Harlan Ellison - Web of the City

In a while, Fish came back. He held a thin brown tube in his fist, and dropped it into Rusty’s lap. “Mex. But not bad.”

Rusty picked up the dark cigarette, smelled the weed. “Pyeew… how much?”

Fish held up one finger.

“A buck? For this?” Fish shrugged, that was the way of it. A buck or no sock.

Rusty nodded okay, tossed a buck’s worth of change on the table. Fish slid it off into his hand, then to his pocket.

“I figured you’d buy in. I paid him already. I got mine. Where you wanna hit for?”

Rusty felt rotten, felt nasty, felt rebellious. “Anything wrong with right here?”

Fish looked uneasy. “A fuzz walks in here, man, we’ve but had it.”

“Cops don’t bother me tonight. I stay here.”

Fish still looked restless, unhappy about borrowing trouble. “You still under the hand of that Pancoast cat?”

Rusty replied, “Yeah. Cops put me under him for a year.”

Fish tapped the table with authority. “Then what d’you wanna pull more trouble for? The fuzz are hard enough as it rides now. We better hit for the clubhouse and puff in the basement.”

Rusty was adamant. “Here.” To accentuate his words, he flicked a match alight, and put it to the end of the Mexican marijuana. He slumped back in the booth, putting his feet up on the seat, sinking into the cool leather of his jacket.

Fish shrugged, lit up also.

Around them the Cougars danced and chattered, while Tom-Tom cursed silently, and wished for sanctuary in the Village.

It took a longer while than usual for the stuff to hit. Rusty never liked the taste of the stuff, but the sock was more than enough to make up for the ratty taste. Pretty soon the world got fuzzy on the edges, and spanged out long, like what was at the end of your hand was way out on the top of the moon. Distances became distorted, and the shop spun a little bit, then settled right side up.

His vision grew even stranger, and way the hell off in never-never land Fish was puffing, too. Fish’s kisser was like the faces in the funny mirrors at Coney, and Rusty knew he was edging away from all his worries.

Worries? Man, they were nowhere. This was gonna be a real dream night. Top, top, top!

He wanted to dance, because the music of the juke was roaring in his head like the front end of the Super Chief. He slid out of the booth—man, it took a whole year to get up, and he swayed unsteadily. Between his lips he could feel something puffing, like it was that dynamite stick, and it was goosing him more and stronger every second.

In front of him he saw Lockup—a buddy, that goddamn Lockup; he loved him like a brother—and Caroline rubbing up and down each other, rocking to the music from The Clovers in the juke. It was a solid cutting and he wanted that Caroline bitch more than anything.

“Hey man!” he called to Lockup, and his voice echoed down and down and down a long corridor, over and over. “Hey. Man. Let. Me. At. That.” He held out his hands, and even through the smoke that enveloped the universe, he saw comprehension on Lockup’s face. He was on a stick and Lockup saw it.

“No, man. I’m workin’ here right now. Come later.”

An uncontrollable hatred filled Rusty instantly for this wise bastard punk Lockup. He had always hated Lockup. To show how much he hated him, he swung Caroline’s soft, gooey body out of the other’s grip, and shoved Lockup hard in the chest.

Lockup was a dwarfy punk and he went back into another couple. He came back up as fast with something in his hand that Rusty thought might be a knife. But what the hell was that, a knife cut no ice, not now, not on sock! He went at Lockup hard and caught him in the cheek with a straight right. Rusty’s arm came out forever, longer than a telephone wire, and way off down the end of the line it hit Lockup. He brought up his knee then and Lockup doubled with his hands clutching his groin.

He swung round, hard, and a bolo punch erupted from the north end of nowhere, missed Lockup entirely. He tried again and missed again. He was sore, man, really sore, about that punk making him miss such easy swats. Lockup was stumbling around with his hands down around his middle, and finally Rusty took back and whammed one home. Lockup sprawled backwards again, and three Cougars caught him. They helped the boy into a booth, and Rusty heard phantom voices from somewhere say, “Let him alone. He’s on pot. He didn’t mean it. Let him be.”

Then he swung on Caroline, and the scared pasty expression on her face made her all the sexier to him. He wanted to do more than dance with her. He wanted to…

Dance. That was safest. Just dance, right now.

So he gathered her to himself, and felt the two soft areas of her press into his shirt, and it was warm.

It was a long, long dance, but he wasn’t tired.

Then they went out together, and he took her in an alley behind Tom-Tom’s joint.

When he woke up the next morning, he went into the bathroom and puked out his guts.

What a helluva night.

A fight and pot, and then that worked-out bitch Caroline. There had to be a better way to live. Couldn’t he ever get free of all that slop? Couldn’t he shake them off him like flies from carrion flesh?

He didn’t have the answer.

The bedroom was a mess. Clothes were thrown all over the floor, on the chair, on the desk, under the bed. He hadn’t even bothered to shuck out of his underwear. He felt sticky and muggy. Through the window he got a clean, clear view of the airshaft, and the smell of Mrs. Hukaya’s rice and meat, stinking on the stove. He wrinkled his nose and turned to the mirror over the dresser.

His lip, where Candle had cut it, was puffy and queer-looking. It reminded him of what he had to do today.

He tried to put it from his mind, but all during the shower, and getting dressed, and combing back his long, brown hair, he knew he would have to open the bottom drawer of the dresser.

Finally, before he went in to eat, he kneeled down and put his hands to the cool metal pulls of the bottom drawer. He hesitated for a minute, wishing there was some way he could stop himself from doing what he was going to do next. But he knew he was sucked in again.

His life was a sick thing, all caught up with brass knucks and swiped candy and fights in the gutters.

As he crouched there, without his even knowing it, he was reliving all the times he had stood with a knife or a broken bottle or a zip in his hand, and faced another boy. At times like that, just as this time, he felt like speaking some other language than English. Was it his native Spanish, a tongue he had never really spoken—never really appreciated—a third-generation Puerto Rican seemed so irretrievably lost to that slim heritage, or was it some other language? Some more guttural, more distant, more deeply buried language? Perhaps it was the growl and scream of the beast. Did the jungle call to him at those times? After all, wasn’t that what he was reduced to, when he fought?

With nothing left to him but the fang and the claw?

He pulled the drawer open slowly, and stared at it.

He hadn’t used the machine-steel, razor-honed, six-inch blade in over three months. Closed, the knife was dangerous-looking, but when he pressed that button on its side, out sprang six deadly inches of gutting metal. It had reach, that knife. It was sharp enough to slice through three layers of clothing and bite deep into flesh.

It was a kill, that knife.

He had laid it away when Carl Pancoast had gotten him free from the fuzz. He had promised he would never use it again, that he would stop running with the pack, that he would start to build a future, instead of building a sin.

He chuckled in his mind. His ma had been right. He did talk too gutter-way. “Building a sin.” Getting ready to commit an immoral act. That was the way he talked. Flip, hard, cryptic, so no one would really know what went on inside his head.