Harlan Ellison - Web of the City

“I don’t dig you, spick man…”

And he whaled in.

The knife came out and up and around in one movement that was all lightning and swiftness. Rusty slipped sidewise, lost his footing and went down, his shoulder striking hard against the base of the lathe. He saw Candle strut back and get ready to pounce. Then there was all that knife in his vision, and he knew he was going to get it at last. Not later, not sometime never, but here, gutted and cut, right here on the floor, and there was nothing he could do about it.

Candle rose high, and his arm drew back, and then his arm was dragged back of his head by someone else. Rusty looked up and everything was out of focus, and his head hurt; but a man with dull red hair had Candle around the throat, had the knife-hand bent back double. Candle screamed high and loud, over the whine of the machines, and the man twisted the arm an inch more.

The blade clattered to the floor.

The man kicked it out of sight under a drill press, into sawdust debris. Then the man had Candle by the front of his dirty T-shirt, was leaning in close, and saying, “You get the hell out of here, or I’ll turn you over to the Principal. I’ll tell him you lied to get me out of my shop while you attacked a pupil with a switch. With your record around here, Shaster, you couldn’t stand it. Now beat it!” He shoved Candle Shaster away from him, sent him spinning into the door.

Candle threw it open, and was gone in a moment.

Rusty still found himself unable to focus properly, but Mr. Pancoast was lifting him to his feet and yelling to the other boys, “Okay, let’s get back to work.”

The rising clatter of shop work filled his universe, and then he was out in the basement hall, in the cool depths of the school. “Sit down,” Pancoast directed him, pushing him gently toward the stairs.

Rusty sat down heavily, felt the incessant throbbing in his shoulder, and for the first time realized he had struck his head also. It throbbed mercilessly.

Pancoast slid down next to the boy. He was a short man, with hair just a few shades darker than orange. His face was tired, but there was something alive in his eyes that gave the lie to his features. He had been dealing with high-school boys so long that he had difficulty with adults, so geared to the adolescent mind were his thoughts.

He pursed his lips, then asked, “What was that all about, Rusty? I thought after that last scrape you were going to stay away from the Cougars, from Candle and his bunch.”

Rusty Santoro tapped gently at the bruise that ached on his head. He swung his body back and forth, as though he were caught in some tremor that would not release him. His entire body shook. The after-effects were setting in; they always did, just this way. He shook and quivered and wished he’d never heard of the Cougars.

“I told ’em I was quitting. Yesterday. They don’t like that. They tell me nobody leaves the gang. I said I did.”

Pancoast rubbed the short stubble on his small chin. He stared levelly at Rusty. “That’s all, Rusty?”

“Isn’t that enough?”

Pancoast replied, “Look, Rusty. When they caught you, along with those other Cougars, trying to break into that liquor store, I went out for you. Remember?” He waited for an answer. Finally, Rusty nodded his remembrance.

The teacher went on. “I had them release you into my custody, Rusty, and you’ve been good as your word ever since. At first I thought you were like all the rest of them—hard, no real guts, just a little killer inside—but you’ve shown me you’re a man. You’ve got real woodworking talent, Rusty. You could be a sculptor, or a designer, even an architect, if you wanted to be.”

Rusty was impatient. Being praised like this, in the crowd he ran with, usually meant a slap was coming. “So?”

“So, we’re both going to have to go over there, Rusty, and let them know for sure that you’re out of the gang, that you don’t want any part of it.”

Rusty shook his head. “It ain’t that easy. You don’t understand, Mr. Pancoast. It ain’t like being a member of Kiwanis or the P.T.A. It ain’t like nothin’ else in the world. When you’re in, you’re in. And the only thing that gets you out is if you land in the can, or you get a shank in your gut. That’s what I tried to tell ya when ya made me quit.”

He stared at the teacher with mute appeal. He was boxed in, and he knew it. There was going to have to be a face-up soon, and he wasn’t sure he was man enough.

Carl Pancoast leaned closer to the boy, put an arm on his knee, tried to speak to him so the words went deeper than the ears. So they went right down to the core. He had to make it with this kid. There had been too many others who had come by him, like lights in the night, and he had never reached out to take that light in his hands, to stop it from rushing down that road to destruction. He had tried with Rusty Santoro—a good boy, a damned good boy—and he wasn’t going to fail now.

“Look, Rusty. Let me tell you something. You can go on doing what the Cougars do, all your life, and wind up the way Tony Green did. You knew Tony. You remember what happened to him?”

Pancoast could see the memory in Rusty’s eyes. He could see the vision of Tony Green, who had been top trackman at Pulaski, laid out on a slab, with a D.O.A. tag around his big toe. A zip gun .22 slug in his head. Dead in a rumble.

“Remember why he got killed, Rusty?”

Pancoast was pushing thoughts tightly, forcing them to the fore, making Rusty analyze his past. It wasn’t a pleasant past.

Drenched in violence. Product of filth and slum and bigotry. Mothered by fear. Fathered by the terror of nonconformity and the fate that waited for those who did not conform. Rusty remembered. His stomach tightened, and his seventeen-year-old brain spun, but he remembered.

Tony Green, tall and slim and dead. Stretched out on a slab, because someone had danced with his steady girl at a club drag. Nothing more important. Just that.

“I’m through, Mr. Pancoast. You don’t have to worry about that. I’m through, but man, it’s gonna be rough all the way.”

Carl Pancoast clapped the boy on the back. It would be tough all right, tough as banana skins, but that was the way it had to be. Not only for himself—and god knows he had a stake in this boy; his own redemption for the sins of failure he had committed with other boys—but for Rusty. Because Rusty had to live out there in that stinking city. He had to live and learn and sweat beside those kids.

But, Carl Pancoast swore inside himself, Rusty Santoro was going to come out of it whole. Come out of it with his guts and his mind intact. For Rusty, and for himself.

“What are you going to do?”

Rusty bit his lip, shrugged. “Don’t know, man. But I got to do something. They ain’t gonna give me much longer. Maybe I’ll go over there tonight, club night. Maybe I’ll go over and have a talk with some of the kids.”

Pancoast’s forehead assumed V-lines of worry. “Want me to go along? Most of the Cougars know me.”

Rusty sloughed away his offer.

“No go. They know you, but you’re still out of it, man. Way out. You’re boss-type, and they don’t dig that even a little. I come walking in with you, and I’m dead from the start… No, I can handle it.”

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

“Damned 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.

It’s going to be rough, he thought. Real rough.

Rough as banana skins.

He went back to his class, worried as hell.