Chapter 21

      

 

                "I hate him," Puck said. "that faggot motherfucker has nerve sending me away, telling you he doesn't want my kind hanging around. My kind? What does that mean? How can he be a judge, when he's busy luring little boys up to his loft, pretending to show them his plants when he means to show them his pecker?"

                Still dripping, Puck now sniffled a little as the chill of the river worked down through his drenched clothing. He shifted his feet and the shoes squished, each sneaker leaving a wet spot on the door step, as they had left a moist trail along the street and up the steps to the door.

                "You ought to change your clothing," Maxwell told him, trying to put out of his mind Creeley's rage, and the throbbing purple vein on the old man's forehead. This rage was so unlike the old man that Creeley seemed like a whole different man entirely.

                "Of course, I'll need to change my clothes," Puck said, spitting out the words as if still spitting out river water, his thin, bony frame that much more exposed thanks to the clinging clothing. "The question is: where do I get them?"

                "Can't you go to your mother's?" Maxwell asked.

                "Sure," Puck said. "If I want to go to jail. The cops'll be there for sure. They'll be waiting for me like a pack of dogs."

                "I thought you said they think you're dead."

                "They have to make sure. They have to watch and wait and if they wait long enough, they may even believe it. It's all part of the game. They have to justify not looking for me any more. If I show my face, they'll have to come after me."

                "So what are you going to do?"

                Puck grinned, one front tooth showing its angled space, broken when he and Maxwell were still kids. With Punk in his late teens, the tooth made him look like a throw back to the Little Rascals.

                "I still have this," he said, drawing the nine millimeter pistol from his pocket, its black metal almost invisible in the darkness.

                "Where did you get that?"

                "I stole it from a cop," Puck said proudly. "Grabbed it out of his hand as I jumped."

                "And what are you going to do with it?"

                Puck's grin widened, his wet brows floating over his sparkling eyes, eyes so full of deviltry Maxwell feared what he would say next, so full of restless rage, Maxwell thought the boy might turn the gun on him.

                "When I got out of the water I looked at it," Puck said as he and Maxwell walked away from the bottom door to avoid having their voices echo in the stairway and incur the further wrath of old man Creeley. "I looked at it and thought I should throw it away. Any cops that sees me with it will try and stop me. Yet I thought any cop who sees me all wet will know where I've been and know who I was, and would want to stop me anyway. Then, I thought of you. I thought that son of a bitch Maxwell is living high off the hog up here, sleeping in a bed that ought to be mine, eating food I ought to be eating."

                "I'm not taking anything that's yours," Maxwell protested, drawing again that glinting stare.

                "Yeah, you are," he said. "You don't know it. That old man up there never said anything about me to you. But your bed is my bed, and your food ought to go to me. Anyway, it's not your fault. It's the old man's. He put me out a long time ago, you didn't. He told me I was no good and that he didn't want to be my father any more."

                "Creeley is your father?" Maxwell said, stopping abruptly to stare at Puck, who stopped, too, and grinned.

                "I told you there were things you didn't know, and that old faggot wouldn't tell you."

                "Why did he put you out?"

                "Because he thinks I'm a bad seed," Puck said. "But I think its because I wouldn't let him pork me any more, and threated to cut his goddamn dick off if he tried it again."

                "He never tried anything like that with me," Maxwell said.

                "You just got here. Give him a month or two, when the mood hits comes over him. You'll find him standing over your bed with his dick sticking out. He'll tell you to suck it or get out, and you'll suck it, and they you'll bend over for him, and then he'll bend over for you, and if you're lucky life will go on later as if nothing ever happened. He won't talk about it. And if you make too much noise, he'll tell you you're crazy and tell you to shut up."

                "And you came to the house to shoot, Creeley?" Maxwell asked.

                "No," Puck said, sucking at a back tooth as he started to walk again. "That only crossed my mind. I came because I thought the old ass fucker would take me back. That's what father's are supposed to do. That's what it says in the Bible. I wanted him to tell me everything would be all right. I wanted him to give me a towel, give me a hug, make me feel a little like a son again. He didn't. He sent me away. Now I want to kill him."

                "But you won't, will you?"

                Puck laughed. "No," he said. "The old man's going that for himself, a little at a time."

                "I don't understand."

                "Then you've never seen his needle collection?" Puck asked. "He has a fine one -- given to him by a doctor friend. No dirty needles for old Creeley. That son of a bitch doesn't share anything but his bed."

                "I still don't understand. What are you going to do with the gun?"

                "I'm going to kill somebody," Puck said. "But first I'm gonna get dry, get high and find some fresh clothes."

                "Where?"

                "Don't you worry about where. Just come on. I'll show you some fun."

