Guns

Three

There was trouble in the street.

He got back to the old neighborhood at a little past midnight, but he was afraid to go into his mother’s block because there were two police cruisers parked just outside the pizzeria. The heat hadn’t let up a bit, the night was still sticky and moist. Men were milling around in their undershirts; women in flowered housedresses were standing with their hands on their hips, looking up the street toward the police cars. Most of them were black.

The neighborhood had been strictly Italian when Colley was growing up, and then it had turned Puerto Rican, and now it was black. His mother still lived here, you couldn’t dynamite her out of that apartment. She’d been living upstairs from the pizzeria for twenty years, from when Colley was nine years old. Had black friends who came in for coffee every morning. Nice black ladies who’d moved uptown to the Bronx, same as Colley’s mother had twenty years ago. Nice black ladies whose sons Colley had probably met when he was doing three-to-seven upstate for armed robbery.

He wanted to get rid of the gun.

He wanted to get out of these borrowed clothes and hide the gun someplace; those police cars up the street were making him nervous. He stopped a white guy going by and asked him what the trouble was.

“Nigger cut somebody in the bar,” the guy said.

“The pizzeria, you mean?”

“Yeah,” the guy said, and walked off.

Colley looked up the block again, and then began walking in the opposite direction, around the corner and onto the avenue. This was Saturday night, he didn’t expect to find Benny home, but he went up the three flights to Benny’s apartment anyway, and knocked on the door and waited.

“Yeah?” a voice said.

“Benny? It’s me. Colley.”

“Colley? Hey, Colley!” Benny said through the door, and Colley heard him fumbling with the lock, good old Benny, and then he threw the door wide and looked out at Colley, beaming, his arms spread, his head tilted, his palms open; he looked like a jolly fat pope giving a blessing. “Paisan,” he said.

“Hey, paisan,” Colley said warmly, and stood there nodding foolishly, and grinning, and opening his hands the way Benny had his hands open, but suspecting he didn’t look anywhere near as popelike as Benny did. “You gonna ask me in?” he said.

“No,” Benny said, “I’m gonna let you stand in the hall. You hear this?” he said to someone in the apartment. “He wants to know if I’m gonna let him in.”

“So let me in already,” Colley said. He was chuckling now, Benny always made him chuckle. He hadn’t seen Benny for maybe six or seven months, since just after he’d thrown in with Jocko. He had put on weight, Benny had. He’d been fat ever since Colley could remember, but now he was even fatter. He put his arm around Colley and led him into the apartment.

A girl was sitting at the kitchen table. There was an empty glass in front of her, ice cubes melting in it. The girl was maybe nineteen years old. She was wearing a long flowing white robe with embroidery around the yoked neck, tooled sandals, a red-and-white-striped kerchief on her head. She had black hair and brown eyes and a very dark complexion. She was even darker than Benny, whose grandparents had come from Palermo around the turn of the century. Everybody on the block used to kid Benny about him being half-nigger. This was when they had the club. Benny used to say, “I’ll give you half-nigger,” and throw the arm salute. He really was very dark, but not as dark as the girl.

“This is Naomi Bernstein,” Benny said. “Naomi, meet my best friend in the entire world — Colley Donato.”

“How do you do, Colley?” she said, and extended her hand.

“Naomi’s from Mosholu Parkway,” Benny said. “I met her in Poe Park.”

“Is Colley short for something?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “Nicholas.”

“I’ll bet a lot of people ask you that.”

“Only everybody I meet,” Colley said. “But it’s better than Nick. Nick sounds like every wop you meet in the street.”

“Don’t get offended,” Benny said.

“Who’s offended?” Naomi said.

“Colley’s Italian, it’s okay for him to say it. Naomi belongs to— What’s the name of it?”

“You know the name of it.”

“I forget,” Benny said, and shrugged. “It’s an organization protects niggers, spics, wops and kikes,” he said, and burst out laughing.

“I’m glad you think it’s funny,” Naomi said.

“You want a drink, Colley?” Benny said.

“You’d be surprised how much prejudice there is in this city,” Naomi said.

“You Jewish?” Colley asked.

“How’d you guess? With a name like Bernstein, what’d you think I was?”

“I thought you were maybe an Arab.”

