The Deadly Streets

by Harlan Ellison

  Himself whirling. His head throbbed. There were strange and unacceptable things happening to him.

  He slumped back against the wall, and the time drew out like taffy. Gardiner, with a metabolic system that had never encountered marijuana, amphetamines, acid, uppers, downers, dope of any sort or style, was rapidly stoned. He found his eyes moist, and his thoughts colorful. He found himself murmuring, saying all sorts of strange and wonderful things, and Kivo was listening. Kivo and the others, staring down at him through a roseate fog, like some coven of magical ghouls.

  “Hey, this old man’s a non-believer,” Kivo was saying. “Who is he?”

  And then they were going through his pockets. They found out little beyond his name and driver’s license number. But they found the sugar cubes.

  “Hey, he’s a seeker.” Kivo laughed. “Let’s turn him on.”

  So they did. With his own acid-cubes. All three of them.

  Jack Gardiner, sole Fury in the Avenger Corps, made the big trip. He rested no more easily than his Connie.

  The Eyes of the Universe buried him on the dark hillside, looking out over Los Angeles. Safe from smog. And they spent many hours wondering what kind of good shit he had employed to get such a fantastic, final high.

  KID KILLER

  “Come on! Ya wanna kill me…ya wanna take the gun away? Come on, ya buncha slobs!”

  The three boys from the Knifemen had him trapped in an alley. They’d seen him flashing the big .45 in the poolroom, and they’d followed him outside. Now he was trapped.

  He was a short boy with a sallow, hungry-looking face. His eyes were deep-set under narrow brown brows and they seemed to cast back the tenement window lights flickeringly.

  He held the .45 awkwardly and backed up as the three boys came toward him. He put one hand behind him, felt the ragged brick surface of the building’s wall. Trapped in the alley: no fence to jump, no door to go through, no way out.

  Trapped. Trapped as he had been since they’d moved to New York. Since they’d moved down into the dirty jungle that was lower Manhattan.

  Anton Cosnakof had turned to his son, and stared silently for a long instant. “We’ve got to leave Detroit, Petey.” His words came through softly, as though he were afraid to use them.

  “We’ve got to leave because I have to find new work.”

  Petey had always hated that tone—that indecisive tone. He looked up from the razor blades and airplane parts on the kitchen table. “Why? Why we gotta move away from here? Why you gotta get new work? You gotta good job in the car plant, ain’tcha?”

  Cosnakof had run a hand through his thinning brown hair. He seemed to have no chin at all, and eyes so weakly squinting it appeared the world was a constant blur to him. “Well, you see, Petey, they laid off some people this week, and I was one of them…”

  Petey stared up, shock on his young face. “Laid off? Why did they lay ya off? Ya been there ten years, Pop!”

  Cosnakof spread his hands in useless defeat. “That’s the way of it, Petey boy. There ain’t nothin’ I can do about it. I thought we might go to New York. That’s a big town, plenty of work.” He grinned thinly at the new prospect.

  Petey ignored the new subject; his mind was still riveted to the fact of his father being laid off. “Didn’t ya put up a squawk? Didn’t ya even make a fuss, Pop?”

  The old man slipped into the battered kitchen chair next to the boy’s own. He laid a hand with permanent dirt in its creases across Petey’s, and looked across, into the boy’s dark eyes. “Petey, I’m an old man. I’m gettin’ older every year, and it just don’t do me no good to yell at folks or put up a fuss. I gotta take what’s handed me.”

  Petey yanked his hand loose, stood up abruptly, spilling flakes of balsa wood from his lap. “You take all the crap everybody hands out! You take it all! You got no guts! You just let ’em shove ya around. You ain’t no good as a father or anything—”

  The older man tried to stop him. He raised a thin hand in anguish. “Petey, Petey boy! Stop, son, please stop. It ain’t true! It ain’t!”

  “—or anything else! You’re as bad off as mom! I got about as much respect for you as I do for her! And she’s a cuckaboo!”

