By the next weekend I no longer look like a fugitive from a riot. All week
in school Nick and I get asked whether we got hit by a swinging door; then
the fellows notice the two of us aren’t speaking to each other, and they
sort of sheer off the subject. Come Saturday, I sit on the stoop and
wonder, what now? There are plenty of other kids in school I like, but
they mostly live over in the project—Stuyvesant Town, that is. I’ve never
bothered to hunt them up weekends because Nick’s so much nearer.
Summer is coming on, though, and I’ve got to have someone to hang around
with. This is the last Saturday before Memorial Day. Getting time for
beaches and stuff. I suppose Nick and I might get together again, but not
if he’s going to be nuts about girls all the time.
A guy stops in front of the stoop, and Cat half opens his eyes in the sun
and squints at him. The guy says, “You Dave Mitchell?”
“Huh? Yeah.” I look up, surprised. I don’t exactly recognize the guy,
never having seen him in a clear light before. But from the voice I know
it’s Tom.
“Oh, hi!” I say. “Here’s Cat. He’s pretty handsome in daylight.”
“Yeah, he looks all right, but what happened to you?”
“Me and a friend of mine got in a fight.”
“With some other guys or what?”
“Nah. We had a fight with each other.”
“Um, that’s bad.” Tom sits down and has sense enough to see there isn’t
anymore to say on that subject. “I start work Memorial Day, when the
beaches open. Working in a filling station on the Belt Parkway in
Brooklyn.”
“Gee, that’s a long way off. You going to live over there?”
“Yeah, they’re going to get me a room in a Y in Brooklyn.” Tom stretches
restlessly and goes on: “I suppose you get sick of school and all, but
it’s rotten having nothing to do. I’d be ready to go nuts if I didn’t get
a job. I can’t wait to start.”
I think of asking him doesn’t he have a home or something to go back to,
but somehow I don’t like to.
“Like today,” Tom says. “I’d like to go somewhere. Do something. Got any
ideas?”
“Um. I was sort of trying to think up something myself. Movies?”
Tom shakes himself. “No. I want to walk, or run, or throw something.”
“There’s a big park—sort of a woods—up near the Bronx. A kid told me about
it. He said he found an Indian arrowhead there, but I bet he didn’t.
Inwood Park, it’s called.”
“How do you get there?”
“Subway, I guess.”
“Let’s go!” Tom stands up and wriggles his shoulders like he’s Superman
ready to take off.
“O.K. Wait a minute. I’ll go tell Mom. Should I get some sandwiches?”
Tom looks surprised. “Sure, fine, if she doesn’t mind.”
I’m not worried about getting Mom to make sandwiches because she always
likes to fix a little food for me. The thing is, ever since my fight with
Nick, she’s been clucking around me like the mother hen. Maybe she figures
I got in some gang fight, so she keeps asking me where I’m going and who
with. Also, I guess she noticed I don’t go to Nick’s after school anymore.
I come right home. So she asks me do I feel all right. You can’t win.
Right now, I can see she’s going to begin asking who is Tom and where did
I meet him. It occurs to me there’s an easy way to take care of this.
I turn around to Tom again. “Say, how about you come up and I’ll introduce
you to Mom? Then she won’t start asking me a lot of questions.”
“You mean I _look_ respectable, at least?”
“Sure.”
We go up to the apartment, and Mom asks if we’d like some cold drinks or
something. I tell her I ran into Tom when he helped me hunt for Cat around
Gramercy Park, which is almost true, and that he sometimes plays stickball
with us, which isn’t really true but it could be. Mom gets us some
orangeade. She usually keeps something like that in the icebox in summer,
because she thinks cokes are bad for you.
“Do you live around here?” she asks Tom.
“No, ma’am,” says Tom firmly. “I live at the Y. I’ve got a summer job in a
filling station over in Brooklyn, starting right after Memorial Day.”
“That’s fine,” Mom says. “I wish Davey could get a job. He gets so
restless with nothing to do in the summer.”
“Aw, Mom, forget it! You got to fill in about six-hundred working papers
if you’re under sixteen.
“Listen, Mom, what I came up for—we thought we’d make some sandwiches and
go up to Inwood Park.”
“Inwood? Where’s that?” So I explain to her about the Indian arrowheads,
and we get out the classified phone book and look at the subway map, which
shows there’s an IND train that goes right to it.