“You mean this?” she said, indicating the robe. “My aunt sent it to me from Israel.”

“It looks like what the Arabs wear.”

“There are very close cultural ties between Jews and Arabs, believe it or not.”

“I believe it.”

“You want a drink, yes or no?” Benny said.

“You talking to me?” Colley said.

“No, I’m talking to the wall.”

“I’ll have another gin and tonic,” Naomi said.

“How about you, Colley?”

“No, nothing,” Colley said.

“That’s a nice sweater,” Naomi said. “Very chic, those holes in the elbow. You’re a very snappy dresser, Colley.”

“Lay off,” he said.

“Then don’t give me any crap about what I’m wearing, okay?” she said.

“Hey, watch your mouth,” Benny warned. “Maybe you didn’t understand this is a friend of mine.”

“I thought I was a friend of yours, too,” Naomi said.

“Not like Colley. You got that?”

She glared at him sullenly.

“You got that?” Benny said again.

“I got it,” she said.

“Then here’s your drink,” he said, and put the gin and tonic down in front of her.

“Thanks,” she said.

“Take it in the bedroom,” Benny said. “I want to talk to Colley.”

She looked at him.

“Do what I tell you,” Benny said.

“I think I’ll go home instead,” she said.

“You go down the street this time of night, you’ll get raped,” Benny said. “You want some boogie to jump out a doorway and rape you? Get in the bedroom there. You trying to embarrass me in front of my friend?”

“No, but...”

“Then get in there,” Benny said. “And take off that thing your aunt sent you. You look like a goddamn Arab, Colley’s right.”

The girl hesitated.

“Go on,” Benny said.

Her lip was trembling.

“Go on.”

She sighed heavily, and then left the room. Colley could hear her sandals slapping on the floor as she walked through the apartment. He heard a door open and then close.

“What’s the matter?” Benny said immediately.

“There’s cops in front of my mother’s building, some nigger stabbed a guy in the pizzeria. I don’t want to go up there just yet.”

“What else, Colley?”

Colley hesitated.

“Come on, this is me,” Benny said impatiently.

“I shot a man,” he said. “Benny, I killed a cop.”

Benny nodded.

“It was on television,” Colley said.

Benny nodded again. “I seen it. A liquor store?”

“Yeah.”

“I seen it,” Benny said again. “That was you, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“They looking for you yet?”

“I don’t think so. I think it’s too soon.”

“Who saw you? Did anybody see you?”

“The guy behind the counter.”

Benny nodded. “Maybe he won’t finger you. Sometimes they’re scared. Especially a cop dead, you know?”

“That’s what I figure.”

“He might think you’ll come back for him he opens his mouth.”

“That’s just what I figure.”

“You want to stay here tonight?”

“I don’t know what I want to do,” Colley said. “I think I’ll go over my mother’s. Once the cops leave, I think I’ll go over there. They can’t be too much longer, huh? It’s only some nigger stabbed a guy.”

“They’ll just throw him in the car, is all,” Benny said, and shrugged. “Look, you can stay here if you want. Don’t let her bother you,” he said, and gestured with his head toward the rear of the apartment. “She’s mad at herself cause I got her shooting dope. I picked her up in Poe Park, this was last Friday night, she’s coming on like a big hippie, you know, smoking pot like it’s going out of style. I get her down here, I tell her listen, baby, you want something’ll really blow the top of your skull, try some of this. She says what’s that? I tell her it’s scag. She says what’s scag? And then she tips it’s dope, it’s heroin. No, thank you, she says. Thanks a lot, but no, thanks. That was last Friday. Sunday, she shot up for the first time. I got home from church, I went to eleven o’clock mass, you know me, Colley, I like to sleep late...”

“Yeah,” Colley said.

“I got back to the house, it must’ve been a little after twelve, she asked me was there any pot left? I tell her we’re all out of pot, why don’t she try some of the real stuff? She shrugs and says why not? She’s been shooting a nickel bag a day ever since. She’s half hooked already. Few more days, I’ll have her on the street peddling her ass. How you like that?” he said, and laughed.

Colley laughed too.

“Listen, you sure you don’t want to spend the night?” Benny said.

“No, I got to get going,” Colley said, and stood up.

