Savage Streets

by William P. McGivern

  “Okay, I’ll get a sweater. Where’s Jimmy?”

  “I don’t know, Mr. Farrell.” The young faces turned up to him seemed curiously blank, he thought. “He told us he’d come out.”

  “Well, I’ll see what’s keeping him,” Farrell said.

  Angey was watching television in the study with two of her friends, and Barbara was in the kitchen making a salad. He kissed her on the cheek, and said, “Where’s Jimmy?”

  “Upstairs. Studying or moping, I don’t know which.”

  “Why isn’t he out playing football?”

  “I didn’t see any point in pressing him about it.”

  “I’ll go and have a talk with him.”

  Jimmy was at his desk, the lamplight shading his thin, intense face. Farrell said, “I just told your pals we’d be out to play a little ball. You’d better put on a sweater.”

  Jimmy looked up quickly at him, his fine eyes bright with caution. “I don’t really feel like it, Dad. It’s okay if I just study, isn’t it? I’ve got a lot of work to do.”

  “You can do it after dinner, I think.”

  “Gosh, do I have to?”

  “Yes, you’ve got to,” Farrell said evenly. “Because you’re afraid. Isn’t that right?”

  “I... I don’t know.”

  “I think I do,” Farrell said. “They told you that you couldn’t play football until you’d given them fifteen dollars. And you only gave them twelve. I don’t blame you for being worried. But we’re not going to put up with that land of pressure.”

  “Are you going out, too?” Jimmy said.

  “Yes, of course.” Jimmy’s nervousness exasperated him, but he kept his tone pleasantly neutral. “So get a move on.” He went into his bedroom, removed his suit coat and pulled on a frayed woolen sweater, a relic of his college days; it was a letter sweater and the front of it still showed the faded area where a chenille monogram had been cut away a long time ago.

  When he returned to the hallway Jimmy was waiting for him at the head of the stairs. Farrell put a hand on his shoulder and said, “I haven’t bothered you with too many fatherly talks in the past, have I?”

  “No, I guess not.”

  “Well, now it’s time for a short one. I’m making you do something you don’t want to do. If you were my size you might tell me to go to hell. But I’m bigger than you are, so you’ve got to do what I say whether you want to or not. Perhaps you don’t see any difference now between me and those kids who’ve been bothering you. Is that right?”

  “No, I don’t feel that way about you.”

  “I’m glad you don’t. As your father I sometimes have the unpleasant job of insisting you do things you’d rather not do. I try to use my best judgment and that’s all I can promise you for now and in the future. And in this case I believe it would be foolish for you to hide in here because a pair of bullies have told you you can’t go out. So let’s go.”

  In the vacant lot the boys were waiting for him, and he threw passes for ten or fifteen minutes, enjoying their yelping, self-important excitement. Jimmy seemed to have come out of his depression, he thought; he was clamoring for his turn as frantically as the others, eyes bright with pleasure, his thin face flushed with the cold wind.

  The last sunlight faded and the sky had turned slate gray. There was a smell of burning leaves on the wind, and the boys’ shrill voices pierced the dying day like the crying of birds. The homes along the quiet, tree-shaded street were lighted now and the soft, yellow illumination fell in pale, rectangular bars across well-tended lawns and shrubs.

  Time was running out; there was just enough light for a short game. He called for the ball and told the boys to choose up sides. Bobby Detweiller kicked the ball toward him, but in his exuberance misjudged the distance and the football sailed over Farrell’s head and bounced out to the sidewalk. Several of the boys went streaking after it, excited as dogs on the trail of a rabbit, but something suddenly checked their clamor and brought the scrambling race to a halt. Farrell turned around and saw two husky teen-agers standing on the sidewalk grinning at the boys. One of them had retrieved the ball; he held it at his side, negligently, in one big hand. He was almost as tall as Farrell, with shining blond hair and a look of vacant, unintelligent energy in his broad, blunt face. In spite of the weather he wore only a white T shirt which was tucked into the belt of his tightly pegged blue jeans. He was built like a weight-lifter, with muscles that pulled the T shirt around him as tightly as a second layer of skin. The second boy was equally tall, but his body was flat and slender and controlled; he looked as if he could move very quickly if he wanted to. But his manner was lazy and negligent; a cigarette slanted across his mouth, and he tilted his head slightly to let the smoke drift up past his half-closed eyes. He looked weary and bored as he stared down at the boys, an ironical smile playing at the corner of his mouth. His skin was darkly tanned, and his hair was jet black. He wore jeans, a red sweater with an Indian head sewn on the front of it, and brightly polished black boots.

