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  I was so glad the Motorcycle Boy came home. He was the coolest person in the whole world. Even if he hadn't been my brother he would have been the coolest person in the whole world.

  And I was going to be just like him.

  4

  I went to school the next day. I wasn't feeling too hot and I was bleeding off and on, but I usually go to school if I can. I see all my friends at school.

  I got there late and had to go get a late pass and ended up missing math. So I didn't know Steve was absent till lunch and he didn't show up. I asked around about him--Jeannie Martin told me he didn't come to school because his mother had a stroke or something. I worried about that awhile. I hoped it wasn't him sneaking out of the house that give her the stroke. His parents were kind of weird. They never let him do anything.

  Jeannie Martin wasn't too thrilled to talk to me. She liked Steve. Poor kid. He wouldn't believe that her tipping his chair over in English meant she liked him. He was still funny about girls. And him fourteen, too! Anyway, she liked him and didn't like me because she thought I'd turn him into a hood. Fat chance. I'd known him since I don't remember when, and nobody thought he was a hood. Try and tell her that.

  So I went to the basement and played poker with B.J. and Smokey and lost fifty cents.

  "You guys must cheat," I told them. "I can't have rotten luck all the time."

  B.J. grinned at me and said, "Naw, you're just a lousy poker player, Rusty-James."

  "I ain't either."

  "Yeah, you are. Every time you get a good hand, we can tell it. Every time you get a bad hand, we can tell. You ain't gonna earn your livin' gamblin', man."

  "Don't give me that. Them cards was marked." I knew they weren't, but I didn't believe that garbage B.J. was giving me. He just wanted to crow about winning.

  In gym I just stood around watching basketball practice. I wasn't about to do any basketball. Coach Ryan finally asked me why, and I said I didn't feel like it. I thought I could leave it at that. Coach Ryan was all the time trying to be friends with me. He let me get away with murder. It was like he'd be a big shot, being friends with me, like he owned a vicious dog or something.

  "Rusty-James," he said, after looking around, making sure nobody could hear us. "Want to earn a quick five bucks?"

  I just looked at him. You never know.

  "Price has been giving me a lot of trouble these days."

  "Yeah," I said. Don Price was a smart alec. Real mouthy. I'm mouthy, too, but I don't mean nothing by it. He was mouthy just to get on people's nerves. A real obnoxious kid.

  "I'll give you five bucks to beat him up."

  Well, that would have been simple enough. I knew where the guy lived, I could jump him some afternoon. With my rep nobody'd think to ask why. He was just the kind of jerk I liked beating up.

  About six months before, a guy had offered the Motorcycle Boy four hundred dollars to kill somebody. That is the truth. He didn't take it. Said whenever he killed somebody it wouldn't be for money.

  "I can't fight for a while," I said. I jerked up my gym shirt to show him why.

  "Hey, man!" There he was, thirty years old, saying "Hey, man." He wasn't brought up talking like that, either.

  "You been to the nurse?"

  "Nope." I pulled my shirt back down. "Ain't gonna, either."

  "Well," he said slowly, "let me know when you're healed up."

  "Sure thing," I said, and went back to watching practice. He must have thought I needed money real bad.

  English was my last class. I liked it because our teacher thought we were so stupid that all she had to do was read us stories. That was all right with me. By the end of the day I was ready to sit still awhile anyway. She didn't have any way of knowing if we were listening. Sometimes she'd give us a test at the end of class, but I could always copy off somebody, if anybody knew the answers.

  I'm always in dumb classes. In grade school they start separating dumb people from smart people and it only takes you a couple of years to figure out which one you are. I guess it's easier on the teachers that way, but I think I might like to get in a class with some different people sometimes instead of the same old dummies every year.

  Steve was in my math class this year only because he had a choice of new math or business math and he took business math. All the other smart people took new math, but he wasn't crazy about numbers. I'd been going to the same school with him since kindergarten and this was the first year we were in a class together. I wondered if he got tired of seeing the same old smart people every year.

