I think that’s where I first got the idea. Lucy Ann just moved into the block. I didn’t even know she was here until I saw her in school. She was very nice. Very polite. I told her all about the school and the teachers and the candy store and everything about the neighborhood, you know? We was getting along real good until she asked me about my jacket. It’s silk. Black and blue. That’s our colors. The debs wear the same jackets, only theirs are blue and black. Reversed, like. So she asked me, was I in a gang? Nobody ever asked me that before. I mean, everyone’s got to be in a club or they ain’t even like real people. I thought she would be impressed, but she didn’t say nothing.
I saw her in school a lot. I mean, I don’t go to school all that much, but she went every day. I found that out, so I went so I could see her.
I couldn’t take her to the candy store, ’cause she wasn’t a deb yet. So I talked to her in school. And after school one day, she said, did I want to walk her home? I figured that was it, you know? I mean, she didn’t need no protection, not in the daytime. So why else would she ask me, right?
But when we get to her apartment, her mother is there. She works nights. Her mother, I mean. So she is home in the day. She was very nice, just like Lucy Ann. But she didn’t like my jacket, either. I could tell that. She didn’t say nothing, but her face got all funny.
She gave me food. Good food, man. Lucy Ann told her we was going to do our homework. Homework, that was funny. I figured, okay, now it was gonna happen, right? But Lucy Ann does her homework in the kitchen. There was only one bedroom, and that was her mother’s. Lucy Ann told me she sleeps on the couch. It folds out, like. I didn’t know what to do. I mean, I didn’t have no books or nothing. So I just sat there with her while she did her homework.
I did that every day after that. I even brought some books with me. I mean, I can read and everything. A lot of guys can’t, but I can. I used to like it when I was little. Before I was even a Junior in the club.
After homework, we would talk. Just me and Lucy Ann. Her mother never came in, ’cause she was getting ready to go to work. Sometimes I was even there after she left, but we never went out of the kitchen, me and Lucy Ann.
Bongo, he asked me once, was I cutting Lucy Ann? This was on the corner. Our corner, the Latin Savages’ corner. Right outside the candy store. Now, there ain’t no rules about it. I mean, it wasn’t like you could only make it with a deb or nothing. Jaime, he got a girl way over in Brooklyn. That’s okay. But I was . . . stuck, like. I mean, I wasn’t gonna lie and say I was having Lucy Ann. And I wasn’t gonna get ranked behind spending so much time and not getting any. So I told Bongo it wasn’t his business. He gets mad behind that. But he don’t say nothing more. I ain’t the toughest one in the club, maybe, but I will go . . . and everyone knows that. I got heart. I proved in a long time ago, when I was just a little kid.
One day, Lucy Ann told me about her brother, Hector. She showed me his jacket. It was like mine, only gold and red. It said Dragons on the back. Underneath it, it said Warlord. I was . . . I don’t know . . . shocked. The Dragons are a big club. All the way over in East Harlem, but we heard of them. Everybody heard of them. They was even in the newspapers. I asked her, was they coming here?
She said no. They weren’t coming down here. She said her mother moved to get away from that. I didn’t understand. I mean, how can you get away from what’s everywhere? I couldn’t see no Warlord moving just because his mother did, anyway. But if Hector stayed Uptown, how come they had his jacket? That’s what I asked her.
“They wanted to bury him in it,” Lucy Ann told me. “But my mother took it out of the casket. Right in front of them. In the church.”
“He was killed? In a bop?”
“Yes,” she said. Her eyes were wet. I guess he had been a good brother.
I didn’t know what to say. I could see, right then, that Lucy Ann didn’t want to be no deb. And I know what the debs would do if she tried to be independent. You can’t have that. I mean, if you let people not be in the club, then nobody’s really gonna respect you. So I knew Lucy Ann was going to be a Latina Savage. And I didn’t want nobody else to have her.
That’s when I got my idea.