  Farrell smiled at them. “Nice stop,” he said.

  “Well, thanks, but it wasn’t really spectacular,” the blond boy said. He grinned at his companion. “Kind of routine, wasn’t it?”

  “Well, I don’t know.” He frowned, judiciously. “Yeah, I suppose you’re right. Run of the mill, I’d call it. You saw the ball bouncing along toward you, and you just picked it up. Nothing to it really.”

  “Yeah, that’s right. You do the play-by-play real good.” He grinned at Farrell. “It was just bouncing along on the ground the way a football does, taking a crazy little jog every now and then.”

  “That’s because a football isn’t round,” the other boy said, glancing at him from the corners of his eyes. “It’s different from a basketball, you see. A basketball now, it rolls along in a nice, straight line.”

  The blond boy laughed softly. “I never thought of it that way.”

  Farrell glanced at his watch. There wasn’t much time left and their elaborate leg-pull was getting on his nerves. “All right, let’s have the ball,” he said.

  “Well, give him the ball,” the boy in the red sweater said. “Go on, you heard him.”

  “Why should I do all the work?” The blond boy pitched the ball expertly to his companion. “You give it to him.”

  The dark boy grinned and flipped the ball back to his friend. “You found it, you give it back,” he said. “That makes sense, doesn’t it?” He smiled at Farrell. “Doesn’t it, Mister? You tell him it makes sense, tell him real nice, and he’ll give you the ball.”

  “Tell him real nice, eh?” Farrell said slowly. With his hands on his hips he glanced up and down the darkening street, not quite sure of what he was looking for; the sidewalks were empty and the houses snugly bright against the dusky shadows, and Farrell suddenly realized that he had been hoping to see Sam Ward or Bill Detweiller or any of his neighbors in the street. Detweiller usually showed up at the tag end of a game to collect Bobby, and there were times when Sam Ward, cheerfully ludicrous in a peaked fishing cap and sweat shirt, would amble out for a few minutes exercise before dinner.

  The two big teen-agers were flipping the ball back and forth between them now, the blond shouting, “You give it to him!” and the boy in the red sweater yelling, “Don’t be so lazy, you big stupe!” and underneath the excitement in their voices ran a hard thread of mockery. Farrell saw that they were watching him alertly from the corners of their eyes.

  The half-dozen smaller boys were huddled together in a group at the edge of the lot. He said to Jimmy, “Do you know these fellows?” But Jimmy shook his head quickly without looking at him.

  Farrell did not know what to do. The situation was absurd and infuriating. “All right, a joke’s a joke,” he said, walking toward them. “But you’re holding up our game.” He had timed his approach to intercept the ball, but the blond feinted a pass, checking it at the last instant, and Farrell’s leap into the air was futile; when he landed heavily on the sidewalk, st
inging the soles of his feet, the blond boy casually lobbed the ball back to the youth in the red sweater.

  “Here’s a nice game,” he said. “Piggy keep-away.”

  The two boys trotted down the lot, kicking their heels friskily. “Come on, Mister,” the big blond called over his shoulder. “Don’t you want to play?”

  Bobby Detweiller said, “It’s getting late, Mr. Farrell. I got to go in.” He turned and hurried toward his home, and the two Sims boys ran after him, their legs pumping whitely in the gathering dusk.

  Farrell walked toward the end of the lot where the two husky teen-agers were grinning at one another and throwing the ball back and forth with lazy skill. Farrell felt the uneven stroke of his heart and the heat of anger and embarrassment in his face. He knew he was being made a fool of. They were faster than he was, and could keep the ball away from him indefinitely. But if he demanded the ball and they told him to go to hell — what could he do then? Call the police? And tell them what? “Officer, a pair of youngsters won’t give me back my football. Would you send over the riot squad, please?”

