Street Scene

From a doorway across Sixth Avenue, a group of youths belonging to a Bronx-based organization titled The Pelham Privateers—what in days of pre-protest picketing would have been called a juvenile delinquent gang, now referred to as “a minority youth group”—observed Will Kiley’s struggles, and continued their own observations.

“But it don’t look like it got hubcaps,” Angie said. “Hey, shtoomie, if it is lyin’ inna street, it is gotta have hubcaps. The question’s where?” The gang’s leader, George (“The Pot”) Lukovich dealt with matters in a realistic fashion.

“Maybe they’re unnerneat,’ “ suggested Vimmy.

“Could be,” George mused, “could very well be.” He pondered a moment longer, then made his mind and the gang’s collective mind, up. “We gotta jack up its ass. Get unnerneat’. Get the hubcaps off. Vimmy, I want you should take t’ree boys and go over to the building they’re building onna corner Madison an’ 48th. Steal a pneumatic hoist or somethin’.”

Vimmy gave a quick one-finger salute, and dodged out of the doorway, tapping three of the gang members on their chests as he passed them. They followed, at a dead run.

A hook and ladder approaching from the direction of Fifth Avenue swerved to avoid the quartet and skidded to a halt in the lee of the dead ornithosaurian. Big Louis Morono, wearing a Texaco hat and black rubber boots and slicker, leaped down, dragging a foot-long brass nozzle trailing a flat gray constrictor of hose. Assessing the situation at a glance, he set off at a heavy-footed trot toward the stern of the beast, assisted by fellow fire fighters each supporting his half dozen yards of tubing. A second team launched itself with silent efficiency in the opposite direction, toward the giant maloccluded jaws. They rounded the head, continued parallel with the scaly neck, paused only momentarily before trampling ahead across the leather carpet of the wing. They met Big Louis and his crew at a point abaft the fourth thoracic vertabra.

“Anything?”

“Nothing.”

“Smoke?”

“Not a wisp.”

Big Louis sighed. His hose drooped. “It figures.”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, boys, reel it in.” Muttering, Big Louis headed back for the trembling truck. Before he had taken more than three steps, however, one of the members of the second team yelled, “Hey, Cap! It’s a, uh, you know what, a dragon. Maybe it breathes fire. Could be, y’know!”

Big Louis stopped dead and smiled a winsome smile. “Reel it out again, men!” he shouted.

As Will Kiley struggled manfully with the golden chain and its golden disc, two rumpled figures wearing thick glasses paused beside him. They ignored him, but pointed frequently at the head of the dead beast:

“The chief difference in the pterodactyl skull from that of a bird is in the way in which the malar arch is prolonged backward 0n each side,” said the first.

“The nostrils are unusually large. Could it be Dimorphodon?” asked the second.

“Don’t be a silly goose, Trenchard,” replied the first. “Doesn’t even resemble.”

Trenchard’s eyes flashed anger and his mouth tightened. “Damn’s blood, Goilvey! You were the one who said this genus shouldn’t be this heavy. You were the one who dragged me out of the Automat, leaving a perfectly good fish cake, just to come down here and argue about this. I don’t know why it’s so big, and I don’t know why it’s so heavy…all I know is that I don’t like you talking to me so snottily. Your seniority in the department doesn’t give you the right to…”

A civil rights group, attracted by the noise, abandoned their labors integrating a parking lot, and instantly interpreting what was going on there in the intersection, whipped out magic markers and fresh cardboard, and rejingo’d their slogans. They began parading around and around the dead beast, bearing signs that read HE DIED FOR US! and DON’T LET THIS DEATH GO UNAVENGED! and SOCIETY ASKS: WHY?

“Looks dead to me,” murmured a secretary, walking to Sak’s with a girl friend.

“Remind me to make an appointment with my orthodontist,” her friend replied.

A representative of the sanitation workers union—summoned by enraged members of his local—arrived on the scene, and uttered a snarl. “Like hell we will!” he commented to the members of the press. “It’ll lay there till hell freezes over! If the corrupt and Commie-Symp government of this city thinks it is going to fatten and batten on the blood and sweat and tears of the members of the United Sanitation Workers of America Local #337, it has another think coming. The name is Fortnoy. F-O-R-T…”

The two CIA men ran out of film. One’s tie-tack camera clicked on empty spools, and the others mini-corder in his hatband whirred emptily. They met at mid-pteranodon and compared notes:

“Maoist?”

“Doubtful. Castroite?”

“Maybe. Reach the office yet?”

“No, something’s wonking up the circuits.”

“Jamming?”

“Maybe. Maoist?”

“Doubtful. Russkie?”

“Maybe…”

Kiley pulled and strained at the disc, trying to drag it out from under the great head. He was making some small headway when a photographer and three models and the director of fashion for a leading women’s magazine nudged him aside, and began posing the girls on the head of the dead beast.

“Look anguished, Maddie,” said the photographer, a slim and ascetic young man wearing an Australian digger hat in white velour. The model looked anguished. “No, no, more anguished. Cry for the entire world, sweetheart!” Maddie anguished harder. She cried. “Now tilt the pelvis just a tiddle forward, darling,” the photographer urged. “Let’s transmute that anguish into a starchy impudence at the really tasty things the season’s culottes have to say to the New Female!”

“Off duty,” said a cabbie, streaking down around a wing-tip and plunging up the Avenue.

Somewhere children were laughing and the wind was sweet with the scent of imminent Summer. But that was somewhere else.

“Jesus, I can’t stand the stink!” shouted a woman from the seventh floor window of an employment agency.

Seventeen sailors from a Japanese freighter, in New York on three-day leave, crouched near the juncture of wing and torso, and snapped pictures of the dead beast with Leicas, several murmuring words that sounded like, “Rodan.” No one paid them any heed.

Several handbills were hastily pasted onto the leathery hide, announcing the candidacy of Roger Scarpennetti for Borough President.

A vendor of socks (seconds) pitched his way from tail to beak, and made almost four dollars with his wares.

Three agile and rolling-gaited Caughnawaga Indians, those last noble descendants of the noblest of noble savages, crossed 48th Street heading downtown. They carried lunch pails. They were on their way home by IRT subway (which they would catch at 42nd Times Square) from the building site construction on Madison and 48th; the selfsame construction site toward which four Pelham Privateers (behind the point-scouting of the redoubtable Vimmy) at this moment were streaking. The three redskins, high-steel workers of the most loftily-paid species, paused at the corner of 47th and Sixth, shifted lunch pails, and clucked their tongues almost in unison.

“Is that crummy, I ask you!” said Walter Knife-That-Gleams-In-Starlight.

“Yeah, first they zap alla the buffalo, bison, whatever the hell they was that they did in, and now this!” The lament was voiced by Teddy Bearclaw.

“Goddam white-eyes,” added Sidney G. Nine Fires.

“Red man’s burden,” said Walter.

“Is it not a sad pass what our people has come to, that we must erect for these shitty crummy pony soldiers a edifice of such nobility as we are at this precise moment in time erecting,” penultimated Teddy.

“What the hell is a bison?” asked Sidney G. Nine Fires. Mutual shrugs of confusion led to a prompt exit.

The Reverend Leroy L. Heal, arriving at the head of the Poke County, Mississippi, delegation to the First Annual Congress of the International Evangelical Brotherhood for the Promotion of Christian Love and Low Down