                So Maxwell followed along after the squishing sneakers, down Main Street to Lower Main, then along River Road to Straight Street, downtown fading into something far less fair, turning into the crumbling grey wood of the town's worst neighborhood -- taverns and whore houses strung along the side of the river like a stained string of pearls. Some of the kinder whites called it "Little Harlem;" most of the working whites called it "Nigger Town;" while all whites made a point of staying away from it after dark, and often before sundown, too. The fact that Puck walked straight towards it without any fear impressed Maxwell, although Maxwell had walked here himself once, after dark, and alone, during that time just after news had arrived about his Uncle Charlie's death. Maxwell had walked from one end of Paterson and back, criss crossing the city, almost unconscious to the subtle differences that marked east side from west or northside from the Lakeview section. So dazed by the death, he even came here, amid the hustle and bustle of party time, when gangs of drunk blacks paraded the sidewalks and the street, laughing, shouting, cursing and crying, all stopping sharply when they saw his white face walking among them, his white face turning from white to blue to red with the flashing bar lights, but never to the color most appropriate to the landscape. So shocked were they than none every did anything to him, sending neither curse or blow after him as he passed through. Only later, when he told others back home what he had done did Maxwell understand the danger he had encountered, learning only then the name of the place through which he had passed unscathed.

                Now again, he came upon it in the dark, wiser than his first time here, aware of what the flashing lights meant -- though as he and Puck came down the street, the sound and sight from a distance seemed like those of a fire, a heated emergency alive in the air, crackling with excitement and danger. In the dark, under those changing lights, the dilapidated buildings -- turn of century buildings that has ceased to exist in other parts of the city with their crumbling porches and desperate air B seemed grander than they had by day, the plyboards over their condemned windows invisible in the dark, as was the pealing paint and other major deformities. In the dark, all the signs of abject poverty gave way to the lights, and the sense of carnival that came alive here after dark, partly inspired by the illusion of drugs, partly by the desperation of the people who lived and played here, each needing this magical time, this illusion, so as to not despair their lives.

                "What are we coming here for?" Maxwell asked, aware of a throbbing in the air as well, a thumping that slowly turned to music as they came closer to the open doors of the taverns. The smell of bar rooms wafted out with the sound, rolling out from two dozen nearly identical places, the smell of hops and whiskey, cigarettes and cigars, perfume and body odor, and a glimpse inside showed bodies rubbing against each other in some aspect of dance, like boy scouts rubbing sticks together in hopes of generating sparks.

                "I've got to meet somebody," Puck said, shoes still making that sucking noise as he put his weigh on them.

                "What for?"

                "I don't have any dope and I need some," Puck said, "and I don't have any dry clothes and I need those, too."

                "And you expect to get those here?"

                "You can get almost anything you want in Nigger Town, if you know who to ask."

                "And you do?"

                "I know the best."

                "Here?"

                "Don't go telling me how awful it is down here. This ain't no black thing. That's the trash your family's been feeding you, and that faggot old man you live with. You read in in the Paterson Morning Call and the Paterson Evening News, too, but that don't make it true. All niggers ain't black, and the things everybody says are going on down here, go on everywhere -- only most white people try and hide it, making whores out of bar maids and a mugger out of me. Down here, everything's honest. These niggers fuck in the hall ways and dance in the street. They gambled up front of the stores where every cop and robber can see them. They shoot dope, drink whiskey, curse and kill, all right out where you can see it, never stealing your house when they can have your wallet, never saying their doing it to help society or some one poorer than them. In most cases, there ain't nobody poorer than folks around here. But they never use it as an excuse, unless its part of some routine that they've worked up, and then they're only doing their own thing. They don't hide behind no bank window. They won't string you out with a lot of threatening letters or call no collection agency. When they cut you up down here, they just do it."

                As Puck talked, he and Maxwell came into the lights -- blinking reds on one side, blues on the other, or a mixture of blues and reds and yellows and greens in-between, flashing from small square windows with lead across the seams or wide windows hanging thick with advertisements for gin and malt liquor. Bar signs that indicated which bar was which didn't seem to exist. Most had been built as bars or "speak easies" as some people called them in the 1920s -- after the silk strike and prohibition created a whole new desperate industry for Paterson workers. Most of the bars even looked the same, squat brick faced buildings saddled with one or two wooden stories on top, with women hanging out the upper windows, blowing kisses and curses down at the men on the street, red lights inside each apartment making silhouettes of the women’s -- shapes, red lights making the interior of these upper floors seemed evil and seductive.

                Once in the middle of it all, even the air smelled, swirling around like trapped water in a basin, growing more intense with each revolution, perfume and booze and sweat and piss, mingling into a broth that defined the essential nature of Nigger Town. It was as strong as a wet hand slapping at his face, and Maxwell walked, turning his head one way then the other to avoid some new rank odor, or following the scent of some smell he had not encountered before.

                He could smell men fucking whores in the shadows. He could smell men shooting up dope. He could smell the pot smokers, whiskey drinkers, and men feasting on beer and spare ribs. Each step lead him to the feast and famine of these people's lives, men with gold chains celebrating, men with gold teeth crying, men drowning in their own cologne, and their own decay, happy and sad, side by side on the same stretch of street, neither acknowledging the other's existence, except to step around or over their fallen bodies.

