Young and Violent

by Packer, Vin

  There are about ten Kings in the basement on 102nd Street, Gober among them. Gober is not saying much, but his eyes show the way he feels. They are like hard dark beads. He is already dressed and waiting for the others. Five or six Kings are still at the Aphrodite, keeping up a front. The ten here are to dress and plant themselves around the tenement at 109th where the Jungles always go with their bims after the dance. Then when the others change and join them, they all close in and pull the jap. Owl gets Pontiac downstairs first, by telling Flat Head Gober wants to arrange a fair fight, and Gober is waiting out front. Flat Head is one who digs the formalities and buys scenes like that. Flat Head is one who will insist Blackie Buttoni, the Jungle War Counselor, comes down with him; and waiting for Blackie is Blitz. Owl goes back up to say more should come down; and one by one the Jungles get worked over. Eventually they get the hang of things and see they are being japped, and then Rumblesville is alive.

  “Remember,” Pigaro warns, as he stuffs a sock with a brick, “if the Junglettes take it into their heads to join the rumble, which is not likely — but if they do, they get the same treatment, and maybe a little fun on the side, should time permit.”

  “And also remember,” Gober says, “I get Pontiac to myself!”

  “You gonna waste him, man?” Blitz asks.

  “I’m going to play with him,” Gober says. “If he dies of fright, I wouldn’t be surprised. But I’m not going to fry for him, that’s sure, trigger-happy though I am!”

  “C’mon,” Braden says. “It’s ten to twelve now, and the dance breaks in ten minutes. We gotta move!”

  Their sweet clothes secure on hangers, their rumble gear stuffed with knives, rocks, razors, can openers, and various other crude, homemade weapons, the Kings lumber out of the basement room and up into the warm night air. Gober tells them, “Split up, now, so we don’t look conspicuous. And on the double. At the corner take different routes.”

  He keeps his hand on his Smith & Wesson, tucked in the belt of his jeans. Leading the others, he strides down 102nd with long, resolute steps. Midway, he hears his name being called.

  “F’Chrissake!” he moans, “who the hell’s yelling my name out — ”

  Pigaro turns around and sees the skinny figure running toward them in the distance, coming from Madison Avenue as they go in the direction of Park.

  Pigaro says, “Goddam that Nothin’ Brown. He’s got a voice like a loudspeaker!”

  “Hey, Gobe — ” the voice stretches itself — ”I been huntin’ you. I been huntin’ you here and at the dance hall and back here. I got see you, Gobe!”

  “Oh, f’Chrissake!” Gobe moans. Then he shouts, “Shut your mouth, Nothin’, or I’ll bust it open!”

  But Nothin’ persists. “I gotta see you!” He keeps running.

  “Jesus!” Gober cusses. “Move on,” he tells the Kings. “I’ll catch up. Don’t forget to split by the lot at the corner.”

  The Kings are almost at the corner. Gober stands impatiently waiting for Nothin’ to reach him. Nothin’ Brown’s legs are worn out but he makes them go, coming toward Gober like a wild horse. When he reaches Gonzalves, he is out of breath, ready to drop. He pants, “Listen, Gobe, I gotta tell you somethin’ — ” and that is all he gets out of him before the high shouts sound from the lot at the corner of 102nd and Park. Like a whip, Gober whirls when he hears them, and starts running. He sees the shadowy forms crop up from behind the wall, pouncing on the Kings as they pass; pouncing and swinging long objects in the air over their heads, and yelling — making the rumble noises like Gober never before heard them.

  Gober runs, and behind him, somehow, Junior Brown runs, falling, skinning his knees, getting up again, and running. Nothin’ never stops shouting the whole way down to the lot. “Wait, Gobe! Listen! Wait — listen!”

  A rock hits the street lamp and kills its light. Gober’s eyes try to know the dark. He sees a King — Braden? Blitz — drop from the impact of a brick-stocking kiss. On the lot, everyone around him is falling down or knocking someone else down. He hears grunts and groans and shrill cries of pain, and he hears the yowls of victors, and he pulls his gun and keeps it under his sweater and crouches along at the side of the wall, looking for Pontiac.

  “Gobe, it wasn’t the Jungles!” Nothin’ is yelling behind him.