“Paisan,” Benny said, and beamed like a pope again, his arms wide, his head tilted, his palms open in benediction.

The police cars were gone.

Colley went up the street and looked in the pizzeria, see if there were any guys there he knew. There was only a black guy sitting in one of the booths near the juke box, girl with him had an Afro looked like the bride of Frankenstein in blackface. Colley’d seen that picture on television, couldn’t tell whether it was supposed to be a put-on or not. He guessed not. He guessed it was just such an old movie that it seemed funny, even when it was supposed to be scary. He nodded to the bartender, and the bartender nodded back, but Colley figured the guy didn’t know him from a hole in the wall. He went outside into the hot August night again. Two black girls were standing in the doorway to his mother’s building.

“Well, well,” one of them said.

The other one pursed her lips and made a kissing sound.

Colley went right by them. Hookers in his mother’s building, great. His brother Al kept saying it would be traumatic to move their mother out of the building. His brother Al was thirty-five years old. He was a Buick dealer in Larchmont; Albert L. Donato, it said on his brother’s showroom window. The L stood for Lawrence, but Al never told anybody what his middle name was. Lawrence sounded faggoty to Al. Al had gone to college for two years, planning to become an accountant; he’d changed his mind when the opportunity to buy into the Buick dealership came along. An uncle in New Jersey had put up the money for the dealership. Uncle Nunzio. Dear old Uncle Nunzio. When Colley got busted the first time — this was when they had the club, and he shot Macho Albareda in the throat — Uncle Nunzio wouldn’t go the bail for him. Set Al up in an automobile agency at the age of twenty-one but wouldn’t go the five-hundred bail for his other nephew. Nice man, Uncle Nunzio. They finally had to ask Al for it, which Colley’s mother hadn’t wanted to do, which was why they’d gone to Uncle Nunzio in the first place. Al was always using words like “traumatic” or “personality disorder” or “acting-out neurotic.” He especially used “personality disorder” when he was talking to Colley man-to-man.

“Nick,” he would say — he was the only person on earth who called him Nick — “I want to talk serious to you. I understand, Nick, from what Mama tells me, that you didn’t learn too much while you were in jail.”

“I learned a lot while I was in jail, Al.”

“Yes, I’m sure. But I’m not talking about what you might have learned from people who are acting-out neurotics,” Al said. “Mom tells me you came home only to pick up your clothes, and then you moved right out again, that you’re living someplace downtown...”

“Al, I’m twenty-eight years old, that’s a little old for somebody to be living with his mother.”

“Nick, I want to tell you something...”

“Yes, Al.”

“Nick, when a man lives by the gun...”

“Yes, Al, I know.”

“He dies by the gun.”

“Yes, Al, you told me before.”

“And a man who has to commit robberies...”

“Yes, Al.”

“Is a man with a serious personality disorder.”

That particular conversation had taken place just before Christmas. Colley had met Jocko a few days afterwards, and they had done their first job together on Christmas Eve. Colley supposed Jocko had a personality disorder, too. He knew one thing for sure. It had certainly been traumatic tonight in that liquor store. It had certainly been traumatic pulling the trigger of the .38 and watching the back of that cop’s head come off and splatter onto the Seagram’s poster. Yes, Al, that was traumatic. That was probably more traumatic than moving Mom out of this building full of hookers would be.

He began climbing the steps to the third floor. There were cooking smells contained in the building, and they blended with the heat of the day to create an overpowering stench that almost knocked him back down the stairwell. The cooking smells were alien. When he was a kid growing up in this building, the smells were always Italian, promising feasts at best, or at the very least, simple meals that were wholesome and familiar. He never felt at home in any apartment that wasn’t Italian; the cooking always smelled of worlds he could never hope to fathom.

There was this kid he used to work with in the stockroom of a company downtown, this was before he joined the club, before he got busted that time. Colley was just fifteen, he remembered he had to get working papers in order to take the job. The kid was Jewish, he lived down on Hester Street, the Lower East Side. One time, after work, he asked Colley would he like to come home for supper with him. Colley went, and when he got in the house there was an old Jewish man reading his newspaper, and cooking smells in the house, those strange cooking smells. The food turned out to be pretty good, Colley couldn’t figure out how, with all those funny cooking smells.