                Worse than the smell were the sounds: the roaring, ranting, raging sounds that emanated from every direction, from every corner, shadow, window and door, a cacophony of discordant clangs, clanks, thumps, mutters, mumbles, grumble, grunts, groans, moans and music so loud and so insistent that somehow through sheer volume and determination found a sense of harmony all its own.

                In an odd way, Nigger Town reminded Maxwell of a TV cowboy city, a movie set with a four or five block main drag and a few off shoots to either side. As with such westerns, all the saloons, rooming houses and whore's windows faced out onto this one short strip, and all the music, shouting, cursing erupted from this street's doorways, windows and sidewalks. Maxwell fully expected a drunken cowboy to burst out from any window or door at any moment, erupting into the usual Saturday night brawl.

                Puck appeared to notice none of this, striding down the middle of the street like an incoming gunfighter, staring either right nor left, saying nothing except calm, whispered commands to Maxwell, urging him to keep up. Yet people noticed Puck, stopping their singing or talking or shouting wherever he passed, some actually making a move towards the two approaching white boys only to have some more knowledgeable person hold them back.

                "That's Red Ball friend," many whispered as the crowds fell back.

                None of the hostility vanished from the sea of black faces. But their rage was equally balanced by a new, rising look of fear.

                Some asked what Red Ball needed to have white friends for, and why in God's name did the fool white boys come parading into Nigger Town on a Saturday night?

                For Maxwell, who knew nothing about the person Red Ball, yet understood the whispers to mean that Red Ball had some importance here. He also understood that the awe these people felt and the restraint they showed was due to Puck, not himself, and he hurried to keep up with his acquaintance so as not to get separated and perhaps become a target by chance.

                And it wasn't just fear of Red Ball that kept the crowd back. Some seemed to know who Puck was and what he had done, pointing to his still wet clothing as news traveled here faster than Puck could, and a begrudging respect for him grew on the faces as word of his exploits near the Great Falls spread. Yet even if Puck had no immediate tale of daring to advertise his arrival, people would have recognized something special about him, some power he carried around with him as he walked, a power Maxwell didn't completely understand, yet recognized as essentially evil. He seemed headed for some building at the far end of this strip, yet did not move as quickly as he could have, glancing back at Maxwell with a look of annoyance.

                "Will you keep up, damn it," he hissed. "You get too far behind someone's likely to grab you up and leave you in pieces in some alley somewhere."

                Maxwell closed the gap again, matching Puck's stride step for step, and the two of them, looked a little like young soldiers showing off their close order drills. Each seemed to fall into it naturally, as if they had spent their entire lives so connected as to read each others movements and thus adjust their own movement to the other.

                Then, Puck slowed his pace, his head turning to make out a particularly door way among the shadowy mass of black and gray darkness beyond the flashing lights. He squinted, and then he nodded, and turned himself towards it, the crowd of drunks and gamblers and whores parting before him as if he was Moses and they were the Red Sea, he stepping over the bottle and shattered syringes to the sidewalk. This time, he stopped before a narrow doorway, one of three stuck between two taverns. Beyond the door sill, darkness swelled, and Maxwell only guessed that a set of stairs stood waiting just inside, stairs that rose up and gave access to the apartments on the floors above. He could hear the sound of music and laughing that confirmed occupation, just as the darkness seemed to deny it.

                "Ring number three," Puck told Maxwell.

                "What?"

                "Ring the bell for apartment three," Puck said again, standing the way a doe might have after hearing some distant noise, his pistol out but pointed straight down along his leg towards the ground. Again, Puck looked the part of a gunfighter just before the big shoot out, his tone of voice so stern Maxwell wondered just what would happen next.

                Maxwell peered into the dark doorway and saw a small vestibule with brass colored mail boxes installed into the left wall, each with a pearl button above each box. Of all, only number three displayed a number, and even that was of the stickup variety with the top of the number pealing off. Maxwell pressed the button. He heard no ring yet deep inside the building the music and the laughter ceased.

                "Who is it?" a harsh voice called from somewhere up the stairs, though no light showed and no sound had reached them of an opening or closing door.

                "Who do you think?" Puck barked. "Get your nigger ass down here. Now!"

                "Puck?"

                "You're not listening to me, Red Ball. Get down here."

                "I'm not dressed."

                "So?"

                "So it's awful public down there and I'm not alone neither."

                "Do you think I care? Or anyone else for that matter? There ain't a woman in his whole neighborhood that hadn't see you naked   or man a man who'd say anything bad about you if they did. Now you get black ass down here."

                The sound of slapping bare feet came as a naked black man emerged from the darkness, a black man Maxwell had seen in jail.

                "You?" Maxwell said with a gasp.

