Idling，Resistance and GrowthWith Billy’s search for patrihe decline of the father both satisfies and disappoints hi’s life with Billy both gives hice. Shultz’s downfall is sie, which can be viewed as another evidence of intertextuality between this novel and World’s Fair. While the boy grows and develops, the father falls and declines. Billy’s suspicion of Shultz power is shown in his inability to continue his appreciation of the “faore aware of his own consciousness and desires. On the one hand, he sees the premonitions for Shultz’ decline, like converting from Judaism to Catholicism, and looking for a priest, an indication of approaching death； on the other hand, his lust for Drew Preston makes Shultz as a distasteful and disagreeable ents “never failed to enrage me or cause me to lose my appetite” (170). Billy has gained his own ability of judgment and has learned how to listen and look on the door；he also knows when it is the time to “slip out” and go to his own rooizes his own ability in handling himself with the grown-ups, and in handling his dual identity, both as a Bible student and as a gang boy； he says that “I was now ahead of him, and that his inadequacy, finally, was that he would know everything except the crucial thing” (188). Feeling not childish anymore, Billy believes he can escape Shultz anytime he wants. Here, he takes wandering as a way to cure his impatience. “I was impatient for people to get up. I wandered about” (211). Almost at the same time, the limitation of Berman, another mentor, is grasped by Billy, when he tells the boy to take Drew to Saratoga. “I thought in this ood the lihematical genius, he was sitting in this car because it was the closest he could get to the courtroo’t go where he wanted to go and that made him plaintive, a little humpbacked man with over-colorful clothes and Old Gold cigarettes the two indulgences of his arithmetical life” (213). Billy’s narrative here functions as the prophecy of the disaster facing the gang group.
It is in his stride in the streets of Saratoga in contemplation that helps Billy overe the terror and regain confidence:
I strode the streets of Saratoga, around the block and then around again, as if I was going somewhere, as if I had a purposeful destination. […] I am proud of this boy I was, thinking through this cold dread, and you know the quickest thinking is the thinking of the body, and the body thinks surely, errorlessly, because it is not soaked in character as the brain is, and my best guess was of the worst that could happen. (230)
Being and more capable, Billy, on the one hand, bees a prophet for the gang’s future fortune; on the other, he turns himself into the only trusted and appropriate person to carry out the most important tasks for Shultz. While acknowledging the falling of Shultz as a vagabond, Billy senses that his tiing. What is important is that, it is in his ride back to the New York City that he has such a sense:
To tell the truth I loved this time, I sensed ing, and it had to do with autuy in its final serious turn toward the winter, the light was different, brilliant, hard, it tensed the air, burnished the top deck of the Number Six double-decker bus with a cold brilliant light, I made a stately ride in anticipation of death, crowds welled at the corners under the bronze streetlamps with the little Mercuries, police whistles blew, horns blew, the tall bus lurched from gear to gear, flags from the stores and hotels, and it was for me, my triumphal procession. I reveled in the city he couldn’t enter, for a o do with what I would. (283)
Billy is excited at the truth that New York bees a fortress for Shultz who can not enter but is shut outside，as “a walled city with locked gates，” and thus the city “belonged” to him instead. Here is his strong identification with this specific city，as in his understanding，is “central” to the world. His being in the “center，” pared to Shultz’s being locked out of the “center” in the “periphery，” proves the truth that Billy bees more powerful，as well as his value to the whole gang group. We can see in the novel that it is Billy who takes the o bribe James Hine whom the Shultz gang wants to bribe；it is also Billy who shadows Thomas Dewey whom the Shultz gang wants to assassinate in the cah Avenue neighborhood pushing his mother’s carriage. Here, wandering and idling bees a means of camouflage. It is also Billy，the little wanderer，who first senses the ultimate danger of killing in the “Palace.” In a sense，he bees the real leader of the gang，and replaces Shultz，becoher of the whole gangster group.
It is i Billy’s flanerie in the city space plays a key role in his process of patrig and independence fostering. His spiritual promenade during his flanerie reveals his gradual but intense identification with the city of New York，which will be given a detailed discussion in later chapters.