THE RAZOR’S EDGE
Too often we think of the “surprise” or “twist” ending as merely a gimmick, an extended one-liner rather than an exposure of sudden truth. But a blinding flash of truth is exactly what we get from this deeply disturbing exploration into the mind of a crippled black boy poised on the razor’s edge of decision in a ghetto which might be in my city…or yours. Joe L. Hensley, well known in science-fiction circles for his short fiction and in mystery circles for his Doubleday Crime Club novels (Song of Corpus Juris, The Poison Summer), is no stranger to disturbing human truths. At the time of submitting this story, he had the sobering responsibility of sitting as trial judge on his first murder case in an Indiana Circuit Court. - J.G.
The night was gentle and so Willie sat out on the combination fire escape and screened play area that hung in zigzags from the north side of the government-built, low-rent apartment building. He stayed out there in his wheelchair for a long time watching the world of lights from the other buildings around him. He liked the night. It softened the savage world, so that he could forget the things he saw and did in the day. Those things still existed, but darkness fogged them.
He reached around, fumbling under his shirt, and let his hand touch the long scar where it started. He couldn’t reach all of it for it ran the width of his back, a slanting line, raised from the skin. Sometimes it ached and there was a little of that tonight, but it wasn’t really bad any more. It was only that he was dead below the scar line, that the upper half of him still lived and felt, but the lower felt nothing, did nothing.
Once they’d called him Willie the Runner and he had been very fast, the running a defense from the cruel world of the apartments, a way out, a thing of which he’d been quite proud. That had been when he was thirteen. Now he was fifteen. The running was gone forever and there was only a scar to remind him of what had been once. But the new gift had come, the one the doctors had hinted about. And those two who’d been responsible for the scar had died.
A cloud passed across the moon and a tiny, soft rain began to fall. He wheeled off the fire escape and into the dirty hall. It was very dark inside. Someone had again removed the light bulbs from their receptacles. Piles of refuse crowded the corners and hungry insects scurried at the vibration of Willie’s wheelchair.
In the apartment, his mother sat in front of the television. Her eyes were open, but she wasn’t seeing the picture. She was on something new, exotic. He’d found one of the bottles where she’d carefully hidden it. Dilaudin, or something like that. It treated her well. He worked the wheelchair over to the television and turned off the late-night comic, but she still sat there, eyes open and lost, looking intently at the darkened tube. He went on into his own bedroom, got the wheelchair close to the bed, and clumsily levered himself between the dirty sheets.
He slept and sleeping brought the usual dreams of the days of fear and running. In the dream they laughed coldly and caught him in the dark place and he felt the searing pain of the knife. He remembered the kind doctor in the hospital, the one who kept coming back to talk to him, the one who talked about compensation and factors of recovery. The doctor had told him his arms might grow very strong and agile. He’d told him about blind men who’d developed special senses. He’d smiled and been very nice, and Willie had liked him. The gift he’d promised had come. Time passed in the dream, and it became better and Willie smiled.
In the morning, before his mother left for the weekly ordeal with the people at the welfare office, Willie again had her wheel him down to the screened play area and fire escape. In the hall, with the arrival of day, the smell was stifling, a combination of dirt and urine and cooking odors and garbage. The apartments in the building were almost new, but the people who inhabited the apartments had lived in tenement squalor for so long that they soon wore all newness away. The tenants stole the light bulbs from the hallways, used dark corners as toilets of convenience, discarded the leftovers of living in the quickest, easiest places. And they fought and stole and raped and, sometimes, killed.
Sometimes, Willie had seen a police car pass in the streets outside, but the policemen usually rode with eyes straight ahead and windows rolled up tight. On the few times that police came into the apartment area, they came in squads for their own protection.
Outside, the air was better. Willie could see the other government apartments that made up the complex and if he leaned forward he could, by straining, see the early morning traffic weaving along the expressway by the faraway river.
His mother frowned languidly at the sky, her chocolate-brown face severe. “It’ll maybe rain,” she said, slurring the words together. “If it rains you get back in, hear?”
“Okay,” he said, and then again, because he was never sure she heard him: “Okay!” He looked at her swollen, sullen face, wanting to say more, but no words came. She was so very young. He’d been born almost in her childhood and there was within him the feeling that she resented him, hated caring for him, abominated being tied to him, but did the dreary duty only because there was no one else and because the mother-feeling within warred with all the other wants and drives and sometimes won an occasional victory. Willie remembered no father, and his mother had never spoken of one.
