Mad Boys (12 page)

Finally, I reached Dali Street. I stopped for a minute to watch the homeless man. He walked into a vacant lot clogged with junk and garbage bags and started picking through the stuff. The sound of the expressway overhead was a like a strained sigh. My attention wandered to spray-painted walls. They were everywhere, but especially numerous on Dali Street. Guys with stiffies. Women’s body parts. Crooked crosses. But mostly words. Initials and names. Some of the words were written in foreign languages which made no sense to me. Some of the American words were swears I’d never heard before or whose meaning escaped me.

I liked looking at the words on the walls, though. Not just the swears but the love declarations, the agonies, and even the hates. Hurt, hate, love, and politics: what the stories written on the walls were about. I liked the way the spray-paint writers used colors, and I liked the mystery: who were these painter-writers? I enjoyed imagining how a creative writer, in the dead of night with his spray can, might suddenly appear like a wounded bird fallen to earth and write the words that were in his soul and then, taking strength from his actions, soar like a hawk. I was thinking these thoughts, observing how dirty words on dirty walls left a feeling in me of clean, when I saw three letters that made me swallow my Adams apple double, A-Y-G.

I went a little farther. Another A-Y-G. Then a sign over a door in spray paint, “Gayguns Faygor Saygale.” The door was ajar, and I pushed it open. It was dark inside, but I went in anyway. I was in a hallway. I could smell pee, vomit, mildew, dog shit. I started up a rickety staircase. When I got to the top, I paused, listening. The only sound I heard was the rush of the expressway outside.

I was beginning to think that nothing of importance was going to happen when suddenly two guys jumped me, knocked me down, wrestled around with me, and stood me against the wall. The next thing I knew the lights were on, and I was gawking at two black boys about my own age.

“No scars, no club colors—you’re a ways from home,” said a tall, skinny chestnut-brown guy with big lips, big eyes, and a receding chin.

“Let’s shoot him,” said the other, waving a 9-mm pistol under my nose. He was short but heavily muscled, head shaved bald. His skin was dull brown, like a scuffed shoe. I looked at his gun, and then I looked at his eyes; he was serious.

“Go ahead, I don’t mind dying,” I snickered.

The bald boy, a little taken aback by my bravery, said, “Don’t get too close to him—he’s appears to have a disease of the
haid.”

Actually, I was too stunned to be afraid and too interested to act stunned. A second later I heard a familiar voice.

“Of course he has a disease of the head, he’s Langdon Webster.” It was Royal Durocher, ambling bow-legged down the hall. He was wearing a black cowboy hat, sunglasses, orange jeans, and a shoulder holster with a pistol. He seemed to have grown another couple of inches. He was almost six feet tall. He punched me in the belly out of friendship, and when I got my breath back he introduced me to the dark-skinned guys. They were members of the Shadows. The taller fellow was Bik, the stocky one with the gun was Nox.

“It took you long enough to get here,” Royal said.

“You were expecting me?”

“Of course,” he said, then turned to the other boys and said, “See you later. I want to get reacquainted with my associate.”

Bik and Nox nodded to me, then left.

Royal took me to his clubhouse, a two-room apartment in the ruined building. The furnishings included lamps, a PC, fax machine, telephone, television set, but no chairs, beds, or couches. Snarls of extension cords ran all over the place and out a window to somewhere that provided a source of electricity. Just as the Autodidact’s trailer had been jammed with books, so Royal’s rooms were jammed with guns. In boxes, piled on the floor and hanging from nails driven into walls and ceilings, were rifles, shotguns, machine guns and handguns of every kind and caliber. I recognized a couple of the weapons that Father and I had lifted in burglaries.

I was a little fidgety, and Royal knew right away what I needed.

“Have a cigarette?” he said. That was Royal, real sensitive.

“Thanks,” I said, lighting up, taking a drag.

Royal had suffered some business reversals but had bounced back, and he was in an especially good mood. Royal’s moods tended to run that way—good, very good, especially good, out of this world, terrific, and taygerraygifaygic. As far as I knew Royal had never had a mood below the good range, unless you count the time he thought I’d betrayed him.