Later, him and the kid sat on the front stoop and talked. The kid said he wanted to be an opera singer. Told Colley he was studying Italian in high school because lots of operas were in Italian and he wanted to be able to sing every opera there was in the world. They tried talking a little Italian together, but Colley spoke only what he’d learned from his grandparents, which was the Neapolitan dialect, and the kid spoke what he’d been taught in school, the Florentine, so they had a difficult time of it. Colley couldn’t remember the kid’s name any more. He always wondered whether the kid had made it as an opera singer. That had been fourteen years ago; if the kid was going to make it, he’d have made it by now.

Colley knocked on the door to his mother’s apartment.

He waited. He could hear sounds everywhere around him in the building, Johnny Carson’s voice clearly identifiable in the apartment next door to his mother’s, upstairs someone shouting, a toilet flushing someplace; he rang the bell again, and then looked at his watch. It was twenty minutes to one, but this was a Saturday night, and he didn’t expect his mother to be asleep so early on a Saturday night. She’d either be watching television — he didn’t hear anything inside there — or else out playing poker with her friends. He reached into his pocket for his key chain. He carried a key to the apartment only because his mother insisted on it.

“Suppose I’m away sometime, and you want to come in?” she said.

“Mom, you never go away,” he said.

“I went away that time to Daytona Beach.”

“Mom, that was six years ago.”

“So? I could still go away. How do you know?”

“Mom, if you did go away, why would I come up to the Bronx?”

“You might want to use the apartment,” she said. “Take the key, Colley, please. Suppose something happens to me? I’m not getting any younger, you know.”

“That’s right, Mom, you’ve got one foot in the grave.”

“You’d at least have a key, you could open the door and see if I was dead.”

“Mom, you’re only fifty years old. Not even fifty.”

“That’s right, and how old was your father when he died, may he rest in peace?”

“Okay, Mom, let me have the key.”

“God bless you,” his mother said, and kissed him on the cheek.

Colley unlocked the door, opened it, and reached in for the light switch. His mother had a Mickey Mouse lock on the door, you think she’d know better, especially in a neighbor hood getting blacker every day. He locked the door behind him, and then went through the apartment throwing on lights ahead of him. The apartment was a railroad flat, the rooms strung out one after the other so that you had to pass through one room to get to the next. The room he grew up in was at the end of the apartment, the single window in it overlooking the back yard. When he was a kid, he used to look out the window and see the waiters from the pizzeria out there having a smoke on a summer night. Once he looked down and saw one of the waiters dry-humping a girl against the brick wall of the building.

There was maple furniture in his room. A bed, a butterfly chair with paisley cushions, a low dresser, and a higher dresser that had one part of it looked like a wide drawer, but when you opened it the front fell down to become a desk. His mother kept that maple furniture waxed and polished as if she was expecting the queen of England to come there and use the room whenever she was in New York. Surprised his mother hadn’t sent the queen a key. That maple furniture had been a big deal when they moved up from Harlem. His mother had hit the numbers for two thousand dollars, that was the biggest anybody had hit in a long time. When they moved to the Bronx, she’d bought the maple furniture for his bedroom, and also a new couch for the living room. That was a long time ago.

In Harlem, he’d shared a room with Al. When they got up here to the Bronx, Al was fifteen. There were three bedrooms in the apartment, it was really a pretty good apartment and a nice neighborhood in those days. Their mother took the biggest bedroom for herself, of course, the one with the windows overlooking the street. On hot summer nights like tonight, she would put a pillow on the window sill and look down at the street; it was the best entertainment value in New York. Al got the second biggest bedroom — but it was Colley who got the new maple furniture. The furniture still looked brand-new. There was a maple lamp on the dresser, made to resemble a candlestick with a shade on it. Colley snapped on the lamp and took the gun out of his pocket.

He’d never had this particular gun with him here in his mother’s house. Only time he carried a gun nowadays was when he was going to a job or coming off it. Man didn’t carry a gun and risk getting busted for no reason. He didn’t know where to hide the gun now. He went out of the room and down the hall to the bathroom, passing what used to be Al’s room, but what his mother now used for her sewing machine and her card table. That’s where she probably was, out playing poker with her cronies. He thought he might take a towel from the bathroom, wrap the gun in it, and hide the gun and towel on the shelf in his closet, the back of the shelf there. But his mother would probably miss the towel, she probably knew exactly how many towels she had in the bathroom, she’d want to know what happened to the goddamn towel.

