All I Did Was Shoot My Man

8

“... That bitch is always tellin’ me that she wants me to be happy and she wants me to be a man, but the first thing I do on my own and she’s actin’ like the world’s comin’ to an end and, and, and...”

These words came from Dimitri through the closed door of his room.

I was carrying his mother down the hall to our bedroom.

Negotiating the doorway without banging her head, I put her down on the bed as gently as possible. We have a big bed, custom-made, one hundred inches square. I considered undressing her, but that might prove a problem if she woke up and came running down the hall to yell some more.

So instead I put a pillow under her head and sat next to her a while, trying to understand how I came to that moment, that place.

As I considered, Katrina’s breathing deepened.

She was a beautiful woman, and brilliant in her own way. For many years she searched for a man who would take her and Dimitri away from me and the other kids. It wasn’t that she didn’t love Twill and Shelly but that they loved me too much.

We didn’t love each other, at least not like man and wife, but we were tied together by a knot of blood, children, and history.

When she began snoring I knew that Kat would be unconscious for hours. I shifted her so that she was sleeping on her stomach, to make sure she didn’t drown in her drunken repose. After that I headed out the bedroom door and back down the hall.

“... I mean, what have I ever done to her?” Dimitri was saying as I walked in. He looked at me, hesitated, and then went on. “Taty has only tried to be nice with her. And Mama won’t even say a word if she’s in the room. She just stands there with that look on her face.”

Dimitri had a child’s baseball mitt in his hand. I wondered if he intended to take it to the new apartment. Tatyana, the svelte former prostitute, was on her knees, rolling socks, while Mardi and Twill picked around in the mass of detritus that filled D’s deep closet.

Shelly was sweeping the floor.

“Why you doin’ that?” Dimitri asked his sister.

“I’m cleaning up so Mom doesn’t have to after you’re gone.”

“Why? You don’t even like her.”

“She’s our moms, Bulldog,” Twill said. “Only mother you ever gonna have.”

“I wish she was dead,” Dimitri said.

“D!” Shelly cried.

Tatyana kept rolling socks.

“That bitch just wants to—”

“Stop,” I said in a voice that I hadn’t used in fifteen years.

Dimitri, cut off in midsentence, stared at me.

“Come on out in the hall,” I said to my only true son.

I turned to leave the room. He had no choice but to follow in my wake.

We stood there face-to-face, but Dimitri was looking down at my shoes. D snorted now and then, his shoulders hunched — waiting for the attack.

“I want to ask you something, son,” I said.

“What?”

“Why do you think your mother is so upset?”

“Because she doesn’t want me to grow up and be my own man, that’s why.”

“It’s because she’s afraid.”

Dimitri lifted his head to look me in the eye.

“Afraid of what?” he asked.

I didn’t have to answer.

“That was a long time ago,” he complained.

“Two years isn’t all that long. And she was living with that gunrunner in Russia less than a year ago.”

“She didn’t know.”

“That’s why your mother’s afraid,” I said. “Because Tatyana has lived an outlaw’s life. But you’re so in love with her that you deny the truth.”

Dimitri and I look a lot alike. Our faces were not made to express powerful emotions. Our people carried heavy loads and looked into the wind. But right then there was unbridled passion in his eyes and a quiver coming up from his neck.

“So what are you sayin’, Pops? You don’t want me to go?”

“That would be like me tellin’ a gosling not to migrate down south his first mature season. You got to go. Got to. There’s gonna be snakes and foxes, and in your case, with Taty, there might even be men with guns. All I need you to do is think about that.”

“So you agree with me moving?”

“Honey, I know what that girl means to you. I look at her and even my blood pressure gets dangerous. Just understand that your mother can only do what a mother can do, like you doin’ what you need.”

“And you understand why I dropped out of school for a while?”

“She’s got a good gig at that Columbia program. It’s the man in you workin’ to help her make her way through. But what you got to remember, D, is that it’s a gift, not an investment. Tatyana is not a bankbook.”

That last bit of wisdom put a new wrinkle in my son’s brooding brow. It was one of the longest talks we’d had in a dozen years and carried more meaning than anything we’d discussed since he passed puberty.

There was a question brewing behind his furrowed eyebrows. He even took in a breath to expel the words.

“Hey, Bulldog,” Twill said at just the wrong moment.

“Wha?”

“Come help us bring all these boxes downstairs.”

Twill, Mardi, and Shelly all came out, carrying boxes. From long experience they all knew how touchy things were between me and Dimitri. I was sure that they meant to help, to get him working, so that I didn’t lose my temper and knock him to the floor.

“Okay,” the man/boy said.

He stomped back into the room, grabbed three boxes, then followed his siblings and Mardi down the hall.

I went into the room to see Tatyana, sitting comfortably on the floor, working with D’s clothes and smaller items. She was wearing thin cotton pants the color of beached coral and a sky blue blouse that was loose and yet still somehow appreciative of her figure.

I hunkered down easily, part of the boxer’s side of my daily training, and looked at her.

“Not a very pleasant induction into the family,” I said.

“She loves him,” Tatyana Baranovich explained, shrugging her left shoulder.

“Even still, it must not feel too good.”

“It is not my business about what happens between a son and his mother. I can only be here for him if he wants me.”

She was working with the socks and watches, cuff links that D had never used and scraps of paper that he was always making notes and little drawings on.

“He’s been making those little doodles since he was a child,” I said.

“He has great talent.”

She stopped working then and looked straight at me. There seemed to be an accusation in the words.

I remembered again what a formidable character Dimitri’s girlfriend was.

“Did you meet my friend Mr. Arnold?” I asked.

There was more than one intention behind the question. Immediately I wanted to derail her insinuation that I dismissed my son’s talents and abilities. I believed in D but he purposely kept me out of his life.

On the other hand, I didn’t only want to know what Hush thought about Tatyana; I was also interested in how she saw the ex-assassin.

“Yes,” she said, shaking out a pair of black-yellow-and-green argyle socks.

“What did you think of him?”

She rolled the socks, placed them in a box, and selected another pair from a pile on the floor.

“Well?” I prompted.

“He has dead eyes,” she said to the floor.

“What do you mean?”

“He is one of those men my babushka used to tell me about.”

“What men?”

“The tightrope walkers who have their death on one side and yours on the other.”