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dropped children once a year and he clapped hands and body-rocked to that Jesus
salva
shit, didn’t smoke, repented for being put down, dog-worked, and smug-smiled all the time. All worse than tea; dreamier than junk. War on poverty? He had the real war and he gestured again, fist shooting out, elbow locked, finger pointing, turning slowly in place.
    They knew. They nodded.
    He told them they were all lost, lost from the beginning and lost now, lost till their deaths. If they were lucky, they would make a quick end and if they were not, they would drag it on, child surrounded, like their parents, being nothing more or less than put-down and fit-in machine parts. Some of them would go junkie, or psycho; they knew what that meant. Sure, they could be pushers, or policy runners, but that fed the machine too.
    They nodded. They knew it.
    Or did they think they might make the big escape by stealing, working their way up into the rackets? There were no rackets for them; hard work was not rewarded; all they would do was to sneak-steal till they were caught and busted and spent a third of their lives on the Inside. And if the police didn’t chill them, the racket boys would ice them. Did they think they could make it? Ismael anticipated them. He reminded them: If they were hard, where were the old hard boys now? Where were all their wasted brothers and all the busted heroes? But how much more
hombre
was an
hombre
in a group than a man alone? They had to know it.
    Most of them agreed. A few hardheads and a few kooks kept shaking their heads because they
knew
they had the stuff to lift themselves into a new destiny. They would make it out of thestrongness of their fists, the insanity of their drives, or because they were much man: wasn’t America full of such stories? Even the blazing skies painted heroes who had made it the hard way and told them about the power of violence. A little luck . . . that was all it ever took.
    He reminded them; it was hopeless . . . unless they listened to him. Arnold nodded wisely and wished he had thought of it all that way himself. And he believed he just might bring his children in. The Junior kept edging back at the words the signal man passed on: he didn’t understand them and shook his head violently, saying that man, he didn’t dig any of that jive at all, and what was more, he didn’t want to hear any more of it. Arnold nudged the Junior. Bimbo, the bearer, waited, ready to agree with whatever Arnold and Hector agreed with. Hinton fought his wild terror, but managed to look as icy as Ismael there, frozen in that pool of light in the Park darkness. Lunkface listened to the words and began to see where it was all heading and understood that here was the Man, the leader they had all been waiting for. His face began to twist with excitement and he kept nodding in time to the moving lips he could just make out. Hector, always alert to threats from the outside and internal discipline, kept half-listening to the words, hardly hearing them, watching both his men and the surrounding groups, barely visible in the darkness. Dewey heard.
    What was to be done, Ismael asked? Ismael said that at any time there were twenty thousand hard-core members, forty thousand counting regular affiliates, sixty thousand counting the unorganized but ready-to-fight. That was about four army divisions. Did they realize what that meant? He told them. With the women it would come to a hundred thousand. A hundred thousand! They had their arsenals. He told them about the big dream he had. One gang could, in time, run the city. Did they know what a hundred thousand was? There were only about twentythousand fuzz. Why should the biggest power force, one hundred thousand, in the city be put down by the Enemy, the Other? They would tax the city and tax the crime syndicates. What was to be done, Ismael asked, and waved his palm-down hand over the great area of darkness.
    Brotherhood, he said. There were one hundred