                "You know Red Ball?" Puck said glancing at Maxwell. "How the hell did someone as over protected as you even get to meet him?"

                "We met in jail," Red Ball said, whose real name Maxwell later learned was Thomas. The black man's eyes shimmered. "He beat the shit out of some of the toughest men in the county."

                "This turd?" Puck said, his glance more sustained this time, eyes narrowing with distrust.

                "I didn't mean to," Maxwell said. "They just wouldn't leave me alone."

                Something registered deep in Puck's eyes like a gear connecting with another gear, one memory joining with this new information, Puck's free hand rose and touched the arm Maxwell had once broken. Then his face grew grim again as he glared at Red Ball.

                "You son of a bitch," he said, lifting his pistol to aim at the black man's bare chest. "The cops nearly got me tonight, cops you said you would keep from rousting me. I ought to kill you like they almost did me."

                "I said I'd keep them off your trail if you laid low," Red Ball said. "But you didn't. You robbed three stores and shot five people. You robbed the mayor's wife's car when she stopped at a red light, then crashed the car into the police chief's garage   nearly killing his wife. How am I supposed to protect you if you insist on riling up the cops like that?"

                Puck lowered his pistol a little, then grinned   that grin Maxwell had seen before slightly less evil than a sneer, his eyes full of delight over his own growing legend.

                "You hear about all that, eh?" he said.

                "Everybody's heard about it, boy," Red Ball said. "If you'd finished fourth grade you could have read about it for yourself. It's the head line in five fucking newspapers today."

                "Is that a fact?" Puck said, pistol lowering another thirty degrees.

                "Don't be so damned proud about it, asshole. You'll go and get yourself killed. Just like what nearly happened last night."

                "I wouldn't have gotten so close to getting killed if you had provided me with protection like you said you would."

                "I'm telling you no one can protect you like that. You can't keep on bucking the system like you do, like some dumb radical nigger. You got to sooth it, make it over into what you want. You don't see me sweating no local heat, do you?"

                "No, I see you just getting out of county jail," Puck said. "Is that how you work the system?"

                "Absolutely," Red Ball said. "I got out. If I was as stupid as you are, they'd still have my black ass in that place, and setting me up for a trip to the state or federal lock up."

                "Who you calling stupid?" Puck shouted and lifted the pistol again, aiming it unwaveringly at Red Ball's face.

                "You," Red Ball said. "Now why don't you..."

                A siren whooped from down the block, and single on and off wail designed to startle and break up the crowd. Someone   most likely one of the many police stooges from the neighborhood   had called the cops saying that two white boys with a gun had come down to Nigger Town and were aimed the damned thing at the head of the chief honcho here, Red Ball.

                "Quick," Red Ball hissed. "Get up the stairs."

                Puck turned towards the approaching car instead, pistol still lifted   the crowd of observers on the street outside scattered to escape the gun and the cops. Red ball, perfectly naked, stepped out of the shadow of the doorway and knocked the pistol down   it clattering on the pavement at Maxwell's feet.

                "Don't be a bigger fool than you already are," Red Ball said. "I can handle this cop. I can handle most of the cops. But not if you're going to go and kill one on me. Get upstairs. Let me handle this."

                Puck glared at Red Ball, his eyes alive with the lights, the red and blue of the bar lights and the police car lights, clashing in his dark stare like swords.

                "All right," Puck said finally. "You handle it. But give me my gun. If you can't get this son of a bitch to go away, I'll put him away for you."

                "Get!" Red Ball said, bending to retrieve the weapon as he pushed both Puck and Maxwell towards the door, wedging the pistol the wrong way down into Puck's grasping hands.

                Behind them, a car door slammed and Maxwell   just before he rushed up the dark stairs   Maxwell thought he caught the angry face of Officer Wilson bearing down on Red Ball, and heard the cop's enraged voice shouting at the crowd.

                Then the darkness swallowed Maxwell and he heard only Puck's shuffling step ahead of him on the stairs, Puck, too, now invisible, even to Maxwell, as invisible as the rest of that interior world, nothing revealing itself to him until he reached the top, where a deep crimson glow greeted them from somewhere around the banister and down the hall, a crimson light so rich it did little more than complement the darkness it was supposed to illuminate.

                Maxwell also caught the scent of sandalwood -- the head shop Stop the World used to burn during his visits there, only thicker and more intense, as if Red Ball had burned whole packets the way hippies had burned single sticks.

                Warmth swelled over him, too, a clinging, wet warmth that instantly made him sweat, and closer he and Puck came to the glow the more profusely Maxwell sweated, and the more the glow and the smell took over his senses swirling him around him, making him stagger like a drunk.

                Something else stirred in that odd environment, a smell perhaps that the incense tried to cover, a sharper odor, breaking out of that moist world to touch something inside of him.