“Selling steroids to high school athletes is still a hot business, but everybody’s getting into it,” he said. “At the moment, I’m facing serious competition from down-and-out yuppies looking to diversify their portfolios. The yuppies have direct contact to the drug companies, and they undercut my sales. I was afraid I was going to have to go back to selling hard drugs on the streets. But I have a moral problem with that. So I did a little black mail. And then I discovered a gold mine in the cities: wars down here between rival boy gangs. Somebody has to supply the combatants with arms. They used to make do with knives, chains, home-made zip guns and hand-me-down iron from the older felons. Is that any way to conduct a war?”

I shook my head no.

“The secret to my success is providing a good product at a reasonable price and to treat everybody fair and square. The gangs respect me because I’m even-steven. Race, religion, national origin: I don’t play favorites. You got the buck, I got the bang. I’m already on my way to a fortune.”

Royal explained that he catered to bands of roving boys in the twelve-to-fifteen age bracket who had not yet graduated to the regular gangs. Two of these boy gangs dominated this area, the Shadows, consisting of poor black boys, and the Souvz, a bunch with ethnic origins on the island nation of Souvien. The two gangs were at war.

“What are they fighting over? Drug turf?” I asked.

“Naw, that’s the older guys,” said Royal. “These kids just fight for the hell of it and out of habit. That’s the problem with this neighborhood, too many ingrained bad habits.”

Royal paused, paced, and then he spoke, only this time there was something different in his voice. It took me a while to figure out what that thing in his voice was: it was concern. “You know what’s going to happen to most of these boys?”

“I don’t know. Grow up?” I said.

“They’re not cut out to grow up. The lucky ones are going to die young. They’re going to die in alleys. They’re going to die in their own puke. They’re going to die alone. They’re going to die making their mothers unhappy. The unlucky ones are going to take years and years to die, years and years of useless walking back and forth before they just cave in from their ambling.” He turned his back on me, whirled around, and aimed his index finger at me. “You’re as bad off as they are.”

“I don’t care. I want to die young.”

“We all want to die young, but it’s got to be a glorious death. That’s why I’m doing them a favor by selling them guns. Guns are their tickets to glorious deaths. Web, I have plans for millions of glorious deaths.” He grabbed my T-shirt. “Soon I’ll be moving my operations south and west. Do you want to be my associate?”

I wasn’t sure what I wanted anymore. Life with Royal would be exciting, but short: ideal. I guess what scared me was that I didn’t want to die Royal’s glorious death; I wanted to die my own death, glorious or not. Still, he was my friend, the only true friend I had. What’s more, he was a genius, so he’d know more than dumb me.

“I don’t know,” I said.

Royal socked me in the belly, and I fell to my knees. “Be strong,” he said, “be sincere, be forthright, be for sure. The maybes will kill you.”

After I recovered, I spent the next hour telling Royal about my adventures so far. I told him about my fight with Father, about meeting the Autodidact, about the River Rats and their hatred of blacks. Royal pretended not to pay attention. He even made a couple of phone calls, but I just kept talking until finally I could talk no more.

“Done?” Royal said.

“Done.”

“I’m grateful to you, Web. You’ve already earned your keep.”

“Huh?” I couldn’t imagine what he was talking about.

“You’ve opened up a new market, suburban gangs of white boys. If, as you say, the River Rats are carrying around a world of hurt, wanting to take it out on blacks, they’ll want to trade their paint guns for the real thing. There’s probably hundreds of other boy gangs out there in the suburbs just dying to die glorious deaths.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Forget it,” Royal said. “You look ready to get some sleep.”

“Sure am,” I said.

I found a piece of floor I liked, circled it like a dog, and lay on my side for the night. I wondered how I was going to keep warm. I looked up at Royal. “Where do you sleep?” I said.

“A leader never tells where he sleeps.” He opened a closet, rummaged about, and came up with a sleeping bag and a pillow, which he tossed to me. “Make yourself at home,” he said.

I yawned.

“I’ll tell you a secret,” Royal said. “A kid short on brains can’t have too many guns. If he’s smart like me he doesn’t need a weapon of any kind. But smart or dumb, gun or not, a kid ought to have a pillow.”

“Is this one yours?” I asked.

“It’s a spare. You’ll never see loneliness in Royal Durocher’s posture. You’ll never smell fear from Royal Durocher. And you’ll never see the pillow he lays his head down upon.”

