles throughout disputed areas, most only felt safe on the northside of the river, and the most safe deep in the lots that no white gang could possibly desire. And here I was with my white face tramping through the heart of their sanctuary, smugly defiant of their ability to stop my trespassing."
School counselors constantly questioned Kenny's family life, and how his mother could be so crazy as to drag the boy into a world like this.
Where's your mother, child? they asked. How could she leave you along? What could she have been thinking bringing you to this part of town?
Kenny hated the way they shook their heads and marked his name in their books, to revisit later, to see if a while boy can survive in a world of blacks.
"Grandpa had shaken his head the same way, telling Momma she wouldn't survive no how on the north side of Paterson," Kenny recalled.
If you have to go out on your own, girl, why not someplace safe? Think of the boy! He's not going to survive an hour in that place.
"We'll survive, Poppa," mother said.
"I remembered how hopeful momma was when we stood at the top of Garret Mountain and she pointed out to me the four brick towers in the distance, saying that was where we were going to live," Kenny recalled. "I remember staring out over the roof tops of Paterson feeling scared."
That's our new home, Kenny, she said, the windows of the new buildings glistening sharply in the sun.
"But what about Grandpa?" he asked. "Is he gonna live there, too?"
We don't need him, Momma said. We don't need anybody.
Close up, the towers looked no prettier, stark, straight brick spikes pressed against the neck of the soft blue sky like knives. Around their feet crawled the crumbling wood and broken macadam of a dying Paterson -- dilapidated and splintered houses not unlike Kenny's grandfather's in shape and size, but with blankets across their broken windows rather than shades and pieces of people's laundry strung out on sills and banisters like sad flags of surrender. A night kids cried from those buildings for reasons Kenny didn't understand. But these voices seemed to echo in his head and sometimes he heard them flowing out from over the lots at night like the cry of ghosts.
Maybe that was part of the attraction to this six block expanse of nowhere, the fact that nobody wanted them but the kids, and nobody owned them except for those forceful enough or clever enough to lay claim to them.
Not every building had been demolished. The city had apparently started their slaughter at the southend and worked their way north, pausing in their destruction before they could knock every building down. The southside suffered the worst of this wrath, left with little more than mounds of mortar and brick filled spaces where storefronts and houses had been. These mounds formed a moonscape of miniature mountains and valleys, trash heaps of useless junk. Occasionally, a basement opened unexpectedly like a monstrous mouth sucking in the unwary invader.
"My mother constantly worked I would disappear into one," Kenny recalled.
But he rarely wandered off South Street, which cut through the lower third of the lots from the front door of school to the cobblestones and trolley tracks of Lacy Street. While the mounds on either side had always been guarded, the street had been a sort of free fire zone, kept open by warring factions-- a precarious turkey shoot for anyone foolish to chance the sticks and stones, but unblocked. Yet now with the dispute over property rights clearly over, the lack of guards seemed that much odder.
A frail spiral of gray smoke showed over the lip of the broken buildings, hinting of a fire farther up in the northside of the lots. Kids often gathered there to watch the firetrucks spraying down the abandoned buildings and the police escorting smoke-inhaling drunks who used them at night to keep warm. From time to time, Kenny had seen fire flicking in the gray windows like burning hearths, and the shadows of the bums around them, hands to the flames.
But he smelled nothing in the air as he crept along that day.
Where were they? The Broadway Gang hadn't taken possession of the lots to abandon them again?
"I hadn't gone far when I began to hear stirrings in the lots beyond the front of wrecked buildings," Kenny recalled, "the clank of metal, the stirring of stone and rubble. A few whispered voices echoed off the brick along the street, like ghosts stirred up with the dust. From time to time, I heard a louder noise, a bang of some sort, followed by a sharp curse or a short spurt of Spanish -- then other voices laughing mockingly."
As Kenny moved along the street, the sounds grew louder, growing closer and closer.
"The gang was apparently coming from some more distant part of the lots," Kenny said, "surveying the full extent of their newly reconstructed empire. They seemed in no hurry, stumbling along, giving up any attempt to remain quiet as they came."
Then, like a wave, they crested, coming to a sudden halt at the top of the wall, sweating brown faces glowing like burnished metal in the sunlight.
It took them a moment to sort Kenny's pale face from the assortment of crumbling stone, gaping at him when they did like people struck dumb. Kenny didn't stop, but eased closer to the side formerly claimed by the Latino gangs.
"I had a vague hope the Broadway Gang might still be too shy to charge across," Kenny said. "In the past, I had always relied on their fear of open gang war to allow me to pass."
Whatever immunity he had in the past, quickly evaporated with the first shout.
"It's that white boy!" one of the gang screamed. "I told you he'd be back!"
The gang flowed down off the walls like brown water, their long limbs stretching to meet the street, stumbling over broken brick and crumbled mortar. Kenny started to run, weaving between the ruins of doorways and storefronts and rusted cars at the curb. Half demolished rooms grinned from above him where the wrecking ball had sliced through people's lives. The furniture, brass and copper piping had had long vanished to junk dealers, but each room still seemed alive to Kenny, wall paper and yellowed shades hinting that the owners had just stepped out, and might return at any moment to pick up their lives.
"That whole aspect intrigued me more than anything," Kenny recalled. "This was the most devastated part of the lots, the place where the city had created the most damage. I had heard talk of other, more lucrative portions and seen more whole buildings in the distance from my apartment balcony at night. Sometimes, I could see lights weaving through the dark, ribbons along invisible valleys. By day, I could see mound after mound, but also the tips of mysterious whole buildings set in the midst of ruin, untouched by anything, unseen save by the members of the Broadway gang."
In daylight, Kenny had seen gang members sprawled out of the tattered room of the red pump house like brown cats taking in the sun. But always, he found himself staring at things from a distance, watching other people collecting treasures that he wanted for himself-- little cryptic things passed from one set of black hands to another in a ritual Kenny didn't understand.
For some reason he couldn't explain, he needed to see that world close up, breathe its dusty air, tramp its dusty trails, dig his fingers into its dusty soil-- recovering the bones of those people who had lived there before, feel the texture of their lives: the warm metal on the palms of his hands, the sharp edges of their shattered glass.
And the basements!
How those places haunted him, too, the exotic tales of strange things there reaching even the mild-mannered ears at school, the mumbled reports of great adventures beneath of surface of that world. Like great caves where some real treasures remained.
