Boys Life

the gray streets that stood beneath the tall gray buildings, though several times we had to stop and wait for Franklin, who indeed was a slow mover.
    We came to a place where alleys cut the walls, and neon reflected off standing pools of water on the cracked concrete. As we were passing an alley, I heard a grunting noise followed by the smacking of flesh. I stopped to look. One man was holding another with his arms behind him, while a third methodically beat the second man in the face with his fist. The second man was bleeding from the nose and mouth, his eyes dazed and wet with fear. The man who was doing the beating did this as if it were a common labor, like the hacking down of a wayward tree. “Where’s the money, you motherfucker?” the first man said in a voice of quiet evil. “You’re gonna give us the money.” The beating continued, the third man’s knuckles red with blood. The victim made a groaning, whimpering noise, and as the fist kept rising and falling, his bruised face began to change shape.
    A pale hand gripped my shoulder. “Let’s move along, shall we?”
    Up ahead, a police car had pulled to the curb. Two policemen stood on either side of a man with long hair and dressed in dirty clothes. They were stocky and their guns gleamed in their black leather holsters. One of the policemen leaned forward and shouted in the long-haired man’s face. Then the other policeman grabbed a handful of that hair, spun him around, and slammed his head against the windshield’s glass. The glass didn’t break, but the man’s knees sagged. He didn’t try to fight back as he was shoved into the police car. As they drove past us, I caught a glimpse of the man’s face peering out, tendrils of blood creeping from his forehead.
    Music throbbed and thumped from a doorway. It sounded like all rhyme and no reason. A man sat against a wall, a puddle of urine between his legs. He grinned at the air, his eyes demented. Two young men came along, and one of them held a tin gasoline can. “Get up, get up!” the other one said, kicking at the man on the ground. The demented one kept grinning. “Get up! Get up!” he parroted. In the next second, gasoline sloshed over him. The other young man pulled a pack of matches from his pocket.
    Princey guided me around a corner. Franklin, slogging behind Ahmet, sighed like a bellows, his face daubed with shadow.
    A siren wailed, but it was going somewhere else. I felt sick to my stomach, my skull pressured. Princey kept his hand on my shoulder, and it was comforting.
    Four women were standing on a corner, under the stuttering neon. They were all younger than my mother but older than Chile Willow. They wore dresses that might have been applied with paint, and they appeared to be waiting for somebody important to come along. As we passed them, I smelled their sweet perfume. I looked into the face of one of them, and I saw a blond-haired angel. But something about that face was lifeless, like the face of a painted doll. “Motherfucker better do me right,” she said to a dark-haired girl. “Better fuckin’ score me, goddammit.”
    A red car pulled up. The blond-haired angel switched on a smile to the driver. The other girls crowded around, their eyes bright with false hope.
    I didn’t like what I saw, and Princey guided me on.
    In a doorway, a man in a denim jacket was standing over a woman sprawled in a doorway. He was zipping up his pants. The woman’s face was a pulped mass of black bruises. “There you go,” the man said. “Showed you, didn’t I? Showed you who’s boss.” He reached down and grabbed her hair. “Say it, bitch.” He shook her head. “Say who’s boss!”
    Her swollen eyes were pleading. Her mouth opened, showing broken teeth. “You are,” she said, and she began to cry. “You’re the boss.”
    “Keep going, Cory,” Princey told me. “Don’t stop, don’t stop.”
    I staggered on. Everywhere I looked, there was only mean concrete. I saw not a hill nor a trace of green. I lifted my face, but the stars were blanked out and the night a gray wash. We turned a corner and I heard a clatter. A small white dog was searching desperately through garbage cans, its ribs showing. Suddenly a hulking man was there, and he said, “Now I’ve got you” as the dog stood staring at him with a banana peel in its mouth. The man lifted a baseball bat and slammed it down across the dog’s back. The dog howled with pain and thrashed, its spine broken, the banana