TO GET up into the hut, you’d sit on a short section of two-by-four, the rope it was tied to between your legs, and you’d pull on the other rope hanging a foot away, the pulleys creaking as you rose up and up till the hut’s floor was at your chest and you’d keep one hand gripping the rope, then reach out with the other and grab the inside jamb of the door, lift your knee onto the platform, then let go of the rope and hear the whistle of it through the pulleys as your two-by-four seat fell to the ground and you were inside. When all three of us were up, one of us would lean out and grip the rope and pull both ends and the seat up and nobody could get in unless he was a monkey.
But what was there to do up there? Soon it was fall, then early winter, and it was cold in the hut, and late at night we ran up and down Columbia Park stealing welcome mats from every front or side porch, our faces lit up under the exterior lights, and we hauled the mats back, tossing them one at a time up into the hut, then tacking them to the inside walls and ceiling till you couldn’t see the paneling anymore. We found an orange electric cord in the garage and ran it down the trunk and along the fence to our house where Jeb pulled it through a crack in the bulkhead doors and plugged it into a socket near the washer.
Down on Seventh Avenue, on top of the trash pile in the dumpster, was an electric heater, a brown metal box, half of its safety grille kicked in but the coils looking new and untouched.
“Give me ten fingers.” Cleary put both hands on the steel lip of the dumpster. He kept glancing back at the apartment houses behind us, mainly the one with the rent collectors, but there were no motorcycles out front and no music playing. Three or four times a year, the collectors went on drug runs down south somewhere. Kids talked about it at the bus stop, what was coming up here from New York and New Jersey and Florida. The mud beneath us was frozen, and from somewhere deep inside the apartments a baby cried. I squatted and knitted my fingers together and Cleary put his cold sneakered foot into them and pushed off into the trash.
NOW THE hut was warm. We’d hung a wool blanket over the doorway, and the orange glow of the exposed heater coils gave off almost enough light but not quite. Soon we had a small lamp up there, its shade scorched in spots, and Cleary got hold of a radio too. It was old and covered with dried paint splatter, but if we kept it in the corner facing southeast, it got pretty good FM stations down in Boston, and every time we were up there it’d be playing Led Zeppelin or Aerosmith or the Stones, though sometimes it was just DJ talk and we’d switch it off.
Girls were coming up now. Girls who were strong enough to pull themselves up our rope elevator. Some of these were from Cleary’s alley, and they were twelve or thirteen and wore tight hip-huggers and smoked Marlboros or Kools and swore a lot. Others came from a few streets over. One was the little sister of Ricky J., one of the rent collectors who’d thrown us out of the pot party and beaten the shit out of Cleary. She was short and thin and wore so much black eyeliner she looked like some kind of night rodent. Cleary bragged to us once that she liked to give blow jobs and that she swallowed, too. Right off she seemed to like Jeb, his wild hair, the soft brown fuzz on his cheeks and chin, his blue eyes and sweet smile.
I had sort of a girlfriend now and while Jeb and Cleary and their girls made out in the hut, I was starting to spend my afternoons at Rosie P.’s house a few blocks west and closer to the highway.
Rosie was black and quiet. She had a neat afro and a pretty face, and she wore small gold earrings like a woman. We’d met months before when we were both thirteen, at a party up in the woods at Round Pond, a Saturday night and thirty or forty kids drinking around a fire, passing joints, listening to the Alice Cooper blaring from the speakers of a Camaro somebody had driven down the trail to the clearing. I was standing next to Rosie, our backs to the dark water, and she seemed shy and kind. I offered her one of the Schlitz Tall Boys we’d brought. Cleary had stolen money from his mother’s purse and we waited outside a liquor store on Cedar Street for over an hour till somebody bought some for us, a big Dominican man in a suit jacket, his Monte Carlo parked half on the sidewalk, its engine still running.
Rosie smiled and took the beer. Her older sister Laila was there too, laughing at something Cleary was saying or doing and she kept eyeing my brother.