  The old man’s face whitened. He stood up and grabbed the boy by his shirt collar. “Don’t you ever say that again! Your Mother is just a little sick, is all. Don’t ever let me hear that again, or I’ll…I’ll…”

  The boy’s thin face creaked up in a grimace. He shook his father’s hand loose, and shrugged his shirt into place.

  “You’ll do what? You ain’t got the guts to slug me.”

  Then he turned away quickly, throwing one of the carving tools to the floor, where it stuck in the linoleum, and walked out of the kitchen. Behind him Anton Cosnakof bent over to pick up the tool.

  Petey couldn’t stand the closing-in walls of the apartment, or the futility of the whole damned thing. He was fifteen, and he felt like fifty. He wanted to go away, to never see these two people again.

  New York. The thought leaped to his mind suddenly. Perhaps that was the answer. In New York he’d be able to get away from his old man and his old lady.

  His face brightened a bit. and he made for the front door. The streets were open to his breathing, and that was where he retreated when he was down-in-the-dumps. Yeah, the streets.

  As he passed his mother’s room, he heard her in there. Still talking. Still gibbering to herself about 1926, and about the heavy snows they’d had in Minnesota, and about the little apothecary shop where she had learned a trade. Still whispering the words out, like some forgotten steam radiator still spewing out occasional puffs of steam.

  Petey’s face screwed into a mask of despair. He had never known this woman—this mumbling, sometimes-frothing slattern his father called wife—but he knew he had no mother. The other boys had mothers, but he had a banana! A looney tune.

  The streets. That was where he would be free. The streets. And what of the streets of New York? He smiled at the prospect.

  Trapped.

  “Come on, Petey,” the first boy said, soothingly.

  “Yeah. Petey,” chimed in his friend, a meatball with curly hair and bad teeth, “Don’t give us no trouble. We want that gun, and we’ll take it whether you give it or not. Steel like that don’t come along very often…”

  Petey Cosnakof watched the three boys. He watched them carefully as they advanced, and the past year flowed back around him terrifyingly.

  A full year of being beaten up in the gutters, of having his pocket money stolen from him, of being made the butt of involved and cruel jokes, of having them constantly call him “Little Petey Polack.” The year flung itself back upon him like a damned soul, and he cringed further against the wall, hoping it would leave him alone.

  They’d been beating him up ever since he’d moved into the neighborhood, and they wouldn’t let him join the Knifemen. He was on the outside, and they didn’t like him. His name wasn’t Carter or O’Donaghey or even Smith. It was a bastardy-sounding thing like Cosnakof. He was a dirty little Polack bastard!

  So they’d shoved him around, and taken his money, and called him names, and made fun of him. But now, suddenly, it was different—now he could protect himself.

  Now he had the gun, and it felt warm and firm in his grip. But they wanted it, and they’d take it from him if he couldn’t be a tough boy. You had to be tough in this block—or get stomped.

  He felt his shoulders smack up against the brick wall at the end of the alley. The three boys stopped momentarily and grinned at one another. The first boy—slim and wiry, with a feather-line scar across his right cheek—the boy called Snake, reached into his pocket, saying, “I’m sick and tired of this little crapper, anyhow. I’m gonna show him what a Knifeman stud can do when he don’t like somebody.”

  He came up with the long switchblade, and flicked the weapon open with a sharp movement of his hand. The blade leaped up and Snake came on once more.

  “Get back…get t
he hell back or I’ll cream ya!” Petey screamed, running the back of his hand across his mouth nervously.

  “S’help me, I’ll plug ya if ya don’t get away from me!”

  Snake put out a hand, palm up. “Gimme the rod, Petey. Give it here or you’ll be sorry. I got this shank starin’ at ya, kid, and if I don’t getcha, there’s thirty studs in the Knifemen, and they’ll get to ya if ya bother us.”

  Farmer, the fat, greasy one, and Arnie, the thickset gorilla of a boy, stood back and watched as Snake moved on Petey. They wanted that gun; it would be real diggin’ murder in a rumble with the Golden Hawkers, but they didn’t want any holes in their skulls getting it.

  “Get away from me, Snake!”

