Harlan Ellison - Web of the City

Candle stepped back for the death-swing and it came up like a jet from around the stout boy’s knees. Rusty jerked sidewise, throwing out one leg. Candle went down in a heap and the hankie popped from his mouth with a snap.

Rusty was on his feet in an instant and Candle lay there staring up at him, the hankie hanging ludicrously from Rusty’s thin lips.

The gang went insane. “Kill him! Jab him! Knife! Knife! Knife!” they screamed, and one hand shot out of the crowd to snatch away Candle’s blade from where it lay in the dirt. Another hand caught Rusty’s arm and shoved him forward. He stumbled and stopped.

“Get him, he was gonna put you down!”

Rusty stared down at Candle, lying on his elbows, at his feet. There was a queer mixture of fear and surliness on the boy’s heavy features. He had lost, but he was going to be angry about dying. It made no sense, but that was the way he looked. Rusty stood silently as the storm of directions grew behind him.

As he stood there, Candle’s cool, green eyes met his own and he saw right to the center of the boy. He saw all the garbage that Candle had substituted for guts, for integrity, for honesty; and Rusty was frightened again. Not so much frightened at how close, but scared because this was the way he had been, before Pancoast had showed him there were other ways than the ways of the gutter.

He knew he had slipped back and knew the gang would now expect him to resume his position at the head of the Cougars. He didn’t want that! He wasn’t going back to all that. Inside him, two warring natures fought for the mind of Rusty Santoro.

The hand holding the knife moved itself, of its own volition, and the blade reversed itself—overhand, so that one downward stroke would slash the throat of the terrified Candle. The stout boy sat looking up at Rusty, knowing his life hung by a thread, hung on that thread of decency—that he called cowardice—he knew was in the boy.

Rusty moved an inch forward and the gang went crazy.

“Kill him! Kill him! Knife ’im!”

Rusty tried to stop his feet, tried to say to himself, this is no good, but the days of the gang were back with him, smothering him like a blanket and he knew the only way he would be safe from an enemy was to kill the enemy. His arm came back and the blade poised there in nothingness for an instant, then started the downward arc that would slice deeply. The hand moved, and then it stopped.

All the hatred passed away. Everything was clear again. Clear and smooth.

“Clear and smooth,” Rusty said, to no one at all.

No one understood.

But they understood what he did next.

He put the blade under his boot and with all his strength bent upward. The blade did not give and he pulled up his foot, brought it down with a crack on the blade. The knife snapped in two, at the base of the steel, and Rusty let it lay there.

“I’m through,” he said.

No one argued with him.

This time no one demanded a stand, for he had proved his strength in the only way they could understand. Now that he had proved it, he was free. Free of them forever and the days would not be filled with wandering and hating.

“Anybody going back to town?” he asked.

There was a tacit agreement that the affair was concluded, an agreement that no one would help Candle to his feet. They walked away, back to their cars and Fish gave the finger-circle to Rusty, to show him the outcome had been right by him.

“I got room in mine,” Fish said, and nodded his head in the direction of the battered Plymouth.

“Ain’t you afraid I’ll whocko on your floor again?”

Fish laughed, then, and they walked to the car together. Only then, when she called from behind, did Rusty remember Weezee.

“Rusty?”

He turned and looked at her and there was nothing really wrong. She was what she was and for the time being she was all the woman he needed; weak and watery and scared and only doing her best by living the rules as they’d been put to her; building a sin once in a bit, and trying to make it from day to day—that was the best anyone could do, till a passage opened up.

He walked back and stood before her, not saying anything. He still had his pride. He still had to let her make the first move.

“I’m—I’m glad ya won, Rusty…”

He let the slow smile build off the corner of his mouth and he fumbled with his jacket to show it had been nothing really. Then he said, “Wanna go back to Tom-Tom’s with us and have a soda?”

She nodded brightly, the past wiped away like clouds from the sky and he decided to let it settle that way.

What was the use of carrying the hurt? It didn’t matter. There were worse hurts than this little one. He took her with him in the way the rules decreed. Not by the hand, gently, as he wanted to for that would have left her confused—but with the hand at the back of her neck. Commanding, leading, directing, roughly, the way a mean stud did it to his broad.

She came up close to him as they walked back and her body said she was his girl again, to whatever extent he wanted her.

Strangely, though, Rusty felt no heat for her, felt no desire to be the big man. She was his girl and he would treat her as he was expected to treat her, but the distantness of their relationship was too profound, too unexplainable, for him to try to love her.

They were together and that was enough for the time being. Alone was bad enough. Together was at least not alone.

In the car, with the others behind them, churning up the dirt of the dumps, with the dual exhausts deep-throating a challenge at the land and the city, they tooled around in a winner’s circle, and sped around the grounds once, like a parading matador with the downed bull still bleeding in the center of the arena.

Candle lay where he had fallen.

The days were finished for him, too. Now he was a mean stud, but he wasn’t the big man. He was just another cat without a tail. He knew his place now and if he tried to overstep it, they would toss this affair at him. That was the code. Silent and eternal, that was it on skates.

The cars tooled around, honked their horns at one another, missed colliding because, hell, that was the way to do it, and ripped back toward town on the shore drive.

It seemed like a good day, a free day, the last day of it all.

Rusty settled back with the hankie around his bleeding hand and let the peace of release flood through his body. He was out of the woods at last.

Free at last. Free of the past and free to move ahead.

He was dead wrong.

rusty santoro

dolores

the war

News spread down through the neighborhood like a swollen river rushing to the sea. By the time he got home, after the many congratulations in the streets—as though he had actually accomplished something—Dolores was waiting, pride and affection shining in her face. She rushed to him as he entered and kissed him warmly on the mouth.

“I heard,” she said.

He grunted a noncommittal answer and shoved past.

Dolo turned uncomprehending eyes on his back, and said, “What’s a’ matter? You got the botts or somethin’?”

Rusty flopped into the chair beside the TV, and threw a leg over the arm. “I don’t like you runnin’ with the Cougie Cats.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“I just don’t like it is all.”

She bristled and flipped her ponytail insultingly. “That doesn’t much matter to me. I got my life, you got yours. You wanna stand with Candle like that, you do it. I wanna split with the kids, that’s my biz, none of yours.”

Rusty slung the leg to the floor and leaned forward, hands clasped between his knees. He stared intently at the pretty girl with the brown hair. He loved her more than anyone he had ever known. Since she was old enough to talk he had been her self-appointed guardian. Her addition to the family had not been a loss of affection from his mother and father, for there had been little enough of that to begin with. Instead, she had been a light toward which he could direct his own affection. And she had needed it, received it with gratitude. But as she had grown older, with the poison of the neighborhood in which they lived flowing through her young veins, she had changed—grown apart from Rusty. He needed her as he knew she needed him. His relationship with Weezee could never have been complete, or deep, for they took each other lightly, as playthings; but his love for his sister was a completely realized thing. Now he was deprived of the one outlet for his warmth, and having introduced her to the Cats, he felt more than just responsible for her. He felt as though he had given her cancer.