"Yo! White boy!" the huge black boy said, barring Kenny's way with thick bristled hairs curling out around the buttons of his shirt like wire. The boy slapped his palm with a large and heavy pipe. "Just where do you think you're going?"
Kenny looked to each side of him, but the walls of the former buildings rose too high here. He could scramble up but not before this black kid hit him with the pipe.
"I'm coming from school," Kenny said, aware of the others pulling up behind him, winded yet amazed, staring at him the way white kids did black kids in his grandfather's neighborhood, not quite believing he was standing there. A deep line formed between the brows of the kid with the pipe. ``You mean school number two?''
"Yeah," Kenny said.
"Bullshit. No white kids go there."
"I do," Kenny said, glancing over his shoulder at the others that had formed a semi-circle behind him, closing the street off like another wall. He recognized some of the smaller kids from school, though none made an effort to confirm his story. Other faces he had seen from the former Latino gangs. These looked agitated and nervous, as if waiting for their turn next.
"Hit him," someone shouted from the wall, as more tall kids appeared, faces scarred and angry, more in keeping with the image Kenny had pictured for the Broadway Gang. Then, a set of hands grabbed at Kenny's jacket, shoving him against the brick wall, brown, blood-shot eyes staring into his like a warmed reflection, his torn jacket still dripping from the three red stars marking the gang's colors.
"We know where you're from, motherfucker," a large boy said, his breath smelling of cigarettes and marijuana. "And we don't like no spies here."
"I'm not a spy," Kenny said, but his words were lost in the accumulated raised voices of the gang, each kid shouting out what should be done with him. The tall kid with the pipe waved for them to shut up. For a moment, the kid holding Kenny loosened his grip. Kenny tore free, shoving him into the boy with pipe before launching himself in the direction of Lacy Street.
"Hey! The white boy's getting away," one of the gang yelled.
Stones clattered on the pavement at his heals like a string of pistol shots kicking up the dust. The lots ended with another set of blue police barricades and the cobblestones of Lacy Street, the sagging buildings nearly crumbling under their own weight. Gray-haired black ladies rocked on the sagging porches, shaking their heads at the noise of the gang and the sudden appearance of Kenny's white face from out of the lots. Tiny black tots giggled from the open windows above, pointing towards Kenny.
"The white boy's over here!" they shouted and waved, then ducked behind the tattered window shades as if expecting Kenny to climb up after them.
Kenny stopped on the corner to catch his breath and the gang stopped just inside the blue barricades, piling up one behind the other like gathering sand, glaring at Kenny, yet making no move to pursue him. While the police did nothing to stop the fighting inside the lots, once on the street, the gang was fair game.
Kenny grinned and waved and leaned back against the splintered gray window of an outdoor fruit counter. The smell of over-ripe peaches filled his nostrils. The sole of his left shoe had come loose and he bent to examine it, fingers probing the wound where the stitching had come undone. His mother would groan over the tear. It was his only good pair and there was no money to buy another.
"What are you stealing there, boy!" the rumbling voice of the grocer said as his large form swept out from the store's interior like a storm, big belly wobbling behind a fruit splattered apron. The man's thick fingers caught Kenny before the boy could escape, pinching his arm. "Well, boy?"
"I wasn't stealing anything," Kenny said, squirming to free himself. Recognition flickered into the grocer's eyes.
"You?" he said, exposing his yellowed teeth with a grin. "You're that crazy lady's kid."
"My momma's not crazy!" Kenny yelled and swung his fist at the grocer's face, but the big man caught his hand and laughed.
"The hell she ain't," he said. "She's a loon just for coming to this part of town."
"You take that back!" Kenny screamed and snatched up a tomato from the stand. His aim was poor, striking the man too high on the forehead to blind him. Chunky red fragments dribbled down the grocer's cheeks like bits of flesh.
"Why you little bastard," the big man said and grabbed for Kenny again. But behind him, the black gang shouted as it charged. In a moment, they were among the fruit stands, pushing and shoving, knocking fruit and vegetables to the ground.
"The gang hated that grocer as much as they hated me," Kenny later recalled. "He often cheated their parents and called the cops on them for snatching pieces of fruit none of the kids could afford to pay for."
Someone swung a stick at the grocer's head and suffered for it, the large man grabbing arm and stick and snapping both across his knee. Someone else hit him with a stone. Kenny used the confusion to leap away, avoiding the sudden sea of grasping black hands as they plunged around the wheeled feet of the fruit stand. The gang was on the wrong side to catch him and he ran with flapping sole towards the rush hour traffic of West Broadway. Behind him, glass shattered and the grocer's protest turned to wails.
"My window! You damned little niggers broke my....!"
"I remember thinking of the word `crazy' as I ran," Kenny recalled. "My face was wet with tears. Not because the grocer had said it, but because I had heard the word used so much in my grandfather's house. Uncle Ed said it over and over."
Ed had argued the move vehemently against Kenny being dragged to north Paterson.
The boy's gonna wind up in Jail, Jane, the man had said, if you go taking him to a place like that. He's got a bad seed him that'll grow worse in that soil.
Bad and crazy that's what Kenny and his mother were. Both of them looking for places to hide, both finding the wrong place to do in, black gangs and social workers haunting them the way the family did.
``Hey! The white boy's getting away!'' someone shouted.
Across his shoulder, Kenny saw the gang regather, like sand back into the mold of furious beast. The thought of easy prey had drawn them out of the lots, and now, loose, they seemed too peeved to go back without getting the meat they came for.
"It was more principle than anger," Kenny later concluded. "If I got away, they'd never hear the end of it, taunted mercilessly during rumbles downtown how they couldn't even catch one small white boy. Maybe they even saw me as the first drop through the dike, after which a torrent of white faces would pour, drowning North Paterson the way it had other sections."
Memories of the largely lost Downtown clung to them like a scars. The gangs journeyed to it daily in an attempt to take it back, always returning bruised and beaten and bleeding, always glad they had this small patch of earth to come back to.
At West Broadway, Kenny slowed. Rush hour traffic blocked the roadway like a huge metal snake, stretching from the bridge to the lip of the hill, anxious white businessmen squirming behind closed windows and locked doors, eyeing either side of the roadway as if expecting attack. They even eyed Kenny when he squeezed between their bumpers, frowning at his white face, not completely comprehending what they saw. Behind Kenny and to either side, the black tide flowed through similar gaps, the Broadway Gang hurrying along to try and cut him off. But they went mostly to the South, mistakenly believing he would retreat towards the bridge. They really did believe he'd come from Downtown.