                The blonde haired woman who appeared would have been white under ordinary light, but here, glowed intensely crimson like a spike of flame, her liquid lips and shimmering nails adding to the effect. She was as naked a Red Ball.

                "Here," she said, holding something out at them, a smoldering pipe, the smoke of which reeked of that other, sharp smell Maxwell had detected. "Take a toke of some good hash."

                Behind her, other women appeared, women of varying races, nationalities, colors of hair and eyes and skin, though in the crimson light all took on a similar hue, and all were beautiful, and all were naked.

                Puck grinned and grabbed the pipe with his free hand, sucking on it as his gaze sucked in the vision of Red Ball's Harum. Then, he handed the hot brass pipe to Maxwell, who shook his head.

                "Don't give me that shit," Puck said. "This is our night to get high. You take some, too, or I'll shove this pipe down your throat."

                Maxwell stared at the pipe and then at the women. The women all stared at him, their dilated eyes full of curious mockery, seeming to study him as some pathetic puppy, waiting for him to perform a trick he refused to perform.

                Maxwell's face grew warm and though he knew no one would notice his blush in the crimson light, he knew they knew how embarrassed he felt. He grabbed the pipe and sucked on it, though he received no smoke into his lungs -- the smoldering black dot in the pipe's bowl dying with his attempt -- yet he tasted the sharp flavor through the stem, a taste that might have come by way of some deep, dark Pennsylvania coal mine or oriental slave camp or from the surface of another planet -- so alien a taste Maxwell choked despite the lack of smoke, and he thrust the pipe back at the women, as they giggled at him.

                "Red Ball told us to come up," Puck explained, licking his lips again and again as if the pipe had made him thirsty, although he clearly didn't want water, his stare studying woman after woman, evaluating each, unable to come up with a grand winner to his personal beauty contest.

                "Then come on inside," the blonde woman said, motioning both boys into the apartment, then towards the floor covered with pillows, low lamps, carpets and nearly legless end tables. If the apartment had one piece of normal sized furniture, Maxwell didn't see it. Life here seemed centered around the floor, where carpets and soft silk quilts made nakedness possible. Red Ball had managed to blunt all the sharp edges with the crimson light, and flowing, billowing wall hangings -- these last had pornographic images imprinted in Greek and Roman styles, of men fucking women, men fucking men, men fucking sheep and goats, sheep and goats fucking women, and on and on into endless combinations of perversion.

                Maxwell took it all in from near the door when the slap of naked feet sounded from the hallway behind him, and Red Ball's naked black body appeared again, bathed now in the same crimson light as the harem women.

                "That fucking son of a bitch," Red Ball grumbled as he came in. "Never trust a fucking pig, Puck. That fucker wanted to arrest me for indecent exposure, telling me I had no right to stand out on the street the way I was. Him, the man whose had more of my girls free of charge than I have, and whose prickly butt has been exposed more often and in more public places that any nudist..."

                "Did he see me?" Puck asked, fingers tight around the pistol butt.

                "Don't be an ass. Of course, he didn't see you. If he had, a swat team would be crawling through the windows of this joint right now. Wilson's an ass, but he's no fool. You hurt important people this time, and riled the old mayor. He'll want your blood, and I don't blame him. The city council is starting to talk, making noise about maybe bringing in the State or the Feds."

                "Let them," Puck said, lifting his pistol.

                "Even you can't be that stupid," Red Ball said. "Or that angry. People like us don't beat the Feds, not even the big dealers do, at least not forever. You got to be smart about this. You've got to build something, take over little things, until enough little things add up to something big. Organization is the key word for the 1970s -- and the next few decades if you're wise. No amount of protection will keep the heat off you if you act the way you did over the last couple of days."

                "Fuck you," Pick said, though it was more a grumble than a threat. He glanced at the door. "Did the pig go away?"

                "Yes," Red Ball said. "But that doesn't mean he won't be back. He'll want a little piece of something for doing me the favor. Which, of course, begs me to ask what the hell you're doing here?"

                "I need some clothes and some dope and a place where I can hold up for a while," Puck said.

                "All at once?" Red Ball asked. "That's asking a lot on the spur of the moment. I can find you clothing and drugs, but a safe place from the cops will take some time."

                "Then we'll stay here," Puck said, eyeing the women with a lecherous eye.

                "You don't listen. I just said Wilson will come back. I need a few hours to find you a place. I'll have to stash you some place else in the meantime."

                "Forget that!" Puck snapped. "I don't want you stashing me in any of your nigger dives. I want some place decent."

                "Decent? You don't know what the word means."

                "Decent like this," Puck said, waving his pistol around the room.

                "You're not civilized enough for this kind of place," Red Ball said. "You still got the beast in you, Puck. You have to learn grace and class before you're ready to come inside. People need to know you won't piss all over the furniture."

                "All right, forget the safe place, motherfucker," Puck said. "Just get me the other stuff and me and Max will find something for ourselves, stash ourselves someplace while you come up with something more or less permanent, where nobody will worry about where I piss or when or how much."