But Lucy Ann had an idea too. “There is a way out, Sonny,” she told me.
“What way?” I asked her. “What you talking about, anyway?”
“For you,” she said. “A way out.”
“Why would I want to be out?” I asked her.
“So we can get married,” is what she said.
I couldn’t believe she said that. I mean, she wasn’t even my girl. She wasn’t in the club. And I never made it with her either, even going over there for a couple of months. Nobody gets married. You have to have a job for that. How was I gonna get a job? I am seventeen years old and in the tenth grade. I ain’t gonna graduate. I got no . . . skills, I guess you call it. Even in shop class, I was no good.
“You will go in the Army,” Lucy Ann told me. “It’s four years. I asked the man in the booth. The one in Times Square. He said you would get an education. And you would only be twenty-one when you got out. The Army will teach you how to do something. They have all kinds of trades you can learn.”
“I don’t wanna go in no—”
“And every month, you would send me some of your pay,” she said, like I hadn’t said nothing. “I would save it. When I graduate, I will get a job. And I will live with my mother, so I could save most of my money too. When you come out, we will get married.”
I knew guys that went in the Army. Right from the block. Sometimes, the judge will let you go in the Army instead of to reform school. But I never knowed nobody who ever came back here with nothing. José, he went in like that. But he was back in a few months. And he’s still a Latin Savage. Just like the rest of us.
Your mother has to sign papers for you to go in the Army if you’re seventeen. But that’s nothing. My mother, she would sign anything. I don’t even really see her much.
But I told Lucy Ann she didn’t understand. I had a plan. If it worked, then nobody would bother her. She asked me what the plan was. I wouldn’t tell her. But I told her I would protect her.
She said she trusted me. Nobody ever said that before. I mean, I guess the club trusts me. I got heart. Everybody knows Sonny will be there when it comes down. But this was different.
It was a couple of weeks later when they grabbed me. Right off the street. They was in a car. An old beat-up crate, a Mercury, I think. I was just walking home when the car pulled up and they all jumped out. They was Dragons, flying their colors like they knew nobody was gonna do nothing to them. Dragons walk anywhere. And the pistol they showed me, it wasn’t no zip gun. I didn’t say nothing.
We drove a long way. I was in the back seat, between two of them. They didn’t say nothing. The best I could do was be a man, not say nothing myself. I wasn’t going to sound on them, but I wasn’t gonna be no bitch either.
They had a real big clubhouse. A whole apartment just for them. It was on the top floor. In the Projects. I’d never been there, but I’d heard about it.
We walk upstairs. It was a long way. There was Dragons on the staircase. Like guards or something.
The Projects is big, but they smell just like my building. I guess they all smell the same.
Inside, there’s a man. He’s in a chair in the corner, away from the window. I know who he is. Who he has to be. Durango. The head man of the Dragons. He tells me to sit down. Not like I’m a prisoner or nothing, like he invited me into his crib. A . . . guest, maybe.
But he doesn’t offer to slap skin with me or nothing. Just looks at me for a minute. I look back at him. Not hard, but not scared, either. That’s what I was trying for, anyway.
He asks me about Lucy Ann. I wasn’t even too surprised. Not after what I knew about her brother. I told him the truth. About everything.
“They giving her a long time to choose,” Durango says. Like he’s wondering why.
I knew he meant th
e debs. “She don’t go out,” I told him. “You never see her on the block. So she’s not in their faces, you know.”
“But summer’s coming,” he said. “Won’t be no school.”
“That’s right.”
“And that’s when they make their move, right?”
“Probably,” I told him. It made sense, but I didn’t know for sure. They got their own ways, the debs.
“It’s on with the Enchanters, right?”
I was surprised for a minute. I mean, everybody in the neighborhood knows, that’s true. But this was a long way from there. I was kind of proud—I mean, a big club like the Dragons knowing we was going to war. But I told him, sure, it was on.
