Disclaimer: Does anyone even write these things anymore?
Note: OH MY GOD YOU GUYS. First update in 3.5 years! And the rest has been edited for NYC-accurate things! And the good news is, this chapter was largely the reason I had trouble finishing - the final chapters are about 75-80% done, so this megaridiculous fic might actually get completed within a month. It has been over seven years since I started this thing and about a year since my life started mirroring it like whoa, and I am going to finish it if it's the last thing I do.
For: RileyAnnaOlson, who reminded me I should get off my ass and finish this chapter, and as always, for RhapsodyInProgress who listens to me babble.
—viennacantabile
fell the angels
twenty-nine : the boy in time
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"You start a question, and it's like starting a stone. You sit quietly on the top of a hill; and away the stone goes, starting others..."
―Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
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And it seemed to him then that every human was always looking for himself, in bars, in railway trains, in offices, in mirrors, in love, especially in love, for the self of him that is there, someplace, in every other human.
—James Jones, From Here to Eternity
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Ice says goodbye to the truck driver after they cross the river and reach a small town on the mainland. He doesn't know where they are anymore; geography was never his strong suit, but it doesn't matter: he's got nowhere to be.
The driver, whose name, Ice has learned, is Phil, gives him a folded piece of paper with his phone number and address on it. They haven't talked too much, but all the same Phil tells him to look him up if he needs anything.
"Take care, kid," Phil tells him, and Ice stashes the paper in his back pocket.
"Thanks," he says, making a mental note to lose it later. He doesn't know why the guy cares, and doesn't want to. It's just another way to get tangled up in someone's life and mess it up, and he's had enough of that for a lifetime. From now on, Ice thinks, he's on his own.
.
There are three things that Ice notices are different, now that he's left. The first is that he never watches the sunrise anymore.
Ice isn't quite sure why. It starts, he thinks, the first night way out in the sticks when he's shacked up in some empty building and he wakes up and goes to the window and stops.
There's no fire escape, he realizes. Just glass, a screen, and a twenty-foot drop.
He's too tired to climb out anyway and so he just returns to the stack of mats he's made into a bed and sleeps til morning. One time, after all, isn't enough to form a habit.
After that, though, Ice finds more screens and more empty rooms and after awhile, he stops waking up. He falls into deep, dark sleep and doesn't open his eyes until light brushes his face, hot and lonely. By then the sun is well on its way overhead and Ice has to get moving, anyway. He's not quite a tramp but he is a man on the run and whether it's from the law or some shadowy corner of himself it doesn't do to linger in one place too long. He's looking for something, and he can't stop til he finds it.
He's not sure what it is. Ice doesn't know whether or not it's something that even exists. All he knows, though, is that he can't go on without it.
.
A few days later, he's passing through a sleepy little town when he sees an old man stumble, and fall.
Ice wouldn't normally stop, wouldn't do anything, but the old man isn't moving and from where he is it looks almost like Doc.
"God help me, why can't you understand? You're just kids."
So Ice steps over, touches the old man's shoulder, then flinches as the man reaches out to close his hand around Ice's wrist.
Ice stares at him, wary. Up close the old man doesn't look anything like Doc. He's shorter, and skinnier. Just another old man. But still—
"Hey, you okay?"
The man can't speak, just holds on to Ice's wrist with more strength than he'dve thought possible. He gasps for air once, twice—then crumples to the ground with one final shudder.
It isn't as if he's never seen anyone die before—and this, if nothing else, is a lot less violent—but even so, Ice gets a shock when the old man just lies there on the ground, eyes open and staring.
"I didn't do nothin'," he says quickly to the police officer who hurries over.
The cop gives him a strange look. "I didn't say you did."
"Well—oh," Ice says. It's odd, he thinks, having a police officer look at him like this isn't his fault. "Yeah."
He gives what little he can for a statement to the suspiciously un-suspicious cop, and watches them take the old man away in an ambulance even though it's clearly already too late.
"What for?" he asks.
"Records," replies the police officer. "The doctors have to pronounce him dead too."
Ice thinks this is dumb: any fool with eyes can see this for himself. But he shrugs and gives his name as a witness, as the guy closest to death that day who looked it in the eye and got to walk away. That, he supposes, seems to be his fate in life.
Hours later he finds a shadow in the shape of a thumbprint on the inside of his wrist, and he stares at it for awhile, tracing the edges of the bruise.
Is this is? he wonders, remembering how they'd taken the old man away in an ambulance even though it had already been too late. Is this all that's left of the man?