He went past the bathroom and into the kitchen — he was still holding the gun in his hand — and in the kitchen he put the gun on the enamel-topped table and looked in the cabinet under the sink to see if she had any of those plastic trash bags, but she didn’t have any of those, either. He saw some brown paper bags from the A&P under there, though, folded neatly alongside the garbage pail. He took one of these, and shook it open, and then picked up the .38, and put it in the bag, and folded the bag around the gun. You couldn’t tell there was a gun inside there. For all you knew, it could be a ham-and-cheese sandwich.

He smiled, went out of the kitchen, and walked down the hall again to what he still thought of as his room even though he’d moved out of the apartment eight months ago. He opened the closet door, pulled the light cord, and then shoved the gun way to the back of the shelf. His mother found it, he’d tell her he was holding the gun for somebody. She wouldn’t find it, though; she wouldn’t be searching for it, so how could she find it? He still kept a few clothes here in the apartment, and he took a pair of khakis from a hanger now, and also a short-sleeved sports shirt. He didn’t visit his mother too often nowadays, but whenever he did come up to the Bronx, he liked to make himself comfortable. He’d come uptown wearing a suit and a tie, for example, like when he came up last Easter on the subway, and then he wouldn’t feel like hanging around all day in a suit, so he’d change into a pair of jeans and a sports shirt, like that. Clothes didn’t mean very much to him. You got some guys, they scored on a job, they went crazy buying clothes. Colley spent the money on booze and women and nightclubs. He loved going to the Copa after a big score. Go in there with a blonde on your arm, guys in there knew you were somebody. Throw a few bills around, grease the skids, get a table up front, blonde sitting there with you.

He took off his shoes and socks — he’d have to wash out the socks before his mother got home, there was still some of Jocko’s blood on one of the socks — and then he took off the borrowed sweater and pants. He found a pair of clean underwear in one of the dresser drawers, and then he put on the khaki pants and the sports shirt and a clean pair of socks and the same shoes he’d been wearing on the job tonight — Jesus, how had things managed to go so wrong?

He went down the hallway to the bathroom.

While he was washing his socks he heard a boom of thunder and saw lightning flash against the pebbled glass of the bathroom window. Almost immediately, it began raining.

The club was called the Orioles, S.A.C.

The “S.A.C.” stood for “Social and Athletic Club,” but everybody on the block knew the Orioles was a bopping gang. There had been an Orioles down in Harlem long before Colley was born, back in the forties. When he was still a little kid, guys used to talk about the Orioles and what a great and powerful club it had been, with thousands of members all over Harlem and even in the Bronx. All the clubs died out in the late forties, early fifties; dope killed the clubs. Guys shooting heroin didn’t want to be bothered rumbling in the streets with other clubs. Didn’t want to be bothered about anything, in fact, except getting that glassine bag and ripping it open and cooking the shit in a spoon, man, and shooting it into a vein. Harlem didn’t have any clubs when Colley was growing up there in the fifties.

Harlem — Colley’s Harlem — was the area between First Avenue and Lexington Avenue, stretching from 125th Street on the north to 110th Street on the south. There were two other Harlems: Spanish Harlem, which was just west of the Harlem Colley knew; and Black Harlem, which was all the way over near Lenox Avenue, Colley guessed, somewhere all the way over on the other side of the city. There were Puerto Ricans coming into Colley’s Harlem even then, crossing the imaginary boundary line that was Lexington Avenue, drifting over from Park and Madison, moving into apartment buildings that had been exclusively Italian during the war years, almost filling up the project on 120th Street, bodegas and Spanish restaurants popping up everywhere; the neighborhood was changing.

That’s why Colley’s mother decided to move up to the Bronx. His father had died from cancer two years before, and all of his mother’s relatives had moved either to Jersey or Long Island, so there was nothing to keep her in Harlem any more. Then she hit the numbers for two thousand dollars, and one of the ladies in her poker game mentioned that an apartment was available on her block, so they’d packed up and made the move.