Usually these parties got broken up by the police. From across the water, one or two cruiser spotlights would shine in our direction, lighting up the trees and casting their shadows across our faces. Then there’d be flashlights, their light paths jerking up and down as cops on foot came for us, and we’d start running.
But this night, somebody threw leafy branches on the fire and they began to smoke up right away. Someone else yelled, “That’s poison sumac, asshole!” A few began coughing, then a few more, then the owner of the Camaro revved his engine and headed back up the trail, his headlight path rising and falling with each dip and rut, and Jeb and Cleary and I ended up at Rosie and Laila’s house.
It was a freshly painted clapboard two-story with a small green lawn in front on a street with other houses just like it. Inside, the rooms were as clean as Cleary’s, no dust or clutter anywhere, pillows set on the sofa, a bowl of apples on the small kitchen table, the hardwood floors gleaming under the lamplight.
Laila and Rosie were being raised alone by their mother who was working two jobs, one in an office, the other in a restaurant. In the six months I was with her daughter, I never met her mother or even saw her.
I don’t know whose idea it was for the five of us to go up to the girls’ bedroom, or if it was Rosie or Laila who lit the candles, or where we got the bottle of wine we began to pass around, Jeb and Laila sitting at the foot of the bed, Cleary leaning against the bureau, Rosie and me sitting side by side up near the pillows. The record player was on, Bill Withers singing “Lean On Me,” and Rosie’s tongue was in my mouth and we kissed a long time. Once I looked up and Laila was standing between Jeb and Cleary, kissing one, then the other, her hand rubbing Cleary’s crotch.
After a while the three of them were gone, and Rosie and I stretched out on the bed on top of her covers. I was thirteen and had touched breasts before, a girl when I was eleven and she was twelve, and it was like holding a soft-boiled egg gently so it wouldn’t break. Rosie let me touch hers that way under her shirt and we never stopped kissing and soon her jeans were unsnapped and unzipped and I was rubbing her pubic hair, so much more than I had, and I kept expecting there to be some kind of hole there, that if I kept rubbing, it would be like finding a button that would open her secret compartment. She seemed to like what I was doing, but I began to wonder if something was wrong with her, if some girls just didn’t have holes and couldn’t have babies. Or maybe I couldn’t find it because she was a virgin, and it wasn’t there yet.
This went on for a long time, maybe half an hour, my wrist burning so I had to switch hands. Then Rosie arched her back slightly and my fingers slid lower and into the warm, slippery answer to all I’d been asking myself, my lips never leaving hers, this girl I’d just met.
A WEEK later we did it on the floor of her bedroom while up on the bed Laila made out with Jeb or Cleary or Sal M., a handsome slow Italian kid who lived close by. The room was dark, but I remember a nightlight plugged in near the bureau. It was shaped like a seashell and it gave off a dim white light over Rosie’s pretty face, her eyes closed, then mine too as something happened to me that had never happened to me, this gathering and gathering in the very center of my body that seemed to pause, then pulse and pulse though it was like I was falling and I knew something was leaving me and going into her.
A few days later, on a bright afternoon lying clothed on her mother’s made bed, she told me that had been her first time.
“Me too.”
“You know what my sister says?”
“What?”
“No protection, no affection.”
She straightened her legs and reached into her front jeans pocket and pulled out a small plastic package. She handed it to me. On the front was the s
ilhouette of a man and woman facing each other, sunset colors behind them. Rosie and I looked at each other, then started kissing, and I learned how to put that thing on and we did it on her mother’s bed.
This is all we ever did. We never ate a meal together or got dropped off at a movie, or even went walking. And she only came over to my house a few times. Mom would be asleep on the wicker couch or the floor or maybe in her room reading a book, and Rosie and I would go to mine.
Laila had done it with Jeb and Cleary, and probably Sal M., but she was older than we were, almost seventeen, and soon enough she had a boyfriend, a white basketball player who’d pick her up in his black Mustang and they’d roar down the street and away. By now Jeb and Cleary had forgotten her and were back up in the tree hut with some of the neighborhood girls. And maybe what happened next came because Ricky J.’s little sister told someone what she’d been doing up there and with whom, told Ricky and her older brother Tommy, too.