“Hector was mi corazón,” Durango said. “I was with him when he went. There was three guys hacking at him. Hector stood alone against them, but when he slipped, they had him. I stayed even after the rollers came, holding him. I watched the light go out in his eyes. His mother, she doesn’t understand.”
I didn’t say nothing. I mean, sure, Lucy Ann’s mother don’t understand. But it wasn’t my business.
“You want her in the club?” Durango asked me.
“No,” I told him. “She don’t wanna be no Latina Savage. I know that.”
“So they gonna jump her in?”
“I dunno,” I told him. Truth. “But you right. Summertime, they got to do something.”
“Can’t be on the street without showing your colors,” Durango said. “You fair game then. Everybody take a shot. You don’t want that for her neither, right?”
“No. That’d be worse. But I got a plan,” I told him.
“What plan you got, Sonny?”
I liked it that he used my name. I didn’t have no permission to use his, but it was respect he was showing me. So I explain. I take out Mystic. By myself. That changes things. I move up in the club. Maybe not to no title or nothing, but up, you know?
Durango, he just nods, like he can already see where I’m going.
“Then, when Lucy Ann comes in, I claim her,” I said to him.
“You don’t do no train for initiation?”
“No!” I told him. “We ain’t like that. It’s funny, right? I mean, we call ourselves the Savages, but we don’t go for that rape stuff. And the Enchanters, that is what they do. Their debs, they all gotta do at least six, the way I heard. Gotta do six right in a row. Word is, it’s their debs who made that rule. It don’t make no sense to me, but I never talked to one of them, so I don’t really know. But nobody gonna rape Lucy Ann.”
“But your debs carry, right?”
He meant, they bring the weapons to the bop. And they take them away when it’s done. Sometimes, even in school, they bring the stuff, when everyone thinks it’s gonna jump off. I told Durango that was true.
He nods his head like this all makes good sense to him. Nobody else says nothing. It is very quiet in their clubhouse, not even no music playing on the radio.
Finally, he looks at me. “We got a rep,” he says. “Citywide. Clubs in the Bronx, in Brooklyn, even, they know us. If we was to take in an outsider, he would have to earn in. Earn big, you understand?”
I nodded like I understood, but I didn’t. Not really. I mean, sure, you want to be with the Dragons, you couldn’t just walk in and sign up. Like with the Army. I heard some of the colored clubs was citywide. Not just with rep, for real. I mean, they had men all over. But we don’t got no coloreds where I live, so I never seen it for myself. They all colored, and we all PRs, and the white boys, they had their clubs too. But it wasn’t about your color, it was the colors you fly. Those be your true colors. Everybody knows that.
“Give me the piece,” Durango says.
One of his boys hands him a pistol. A real little pistol. He looks at it for a minute, then he gives it to me. It had two barrels, one over the other.
“That there’s a derringer,” Durango says to me. “Only a twenty-two. Just like a zip, but this is a real one, understand? I mean, it ain’t gonna blow up in your hand. But it’s like a zip ’cause you got to be very, very close for it to work. You can’t blast nobody across the way with this. Even if you hit him, you don’t take him down. You ever been hit with a zip?”
“No,” I tell him. “Sometimes, when we’re into it, I can hear them . . . pop, like. But I don’t know nobody ever got hit with one.”
“I was,” he told me. He opened his shirt and he showed me. Just a tiny little dot on his chest. “It didn’t go in deep,” he said. “I didn’t even know I was hit until later. Didn’t have to go to no hospital or nothing. We just dug it out.”
“Okay,” I say.
“Okay? Nah, that ain’t where it is, Sonny. There ain’t but one way you be with us. You got to bring us something, understand? You bring us Mystic. Like you planned.”
“But I—”
“We ain’t looking to take over your club,” Durango said. “We don’t care nothing about no . . . What you got, anyway? A dozen men?”
“Fifteen for sure,” I told him. “For the meet, maybe twenty or more.”
“And the Enchanters, they got a couple more, but it’s about even?”
