The scattered clouds of early morning had fallen out
of the sky and the sky was now a hard eggshell blue. 
A fine day for a funeral.  Unless it was your own.

He could merely remain in the park.  They, whoever
they were, would eventually grow tired and go away.

Sure.  In about a thousand years.

He had already drawn blood.  Some of their men were
missing.  It was probably now a matter of professional
pride that would keep them waiting and, when they grew
tired of waiting, would bring them into the park after
him.

If he waited, they would have an advantage.  The
hounds always have an advantage over the fox in a
chase.

However, he wasn't a fox.  And he wasn't going to
wait.

As soon as Caraboo's helicopter vanished from sight,
Snake walked quickly south in the park.  The asphalt
pathway led around a low hill and past some huge
rocks.  The trees beyond the rocks were bare from the
winter that still lingered in New York City.  Winters
here were always long and sometimes hard and other
times worse.  Trees would not began to green until
around the traditional Easter Day Parade and even then
you could have snow.

It wasn't all that cold today.  Just cold enough to
make you feel alive.

He paused by the rocks and buttoned his jacket at the
neck; the jacket would provide some protection against
a stray bullet.  As for the bullets that were not
strays, he hoped to avoid as many of those as
possible.

From the cover of the rocks, he had a pretty good view
of the street.  Tall apartment buildings flung a wall
against the sky, penetrated at clocklike intervals by
canyons slicing west.  A few lookouts on those
buildings could keep a pretty good eye on this side of
the park.  Walkie talkies would alert others.  An army
could be mounted fairly fast.

However, once across that street, a man might dive
down one of those canyons and they would have to come
after him from one direction or the other.  If they
came after him from both ends of the street, their
forces would be divided; too much danger of shooting
each other.

If they came at him strictly from the park, chasing
him down that canyon, it would be a game of hide and
seek.  That could be prove interesting.

After pulling in his belt a notch and fastening the
heavy belt buckle that he wore, Snake left the
protection of the rocks and, keeping out of sight, ran
southward.  In a few minutes, Snake was crouched
behind a tree looking out from the park.  Across
Central Park West was the entrance to 103rd Street. 
Parked cars lined both sides of the street; the cars
would provide some protection.  There were the
doorways of the old, dismal brownstones.  If he made
it past the cross street and reached the park along
Riverside Drive, they would never pin him down; he
would be as good as gone.

There was only one major problem with the plan:  It
was a plan.  He had relied far too long on impromptu
action, reacting from whatever happened.  It was a
little late now in the game to change all that.  It
wouldn't be natural.

He took his time and surveyed Central Park West.  A
taxi came from the north with a passenger and, dodging
cars as if either the driver or the passenger was in a
hurry, almost sideswiped a blue Buick.

One man standing in an apartment building doorway
across the street looked out of place.  He was reading
a newspaper, but hadn't turned a page in several
minutes.  Not even the New York Times carried that
much interesting information on a page.  And the man
was reading a tabloid.

It was a long toss from here, but Snake wasn't trying
to hit him, just disturb his reading.  He picked up a
small rock and threw it.  The rock hit the sidewalk
near where the man was standing and bounced past him
and against the wall of the apartment building.

Now this was impromptu!

Pages of the newspaper flew like falling leaves
through the air.  The man had a gun in his hand in
less than a second and a second later was sprawled on
the sidewalk, desperately trying to discover who had
thrown a rock at him.

Snake stood up.

"This direction, dummy!"

His action immediately brought a bullet.  The gunman
fired from his prone position.  But he hadn't taken
time to actually locate the target and sight first,
which was precisely what Snake had counted on.

Snake dodged behind the tree, then, running low,
plunged deeper into the park.  He stopped in a growth
of brush and crouched down, sitting on his heels. 
Although the thin branches offered no protection, he
was mostly hid from view and at this distance
virtually invisible from detection of the gunman on
Central Park West.  

The gunman said a few words into a cellular phone.

Almost as soon as he pushed the antenna down and
tucked the phone away, a car pulled up and double
parked by the curb.  He gestured in the direction of
the park.  Four men got out of the car and, hands in
pockets, dodged a taxi, and ran toward Central Park.