Instead, Kenny turned north. Uphill. Towards the red brick towers that loomed over the roadway like the faces of God. They had that aura. Kenny had felt it from the moment he and Mother had climbed from the cab, bags in their hands, as if they had stepped off in front of a cathedral. There should have been a choir singing, not the echo of a bouncing basketball from one of the many courts.
We're gonna live here, Momma?" Kenny had asked.
"Yes, Kenny, isn't it wonderful?"
"That was another word I continued to remember from that time," Kenny later recalled. "Staring up at the towers with the Broadway Gang at my back, I kept hearing again my grandfather's final whispered message to me as my mother dragged from the house: You just hold on there, boy. We'll be there to fetch you before long.
How long, Kenny wondered as he ran up the hill. It already seemed like forever. The first days stretching into weeks and months and no more word from the man.
How long, Grandpa? When are you gonna come save me?
But only the slap of his broken shoe answered, its dusty echo resounding from the walls of the storefronts and houses and cars. Fragments of their shattered lives glittered up at him from the sidewalk, beer bottles, soda cans, empty packs of cigarettes and then a crack...
He didn't even see it until his shoe caught on it, and he tumbled forward, his arms up in front his face as he hit concrete.
The hands that yanked him up, however, were black hands, and black faces behind the hands, winded and sweating faces amid waving sticks, like a forest of black with smaller black kids filling in the gaps between the angry taller ones.
"What are we gonna do with him?" some of them asked. "You wanna beat him up right here?"
The smaller boys glanced around nervously at the cars and the waving grocer down the hill.
"What you doing around here, white boy?" the larger boys asked.
"Let's take him back to the lots, please," the smaller boys pleaded. "It ain't safe to do nothing here."
"Too much trouble," the larger boys said. "We got to do it here before the cops come."
But already the sirens were winding up from over the bridge, resounding from the brick face of the towers like a vengeful parent, the top of their car sending forth bolts of red and blue lightening, frustrated by the bumper to bumper commuter traffic. The larger boys ignored it, circling Kenny, staring into his pale eyes and white face, poking him with the ends of their sticks.
"What are you doing here, white boy?'' they asked over and over, and each time he told them, they hit him again. "Don't give us no shit! No white boys live around here."
"But I do!" Kenny yelled.
"Make him bleed," one of the others yelled.
The police cars had reached this side of the bridge and the smaller boys grew nervous, casting dark glanced down the hill. Blue and red lights rushed up like a rising storm, the grocer waving them on, pointing towards the gathering of kids around Kenny, "It's those niggers there! They're the ones who did it!"
This proved the undoing of the gang's smaller members, who broke and ran, leaving a gap through which Kenny leaped. The larger boys shouted and tried to grab him, but too late, Kenny was already legging it up the hill.
Even then, the gang took time to gather themselves again, older boys shouting at younger boys to give Kenny chase. The whole time the sirens wailed, growing louder and louder, blotting out their voices like a voice of God. Kenny's sole slapped time as he passed more abandoned store fronts-- the buildings here on the verge of falling into ruin without help of demolition crew, gray wood splintering into dust even as he ran.
Kenny turned into the Pathmark parking lot, waist-high weeds poking through the asphalt cracks like yellow flames. Beyond them, the hulk of a gas station greeted Kenny, gas pumps long stripped of metal and glass. Then he came to the projects.
"It was a world of concrete and brick," he recalled. "Concrete benches, sidewalks and stairs placed between each building as if squeezed out of a mold. Even the basketball court was concrete, with faded white lines marking out the boundaries."
The slap of the basketball sounded flat as the black kids stopped their game to watch Kenny's flight. None said a word. No one tried to hinder him, or help him either. They just stared, following his movement to the doors.
A rock smacked the glass as Kenny grabbed the handle. A web-patterned formed in the wired-window. He slammed the door behind him, the dark lobby greeting him with the upturned face of Latino women waiting to use the laundry.
A hand-printed sign had been taped to the elevator door saying it was still out of order. Kenny barged through the gray door beside it and up the stairs, one flight after another in a series of what seemed to be the same set of stairs. Each half flight turning sharply onto another set of stairs. Only the floor numbers changed, some half pealed off, or covered over in the scrawl of some hallway gang. He saw no one. But behind him, down below, the stair door slammed and the echo of pursuing feet rose up around him like ghosts. Shouts and curses promised a variety of dooms, all equally unpleasant, all driving Kenny that much faster to avoid them.
But after a time, the shuffling steps and the curses subsided. He heard instead warnings for Kenny not to come into the lots again.
"We mean it, white boy!" the echoing voices said. "You hear?"
Kenny continued his flight, climbing higher and higher into the bowels of the building till he reached the 13th floor where he fell gasping for breath. No one had followed, though behind him dots of red showed on the stairs. He touched his nose. It was bleeding and throbbed at his probing, but didn't seem broken.
Above him, the door to the hallway snapped open. Kenny staggered to his feet, ready to leap down the stairs again. An olive-skinned Latino boy stepped out wearing a torn denim jacket, the sleeves removed in a fashion similar to the Broadway gang's. But it lacked the three red stars on its back.
"Look, I'm sorry..." Kenny started, holding his palms out in a gesture of peace.
"I'm not one of them," the boy said, shifting his weight slowly from one foot to the other. He was older than Kenny, yet not as old as the elders of the gang. "But you're stupid for going in that place now that they own it all."
"You saw me?"
"From the window in the hall," he said, jerking his head towards the door through which he had just come through. "And it was stupid you leading them back to this place. Now they know where you live. They'll probably watch the place and wait for you to come out."
"Maybe they're not as smart or tough as people make out," Kenny said, gathering strength again, and a bit of pride from his escape. "After all I got away from them."
"You were lucky. They may not be smart, but they're tough-- and there's a lot of them now that the other gangs have joined them."
"That's what happened?" Kenny asked. "They made a deal with the other gangs?"
The boy spat violently to the side. "No deal. My side sold out. They got tired of fighting."
"Maybe that's not a bad idea," Kenny said. "At least they get to share the whole lots now."
"Not for long," the boy said. "The Broadway Gang'll take those of them they think are tough and throw the rest out. There'll be competition soon -- to weed out the weak."
"In the lots?"
"Down by the pumphouse," the boy said. "Where the cops won't interfere."