                Red Ball let out a low sigh. He looked concerned yet sagged a little, as if he had been through similar arguments as this in the past and knew he couldn't win any with Puck in this mood. He waved a hand at one of the women.

                "Get this animal here some clothes," he said, then addressing Puck again. "I'll get you a safe place. But it won't be until morning. Call me from somewhere, don't come back here, and for God's sake, stay the hell out of trouble in the meantime."

                ***********

                "This is crazy, Puck," Maxwell said when they had finally emerged from the Lakeview section of the city and came to the cemetery wall    a wall lower than Maxwell remembered it being, and more thickly covered with cracks and vines. "We can't spend the night here."

                "Why not?" Puck asked, squirming in his borrowed clothing. "We've done it before."

                Puck's out fit looked at a bad as it seemed to make him feel. Red Ball's girls had dressed him, giggling the whole time, putting his legs into silk socks and pin striped pants, buttoning his thin arms and scrawny chest into a pale blue shirt, over which they had put a pined striped double breasted jacket. He fought them all, tooth and nail, to avoid the tie, and insisted on wearing his still wet sneakers. He looked as much like a TV mobster as anything else, and to Maxwell's eye, looked alien in those clothing    even if they had fit him well, which they did not. Although, the clothing fit Puck better than either of them had expected.

                Maxwell kept thinking what the police would think if spotted him stalking the streets like that, hair tangled, dirty face (he had resisted all attempts at washing him) and his scarred jaw.

                "We were kids the last time when stayed here," Maxwell said.

                "We're still kids," Puck said, motioning for Maxwell to climb through the slightly lowered gap in the crumbling wall. "It's other people who don't think so."

                "I don't feel like a kid," Maxwell said, placing his now larger foot where he had once placed his smaller foot so many times years earlier, the concrete dust sliding out from under it onto a pile near the base of the wall: dust to dust, he thought, recalling those few times he'd actually gone to church instead of coming here. Then, gripping the sides, he hoisted himself over and into the deeper darkness beyond where the grave stones greeted him with their dull grey reflection like ghosts.

                Nothing here had changed, looking as large in reality as it was in memory, with drooping leafless limbs of willow over hanging the darkness like tears. The place smelled the same, too, that scent Maxwell had always struggled to identify, a cross between barn yard and golf course, grass smells, stone smells, but most of all the smell of earth, deep, rich black earth just recently turned.

                This smell brought the chill to him, and spread goose bumps across his arms. Like the first time he feared to move or breathe, feared that if he stepped on a twig or turned a stone, someone or something would leap out at him.

                "Are you going to stand there all night?" Puck asked, crossing the gap with much less care, kicking bits of the crumbling wall down onto the lawn.

                "We could stay here," Maxwell suggested, wishing to linger near the wall where at least some of the glow of the street lights spilled over diluting the darkness.

                "And we could get caught here, too," Puck said. "Especially if someone saw us climbing over. The deeper in the better. No cop is going to climb over after us, but he might shine a light in. If he sees us, he'll have the keeper open the gate, and then I'll have to shoot the bastard, and maybe a few more cops, too."

                "All right," Maxwell said, and shuddered. "Let's go then."

                Now the glow from the street frightened Maxwell, and he half expected a flash of light beam to dawn over the ragged edge of the wall at any moment. He stumbled ahead into the dark, finding himself walking over inch high grave markers hidden in the grass. He had never noticed these before, the low stones of unimportant people who could not afford to mark their passing in any kind of grand style -- the way whole families had with walled grave areas, or the rich, ex-political people with full sized, glass-doored above ground graves. Yet as Maxwell stumbled, he imagined them not as old graves, but new graves growing up from the ground like weeds, the final product of a body's burial, each carved with the appropriate date of birth and death. He looked at none. He refused to look down at all. He feared that one of them might show his own name, date of birth and -- date of dying.

                Side by side with Maxwell, Puck walked apparently undisturbed by the darkness or the graves. He didn't trip or stumble. He just glanced around as if familiarizing himself with an old neighborhood, marking out those places where he used to hand out. In fact, this place seemed to make him more joyful, releasing him from the rage displayed down in Nigger Town.

                "We got dope," he said. "We're going to have a good time tonight."

                "You mean you still want to get high after everything that has happened?"

                "Damned straight," Puck said, and when they came to a particularly dark place in a copes of pines, he pulled a plastic bag from his pocket, a bag Maxwell had seen Red Ball give him. Puck poked through it for a moment, then cursed.

                "That son of a bitch!" he howled.

                "What's wrong now?"

                "That mother fucker stiffed me."

                "That's not dope?"

                "It's not the kind I wanted."

                "What kind is it?" Maxwell asked, peering at the bag, trying to make out the shape of the pills it contained.

                "The fucker gave us acid."

                "Acid"

                "LSD."

