The Crabtree Gang-excerpt from a short story by Austin Mitchell

The Crab-tree Gang

by A.G. Mitchell

           The crab-tree gang was at lunch. They numbered five youths all under eighteen except Bryce Deans who was reported to be nineteen. Naddy had ridden a mile to the nearest fast food outlet to buy their food.  This was his payment to the gang in lieu of hard cash. The gang had been operating at Mc Clellans’s High School for the past fifteen years. Leadership and membership of the gang had been passed down among families.

          “We nearly didn’t collect enough money to buy our lunch,” Bryce told them as he bit into a piece of chicken.

          “It seems as if those youths don’t want us to protect them anymore,” Welton Bright said as he bit into a huge piece of chicken. He was seventeen and in his last year at school. He had come into membership of the gang through a cousin.

          The gang protected children from Nixon, Norton, Waste Land and Big Leaf districts numbering about three hundred in all.

          “If they don’t pay us they’ll have to pay the Deuce gang and they charge more than us or maybe they’d like to pay the Ridley or the Dexterous gang?” Dalton Dillon asked as he drank some more of his fruit punch. He was big and burly and a month younger than Welton. Dudley West and Bidey Dixon made up the rest of the gang. Dudley was of medium height and was a few months past his sixteenth birthday while Bidey was also of medium height. Bidey was going on eighteen.

          These boys had gotten into all sorts of trouble and had just missed being kicked out of school on several occasions. Bryce had to repeat grades at least twice and it wasn’t because he wasn’t good at his lessons. He loved loafing about and playing all sorts of pranks plus he was something of a playboy.

          In addition, each boy was required to spend at least a week being an enforcer in either Kingston or Spanish Town. So that some days at least two boys from the gang would be absent from the school and dressed in plain clothes. So in addition to their behavior, their attendance record was also very poor.

            All the gangs controlled different clusters of districts and had their enforcers in the school. The Crab-tree gang only operated at Mc Clelland High and was not an offshoot of any other gang like the others. The surplus cash from the day’s takings was split among the gang members who used it to outfit themselves or their girls and to party with them. They bought the most expensive cell phones, sneakers, clothes and sunglasses. Occasionally they would make up a collection to give to Stash, the area Don, who, although he didn’t demand it, felt that the youths were showing him respect the more frequently they gave him  money.

          Bad men were roaming the communities doing kidnappings and raping of young girls. They were also robbing kids of their lunch money and lately their cell phones. All the youths had bicycles. They would shepherd those kids, they protected to school in the mornings and back home in the evenings. Bryce had gotten into fights several times with grown men and came out the winner each time. Each of the other boys  had confrontations with some of these men and had prevailed over them. The gangs had managed to chase some of these miscreants out of the communities. A few remained and it was these that the kids sought protection from by partaking of their lunch money to the various gangs operating at their school.

  Read the full story in 'Waiting to cross the Bridge' or in 'Riding the milk-truck to School'.