“None of them bad kids bother you up here, do they?” she asked, always suspicious.
He smiled, really amused. “No,” he said.
She shook her head tiredly and he noticed the twitch in the side of her dark face. She said: “Some of them’s bad enough to bother around a fifteen-year-old boy in a wheelchair. Bad enough to do ’most anything, I guess. When we moved in here, I thought it would be better.” She looked up at the sky. “It’s worse,” she ended softly.
Willie patiently waited out her automatic ministrations, the poking at the blanket around his wasting legs, the peck on the forehead. Finally, she left.
For a while then he was alone and he could crane and watch the expressway and the river and the downtown to the north. He could hear the complex around him come to angry life, the voices raised in argument and strife. Down below, four boys came out of a neighboring building. They were dressed alike, tight jeans, brown jackets, hair long. He saw them gather in front of the building and one of them looked up and saw him watching. That one nudged the others and they all looked up, startled, and they went away like deer, around the far corner of their building at a quick lope. Willie only nodded.
A block away, just within his vision, a tall boy came out of the shadows and engaged another boy in a shouting argument. A small crowd gathered and watched indolently, some yelling advice. Willie watched with interest. When the fight began they rolled out of sight and Willie could only see the edges of the milling crowd and soon lost interest in watching.
The sun came out and the sky lightened, and Willie felt more like facing the day. He looked down at his legs without real sorrow. Regret was an old acquaintance, the feeling between them no longer strong. Willie leaned back in the wheelchair. With trained ears alert to any sudden sound of danger, he dozed lightly.
Memory again became a dream. When he had become sure of the gift, he had followed them to their clubhouse. It was in a ruined building that the city was tearing down to build more of the interminable housing units. He rolled right up to the door and beat on it boldly and they came and he saw the surprise on their faces and their quick looks to see if he’d brought police along.
“Hello, Running Willie, you crippled bastard,” the one who’d wielded the knife said. The one who’d held him and watched smiled insolently.
He sat there alone in the chair and looked back at them, hating them with that peculiar, complete intensity, wanting them dead. The sickness came in his stomach and the whirling in his head and he saw them move at him before the sunlit world went dark brown.
Now they were dead.
A door opened below, and Willie came warily awake. He looked down and saw Twig Roberts observing the day.
“Okay to come on up, Willie?” Twig asked carefully.
“Sure,” Willie said negligently.
Twig came up the stairs slowly and sat down on the top one, looking away into the distance, refusing to meet Willie’s eyes. He was a large, dark boy, muscled like a wrestler, with a quick, foxy face. He lived in the apartment below Willie’s.
“What we goin’ to do today, Willie boy?” Twig asked it softly, his voice a whine. “Where we headin’?” He continued to look out at the empty sky and Willie knew again that Twig feared him. A small part of Willie relished the fear and fed on it and Willie knew that the fear diminished both of them.
Willie thought about the day. Once the trips, the forays, into that wild, jackdaw land below had been an exciting thing, a thing of danger. That had been when the power was unsure and slow, but the trips were as nothing now. Instead of finding fear below, he brought it
He said softly: “We’ll do something, Twig.” Then he nodded, feeling small malice. “Maybe down at Building Nineteen. You been complaining about Building Nineteen, ain’t you?” He smiled, hiding the malice. “You got someone down there for me?”
Twig looked at him for the first time. “You got it wrong, Willie. I got relatives in that building. I never even taken you around there for fear…” He stopped and then went on. “There’s nothing wrong with Nineteen.” He watched earnestly until Willie let his smile widen. “You were puttin’ me on, Willie,” Twig said, in careful half-reproach.
“Sure, Twig,” Willie said, closing his eyes and leaning back in the wheelchair. “We’ll go down and just sort of look around.”
The fan in the elevator didn’t work and hadn’t worked for a long time, but at least today the elevator itself worked. The odor in the shaft was almost overpowering, and Willie was glad when they were outside in the bright sun that had eaten away the morning fog.