  He could kick Nothin’ Brown’s teeth in. “Gobe, Tea done it, and — ” Goddam Nothin’ Brown. He could plug him. Then near the end of the wall, Gober hears a new voice.

  “Over here, Gonzalves. Right over here. Right near the tin-can pile, Gonzalves. Get your knife out, dad!”

  This is what he wanted to know.

  He moves in slowly, making sure no one’s behind him — -no one but goddam Nothin’ Brown, still squealing his guts out.

  He sees a form near the pile, at the end of the wall. He goes toward it, his fingers fondling the handle of the Smith & Wesson. He figures Pontiac won’t have one, but he can’t figure entirely on it, because Pontiac has been known to pack a piece before. He figures he’ll hold Pontiac and make him dance, before he hits him with the butt of the gun. As he gets near the form, he sees the flash of a silver blade and laughs to himself. He’s got Pontiac this time.

  “C’mon,” Pontiac yells. “C’mon, dad!”

  Gober walks slowly toward the form that is hunched over a little, in position to spring. He keeps his hand on the trigger, and comes closer and closer.

  “Gobe, Gobe, wait!” Nothin’ screams. He has fallen on a rock pile there behind Gober, sprawled across it.

  Gober is a few feet now from Pontiac.

  “That’s right,” Pontiac says. “Come closer.”

  “Don’t worry,” Gober says. And he walks right up to him, with the neck of the gun pointing; and his eyes suddenly seeing the face for the first time.

  “Tea!” Gober says. “Tea, what the hell! You hopped up or something? Where the Christ is Ponti — ”

  Pontiac says, “I’m around the wall, Gober, and to get me, you got to pass a King, Gober. A King with a knife!”

  “Bags!” Gober says, letting the gun relax, “Bags! You crazy?” he says, walking toward his War Counselor.

  • • •

  All the front pages carried the story:

  TEEN KILLERS GO SOFT AS STATE SEEKS DEATH

  All trace of bravado drained away, confessed teenage killers Alto (Flat Head Pontiac) Moravia, and his dope-ridden accomplice, Salvatore (Tea Bag) Perrez, stood ashen-faced in court Monday with remorse showing in their eyes for the gang slaying of 17-year-old Rigoberto Gonzalves and a young Negro boy identified only as Junior Brown.

  Ironically, Perrez was a member of the gang known as the Kings of The Earth, and it was he who knifed to death his leader, Gonzalves, when the war broke out between the Kings and a gang known as the Jungle Boys. The “rumble” took place shortly before midnight at a vacant lot on 102nd Street and Park Avenue in Manhattan. Fourteen boys, 14 to 16 years old, were seized by police shortly after the fracas got under way. The youths were armed with knives, clubs, lead pipe, axes, and other weapons, and by the time police arrived, Gonzalves was dead from repeated stab wounds in the chest and stomach, administered by Perrez, and Brown had been shot to death by Moravia with a Smith & Wesson gun.

  The quarrel was touched off by an alleged attempt on the part of Moravia to steal Gonzalves’ girl friend. It was speculated that Perrez, under the influence of narcotics, was unaware of his victim’s true identity. Why Moravia murdered Brown, who was a member of neither gang, was not established.

  In court neither boy was represented by a member of his family. Both still wore the clothes in which they were arrested. Perrez was said to be relieved of the suffering of the dope addict with “stand-up” shots given under police jurisdiction.

  As Moravia and Perrez arrived outside the courthouse, a crowd of more than 150 watched from behind barriers across the street. Moravia, at the time of their arrest the swaggering, insolent member of the twosome, in sharp contrast to the bewildered P
errez, had lost the cocksureness that had led him to exclaim on Saturday morning, “You’re talking to a big man, dad!”

  Quickly they were led from a detention cell to Youth Term of Magistrates Court for arraignment before Magistrate Mann on charges of homicide, and, in Moravia’s case, violation of the Sullivan law as well.

  Bail for each was set at $50,000.

  “If you ask me who is to blame,” Magistrate Mann declared, “I would say the people of the city. The press is awake, the police are, public officials are, but the public — not only the families of these two boys, but the public in general — is asleep. Until it wakes up, the situation will continue!”