They spread out.  Two of them passed by within a few
yards of where Snake crouched.  They weren't looking
for him this close.  Their quarry was supposed to be
further off and fleeing for his life.

Silently, Snake stepped in behind the one on the
right.

The gunman either sensed someone behind him or Snake
had made a small noise.  He tried to turn.  With the
edge of his right hand, Snake cropped the gunman
across the back of the neck and jumped at the second
gunman.

The man had his gun drawn.  But it was pointing the
wrong direction.  He fired three quick shots-mostly
out of fear-as he fell.  The shots rang into the sky.

Snake picked him up and threw him at the two other
approaching gunmen.  One of them fell under the impact
of the flying body.  The other tried to dodge, but he,
too, was knocked to the ground.  He was trying to
raise his gun to fire when Snake stepped on his arm
where it hinged at the elbow.  He stepped hard and
then stepped again.  There was the sound of breaking
bones.  The man would have to shoot with his left hand
from now on.

He kicked the other gunman in the head as he ran past.
 Then turned and picked up the guns at his leisure.

The man with the broken arm was crying in pain.  He
emitted soft, low sobs.  He tried to stop and
couldn't, so he kept as quiet as possible.  His eyes
followed Snake's every movement.

Only one gunman seemed capable of further action, but
he had collided with a tree during his recent flight
and he wasn't feeling very good at the moment.  He sat
on the ground and tried to avoid being sick.

Snake also took the cellular phone he found.

"Any of you kill Rabbit?" Snake asked.

The gunman shook his head.  He stared at Snake.  His
eyes were bright and as wide as if he were afraid he
might miss something that was about to happen.

"I'm not going to kill you," said Snake.  "On the
other hand, I'd rather not have any of you around." 
He took one of the pistols and carefully shot the man
in the calf of both legs.

"Oh, my god!" the gunman screamed.

"Should have called him earlier," said Snake.

He looked down at the man with the broken arm.  The
man was not going to be of much use.  He skipped him
and shot one of the other men, still unconscious, in
the legs.  He jerked spasmodically, but didn't come
to.  The last man, however, was awake.

"You don't have to shoot me.  I'm out of action. 
Busted rib, I think."

"Your word?"

Yes."

"Good enough," said Snake.

>From a jacket pocket, Snake took out a small Buck
knife and sliced the trousers of each of the men he'd
shot.  With these strips of cloth, he made bandages
for the wounds to reduce the bleeding.

"Your boss, the thin-faced lady-what's her name?" he
asked one of the men he'd shot in the legs.

"I...I don't know."

"But you know who I mean," said Snake.

"I don't...know any lady."  He spoke with considerable
strain.

"Well, she may still kill you.  I can't help that. 
Because if one of you gentlemen didn't do it, who did?
 Do this for me, if you get the chance:  Give her a
message if you talk to her again.  I would appreciate
it."

"A message?"

"Tell her she shouldn't have shot Rabbit.  I'm
somewhat irritated about Rabbit.  That's all you have
to say."

Without saying good-bye, Snake walked back toward
103rd Street.  Along the way, he dropped the guns and
the cellular phone in a shallow pond.  The cellular
phone was as useless to him as the guns; the owner
would eventually get a bill for any calls made and he
could not afford to have the number of the room known.

He thought about holing up and making a whole bunch of
phone calls to numbers at random in the phone book. 
It amused him to think of someone checking out all of
those numbers.  However, under the present
circumstances, his joke might prove rather deadly to
those he called.

At a pay phone, he telephoned the room and asked the
woman the other end-it was not Neva-for a suite at the
Waldorf-Astoria.  "Towers.  Order a New York Strip
well done with all of the trimmings delivered at 7
p.m."

"Beer?"

"Milk.  A quart of milk.  And I'd like a bowl of
dry-roasted peanuts."

Milk doesn't go with peanuts.  Beer goes with
peanuts."

"That all depends on how crazy you are," Snake said.

He hung up on the girl's startled "Oh!"

A few minutes later, he was again across the street
from the canyon of buildings that was 103rd Street.

