KEEPERS

CHAPTER 1

HARRY'S POV

Summer 2002

Labor day weekend always signaled the annual go-cart race across the streets of Hell's Kitchen, the mid Manhattan neighborhood where I was born in 1993 and lived until 2008.

Preparation for the race began during the last two weeks of August, when my three best friends and I would hide away inside our basement clubhouse in a far corner of a run-down 49th Street tenement, constructing, painting and naming our racer, which we put together from lifted lumber and stolen parts. A dozen carts and their teams were schedule to assemble early on Labor Day morning at the corner of 50th Street and Tenth Avenue, each looking to collect the $15 first-prize money that would be presented to the winner by a local loan shark.

In keeping with Hell's Kitchen tradition, the race was run without rules.

It never lasted more than twenty minutes and covered four side streets and two avenues, coming to a finish on 12th Avenue end of the West Side Highway. Each go-cart had a four-man team attached, one inside and three out. The three pushed for as long and as hard as they could, fighting off the hand swipes and blade swings of the opponents who come close. The pushing stopped at the top of the 50th Street hill, leaving the rest of the race to the driver. Winners and losers crossed the finish clothesline scraped and bloody, go-carts often in pieces, driver's hands burned by ropes. Few of us wore gloves or helmets and there was never money for knee or elbow pads. We kept full plastic water bottles tied to the side of out carts, the fastest way to cool off hot free and burning wheels.

The runt of the litter among my team, I always drove.

Liam Payne and Niall Horran were spreading black paint onto thick slabs of dirty wood with color-by-number brushes.

Liam was eleven years old, a dirty brown haired, brown-eyed, charmer with a British's knack for the verbal hit-and-run. His clear baby face was marked by a six-inch scar above his right eye and smaller, half-moon scar above his right chin line, both the results of playground falls and homemade stitches. Liam always seemed to be on the verge of a smile and was the first among my friends to bring in the latest joke off the street. He was a poor student but an avid reader, a mediocre athlete with a penchant for remembering the batting and fielding statistics of even the most obscure ballplayers. He loved Marx Brothers and Abbot and Costello movies and went to any western that played the neighborhood circuit. If the mood hit him the right way, Liam would prowl the street of Hell's Kitchen talking and walking as if he were Ralph Kramden from The Honeymooners proclaiming "Hiya,pal," to all the neighborhood vendors. Sometimes,in return for his performance, we would each be given free pieces of fruit. He was born with a small hole in his heart that required regular doses of medication his mother often could not afford to buy. The illness, coupled with a frail frame, left him with a palpable air vulnerability.

Niall Horan, also eleven, was Liam's physical opposite. He had his Iris mother's dirty blonde hair and his father's ruddy, bright and blue eyes. Short and flabby around the waist and thighs, Niall loved sports, action movies, Marvel comics and adventure novels. Above all else, Niall loved to eat-meatball heroes, buttered rolls, hard cherry candy barrels. He collected and traded baseball cards, storing each year's set in team order inside a half-dozen Kinney shoeboxes sealed with rubber bands. He had a natural aptitude for math and build model ships and planes out raw wood with skill and patience. He had a sensitive nature and a feel for the underdog, always cheering on team and athletes that were destined to lose. He was quick to laugh and needed prodding to loosens the grip on his temper. A botched surgical procedure when he was an infant forced him occasionally to wear a pad and brace around his right leg. On those days Niall chose to wear a black eye patch and tie a red handkerchief around his head.

Louis Tomlinson, at twelve the oldest of my friends, was quietly hammering nails into a sawed-down Dr. Brown's soda crate.

The best student among us, Louis was a smooth blend of book smarts and street savvy. His blue eyes bore holes through their targets, but his manner was softened by wide, expansive smile. He kept his thick, dark dirty blonde hair short on the sides and long on top. He was never without a piece of gum in his mouth and read all the tabloids of the day, the only one among us to move beyond the sports pages to the front page. He was also never without a book, usually a rumpled paperback shoved inside the rear pocket of his jeans. Where we still favored the tales of Alexandre Dumas, Jack London and Robert Louis Stevenson, Louis had graduated to the darker domain of Edgar Allan Poe and the chivalry and romance of Sir Walter Scott. He initiated most of our pranks and had a cutting sense of humor that was doused with a wise man's instinct for fairly play. He was our unofficial leader, a position he valued but never flaunted and one that required him to care for and maintain out collection of Classics Illustrated comics.