There were no clubs in the Bronx, either. Not at first. It really was a nice neighborhood. But when Colley got to be fourteen, fifteen, the clubs started up again. This was the sixties now. He began noticing guys wearing the Oriole jacket, black jacket with orange cuffs and a picture of a bird on the back, the bird colored orange, the lettering Orioles, S.A.C. in orange just below the bird; the bird was perching on the “O” in “Orioles.” Colley noticed the guys in the jackets, and he asked about them, and learned that they called themselves a club, but he knew they were a gang. He steered clear of them. His brother Al knew all about street gangs because he was six years older than Colley and presumably remembered the gangs in Harlem dying of heroin pollution. He warned Colley to keep away from them. He was still in college at the time, and was learning a lot of new words. “Gangs are full of kids with personality disorders,” he told Colley.

Anyway, Colley did manage to stay away from the Orioles or any of the other gangs until just before the summer he turned sixteen. That was almost a year after he’d had the stockroom job with the Jewish kid; he was in fact thinking of taking another summer job, going down to the employment agencies downtown, looking over the blackboards to see what jobs were chalked on them. He wasn’t thinking of joining any damn street gang. But one day in school this fat kid Benny sat down across the table from him in the cafeteria. Up to that time, Colley had seen Benny around the neighborhood, wearing the orange-and-black jacket and strutting like a fuckin bigshot. He knew he was an Oriole, but he didn’t know his name. Colley was working on a crossword puzzle in one of the books he used to buy; it was Benny who started the conversation.

“You like doing those things?” he said, and Colley looked up. Benny wasn’t wearing the Oriole jacket. Colley learned only later that it wasn’t cool to wear the jacket to school. Teachers got nervous seeing the Oriole jacket, or any other club jacket in school. That’s because most of the teachers had grown up in the forties and knew all about street gangs and were afraid of street gangs starting up again.

“Yeah, I like crossword puzzles,” Colley said.

“You must be a good speller.”

“I’m not bad.”

“I can’t even spell my own name,” Benny said. “Gallitelli. Benny Gallitelli. No wonder I can’t spell it,” he said, and laughed. “Can you spell Gallitelli?”

“I don’t know,” Colley said.

“Try it. I’ll give you a hint, it starts with a G.”

Colley spelled the name on the first try. Benny seemed amazed.

“You got to meet my English teacher,” he said. “She can’t even pronounce it, no less spell it. What’s your name?”

“Colley Donato.”

They went through the whole “what’s-that-short-for” routine, Benny expressing surprise that anybody named Nicholas would be called Colley; his own brother was named Nicholas and he’d always been called Nick or Nickie. Colley explained that he had a cousin named Nicholas, and when they were little kids, all the aunts and uncles and goombahs used to call one of them Nickie and the other one Colley, to tell them apart. That’s how he’d got the name Colley. Benny said he could understand this because he himself had a pair of cousins both named Salvatore, and the family called one of them Salvie and the other one Sally.

It seemed to Colley that Benny was sounding him about something, but he didn’t know what. Finally, Benny started talking about the Orioles, and Colley figured he was trying to find out whether or not he’d be interested in joining the club. The club was just a bunch of guys who’d got together because they liked hanging around with each other, Benny explained. And also for protection.

“Against what?” Colley said.

“Against whoever wants to start up with you.”

“Nobody ever starts up with me,” Colley said. This was true. He was small in comparison to some guys his age, but he’d begun lifting weights when they moved to the Bronx and he was muscular and hard, and guys thought twice before they picked on him.

“You never know,” Benny said.

“Well, nobody bothers me,” Colley said. “Really.”

“You still might need protection sometime.”

“What for?”

“How do I know what for?” Benny said. He seemed irritated all at once. “Guys could jump you for no reason at all.”

The next day, on his way home from school, half a dozen guys jumped Colley for no reason at all. They were all wearing Oriole jackets. They knocked out two of Colley’s teeth and closed one of his eyes. That night he went looking for Benny in the street, and found him sitting on a stoop two blocks from the pizzeria. There was a wrought-iron railing to the right of the stoop, and steps leading down to the basement of the building. The basement windows were painted over with green paint, and you could see the brush strokes where the lights from inside were shining through. A record player was going, a rock group singing a doo-wah, doo-wah, doo-wah riff. A girl laughed.