  I sat there and didn't listen and thought maybe I'd go by and see Patty after school. If I hadn't lost that fifty cents at lunchtime I could have bribed her brothers to go to the park or something.

  Smokey must have been cheating. I ain't that bad a player.

  When I went by her house, though, her mother's car was still there. Maybe it was her day off. I never could keep them straight. Her mother wasn't crazy about me. I think the brothers sometimes squealed on Patty. Man, I wanted to knock their blocks off.

  So I went to Benny's and shot a game of pool by myself. There were other people there, but nobody playing pool. Everybody who came in wanted to see my knife cut. They thought it was cool.

  Steve came by after an hour. I could tell he wasn't in a mood to hang around Benny's. He just wanted some company, so I left with him.

  "How's your old lady?" I asked him after we'd walked a couple of blocks.

  "Real sick." He had a funny white look on his face. "She's in the hospital."

  "It wasn't you sneakin' out that did it?"

  He looked at me like I was off my rocker. Then he remembered and said, "No, it wasn't that."

  He didn't say anything else, so I started telling him how Coach Ryan had asked me to beat up a guy. Only I said he offered me fifty dollars to do it, and said I was really thinking about it. But even that didn't seem to shake him out of it. He just said, "Yeah?" like he was somewhere else.

  I was needing some money. My old man, he got a regular check from the government. He had to go down and sign for it, but it wasn't very much and sometimes he'd forget to give me some of it before he drank it up. I did a lot of scrounging around. Once in a while I'd borrow money from the Motorcycle Boy, but I had to be really careful and pay it back. I don't know why I was so careful about that. One time he gave me a hundred-dollar bill because he said he didn't want it. I don't know where he got it. Since he didn't want it I didn't worry about paying that back. Most of the time I paid him back, though.

  So when I spotted a set of real cool simulated mags on a late-model Chevy, I saw a quick way to make twenty bucks. Twenty dollars would last me a good long while.

  The car was sitting there in front of an apartment house, but nobody was around. I had three of the hubcaps off and was working on the fourth one when Steve said, "What are you doing?" like an idiot. I had handed him those three hubcaps and he was standing there asking me what I was doing. I had to work a little harder on the fourth and was getting nervous, so I said, "Shut up."

  "You know I don't steal things."

  "You know I do," I answered. Finally it came off.

  Just then three guys came shooting out of that apartment house hollering at us. I took two running steps and saw Steve just standing there, so I had to waste some breath screaming, "Move it!" before he woke up and ran. About two blocks later he realized he was still carrying the hubcaps and threw them down, the dummy. That wasn't going to stop those guys.

  They had been swearing at us, but were saving their breath. One stopped to get the hubcaps; I figured one wouldn't do me any good and threw mine away a block later. That stopped another one. The third guy kept on after us.

  Steve was keeping up better than I thought he would, but my side was killing me. I turned down an alley and cut across a fence. Steve followed with a desperate look on his face that made me want to laugh.

  The fence slowed down that guy who was chasing us, but it didn't stop him. Man, he was
out for blood. I ran into an apartment house and shot up the stairs, got to the top and ran out onto the roof. It was a good-sized jump to the next roof, but I made it easy. I was tearing off across it for the next one, when I noticed Steve wasn't with me.

  He had stopped at the gap between roofs. He was almost doubled over from trying to catch his breath.

  "Come on," I said. I wasn't sure we had lost that guy.

  "I can't make it."

  "Yeah, you can. Come on."

  Steve just shook his head. I told him what would happen to him if he got caught. I made it sound worse than falling off the roof. Anyway, it was only two floors up. I'd dropped off a two-story roof before and only broke my ankle. I did it on a dare.

  "Come on," I said. "I'll catch ya."

  Steve looked back at the door, then down at the alley, backed up a few feet and jumped. He didn't know how to do it right at all. But for some reason he made it, landing across his belly on the ledge. He was so surprised he made it that he forgot to hang on and just slipped down. He would have gone all the way down if I hadn't caught his wrist. He hung there hollering his head off, till I said, "If you don't shut up I'll drop you."

