One fact was that Pete Vitanza had broken the rules of his brief life. By the rules of Chelsea, Vitanza should have minded his own business. He should have been silent until he knew more. But he came to me. And that was the second fact — that Pete came to me. If he had gone to someone else who knows how it would have ended? Maybe better and maybe worse. But he came to me because I had known his father, Tony, before Tony Vitanza died building a bridge so that people could get to the beach faster. And because I had known Tony, I suppose I felt I owed Pete a little. Not much, but enough to work a little harder than I might have otherwise.
The story of a man is what that man is. It is the people he knows and loves and hates. The air he breathes. The strangers he never knew existed. The whole complex of shadows waiting for a spark to set them off. The story is that complex, not the spark that blows it up. And Jo-Jo’s story is my story. Without me it would have been a different story.
It would also have been a different story if one of the cast of characters had been smarter and less nervous.
I had worked for three days and was about to call it fifty dollars’ worth when the spark reached me, and the first blood in the story was mine.
Chapter 5
The man who came out of the alley to maul me was big but slow.
‘Lay off Jo-Jo!’
I’m not big, and I’m not slow. About five-foot-ten, 160 pounds, and a face that is not the dream of even an ugly schoolgirl. (Especially an ugly schoolgirl. The ugly look for beauty. The beautiful don’t have to look for it in others.) But I can catch a fly in mid-air, and when I was a kid I ran the hundred in eleven seconds flat. I’ve run it faster since when there was no one to clock me except a shadow with hot breath behind me. When you have the average number and size of muscles, no fighting skills except cunning, and you’ve picked up a handicap like one arm along the way, you have to develop good legs and quick wits. It’s called compensation or adaptation or just learning to use what you have.