Harlan Ellison - Web of the City

Rusty cut her off with a half-cough, half-chuckle that had been waiting to emerge for two semesters. It stopped her. She licked her thin, icy lips.

She started again. “I’m, I’m very sorry to hear about your sister. I’ve seen her many times in the halls and she seemed like an intelligent little girl with a remarkable capacity of learning.”

It died. It just fell down and croaked. Rusty stared at her with hatred bubbling in his eyes. Bull! That was what she was spitting, just plain bull!

“Whaddaya want from me, Miss Clements?”

Her look became one of huntedness. To Rusty it was sadistically fascinating to make her squirm, as she made him squirm in class. She hated Puerto Ricans. She had often spoken of them as “You People” as though they were untouchables, and now one of Those People had her wiggling on the end of the rod.

She tried to start several times, then gave it up and murmured a good-bye. She started for the door, but Rusty stopped her with a word. She turned and the real reason for her appearance here came out in a flooding rush.

“You’ve got to stop this running around and—and looking for people, Santoro!” She spat out his name as though it were coated with alum. It typified her attitude in class; bitter, nasty, tactless. “You’ve got to buckle down and stop this senseless, this stupid…” She waggled her hands for emphasis, came up with another thought entirely. “Do you want to flunk History?”

Rusty eyed her coldly. It was apparent, she was threatening him with the one weapon at her disposal. She would lay the skids to him in school. Well, then, okay, lady. Do your sleazy damnedest!

He shrugged. “Don’t care.”

She bit her lip. Desperation rang in her voice. “I’m warning you, Santoro,” her voice rose sharply, “if you don’t cease this childish melodramatic detective business, I’m going to take you to the Principal. You wouldn’t like that. You listen to me!” she was almost screaming, for Rusty had half-turned away in restrained fury.

The bedroom door popped open and Mrs. Givens emerged, her plump little hands twitching in brown circles. “Go ’way! Go on, go ’way! You making more sickness here! G’wan, get out!” She lapsed into deep Spanish, and the force of her tirade drove the bone-thin teacher before her, as though whiplashed.

Miss Clements cast a frantic look at Rusty who had turned his back and was clutching the fabric of the easy chair with unbelievable tenseness. He was deaf to her, his eyes were closed to her. School? Nothing, next to finding the man in the camel’s hair coat. No matter how much she warned him, and cajoled and threatened, he was on his way somewhere, and no one would stop him. No failure meant anything, next to that final failure.

Mrs. Givens’ low but furious words sent the teacher to the door. Miss Clements tried to hurl one last threat at the boy, but the little Puerto Rican woman had the door open and the teacher was outside before she could stop herself.

The door slammed in her face, softly.

Rusty was alone with Mrs. Givens. She knew enough to say nothing. She went back to the bedroom, to resume her vigil, and as she passed within, the trembling words, “So much trouble…” trailed like smoke behind her.

Rusty stood clutching the fabric of the easy chair till it ripped with the intensity of his grip. Then he dropped his hands free, and sank into the chair, despair choking him.

That was the first incident.

The second incident was much less complicated, affected Rusty less violently and promised much more trouble.

He had left the apartment, again pacing the street in search of an answer. Several times he left the beaten track of the neighborhood, and sought nothing at all on the rooftops, in the big weed-high lot between a deserted dry cleaning plant and the back of a row of apartment buildings, in the alleys. He searched and found nothing. The city had drawn in its lines to him. He was seeking and they wanted no part of him as he trudged that road.

He received the warning as he entered Tom-Tom’s joint. The baby-fat sphere that was the soda jerk came out of the back room, the shine of sweat across his forehead. Nipping at the Tokay again. Well, that was okay, too. Everybody had a skeleton. Tom-Tom’s didn’t rattle as much as some.

“I got a message for you,” the fat little man said, coming up behind the counter.

Rusty had swung up automatically on a stool. It was the way he did it when he came in, and reflex carried him. “From who?”

Tom-Tom shook his head in an indefinite bobble. “Don’t know, y’know. Some kid, one of these kids that hang with the little kids around the stoop up the street, y’know, he brought it around, said to give it to you.”

He reached up onto the mirror and from behind a stud that held the mirror in place he withdrew a folded envelope. Dirty and frayed. He handed it to Rusty, and moved away.

Rusty tore it open sloppily, and drew out the single sheet of notepaper. It was from a three-ring notebook such as the type used in his high school.

In a painstaking print that tried valiantly to be anonymous, the note said, STAY OUT OF CHEROKEE TURF AND STOP TRYING TO STICK YOUR BASTARD NOSE IN WHERE IT DON’T BELONG. COUGARS.

So that was the second warning, was it? Now the gang was afraid he was getting too close to something. What the hell was all this? So far Rusty had found out nothing, really. He had two bits of information that were valuable and a round cipher of nothing for the rest. He sought a man in a camel’s hair coat, and somehow that man was tied up with dope. Other than that—nothing.

He read the note again. The Cougars had changed a lot since he had been Prez. They were wilder now, though they had never been chicken-gut while he was top man, and there seemed to be something about them they did not want known, even to the gutter-runners who knew them so well.

Rusty tapped the note against his fingernail for a moment. Then he laid it down on the counter. A wet ring, left from a Coke bottle, darkened through, and the paper lay flat to the micarta surface. He stared at it for a long time, and then folded it up, put it in his pocket. Bull! It meant nothing, except that someone was putting the screws to the neighborhood. Whoever had shuffled the Cougars onto him was not going to stop with anything as simple as this. He wondered for a moment why they hadn’t just taken him into the alley and leaned on him heavily. Then he remembered the Beast and the night before, and he knew they were not going to fool around any more than they were forced to.

Rusty had a silent, hulking protector there and that bothered him, too.

For a minute he contemplated going after the gang, trying to wring out of them the names of the persons who had made them send this note. It was obvious there was a line of communication between that Mirsky kid and the Cougars, or the gang would never have known he had been looking. The tie-up between such live enemies as the Cherokees and the Cougars brought the first faint tingle of tenseness to him. It had to be a strong tie, and one that put the fear of something into those knife-happy tenement kids. Rusty grew worried, and almost immediately discarded the idea of going looking for the gang.

First, they were probably well gone by now. Second, he did not want to press his luck with shoving them. Once he had beaten Candle fairly. The second time he had been saved by the Beast, but a third time might shove the juvies a little too far.

Tom-Tom walked back up, stopped in front of Rusty, and leaned a plump, pink arm on the counter. “Bad news?”

Rusty looked up, and the natural belligerence he felt at being so helpless emerged. “Good news. They got a special on, down at the undertakers. They’ll let me have you embalmed for halfprice. Special on all busybodies.”