Savage Streets

by William P. McGivern

  “You’re talking absolute rot,” Baldwin said. “Do you seriously believe that a man’s relationship to this or any other community is defined by whether or not he owns property and has sired children?”

  “I didn’t say that. I just mean we’ve got a stake in things that you don’t have.”

  “You mean a great deal more than that whether you realize it or not. You believe that owning property and having children makes you an elite group.” Baldwin shook his head with something like impatience. “Seriously, can’t you see that your attitude is not only pretty damned presumptuous, but also about as dangerous as a ticking bomb? Sure you’ve got a nice life out here. Shiny cars, golf clubs, country-squire gimmicks from Abercrombies. It’s the American dream or the American nightmare depending on your tastes, but that’s beside the point. The thing is...”

  “You think we’re pretty damned square, I know,” Detweiller cut him off, no longer bothering to curb his temper. “You’ve made that clear. You’ve filled Chicky up with your smark-aleck opinions. Everything’s a joke to you. Homes, religion, children... it’s all gag material for you and your pansy friends in Greenwich Village.”

  “Det, stop it!” Chicky said. She looked contritely at Baldwin and put a hand on his arm. “Please don’t take all this too seriously.”

  Baldwin smiled at her; he seemed confident and at ease with her slim hand resting against the black sleeve of his suit. “Thanks, Chicky,” he said. “I’ll chalk it up to the high alcohol content in the blood stream.”

  Detweiller raised his voice and said, “Don’t chalk it up to anything but the truth, Baldwin. I’m cold sober. I’m sick of your gags and cracks. Is that clear enough?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Baldwin said. “If you want me to leave, I’ll go quietly. If not, let’s have a drink and forget it.”

  “Your first idea suits me fine.”

  “Det, I’m ashamed of you,” Chicky said, and moved closer to Baldwin. To Farrell it seemed a tactless display of allegiance; in apologizing for her husband she had destroyed any chance of an armistice. And she must have known it.

  “Don’t be upset,” Baldwin said, and gave her hand a little pat. “I’ll toddle along. The lord of the manor has spoken.” He removed his glasses, rubbed them nervously and replaced them over his mild, near-sighted eyes. He was very pale. “Det, let me say one thing. Perhaps my levity was out of place. If that’s so, I’m sorry. I apologize. But for your own good try to get this one thing clear. For better or worse you’re a little chip that floated down a stream from places like Greece and Rome, through the Italian Renaissance and a tennis court in Paris and, closer to home, through Gettysburg and Harpers Ferry.” Baldwin’s voice was steady but there were spots of color in the thin pale face. “The idea of due process of law wasn’t evolved because somebody thought it would look nice chiseled over the doorway of a court house. When and if you pick up a rock to settle your problems you’re starting back upstream, you’re denying everything we’ve collectively learned in a two- or three-thousand-year-old fight against barbarism and bigotry. Keep that in mind. If you pick up that rock you’ll pay like hell for it.”

  “Spare me the speeches,” Detweiller said. “What the hell do I care about Rome and Gettysburg? They haven’t a damn thing to do with this issue.”

  Baldwin said, in a serious voice, “Det, I’m actually sorry for you. You’re dumber than I suspected.”

  Detweiller slapped him sharply across the face. Farrell moved when he saw Detweiller raise his arm but he was too late to block the blow; it sounded with a hard flat noise on Baldwin’s cheek, and when he retreated, covering his face with his hands, his heel caught on the raised hearthstone and he tripped and fell awkwardly to the floor. His glasses hung crazily from one ear, and he fumbled at them with trembling hands, unable to get them back in place.

  Farrell wrestled Detweiller across the room and pinned him against the wall. Janey Norton began to cry in a soft hysterical voice. Sam Ward said loudly, “Well, damn it, he asked for it.”

  Chicky knelt beside Baldwin and held his head against her knees. His face was a sickly white against her yellow slacks. A little dribble of blood ran from his mouth.

  Chicky stared up at her husband, her eyes dark with angry tears. “Goddamn you,” she said, in a low, desperate, bitter voice. “You had to prove it, didn’t you? You just had to.”