  The 14 other boys, members of both the Kings of The Earth and the Jungle Boys, were scheduled for hearings as juvenile delinquents, but their arraignments in Children’s Court were put off until May 31.

  The Brown boy, difficult to identify at the time his body was delivered to the morgue, due to the fact that he carried nothing in his clothing other than two dried-up pieces of smoked oyster, was later identified by his grief-stricken mother, Bessie Brown, domestic, who is currently under a doctor’s care.

  Gonzalves’ mother and father, neither of whom speak English fluently, told an interpreter that they had never heard of such a gang as the Kings of the Earth. Mrs. Gonzalves, near the point of collapse, said her son had ambitions to be a professional man, and that he was engaged to marry a girl named Anita Manzi.

  Emblazoned on Gonzalves black leather jacket in bright gold letters were the words: RIGOBERTO GONZALVES — KING OF KINGS.

  THE END

  If you liked The Young and Violent check out:

  Girl on the Best Seller List

  One

  … and the town sat in the lush hills of the Finger Lakes, sat like an unsightly red pimple on the soft, white back of some sultry and voluptuous woman.

  — FROMPopulation 12,360

  ROBERTA SHAGLAND parked her Volkswagen on Genesee Street, the town’s main thoroughfare. She parked in front of The Book Mart. Beside her on the seat was a cellophane-wrapped novel from the Mart’s lending library. It was this book which had come like a sudden avalanche on Cayuta, New York, leaving its populace shaken and angry; this book which had put Cayutians under some merciless microscope, like a community of wiggling amoebas, swimming in stagnancy. It was the woman who wrote this book whom Roberta Shagland hated, and her name was Gloria Wealdon.

  Miss Shagland picked the book up and rubbed her fingers along the cellophane, along the author’s name, as though with that motion she could rub out the name.GLOR-I-A first — rubbed out — thenWeal-don. Next, the title:POPULATION 12,360…. That would leave just the blurb above the title: “… a searing novel of a small town by a daring new writer.” She ran her thumb across those words, then dropped the book in her tote bag on the Volkswagen’s floor. For a moment, she sat behind the wheel watching the people pass back and forth on Genesee…. How many of them were hurt by Gloria Wealdon’s novel; how many angry, amused, disgusted? As much as she wanted to ponder this, she found she was able only to think of Milo Wealdon, Gloria’s husband — big, good-looking, strong, gentle Müo — and of the way he had been maligned in the book.

  Miss Shagland had arrived in Cayuta in the middle of January, five months ago. She had come to fill the post left vacant by the sudden demise of Cayuta High’s dietician. A farm-born, awkward and shy woman nearing the end of her twenties, she had come from a horribly confused settlement on the outskirts of ever-expanding Syracuse, New York. It was a settlement that was ugly and treeless and smelly, with the noise and odor and look of growing industry. She had hated the greasy diners near there, the half-dozen used car lots, the junkyard, the smoke, and the new, new — everything about them new — ranch house developments that were all alike — little lawns, hugging the highway, pink or bright blue or lemon yellow, within walking distance of the shopping center with its sleek A&P, drugstore, Five & Ten. Modern and young and obvious and vulgar.

  She had come from there to Cayuta in dead winter, so that it did not look as fabulous and amazing as it did now in May, but she had known what Cayuta would look like. In her imagination she had undressed those great hills of their snow like an eager lover in his erotic fantasies; and she had with dreamer’s kisses put the blush of color to all the trees and brush surrounding. She had known that Cayuta would be like so many of the lakeside cities in the Finger Lakes, hiding behind and between huge green mounds. A sudden surprise of glinting blue water, church spires, farm houses dotting the approach; then the city limits sign, the tall Victorian houses with their peaked gables making the new ones in between seem squat and crazy-modern; the immense Norway maples and horse chestnuts ticking the green soft long lawns; and the sprinklers now, turned on at summer’s near-beginning, and at the lake the boats being scraped and painted, their sails airing; all of it — Cayuta. How had Milo Wealdon put it?

  “Cayuta,” he had said, “is like a perennial plant. Some plants — the annuals and the biennials — are pretty for a while, but they change and die. Towns are like that too. Cayuta’s not. It’s like a perennial — it stays. It dies down in the winter, but renews its growth again in the spring.”

