Susan Hinton - Rumble Fish

“You give?” I sat back on his gut and waited. I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him. He didn’t say anything, just lay there breathing heavy, watching me out of the one eye that wasn’t swollen shut. Everybody was quiet. I could feel his gang tensed, ready, like a dog pack about to be set loose. One word from Biff would do it. I glanced over to Smokey. He was ready. My gang would fight, even if they weren’t crazy about the idea.

Then a voice I knew said, “Hey, what’s this? I thought we signed a treaty.” The Motorcycle Boy was back. People cleared a path for him. Everybody was quiet.

I got to my feet. Biff rolled over and lay a few feet away from me, swearing.

“I thought we’d stopped this cowboys and Indians crap,” said the Motorcycle Boy.

I heard Biff dragging himself to his feet, but didn’t pay any attention. Usually I’m not that stupid, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the Motorcycle Boy. I’d thought he was gone for good. I was almost sure he was gone for good.

“Look out!” somebody screamed. I whipped around, and felt the knife slide down my side, cold. It was meant to split me open from throat to gut, but I had moved just in time. It didn’t hurt. You can’t feel a knife cut, at first.

Biff stood a few feet away from me, laughing like a maniac. He was wiping the blood off the blade on his already-splattered T-shirt. “You are one dead cat, Rusty-James.” His voice was thick and funny-sounding, because of his swollen nose. He wasn’t dancing around anymore, and you could tell by the way he moved he was hurtin’. But at least he was on his feet, and I wouldn’t be much longer. I was cold, and everything looked watery around the edges. I’d been knife cut before, I knew what it felt like to be bleeding bad.

The Motorcycle Boy stepped out, grabbed Biff’s wrist and snapped it backwards. You could hear it crack like a matchstick. It was broke, sure enough.

The Motorcycle Boy picked up Biff’s switchblade, and looked at the blood running down over the handle. Everybody was frozen. They knew what he had said about gang-fighting being over with.

“I think,” he said thoughtfully, “that the show is over.”

Biff held his wrist with his other arm. He was swearing, but softly, under his breath. The others were leaving, breaking up into twos and threes, edging away, leaving quieter than you’ll ever see people leave a battle ground.

Steve was there beside me. “You okay?”

“When did you get here?” Smokey asked him. Then, to me, he said, “You’re hurt, man.”

The Motorcycle Boy stood behind them, tall and dark like a shadow.

“I thought you were gone for good,” I said.

He shrugged. “So did I.”

Steve picked up my jacket, where I’d thrown it on the ground. “Rusty-James, you better go to the hospital.”

I looked down at my hand, where it was clutching my side. I saw Smokey Bennet watching me.

“For this?” I said scornfully. “This ain’t nothin’.”

“But maybe you better go home,” the Motorcycle Boy said.

I nodded. I threw an arm across Steve’s shoulders. “I knew you was gonna show up.”

He knew I would have fallen down if I wasn’t leaning on him, but he didn’t show it. He was a good kid, Steve, even if he did read too much.

“I had to sneak out,” Steve said. “They’d kill me if they knew. Boy, I thought Biff was gonna kill you.”

“Not me. It was Biff who was gonna get killed.”

I could feel the Motorcycle Boy laughing. But then, I never expected to fool him. I tried not to lean on Steve too much. Smokey walked along with us until we came to his block. I guess I had convinced him I wasn’t going to drop dead.

“Where ya been?” I asked the Motorcycle Boy. He’d been gone for two weeks. He had stolen a cycle and left. Everybody called him the Motorcycle Boy because he was crazy about Motorcycles. It was like a title or something. I was probably one of the few people on the block who knew what his real name was. He had this bad habit of borrowing cycles and going for rides without telling the owner. But that was just one of the things he could get away with. He could get away with anything. You’d think he’d have a cycle of his own by now, but he never had and never would. It seemed like he didn’t want to own anything.

“California,” he said.

“No kiddin’?” I was amazed. “The ocean and everything? How was it?”

“Kid,” he said to me, “I never got past the river.”

I didn’t understand what he meant. I spent a lot of time trying to understand what he meant. It was like the time, years ago, when our gang, the Packers, was having a big rumble with the gang next door. The Motorcycle Boy — he was president — said, “Okay, let’s get it straight what we’re fighting for.”

And everybody was all set to kill or be killed, raring to go, and some cat — I forget his name, he’s in prison now — said, “We’re fighting to own this street.”

And the Motorcycle Boy said, “Bull. We’re fighting for fun.”

He always saw things different from everybody else. It would help me a lot if I could understand what he meant.

We climbed up the wooden stairs that went up the outside of the dry cleaners to our apartment. Steve eased me onto the platform railing. I hung over the railing and said, “I ain’t got my key,” so the Motorcycle Boy jimmied the lock and we went on in.

“You better lay down,” he said. I laid down on the cot. We had a mattress and a cot to lay down on. It didn’t matter which.

“Boy, are you bleeding!” Steve said.

I sat up and pulled off my sweatshirt. It was soggy with blood. I threw it over into the corner with the other dirty clothes and inspected my wound. I was gashed down the side. It was deep over my ribs; I could see white bone gleaming through. It was a bad cut.

“Where’s the old man?” asked the Motorcycle Boy. He was going through the bottles in the sink. He found one with some wine still in it.

“Take a swallow,” he told me. I knew what was coming. I wasn’t looking forward to it, but I wasn’t scared either. Pain don’t scare me much.

“Lay down and hang on.”

“The old man ain’t home yet,” I said, laying down on my good side and grabbing hold of the head of the cot.

The Motorcycle Boy poured the rest of the wine over the cut. It hurt like hell. I held my breath and counted and counted and counted until I was sure I could open my mouth without yelling.

Poor Steve was white. “God, that must hurt,” he whispered.

“Ain’t all that bad,” I said, but my voice came out hoarse and funny.

“He oughta go to a doctor,” Steve said. The Motorcycle Boy sat down against the wall. He had an expressionless face. He stared at Steve till the poor kid wiggled. The Motorcycle Boy wasn’t seeing him, though. He saw things other people couldn’t see, and laughed when nothing was funny. He had strange eyes — they made me think of a two-way mirror. Like you could feel somebody on the other side watching you, but the only reflection you saw was your own.

“He’s been hurt worse than this,” said the Motorcycle Boy. That was the truth. I got cut bad two or three years before.

“But it could get infected,” Steve said.

“And they’d have to cut my side off,” I added. I shouldn’t have teased him. He was only trying to help.

The Motorcycle Boy just sat and stared and stayed quiet.

“He looks different,” Steve said to me. Sometimes the Motorcycle Boy went stone deaf — he’d had a lot of concussions in motorcycle wrecks.

I looked at him, trying to figure out what was different. He didn’t seem to see either one of us watching him.

“The tan,” Steve said.

“Yeah, well, I guess you get tan in California,” I said. I couldn’t picture the Motorcycle Boy in California, by the ocean. He liked rivers, not oceans.