  “You can’t go no further, kid, so you better come up with it and stop givin’ me any trouble before I’m forced ta slice ya! I’m prez of the Knifemen, and I’ll clue ’em in not ta bother ya if ya just gimme the…”

  The shot exploded in the tight confines of the alley, and a dying sun’s hell-glow lit Petey’s face for an instant, as Snake doubled forward. The switchblade clattered onto the cement as he fell to hands and knees. He screamed low and long. Then he felt at the ragged hole in his face, felt the pulped mass that had been his right cheek, felt the blood beginning to well, and he screamed again. Only half a scream.

  Then he died.

  Farmer and Arnie seemed to be mannequins. They stood watching, no expression on their faces, for one second. They saw the bloody body of their president stretched into a queer position. They saw the glaze-eyed look of Petey, the smoking .45 so big in his mitt. They saw the way he stared at Snake, and suddenly was looking at them! They saw him take a step forward almost arrogantly, and they flattened against the wall. The kid was nuts!

  And they ran. They turned on their heels and bolted.

  Petey fired over their heads once, wildly. The bullet ricocheted off the wall, splattering brick shavings across the alley. The two terrified Knifemen ran like hell because they knew what it meant to have a kid like Petey loose with that .45 in his hand.

  The evening street was a hollow canyon and as they ran. they heard his scream. They heard it bouncing back from the dirt-layered walls of the city. “I’ll get you guys, too! You been pushin’ me too long. Everybody’s gonna find out they pushed too much, poddamn ya! I’ll get ya ’cause you been makin’ my life hell! And I’m gonna be prez of the Knifemen, too…you wait an’ see!”

  The scream followed them down the sidewalk and into the other alley and over the fence. It followed them away from the sound of the police sirens, and they knew Petey had gotten away clean. They knew the cops would come down and find Snake in there.

  So they ran away, back to tell the gang, because they knew: better than the cops, or the parents, or anybody. They knew that as long as little Petey Cosnakof held that rod, the pang was stuck. He’d take over, he’d make sure they got clobbered!

  The gang had to get that kid! He was a goddamned killer!

  Petey didn’t go home. Home was nothing. Just an old, yielding man. a tired man, who was too weak even to slap his son when he’d done something wrong. And an old lady who should have been put in a bug-house years ago.

  A mother fifty-three years old and mumbling to herself. A mother who had never spoken soft words of youth, or suckled, or tended—who merely stumbled and muttered, who eternally, over and over, dusted a cracked pharmacist’s mortar and pestle.

  Home was nothing. Zero.

  Guts. That was what made it, by God! Guts; and you had to have them, or you were nowhere. His old man was gutless. He’d let himself be shoved out of Detroit, and he’d let himself be shoved into the tenements. Well, Petey wasn’t going to be like that no more, no sir! Now he had the guts. He had the guts, and he had the gun.

  And the one was the other.

  It had been like God smiling down, the way he’d gotten that .45—just that afternoon. It had been like God…or someone….

  The guy was running from the cop. Petey saw him come around the corner with the .45 in his hand. The guy had turned, still running, and snapped a shot quick at the cop, then turned into the alley behind the Puerto Rican grocery—the bodega.

  It was a hot afternoon in the block, and Petey watched as the cop came to the comer, a fat little Italian woman two steps behind him. Petey heard the woman scream, “Finda heem! Catcha heem! He’sa rob my bakery!” and saw the cop wave an impatient hand at her while he searched the street for the man with the gun.

  This is gonna be a cool deal! Petey thought, and ran Into the building entrance next door to the bodega doorway. He ran up three flights and went out the window, onto the fire escape. This was going to be too good to miss!

  Petey looked down. The guy was on top of a pile of crates, trying to scale the wall at the alley’s end. He recognized him, then. A petty crook who hung around the neighborhood—a guy named Fletchman. A guy like all the guys who didn’t hold steady jobs. A guy with angles. And this latest one had backfired.

  But Petey had never suspected Fletchman owned a gun!

  Even as Fletchman tried to dig a hole in the brick wall, the cop appeared in the alley’s mouth. “Hold it there, fellow!” the cop yelled.

  Fletchman dropped back down onto the stack of old crates, and brought the gun up fast. The lone shot he got off went wild over the cop’s head and disappeared into the street. The cop ducked back and began to signal a pedestrian to call the station house; he needed help.