Ice wonders what it's like to be old, and to die. To look back and see everything in his life leading up to this moment, decades of memories building up to your death. Because he can't imagine it. It's hard enough being young. What must it be like to have so much to let go of, and to leave behind?
And though he tries not to, he wonders how they're doing.
Ice has a guess as to who claimed the captaincy after he left: Action, of course; if it wasn't Riff and Tony and it wasn't him, then it was always going to be Action. Which is both the only way for the Jets to go forward and completely terrifying.
Especially if the Reds have regrouped. If there's been another rumble. If enough of them are still left to fight.
The memory of a knife flashing in the dark comes to him. What is it like, he wonders, to die?
.
He dreams that night, of his friends, and the first block they ever claimed as their own, up on 62nd and 10th.
They're standing in front of what would be just a wall to anyone else, but even in the beginning, Riff and Tony have vision and they know just what to do.
"Here," says Riff, handing over a paintbrush and can, "put your John Hancock down."
Ice glances at him. "Huh?"
"Your name," fills in Tony with a big grin. "C'mon, Ice, let the world know who ya are."
Ice shrugs. He's not exactly sure what the point of all this is, but he might as well since they'd gone to all the trouble to nab the paint from the hardware store. And in a minute, the three of them are stepping back to look at their handiwork.
TONY. RIFF. ICE. JETS.
As he looks at the four words splashed in blue all over the wall, Ice feels a smile come over his face. He has to hand it to them. The Jets are a gang because the two of them can fight like nobody's business, yeah, but more than that Riff and Tony know how to make you feel like you're on top of the world, and that, in his opinion, is what makes them the best gang leaders around.
"See?" says Riff. "Now this block knows who they gotta watch out for, huh? The Jets."
"Yeah," says Ice, feeling warm under his sweatshirt. "The greatest."
.
The second thing about leaving the city, Ice realizes, is how quiet it is.
Ice has always taken for granted just how noisy the city can be, humming with cars and people at all hours. But out here, there are no Jets to ask him what to do next, no mother to shield, no Velma to look at him like he's someone she needs to protect. There's nothing but crickets and the occasional birdsong. And Ice, lying awake on one of his nights hitchhiking in the back of a trucker's rig, realizes how unnerving it is to have nothing but the sound of his own thoughts to keep him company.
Because his thoughts aren't pretty. They're full of a lot of things it takes him time to name: guilt, mostly, for leaving. Fear, of what might happen without him.
Most of all, though, it's relief he feels, and this is probably what's worst of all.
This is what he wanted. He wanted to be free of all of that and what he saw himself becoming, and this was the only way to do it. The only way, Ice tells himself, to show all of them they don't need him and never did.
There's a little voice, though, that tells him he's just taking the easy way out. That he can't run away forever. That this isn't the answer.
But as the days pass it gets easier to push that voice down, to wake up and go whole days without having to justify anything to anyone. He can do anything, Ice thinks. Anything.
Except what he really wants, which is to go back in time to the day before it all went wrong and stop it. Turn back the hands of the clock and bring them back. That, he knows, will never happen.
.
A week later, he steals some money, buys a ticket, hops a train, and rides it as far as it will go. Ice has seen the sea a couple times, on trips to Coney Island with Velma and the Jets, but he's never gone alone.
He finds a spot near the water, not too close to the families around him, and watches the tide roll in and out. Takes a breath, fills up his lungs with salt air.
Out here, it's slow and peaceful. Out here it's hard to imagine a gang war raging on the Upper West Side because here there's nothing to fight against, nothing to do but sit in the sun.
Riff and Tony would be chasing each other with water guns, Ice thinks. The younger ones would be running in and out of the waves, throwing water balloons at each other and any unlucky person who was in the way. And the girls would be sunning themselves on the sand. He can see it so clearly that Ice has to remind himself that it's not real because if it was real, he certainly wouldn't be sitting here in peace and quiet right now.
After awhile, Ice takes his shoes and socks off and walks to the edge of the water, sand and shells gritting between his toes. He stands there and lets the cold water lap over his feet and around his ankles, and he listens to the seagulls, and the shrieks and laughter of the people around him.
His mother would like this, he thinks.
Ice stays there until sundown, stretched out on the rocky sand, precisely because he can. He answers to no one out here, and if he wants to lie on the beach for awhile and relax – the word is almost foreign to him at this point – who's to say he can't?
He watches the whole world turn from a pale summery blue to yellow to pink to violet to night in just a few hours. There are sunsets over the Hudson back in the city, too, but it feels different out here with the gulls and the trees and the open water. More real.