“About even,” I agreed with him.
“This is how it is,” he told me. “You can’t even show the piece until you get right on top of him, understand? You got to fight your way there. What you use?”
I knew what he meant. Some guys use knives, but most of them use baseball bats or pipes. Something long. Maybe they carry a knife just in case, but knives, they more for one-on-ones. “A chain,” I told him.
“Good. Walk right for him. Let him see you coming. You got to cut off your own Warlord, ’cause he’s gonna want him. So you go right to him, got it?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Don’t be cocking the piece,” he said, taking it out of my hand and showing me what he meant, “until you ready to use it. And make sure you get him in the head. You got two shots. Don’t be wasting one.”
“All right.”
“You get Mystic and you a Dragon,” he said, looking around the room like he was waiting on a challenge. But nobody said nothing.
“I . . .” I didn’t know what to say. I mean, this wouldn’t fix nothing.
“You be with us then,” he said. “For maybe two, three weeks. That’s all it’s gonna take.”
“Take for what?”
“For you to go in the Army,” he said. “They gonna be looking for whoever dusted Mystic anyway. And you be gone.”
“But Lucy Ann—”
“Lucy Ann gonna be flying colors, Sonny. Next day, walking to school, Lucy Ann gonna be wearing Hector’s jacket.”
That was fair, what he said. If I was a man, if I loved Lucy Ann, I had to take care of her. That was my plan. Now they was telling me she was safe. No matter what.
2
So it’s tonight.
I can see them coming. Just like a black blot, moving toward the open ground. The debs are over to the side, watching. I got my chain. Got my hands wrapped in tape. Got the pistol in my jacket pocket.
I see Mystic.
It’s my time now.
Time to show my true colors.
for Wendy
* * *
FROM THE UNDERGROUND SERIES
CURTAINS
I am very patient. I know I have to wait. It’s not enough to be patient. . . . I have to be patience. The way they taught me in the temple.
At first, I tried to edge a little closer every day—inches only, but then I realized the Questioner was just playing with me. So now I’m unpredictable: one day I move a foot or so toward her, the next an inch or two back. Sometimes sideways. And, for days, I don’t move at all.
I don’t respond to anything except her voice. The softer she speaks, the closer I come to her. The Rulers call this a Siren Call. I don’t know why they call it that. Nobody knows why the Rulers call things what they do. It’s not important now. What’s important is that she thinks she’s controlling. And what I fo
und was, as long as she thinks she’s in control, she’s not afraid.
I need her not to be afraid. I send my calm out to her—in gentle waves, lapping against her spirit.
The men and the women of the Rulers are different. To calm the men, you have to let them feel your fear. For the women, you have to let them feel your gentleness—they have to know that you won’t hurt them.
I wonder how the men and women of the Rulers ever have sex, then. But maybe they don’t. The whisper-stream says they don’t—it says they clone. But that’s only because you never see any of the Rulers in the Sex Tunnels. Except the Police, of course. And they never take any, that’s what people say. But the Book Boys don’t write that on the walls, because we never write rumors.
If the Book Boys ever wrote a rumor on the walls, it would become the truth. So we could never do that.
The gentle waves I send are like the tide, in and out. Now they’re all coming in from behind her, washing over her back.
But because I send the tide, the undertow is within me, too. And it’s very deep. I can call it in. When it locks on, everything will go under. And stay there.
I keep a journal. In my head only—they read everything in here. But I write stuff, too. For them to read. That helps to keep them calm.
They asked me if I wanted to write on the walls, but I told them I didn’t have any paint. That’s when this started, really.
The Questioner is one of them. Another drone who thinks she’s a leader because she has a title, an office. The Rulers don’t call her what she is.
I’m in here because I called things what they are.
That’s the part of my training they know about. In the temple, truth is God. That was a religion once. Before the Terror. Outside. They called the religion “Journalism.”
Everybody Pays Page 7