  At that moment Fletchman decided to make a break for it. He stood tall on the crates, and took aim at the edge of blue jacket showing around the wall. The cop took a wild chance, leaped into the mouth of the alley, in plain sight, and pumped three shots into the crook.

  The .45 flew from Fletchman’s limp hand, skittered across the crates, and disappeared down in hack. The man stumbled a half-faltering-step, caught his toe on the edge of a crate, and clattered down into the dirty alley, crates tumbling atop him.

  Petey watched it all from the fire escape. He saw the young cop stoop down, thumb his cap back on his head, and take Fletchman’s flaccid wrist between thumb and finger. He saw the cop stand up and shake his head sadly, holster the police revolver and lick his lips in resignation.

  Petey watched, fascinated, as they came, five minutes later, and hauled the body away, as they shooed the crowd away and sent the gibbering Italian woman back to her bakery. No one seemed to remember the .45. He hoped feverishly they wouldn’t look for it.

  Finally, they all left. Then he ran down the fire escape, into the second floor window, out the building, onto the street, around and into the alley. It took him ten minutes to haul the crates away, and there it was…

  The gun. Big and black and deadly. All the guts he’d ever need. Enough guts to put those bastard Knifemen where they belonged. He’d run the block now. And to start off, he’d go down to the poolroom where they hung out, and shove the rod around. If he was lucky, Snake’d be there!

  All the way over to the warehouse on Lexington, Petey kept thinking about how easy it had been to shoot Snake. It had been a pipe cinch. And Snake had deserved it, the bastard! That’d teach him not to shove smaller kids around!

  When he got to the warehouse, he smashed in a window with the butt of the gun and crawled through, into the dirty, abandoned garage-warehouse. That gun was a real helpmate.

  This was a safe place. No one would think to look in the old warehouse, and he could wait it out awhile—think it out awhile. He was sure the cops would be after him. And the Knifemen, too. They didn’t like their men clobbered like that. And the prez being cooled was enough to start a rumble that’d have Petey’s head in the sewer quickly. He fondled the gun, standing there in the darkness of the huge building. That .45 was all he had, but it was more than enough.

  He had to plan a strategy.

  He found the stairway at the back of the main floor and followed it up. The building was condemned, but some parts of it were still fireproof and intact, like the stairway. Finally he came t
o the roof-door, and opened it out on the night. It was cool, and the breeze off the river came up to Lexington just toned down enough to cool him more, but not chill him. He could sleep here, and wait it out.

  He searched around and found a stack of old newspapers, all stuck together, and the middle ones still soggy from having lain out in the rain. He piled them, and lay down, pillowing his head so he could stare out at the checkered-light that was the skyscraper forest. Big black pencils, pointing toward maggots of stars. That was how he saw the sky. A dark inside to a garbage-pail, and the crawling, maggoty stars.

  The breeze stiffened, and began to ruffle his lank brown hair. The sky was so big…and he felt so small. So damned damned small. Smaller than when the kids had beaten him up.

  Why did he have to be so goddamned small? So the kids could push him around? Why wasn’t he a big stud like that stupid-ass Arnie, no brains, but all that size! He deserved that height and weight more than the ignorant Arnie. Then he could whip anybody. Well, now he didn’t have to worry about them pushing him. He had the .45 and that was an equalizer every time.

  If he’d only had that the first time they’d leaned on him…

  “Ay! Chopper, Arnie. Farmer! C’mere! Dig what just blew inta the neighborhood!”

  Snake stood tall, and stared down at Petey, sitting on his front stoop. He placed one foot on the step, putting his big stomping-boot over the smaller boy’s loafer. Petey moved his foot away nervously. It was Petey’s first day on this block, and he wasn’t too certain what he could do. “My name’s Cosnakof. Petey Cosnakof,” he began.

  Snake’s lean face V-split down into a vicious grin, and he threw back his head in laughter. The scar on his face became bright and shiny against the tanned skin of his cheek.

  “Cowzakop? What kind of a crazy crap name is that?”