                Alarm spread through Maxwell. He had heard a lot about the drug, mostly from people who had never used it, or people on TV warning him against it, each telling horror stories about the people who never came back from it.

                "What are you going to do now?"

                "We're going to take it."

                "We? Take it?" Maxwell said, the pitch and volume of his voice rising.

                "Keep your voice down," Puck scolded. "Kids might think we're ghosts. But the cops won't."

                "I'm sorry. I just got a little concerned."

                "Why?"

                "LSD scares me."

                "Hell, everything scares you."

                "I've heard talk," Maxwell insisted.

                "You've heard shit," Puck snapped. "Who's been telling you tales this time, your uncle, Charlie?"

                "Leave my Uncle Charlie out of this."

                "Why? You're the one who's always bringing him up."

                "Because he's dead."

                Puck blinked. "When did this happen?"

                "About six months ago. We got a call from the Department of Defense. His unit was overrun in Vietnam."

                "Who said?"

                "The Army."

                "And you believed them?"

                "Why shouldn't I?"

                "Fool," Puck said, making the word sound like a curse. Then, he pinched out several small pills from the bottom of the bag. "Here. Hold out your hand."

                Maxwell complied, and Puck dropped the purple pills into his palm.

                "Put them under your tongue and let them melt," Puck said.

                "But I don’t want to..."

                "Do it!" Puck snapped. "You take the word of too many people for too much. This stuff will open your eyes a little, make you start questioning what people say."

                Maxwell frowned, staring down at his hand. "Uncle Charlie used to say things like that," he mumbled.

                "Take the dope, boy," Puck said.

                Maxwell peered down at the tiny purple pills, the shape and size of which surprised him. The TV movies he had watched before his uncle had gone away always said LSD came in sugar cubes. These things looked more like ordinary candy. Yet when he slipped them under his tongue as Puck commanded, they tasted like no candy he had ever eaten, a little bitter, a little metallic with that slight after taste of chemical.

                "What now?" Maxwell asked.

                "You'll see."

                "See what? At least give me a clue as to what I should expect."

                "I couldn't describe it even if I wanted to," Puck said. "That's what I meant. There are some things you have to experience for yourself, things you can't get from reading a book, like jail and acid and sex."

                "I experienced jail, thank you, and hated every minute of it."

                "But you're better off for the experience," Puck said. "Now you know you don't want to go back there."

                "You've been there?"

                "More times than I can count."

                "And you liked it?"

                "No."

                "But you keep on going back."

                "And keep getting let out, too," Puck said. "Now let's not talk about it any more. Jail is boring. I only want to talk about things I've never done before."

                "What haven't you done?"

                "I haven't died."

                "You're crazy," Maxwell said, Puck starting to scare him now -- not in the ways he had in the past, that violent sensibility that seemed to come up from the street. This was a new strange tone in his voice, something a little manic against which Maxwell had no defense. Something in the voice hinted Punk was dead serious.

                "We're all crazy because we can't help thinking about and wondering over death," Puck said, putting the rest of the pills into his own mouth. He had given Maxwell two, and taken ten for himself. "Some of us even crave it, though we don't know we do, and it drives us nuts, not knowing when its coming or what happens afterwards. You went to Religious School, Max?"

                "For a while," Maxwell said. "Until they tossed me out. Then I had to go to public school."

                "What did they teach you?"

                Maxwell shrugged. "The usual things I guess reading, writing and mathematics."

                Puck shook his head. "No, they might have pretended to teach you those things, and pretended so well you probably learned a lot more than you did in public school, but that wasn't the real lesson."

                "What was?"

                "About dying."

                "I don't remember any of that," Maxwell said.

                "They covered it up a bit by calling it religion. That's what all that dust to dust stuff is all about. Those Jesus people got their fingers on the pulse. They know that people are dying. So they teach you from day one about it, about what comes later, rather than let you think about it on your own, rather than let it drive you crazy."

                "For God's sake, Puck, we're only seventeen. We've got our whole lives to deal with. Why in the world would religious school want to teach me about death when I'm only five or ten?"

                "I told you," Puck said, growing more adamant, waving his hands about in the dark, some trick of light from the street flashing off his finger nails. "They know. Those Jesus people know. Even when we think we have time, we're dying. We put off the idea of it, selling ourselves with the thought that we have time. But that only makes it worse. So that when we're forty of fifty and realize just how little time we've had after all, we sort of freak out, searching out some kind of meaning or something. Some guys take on young girl friends, or get strange habits, or suddenly find out where church is and show up their regular, hoping to make the thoughts inside their head go away. That's what happened to my old man."

                "Creeley?"

                "Damned straight," Puck said. "You don't think he was always just the weirdo faggot he is now. He used to be some high muckily muck up at the college, a professor of this or that. Then one day, he sees he's got grey hair on his head and he goes off the deep end, tells my mother to get lost, then he goes off to his little hole downtown. He starts fucking boys right out in the open, instead of on the sneak, he starts messing with magic and smack, and then, he finds all that doesn't work, he runs away to the country where he says the air is cleaner and the water purer and the moon light good for curing his wrinkles."