MOST FIGHTS broke out when you didn’t see it coming. I’d be walking down the crowded corridors of the school, too hot because like most of the kids from the avenues I wore my leather jacket all day long, my ponytail halfway down my back, my eyes on the backs of kids ahead of me as I moved from one class where I said nothing to the next where I said less.
“Fuckin’ asshole!” The slam of a locker, the slap of feet over the hard floor, the soft thudding of a fist thrown again and again into someone’s face, like waxed wings flapping, then a joyous shriek of someone yelling “Fight!,” and we’d all be running to them, crowding around the two or three bodies flailing away at each other in the center. In a school of over two thousand students, this happened once or twice a week.
It was a cool morning in October, the sky was gray and looked heavy with snow. The second bell had rung and Suzanne and I and all the dealers and smokers and loud trash-talkers from out back stepped off the grates and headed for the glass doors of the high school.
And again, it was like stepping into still water that suddenly has a current and it was pulling me forward, a bunch of us rushing for something happening on the concrete stoop in front of the doors, a big-breasted girl in a short green jacket straddling the chest of another girl, punching her in the forehead, her eyes, her nose, her teeth, yelling, “You cunt! You fucking cunt!”
Other kids were laughing, cheering, urging the one on top to kill her, urging the one on the bottom to fight back, her nose splattering blood on the concrete beside her ear.
Then Perez the narc pushed through us and grabbed the top girl under the arms and pulled her off and she kicked the other girl in the crotch and a knee and the girl jumped up, her eyeliner streaked, her nose and mouth bloody, hair in her face, and she charged after the girl who’d just done this to her, just like Cody Perkins had gone after Big Sully, this much smaller girl going after the bigger one Perez held, and again I felt small and weak because I knew I’d be running; if I were that girl, now was the time to run.
BUT SOME fights came with a warning. Word would get out that somebody was going to kill somebody else, beat his head in, demi him out, kick his ass for some slight; owing money he was never paying back; screwing another’s girlfriend and bragging about it; telling another, “He’s a pussy. My mother can take him.” And then the other comes around with maybe a bat or a knife or just fists and feet to prove otherwise.
GLENN P. had just flicked his smoking roach into the gutter of Main Street. “I wouldn’t want to be your brother right now.”
“Why?”
“’Cause he’s fucking dead, that’s why.”
Glenn P. hooked a strand of hair behind his ear and smiled at me like he was witnessing something that satisfied him more than he thought it would. “It was gonna be Ricky, but he got shanked in the leg so guess who’s coming home on leave?” Glenn P. turned and walked into Pleasant Spa for chips and Pepsi, his usual stoned breakfast. I’d just been in there with change I’d stolen from my mother’s purse, and I’d bought a Coke and a Willy Wonka bar. Now my heart was thudding in my chest, my mouth dry as the bus pulled up to the curb from Seventh. I thought of the J. brothers’ little sister, her heavy black eyeliner, her skinny little body, the way she’d probably talked too much about fooling around up in the tree hut with my brother, who right now was either sleeping late or just leaving the house to walk to the middle school.
FOR A week or more, this was one of the subjects at the back of the bus, on the grates out behind the M and L wings, in day parties down on Seventh. “You hear about Tommy J.? He’s coming home on leave to kill Sue’s little brother. Man, you seen Tommy lately? He’s fuckin’ big.”
I hadn’t seen him. But I’d heard about him. People said he was crazier than his brother Ricky who’d go after anyone for anything, that Tommy was quiet but meaner and more dangerous, that some biker down on Fourth looked too long at Tommy’s girlfriend and he jerked him off his parked hog and beat him till he was almost dead. That’s why Tommy J. had to join the army, they said. That or prison.
I knew he was nineteen or twenty years old, that he weighed close to 200 pounds and was an MP in the army. I remember hoping he’d get killed on the way home from wherever he was. Or that the army would need him and wouldn’t let him out and then months would pass, and he and his brother would forget whatever their little sister had told them.