As he pushes off from the sand to find a spot for the night, Ice hears something crunch and feels a stinging pain in his hand. The shells around him are sparkling all over his palm. There's only one cut, though, and Ice shakes his hand free of the smaller pieces before removing a larger one. It's strange to see the red of his blood staining the iridescent shell.
His muffled curse gets the attention of a redhaired girl a few yards away, who's walking by with an armful of driftwood. She comes over and takes a look, ignoring Ice's wary gaze.
"Dip it in the salt water," she says. "It'll hurt for a moment, but it'll help."
Ice gives her a skeptical look. She only looks a little older than him—maybe a college coed—and from her braids and clean-cut appearance he's not sure she's had too much experience with cuts and bruises. "You sure about that?"
The girl laughs. "Well, it's what my mom always told me."
Ice shrugs. "It's fine."
She shrugs back, shifting her armload and beginning to walk in the direction of a bonfire in the distance. "Suit yourself. My friends and I are over there if you feel like a beer and company."
After she goes back to her friends, Ice eyes the water, then dips his hand in before he can change his mind.
It's clear and cold and stings like all hell, and Ice, swearing again and clenching his teeth, grimaces as the pain passes into a dull ache.
But at least the bleeding has stopped, he thinks, though he'll have to figure out some sort of bandage for at least a couple days. For now he rips off the sleeves of his t-shirt and wraps it around his hand. It's none too clean, but better than nothing, he figures.
As he hears the sounds of laughter by the bonfire, Ice almost takes the girl up on her invitation, if for no other reason but that he could use a beer. But he doesn't want to have to listen to their questions about who he is, where he came from, and what he's doing here now. It's nobody's business, he tells himself, if only to keep from having to face the truth: that out here, removed from everything he's ever known, he just doesn't know any of the answers.
And that, he thinks, is definitely nobody's business but his.
.
He tries not to think about her, but he sees her in small things like the sunlight on water and the moon at night and all of that makes him wonder what she's doing and who she's with.
He shouldn't care, Ice tells himself repeatedly, while it's not as if a girl as pretty as Velma has ever had trouble finding dates, he'd given her up when he'd left, after all, and he guesses that means he doesn't have the right to care.
But still he can't help wondering if she's forgotten him. He doesn't think she would have, not in just a few weeks, but then maybe he's just a sap. Because Ice is not the kind of guy who forgets anyone he loves, and if he knows anything it's that he loves Velma and he thinks he always will.
If he loves her so much, though, he asks himself sometimes, why isn't he there right now? Why isn't that enough right now? It's yet another question he doesn't know the answer to.
And Ice remembers last summer when it had seemed like he had all he could ever want: his best friends, his mother, his girl. How things have changed.
What does he want, he wonders, lying awake at night. What does he want.
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It takes awhile for the biggest difference between the city and out here to dawn on him: it's that out here, he can see the stars.
It's not something Ice ever would have thought about. He'd never even realized he wasn't seeing them, before. Because they were always there, faint and winking in and out between the lights of the city. But out here, the midnight sky is so dark that he can see, really see, how bright they truly are, and—in some strange reassuring way—how small he is.
So he starts spending his nights outside, finding open spaces and patches of grass to camp on when it's clear, and overhangs when it isn't.
He's camped out under an overpass one muggy night by a river in the middle of nowhere, only moderately relieved that it's summer, when the scuff of a shoe against concrete alerts him to the figure climbing up to the ledge. In an instant, Ice is on the alert, eyes narrowed.
"Don't worry," the man says, his voice gruff as he settles a fair distance away. "Only lookin' for a place to sleep, just like you."
Ice relaxes a little—if only because it's not like he has anything valuable anyway—and eyes the man with guarded curiosity. He's a tramp, that much is clear, with matted hair and a grizzled beard and a look of having seen better days. Not big enough to seem like a problem, if he's lying, but no weakling, either.
Ice doesn't sleep, of course. Maybe dozes off for a few seconds, here and there, but if the tramp's looking for something, the knife in Ice's pocket won't do its owner any good if he's snoozing.
After awhile he realizes the man isn't sleeping, either.
"You ever been to war?"
The question comes from nowhere. Ice thinks about the gangs of the upper West Side. He kind of thinks that counts, but he's pretty sure that's not what the man is talking about, so he shakes his head and says, after he remembers that he's lying in the shadows, "No."
"Don't," the man says, taking a bottle out. He taps the glass, then takes a swig. "You see things you never—"
"I've seen things," Ice says before he knows it. Above them, a truck rumbles by.
"A kid like you?" To his credit, the man only sounds a little skeptical.