  Chapter Five

  Ат home Farrell changed into slacks and a sweater, thinking he might do an odd job or two around the house. He went downstairs and glanced into the study. Angey was watching television with two of her friends, the overhead lights on and the record-player spinning silently in the comer. They had been playing dress-up and wore high heels, slips of Barbara’s pinned up under their armpits, and vivid, inexpertly applied eyeshadow and lipstick. Farrell went down the hallway to the kitchen. Barbara was checking the freezer. “Are you playing golf?” she asked him.

  “I don’t think so. Look, how about telling Princess Angela to turn off the damned lights and record-player when she’s watching television. She and her pals are the electric company’s best friends. They all look like miniature street walkers, incidentally!”

  “Oh, let’s don’t pick on her today. Everyone seems crabby lately. Are you hungry?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “We’re having soup and salad for lunch, a roast for tonight. All right?”

  “Fine.” He lit a cigarette and looked out at the back lawn. Jimmy’s wagon lay on its side and one of the chains on the swing was broken; the wooden seat turned slowly with the wind, dragging back and forth on the ground.

  “I couldn’t help feeling a little bit sorry for Det,” she said. “He is dumb but Baldwin can be awfully hard to take. Did you ever notice how he looks when anyone tries to make small talk with him? You know what I mean? He kind of grins as if to say, ‘Oh come off it now. Do you seriously expect me to discuss traffic and weather with you? Really!’ He’s just so above all that, he lets you know.”

  “I feel kind of sorry for everybody,” Farrell said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s just a philosophical generalization,” Farrell said. “In the original Latin it has more bite.”

  “Ho, ho,” Barbara said.

  Farrell drifted back to the living room. He was in a restless, uneasy mood; the scene at the Detweillers’ had been ugly enough, but even worse had been the raw excitement generated by Detweillers proposal to form something in the nature of a vigilante committee. Everything seemed set for an explosion.

  Farrell picked up the telephone book and looked up Duke’s address. There it was, prosaic and respectable in the columns of neat agate type: Resnick, Thomas, 324 Royal Street, Ohio 6-7845. Frowning he put the book down. He wandered about the room for a few seconds, stared out the windows, straightened a pile of magazines. Finally he made up his mind; he went into the hallway and put on his topcoat. He called casually to Barbara: “I’m going to run down to the village for the paper.”

  “Do you want to take jimmy? He’s moping around upstairs.”

  “No, I’ll be right back.”

  She came to the kitchen door. “Anything on your mind but deep philosophical generalizations?”

  “Not a thing,” he said.

  Farrell hesitated with a hand on the door of his car, then changed his mind and walked down the block to Wayne Norton’s home. Norton’s son answered his knock. He told Farrell that his mother was resting and that his father was working in the basement. “Do you want me to call him?”

  “No, I’ll go on down,” Farrell said, and tousled the boy’s hair.

  Norton had changed to jeans and a T shirt. He had a paint brush in his hand and was working on a chest of drawers, a dark and ugly piece of furniture with ball-and-claw feet and elaborate carving around the brass handles and keyholes. There were newspapers spread on the floor to catch spatterings of paint remover, but everything else was clean and tidy; shelves of canned goods were ranged ag
ainst one wall, and the tools above Norton’s workbench were lined up as neatly as rows of tin soldiers.

  Norton smiled at him in surprise. “I thought you’d be out with the golfers.”

  “I didn’t feel up to it,” Farrell said. He rubbed his fingers over the top of the chest of drawers. “We inherited quite a few pieces like this when Barbara’s father died. I refinished a couple of them, a chair and a little sewing table, but it was quite a job. A week of steady rubbing and scraping equaled about a square foot of surface, I think.”

  “You don’t know the trick,” Norton said. “Scraping won’t get you anywhere. Watch.” He splashed a generous amount of liquid paint remover onto the top of the chest of drawers, and spread it about with his brush in a slow, rotary motion. “No rubbing, no scraping,” he said. “Let the paint remover do the job. But the trick is to use enough of it so that it will stand in puddles and soak into the paint. See, it’s loosening up already.”

  Farrell saw that this was true; the hard, glazed surface of paint was cracking here and there, going pulpy under the soft pressure of the brush.