  I wasn't threatening him; I was just telling the truth. I kept trying to haul him up, but it wasn't easy. I was hurting pretty bad, too.

  "And don't look at me like a rabbit, neither," I panted.

  He was trying to get a toehold on the wall. He worked so hard to change the expression on his face so he wouldn't look like a rabbit that it almost made me laugh and drop him. Finally, he climbed and clawed his way on up. We just sat there trying to breathe again. I kept listening for that guy who was chasing us. Finally I figured we'd lost him.

  "I guess we didn't need to do that," I said. "He ain't comin' up here."

  I didn't notice till then that Steve was shaking pretty bad.

  "We didn't need to do that, huh?" he said, and really swore at me. I just sat there and tried not to laugh.

  "You shouldn'ta throwed them hubcaps away," I said. "I coulda got twenty bucks for 'em."

  "You were stealing them." He said it like he was really telling me something new.

  "So what. They stole 'em from somebody else."

  "That isn't any reason."

  I started to answer him, then thought, Why bother? We'd had this argument before.

  "You all right?" he asked. I said no, and passed out cold. What with all that running and jumping around and bleeding and not eating anything that day, I was in pretty bad shape.

  I wasn't out too long, just long enough to scare Steve into looking for some help, so when I came to I was laying there on the roof by myself. I fixed that as soon as possible, almost running to the roof door. I bumped into Steve and some old lady he'd talked into coming to help. I don't know what the hell he thought she should do. I said, "Let's go," and got out of there. That lady was real unhappy about being dragged up there.

  I was so mad at Steve for going off and leaving me that it took me about three blocks of fast walking to see that he was crying. That scared the hell out of me. I'd never seen anybody but girls cry, and I couldn't ever remember doing it myself.

  "What's with you?" I asked him.

  "Just shut up," he said. "Just shut the hell up."

  Now that wasn't like him at all. I decided he must still be worrying about his mother. I couldn't remember mine, so I didn't know how he felt.

  5

  Steve went home, and I went home, because I didn't want to keel over in the streets and because I figured the Motorcycle Boy might be there. It was still a little early for the old man.

  I ran into Cassandra on the way up the stairs. I mean, really ran into her. Cassandra thought she was the Motorcycle Boy's girl friend. She was a weirdo, if you ask me. I couldn't stand her. See, she'd been a student teacher at the high school the year before, and the Motorcycle Boy was in one of her classes. She flipped out over him. Girls were chasing him all the time anyway. It wasn't just because he was good-looking. He was different-looking. Anyway, he could have any chick he wanted, and what he saw in Cassandra I don't know. He must have been sorry for her.

  There she was, college-educated and from a good family and from a nice home on the other side of town, and she moves here into an old apartment and follows the Motorcycle Boy around. She wasn't even pretty. I didn't think so, anyway. Steve said she was, but I didn't think so. She'd walk around barefoot like a hick and didn't wear any makeup. Almost every time I'd see her she'd be carrying a cat. I don't like cats. I didn't go as far as Biff Wilcox did, use them for target practice with a twenty-two pistol, but I didn't like them. And she'd try to talk like the Motorcycle Boy, try to say things that meant something. She didn't fool me.

  "Hi," she said to me. I waited for her to move over so I could go on up the stairs, but she didn't. Hell, it was my stairs, for pete's sake. I just looked at her. I never tried to pretend I liked her. "Well, move it," I said finally.

  "Charming child," she said.

  I said something to her I wouldn't normally say to a chick, but she really got on my nerves. She didn't even flinch.

  "He don't like you," I went on. "Any more than he liked any of the rest of them."

  "He doesn't like me now, period," she said. She held out her arms. They were covered with tracks. She was shooting up. "See?"

  I was surprised for a second, then disgusted. "If he ever caught me doin' dope he'd break my arm."

  "He's done almost that much for me," she said. She had always seemed stuck-up, like she thought her and the Motorcycle Boy belonged to some superelite club or something. She wasn't so sassy now.

  "I'm not hooked," she said, like I was her best friend. "I just thought it might help. I thought he was gone for good."