It's true.  He probably was a little crazy.  It's
better to be a little crazy in this kind of business. 
Because one seldom dealt with ordinary people.  The
old cliché about "birds of a feather" was as true way
back when as whenever.

He knew he wasn't a masochist.  A year or so ago he'd
thought seriously about quitting.  Getting out of the
game.  He went down to Corpus Christi and took a motel
room and stayed there for three weeks, letting a
couple of bullet wounds heal.  Doing a lot of
thinking.  Taking long walks at dawn.  A masochist,
basically, likes to punish himself.  He had no great
fondness for pain.  It's just that he could will pain
to go away.  Most of the time.  Lock pain in the back
of his thoughts.  And then he didn't mind it so much. 
He hadn't even gone to the doctor with the two wounds.
 One had gone completely through his left shoulder. 
The other had merely grazed his thigh.  Both bled a
lot.  But bleeding was good because it cleaned the
wound.  He'd poured a bottle of 150-proof rum on the
wounds and bandaged them and that was that.

No, he was not a masochist.

But a dark side was there in him; Caraboo had been
right about that.  He knew it.  And it never went
away.  And it was very difficult-almost impossible-for
him to describe what it was.

He was afraid of death.  He was afraid of it because
it was something unknown, not because it was scary
itself.  And he knew without question that he was
going to die and it was just a matter of time.

The people who played this game usually didn't live
long enough to flop down into the proverbial rocking
chair.

That man across the street probably never thought much
about death.  Probably just your ordinary, every day
run of the mill goon.  There are two types of
criminals, Snake had decided.  The very bright ones
and the goons.  The hunter had probably been one of
the bright ones.  College.  Read.  Watched the
"McNeil/Lehrer Hour."  Tough to realize you'd killed a
person like that: a man who might have been something
or somebody.  Goons, on the other hands, would never
be anything but goons.  They killed because someone
told them to and they did it without much other
reason.  It was not a career, per se; it was merely a
way to make a few dollars.

The goon across the street had gathered up his
newspaper and once again was pretending to read it.

If, as Caraboo believed, Snake was predictable, the
goon across the street was even more so.

This time, Snake was more accurate.  The rock that he
threw hit the newspaper.

Screaming in rage, the man tossed the newspaper aside
and charged across the street in Snake's direction,
gun drawn.  He fired as he ran.

Instead of fleeing this time, Snake also charged,
running in the direction of the goon.  It was not a
direct attack because of the traffic.  Snake darted
behind a truck, slipped around a limousine carrying a
man in a hat.

However, he felt one of the slugs fired by the goon
hit him in the side.

Because of the lining in his jacket, the bullet didn't
even slow him down.

The goon was so surprised, he stopped in the middle of
Central Park West and stood there as cars came and
flicked past.  The gun hung at his side as if he
didn't know what to do with it.

As he ran past him, Snake knocked the gun out of the
gunman's hand, slugged him in the chin, grabbed the
man, and slung him over his shoulder and then, at a
casual stroll, carried the man down 103rd Street.

In some cities of America, it would have been a
startling sight.  They would have attracted
considerable attention.

The average person in New York City, however, has seen
it all.  Twenty-nine people watched a man knifed to
death in Brooklyn and yet the police couldn't find a
witness.  On 103rd Street, where dope dealers set up
shop at several of the light poles on a summer
evening, where hookers go for whatever price you've
got in your pocket, where the odor of death drifts
like a gentle breeze through the tenements, there
isn't much that isn't usual.

A few people would have noticed, of course, but
quickly looked the other way, preferring to mind their
own business, so to speak.  New Yorkers are experts at
minding their own business.  It's a way of life
whether you live on Park Avenue or the even more
prestigious Sutton Place.  On 103rd Street, minding
your own business is definitely a way of life and
extremely necessary if you want to stay alive.

Snake crossed over into Riverside Park.  Down by the
Hudson River, he sat the gunman down on a park bench
and made a casual search.

He found the cellular telephone and laid it on the
bench.  The gunman, like the others, carried no viable
identification.  Fake driver's license, fake hospital
insurance card.  There was even a small snapshot of
him and some woman; she didn't exactly have the
appearance of a wife.