  “I’ll be through by supper,” Norton said, in a cheerful, contented voice. “When I’m down to the wood I’ll put on a coat of white paint and then rub that off in a hurry before it gets dry. That gives the wood a streaky, limed look. Then I’ll rub it down with linseed oil to bring up a nice warm glow.”

  “Well, that’s better than my method,” Farrell said.

  “I’ll give you a hand some evening if you like,” Norton offered. “With the two of us working we could get quite a lot done.”

  “You enjoy this, don’t you?”

  “Well, I don’t mind it, put it that way.” Norton smiled at Farrell. “When I’m worried about something, you know, a problem at the bank maybe, I find that a few hours of work like this helps me to forget all about it.” He paused, frowning slightly then, and looked at Farrell. “What did you think about that business at the Detweillers?”

  “It seems to me Det is talking up a big mess of trouble. And that’s what I came over to see you about. What was your reaction?”

  “I’m not sure I know. Maybe that’s why I decided to come down here and go to work this afternoon. I feel kind of stirred up inside. I’m worried, I guess. My home and family are all I’ve got, and naturally I don’t want anything to happen to them.”

  “Naturally,” Farrell said. “But we aren’t going to solve anything Det’s way.”

  “That’s not what’s bothering me.” Norton made a restless gesture with his hand. “As far as going out and beating up those kids, well, that’s idiotic. And I’m not sure Det was really serious about it. But the way Chicky was making a play for Baldwin disturbed me. She kind of cut herself loose from her husband, it seemed. It was like she was announcing to every man in the room that she was ready for some kind of action.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Farrell said. The turn of the conversation surprised him, and he felt his face becoming warm. “She likes to show off occasionally, that’s all it amounts to.”

  “Well, that makes it worse,” Norton said, rather grimly. “What’s she trying to do? Stir people up for the fun of it?”

  “She doesn’t bother me,” Farrell said, smiling.

  “That’s different.” Norton paced the floor and rubbed the back of his neck with his hand. “She knows Janey’s pregnant, I presume. So why doesn’t she lay off? I mean, doesn’t she know the score? She makes it damn plain that she’s around, is what I’m trying to say. The other night she asked me to tie her apron on when we were alone in the kitchen. And when she was leaving here the other day she couldn’t get into her boots because she had high heels on or something, and it was me she called on for help.” Wayne picked up the paint brush and began working vigorously on the chest. He was quite pale. “Maybe I’m just imagining things,” he said. “I guess I sound like a soldier in a barracks waiting for a furlough.” He nodded at the surface of the chest. “See how it’s coming off now? No nibbing, no sweat at all. You know, we might get at some of your furniture tonight, if you’re not doing anything.”

  “I don’t know what Barbara’s got planned,” Farrell said. “Let me check, and I’ll give you a ring.”

  “Okay. My nights are pretty clear.”

  Farrell left after another few minutes. The street was soft and drowsy with the Sunday afternoon stillness; sunlight dappled the trees and birds called aimlessly in the quiet air. Farrell went down the street and got into his car. He felt very sorry for Norton.

  The Resnick home was old and graceless but its tiny plot of lawn was well-tended and the dark brown paint was fresh. The rest of the neighborhood was in decay; there were disorderly piles of rubbish at the curb, a tom overshoe, a tire, a pair of tattered overalls, empty paint cans, a section of canvas from the top of a convertible — a prideless collection, the sort of things most people would cart off to junk yards. The man who answered his knock was of medium height and thin except for a plump stomach that bulged as symmetrically as a basketball against his clean blue work shirt. He was freshly shaven, with sparse gray hair and rimless glasses which enlarged his dull but amiable gray eyes.

  “Are you Mr. Resnick?”

  “That’s right.” The voice was dry and strong. “What can I do for you?”

  “I’d like to see your son if he’s in.”

  “Duke? No, he’s over at the golf course, I expect. Or at that club of his.” Mr. Resnick studied Farrell’s sweater and open shirt collar. “You’re not a cop, I guess.”

  “No. My name’s Farrell. I live in Faircrest. Could I talk to you for a moment, Mr. Resnick?”