Royal left his clubhouse. I was alone. It was suddenly quiet, and then I heard ticking. Tick-tick, no tick, then tick-tick-tick. It sounded to me like a clock that had forgotten how to tell time. Two seconds later I was dreaming of a gunfight, and the rest of the night went by without incident. I slept soundly and late into the morning. But I woke to the ticking I’d heard going to sleep. It took a minute of tracing down the sound before I located its source: the crumbling ceiling; bits of plaster fell in a tiny but constant rain on a radiator.

I stayed with Royal in his clubhouse for a couple days, just resting and lounging around, watching television, playing with guns. I didn’t see much of Royal. He was on the telephone a lot, and there were times when he’d disappear for three or four hours. When he’d come back, he’d always bring me food—burgers, fries, pizza, cokes. But he never spent the night in the clubhouse.

Just about when I was getting bored and feeling cooped up, Royal announced that he wanted me to join the Shadows.

“You think they’d take me in?” I asked, suddenly full of the anticipation of new adventures.

“I’ll vouch for you.” Royal called Bik and Nox on a walkie-talkie. A minute later, they were in Royal’s clubhouse looking me up and down.

Nox brandished his gun when he spoke to Royal, “He’s dark but not dark enough to be a Shadow.”

“Take him on as a spy,” Royal said.

“A spy?” said Bik, interested.

“Sure,” Royal said. “He can join the Souvz and then report back everything going on in their gang.”

“What if he’s already working for the Souvz and spying on us?” said Nox.

“Then kill him,” said Royal.

“Great idea,” said Bik, but he was being sarcastic.

“Let’s save ourselves the aggravation and do it now,” said Nox, no sarcasm in his voice at all. I liked him, he came right to the point; you knew where you stood with Nox.

“I don’t know. He looks like a Souv,” said Bik.

“I swear on my mother’s love that the only language I speak is English,” I said.

“Liars swear like candy rots teeth.” Nox opened his mouth and flashed his cavities. His mouth was shot full of holes. His breath smelled like dead animals.

“If you boys make me mad I’ll put the d-a-d hex on you,” I hissed.

Bik backed up a step. “The d-a-d hex, what’s that?”

“It’s the brand of Cain. It sears through your skin all the way to your soul.”

Nox looked at Bik. “He’s got the mad boy power.” Nox was definitely confused. I was making some headway, but not much.

“He’s a liar.” Bik spat in his hand for emphasis.

“Naturally he’s a liar, but you have to admit he’s a good one,” Royal said.

“The d-a-d hex is the forked tongue of a snake licking your eyeballs.” I was thinking about the Alien.

“He’s bad, real bad,” Nox said in admiration.

There it was again, Nurse Wilder’s philosophy: good is bad; bad is good.

“Maybe.” Bik was relenting a little, and he was the real leader, although Nox was tougher.

“I’ve seen Web lie so good, even
he
thought he was telling the truth,” Royal said. “When Web finally is killed and saunters up to the pearly gates, St. Peter and Satan won’t know which place he belongs.”

Bik said he’d take my request to be a member of the Shadows “under advisement.” Some of the Shadows had already been hauled into court a few times and they had picked up lawyer words such as “under advisement.” Bik and Nox said they would conditionally sponsor me with the gang, but that I would have to plead my case at a special initiation rite. Then the Shadows would vote on whether to accept me in the gang. Or.

“Or what?” I said.

“Death,” said Nox.

“I don’t care,” I said, and I meant it, and they could tell I meant it, and we all knew I was in. Bik and Nox left, and I was alone with Royal.

“Faygantaygastaygic,” Royal said. “You’ll report back to me everything that the Shadows do.”

“I don’t want to be a squealer,” I said.

“It’s not being a squealer. It’s being on the right side, the strong side, the side of destiny. You owe me. I saved your life. Those boys would have killed you.”

“I wouldn’t have cared.”

“Listen, Web, I love the boy gangs as if they were my own brothers. They’re closer than brothers; they’re clients. I just need to be kept informed as to their activities, so that I can better serve them.”

That made sense to me. I hung around the clubhouse playing with Royal’s stockpile of guns, but he wouldn’t let me fire them.

“You shoot a gun, you have to clean it, or else it’ll rust and then it’s harder to sell,” he said. “That’s the main reason I don’t participate in gunfights. You have to clean the piece afterward, and I’ll do anything to avoid work. Work is not wholesome or comfortable or fitting for a boy. Work is the opposite of play, and that’s what boys are supposed to do—play.”