Kenny could almost see it all in his head, like a slice out of Roman history, gladiators fighting in elimination rounds. Those that fought the best stayed. Those who were beaten were beaten more thoroughly and run from the lots.
"You've seen the place?" Kenny asked
"Once."
"Then you know the way in -- and could show me?"
"No," the boy said, then turned and went back through the door. Kenny hurried after him, catching the door before it slammed. Three windows greeted him from across the hall. These looked out onto the lots and the maze of streets through which Kenny had just run. To either side, the hallway stretched with numbered apartment doors.
"Why not?" Kenny asked, as the boy stopped before the windows, thumbs hooked into the hoops of his pants.
"Because I don't want to get beat up," he said.
"You wouldn't have to stay. You could show me and then go."
"They'd catch me-- and you, eventually."
"But not before we got to see some of what's in there."
"There's nothing in there," the boy said, glancing at Kenny as he frowned. "Just junk."
"There has to be something," Kenny said, staring out over the landscape. The spiral of smoke he had seen from the ground had dissipated into haze. But the firetrucks were still clumped around one of the distant buildings-- one just on the other side of the lots, as if the lots were seeking to spread.
"Not that I've seen," the boy said, his attention drawn to the fire engines, too.
"But you said you only went in once."
"To the pump house," the boy said. "That's the heart of their side. But we had our own little piece of the lots and it was all junk."
"But that's not all of it."
"We made raids. We got deep into their side. I'm telling you there's nothing to look at."
"Then why do they guard it?"
"I don't know."
They stood silently staring until the twilight came, the sun winking out behind the towers sending the shadow of their shape across the first few mounds, like four fingers pointing east towards something Kenny couldn't see.
The boy looked over at Kenny. "You're bleeding," he said.
Kenny touched his nose again. The blood had mostly dried, but the wound throbbed a little.
"It's nothing," he said.
"Next time it'll be worse."
"How do you know there'll be a next time?"
The Latino boy shrugged. "You'll keep going in there until they carry you out."
"Or I get to see what they're hiding. I only need to look once, take a tour and leave. You could help me."
Again the boy shook his head. A door opened down the hall. A woman's head leaned out, calling softly in Spanish. The boy called back then shook his head at Kenny.
"Wise up. Stay out of that place," he said and was gone, leaving Kenny to stare out the window again.
Down below, the silver strip of traffic had turned into a string of headlights. Kenny could just make out the shadow of the gang, moving through the bumpers like a swarm of dark bees. He followed their flight back towards the lots, and then, they, too, were gone, lost among the tangle of weeds and junk. Slowly, Kenny detached himself from the window and took the key to his apartment door from around his neck. He hesitated at the door, listening for a moment before twisting open the lock.
***********
All was quiet inside -- save for the distant voices mother called ghosts, whispers of TVs, radios and crying babies which slipped up through the heat grates from the apartments below. It made the room feel strained-- and with the splash of yellow light spilling out from the kitchen across its tiles-- starkly empty.
There was no furniture, just a radio on the floor and the plastic turtle tray on the window ledge. Even the bedrooms were sparse, an old bed and dresser in momma's room, and a cot from Grandpa's basement in Kenny's.
Kenny eased in and closed the door. The newspaper on the floor read of Kennedy's victory. The teachers had hummed about it at school. It hadn't meant much to him or mother.
All mother wanted was a job.
The turtle tray was empty, too, for the fourth time that week-- and the scuffed tiles showed no trace of the creature. No wet trail pointing which way the it had gone. Kenny had been through the routine before, crawling on his hands and knees as if to get a turtle-eye view of the world, always finding him some place new.
One time Kenny had found Houdini under mother's bed when mother was counting her dwindling cash. To be funny, Kenny grabbed a few of the bills and rolled back under the bed with the turtle.
"Give it back, Kenny," mother pleaded, getting down on her knees to peer under the bed. "It's all the money we have left."
Kenny looked there first, half hoping to find a crumpled bill among the threads of dust. But there was no money or turtle there today, just the dirt. He was still bent when he heard the sound of the lock snapping open. He scrambled to the edge of the bedroom door and peered out into the hall.
Mother's melancholy face appeared around it like a cracked piece of Garret Mountain, still red from the long slow climb up the stairs, each wrinkle deep wrinkle a history of pain.
"Kenny?" she called tentatively, as if half expecting someone else to answer. "Are you home?"
"Just got in, Momma," Kenny said, stepping out into the long hall, the smell of cleansers filling the air from the open bathroom door behind him. Mother's eyes livened and she closed the door. Her smiled wavered as her gaze worked its way around the apartment, sweeping across the empty front from to the kitchen, then back to the hall, pupils dilating as they tried to peer past Kenny at the darkened bedroom doors.
She was searching for ghosts again, Kenny thought and snatched up the newspaper from the floor, holding the headline before her face.
"Look, Momma, Kennedy won!"
She glanced perfunctorily at the print, then seemed to dismiss it-- yet ceased her search with a sag. She removed her cloth coat and from came the smell of lint, mothballs and cheap Woolworth's perfume.
"Did you have your supper?" she asked.
"I wasn't hungry."
Her gaze refocused in his direction. "You have to eat, Kenny," she said, still not quite seeing him. "You'll waste away to nothing."
It was difficult to tell her the truth, of how he missed the clamor of his grandfather's house, the loud talk, the jangling silverware, the large kitchen table full of people around him.
"I lost Houdini," he said.
"Again?" mother said, snapping back another degree with the name of his turtle. She glanced across the room at the empty plastic container. "Did you look in my room?"
"He wasn't there."
Then came the first sounds of the night, the after supper TV in some neighbor's apartment suddenly coming to life, a voice through the channels of hollow walls working its way up. Mother's head jerked around, her eyes dilating into two round circles of fear.
"No," she moaned. "Don't start with us now."
"But Momma it's only..." Kenny started to say, looking for something else to wave before her to distract her attention. But mother would not be distracted, striding straight into the empty room with her two hands balled into fists. She waved one in the air.
"I said leave us alone and I mean it!" she shouted, looking remarkably like grandfather when he grew angry about noise in the house. Mother and he with the same stern jaw, though Grandfather's lips never quivered the way mother's did now. She grabbed at Kenny and pulled him to her side, making him feel that much smaller-- the way he had on Carroll Street when he was three. Perhaps someone had heard down in the apartment below because the sound sputtered out before she had time to stamp her feet. Mother stood there for a moment, staring out at nothing, her fist slowly descending to her side. Finally, she shook her self and looked down at Kenny.