  One thing the Motorcycle Boy couldn't stand was people who did dope. He didn't even drink, most of the time. There was a rumor around that he'd killed a junkie once. I never cared to ask him about it. One day out of the clear blue sky he said to me, "I ever catch you doin' dope I'll bust your arm." And he'd do it, too. Since that was one of the few times he ever paid any attention to me, I took it serious.

  I looked away from Cassandra and spit over the railing. There was something about her that really got on my nerves. She took the hint and went on down the stairs. I found the Motorcycle Boy in the apartment, sitting on the mattress against the wall. I asked him if there was anything to eat in the house, but he didn't hear me. I'd gotten used to that, his hearing had been screwed up for years. He was color-blind, too.

  I found some crackers and sardines and milk. I ain't picky. I like about anything. I also found a bottle of sneaky pete and finished it off. The old man never kept count.

  I took off my shirt and washed out my knife cut again. It hurt real steady, not bad, but steady, like a toothache. I'd really be glad when it quit hurting.

  "Hey," I said to the Motorcycle Boy, "don't go anywhere till the old man gets home, okay?"

  He dragged his eyes off the wall, looked at me slowly without changing his expression, and I could tell he was laughing.

  "Poor kid," he says to me, "looks like you're messed up all the time, one way or another."

  "I'm okay," I said. I was a little surprised he'd worry about me. See, I always thought he was the coolest guy in the world, and he was, but he never paid much attention to me. But that didn't mean anything. As far as I could tell, he never paid any attention to anything except to laugh at it.

  My father came in after a while.

  "Both of you are home?" he asked. He wasn't as drunk as usual.

  "Hey, I need some money," I told him.

  "I haven't seen you for quite some time," the old man said to the Motorcycle Boy.

  "I was home last night."

  "Indeed. I didn't notice." My father talked funny. He'd been to college. Law school. I never told anybody that because nobody'd believe it. It was hard for me to believe it myself. I didn't think people who went to law school turned into drunks on welfare. But I guess some of the
m did.

  "I need some money," I repeated.

  He looked at me thoughtfully. Me and the Motorcycle Boy didn't look anything like him. He was a middle-sized, middle-aged guy, kind of blond and balding on top, light-blue eyes. He was the kind of person nobody ever noticed. He had a lot of friends, though, mostly bartenders.

  "Russel-James," he said suddenly. "Are you ill?"

  "Got cut up in a knife fight," I told him.

  "Really?" He came over to take a look. "What strange lives you two lead."

  "I ain't so strange," I said.

  He gave me a ten-dollar bill.

  "And how about you?" he asked the Motorcycle Boy. "Did you have a nice trip?"

  "Yeah. Went to California."

  "How was California?"

  "It was one laugh after another. Even better than here, as amusing as this place is." The Motorcycle Boy looked straight through the old man, seeing something I couldn't see.

  I was hoping they wouldn't get started in on one of their long talks. Sometimes they'd go for days like they didn't even see each other, and sometimes they'd get started on something and talk all night. That wasn't much fun for me, since I couldn't understand half of what they said.

  It was hard for me to decide exactly how I felt about my father. I mean, we got along okay, never had any kind of arguments, except when he thought I'd been swiping his wine. Even then he didn't mind much. We didn't talk any, either. Sometimes he'd ask me a question or something, but I could tell he was just trying to be polite. I'd tell him about a river bottom party or a fight or a dance, and he would just look at me like he didn't understand English. It was hard for me to respect him, since he didn't do anything. He drank all day out in bars, and came home and read and drank at night. That's not doing anything. But we got along okay, so I couldn't hate him or anything. I didn't hate him. I just wished I could like him better.

  I think, though, he liked me better than he did the Motorcycle Boy. He reminded the old man of our mother. She left a long time ago, so I didn't remember her. Sometimes he'd just stop and stare at the Motorcycle Boy like he was seeing a ghost.

  "You are exactly like your mother," he'd tell him. And the Motorcycle Boy would just look at him with that blank, expressionless animal face.

  The old man never said that to me. I must look like her, too, though.