“But you get along.”
“Yes.”
“Is being white a handicap?”
She did smile. “Kids say I’m beige. Getting beiger.”
“Save many?” I said.
“No.”
“Worth the try,” I said.
“One is worth the try,” she said.
“Yes.”
“You understand that, don’t you?” she said.
“Yes.”
She nodded several times, sort of encouragingly. She leaned back a little in her chair, and crossed her legs, and automatically smoothed her skirt over her knees. I liked her legs. I wondered for a moment if there would ever be an occasion, no matter how serious, no matter who the woman, when I would not make a quick evaluation when a woman crossed her legs. I concluded that there would never be such an occasion, and also that it was a fact best kept to myself.
“A while back the state decided to train some women to work with the kids in the ghetto. The training was mainly in self-effacement. Don’t wear jewelry, don’t bring a purse, don’t wear makeup; move gingerly on the street, don’t make eye contact. Be as peripheral as possible.”
She shook her head sadly.
“If I behaved that way I’d get nowhere. I make eye contact. I say hi. Not to do that is to dis them. If you dis them they retaliate.”
“Dis as in disrespect,” I said.
“Yes. The thing is that, to the people training the women, these kids were a hypothesis. They didn’t know them. Everything is like that. It’s theory imposed on a situation, rather than facts derived from it. You understand?”
“Sure,” I said. “It’s deductive, and life is essentially inductive. Happens everywhere.”
“But here, with these kids, when it happens it’s lethal. They are almost lost anyway. You can’t afford the luxury of theory. You have to know.”
“And you know,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “I know. I’m out there every day, alone, on my own, without a theory. I listen, I watch. I work at it. I don’t have an agenda. I don’t have some vision of what the truth ought to be.”
She was alive with the intensity of her commitment.
“Nobody knows,” she said. “Nobody knows what those kids know, and until you do, and you’re there with them, you can’t do anything but try to contain them.” She paused and stared past me out the dark window.
“Had one of my kids on probation,” she said. “Juvie judge gave him a nine P.M. curfew and he kept missing it. There was a drug dealer, used to work the corner by the kid’s house every night. So I got him to keep an eye on the kid, and every night he’d make sure the kid was in by nine.”
She smiled. “You got to know,” she said.
“And if you do know,” I said, “and you are there, how many can you save?”
She took in a long slow breath and let it through her nose.
“A few,” she said.
The overhead light was on, as well as my desk lamp, and the room was quite harsh in the flat light of it. I had the window cracked open behind me, and there was enough traffic on Berkeley and Boylston streets to make a sporadic background noise. But my building was empty except for me, and Erin Macklin, and its silence seemed to overwhelm the occasional traffic.
CHAPTER 19
I kept two water glasses in the office. In case someone were overcome with emotion, I could offer them a glass of water, or if they became hysterical I could throw water in their face. I also kept a bottle of Irish whiskey in the office, and Erin Macklin and I were using the water glasses to sip some of the Irish whiskey while we talked.
“A little kid,” she said, “goes to the store. He has to cross somebody else’s turf. Means he has to sneak. In a car he has to crouch down. The amount of energy they have to expend simply to survive… ” She paused and looked down into her whiskey. She swirled it slightly in the bottom of the water glass.
“They live in anxiety,” she said. “If they wear the wrong color hat; if their leather jacket is desirable, or their sneakers; if they have a gold chain that someone wants; they are in danger. One out of four young men in the inner city dies violently. These kids are in a war. They have combat fatigue.”
“And they’re mad,” I said.
I had shut the overhead light off, and the room was lit like film noir, with my desk lamp and the ambient light from the streets casting elongated vertical shadows against the top of my office walls and spilling their long black shapes onto my ceiling. I felt like Charlie Chan.
“Yes,” she said. “They are very angry. And the only thing they can do with that anger, pretty much, is to harm each other over trivial matters.”
She took in some of her whiskey. She sat still for a moment and let it work.
“Something has to matter,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s exactly right.”
“Are there turf issues?” I said.
“Sure, but a lot of the extreme violence grows out of small issues between individuals. Who dissed who. Who looked at my girl, who stepped on my sneaker.”
“Something’s got to matter.”
“You get it, don’t you,” she said. “I didn’t expect you would. I figured you’d be different.”
“It has always seemed to me that there’s some sort of inverse ratio between social structure and, what… honor codes? Maybe a little highfaluting for the issue at hand, but I can’t think of better.”
“By honor do you mean inner-directed behavior? Because these kids are not inner directed.”
“No, I know they’re not. I guess I mean that nature hates a vacuum. If there are no things which are important, then things are assigned importance arbitrarily and defended at great risk. Because the risk validates the importance.”
Erin Macklin sat back in her chair a little. She was holding her whiskey glass in both hands in her lap. She looked at my face as if she were reading directions.
“You’re not just talking about these kids, are you?” she said.
“Any of them got families?” I said. “Besides the gang?”
“Not always, but sometimes,” she said. Outside a siren whooped: fire, ambulance, cops. If you live in any city you hear sirens all the time. And you pay no attention. It’s an environmental sound. Like wind and birdsong in the country. Neither of us reacted.
“Often the families are dysfunctional because of dope or booze or pathology. Sometimes they are abusive, the kind you see on television. But some times they are Utopian-my kid can do no wrong. My kid is fine. The other ones are bad. It’s the myth by which the parent reassures herself, or occasionally himself, that everything is okay. And of course it isn’t and the pressure on the kid to be the source, so to speak, of `okayness’ for the family adds to his stress and drives him to the gang. Sometimes the kid is the family caretaker. He’s the one putting food on the table-usually from dealing drugs-nobody asks him where he got the money. He’s valued for it.” She raised her glass with both hands from her lap and drank some more of the whiskey.
“If you’re dealing,” she said, “you have to be down with the gang where you’re dealing.”
I stood and went around my desk and poured a little more whiskey into her glass. She made no protest. She had settled back into her chair a little; she seemed in a reverie as she talked about what was obviously her life’s work.
“Then there’s the other myth. The bad-seed myth. The family that tells the kid he’s bad from birth. One of my kids got shot in the chest and was dying of it. I was there, and his mother was there. `I told him he was no good,‘ she said to me. `I told him he’d end up with a bullet in him before he was twenty. And I was right.’ ”
“What a triumph for her,” I said.
The whiskey seemed to have no effect on her, and she drank like one who enjoyed whiskey-not like someone who needed it. She smiled, almost dreamily.
“Had a kid, about fifteen, named Coke. Smart kid, had a lot of imagination, felt a lot of things. He knew the numbers, one in four, and he was sure he was going to be the one. So, because he was certain he’d die young, he set out to impregnate as many girls as he could. Even had a schedule set up, so he could achieve the maximum possible pregnancies before he died.”