The sadness returned to her eyes. Her face sagged with it and he wanted to smother her in his small arms and make the madness go away, shielding her the way she pretended to do from him. He remembered Grandfather's warning years ago, before he release from the hospital.
Don't pay her madness any mind, Kenny -- just do whatever she asks.
Then he hugged her, downtown peeling off her breasts in the scent of Planter's Peanuts and fumes of polluted buses. He could smell Carroll Street again, and the vague hint of the park at the end of the block, and of how he had played on the tiles of the one room apartment -- a solider at three, using a baseball bat for a bugle and an unfolded wire hanger as a sword. He remembered blowing taps for his dying army and trying to swallow the sword.
"Blood!" mother howled and thrust Kenny away, her appalled stare studying his wounded nose and tattered clothing. "What happened to you, Kenny?"
"Nothing, Momma," he said and struggled to be free of her clutching hands.
"Nothing, my foot! Your face is a mess!"
She dragged him down the hall to the bathroom and flicked on the light. The mirror showed the horror of his face: the blood caked thickly around the nose and mouth like paint on a TV Indian's.
"Well?" she asked, displaying his face as evidence of a crime.
"It was only a fight, Momma."
"A fight? With who?" She sounded surprised. She didn't understand the danger here, the difference between white and black, her pained stare trying to make sense out of the image in the glass.
"Kids from the lots," Kenny said, lowering his eyes to avoid meeting her gaze in the mirror. "They didn't like me looking in on their turf."
"You were in the lots? How many times do I have to tell you it's dangerous in there, Kenny? What if you fell into one of those basements, I might never see you again?"
"I was only on South Street," Kenny said. "There's no basements there."
"No, only boys that want to beat you up. My God!" she moaned.
"They didn't beat me up in the lots, Momma. They did it on West Broadway."
"Because they found you wandering around in the lots, no doubt," mother said. "Don't try and lie to me. I can see right through you."
"I wasn't lying , Momma. I did cut through the lots on my way home from school. It's shorter that way. Otherwise I gotta walk six blocks farther."
"Walk the six block, Kenny. It's better that than you coming home looking like this."
She yanked his face forward by the chin, twisting on the hot water faucet with her free hand. The scalding water gushed into the basin, sending steam across the glass, clouding it. For a moment, he and mother hovered at the still clear center, their faces imprisoned by its closing circle. Yet, there was peace there. The sound of the rushing water raced through the empty apartment, overriding the more distant whispers of her ghosts, keeping them from mother's attention. He wanted to keep the water running forever, both of them shielded by its white noise.
"I don't know about you, Kenny," mother said, scrubbing off the dried blood with the rough tip of the wash rag.
"Know what, Momma?"
"You're wilder than anyone in the family, even your father."
"I'm not wild," Kenny said.
"I didn't say you were bad, child. But there's a streak running through you that makes you act crazy. I just don't want to see you get hurt."
"No one's gonna hurt me, Momma," Kenny said, though cringed when she struck where the cut was on his upper nose.
"Thank goodness," she said, her face an inch from his. "It doesn't look too bad."
She cleaned it, then dried it, and pealed a Band-Aid, putting it over the wound. Kenny stared at the blurry image in the mirror. It made him look smaller and helpless. He had hoped something that would scar, something to take back with him into the lots.
Then, mother turned off the water and sound came. Not the TV voices this time or the neighbors rising and falling voices, but a scratching that seemed to come from the direction of the kitchen.
"No!" mother roared, turning towards the long hall with the kitchen glowing softly at the far end, the last beams of slanted orange light painting its white cabinets and floors. "I just got him whole again!"
"Momma, don't listen," Kenny pleaded, tugging at her sleeve. "It'll go away. It always does."
But her face had changed again, the mask of wrinkles thick around her eyes and mouth as she took a staggering step towards the kitchen, shaking Kenny's fingers from her sleeve, her own hands pressed so tight that the knuckles turned white.
Maybe there was some truth to what mother said. Maybe Kenny was crazy, because he heard the noise, too, a scratching or clawing noise as if something spirit was seeking escape into this world from beyond. He grabbed his wooden baseball bat from the hall closet and crept closely behind mother as she marched towards the kitchen. The noise grew louder as they advanced, with a clink of metal or plastic breaking into the desperate rhythm.
"It's coming from behind the refrigerator," Kenny announced. "Wait Momma. Let me handle this."
He put the bat between his knees and pressed his weight against the refrigerator, against one side, then the other, walking inch by inch outward from its cubby hole of cabinets till there was a space of about a foot behind. Then, he dragged open a couple of drawers and climbed them like stairs to the counter.
"I need light," he said, staring down into the black space.
Mother handed him a pen light from the utility drawer and he shone its flickering yellow beam into the gap, revealing a white plastic spoon, a Pathmark receipt and clumps of dust clinging to the floor like dirty wool.
The scratching came again, and with the tip of the bat, Kenny cleared away the dust, and there among the gray wool, plastic spoon, Pathmark receipt and motor oil, Houdini struggled trying to escape.
***********
The blood had dried overnight on the stairs and looked like small brown splotches of paint as Kenny descended, a trail leading down into the guts of the building as if down the throat of a dinosaur. The echoes of their own feet reached out before them, announcing their descent, an open invitation for a trap to any possible Broadway Gang members waiting. Yet the stairs seemed to go on and on and for a time, Kenny wondered if they would ever end, if maybe he would go clear through the center of the earth and come out... Where? Grandfather's? He could think of no place more different.
"Why you do this stupid thing?" the Latino boy asked, slowing his long stride so Kenny could keep up. "They're going to beat you up."
"Maybe," Kenny said. "And maybe I'll just sneak in and out before any of them find out? I don't need to be in there long."
"They'll find out. They'll see your white face and make it red," the boy said.
"Then why are you helping me if you think it won't work?"
The boy shrugged. "Maybe I go there to watch, eh? To see the black boys kick the shit out of a spy from South Paterson."
The boy's thin lips were laughing, but his deep black eyes were not. Kenny saw himself in the dark pools, like a drowning child with a Band-Aid on its nose. He saw the same reflection in the glass of the front door when they reached the lobby. Someone -- most likely the building superintendent -- had spread tape across the cracks where the rock had struck. Gone were the Spanish women and their laundry. Everything seemed empty and cold.