                "Creeley, leave Paterson? You don't know what you're talking about."

                "You haven't been around him long enough," Puck said. "You haven't been tossed out on the street, or had to see your father go to pieces, or your mother dying of heart break, or hatred, or whatever for lack of that faggot... what was that?"

                "What was what?"

                "I heard someone cough," Puck said, turning to stare out into the gloom. The lights from the city glowed over from the direction of the wall despite the distance Maxwell and Puck had put between, glowing the way Maxwell always imagined the sky would at a distant fire. Nightmares over air raid drills had painted such a glow on the sky when the imagine bombs dropped.

                "Who is it?" Puck shouted, standing now with his pistol up and feet parted. "Come on, asshole, show yourself. Don't think you can fool anybody by hiding in the shadows."

                At first, only a shape showed, a foot-dragging, limp-shoulder shape, emerging from between two pale grave stones, as gray and grim as the graves behind which he had hidden. The features of his face and clothing sanded smooth by darkness. Only when the man neared, did Maxwell recognize the smell of alcohol and the street life, a stomach-retching smell so strong it said this man had not bathed in months or years, a figure wearing an old man's face, though with these people Maxwell could rarely tell an age. They all looked haggard and old and seemingly on the stoop of death's doorway.

                "Who are you?" Puck demanded.

                "Nobody, mister," the old man said. "just somebody sleeping here. Nobody important."

                "Here?" Puck snapped. "What the fuck are you doing sleeping in here?"

                The old man answered with a shrug. It was the only answer many of them had to explain their situations, as if how they got where they were was as big a mystery to them as it was to anybody else.

                But Puck clearly didn't like the answer, his face growing grimmer as starlight and street lights caught the edge of his anger-carved cheeks and jaw. Then, Puck's warped into an expression of conflicting rages, one cheek twitching as the other side tightened, his small eyes growing smaller and narrower until they each looked like the open end of a pistol barrel. Maxwell saw the flash first, erupting from Puck's mid-drift, followed as if by miles and hours by delayed thunder, the roar of the gun.

                The impact of the first shot spun the bum around, arms flailing like loose rags, feet stumbling in a stranger searching dance over the inch high grave markers. The second shot hit the bum in the side -- interrupting the man's efforts to recover his balance. He fell side ways into the flat face of a grave stone, seemingly pinned against it, his dark form making a human silhouette that allowed Puck to take more careful aim.

                The third shot exploded the bum's head. The darkness and grave stone backdrop showed only the grass mass as it boiled out the other side, splattering against stone, grass and the Mausoleums, grey that dripped down the flat grave stone like a misshapen slug. No moan came from the bum. He no longer had a mouth with which to moan. That last shot had removed most of his face, shattering jaw and nose, leaving only a black hole in their place.

                The smell of street evaporated -- replaced by the smell of spent gun powder and the sticky sweet odor of blood. It was a smell that floated over Maxwell, so strongly and thickly, he might have floated in blood, breathing it in, gaging over it, vomiting it out again. He retched and retched again, as the echoes of the three shots died in the distance and the ruins of the former bum crumbled to pieces on the ground.

                Puck stepped forward, pistol hanging from his fingers at his side. He made no move to touch the body when he reached it; he just stared down at it, squinting so hard he seemed to search for something important among the ruins, some rising of steam to indicate the escaping spirit. Where did the life go? How did it get away so unnoticed? Why did the man's eyes -- which remained frozen open in their moment of horror -- show a sense of intelligence even when the heart had ceased? They were the same eyes. It was the same wreck of a man. Yet staring down, Puck frowned over the differences.

                "Why the fuck did you do that?" Maxwell yelled, wiping the strands of vomit from his mouth, though he made no effort to straighten himself, holding both his arms across his stomach.

                "Keep your voice down," Puck said in an eerie calm tone. "The cops'll hear you."

                "Fuck the cops," Maxwell shouted, even more loudly. "You just killed someone and you expect me to stay calm."

                "I killed a bum."

                "That's still somebody."

                "No," Puck said, turning away from the body. "It isn't."

                Puck looked disappointed and sad, as if he had expected to find out something important with the shooting, and found nothing. Maxwell retched again, and moaned, as his own vomit seemed to turn red on the ground, first like blood, then something more like lava, then finally, something absolutely alive and furious, slithering away from him to mingle and entwine with the red, still bubbling blood flowing snake-shaped from the bum.

                "Come on, come on, stop staring at it," Puck said and pulled Maxwell's arm. "It's only a bum. Nothing to go on a bad trip about. Come on. Let's get out of this place. We'll go hang out under the rail road bridge. We shouldn't have come here. This place has always given me the creeps."

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