  Milo Wealdon was the physical education teacher at Cayuta High where Roberta Shagland was dietician. Even though she knew him very, very slightly, Miss Shagland knew he was different from any man she had ever met. When he spoke (just those few times, just those precious few times) it was like a poet speaking; still, her nose came just to the level of the huge muscle on his arm, and she had seen him once outside the gym, near the lockers, in shorts, and she had trembled to notice his build; and she had thought about how much a man he looked…. She had thought about that quite a lot.

  As if to force the subject from her mind that morning, Roberta Shagland jerked up the Volkswagen’s door handle and got out. The suddenness of her movement caused her to hit her head, and her own “Damn!” made her feel naughty and slightly sophisticated, but she was neither of these. She slipped a dime into the parking meter and walked toward The Book Mart; and she did not even have to look closely at the window to know that there was only one book on display. Twenty-five, thirty, fifty — how many copies of that one book arranged every which way?

  She nearly collided with an elderly woman standing near the entrance. A parent. She recognized old Mrs. Waterhouse from out on Grove Street, who still came to P.T.A. meetings though all her children were well into their thirties and had children of their own.

  They said hello, but Mrs. Waterhouse had something to add, and Roberta Shagland turned to listen. “I beg your pardon?” she said. “I didn’t hear you.”

  “I said if Miss Dare was still with the Mart a thing like this would never have happened.”

  “You mean the window display.”

  “Miss Dare had taste.”

  “I never knew her,” said Miss Shagland.

  “She was a fine girl. She wouldn’t have kept that woman’s book in stock!”

  Roberta Shagland had often heard Gloria Wealdon described as “That Woman” since the novel’s publication. “That Woman,” Cayutians said, as though her name was a strange one to their ears; as though her name were not worth remembering — the way an irate wife might refer to her husband’s mistress, or the local chapter of the Women’s Temperance Union might identify a female barfly. Gloria Wealdon’s name was as well known to Cayutians as cod to Boston, steel to Pittsburgh. It was not a strange name to many outside Cayuta either. People “out of touch” might not have heard the name — pedants, coal miners, expatriates who had suddenly returned from abroad and who wanted to know if she was a murderess, a television star or what? — but most everyone else in the country knew that Gloria Wealdon was synonymous with sex and money, that she had written a novel which theTimes had called “a feverishly inept exposé of a festering small town,” and that it was selling like knishes in the Catskills.

  “I don’t know why anyone would waste their time on such trash,” said
old Mrs. Waterhouse.

  Roberta Shagland’s tote bag felt suddenly enormously heavy. “Yes,” she murmured. “It mustn’t be a very worthwhile book.”

  “When Miss Dare ran The Book Mart, she sold literature. Now look.” Mrs. Waterhouse waved her hand at the display. “Trash!”

  “Goodbye, Mrs. Waterhouse,” said Roberta Shagland.

  Mrs. Waterhouse nodded, still standing before the window, shaking her head and mumbling angrily.

  Inside the Mart, the clerk beamed at Miss Shagland when he saw her take the book from her bag. “We’ve been waiting for this!” he said. “We have a waiting list as long as Genesee Street!”

  “I’m sorry if I kept people waiting.”

  She was not sorry at all. She felt sorry for Milo Wealdon, and if she had kept other Cayutians from reading his wife’s descriptions of him, she was glad.

  The clerk said, “We just got a whole new order of the book in, but you know how people are. People don’t want to buy anything they can borrow for a few cents a day.”

  “Yes,” Roberta Shagland said.

  “I’m not casting any aspersions on you, Miss Shagland. Don’t get me wrong. On a schoolteacher’s pay, I don’t blame you if you don’t buy books.”

  “I buy books. Some books.”

  “I always put my foot in my mouth. I didn’t mean anything like that.”

  “I just wouldn’t buy this book.”

  “It’s pretty exciting though, isn’t it? I mean, someone from right here in Cayuta writing — ” but when he saw that Roberta Shagland was not indicating any enthusiasm, he did not bother to finish the sentence. He took a piece of paper and began to figure.

  When he was finished, he looked embarrassed.

  “You’ve had this out for some time, Miss Shagland.”

  “I know.”

  “It seems a shame.”

  “Well, how much do I owe you?”

  “You had it for ninety-three days, Miss.”