It's like this, cat Part 5

"You sore or something?" he asks, as if he didn't know.

I keep on walking.

"O.K., be sore!" he snaps. Then he breaks into a falsetto: "Goo'bye, Bashful!"

I let him have it before he's hardly got his mouth closed. He hits me back in the stomach and hooks one of his ankles around mine so we both fall down. It goes from bad to worse. He gets me by the hair and bangs my head on the sidewalk, so I twist and bite his hand. We're gouging and scratching and biting and kicking, because we're both so mad we can hardly see, and anyway no one ever taught us those Queensberry rules. There's no point in going into all the gory details. Finally two guys haul us apart.

I have hold of Nick's shirt and it rips. Good. He's half crying, and he twists away from the guy that grabbed him and screams some things at me before darting across the avenue.

I'm standing panting and sobbing, and the guy holding me says, "You oughta be ashamed. Now go on home."

"Aw, you and your big mouth," I say, still mad enough to feel reckless. He throws a fake punch, but he's not really interested. He goes his way, and I go mine.

I must look pretty bad because a lot of people on the street shake their heads at me. I walk in the door at home, expecting the worst, but fortunately Mom is out. Pop just whistles through his teeth.

"That must have been quite a horror picture!" he says.

5

[Ill.u.s.tration: Dave and Tom lunching in meadow above river.]

AROUND MANHATTAN

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 Sat.u.r.day, 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 Mitch.e.l.l?"

"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 c.o.kes 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 cla.s.sified phone book and look at the subway map, which shows there's an IND train that goes right to it.