Free 145th Street by Walter Dean Myers Page B

Monkeyman said.
    He took off his jacket as if he meant to fight Clean. For a moment I thought maybe it would be a fair fight. But then Monkeyman took off his shirt and just stood there in his bare skin and held his hands out and his head to one side.
    Clean didn’t know what was happening. He looked around.
    “Kick his butt!” one of the Tigros called out. “Waste him!”
    Clean took his hands out of his pockets and started circling Monkeyman, but Monkeyman didn’t move. Clean hit him in the back of his head and he didn’t say nothing.
    “Please don’t do that, boy,” Monkeyman’s grandfather said. “He made us promise not to help him, but please don’t do that.”
    “We’ll kick your butt, too,” a girl said.
    Everybody turned and looked at her and she held out her chin like she didn’t even care. But she didn’t say anything else.
    Monkeyman’s godmother was praying.
    It was dark but there was a moon out and the park lights were on. More people came into the park to see what was going on. What they saw was Monkeyman standing with his arms outstretched and Clean hitting him. He hit him in the face a couple of times and an old man asked, “What’s going on?”
    “That’s the Tigros gang,” Fee said. “They’re beating up Monkeyman because he stopped one of their girls from slashing somebody in the face.”
    “I ought to kill you!” Clean shouted.
    “They just waiting for the police to come,” another Tigros guy said.
    It grew quiet. There had to be fifty people watching now, watching Clean standing in front of Monkeyman, not knowing what to do, watching the rest of the gang not knowing where to take it, watching Monkeyman with his arms still out from his sides, his nose bleeding, his body quivering from the pain and from the growing cold. The high streetlamps outside the park cast a pale glare on Monkeyman’s dark skin. The shadow on the ground, of Monkeyman’s body being offered up for a beating, was long and thin and disappeared into the shifting knot of people watching.
    “That’s what’s wrong with the neighborhood now,” a man said. “We got it hard enough without this kind of thing.”
    “He ain’t nothing but a punk” A short, squat guy stepped out from the Tigros group. “If he don’t fight he a punk!”
    “I ain’t even going to waste my time on him,” Clean said. “If I was back in the Crips I wouldn’t even waste my time on no punk.”
    The Tigros were outnumbered now, and began drifting off. When they got down to the last five or so someone yelled that the cops were coming and they all ran.
    Monkeyman put on his shirt. His grandfather put his arm around him and they started out of the park The wind picked up a little and I began to shiver. Around me others were slowly starting to move and I pulled my jacket shut and started home.

    I saw Monkeyman two days later.
    “You were wrong,” I said. “You took a chance and you could have been killed.”
    “I was hurt,” Monkeyman said. “I was hurt but they were wrong, not me.”
    “What if they had killed you?” I said.
    He just looked at me. “I know,” he said. “I know.”
    He said it with a sadness that just got all into me. He had been looking down but now Monkeyman looked up, right into my eyes, as if he expected me to say something that was right for the moment. I couldn’t think of anything.
    “Yo, Monkeyman, what did you think was going to happen that night?” I asked.
    “I just thought that some people were going to show wrong, and some others were going to show right,” he said. “No matter what happened to me, everybody was going to know the difference.”
    I couldn’t see it. I wouldn’t have let them beat on me like that. What I would have done I don’t know.
    It didn’t end there. Three weeks later another guy in the Tigros stabbed Monkeyman in the back. Monkeyman was in the hospital for three weeks, hanging on between life and death, but finally he made it.
    The guy who stabbed Monkeyman