Benny was smoking a joint. Sitting there all alone, wearing the black jacket with the orange cuffs, his name stitched in orange over the heart, Benny. Puffing, holding in the toke, letting it out at last. Joint down to a roach already. “Hey, man,” he said, “how you doing?”

“Not so hot,” Colley said. “Some of your friends knocked out two of my teeth.”

“That right?” Benny said.

“Yeah,” Colley said. “Also, they closed my right eye. See it here?”

“That’s a shame,” Benny said.

“You suppose they’re downstairs in the basement?” Colley asked.

“Maybe. Why?”

“I don’t like getting jumped for no reason,” Colley said. “I’m limping. Did you notice I was limping? They hurt my ankle, too.” He was limping, that part of it was true. But nobody had hurt his ankle. He was limping because he had a baseball bat inside his pants, running the length of his left leg. “Are they down there?”

“I guess they’re down there,” Benny said, “but I wouldn’t go down there if I was you.”

“Why not? I got a question I want to ask them.”

“Like what?”

“Like who told them to beat me up.”

“I did,” Benny said.

“Why?” Colley said.

“To teach you respect.”

“For what?”

“For the Orioles.”

“So you had them knock out two of my teeth, huh?”

“That’s right,” Benny said.

“And close my eye, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“Benny,” Colley said, “there are going to be some cripples,” and he pulled the baseball bat out of his pants.

Benny was slow getting off the stoop; the pot had reached him and his eyes were a little glazed and he was grinning from ear to ear because he was so fucking pleased with having taught Colley respect for the Orioles, S.A.C. Colley brought back the bat as if he were swinging at a ball coming in very low over the plate. Benny let out a yell when the bat connected, and four or five guys came running up out of the basement to see what was the matter. They were surprised to find Benny lying on the sidewalk with a bone splinter showing through his pants leg, and they were even more surprised to see Colley coming down the basement steps toward them, the bat in his hands.

You didn’t have to tell anybody raised in the slums that a baseball bat was a deadly weapon. The guys saw the bat and recognized Colley as the kid they’d beat up that afternoon, and they saw Benny writhing in pain on the sidewalk, and they did an almost comic bunching-up in the doorway, some of them back-pedaling, some of them still running forward, all of them too late to do a goddamned thing about Colley or the bat. Colley started laying that bat into them, swinging that fuckin thing like a machete, doing just what he promised himself he’d do when he looked in the mirror and saw those two teeth missing in the front of his mouth and that big swollen purple sunset of an eye. All the while he was swinging the bat, the girls kept screaming inside, and some guys — he never did see who they were because they were afraid to come out of the basement — kept swearing and crying (it sounded like), and telling him they’d get him for good, he’d never be able to walk the street again.

It was Benny who didn’t get to walk the street. Not for six weeks, anyway, because that’s how long his leg was in a cast. And one of the guys in the club, a big musclebound jerk named Ernie, was wearing a bandage on his head for almost a month, and one guy had a broken wrist, and another guy had his forefinger and his middle finger together in a splint. Wherever Colley went, he carried the baseball bat with him. Even to school. Teacher in one of his classes told him he was going to report Colley to the principal if he continued bringing the bat to school with him. Colley said to the teacher, “Mr. Gersheimer, if I don’t bring this bat to school with me, I’m going to get killed. Would you like my blood on your hands, Mr. Gersheimer?”

“Nobody’s going to kill you, don’t be silly,” Mr. Gersheimer said. But his face went pale, and he never mentioned the bat again.

Just before school ended for the summer, the doctors took the cast off Benny’s leg. That was when Colley bought the gun. He bought it from a black kid who was on the high school band. The kid was stealing instruments from the band room, and then trading them for handguns, which he sold to whoever could pay the price; apparently there was a bigger market for pistols than for trumpets or clarinets. The guns were cheap crap; Saturday-night specials. The one Colley bought was a .25-caliber pistol. It was the first gun he ever owned. To pay for it, he stole money from his mother’s pocketbook. She never even found out the money was missing, but if she’d asked him about it, asked him if he’d taken it, he’d have told her yeah, it was a matter of life and death. The day after he bought the gun, he went around to the Oriole clubhouse again.

