The white boys from Northwest began to move out. Then the skinny one said, “Hey, you with that black mark on your face.” Karras turned around.
“Yeah,” said Karras. “What d’ya want?”
“What’s your name, anyway?” said the skinny boy.
Karras softened his glare. “Pete Karras. You?”
“My daddy’s name is Oliver. Around my way, they call me Junior Oliver.”
Karras nodded, and the one called Junior Oliver blinked his eyes. They turned, and joined their own. The Negroes walked back towards Southwest. The boys from Northwest went in the direction of their homes.
“You all right, Perry?” said Karras.
“Fine,” said Angelos, smiling a little in relief, blood smudged pink on his teeth.
“Jimmy?”
“Yep,” said Boyle, brushing dirt from a scrape on his cheek.
“Those nigger boys could fight,” said Recevo.
“Yeah.” Karras put his hand on Recevo’s shoulder. “Thanks for watchin’ my back, Joey.”
“Count on it, Greek,” said Recevo. And Karras had no doubt.
“Where we goin’ now?” said Boyle.
Recevo picked up his newsboy’s cap where he had left it, slapped the dust off on his trousers. “Let’s find Nicodemus,” he said. “Maybe we can get in on that soapbox deal.”
Karras shook his head. “I can’t.”
“Why not?” said Recevo.
“Gotta pick a chicken up for my ma,” said Karras. “She’s makin’ a soup.”
4
To Peter Karras, the long days of summer seemed to drag. Yet soon enough they had passed, and he and his friends found themselves in school, daydreaming about the season gone and looking to the one ahead.
At St. Mary’s, Karras spoke to the nuns only when called upon, and responded to their lessons with barely masked inattention. Often he looked through the smudged glass window next to his desk at the oak that grew alongside the church, watching the gradual turn of its leaves. His grades were only adequate, better than Recevo’s, and on par with Nicodemus’s and Boyle’s. Perry Angelos, who already talked about college as the clean path to making a buck, placed far ahead of the rest.
“Hey, Pete,” said Recevo one morning, as Jimmy Boyle entered the classroom, a gaping rip in the knee of his trousers. “Looks like Boyle just checked out of a Hoover Hotel.”
“His old man got his walking papers at the morgue,” said Karras. “He’ll get his job back, once things get better. My pop says Roosevelt’s gonna turn things around. Says he’s gonna put the men back to work, the ones that wanna work and even the ones that don’t.”
“Your pop says. All you Greeks are in bed with Roosevelt.”
“Yeah,” said Karras. “I guess.”
During the lesson, Recevo set fire to a book of matches, then quickly blew out the flame. Their teacher. Sister Cumilliana, asked who had done the deed, and a girl named Linda McCabe pointed to Joe. Sister Cumilliana walked over to Recevo, stood over him, and rolled up the right sleeve of her habit.
“Hold out your hand,” she instructed.
Recevo, his eyes fixed on the right hand of the nun, did not comply. The nun’s left hand slashed out of nowhere, slapping him sharply across the cheek. Recevo rubbed the red mark as the children laughed. Sister Cumilliana walked back to the head of the class, a smile in her eyes.
You shoulda watched the left, Joey, thought Karras. You shoulda watched out for the left.
The days went on like that, with Recevo and Karras in and out of trouble and getting little from their schooling. Perry Angelos applied himself and concentrated on his studies, though he could not fail to notice that the girls of the class admired the antics of Recevo and Karras more than his own academic accomplishments. But it was not in Angelos to misbehave. Boyle and Nicodemus talked big out on the playground, but remained quiet and virtually invisible within the walls of the church. Outside the smudged window, Karras stared at the branches of the oak, now stripped bare.
An early snow came the second week of December. On the Sunday morning after the storm, Karras went to church service at St. Sophia’s, on 8th and L. It was usually Karras and his mother in church, while his father slept off his Saturday-night drunks undisturbed. Karras sat there, listening to the nasal chanting of Father Papanicolas, watching the other families in the pews through the heavy haze of incense, thinking, as he tended to do in church, of how he did not belong. He had always felt apart from the rest of them, with their large numbers of relatives and their brothers and sisters. Years ago his mother had given birth to a little brother, Theodoros, who had died in his crib just after his sixth month, and Karras had remained and would remain an only child. As for relatives, his father had broken off relations with his own sister and cousins in D.C. long ago. Peter Karras could not see himself as an adult, with his own wife and children. It was not something he could picture in his mind.
After church, Karras met his friends at a garage in the alley, where they had hidden an air rifle they had saved for and bought together in the fall. They knew the man who sold it to them had stolen it himself, and they used that knowledge to bargain out a good price.
“You pump this baby up, say fifteen times,” said the man, “and what you boys got here is as powerful as a twenty-two.” The boys knew that the man was selling them a load of baloney, but they wanted that rifle awful bad.
The day was not warm, but the sun had come out and the snow had melted from the streets, though it hung in the pockets of the branches and capped the roofs of cars. Walking across town, the boys took turns carrying the rifle in their pantslegs, which afforded each one of them the opportunity to affect the tortured movements of a cripple. This provoked a new joke within the group each time the rifle changed hands, jokes at which Peter Karras could not laugh; he had seen a cripple once, a real one, begging for money downtown, and the sight of it had caused him a series of tortuous nightmares. He would rather be anything, maybe even dead, than that.
It took a few hours for them to make it to the other side of Northwest. In Georgetown they lost direction, and asked help from a man who was dumping something chunked and brown from a pot behind a restaurant. He pointed them to the bridge. Boyle, who smelled the roasted meat coming from the back door, could not resist asking the man for a bite of food.
“I’m workin’ for my dinner my own self,” said the man. The boys went on their way.
They walked over the bridge from Georgetown to Virginia. It was all field and forest there, with woods at the edge of the field. The sun hung weak and pale yellow against the sheeted gray sky.
Karras looked back at the city as they walked off the bridge through the snow and to the middle of a field. Though this was not the country, it was close enough, and he did not like to be away from the car sounds and restaurant smells, to be without the solid feel of asphalt beneath his feet. He had gone with his parents into Maryland one summer day, driven in a friend’s borrowed car toward a place called Soloman’s Island, and they had tried to find a beach where they could sun themselves and where his father could swim. His father had been turned away at the gate, where a sign said NORTHERN EUROPEAN WHITES ONLY. Karras did not like the feeling he had when he left D.C.
“Give me the rifle. Perry,” said Boyle, whose feet stung from the cold and who wanted to get on with it. Boyle had worn two pairs of socks but the snow had entered a split in the leather of his shoe.