Free Wise Men and Other Stories by Mike O'Mary Page B

winter. That could be Joey, too, I thought. Shuffling around downtown, looking for warmth, being chased off wherever he went.
    I was feeling sorry for Joey, when suddenly, he turned and swung at me, stopping an inch from my face and smiling a nasty smile.
    “You know something?” he said; “sometimes you ain’t too smart.”
    At that moment, Kenny Vessels and the members of The Clique started down the driveway.
    “You coming, Joey?” Kenny asked.
    “Rodney’s a lot of talk,” said Joey. “Don’t go looking for trouble.”
    “You coming or not?” responded Kenny.
    And with that, Joey left me and Mark and went with the older guys.
    * * *
     
    There wasn’t any trouble that night, but there were more and more clashes between black and white kids in Germantown as the year went on. That was 1967. It seemed like every time you looked at the television, Martin Luther King was leading a march somewhere. When he came to Louisville, my parents took me to my grandmother’s house. We watched on television as Martin Luther King led a march through town.
    “Somebody is going to kill that man,” declared my grandmother. It was not a threat. It was not a wish. She was simply stating what she felt to be obvious.
    When King was shot in 1968, there were fights all over town. It was nothing compared to the rioting that went on in other cities, but things had changed. Nobody dribbled basketballs in the alley behind the Eberhardts’ house. It was a dangerous place. White kids stood at one end of the alley calling names and throwing rocks at black kids, who stood at the other end of the alley and did likewise. Our neighborhood—our world—was not as nice a place as it had once been. It was as if the fabric of the whole country had unraveled to the point where we were all living on the fringe. And I came to realize that for Joey Russo, who had spent his whole life on the fringe, the world had never been a nice place.
    I did not see Joey for a long time after our slap box fight, but the memory of that night stuck with me. Once again, with an opportunity to hurt or humiliate me, Joey Russo had let me off the hook.
    Not too long after that, I began to get into trouble myself. After the sixth grade, I left St. Elizabeth for Highland Junior High School. While at Highland, I got into progressively more trouble until by the ninth grade, I barely passed, getting six Ds and one F after skipping forty some-odd days of school that year. My problems at school, combined with an arrest for shoplifting and my parents’ divorce, meant I had enough troubles without worrying about Joey Russo any more. I ended up moving away to live with my father.
    The next time I saw Joey Russo was a few years later when I was back to visit my mother for the holidays. I saw Mark Schmid and a lot of the other guys I had always hung around with, but I was surprised to find that Joey Russo was now hanging out in our part of Germantown. Joey had always hung out with the tough guys, the older guys, even some of the black guys. He didn’t really fit in with my mischievous—but not necessarily tough—friends. Yet there he was, hanging around, trying to fit in.
    One night, a bunch of us were in front of my mother’s house with nothing to do when somebody suggested that we go ice-skating. Mark Schmid said he could get his parents’ car, so the rest of us went to tell our parents what we were planning to do. Everybody went their separate ways except Joey, who just kind of hung around in front of my house.
    Inside the house, my mother gave me five dollars—two for admission, three to spend—but rather than wait outside with Joey, I stayed in the house. I didn’t go out until everybody else was back. Then as we were getting into Mark’s car, Joey asked me if I would lend him the money to go ice-skating. This caught me off guard, but I knew right away that I did not want to lend him the money. I knew I would never get it back. I also knew that, although no one had