Outside, a group of boys still occupied the courts, dribbling the basketballs more slowly as Kenny and the Latino boy passed. None said anything or looked directly, but they whispered among themselves.
It's that white boy! Bet ya he's going back into the lots. He's as crazy as his momma.
Some of the smaller, more curious kids even trailed after Kenny, until they were dragged back and scolded.
Don't be stupid. There's nothing going to happen but him getting beat up.
The Latino boy slowed when they reached the Pathmark parking lot and stopped at the curb of West Broadway, staring passed the roadway to the side streets that led down to the lots. There was smoke in the air again, hanging above the tops of the gray still-occupied houses in-between, like a gray hand warning them to stay away. West Broadway had lost its glitter. The morning rush had already passed. Now only a few cars and buses moved up and down the hill, sad and dilapidated like the buildings on either side. The traffic lights blinked orange, then red, in a succession all the way down to the bridge.
"Well?" Kenny asked when the Latino boy made no move to cross. "What about it?"
"I still don't think it's a good idea, Kenny."
"Are you afraid?"
"Not here and now," the boy said with a long swallow as he stared down the street. "But I will be."
"Well, I'm not!" Kenny said. "You don't have to come all the way with me. Just show me where to go in and then you can run home to your momma if you want?"
A small angry flame flared in the Latino boy's dark eyes. But so did a look of relief. He nodded, then crossed, pausing again on the far side curb until Kenny caught up, then both started down the slanted sidewalk, following the trail Kenny had taken up the previous day. On either side, young black kids played in the yards of several buildings, nearly hidden by weeds as tall as they were, or broken fences which were scarred with the slogans of various gangs. They pointed, giggled and made a squealing retreat when they saw Kenny.
Then sliding down the slanted side street, Kenny came upon the ruins of the grocery, two by fours criss-crossing where the windows had been, the glass glittering on the sidewalk and store interior like a collection of precious jewels no one wanted. Everything was still wet from where the firehouses had struggled against the flames, black streaks marked the stone foundations.
"The gang did this?" Kenny asked, shocked.
"Last night," the Latino boy said.
"But why? Wasn't it enough that they broke up his carts?"
"They don't like white people and especially when they call the cops on them."
Kenny nodded slowly and gulped down the lump that had formed in his throat, staring instead across the street at the wide maw of South Street, the sharp broken edges of buildings rising up from the mounds like teeth. But there were no guards other than the silent ghosts that seemed to hover over the deeper shadows. Yet Kenny could hear the strains of music floating over the hills from some hidden hovel, just strained enough to be gang members singing.
"So where's this secret way you promised?" Kenny asked.
"I'm not sure how secret it'll be," the Latino boy said. "But we've got to go around to the southside to find it."
"Go ahead," Kenny said. "I'm right behind you."
They turned left on Lacy Street, keeping to the side where the houses still stood, sunlight shimmering over their shoulders and onto the mounds, giving the protruding pieces of junk the images of turn-of-the-century grave stones, lacking any mark as to whom was buried beneath the rubble.
Old women and young children bleated at them from the porches and windows of the buildings on their side, looking as frightened as Kenny felt. Of Kenny. Of his passing. Of a world suddenly changing under them. Their old and young eyes keeping watch on the mounds to keep them from spreading over the street during the night, to keep themselves from being buried in the process.
The lots ended with another street and more police barricades. Here, much of the rumble had rolled onto the asphalt, in some cases crushing cars where whole walls had collapsed. The slogans of the Latino gangs had not been totally obliterated here with the Spanish neighborhood right across the street. The very edge of the lots seemed in dispute now, and a few Puerto Rican boys looked up from them as Kenny and the Latino boy approached. They started to run then stopped, as they stared at Kenny.
The Latino boy said something in Spanish. They said something back. Then there was a heated flow of words between them and the Latino boy that seemed to climb over each other, one string connecting to the other until both sides stopped and their was silence.
"What is it?" Kenny asked.
"They don't want me to show you the way in."
"Why not?"
"Because it's still secret and they want to use it from time to time."
"They can use it all they want," Kenny said. "I just need it this one time."
"They think the gang will find out when you get caught, that you will tell everything after they beat on you a little."
"Then why don't I just climb up any of these paths?" Kenny asked, indicating the various gaps that showed between the buildings.
"Because you'll get lost in there or fall into one of the basements," the Latino boy said. "Most of the paths don't even go through to South Street, and only one path crosses over and goes all the way through the lots."
"And you won't show it to me unless they say it's okay?"
"These are my people, man," the Latino boy said. "I don't need them to beat me up for you."
"Ask again," Kenny said. "If they say no, I'll go back to South Street. But tell them that if I get caught there, I'll say your people helped me."
Again something like anger flared in the Latino boy's eyes, but he turned back to the others and spoke a quick string of Spanish. Again, the words seemed to duel around Kenny, with a few of the Latinos gesturing at Kenny with their sticks. Finally, the Latino boy sighed.
"They don't like it, but they'll let you go. I told them I'm not going with you. But when the gang catches you, you've got to say you came in a different way."
"All right," Kenny said.
Then, all three boys accompanied Kenny along the street to the edge of the lots, weaving in and out of the piles of junk. Some of it had been collected and sorted. Much of it had been dumped by rich white men from South Paterson who pulled up at night, throwing it from the backs of their pickup trucks.. There were many paths. Some of them well trodden from the days when the Latinos partied here, and they all looked the same to Kenny, rising up over the initial lip and then down into gully on the other side. Atlantis trees sprouted everywhere among the reeds, forming small jungles on both sides of the lip. In a year or two, the place would be overgrown and the paths that less easily discerned. Then, they stopped before the least likely looking of the paths.
"This is the one," the Latino boy said.
"This?" Kenny said, eyeing the path as it rose in a narrow lane up between two buckled brick walls. Two buildings had fallen together, leaving a cramped space through which only a skinny boy could fit. "It hardly looks right to me."
"Which is why it is still secret," the Latino boy said.
"Or a trap that'll wind me up in someone's basement," Kenny said. "How do I know this goes even to South Street."
"It does."
"But I don't know that. So I want you go come with me and prove it."
"Me? Go in there? No way."
"Only to South Street. Then you can turn back."
"I can't..." the Latino boy said, choking off the words as he glanced up over the mounds of rubble. His friends chattered in Spanish at him and he chattered back, drawing squawks of protest. "They don't want me to go either."
"Only to South Street," Kenny repeated.
