They went out steady for a while and after a few weeks Kitty naturally wanted to know how Mack felt about her. She hinted around for a while, then she came right out and asked him.

“You’re okay,” he said.

“Don’t give me no okay,” Kitty said. “I want to know if you love me.”

“Something like that,” Mack said.

That’s what he said to Kitty, but to everybody else he was planning his whole life.

“It’ll take her six or seven years to get her law degree,” he said. “Then I’ll play ball for another eight or nine years and then we’ll open a little business.”

Kitty lived with her parents above her grandfather’s shop. That’s where Mack was coming from the day before Christmas. Kitty had been up at Brown University in Rhode Island on a visit to see if she wanted to go to that school and Mack had met her at the train station. It was a cold night and a light snow was falling. Down on the corner some guys were selling Christmas trees and had started a fire in a garbage can to keep warm.

All of a sudden two guys come running down the street. They were hoofing heavy and looking back over their shoulders. When they ran across Powell Avenue they almost got hit by a gypsy cab. The cab swerved just in time and one brother was slipping on the snow and almost fell in the path of a delivery truck. He was so close to being hit that he steadied himself on the fender of the truck. The car that came across the intersection was an old Mustang painted black. The two guys were running on the uptown side of the street but the Mustang came over, facing the wrong way in traffic, and a dude leaned out the back window.

“Drive-by!” a kid screamed.

People were hitting the ground, or running, or ducking behind cars. Most of them didn’t know where the shooting was coming from. A window broke, sending glass across the sidewalk. People screamed. Tires squealed. The two guys they were shooting at turned the corner and ran up the avenue. The car sped away toward the bridge that leads to the Bronx. In a minute it was out of sight.

“That’s a shame!” an old West Indian woman was saying.

“Those gang people don’t care two cents for your life!” the woman with her said.

“The day before Christmas, too,” the first woman went on, shaking her head. “They don’t have a thing to do but to—is that somebody laying on the ground over there?”

It was Mack. A man called the police and in minutes the street was full of police cars and emergency vehicles.

“He’s moving,” a long-headed boy with a scarf around his face said. “He’s okay.”

They took Mack downtown to Harlem Hospital. Pookie, who came along after the shooting and saw that it was Mack, went and told his folks.