Thrown-away Child

spread wide and hose rolled up to just below her knees, drinking something with ice in it.
    “Good morning, dear,” I said. “Morning,” she replied, sweetly. Then she slipped back inside her house when I had passed, and in the time it took her to make a few critical phone calls the curtains and blinds up and down Crozat Street began discreetly opening for a look at the stranger.
    A boy of about eight years old came up behind me, shirtless but otherwise wearing a stiff white sailor cap; shorts, and sandals. He was pulling a wagon full of empty bottles and cans. The rattling made me turn around.
    “You lost or something, Mister Man?” he asked. He was a good-looking kid, with dark brown eyes that matched his skin and a mouth on him that was ten years wiser than his age. His hair needed brushing. If I was his daddy, I would have made him take a bath.
    “No, son, I’m looking for Joe Never Smile’s house. Trouble is, I forgot the number.”
    “What for you want to see Joe?”
    “You know where he lives, kid?”
    “Where you get that fine hat?”
    “Up in New York.”
    “That’s where you from, hey?
    “Does it sound like I’m from around here?”
    “Sure it don’t.”
    At last, the kid had not answered a question with a question. I would have been irritated with him except that he reminded me of myself about a thousand years ago.
    “Okay now.” I waved my arm up the street. “You want to tell me which one of these houses is Joe Never Smile’s?”
    “Well, I might know where Joe stay. Then, too, I might never get to New York.”
    “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    “Means I know what you want, you got what I want.”
    “Forget about the Yankees cap, kid.”
    “All right, Mister Man.” He shrugged his skinny shoulders and resumed walking up Crozat, pulling his rattling wagon behind him.
    Then of course it hit me, with the force of a powerhouse right thrown by Ali in his prime. Exactly why was I looking for Joe Never Smile? Because Claude Bougart and I were trying to get a lead on some no-name kid who was murdered yesterday—and branded. And what about this shirtless street kid who by right should have been on the school bus? What was this one’s name?
    “On the other hand, kid,” I said to him, catching up with the wagon, “maybe when I’m home I could just get myself another one.”
    I took off my Yankees cap and gave it to the boy, He held my cap by its brim, feeling the light wool, turning it around to check wear and tear in the sweat-band and the tiny backside figure of a Yankee at bat embroidered in white against the navy blue.
    The way this kid handled my cap was the way jewelers on West Forty-seventh Street inspect gold. Every so often, the shirtless boy whose hair needed brushing would look up from the merchandise, to see the way I was watching him. The jeweler and this kid, the same look.
    “Authentic big league licensed merchandise, right?”
    “What’s your name, kid?”
    “How come a New York white man be running ’round here asking a little black boy name?”
    “You got one?”’
    “Maybe it’s Richard. I forget.” No smart-mouth question this time. Now came the bald honesty-—and tragedy—of a child who thought that forgetting his name was not particularly unusual. Or that standing in the middle of Crozat Street on a school day swapping a Yankees cap for some information was perfectly natural.
    “Go ahead, try it on,” I said.
    The kid took off his sailor cap and wedged it between a couple of Jax beer bottles in his wagon. He pulled on the Yankees cap, snugging it down in back. It was too big.
    “I’d have to take a pin to it,” he said.
    “That or a few stitches. Tell me now—”
    “Joe Never Smile, he stay right over there,” the kid cut in. He pointed across the street to a house two doors from where we were standing.
    “Okay, thanks. What do they call you, kid? Rich? Dick? Richie?”
    “Everybody call me Maybe.”
    “As in Maybe Richard?”
    “Yeah, you right.”
    I spotted Claude Bougart’s car turning into Crozat from up at the corner where the school bus had picked up kids with names. Bougart slowed to a stop in front of the house the no-name kid had just identified, stepped out, and gave me a wave. He was wearing his uniform. Maybe Richard panicked.
    “You the po-lice, too?”
    “Not in this town,” I said.
    “I’m out of here, man.”
    Maybe yanked his wagon and trotted down the street. A couple of Pepsi cans jiggled off the side,