There was another gun in his hip pocket.  A .38 
caliber revolver, the kind that a cop might carry. 
Probably stolen.  Interesting, none the less.

Snake tucked the gun away in his denim jacket and sat
down behind the man to wait until he came to.

His jacket had been torn by the bullet.  He pulled
from a side pocket a mangled Max Brand pocketbook. 
The pocketbook had slowed the slug down.  His
specially lined jacket had done the rest.

It took quite a while for the goon to come around. 
However, the bench was situated so that Snake could
watch both the river and the end of 103rd Street.  He
didn't expect anyone to follow them.  It didn't pay to
relax, so he looked at the end of the street a while
and then at the river.

Hunger began to gnaw at his gut.  So, he nibbled on a
handful of leftover trail mix while he waited.

The Hudson River used to be one of the most beautiful
rivers in the world and it still is in scattered bits
a pieces to the north.  On the other side of George
Washington Bridge, which he could see in the distance,
was the Palisades area.  Beautiful cliffs.  A very
pleasant walk on a pathway among the trees along the
river.

Here, however, when the eyes strayed beyond the park
in the direction of the river, all you saw was a dark,
foul stream of refuse.  The water was so filthy you
could get sick if you fell in the river even on a warm
day.  A low, dim shape moved slowly upstream, but it
was difficult from here to tell if it was a boat or
some huge monster swimming home.  On the other side of
the river, almost invisible in a haze, were jagged
edges of tired buildings.

Bored with waiting, Snake slapped the gunman twice. 
The man groaned slightly  So Snake slapped him again
hard.  His head popped back and his eyes jerked open.

"I want you to make a phone call on your little phone
here.  I want you to call your boss.  You don't have
to tell me who it is, but I guess you wouldn't anyway,
would you?"

"No."

"Not even if it meant your life, I suppose?" said
Snake.

"They'd killed me."

"I see.  It's that old dammed if I do, damned if I
don't tango, eh?"

"That's what it is," said the gunman.

"Well, I'm not going to kill you," said Snake.  Then,
lowering his voice, added, "maybe.  All you have to do
is make a phone call and hand me the phone."

"And if I don't?"

"Then you won't have to worry-not ever-about getting
killed."

"It's like that, huh?"

"I thought I should be up front and frank with you. 
It's not me, you understand.  That is, it's not
necessarily what I would prefer to do.  It's just that
I'm a touch disturbed.  Put out, you might say.  About
everything.  So, I'm aiming to reduce the odds."

"I heard shots out in the park.  Did you reduce the
odds much out there?"

"Some," admitted Snake.

"What are you?" the goon asked.  "I ain't never seen
nothing like you.  Not even on television."

"It doesn't really matter," said Snake.

"Like hell," said the goon.  "Like hell!"

Snake handed him the cellular phone.

"Now's the time to make your decision," said Snake.

"What happens if I call for help?"

"You don't really want to know," said Snake.

With hesitant, nervous fingers, the goon tried to
dial.  He had to punch the button and hang up once and
start over.

When the phone rang, he handed the cellular phone to
Snake.  Snake listened until someone answered at the
other end.  It was a female voice.  She said, "Hello."

"This is Snake," Snake said.  "I need more playmates."

He hung up the phone and pushed the antenna back into
place and put the phone in his pocket and stood up. 
Then he took out the .38 revolver he'd taken from the
goon.

"Hey!  You said you weren't going to shoot me!"

"I said I wouldn't kill you.  Bit different," said
Snake.  And he shot the man twice in the leg.

The goon grabbed his knee.  But he didn't cry out.  He
merely stared at Snake.

Snake put the goon's gun back in his pocket and walked
away.

"I'll get you for this!" the goon shouted after him.

Snake stopped, turned around, and walked back.

"No you won't," he said.

The goon began to scream as Snake pointed the gun at
him.  It was as if an animal was screaming, not a
human being.  The goon's fear was instinctive.  It was
surface level.

Snake calmly shot the goon in the right knee cap. 
Then the left knee cap.

The screaming stopped.

"You don't dare kill me!"

"Oh, I dare fairly well," said Snake.