  Farrell stopped about twenty feet from them and put his hands on his hips. “You’re pretty good at this game,” he said.

  “Gee, thanks, Mister,” the blond said.

  “It figures. It’s a game for girls. Like beanbag and hopscotch. It requires a certain limpness of wrist, if you know what I mean.”

  The dark boy in the red sweater studied him with indifferent eyes. “Trying to make us mad, eh?” He nodded at his companion. “This is psychology, see.”

  “I could take that ball away from you in a game of tackle,” Farrell said. “Want to try me?”

  The blond smiled slowly. “Sure, let’s give it a whirl, Mister.”

  “He’s suckering you,” the boy in the red sweater said. “It’s psychology like I told you. He’s got you worried. So you got to prove something to him.” He grinned suddenly. “Don’t blame me if you get hurt.”

  “No, I won’t blame you,” the blond boy said. He was grinning, too. “Let’s go, eh?”

  They trotted toward him at an angle, the big blond running interference, the boy with the ball trailing alertly behind him, feinting a breakaway every now and then and obviously waiting for a chance to sprint past Farrell into the open. Farrell drifted sideways with them, trying to cut them off and force them to change direction; when they did that he could check the blond with his hands, and then drive into the ball-carrier.

  The blond boy veered toward him, moving with a look of lazy power, his body bent in a crouching position and his weight riding easily on the balls of his feet. Six feet behind them the boy in the red sweater was slowing down, bouncing from side to side on springy legs, calculating the narrowing area Farrell had forced him into along the edge of the lot.

  Farrell felt sure he had him; the boy had come to a dead stop to change directions. He moved in swiftly, hands ready to check the blond, legs ready to drive at the ball-carrier. But something went wrong and it went wrong so fast that Farrell was only conscious of his hands missing their target, and then a jolting blow in his stomach that knocked the wind out of him, and finally the cold scrape of stubble on his face as he hit the ground. When he rolled over and sat up the two boys were a dozen yards beyond him, laughing with exuberant good humor.

  “You should be ashamed of yourself,” the boy in the red sweater said. “Treating an old man like that. You should show some respect for his psychology, at least.”

  “He rolled kind of like a football, didn’t he?” said the blond boy. “End over end, nice and crazy. Next time let’s roll him like a basketball, smooth and easy, I mean.”

  Farrell got to his feet and brushed the dirt and clinging leaves from his trousers. He was badly winded, and there was a cut at the comer of his mouth; he could feel the blood welling warmly against his lip. For some giddy and irrelevant reason he thought of the plans conference in the agency that afternoon, and Weinberg’s talk of oral satisfaction and keeping rooms. He got slowly to his feet. His side hurt and he had the feeling that he had eaten too much lunch. “Nice going,” he said. He took a slow, careful breath and smiled. “Let’s try it again, eh?”

  “A glutton,” the blond said, shaking his head.

  Farrell’s smile was for Jimmy’s benefit; he didn’t feel like smiling at all. Grin and bear it. More verbal glucose. Stand up to bullies. Hit ’em and they fall apart.

  They were trotting toward him again, and he wiped his hands on his trousers and moved slowly to meet them. His muscles were stiff and he knew that his reflexes were not very reliable; it might have been in another existence that he had been able to do this sort of thing efficiently. He had played three years of college football and had been an all-conference end in his last season. A succession of coaches had drilled the fundamentals of the game into him until he could play his position from memory. But it was so damn long ago, he thought, and remembered with faint surprise the curious sense of futility and loss he had experienced the night before, the directionless nostalgia, the vague self-pity that had crystallized into the prosaic realization that time was passing and he was no longer young.

  They were on top of him then, running fast this time, and Farrell had no time to think of what he was going to do; instinctively his hands went out to check the shoulders driving at his stomach, and instinctively he knew he was too late. His knee came up in a protective reflex then, smashing into the blond’s face. A surprised gasp of pain sounded and then Farrell was free, the blond sprawling at his feet, the boy in the red sweater exposed and vulnerable as he tried to reverse his field and cut back behind him.