The former gang leader sits up, meets his gaze. "I stopped bein' a kid a long time ago," Ice tells him, his voice flat. He's so tired of adults assuming they know everything about him. "Even before I saw anybody get knifed or shot." He hesitates. "Even before I did it myself."
The man considers this, then holds out his bottle. "Go on. Take some."
Despite his wariness, Ice moves just close enough to accept the bottle and takes a sip, feeling the whiskey burn his throat. "Thanks."
"Thing is," the man says after a moment, "once you see a man die, talking to his mother like he can see her face, going off and being a hero don't look so good anymore."
Ice feels his stomach tighten. He would wonder, he thinks, why the man is telling him all this, but he knows that feeling of waking up, images burned into your mind. Or worse: not being able to sleep at all for fear of the night. "Yeah?"
"'Bout the third time it happened, I got to wondering," the man says. "If it was my time—who the last face I'd want to see would be, and would I see it."
"Who was it?" asks Ice, thinking about this.
The man shrugs, back slumped. "That's the thing," he says. "I hadn't found it yet. And I didn't wanna die there, without ever knowin' who it was. So I left."
Ice glances at him. "Left."
"Left. Ran out. Deserted. It all amounts to the same thing," says the man. "Dead to Uncle Sam. But alive."
"Where'd you go?" asks Ice, unsettled. "Home?"
"For awhile. But I'da been arrested if I'd stayed for long." The man shrugs. "I didn't care, though. Saw who I wanted to see and hit the road."
Ice thinks about this. "You find it?"
The man shakes his head. "No. Not yet. But I will."
"You ain't worried?" asks Ice. He can't imagine it. "That ya dropped everything for somethin' ya ain't even found yet?"
"See, that's the thing," the man says. He reaches over, takes a long pull from the bottle, hands it back. "I figured out you have to take a good hard look at it all, figure out what's most important to you. What you care about." He exhales. "And to hell with the rest."
"It's that simple," Ice asks.
The man looks at him. "Everything else, it doesn't matter."
Ice stares straight ahead and takes a swig of the whiskey. It must be nice, he figures, to be able to see the world like that. But if Ice has learned anything this year it's that Doc was right when he said that anytime it sounds that simple, it usually isn't. "I guess."
"That's if you want to be happy, though," the man says. "Which ain't always the case."
Ice stares at him. "Don't everyone?"
The man shakes his head. "You'd be surprised. Some people can't stand it an' just keep runnin' away. Scared of ruinin' it so they mess it up before someone else can. Some people there's just no helpin' no matter what you do."
Ice lets out a short laugh, too loud even to his ears. "What are ya, some kind of psychiatrist?"
"No," the man says, taking the bottle back. "Just a guy trying' to make his way in a tough world."
Near the sedge grass, a light winks on, and off. Ice blinks. At first he thinks the whiskey is stronger than he'd thought, but then he sees another. Then another.
"Lightning bugs," says the man. "Pretty, ain't they."
"Yeah," Ice says, staring. He watches the insects trace their paths in and out of the grass, above the water, and out into the night.
"I figure this's where they go to get away from the city," says the man, squinting. "I've been there plenty and ain't never seen 'em there."
"I have," says Ice, almost reluctantly. "Once."
The man glances at him. "Yeah? What'd they look like, up close?"
And the answer is out of his mouth before he can even think about it.
"Stars."
The man considers it. "Stars."
Ice shrugs, embarrassed. "Yeah. Like little stars, goin' in an' out."
The man is quiet for a moment, then let out a short, soft laugh. "What are ya, some kind of poet?"
Ice takes a sip from the bottle, feeling the fire go down his throat, and thinks of all the gang kids he's ever known, friend and foe, lives tangling with each other over weeks and months and years, only to end in just the same way. "No," he says at last. " Just a guy tryin' to make his way in a tough world."
.
He thinks, sometimes, about the Puerto Rican girl. Maria. About what she's doing, and about her beautiful, no longer innocent face.
Had she been like Graziella, Ice wonders, whose tears were enough to drown them all? He hasn't seen Anita since that night at the dance but if he had to guess he supposes all her hard-edged passion would turn into bitterness.
He thinks, though, that Maria would be different.
She'd pointed a gun at his chest and in a roundabout way you could say the whole mess was her fault, but Ice can't bring himself to hate her. How could he, when he thinks he understands now that feeling of desperate helplessness that led her to Chino's gun? How could he, when she loved Tony?
Te adoro, Anton.
Where does that love go, now that half of it is dead? Ice wonders. What is Maria, without Tony? What are the Jets?
