Harlan Ellison - Web of the City

After school, Rusty avoided Mr. 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, her books clutched tightly to her chest. She saw Rusty, and stopped. Rusty knew what was pelting around 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. It was tough all right.

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 on to one person in this thing… if only for a short while. He pushed away from the wall, walked over to her.

“Wanna stop for a Coke, Weezee?”

Louise Chaplin, more “Weezee” than Louise, was a highly attractive girl, with the natural features that made up her beauty 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 curved areas within her sweater and skirt. She was aware of the growing body, and so the sweater was a size too small.

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

It was like that all the way down the street.

Chitchat. She was scared. Really, terribly scared, and though Weezee wasn’t a member of the Cougars’ girl 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 baseball on sidewalks, against walls; radios blasting from every direction with the Giants or the Dodgers beating the pants off someone. Normal day, with the sun shining, 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 antimacassared 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 territories, hurrying back downtown to catch the 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 the weekend joviality. Rusty walked through it, dragging his feet as if he were under water.

Weezee walked along beside him, clutching her books to her firm young breasts too tightly, till her fingers whitened on the notebook. The scare was so high in her, it came out of her pores, and Rusty wished he had not approached her. 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, she 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 pack in his jacket pocket. He offered it to the girl, but she shook her head slowly. He lit it 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. 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 down 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, isn’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 were 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 around himself. 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, understand? 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 have? 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 want 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.”

He nodded silently.

Tom-Tom brought the Cokes, collected the two dimes Rusty laid out, and went back to his fountain.

Five minutes later, they arrived.

Not the entire gang, just ten of them. With Candle in the front. Many of Rusty’s old buddies were there—Fish, Clipper, Johnny Slice, even the kid they called the Beast—and they all had the same look in their eyes. All but the Beast. He was half-animal, only half-human, and what he had behind his eyes, no one knew. But all the rest saw Rusty as an enemy now. Two days before he had been their leader, but now the lines had changed and Rusty was on the outside.

Why did I come here with Weezee? Why didn’t I go straight home? His thoughts spun and whirled and ate at him. They answered themselves immediately: there were several reasons. He had to prove he wasn’t chicken, both to himself and to everyone else. That was part of it, deep inside. There were worse things than being dead, and being chicken was one of them. Then too, he knew that running and hiding were no good. Start running—do it once—and it would never stop. And the days in fear would be all the worse.