It was Christmas day when the news got back to the block. Mack was going to live, but two bullets had torn into his right ankle and just about taken his foot off. Doctors had worked on his foot for seven hours, but finally they gave up. It had to be amputated.

When he came out of the hospital Mack was different. It wasn’t like he just acted a little strange; he was a different person. At first when some of the guys went around to see him they said he didn’t talk much, but then after a while he wouldn’t even come out of his room. Then Peewee found out that he hadn’t seen Kitty.

“She didn’t even go to the hospital?” Eddie, who was in Mack’s math class, asked.

“She went to the hospital,” Peewee said. “But since he’s been home he hasn’t seen her. He told his mother not to let her in and he won’t answer the phone.”

“You can’t turn your back on people like that,” Eddie answered.

But the truth was that Mack could turn his back on people, because he really had turned his back on himself. Kitty called him every day at the same time so he would know it was her, but he wouldn’t answer.

Mack’s father worked in a restaurant just down from Sylvia’s. It wasn’t as high-class a restaurant as Sylvia’s but it was nice. He went to work at one in the afternoon and Mack would keep his door closed, not even come out of his room, until after his father had left.

The next thing that Kitty did was to organize a little get-together with Peewee and some of the guys on the baseball team. Peewee told me about it and for the first time he didn’t make a lot of jokes about it.

“He was sitting on his bed and he had his leg out from under the cover,” Peewee said. “You know, we just sat there and tried not to look at his leg. Mack kept laughing at his leg and pointing to it. Man, it was terrible. Dottie was there and she held Kitty’s hand.”

“She was tore up,” Dottie said. “You loving somebody like she loves that fool and you hate to see them looking so pitiful.”

“Nobody else could get it up to say anything,” Peewee continued. “People started drifting out one by one. I know those guys aren’t going back there. That scene was too rough.”

No one saw Mack for a long time after that. There were reports that he had lost a lot of weight, and that maybe he was losing his mind. The worst time was when Mack’s father called the cops because he wouldn’t come down from the roof. It was nearly three o’clock in the morning in late January. A cold rain slanted down onto the tar paper and onto the lone figure sitting on the ledge overlooking the empty street below. A policeman tried to talk him away from the edge but Mack didn’t respond.