Harlan Ellison - Web of the City

“No, I can handle it.”

He stood up unsteadily, clung to the bannister for a minute. It rocked under his weight.

“Lousy school,” he mumbled, slamming the banister, “gonna fall apart under ya.”

He walked back into the shop, and a minute later Pancoast heard the chisel on the ruined chair leg. Violently. Could Rusty come all the way back? Could he purge the kill stuff from his blood?

It was going to be rough. Real rough.

He went back to his class, worried as hell.

After school, Rusty avoided Carl Pancoast. The teacher had done too much for him, and whatever was coming, was going to have to come to him alone. Rusty slouched against the sooty brick wall of Pulaski High and drew deeply on a cigarette. The kids avoided him. The stench of trouble was all about him.

Finally, Louise came out of the building, books clutched tightly to her chest. She saw Rusty, and stopped. Rusty knew what was running around scared inside her head: should she go to join her steady, walk home with him, stop to have a Coke with him—or should she walk past and get the hell away from what might be coming?

It was a big choice. One way she would lose Rusty—he was like that, just like that—and the other she might lose her pretty face.

Rusty knew what was happening within her, and he abruptly felt so alone, so terribly desperately alone, he had to remove the burden of decision from her, had to hold onto one person in this thing… if only for a short while. He pushed away from the wall. He walked over to her.

“Wanna stop for a Coke, Weezee?”

Louise Chaplin, more “Weezee” than Louise, was a highly attractive girl, whose natural beauty was marred by imperfect application of makeup. Her eyes were a clear blue, her skin smooth, her hair a rich chestnut brown, drawn back into a full, rippling ponytail. Her young body was already making attractive bulges and curves within her sweater and skirt. She was aware of her growing body, and so the sweater was a size and a half too small.

Now her eyes darkened, and she blinked rapidly, pausing a moment before answering; an agonizing moment for Rusty. She finally answered, “Sure. Guess so. What’s new?”

It was like that all the way down the street.

Chit-chat. She was scared. Really, terribly scared, and though Weezee wasn’t a member of the Cougars’ girls’ auxiliary—the Cougie Cats—she was still in Cougar turf, and if a war started, she would be one of the first to get it. Right after Rusty.

The streets were crowded. Late Friday afternoon, with fat Polish women going from butcher to butcher, trying to get the best cuts of meat for the weekend; little kids playing hopscotch and stick-ball on sidewalks, against walls; radios blasting from every direction with the Giants or the Dodgers beating the pants off someone. Normal day, with a sun, with gutters dirtied by candy wrappers and dogs that had been curbed, with the sound of the subway underfoot, with everything normal. Including the stink of death that hung not unknown above everything else.

It was funny how the territory—the turf—knew when something was burning. Even the old women in their anti-macassared single rooms, waiting for their government checks, knew the gangs were about to rise. The shopkeepers knew it, and they feared for their windows. The cops knew it and they began to straighten in harness. The cabbies knew it, and they shifted territory, hurrying back uptown to catch the safe Madison Avenue crowd.

Everyone knew it, yet a word was never spoken, an action never completed. It hung rank in the air, dampening everyone’s mood of weekend joviality. Rusty walked through it, dragging his feet as if he were underwater.

Weezee walked along beside him, clutching her books to her firm young breasts, too tightly, till her fingers whitened out on the notebook. The scare was so high in her, it came out of her pores, and Rusty wished he had not approached her. They were steadies, but their feeling went no deeper than movies, casual loving, kicks and mutual respect. Was it enough to die for? No sense dragging her into this.

But at the same time, he was perversely glad she was there; he was determined to make her sweat, if he had to sweat. They turned in at Tom-Tom’s Ice Cream Parlor. Rusty gave the place a quick look-over before entering, and then pushed open one of the wooden doors with the glass almost covered by soft drink advertisements. They walked past the counter, past the magazine racks, to the booths in the back.

Weezee slipped into one far back, and even as Rusty watched, drew in on herself, slid closer to the wall, made herself ready for what had to come.

Rusty sat down across from her, two-fingered a cigarette from the crush-box in his jacket pocket. He offered it to the girl, but she shook her head slowly. Her eyes were very blue and very frightened. He lit the cigarette with a kitchen match and settled back, one foot up on the bench, watching her steadily.

Finally Tom-Tom came back to get their order.

He was a stubby man, built like a beachball, with rolls of baby fat under his chin, where a neck should have been but was not, with faint lines where his wrists joined his hands… like the lines on a baby’s wrists. He had been in the neighborhood a long time, and his hair was white, but his appearance was always the same. So was his service. Bad.

Rusty looked across at Weezee. “Coke?” She nodded. “Make it a pair,” he said to Tom-Tom.

The beachball rolled away, shaking its head. These damned kids sat here for three hours over one lousy Coke, and if he tried to bounce them he’d get a staved-in candy counter for his trouble. Damned neighborhood. One of these days, he was going to move, open a high-class little shop in the Village somewhere.

Rusty sat silently watching his girl. Weezee bit her red, red lips, and her hands moved nervously. Finally, she asked, “Why are you quitting the Cougars?”

Rusty made a vague movement with his hand, uneasy that she had broken the law. She had let her feelings be known, had asked him a straight question he could not goof out of answering. “Dunno. Just tired, I guess.”

Her face grew rigid. “It’s that goddamned teacher, that Pancoast, ain’t it?” she asked.

Rusty leaned forward an inch, said tightly, “Just forget about him. He’s okay. He saved my tail from the can a month ago, that’s all I know.”

“But it is him, isn’t it?”

“For Christ’s sake, can’t you knock it off? I just quit because I wanted to, and that’s it, period.”

She shook her head in bewilderment. “But you was Prez of the Cougars for three years. They ain’t gonna like you leeching out that way.”

“That’s their row to hoe.”

She tried desperately to pierce the shield he had erected before his thoughts. What he was doing was suicide and she felt a desperate need to communicate with him, to get him to see what he was doing to himself—and to her. For as Rusty’s drag, she was as marked as he.

“Are you chick-chick?”

Rusty slammed forward against the table. His hand came down flat with a smash, and his eyes burned fiercely. “Look, don’t you never call me that, unnerstand. I’m no more chickie than anybody else.” His face smoothed out slowly, the anger ebbed away even more slowly.

Finally, he added, “Weezee, I been runnin’ the streets with the Cougars for three years. I got in lots of trouble with ’em. Look at me. I’m seventeen, an’ I got a record. Nice thing to know? Like hell it is! I been usin’ my fists since I could talk, and I’m just up to here with it, and that’s on the square. I just wanted out, is all.”

The girl shook her head. The brown hair swirled in its ponytail, and she began twirling it nervously. “They’re gonna make it rough on you, Rusty.”