"All right," the Latino boy said, looking as if he was deciding something that had been unsettled in his own mind. "To South Street, but no farther."
Then up through the gap he went, sneakered feet kicking up the dust. Kenny followed less certainly, pieces of brick and stone poking at the bottom of his foot through his ripped sole. He hadn't thought to change his shoe from the day before. Over the lip, the world changed into a moonscape of hills and valleys, junk protruding from everywhere like elbows and arms. The path seemed to follow a series of valleys and was largely covered by the height of the mounds. Weeds formed walls where they had been trust aside by frequent passage. The white and rusting shells of old stoves and refrigerators appeared on either side, a burial ground for unwanted appliances with rags and newspapers rotting at their feet.
Then, the Latino boy stopped and crouched, yanking Kenny down by the arm as voices sounded from somewhere ahead, the jocular voices of turf-kings patrolling the perimeters of their vast empire.
"Are they on this path?" Kenny whispered.
The Latino shook his head and indicated silence. The voices grew louder, then faded again behind them, headed for the extreme south side of the lots to take up guard.
"We're lucky," the Latino boy said. "If we came any later we wouldn't have gotten in."
"The question is how are you going to get out again?" Kenny asked.
"Run like hell, man, and hope they can't catch me," the Latino boy said sadly.
He moved on, following the path as it climbed finally out of the series of depressions and to the lip of wall that marked the former boundary of Latino lots. South Street gaped before them like the Grand Canyon. It had come much sooner than Kenny expected and the trip through the Latino quarter had revealed few secrets, other than the path itself and the few remaining pieces of unbartered scrap metal along its side.
The Latino boy dropped down the flat face of a brick wall to the sidewalk below and urged Kenny to hurry.
"I hear them," he said. "There are more coming."
Kenny leaped down, twisting his ankle on a loose stone. He cursed, tested the limb, and cringed only reluctantly with pain.
"Thanks," he said. "I should have trusted you."
The Latino boy shrugged and pointed towards a stairway across the street, which was largely covered with draping weeds.
"That takes you where you want to go," he said. "To the pump house, then to the northside. But I don't expect you'll get passed the pumphouse without being seen. A lot of the gang hang out there. It's where they have their games."
"The fights?"
The Latino boy nodded. "They catch you, they'll make you fight somebody. Maybe one of my old gang. So don't let them catch you. You can't win."
Kenny grinned and touched the Band-Aid on his nose. "We'll see," he said. "You sure you don't want to come?"
"Yes, I'm sure," the Latino boy said, and watched as Kenny crossed the street and brushed back the weeds to climb the stairs.
Kenny paused only briefly at the mouth of the stairs, aware of the Latino boy's slowly shaking head, as if he didn't expect to see Kenny again.
"Good luck," he said, then started down South Street towards Lacy Street, following the path Kenny had taken the day before.
Kenny climbed the set of a dozen disintegrating stairs, dust and old leaves crunching under his feet. Shards of broken glass threatened to poke through the open wound of his shoe. Green glass. Cheap wineglass and whisky glass. He strode passed each as the stairs narrowed and the thick belly of the mounds on either side squeezed it slowly out of the existence, weeds and tree roots poking down into his face.
What if they stopped altogether? What if the Latino boy was in league with them after all, leading him into some boxed canyon from which there was no escape? The walls seemed to grow higher and steeper with brick and concrete now revealing the basement level of a one-time apartment building.
But ahead, the land spread again as the walls fell away into the sides of junk mounds. A clear path showed between them with sheets of plasterboard laying across the mud patches like a bridge, showing the muddy imprint of feet, which had passed this way before. It cheered Kenny to see signs of other travelers though their knowing of this path disturbed him.
It goes all the way through, the Latino boy had said.
Then others could have come the other way, or from the pumphouse, or down from the tips of any of the mounds that seemed to bound the path in, little round topped hills of junk that seemed like Everest from here -- yet not totally inaccessible. Kenny could feel others moving just beyond them, following other paths to and from various little places the gang kept secret.
Then, the path forked and Kenny stopped.
The Latino boy had said nothing about a fork in the road. Which way was the right way? Or did they both lead to the same place, gathering again at some deeper portion of the lots? Perhaps one was a blind, leading to the very basement drop the Latino boy had warned him against, into which Kenny might fall and not get out again.
He eased down the right fork for a space of time. It delved deeper into the earth, twisting right, then left, weeds poking out of the sides of the hills an archway of golden swords.
He didn't trust it. It had a dank, mildew scent that suggested unmoving water, the kind of which one found in a basement or ditch. He hurried back to the fork and took the left path. Immediately it started to climb, making him feel better for a time until it rose above the reeds and left him standing at the peak of one of the mounds, then vanished.
Around him on three sides were three small valleys, each containing a treasure of trash. A set of interior spiraling stairs lay on its side in one, like the bones of a dinosaur that had crawled there and died, its spokes sticking up at precarious angles. Kenny recognized them. Some of the gang had carried them during his run from the lots. They made brutal clubs.
In one of the other valleys, strips of carpet had been stretched on the dirt to dry. Only God knew what they wanted with them, but the pattern of them marked the side of the hill in blue, red, green and yellow stripes with a small circle of greenish water at the bottom.
Weeds, stone, concrete and bits of twisted metal filled the remaining valley, dirt seemingly squeezed out from between them from the shifting steel hand of a bulldozer. But Kenny's gaze was drawn to the spiral of smoke rising blackly from the far north side of the lots, like a tornado spinning down towards him, its bottom bright red from the flames that leaped up from the roofs of the remaining buildings. The bums had likely set themselves on fire again during the crisp early morning. Arches of water rose high into the air from the spouts of firetruck hoses, they seemed frozen, forming a gateway of crystal or ice. Waves of the moisture struck Kenny as he stood, flavored with the scent of fire. It pressed heavily against his chest. He could hardly breathe.
Then, from between the cropping of stone and weeds, he heard the gurgle of a stream, water gushing from some remaining main that the city had failed to turnoff. He slid down the stones searching for it among the protruding weeds, and found the narrow broken pipe. The water gushed forth from it and down the flat gray face of a great boulder, gathering in a palm of stone farther down before falling again, more sharply. He followed it, shoving the reeds aside as he did, finding footing as it turned sharply left into yet another lower valley.
Rats scurried ahead of his advance, though he only saw their movement among the tall golden stalks, like ghostly figures moving ahead of him on this new path. But it was a faint path, ghosts or not, and he struggled to keep to the stream as it twisted down into cuts of stone, finding new and inventive ways to escape at some unpredictable angle in an unpredictable direction.