Two guys were on the front stoop, they went running down the basement the minute they saw Colley. Benny came out a minute later. No cast on his leg. Lost a little weight, too, but still fat as a pig and black as a nigger.

“I have a gun in my pocket,” Colley told him at once.

“Yeah?”

“That’s right.”

“What do you want here?”

“I want to tell you anybody starts up with me, I’ll kill him.”

“There’s already a warrant out on you,” Benny said.

“Don’t give me any of your bullshit gang talk,” Colley said. “Warrant, shit! I’m telling you I’m going to use this if I have to,” he said, and pulled the gun from his pocket and stuck it right in Benny’s face. “You the president of this asshole gang?”

“No,” Benny said, and looked at the gun.

“You told me you were the one...”

“Put up the gun, man,” Benny said.

“Had me beat up.”

“That’s right, watch the piece, will you?”

“If you ain’t the president...”

“I’m the president,” a voice said. “What the fuck you want around here?”

Colley turned. Ernie was coming up out of the basement room. Ernie was the one whose head had been in bandages for a month.

“Well, well,” Colley said, and laughed. “You’re the man whose head I busted. Well, well.” The gun made him feel very cool and very tough. “I didn’t know I was busting the president’s head,” he said. The president made one funny move, he was going to be the ex-president. The former president. The late president.

“If you’re the president, how come it was Benny gave the order to have me jumped?” Colley said.

“Benny’s the war counselor,” Ernie said.

“The war counselor, huh?” Colley said, and laughed again. “Well, well.”

“He told us you were putting down the club...”

“I didn’t say nothin about your fuckin club,” Colley said. “You told Benny you was safe. You told him you didn’t need no insurance.”

“Oh, are you insurance salesmen?” Colley said. “I didn’t realize that.”

The gun was still pointing right at Benny’s nose, and everybody was getting nervous. Not as nervous as Benny, who was expecting to get shot any minute now. But pretty damn nervous. They had guns of their own in the gang armory, but the armory was six blocks away, at Concetta’s house, and right here was a guy with a .25 under Benny’s nose. They kept looking up the block for fuzz, and then looking back at the piece under Benny’s nose. Benny kept his eyes on Colley’s face. He was figuring he would know when Colley was about to squeeze the trigger; if only he kept watching Colley’s eyes, the eyes would telegraph, and then Benny would duck away in time. Faster than a speeding bullet, that was Benny Gallitelli.

“He came home and told us you thought you were hot stuff,” Ernie said. “So he’s the war counselor, so I told him to get up a raiding party...”

“You guys always talk like this?” Colley said. “Man, I never heard such shit in my life. War counselor, raiding party... what the hell is this? An Indian tribe?”

“That’s the kind of talk got you in trouble the first time,” Ernie said.

“Ernie, do you see this gun in your war counselor’s left nostril?” Colley said.

“I see it, I ain’t blind,” Ernie said.

“Don’t get him mad,” Benny said.

“If I pull this trigger, your war counselor’s going to be breathing from his nose up on the roof while he’s still here down in the street. Now what I’m going to do, Mr. President, I’m going to ask you whether you want a war counselor without a nose, or whether you want to call off this fuckin warrant shit and make peace. Because if you don’t want peace, then, man, you’ve got war with a crazy guinea, I’m telling you. The first thing I shoot off is fat Benny’s nose, and the next thing I shoot off is your balls, Mr. President. So what do you say?”

“You’re holding the cards,” Ernie said. “Right now you’re the one holding the cards. So okay.”

“Ernie,” Colley said, “what you say right now sticks forever, you dig? You don’t say you want peace now, and then tomorrow I get jumped. No way, Ernie. I want your solemn word, or else lard-ass here will be chasing his nose over the rooftops. Swear on your fuckin mother, Ernie.”

“I swear on my mother,” Ernie said.

“What do you swear, you cocksucker?”

“I swear we won’t try to hurt you.”

“Never. Say never.”

“Never. We won’t try to hurt you never.”

“You swore it on your mother,” Colley said. “You heard him swear it on his mother.”

He put the gun away, and turned his back on them, and went up the street. The next day Benny came to him and asked if he would like to become a member of the Orioles. Colley said he would think it over.

A week later he told them yes.