Magic Street Page 0,73

live. They don't have to live here. This neighborhood is an island in a sea of troubles. Somebody young and loud like that, she's some people's worst nightmare."

I know what their worst nightmares are, thought Mack. Or at least what they might be, if they got their wishes.

Out loud, he said, "Well, she's not trashy, she's nice."

Both women raised their eyebrows, and Mrs. Tucker set down her cup. "Oh ho, sounds like love."

"She's ten years older than he is if she's a day," said Miz Smitcher.

"It isn't love," said Mack. "But I did something nobody else in this whole neighborhood bothered to do. I talked to her."

"They did not talk to her, they talked at her, told her what she got to do or else."

"Oh, were you there?" asked Mrs. Tucker.

"I'll tell you about Yolanda White. She sees a kid running to school cause the bus driver took off without me like she always tries to do, and she pulls up in front of me on that bike and gives me a ride to school."

Mrs. Tucker gasped and Miz Smitcher looked at him for a long moment. "You been on that bike?"

Only now did Mack realize that they might not take the right lesson from his experience. "My point is that she's a kind person."

But Miz Smitcher wasn't having it. "She's riding along and she sees a schoolboy and she gives him a ride?"

"It was a nice thing to do," Mack insisted.

"So you had your arms around her and you were pressed right up against her back and tell me, Mack, did she drive fast and hard so you had to hold on real tight?"

This was not going the way Mack intended. "We were riding a motorcycle, Miz Smitcher, if you don't hold on you end up sliding along the street."

"Oh, I know what happens if you don't hold on to a motorcycle, Mister," said Miz Smitcher. "I see motorcycle accidents all the time. Skin flayed right off their body, these fools go riding in shorts and a t-shirt and then they spill on the asphalt and get tar and stones imbedded in their bones and the muscles torn right off their body cause the pavement's like being sandblasted. And that woman took my boy and put him on the back of her bike so he rubbing up against her and she drove him along the streets like a crazy woman so she put him at risk of ending up in the hospital with a nurse like me changing the dressings on his skinless body while he screaming in spite of the morphine drip - oh, don't you tell me about how nice she is."

Mack knew that anything he said now would just make things worse. He dug into his cereal.

"Don't you sit there and eat that Crispix like you didn't hear a word I said."

"He just trying to think of an answer," said Mrs. Tucker.

"Just trying to finish breakfast so I don't miss my bus," said Mack.

"You're not to go near her, you hear me?" said Miz Smitcher. "You think you're friends with her now - "

"I know we not friends." They'd be friends when she let him call her Yo Yo.

to kill her or you or both, and if you get on her motorcycle again, I'm kicking you out of this house!"

"So I'd be dead and homeless," said Mack.

"Don't make fun of what I'm telling you!"

Mack got up, rinsed out his dish, and started to put it in the dishwasher.

"Don't! Those are clean in there!" shouted Miz Smitcher.

"You're right," said Mack. "Wouldn't want a dirty dish to spoil the property values in there."

"That's exactly my point!" said Miz Smitcher. "That is exactly my point. One dirty dish and you have to rewash the whole batch."

"Well, this whole neighborhood better start rewashing, cause Yolanda White bought that house and I don't think she going to pay any attention to a neighborhood vigilante committee." He stalked off to get his backpack out of his bedroom.

Behind him, he could hear Miz Smitcher talking to Mrs. Tucker. "She already setting parent against child. She is divisive."

Mack couldn't let that go. "She isn't divisive! She just minding her business! You and me the ones getting divisive!"

"Because of her!" shouted back Miz Smitcher.

Mack stood in his room, holding the bookbag. In all his years in this house, this was the first time he and Miz Smitcher ever shouted at each other in anger.

Which wasn't to say that they never disagreed. But up till now,