He pointed the gun at the man's head, taking time,
sighting down the gun barrel.

Suddenly, the goon wasn't all that brave.  He began to
whimper.  "Don't kill me.  I didn't meant it.  I
didn't meant it!"

Snake pulled the trigger just as the goon yelled in
utter terror.  It was not surface fear this time.

The gun clicked on an empty chamber.

Snake put the gun in his pocket again and stood there
looking down at the gunman.

"You'll perhaps ask yourself whether I knew the gun
was empty or not," said Snake.  "The real truth is
that I didn't care.  Now you can look me up, when
you're able to walk again, if you wish.  I don't even
care about that.  But my advice is that you run and
hide if you ever see me, even if you see me at a
distance.  Even if you hear the word snake on radio or
see it in a newspaper and it's not even me, run and
hide.  Because there's the rattlesnake and there's the
sidewinder.  The rattlesnake warns you most of the
time before it strikes.  The sidewinder strikes and it
may rattle later.  Or it may not."

He turned and in a few minutes was out of sight of the
park bench.  Just before he drifted among some low
pines out of view, he looked back.  The goon was
doubled up on the park bench, holding his knees in his
arms, crying.

(continued next week)

In the old days, I drank a lot of beer.  I was sort of
an aficionado on the brew.  Today, I drink a lot of
Diet Pepsi.  No, I do not know a hell of a lot of
about Diet Pepsi.  But I know enough to save the cans.
 We save every empty aluminum can and they are
collected every other Wednesday by Silver State and
hauled away to be recycled.  We also include a lot of
plastic bottles in the fray.  These are the leftovers,
largely, of artificial water (I cannot convince my
beautiful wife Barbara that the water from the faucet
in the kitchen is perfectly safe; she says it doesn't
taste as good at the expensive water).  But a lot of
things, including apple juice and vinegar and mayo and
peanut butter come in plastic containers these days.

I visualize that I will probably drink Diet Pepsi from
the same aluminum, reconstituted, some day.  The
plastic bottles from water and ketchup and whatever
will come back at me, too, I suspect, in the form of a
coat hanger or one of those flimsy plastic chairs for
the patio.

As this might indicate, I believe in recycling. 
Especially paper.  I don't recycle much glass.  I
should do better.  I don't recycle tin cans at all.  I
feel guilty about it.  Just too lazy to do it.

Regardless, I know without question that unless we all
recycle the materials of the day, we will be buried in
them on the morrow.

Meanwhile, millions of people in this world are
homeless or near homeless this very second that I
write.  From poverty.  From storms.  From the
idiocracies of begotten wars.  From stupidity.

Yet, we have the technology and the refuse to solve a
great many such woes.  An old plastic bottle can be
magically transformed into a wall.  Two thin sheets of
hard plastic with a core of plastic foam like that of
the coffee cup in your hand this morning.  Perfect
insulation.  Flanges around the rims of the walls for
plastic bolts to fasten these together.  Floor, walls,
 ceiling.  A room.  Two rooms, a house.  A designed,
functional bathroom of plastic...the kind featured in
a mobile home.  These "walls" and bath and a kitchen
sink and cabinet could be shipped en masse virtually
anywhere in the world by air and land and sea.  Even I
could manage to toss up a room.

Instead of carrying bullets and bombs to the world,
take them a home.  The cost is much less, I assure
you.  Storm in Haiti!  Send them suitable homes! 
Water.  Food.

We have created such a vast number of enemies in the
world today.  We should be attempting to create
friends instead.  You feed me a bullet, I will hate
you forever and my children will hate you and all of
my relatives and friends will not like you until the
end of time.

You feed me a house and a bowl of rice and a book and
at least there's an opportunity for conversation and
maybe some form of friendship.  At least, no reason
extant for animosity.

Who would build the walls?  The homeless in America if
you offered them the chance.  America's ignored world.
 Factory to make these would be cheap at the price and
the first walls off the assembly line would be used to
build homes for the homeless working in the factory. 
Place the factory in Caliente, NV.

Who would grow the rice, the beans, the potatoes? 
America's farmers...especially those being paid not to
grow anything.  Farm subsidies never made sense to me.