“I get sort of restless myself, with nothing to do,” says Tom. “We just
figured we’d do a little exploring around in the woods and get some
exercise.”
“Why, yes, that seems like a good idea.” Mom looks at him and nods. She
seems to have decided he’s reliable, as well as respectable.
I see there’s some leftover cold spaghetti in the icebox, and I ask Mom to
put it in sandwiches. She thinks I’m cracked, but I did this once before,
and it’s good, ’specially if there’s plenty of meat and sauce on the
spaghetti. We take along a bag of cherries, too.
“Thanks, Mom. Bye. I’ll be back before supper.”
“Take care,” she says. “No fights.”
“Don’t worry. We’ll stay out of fights,” says Tom quite seriously.
We go down the stairs, and Tom says, “Your mother is really nice.”
I’m sort of surprised—kids don’t usually say much about each other’s
parents. “Yeah, Mom’s O.K. I guess she worries about me and Pop a lot.”
“It must be pretty nice to have your mother at home,” he says.
That kind of jolts me, too. I wonder where his mother and father are,
whether they’re dead or something; but again, I don’t quite want to ask.
Tom isn’t an easy guy to ask questions. He’s sort of like an island, by
himself in the ocean.
We walk down to Fourteenth Street and over to Eighth Avenue, about twelve
blocks; after all, exercise is what we want. The IND trains are fast, and
it only takes about half an hour to get up to Inwood, at 206th Street. The
park is right close, and it is real woods, although there are paved walks
around through it. We push uphill and get in a grassy meadow, where you
can see out over the Hudson River to the Palisades in Jersey. It’s good
and hot, and we flop in the sun. There aren’t many other people around,
which is rare in New York.
“Let’s eat lunch,” says Tom. “Then we can go hunting arrowheads and not
have to carry it.”
He agrees the spaghetti sandwich is a great invention.
I wish the weather would stay like this more of the year—good and sweaty
hot in the middle of the day, so you feel like going swimming, but cool
enough to sleep at night. We lie in the sun awhile after lunch and agree
that it’s too bad there isn’t an ocean within jumping-in distance. But
there isn’t, and flies are biting the backs of our necks, so we get up and
start exploring.
We find a few places that you might conceivably call caves, but they’ve
been well picked over for arrowheads, if there ever were any. That’s the
trouble in the city: anytime you have an idea, you find out a million
other people had the same idea first. Along in mid-afternoon, we drift
down toward the subway and get cokes and ice cream before we start back.
I don’t really feel like going home yet, so I think a minute and study the
subway map inside the car. “Hey, as long as we’re on the subway anyway, we
could go on down to Cortlandt Street to the Army-Navy surplus store. I got
to get a knapsack before summer.”
“O.K.” Tom shrugs. He’s staring out the window and doesn’t seem to care
where he goes.
“I got a great first-aid survival kit there. Disinfectant and burn
ointment and bug dope and bandages, in a khaki metal box that’s
waterproof, and it was only sixty-five cents.”
“Hmm. Just what I need for survival on the sidewalks of New York,” says
Tom. I guess he’s kidding, in a sour sort of way. If you haven’t got a
family around, though, survival must take more than a sixty-five-cent kit.
The store is a little way from the nearest subway stop, and we walk along
not saying much. Tom looks alive when he gets into the store, though,
because it really is a great place. They’ve got arctic explorers’ suits
and old hand grenades and shells and all kinds of rifles, as well as some
really cheap, useful clothing. They don’t mind how long you mosey around.
In the end I buy a belt pack and canteen, and Tom picks up some skivvy
shirts and socks that are only ten cents each. They’re secondhand, I
guess, but they look all right.
We walk over to the East Side subway, which is only a few blocks away down
here because the island gets so narrow. Tom says he’s never seen Wall
Street, where all the tycoons grind their money machines. The place is
practically deserted now, being late Saturday afternoon, and it’s like
walking through an empty cathedral. You can make echoes.
We take the subway, and Tom walks along home with me. It seems too bad the
day’s over. It was a pretty good day, after all.
“So long, kid,” Tom says. “I’ll send you a card from Beautiful Brooklyn!”
“So long.” I wave, and he starts off. I wish he didn’t have to go live in
Brooklyn.
6
[Illustration: Dave wheeling his bike across Belt Parkway.]