  Farrell took no chance on missing him; he tackled him high, well above the waist, and pulled him sprawling to the ground. The impact jarred the ball from his arms, and Farrell scrambled over him, scooped it up and got to his feet. He was breathing very hard. “I told you this was a grown-up game,” he said.

  “The referee would have blown a whistle on you for that,” the blond boy said. He stood slowly and rubbed his chest. There was a smear of blood and dirt on his face, but he seemed more puzzled than angry.

  “That’s psychology,” the boy in the red sweater said. He grinned at Farrell but the smile didn’t touch his eyes. “A great big knee in the puss. An Irish uppercut, we call it.”

  “It happens to wise guys,” Farrell said. “But not often enough, unfortunately.” For an instant he regretted his tone; their judgment was probably worse than their intentions, he thought. “So let’s chalk it up to experience, eh?” he said.

  “Experience, eh?” The boy in the red sweater dusted dirt from his trousers. There was an indulgent little smile on his lips. “Yeah, you learn from experience, come to think of it. Let’s roll, Jerry. Dad here is going to make smart boys out of us.”

  Farrell watched them as they sauntered across the lot to the sidewalk. Jimmy ran over and caught his hand. “You showed ’em, Dad, you showed ’em,” he said.

  “Sure,” Farrell said, and patted his head. He was still breathing hard.

  “Boy, you knocked ’em over like a pair of dummies,” Jimmy said, as they crossed the street.

  Farrell stopped at the sidewalk and looked after the two boys. It was almost dark, but he saw their shadowy figures entering the next block, swinging past the neat homes and graceful rows of young buttonwood trees, long legs flashing in the illumination from street lamps and windows. He looked down at his son. “They’re the ones who made you steal the twelve dollars, right?”

  Jimmy sighed and said, “That’s right.”

  “You said they were your size, your age.” Farrell squeezed his shoulder. “How come, Jimmy?”

  “They told me to. I was afraid. They said if anybody asked about them to say they were just kids. I don’t know — I mean, I know why I lied to you. I was afraid, that’s all.”

  “I understand, Jimmy. Don’t worry about that.”

  “Are you going to do anything to them, Daddy?”

  Farrell said, “Do
n’t worry about that either. I’ll take care of it.”

  Chapter Three

  After dinner Barbara tidied up in the kitchen while Farrell helped the children get ready for bed. He listened to Angey’s incredibly involved account of a feud with her “three very best friends,” then listened to her prayers which sounded more like injunctions than entreaties, and finally kissed her good night and went across the hall into Jimmy’s room.

  Jimmy was wide awake. “What are you going to do to them, Dad?”

  “The blond boy is Jerry, eh? And the thin dark one is called Duke. Is that right?”

  “He’s the boss. They all do what he says.”

  “And this gang. They call themselves the Chiefs?”

  “Most of them wear sweaters with Indian heads on them.”

  “Well, we’ll take care of them,” Farrell said. “Don’t you worry about it any more.” He kissed Jimmy on the cheek.

  “Dad, you’re not afraid of them, are you?”

  The boy’s soft skin smelled of soap, and there was the tang of a minty toothpaste on his breath. Farrell said easily, “No, I’m not afraid of them, Jimmy.” He realized with surprise that he was angry enough to kill the young hoodlums who had terrorized his son. “They’ve committed a crime, and the police will see that they’re punished for it,” he said. “That’s what we’ve got a police department for. Get to sleep now.”

  Barbara had brought their coffee into the study. As she was pouring his the phone rang. It was Sam Ward. “John? I was just wondering if you’re doing anything in particular right now.”

  “Nothing special.”

  “I’d like to stop by for a few minutes. It’s important.”

  “Sure, come on over.”

  Barbara sighed as Farrell replaced the receiver. “Who was that?”

  “Sam. He’s got something on his mind.”

  “So have we. Couldn’t you have told him we were busy?”

  “Well, he said it would only be for a few minutes.”