The death dealers in the White House feed us fear at
the same time they feed the world bullets and bombs.

It would be so much better, so much more productive to
feed the entire world hope.

OTHER MATTERS
Been some changes in the email address for 440,
according to John Williams,
john-williams@hawaii.rr.com: "BossJock@440.com and
BossJock@440int.com have been forged as return
addresses on emails all over the universe, so I've had
to stop using them.  New addresses effective
immediately:  1) john-williams@hawaii.rr.com -- (feel
free to use this one),  or  2) johnnywilliams@440.com
-- for any John(ny) Williams-related stuff,  or  3)
hotline@440.com -- for any 440:
Satisfaction/TWtD-related stuff.  Sorry for the
trouble, but such is life in the spammed world of
2004."

Personal notes from Sonny Melendrez and Kent Burkhart,
for which I'm grateful.

It's now Saturday morning.  My major project of the
moment is a family history CD. I was going to print it
as a book.  Too much work.  CD will have to do.  Yes,
I'm aware that books have been around a long, long
time...from the codex on...and we are not aware just
how long the CD will be on hand; new systems seem to
be in the wings.  My CD:  Tales.  Pictures. 
Geneologies as far back as I could trace.  The Halls
disappear in times and trails; they have been here too
long to follow their various pathways through history;
they were in Texas at least by 1800.  And was Pappy
Smith really a Texas Ranger?  He damned well wore a
Walker Colt and brought home dead bodies draped across
a horse.

I'm close to finishing this family CD and will pass
out copies to the relatives.  Few people would
otherwise be interested.

Another project I desperately wanted to do was a Who's
Who of Radio.  Not just the big ones.  Everyone that I
could find anything about.  An impossible chore, of
course, but I've had this in my mind since my early
days on Billboard magazine in the 1960s.  Music came
and music went.  But the disc jockey was there.  Like
concrete to hold the music together.  The community
together.  The world together.  He was more important
in the way things were and the way things got done
than anyone realized...even more than he realized. 
For often, the disc jcokey was having too much fun or
otherwise working too damned hard, to comprehend his
role in the pattern of life.

There was the ordinary work-a-day jock.  We had our
share.  Then there was the exceptional disc jockey who
arrived in radio with a god-given talent that neither
he understood completely nor his peers and comrades
believed.  These became legend.  Most of them.  Some
are still around.  Don Imus, Joey Reynolds, Sonny
Melendrez, Gary Owens, Jack Gale.  Jimmy Rabbitt. 
Some, in spite of this enormous talent, disappeared
and no one remembers much about them today.  Long John
Silver?  Weird Beard?  Jack Armstong?  Don Sherwood? 
Tom Clay?  And how many Johnny Dollars?  Some grew big
in an area and couldn't quite capture that same glory
in any other market.  Remember Pat Patterson?  Eddie
Hill?  Dick Lawrence?

Sometimes, the glory had to be cultivated.  Tom
Campbell enjoyed no exceptional voice, probably little
exceptional ability when you thought about it.  But he
worked hard!  Learned!  Adjusted!  He related to his
audience; he was his audience and they became a part
of him, his life, his on-air show.  And he became a
legend.  Yet, who remembers him now?  Some of his fans
have written me.  I think:  Tom was bigger than we
knew.  But even then, in those gone days, I recognized
he was something special in radio.  It's just that
time is passing all of us by.  The speed seems to be
increasing day by day.

Often, the talent of this unique disc jockey or that
unusual disc jockey sparkled like a diamond in a field
of mere pebbles.  Often, it was the different kind of
voice, the different kind of approach, some gimmicky
like that used by Gary Stevens whom even the old
timers have probably forgotten he once jocked at WMCA
in New York City.  If I mention Dandy Dan, who of you
will remember his last name by which he was known on
the air and that he was known once for his witty
one-liners?

No one at all remembers Bob Fasse.  Few remember Horse
Allen.  The memories of Georgie Woods, Joe Smith,
Reggie Lavong and countless others seems to be fading
fast.  A part of the disappearing history of radio.

How I wish that I could have written that book of bios
of disc jockies so that, today, I could look back and
remember them all.