  “Sure, come on in. I know Duke’s in some trouble. The police were here for him yesterday morning. But Mr. Garrity, he’s our committeeman, called and told me everything was all right. Kind of a mistake all around. You know Mr. Garrity? A fine gentleman, and that’s the Gospel.”

  “Is it?” Farrell said.

  “Indeed it is.”

  The living room was tidy, impersonal, and severely clean. A framed picture of a lake at twilight hung above the high, blond wood mantelpiece, and beside what Farrell judged to be Mr. Resnick’s chair was a table supporting a stack of pulp magazines, a rack of pipes and a pound tin of tobacco.

  “Just take a seat,” Mr. Resnick said. He laughed, his teeth unexpectedly strong and white in the commonplace face. “I just finished the housework so everything’s clean. Now what’s the trouble — the name is Farrell, you say?”

  “That’s right.” Farrell told him what had occurred between their sons, but made his account as neutral as possible; he hadn’t come here to quarrel with Resnick.

  But Resnick seemed neither concerned nor angry. He shook his head thoughtfully and said, “Well, Duke’s no angel, I guess. But then your boys wouldn’t say he was the one bothering them. Maybe it’s just all a mistake, like Mr. Garrity said.”

  “That’s possible, of course. As far as I’m concerned, the damage has been done, and the thing now is to prevent any more trouble. Some of my friends, to put it bluntly, are mad as hell about what’s happened, and if there are any more incidents they’re just likely to do something violent and foolish.” Farrell paused to light a cigarette. He found Mr. Resnick’s polite but noncommittal interest a bit disconcerting; he had a feeling Resnick would listen with about the same emotion to a discussion of the weather. “I don’t know your son at all, Mr. Resnick,” he went on. “I’ve only seen him twice, and I haven’t had a chance to talk with him. Perhaps he’s a bit wild, but that’s part of growing up, don’t you think?”

  “Well, I guess so.” Mr. Resnick was filling a pipe, his fingers working with the deftness of long habit. “Some kids are wild, and others just go along nice and easy. It’s funny.”

  “Was Duke a difficult boy to raise?”

  “Difficult? Well, no. Actually he sort of raised himself, you might say.” With his pipe drawing well Mr. Resnick became more expansive. “I’m the boy’s stepfather, see. I married h
is mother when he was just two. She died four years later, and I had the whole job to myself then. But he wasn’t any trouble. He didn’t like other people doing for him. He was independent, you could say. For instance now, he didn’t like me to fix his meals, and that was lucky because I was working every day in the switching yards. And he didn’t like me to put him to bed or fuss over him. No, you couldn’t say he was any trouble.”

  “How did he do in school? Does he have any particular ambitions?” Farrell smiled. “I hope you don’t mind these questions. I think if I knew him better I could talk to him.”

  “He did okay in school. He was on some teams too — football and basketball. He’s good at things like that.” Mr. Resnick smiled, and Farrell was again surprised by his white teeth. “There’s no money in games, I told him that, but they keep a boy out of mischief. He doesn’t have a steady job, and I just don’t know what his plans are in that way. But he makes good money caddying.” Mr. Resnick laughed. “Damn it, but it beats me the way grown men will pay a kid five dollars to carry a pack of golf clubs around for them. But if they’ve got it to waste, I guess it’s all right. Duke pays board, but that’s his idea, not mine. I’m happy to board him, but he likes to be on his own.”

  “You know, sometimes that kind of independence can be an act,” Farrell said. “A boy may want help and direction the worst possible way, but can’t bring himself to ask for it. It isn’t easy to ask for things like that — ideally, they should just be there for the taking, like fresh air.”

  Mr. Resnick looked surprised. “Well, I don’t see why if a person’s got a tongue he can’t speak up for what he wants.”

  “It’s not that simple,” Farrell said. “At least that’s the opinion of people who study these problems. If a child has been pushed too quickly into maturity — if a lot is demanded of him through the death of a parent, for instance, he may feel guilty about asking for the help he deserves. What I mean is that a child can feel that it’s a sign of weakness not to stand on his own two feet. Even when that’s too much to expect of him.”