Jeb started taking different routes to and from school. Some afternoons his teacher would drive him home. She was thirty-five years old and had wild frizzy hair just like Jeb. She was small and thin and wore big, round glasses like Janis Joplin, and she drove a bright orange Z-28, sleek-looking and low to the ground. At the middle school she’d encouraged Jeb’s natural creativity, and gave him Andrés Segovia records he would listen to on our old record player in his room. He was starting to teach himself classical guitar.
It was a weekday afternoon in April, and I was sitting on the front steps of our house waiting for him to come home. An hour earlier on the high school bus, Glenn P. tapped the back of my head, his eyes pink behind his glasses, his long greasy hair stuck behind both ears. “Guess who got in last night?”
I had said nothing, and he’d laughed his stoned, gleeful laugh, and now I was waiting for my brother to come home so I could, what? I didn’t know. Maybe I was just going to tell him to get in the house and stay there. Don’t go down to the store for a Coke or anything. Don’t get seen in the street.
It was a strange afternoon anyway because our mother was home, sick with the flu, and the house was quiet, no other kids inside smoking, drinking, cranking the stereo so loud you could always hear it out on the sidewalk. Most of the snow had melted, but there was still a patch of it in the front yard, the grass brown and damp, bare twigs and half a fallen branch lying in the wet leaves nobody had raked in the fall.
Down on Main Street cars passed. It had to be after three, but I didn’t own a watch and didn’t want to go inside and check the clock in the kitchen. On the other side of our street, on the corner of Main and Columbia Park, was a yellow brick apartment building, and I looked past the bare branches of the trees to the flat roof and tin-colored sky above it. The air had gotten cooler. It felt like it might rain. And then I saw Jeb’s teacher’s sports car as it slowed down on Main, her indicator blinking yellow like an advertisement for anybody bumming at the corner of Seventh, that Sue’s little brother had just gotten home. My heart started up and I stood and walked to the curb to tell him Tommy J. was home on leave, but in only seconds a man was striding up Columbia Park from Main followed by six or seven others, kids I’d seen from the avenues and on the bus, kids in leather jackets and T-shirts and Dingo boots, their long scraggly hair stuck behind their ears, though Tommy J.’s hair was so short he looked bald, and he had a trimmed mustache like a cop’s. He was already halfway up the street when Jeb’s teacher’s car pulled up and my thirteen-year-old brother climbed out of the passenger seat, smiling and oblivious, a book or some art supplies under his arm, his hair wild, that brown fuzz on his cheeks and ch
in.
Somebody said, “That’s him, Tommy.”
The teacher was opening her door. I told Jeb to run inside. “Do it. Go.”
But Tommy J. was already there in front of our house. He was wearing a sweatshirt, and he was a foot taller than both of us, sixty or seventy pounds heavier, and he punched my brother in the face, Jeb’s head snapping back, his book falling to the street.
“You like my little sister, mothafucka?”
Some kid laughed, the teacher was screaming something, and Jeb’s nose was bleeding, his arms at his sides. “Jesus,” he said.
“Tommy, come on.” I stepped forward and he whirled around, his fist at his shoulder. “Shut up, Dubis, or you’re fuckin’ next.” He punched Jeb again, his head knocking back, his hair falling in front of his face. Tommy J. was yelling something about his sister, about Jeb being dead if he even looked at her again. Jeb’s eyes were welling up and there was blood in his mouth and my feet were bolted to concrete, my arms just tubes of air, my heart pounding somewhere high over my head as my sick mother came running out of the house and down the stairs. She grabbed the fallen branch off the ground and started swinging it in front of her. “Get out of here or I’ll call the cops! Get!”
Tommy J. turned and raised his forearm, her swinging stick just missing it. “Fuck you, you fuckin’ whore.” He began walking backwards, pointing his finger at Jeb. “You heard what I said. You fuckin’ heard me.” His eyes passed over me as he turned and started walking back to Main and the avenues, the others falling in with him, and it was the same look Cody Perkins had given me as he pedaled right by me on my stolen bicycle, as if no one sat or stood where he was looking, nobody at all.