Twig maneuvered him out the back entrance of the building. Outside, the ground was covered with litter, despite the fact that there were numerous trash receptacles. A rat wheeled and flashed between garbage cans and Willie shivered. The running rat reminded Willie of the days of fear.
They moved on along the sidewalks, Willie in the chair, Twig dutifully behind. Ahead of them, Willie could almost feel the word spread. The cool boys vanished. The gangs hid in trembling fear, their zip guns and knives forgotten. Arguments quieted. In the graveled play yards the rough games suspended. Small children watched in wonder from behind convenient bushes, eyes wide. Willie smiled and waved at them, but no one came out. Once a rock came toward them, but when Willie turned there was no one to be seen.
There was a dead zone where they walked. It was always like that these days.
A queer thought came to Willie as he rode along in solitary patrol. It was an odd thought, shiny and unreal. He wondered if someplace there was a someone with the gift of life, a someone who could set stopped breath to moving again, bring color back to a bloodless face, restart a failed heart, bring thought back to a dead mind. He rather hoped that such a gift existed, but he knew that on these streets such a gift wouldn’t last. In this filth, in this world of murderous intent the life-giver would have been torn apart. If the life-giver was Willie—if that had been the gift—they would have jerked him from the moving casket he rode, stomped him, mutilated him. And laughed.
There were other worlds. Willie knew that dimly, without remembrance, without real awareness. There was only a kind of dim longing. He knew that the legs were the things that had saved him from a thousand dangers. He remembered the leering man who’d followed him one day when he was twelve, the one who wanted something, who touched and took. He remembered the angry ones with their knives and bicycle chains, the gangs that banded together to spread, rather than absorb, terror. He looked at his world: the ones who’d roll you for the price of a drink and the ones who’d kill you for a fix. It was the only world he knew. Downtown was a thing of minutes spent. It wasn’t life. Life was here.
The legs had been survival. A knife had taken them. The doctor had promised something, and Willie had believed. Survival was still necessary and the world savage.
So was the compensating gift.
Twig pushed on into a narrow alley between trash cans. The sound of their coming disturbed an old white man who was dirtily burrowing in one of the cans. He looked up at them, filthy hands still rooting in the can. His thin, knobby armed body seemed lost in indecision between whether to dig deeper in the muck or take flight. Hunger won.
“What you doin’ there, man?” Twig demanded, instantly pugnacious at the sight of the dirty, white face.
The old man stood his ground stubbornly and Willie felt an almost empathy with him, remembering hungry days. The man’s old eyes were cunning, the head a turtle’s head, scrawnily protruding up from its shell of filthy clothing. Those eyes had run a thousand times from imagined terror, but they could still calculate chances. Those eyes saw only a boy in a wheelchair, a larger boy behind.
The old man reached in his pocket. “Ge’ away, you li’l black bassurds. Ge’ away fum me.” The hand came out and there was a flash of dull metal. A knife.
Willie saw Twig smile triumphantly. Those who stood their ground were hard to find in these days of increasing fear.
“Hate him, Willie,” Twig said softly. “Hate him now!”
Willie smiled at the old man and hated him without dislike. He had to concentrate very hard, but finally the wrenching, tearing feeling came in his head and the brownout and the sickness became all. He faded himself into the hate and became one with it and time stopped until there was nothing. When it was done and he was again aware, he opened his eyes.
The old man was gone. There was nothing left to show he’d ever existed, no clothes, no knife.
“Did he run?” Willie asked.
Twig shook his head. “He smoked,” he said, smiling hugely. “That was the best one yet. He smoked a kind of brown smoke and there was a big puff of flame and suddenly he ain’t there anymore.” He cocked his bead and clapped his hands in false exuberance. “That one was good, Willie. It was sure good.” He smiled a good smile that failed to reach his eyes.
The sun was warm and Willie sat there and knew he’d been alone for all fifteen of his years and now, with the gift, that he would remain alone and that he was quite sanely mad.
He looked again at the children playing their rough games in the measured gravel and he knew he could explode them all like toy balloons, but the insanity he owned, he realized, should be worse than that.
The sun remained warm and be contemplated it and thought about it and wondered how far the gift extended. If I should hate the sun…
There was another thought. He worked it over in his head for a long time, while his fingers absently reached and stroked the long scar on his back.
There was a way out, a possible escape.
Tomorrow he might try hating himself.