Hells Kitchen

something you can get him into.”
    Carol apparently thought he was kidding and burst out laughing. “A program? Nope, Pellam. No program, no nothin’.” They stopped in front of a store selling exotic gypsy dresses. Carol, in her fat-hiding clothes, looked wistfully at the outfits on the anorexic mannequins. They walked on. “His father’s dead or gone, right?”
    “Dead.”
    “His mother? He called her a cluckhead. That meansshe’s a crack addict. No other relatives. You showed some interest. That’s why he attached himself to you. But you can’t give him what he needs. Nobody can. Not now. Impossible. He’s making gang contacts now. He’ll be jumped in in three years. Five years from now he’ll be a street dealer. In ten he’ll be in Attica.”
    Pellam was angered by her cynicism. “I don’t think it’s that bleak.”
    “I know how you feel. You wanted to let him stay with you, right?”
    He nodded.
    “I used to be optimistic too. But you can’t take ’em all in. Don’t even try. It’ll only drive you crazy. Save the ones you can save—the three-, four-year-olds. Write off the rest. It’s sad but there’s nothing you can do about it. Forces beyond our control. Race’ll be the death of this city.”
    “I don’t know,” Pellam said. “Making this film, I see a lot of anger. But not angry blacks or whites. Angry people. People who can’t pay their bills or get good jobs. That’s why they’re mad.”
    Carol shook her head emphatically. “No, you’re wrong. The Irish, Italian, Poles, West Indians, Latinos . . . they were all despised minorities too at one time. But there’s one insurmountable difference—it may have been in steerage but their ancestors booked passage to the New World. They didn’t come on slave ships.”
    Pellam wasn’t convinced. But he let it go. This was her world, not his.
    I be his friend . . .
    He was surprised at how bad he felt about the boy.
    “I hear so much rhetoric,” Carol continued angrily.“‘Ghettocentric.’ ‘Fragmented family units.’ What incredible bullshit you hear. We don’t need buzzwords. We need somebody to get the fuck into these neighborhoods and be with the kids. And that means getting to them in the nursery. By the time they’re Ismail’s age, they’re set in concrete.”
    She looked at him and her eyes, which had grown icy, softened. “Sorry, sorry . . . You poor guy. Another lecture. The thing is, you’re an outsider. You’re entitled to a certain amount of optimism.”
    “Bet you’ve got a little left, though. To stay here, I mean. Do what you’re doing.”
    “I really don’t think I’m doing very much.”
    “Oh, that’s not what your neighbors say.”
    “What?” Carol laughed.
    Pellam tried to remember. The name came to him. “Jose Garcia-Alvarez?”
    Carol shook her head.
    “I taped him for my film. Just last week. He spends every afternoon in Clinton Park. Shares his Wonder bread with a thousand pigeons. He said something about you.”
    “That I’m a fiesty bitch probably.”
    “That he’s forever grateful. You saved his son.”
    “Me?”
    He told the story. Carol had found the sixteen-year-old boy, strung out and unconscious, in a tenement that was just about to be torn down to make way for McKennah Tower. If she hadn’t called the police and medics the teenager might’ve been crushed to death by the bulldozers.
    “Oh, him? Sure, I remember that. I wouldn’t exactly call it heroic.” She seemed embarrassed. Yet part of herwas pleased, he could see. She suddenly grabbed Pellam’s arm to stop at a shoe store. It was an upscale place, doing no business whatsoever. Joan and David Shoes, Kenneth Cole. A single pair probably cost a week’s paycheck for most of people walking past. The owner was praying for gentrification and couldn’t hold out much longer.
    “In my next life,” Carol said, though whether she was talking about being able to afford the svelte rhinestone-studded black heels she looked at or fit into a dress that would go with them, Pellam couldn’t guess.
    Halfway down the street Carol asked, “You married?”
    “Divorced.”
    “Kids?”
    “Nope.”
    “Going with anybody?” she asked.
    “Haven’t been for a while.”
    Eight months to be precise.
    If you could call a lusty night in a snowbound Winnebago “going with.”
    “You?” He didn’t know if he should ask. Didn’t know if he wanted to.
    “Divorced too.”
    They dodged around a hawker in front of a