And what, asks a voice so small he barely comprehends it, is Ice, without all of them?
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Ice is passing a fenced off field when a kid comes running down the road from it.
"Mister," the freckle-faced boy says, panting, "my dog's hurtin' somethin' awful an' I don't know what's wrong with him. Can you help me?"
He's not exactly sure what about him might say warm and fuzzy, like he might help. "Can't your ma look? I ain't a vet, kid."
"Ma 'n Pop won't be back til night," the boy says, his eyes pleading. "Look, Rocket's my best buddy, an' I don't know what to do. Please help, Mister."
He can't be more than ten. And Ice is uncomfortably reminded of another kid he knows on the upper West Side, another boy's wide innocent eyes. "Sure, kid," he says, giving up. "But I don't think I'll know any better than you do."
Ice follows the kid, who tells him his name is Willie, down the road and to an old barn, where he does indeed hear a low mournful howl from inside. But when they go inside, Ice has a feeling that even without ever having had a dog himself, he knows exactly what the matter is.
"Kid," he says, staring, "I think he's a she."
"What?" Willie yelps.
Ice gestures to the floppy-eared basset hound, whose swollen belly is heaving. "Hope ya like puppies, Willie."
Willie turns pale and drops to his knees in the straw. "Ya gotta help hi—her!"
Ice half-smiles. "Y'know, I ain't no expert, but she looks like she's doin' just fine on her own."
And it's true: the mother-dog doesn't seem to need any help at all. She's just curled in on herself as a pink, furry wet thing emerges from between her hind legs.
"Rocket," Willie squeaks, clearly blown away as the hound starts licking her pup all over. "Did you know you could do that?"
"Probably," Ice says, amused in spite of himself. "But I don't think she's done yet."
Rocket has eleven puppies in all, and Ice stays until all of them are happily nursing at her side and Willie is fussing over them like a grandmother. He's getting soft in his old age, he thinks with a sigh, but really the kid's delight is hard not to enjoy. What would he have been like, Ice wonders, growing up in a farmhouse with a dog and a litter of puppies all his own?
It isn't until he's a mile down the road, munching on the sandwich the grateful boy had insisted on making him, that he realizes this is the first time he's ever seen something get made from nothing. Really when you think about it, it's kind of crazy, Ice thinks. How things get born and become alive without you ever knowing where they come from.
And his thoughts settle on a small baby in a cramped apartment in the city, named for a dream bigger than the whole West Side. His best friend, passing his name on for another shot.
Maybe it'll be better, for this one, Ice thinks. If he had to put money on it, he wouldn't bet on it, but the side of Ice that believed every word the Jet captains ever said still hopes. Maybe.
.
He's holed up in an empty schoolhouse one morning when he wakes up and doesn't see the sun. Still half asleep, he's almost afraid until he realizes he is awake, and that it's just raining outside.
What a wuss he is, Ice thinks, half-ashamed, half-relieved. Scared of a little rain. It'll be over soon, and then the sun will come back and he'll be on his way to the next town.
It doesn't let up, though, not in an hour, not in two hours. And Ice, with a sigh, settles in for the morning. He's got a pack of cards and by now he knows how to play Solitaire and if nothing else, he's never been bad at being alone.
But as the hours pass, Ice starts to get antsy. It's stuffy in here, with the building just recently closed up for the summer, and it wasn't all too long ago when being cooped up in a school was a regular occurrence. He's not far enough away from it that he feels like doing it again.
It's still raining, though, and it doesn't seem like it'll stop anytime soon.
Ice tries to remember what Willie had said about the next town over. Straight down, a right past the river, to the schoolhouse, and just a few miles from there. Not far from where he is now, but enough of a distance that he'll get soaked for sure, especially without a umbrella.
But does he really mind, though? he thinks. It's not as if he has anything to look presentable for, anyway.
Ice stares at the rivulets trickling down the windowpane, past the pouring rain to the hazy mess of green beyond. There won't be anyone out in that, at least.
And Ice, putting the cards and his cigarettes in his the rucksack he'd picked up two towns ago, decides he has to go.
When he gets outside it's cool and the air smells like thunder. Ice makes it less than thirty yards before he's sopping wet but for once he doesn't mind, just walks faster and faster till he's practically running out in the dirt road, feeling raindrops hit him and cascade down his face.
And something Tony would have said comes to him: maybe he can run faster than the rain.
It's dumb, Ice thinks with a rueful smile, but out here with nothing but the pattering shhh of the rain to say any different, he can almost believe it.
And even if he can't do it, can't outrun it—it's only a few miles to go.