All the time, voices grew louder around him -- whispered and shouted, crying and laughing voices that reminded him all too much of mother's ghosts, always just beyond the next rise or behind a bed of weeds, always gone by the time Kenny reached where they had been. Finally, the gurgling little brook came to a halt, dropping down a steep wall of gray stone into a great green pool. This lapped at the stone and concrete foundation of the shabby red building Kenny had seen from a distance.
The pump house!
There was no glass in the windows any more, nor much paint upon the wooden upper half to give it color. But the roof still had shingles, and sprawled across these was a group of about twenty black boys. Like beached seals taking in the sun, their arms draped over their eyes in lazy ecstasy.
They hardly even noticed Kenny at first and looked over only when Kenny's feet accidentally sent a shower of dirt and stone down over the lip of the drop, plopping into the pool at the bottom. Then one of the boys leaped up and shouted.
"It's the white boy! That fucking white boy is here!"
It was as if the boy could not believe what he saw. He didn't move at first after raising alarm, his arm lowering again to his side after pointing Kenny out, too heavy to hold up in his shock. They all bore the same expression, even as they uncovered the arms from their eyes.
It wasn't just Kenny standing there, but the whole of South Paterson, slipping in on their turf from the shadows of Downtown. When the trance finally broke, they were angry, and they shouted and waved, the echo of their voices carrying through the lots with the wail of a siren, picked up by other voices deeper into the sea of mounds. It called to those who had gone north to watch the fire, drawing them back.
At first, Kenny didn't move, listening to the sound of it, seeing the glint of moving bodies against the horizon, figures growing larger and larger as they bobbed up and down from the mound tops. Rumors estimating the size of the gang had always seemed extravagant to Kenny, twenty, thirty, forty, sometimes even fifty--- but the number that flowed over the hills now far exceeded that, by a hundred or two hundred, Kenny couldn't even count. Row upon row of them like an army of worker ants descending upon someone's picnic, a picnic in which Kenny was the main course.
Kenny wanted to turn and run -- he could have made a chase of it and maybe gotten to South Street before they caught him. Yet he couldn't make his limbs move. It was as if there was no point. The world began and ended with the boundaries of the lots. To seek escape was to fall off the edge.
He waited and watched as they closed in, the swarm of brown faces moving towards him now from three sides. Some had discovered the path, which he had taken, others rushed headlong up and down mounds and over piles of junk, swinging their clubs.
"The white boy's here!" many of them shouted, the chant of it pounding against Kenny the way their warnings had in the stairwell back in the projects the day before. When they had drawn blood from him and chased him up to the arms of his mother.
Kenny shuddered, then turned, sliding down a narrow gorge beside the falling water, his torn shoe slipping on the wet stone as he descended. He clutched yellow weeds, using them like rope, some pulling out at the roots. Finally, he was down, standing on a small peninsula of stone. It jutted into the greenish water like a tongue with the flat stone foundation of the pump house to one side of the waterway and the slowly climbing hills to the other. But the water here stank. A green foam formed upon its surface, smelling of used laundry water and urine. Only a few flat stones offered any way across and they were covered with a green slime that he didn't trust any more than the water.
Above and behind him, the gang appeared, face after face forming a fence of black flesh that he could not penetrate. There was no retreat now. There was only the path of stone and he leaped across it in a sudden surge of desperation, stones slapping the water from above, splashing water onto his pants legs. He half expected the contact to fizzle and steam and eat through the fabric. The stones rocked beneath his feet as he crossed, threatening to spill him into the pool.
When he reached the other side he stopped. No one had started down the slope after him. No one had moved from the roof of the pump house either. They stared and he stared, and all might have stayed like that except for one small black kid who might have been one of the newer recruits.
"Get that white boy!" he screamed, breaking the spell which held the others in place, sending the stream of black down the varying gorges and gullies like flowing lava from the exploding mouth of a volcano. Some oddity had those paths ending on the wrong side of the water, giving Kenny time to scramble up into the hills on the north side before the others could cross. But cross the water they did, cursing as the water stained them, promising Kenny worse for the pursuit.
"You're gonna pay for this, white boy!" they said.
He was closer to the fire now, though he could no longer see the building or the streams of uplifted water fighting their flames. But the smoke had settled into the valleys here like a thick white milk, obliterating anything their contained. A path led down into the closest valley, but was lost after that. Kenny hesitated. There were yawning basements and perhaps worse waiting to trap him. Stones kicked up on the soil near his heals. The first volley from the gang that had landed on his side of the pool, rushing up the side of the hill.
He plunged into the smoke, feeling his way slowly as things popped out at him, the arm of a shopping cart or the sharp end of a broken water pipe. Metal rumbled under his feet or slid out from under him as he rose again up to the heights of the next mound.
But the gang had not be idle, they had swept around the pump house and pool, diving in and out of valleys until they were on all sides of him, rising up each of the slopes of the hill upon which he stood, grinning as they came, patting their palms with pieces of banister or pipe.
"Hey, hey, white boy! Come for a little visit? Maybe you want to play a game with us?"
"What kind of game?" Kenny asked, remembering vaguely something the Latino boy had said.
They make people fight.
Like gladiators. He shivered and searched the ground for a stick or stone, but this hilltop seemed void of both, just a bare round top of dirt that had solidified under rain and snow into a mound of weeds. And the gang rose, stopping just out of arm's reach, laughing, something jostling in their midst as something-- someone-- was shoved towards the front.
"You want to fight, white boy? You want to join the gang?"
They make people fight, the Latino boy had said.
"No!" Kenny shouted. "I just want to look around. That's all. Why can't I look and then go home?"
"But you gotta fight, white boy! That's the rules!" some of the black kids said, still shoving someone towards the front, finally pushing him into the clearing near to where Kenny stood, a staggering, already brutalized figure with blood dripping down his temple. A bleeding, bent and angry Latino boy glaring at Kenny, his hard gaze saying he had come to fight. Not because he wanted to see the lots the way Kenny did, but because he wanted to leave them -- and only one could leave here standing.
"Fight, white boy!" the Latino boy growled, and with his hands in fists slowly climbed up the side of the mound and the waiting, unwilling Kenny at it's top. "Come on! Fight!"
Kenny took a long breath and then swung his fist as hard as possible straight into that Latino boy's face.